8. Alongside the economic crisis and the US-led campaign of permanent global war, the world today is also acutely experiencing the third dimension of capitalist devastation – the energy crisis and ecological disaster. The US and its western allies are desperately trying to tighten their grip over key energy resources like oil, gas and coal; they are also increasingly grabbing land in third world countries and pushing for cultivation of bio-fuels to secure their own energy needs while destroying the agricultural economy and food security and sovereignty of the developing countries. The so-called war on terror is very much a war for grabbing resources and securing a monopoly control over the global energy economy. Meanwhile, even as the inherent danger of nuclear energy is widely acknowledged in the advanced capitalist countries and almost all of them are moving away to other sources of safer and cheaper energy, yet despite the alarming experience of Chernobyl and Fukushima, the US and other big nuclear powers are busy selling their outdated nuclear technology to countries like India.
9. Global warming or climate change is no longer just a threat for the future; it has already assumed ominous proportions for all forms of life in the planet. The Kyoto protocol of 1997 had fixed targets for the advanced countries – the main players responsible for the developing ecological disaster – to reduce their per capita emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. But the US and some other advanced countries derailed and sabotaged the Kyoto process and finally in the climate change conference held in Durban in 2011 they succeeded in transferring a disproportionately heavy burden on to countries like China and India by dumping the parameter of per capita emission and thus sacrificing any notion of equity and justice in combating the climate crisis. The advanced countries are also trying to use the third world as the dumping ground for all their toxic waste. The battle for an ecologically sustainable model of development must therefore squarely challenge the continuing injustice being inflicted by the advanced countries.
10. The phenomenal rise of information technology, especially the tremendous growth of the internet as a medium of communication and mass dissemination of information has opened up huge possibilities of anti-corporate anti-imperialist resistance. The enormous potential of this new medium has already begun to be felt as a weapon of revelation of corporate-imperialist secrets, as a tool of social and political mobilisation in physical as well as ideological terms and as a mode of resistance to the very basis of capitalist monopoly in the realm of knowledge and information. This is why the power of capital and the state is desperately seeking ways to curb and subvert internet freedom. Foiling this conspiracy and expanding the horizons of information technology and internet freedom to deliver bigger blows to the offensives of capital and corporate-imperialist state has emerged as a key challenge for people’s struggles across the world.
11. The US dream of absolute and permanent domination in a unipolar world faces its most serious challenge in the economic arena. While the US has been hit hard by the current recession, China, now the second largest economy in the world, has been affected much less and is slated to overtake the US by 2020 as the world’s largest economy measured in terms of purchasing power parity. The economic rivalry between the two powers is understandably sharpening despite a high degree of interdependence. European Union, if recognised as a single entity as in the WTO, is already bigger than the US. Driven by China, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, China, India, South Africa – South Africa has been included in the group since the group’s third summit held in China in April 2011) has emerged as a powerful economic group – even though the crisis has stolen much of its initial shine. The countries listed as emerging economies (different institutions have different lists – the World Bank recognises South Korea and Indonesia apart from Brazil, Russia, India and China as the six major emerging economies) are widely acknowledged as a major power rivalling the old G7 countries (US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan) and hence G7 has taken the initiative to accommodate a number of emerging economies in G20. The biggest economic weapon in the hands of the US is the exclusive global recognition of its currency as the international standard for exchange and the day the dollar is pulled down from this position of supremacy the balance of the world economy will change drastically. Ending the domination of dollar and replacing it with some alternative arrangement is the most urgent global economic reform that the world needs.
