 The topic today is the world 20 years after the fall of Soviet Union. And the reason for this is I think we need to look forward to what the future holds. Instead of the withdrawal of the colonial powers, we are getting a certain sense of recolonization of the world, which you can see most sharply in what is happening in West Asia and North Africa. So that's, we see again, NATO becoming the much more dominant military force intervening now in different parts of the world. So we do see wars and recolonization sort of taking place in the world today. And finally, we also would like to address what has left internationally, what can the left do, what are the kind of global alignments that are possible, what kind of interventions are possible at the local, at the regional, at the national, as well as at the international level. I would start with Professor Ajaz to tell us what is, how does he see the world post-Soviet Union and what are the challenges that we face today? My first impression upon seeing the title was that we are dealing here not with one topic but two. If there's one topic given in the first line, then there's a second topic in the second line. The first invites us to consider the consequences of the collapse of the USSR and the communist state systems as such as we see it now 20 years later. The second topic having to do, has to do with the here and now of contemporary challenges before the left, brings us into the world of the current economic crisis of capitalism, the ongoing imperialist wars, the Arab Spring, the popular demonstrations against neoliberal extremism across Europe, and indeed in many countries across the world, from Israel to Chile. None of which would appear to be connected with the dissolution of the socialist state system as such. It is perhaps the task of this panel to draw out the connections between the two apparently different topics. Let me begin then with spelling out some of the continuities in imperialist offensives and the capitalist system regardless of the fate of the USSR as such. For instance, the imperialist wars of today are by no means more savage than the wars in Vietnam and the Chinese countries or the Israeli occupation of large territories, Palestinian, Egyptian, and Syrian in 1967 or other wars of settler colonialism in Algeria and Portuguese colonies. So the first point is that the contemporary wars savages there are by no means more savage than the ones that were undertaken throughout the 60s and 70s and early 80s. During the period when the USSR was very much alive and well. The first neoliberal regime, neoliberalism is not in effect of the collapse of the USSR. The first neoliberal regime emerged in Chile in 1973 and neoliberalism had become the dominant element in economic statecraft in the USA and Britain by 1980. The European Monetary Union of 1992 established the neoliberal regime on the continent as well. Now the consequences of the dissolution of the socialist state system is obviously a complex topic that cannot be fully addressed nor perhaps need be addressed in so brief a presentation. Let me begin by recounting four major consequences and I may bring up more in due course. First, the Warsaw Pact countries had been the great source of material support above all as suppliers of military equipment for the national liberation movements of that era. So that the anti-imperialist forces in the China or in the Portuguese colonies or in Palestine were not nearly as defenseless as they have been during the more recent invasions from Iraq to Libya, not to speak of Palestine itself. They were also a major source of technology transfer and even military equipment for countries such as India and Nasr's Egypt, providing a backbone to the non-aligned movement. Moreover, multilateral institutions such as the UN Security Council were not so much a plaything of the imperialist forces as they are now. And Western military complexes such as NATO did not have nearly so free a hand to go wherever they want. This is a point that Prabir made in his presentation and it's really worth emphasizing NATO, not Atlantic, not Atlantic, treaty organization is fighting wars in Afghanistan and Libya and may fight further in inland in Africa. Secondly, the dissolution of socialism in China and the Soviet Union led to enormous worldwide disarray in the politics and ideology among those very forces that arose in post-Soviet period against imperialist aggression and corporate capitalism. Imperialism had been able to inflict many defeats on the socialist forces around the world even before the fall of the USSR through a series of coups in Latin America, for example, as well as outright bloodbaths as, for instance, in Indonesia. Several revolutions were indeed made, notably the Indochinese countries and the Portuguese colonies, but countries where revolutionary regimes arose, such as Vietnam or Mozambique, but so thoroughly devastated in the course of imperialist aggression that nothing resembling a socialist society could then be built on such ruins. So there had already been considerable despondency and loss of faith, but socialism was still regarded as the determinate alternative to capitalism. The dissolution of socialism itself in China and the USSR brought that very belief into question for vast numbers of people. This is a difficult point to make in the Indian context where the left party suffered no loss of cadres or social support in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse. Such was not the case in most parts of the world. The ideological vacuum opened by the retreat of socialism on the world scale was then filled by a whole array of other ideologies, most of them deeply anti-communist. A large swath of Muslim lands are now gripped by several varieties of Islamism from millenarian jihadis, such as Al Qaeda to sectarian militias in Pakistan, from resistance movements such as Hezbollah and Hamas to right-wing populists such as the Muslim Brotherhood in a dozen Arab countries. Among the secular forces across the globe, other kinds of ideologies are ascendant, such as anarchism, left liberal reformism, postmodernism of various kinds, the network politics of NGOs and corporate-funded social movements, not to speak of anti-organizationalism that relies heavily on instant mobilizations through