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Global mobilisation against G20 summit!

International Secretariat of the League for the Fifth International

On July 7 and 8, leaders of the G20 nations will gather at their annual summit, this time in Hamburg, Germany. Amongst them will be Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Angela Merkel, Theresa May and whoever is elected president of France this spring. These leaders of the world’s major imperialist powers, plus major regional powers like Brazil, Turkey and India, have been the target of well deserved protests before. This year the star attraction is undoubtedly the new US President, infamous from day one in office for his executive order barring muslims, migrants and refugees and launching a mass witch hunt for illegal workers inside the US.

Also from day one of his presidency, a huge wave of protests has answered Trump across the USA and this, in turn, generated powerful protests in many other countries, such as Mexico, targeted for Trump’s racist abuse and the pledge to build that wall.

July in Hamburg gives us a golden opportunity for truly international days of solidarity with the resistance movement in America and with all of Trump’s intended victims. Not that Trump is the only monster amongst the G20. There is Vladimir Putin, fresh from bombing eastern Aleppo into submission. There is Theresa May, trying to implement the Brexit blockade of European workers after building the steel fences in Calais and refusing to accept more than a tiny handful of Syrian refugees, turning away even unaccompanied children. The Brexit decision and Trump’s election have also encouraged racists like Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders in their electoral bids, both due before Hamburg.

Nor should we forget the G20 host, Angela Merkel, who is still bleeding Greece dry to pay off the debts to the Frankfurt bankers. Just for good measure, Presidents Michel Temer of Brazil and Mauricio Macri of Argentina will be there. They are presently inflicting savage austerity against the resistance of the Brazilian and Argentine workers. We will also see Turkey’s “strongman” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is locking up the country’s journalists, sacking teachers and lecturers, crushing the country’s main left party and waging a bloody war on the country’s Kurds.

The G20 stands for more than increased exploitation by the big banks and giant corporations, however; it stands for war and interventions by the imperialist powers in each others “backyards” as they strive to carve up and redivide the world. They are driven by the need to overcome the crisis and stagnation that capitalism crashed into back in 2008 and from which it has not fully recovered even yet. What they are offering us is the plague-or-cholera “alternatives” of continued neoliberalism or a turn to beggar-my-neighbour protectionism and “restoring national greatness”. The latter, Trump’s remedy, is just a shorter road to economic crisis and more wars even, perhaps, an ultimate war.

Resistance

In Germany over the past months, a broad coalition of working class parties, trade unions and migrants’ rights groups, anti-capitalists, environmentalists, women’s organisations, anti-racist and anti-war groups has started to organise what is likely to be one of the biggest mass protests against the G20 ever seen.

Events will include a counter-summit with a series of meetings to expose the politics of the “world’s leaders”, of the old and new imperialist powers as well as regional powers. It gives a golden opportunity for organisations and individuals, who have hitherto been fighting on separate fronts, to learn from one another and to link up their struggles.

The calendar of events will also include direct action in the form of blockades of the conference venues on July 7 and a mass demonstration on July 8. Its aim is not to plead for the G20 leaders to change their minds or to soften their blows but to make it obvious to their own citizens and those they exploit worldwide that the ordinary people of Europe reject them and their policies. It is to show solidarity with all those who resist them; with workers in Latin America, southern Europe, refugees in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Our message will be that we will not let the old imperialist powers, like the US, Britain, France or Germany, or new rising ones like Russia and China, drag the world into further regional wars and economic crises. We will not let them devastate the environment for future generations. We will not let their military rivalries, their attempts to carve up the world for the profiteers, drag us into a third imperialist war.

We will also make it clear that workers, young people, the oppressed of the whole world have the will and the means to successfully resist them and to go on to lay the foundations of a radically different world. We will fight to put an end to their rule and the system Trump, Putin, Xi, Merkel and May all defend.

For this, Hamburg must be a signal to link up the struggles across Europe with those in the USA, as well as those in Asia, Africa and Latin America, so long exploited by our rulers. Together we can end austerity, neoliberalism and protectionism, racism, environmental destruction, imperialist interventions and the threat of a world war. In sum, we can end the capitalist system the G20 leaders all stand for.

Let’s make the mass protests in Hamburg a rallying point for our struggles!

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