"The world of the past three decades has gone." So wrote a columnist in the Financial Times, a major trans-Atlantic business daily, in 2008 after the outbreak of the world crisis. It's a point of view that couldn't have escaped the 20 million workers made jobless in the Guandong region of China the following year.

It's a point of view that still rings true. "Soon nothing will be as it once was in Bagamayo," says an activist in Tanzania, "because the new rulers of the world, the Chinese, are coming." According to the German magazine Der Spiegel, Bagamayo, "a sleepy coastal town in Tanzania," is the site of new multi-ship container terminal built by the Chinese construction company Group Six International.

It doesn't matter on what continent you live. The conclusions are the same. Change, whether calamitous or revolutionary, is on the immediate agenda.

Capitalism=Wage Labor System

We call it a capitalist crisis. We could just as easily call it a wage-labor crisis. Capital (a huge concentration of money in the hands of a few) and wages (small bundles of money distributed to billions) are inseparable. Without wage workers,  money means nothing; it can't become "capital" in the hands of the few. "An increase in capital," Marx pointed out, "is an increase in the working class." A reformist world view among the working class, therefore, is vital for capitalism to be able to function. In this light, the expansion of Red Flag, which argues for a communist share-and-share-alike world view, becomes urgent.

The labor force in China, totaling 798 million, is over five times the size of the US labor force. Its very size is both a source of great strength and terrifying weakness for the Chinese capitalists. For example, it allowed the government to launch a gigantic stimulus program to try to counter the effects of the world-wide economic crisis and re-employ those workers who were laid off when the crisis first broke.

The program will develop seven "Strategic Emerging Industries:" biotechnology, new energy, high-end manufacturing equipment, energy conservation, clean energy and the next-generation internet technology. Among other things, the program translates  into building a nanotechnology research center, 50 engineering centers, and 88 labs focusing on new technologies, as well as laying 621,000 miles of fiber optic cable and adding 35 million new broadband ports.

Stimulus Plan Is Economic Warfare

Add these plans to the already completed improvements in shipping ports, highways and high speed  rail, and a new picture emerges. China's working class, which already produces the most of any country in the world (having just edged out the US) will become even more productive.

Whether they intend to or not, these plans are a direct attack on US imperialism. The US bosses' strategy is to maintain or expand "America's global primacy." These plans promote "Chinese global primacy."

Chinese penetration has already sparked French military actions in Africa, where Chinese investments (and influence) already match those of France, as well as the formation of a new US Army command for Africa. To many, especially in Africa, the Chinese  are "the new rulers of the world."  The old rulers, the US imperialists, are being successfully challenged. But they won't go down without fighting to the last drop of our blood.

And it is not the "war hawks" in China or the US who will be the prime movers. It is the essential nature of capital itself that is the prime mover. It is the necessity of capital to expand and expand again, as if there is no limit, that creates the crisis. At some point, however, it is war that decides which imperial group will dominate and which will be subordinate to the other. In this light a domestic policy like China's "Strategic Emerging Industries" program is as warlike as its deep- water Navy  project.

The international working class, only by joining and massively building ICWP, can become the main protagonist of the revolutionary communist social change we need. Then we shall rule the earth, putting an end forever to all the old and aspiring capitalist-imperialist rulers of the world.

(The next article will look at how China's massive working class terrifies China's capitalists.)