Foreword
As this edition of International Correspondence goes to press, new shocking events have taken place, such as the crash of the Japanese stock market or the fall of the Bangladesh government amidst massive protests.
These events are in addition to the heroic resistance of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the popular protests against the scandalous fraud of the false socialist government of Nicolás Maduro, in Venezuela. Both topics are the highlights of this new edition, along with the political crisis in the United States ahead of the upcoming presidential elections in November.
Such is the dynamic of the crisis of imperialist capitalism that we have not had the time and space to reflect on our pages the plunge of the Japanese stock market on Monday, 5 August and the popular rebellion in Bangladesh.
The Nikkei index of the Tokyo Stock Exchange fell by 12.4%, marking the largest drop in points in its history and the most important since the 1987 market crash. And it had repercussions in all the stock markets of the world. This is another expression of the economic crisis of capitalism and its decadence, that leads to the growth of speculative capital seeking profits outside of production. Behind it is the stagnation of the Chinese economy and the danger of a new recession in the United States. Huge speculative bubbles are formed, in this case in the stock markets, that end up bursting, generating the flight of this capital, that feeds the global crisis.
In Bangladesh, after five weeks of student and popular protests, the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fell, and she fled the country. The student protests began to demand the end of public employment quotas that they consider discriminatory in one of the poorest countries in the world but ended up demanding the resignation of Hasina and her starving government, after the death of 300 demonstrators.
International Correspondence and the IWU–FI will continue to denounce imperialist capitalism and its crimes and to support the workers’ and popular struggles of the world.