the internet, which then subside just as quickly. I spell this out at such length because the left has to work through this whole maze of forces, many of whom may well be objectively anti-capitalist but which have lost their moorings in any recognizable kind of socialist politics. In this context of the collapse of the socialist alternative and political fragmentation in disarray among the anti-capitalist forces, capitalism has waged a savage war to take back everything that the working classes in peoples of the world had won in the course of the 20th century through struggles for socialism and national liberation movements. Within the core capitalist countries the new deal is getting reversed in the United States and Europe is in the process of dissolving the socialist state that the European working classes had achieved through a struggle, through a century of struggles. In the third world and most intensely in the oil producing regions of Middle East, Africa and Central Asia, the very concept of national sovereignty is getting abrogated in the name of war and terror, human rights, interventionism or whatever. More generally the cheap labor reservoirs of Asia and Eastern Europe are being used to bring down the wage rate globally. All in all the past 20 years have witnessed a great shift of incomes from the poor to the richest segments of the world that was inconceivable during the period when socialism was still perceived by large masses of people as a viable alternative. Finally the dissolution of socialism in China and the Comic Con countries suddenly provided for the world capitalist system not only great investment opportunities for surplus capital in the west but also vast reservoirs of cheap labor. Healthy, educated and well trained in a way that countries like India cannot provide. Where would US corporations such as Walmart be? But for reservoirs of cheap Chinese, of Chinese labor so very cheap and yet so highly skilled. The same is true of a whole array of American, European and Japanese multinationals who have built massive plants for producing such items as electronic goods in coastal China, mainly with a view of cutting labor costs. One of the features of contemporary capitalism is that the labor market is well on the way to a global integration but without any kind of equalization of wages. These developments have led to a relative easing of the crisis of capitalism in our time but by no means to stabilize it. The left has to devote much energy to grasping the nature of capitalism as it has now become in our time because it is this capitalism of our own time within which we have to think of a socialist project of the class forces that will be the bearers of this project, the type of organizations and class alliances we shall need. Let me offer one very broad point. I believe that even in its most stable form, contemporary capitalism has come to the end of its capacity to expand the industrial product area and it has come to the end of its capacity to provide jobs of any kind that the majority of the population can undertake with pride, with a sense of vocation, with a sense of belonging, with a sense of security. When we agitate against jobless growth, we agitate against what capitalism now is essentially. It cannot provide jobs structurally. It's not just a matter of the policies of this government or that government. Our times are paradoxical. On the global scale, as mass industrialization came to Asia and Africa, the last half a century or so has witnessed a far greater growth in the absolute number of the proletariat than in the heady of European and American industrialization. And yet, as proportion of the population, numbers are modest and limits are being reached rapidly. Armies of the unemployed are vast and they're here to stay. And then there are those for whom we have no real name that corresponds to categories of classical Marxism. So we call them the urban poor, the unorganized sector, or in Mike Davis' eloquent phrase, a planet of slums. All the great cities of the world are now in the third world. And the majority in all our cities, without exception, belong to this unnameable category. Now I'm not sure what kind of organizational form arises out of this immense historical novelty. What I'm suggesting very broadly is that first, all the special qualities that classical Marxism has always associated with the industrial proletariat and the working class generally do continue to apply in our time. Second, in an overwhelmingly agrarian society such as India, the leninist vision of a worker-present alliance equally applies. However, thirdly, and in addition to all that, the time of multi-class alliances and organizations resting very largely upon those who have no clear-class identity is upon us. We do not know what the eventual consequences are going to be of the massive economic crisis brewing at the very heart of the core capitalist zones, Europe as much as the US. Nor am I sure that the model of ferocious capitalism that China has adopted is sustainable in the long run. What we can see, nevertheless, is that forces of the far right are growing exponentially across Europe and North America. Rick Perry, currently the leading contender for Republican presidential nomination for the next elections, is by any definition of the term, the fascist. And all the other contenders for that nomination are Bible thumping men of the far right. The neo-fascist national front is fast emerging as the second most powerful political force in France and so on. Extreme forms of neoliberal attacks on the working masses is, in any case, a consensual position among all the significant parties across Europe and North America. However, it is within the realm of possibility that within the next couple of years we might see in some major western countries, government which are functionally fascist in character. What kind of offensives they will launch against countries of the third world? We shall see. More broadly and quite irrespective of the fall of the USSR, there has been a sharp decline in U.S. hegemony. These two must be seen in a correct perspective. Transnational capitalism requires a leading hegemonic power that can act as a surrogate state of this capitalism as a whole. Disappearance of such a hegemonic power creates