By Raju Prabath Lankaloka
The mass struggle taken place in Sri Lanka, which forced Gotabhaya flee from country, immediately prompted the most frantic discussion amongst representatives of the ruling class, who are terrified of similar events occurring elsewhere.
As the Financial Times wrote in the week following Rajapaksa’s overthrow: “Economic pressures bring political instability – and today economic pressures are everywhere.”
Bloomberg warned that a “historic cascade of defaults is coming for emerging markets”. More than 19 countries, with a population of more than 900 million people, have debt levels that mean there is a real possibility of default – including El Salvador, Ghana, Tunisia, Egypt, Pakistan, Argentina, and Ukraine.
A heavy debt burden, rampant inflation, rising interest rates, and severe supply shocks all contributed to Sri Lanka’s dramatic economic collapse and subsequent social explosion. These are now generalised features of the global economy – and particularly of those countries known as ‘emerging markets’ in the bourgeois press, i.e. poorer and less-developed countries.
A huge amount of inflammable material has built up across the world. In the coming period, we can be certain to witness the eruption of explosive revolutionary movements all around the globe, as this material ignites.
The revolutionary turmoil that has swept Sri Lanka – an island nation of 22 million people – has grabbed world headlines. It has inspired millions of workers and young people everywhere to the same extent that it has terrified ruling classes.
Almost every country in South Asia is facing similar intractable economic contradictions. Sri Lanka was the first country in the region to turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a bailout in April, but it was soon followed by Pakistan. And now Bangladesh has become the latest to seek an IMF loan. Bangladesh had been hailed as a ‘shining beacon’ of the emerging market, on account of its booming, hyper-exploitative garment industry.
But devastating floods and the war in Ukraine have exposed the fragility of the country’s economy, which relies heavily on imported fuel – fuel that the government is now seeking to preserve through scheduled power cuts. But try as it might to pass on the effects of the crisis to the working masses, in the last year its foreign exchange reserves have nevertheless fallen by $6 billion.
India, the biggest economy in the region, has seen its foreign reserves fall to their lowest point in 20 months; whilst the Indian rupee has fallen six percent against the US dollar in the last year.
The strategists of international capital are most terrified of all about what is to come in Pakistan. The country now has only $6 billion of foreign reserves left in total, the equivalent of less than six weeks of imports. Its currency, the rupee, has plummeted to an all-time low, and IMF-directed fuel price hikes have inflamed anger up and down a country that was already a powder keg following the fall of Imran Khan’s government in April.
14-hour power outages, the most severe in a region wracked by an energy crisis, have compounded the suffering of a blistering heatwave, leading one man from Turbat in Balochistan to comment to the Guardian: “We are living in hell.”
Hundreds of millions of people across the world would echo that very sentiment: life is becoming intolerable. Bourgeois commentators are beginning to feel that revolution is inevitable.
Revolution in Pakistan, a country of 220 million, would cause shockwaves that would reverberate around the world. “The international fallout from Pakistan’s internal collapse would be much bigger than Sri Lanka,” said one political scientist in the Financial Times. “I think there are many outside [powers] who would want to avoid an outright disaster in Pakistan created by an economic collapse.” That’s quite an understatement!
As Samantha Power, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development candidly stated: “If history is any guide, we know that Sri Lanka’s government will likely not be the last to fall.”
Whilst the strategists of capital fret about a domino-effect of revolutions and crumbling regimes in South Asia, this is far from the only region of the world where explosive material is accumulating. In Latin America, El Salvador is edging ever closer to default. Argentina too has had to turn once more to the IMF.
The country is now on its third finance minister in the space of one month, while inflation is forecast to hit 90 percent by the end of the year.
A striking illustration of how unbearable life has become was given in an interview with Reuters by one of Buenos Aires’ ‘cartoneros’ : “Every day we are collecting less,” said Joaquín Rodríguez, complaining that, as people are unable to buy as much as before, they are also not throwing as much away. “People have no choice but to do the same work as us: there are more and more cartoneros and less waste.”
Perhaps, the most significant events in recent weeks have been the developments in Panama. Although the mainstream media is keen to stress that protests there are rare, even the BBC has admitted the country “is on the verge of social collapse”. One of the most unequal societies in the world, the price of fuel there has risen almost 50 percent since January, while unemployment stands at 10 percent and inflation is accelerating.
By July, the masses had clearly had enough. Taking after protestors in Ecuador, who blocked roads in June to demand a fuel price cut – they blockaded the essential Pan-American Highway with parked trucks and burning tires.
A sign at one of the protests accompanying the blockades summarised the plight of many, reading simply: “Gasolina o comida?” – “Gasoline or food?” – the same question that men and women in Sri Lanka are being forced to ask themselves today.
Across the world, immense anger is building amongst the masses, as the crisis of capitalism deepens, creating impoverishment and hunger. In one country after another, this fury is exploding to the surface. The situation is ripe for revolution.
(Taken from an article appeared in www.marxist.com)