anarchy, turbulence, and disorder within the capitalist system. Secondly, the decline of U.S. hegemony does not mean that any other country or a group of countries can fill that vacuum. Neither China nor the Eurozone is in that position. Third, the U.S. may not be hegemonic in the old way any longer, but it is still the world's most powerful economy, still commands the safest currency to store the world's wealth, still has a military machine as powerful as the next 25 other most powerful countries, and is still by far the only one capable of making wars in any corner of the globe at any time. Finally, the more it loses of its hegemony, the more desperate and aggressive the U.S. becomes and is likely to remain. A weaker United States does not mean a safer world, in fact the opposite. This crisis is greatly aggravated by the fact that the contradiction between capitalist growth and the natural resources of this world is fast approaching a point of no return. The entire capitalist model is based on infinite supply of fossil fuels, unpolluted fresh water, minerals of all sorts. As these resources diminish and become scarce wars and conflicts over them will become more acute. Libya has been smashed not just because it has oil and gas, but because it has immense freshwater resources that European bottling agencies call it. Because it will serve as a major NATO military base for future forays into oil and mineral mineral rich countries of Africa, and because NATO and its allies want China out of Libya, Sudan and elsewhere in Africa. While China is so poor in its own natural resources that its model of capitalist development cannot be sustained without spectacular increases in imports of all such requirements. We need to draw not one but two lessons from this. First, that we are in a period of permanent and expanding warfare. All sorts of slogans shall be used, terror, human rights or whatever, but in reality it is a ferociously new colonial war over the capture of scarce resources and it will be fought in very many corners of the world, not just the Middle East. Second, it is the sheerst fantasy to imagine that China or India can simply replicate the European or American path of development and become advanced capitalist powers of that kind in a world of dwindling natural resources, ecological catastrophes and a capitalist technology that generates little meaningful employment. Not just western imperialism, but capitalism itself is the problem. Let me conclude then with a few remarks on the extraordinary wave of demonstrations and appraisings that have been witnessed over the past two years. It goes without saying that every demonstration against wage cuts and social benefits, every strike against the so-called fiscal discipline and austerity, every democratic uprising against autocracy must be applauded. And indeed, sheer scale and persistence of such actions have been thrilling. Dictators were overthrown as a result of popular appraisings in Tunis and Cairo. Spain has seen a wave of demonstrations, one of which brought out full half of the labor force. 400,000 marched in sleepy London. Greece has been on the boil off and on for two years. In cities sprouted in the streets of Tel Aviv, which saw a demonstration of a quarter million people in a country of about six million and so on. And yet, I do want to introduce a word of caution. Let me recall Pascal's victim that Gramsci was fond of quoting, optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect. Without optimism of the will, no socialist action is possible. But if these times of global ideological, in these times of global ideological disarray, the socialist intellectual becomes too optimistic, it runs the risk of succumbing to the most crassist kind of populism just because masses of people are set to be in the streets. A person of the left must always ask, what is the social base? Who is doing the organizing? Who is doing the funding? How is this politics benefiting the working classes? Who is producing the images? Where does my knowledge of it comes from? The net, for instance, is both a great resource but also highly misleading. Al Jazeera, the channel so celebrated in the liberal world, will tell you all kinds of lies about Libya and Syria and never a word about Saudi troops in Bahrain. There's no TV channel which is free of disinformation and no such thing. The world has not become easier to understand just because we live in the so called information age. The worst of the austerity plans have been implemented in Spain and Greece by social democratic governments. All across Europe, the working classes have yet not found a political leadership that could serve as an alternative to the social democrats who delivered them to the new liberal order. In Egypt, at the very heart of the so called Arab Spring, a new power elite is emerging based on a tripartite alliance between the army, the Muslim brotherhood, and the old elite represented by men like Amr Moussa. Libya has been secured for western corporations even more swiftly and securely than Iraq. A veritable counter evolution is being organized in Syria that promises to change the entire political map of the region for the worse. All in all, the principal beneficiaries of the Arab Spring so far have been imperialism, neoliberalism, and Islamism. I could give you more examples. Let me just finish with two quick points. First, yes, capitalism today beset by a massive internal crisis for which it has no solutions. And yes, there is enormous restlessness around the world that constantly expresses itself in popular protests, demonstrations, and uprisings. There is much disturbance under the heavens, and that is a good thing. However, the left has a unique viewpoint of its own, and what happens in the world becomes much easier to understand if we remain true to that standpoint and not get carried away by all of this paraphernalia that comes at you about democratization, human rights, this, that, and the other. You have to examine your own standpoint. Second, more crucial is the point that unless authentic movements of the left arise in the very zones where masses are so much in the move, the progressive potential of protests and uprisings is bound to dwindle away quite fast, as it has done in much of the Arab world. Thank you very much.