 I've been given one of these titles with a question mark, but really there's only one answer to this question. Never will notice the answer to this question already before we start, so hardly going to bother to answer it. But the question is, is this the end of globalization? And the answer is I would say no. And there's not really any doubt about that. I think what we need to do today in this session instead is try to understand why there is an end to globalization and what this means as more interesting parts of the discussion. And also maybe we should start by trying to define our terms. And in this I will be using term globalization, I think that's the reason why it was put on agenda is to denote a specific thing, not internet, not travel to Costa Rica to go on holiday or anything of that sort, or go studying in the US or something like that. That's what we're talking about although it's related in a way. But what we're talking about specifically here is what we're talking about globalization, we mean free trade, the expansion of world trade, the expansion of the world market, those are the specific things we're talking about. When we talk about the end of globalization, we talk about the end of these periods of the expansion of the world trade and the world market and free trade specifically. And the opposite of globalization therefore is protectionism. And it's various forms, there are many different forms that come in, but the general thrust of it is to try to put up barriers to entry of the internet of the world market with various of the world market to protect your own national market, your own national companies and so on to try to defend them from competition abroad. And as Marxist we have to understand this process, not as isolated policies as in do we now introduce a tariff, do we not introduce a tariff, do we not introduce subsidies, do we not introduce subsidies, do we not introduce subsidies, these are individual policies but that's not how we have to understand this thing. It's not a question of choice between one thing or another that the government faces. We have to understand it as a process. We have to understand free trade and protectionism as part of a process of the development of capitalism or the lack of development of capitalism more specifically. In a sense, it's similar to the discussion that happened between Kalksky, who you know that is, and Lenin, who you probably do know that is, on the question of imperialism. What Kalksky talked about imperialism as a policy of the ruling class was Lenin refused to talk about those things. There's wrong to understand imperialism as a policy. Imperialism is part of a process. It's called the highest stage of capitalism. In a similar way we have to understand free trade, opening up free trade and its opposite protectionism as part of a process of capitalism. It's actually very close to the development of imperialism. I remember back in the early 2000s the chair has already alluded to this. Globalisation and free trade was all the rage. All the liberals and conservatives, young people were very enthusiastic about all the wealth from prosperity. That's a globalisation of free trade that we're going to bring to the world. They studied Adam Smith, the wealth of nations, like he was the Bible, and they thought it was the most profound thing ever written. Of course they had a point. Adam Smith's wealth of nations is a very important work of economic theory. It actually describes one particular aspect of the world and the development of capitalism very well. He was then expanded upon, his theories were expanded upon by a person called David Ricardo, another British economist, and both of them actually stopped the foundation of Marxist economics or in those two writers. Marx didn't really have objections to what they were saying. Both of them were part of developing the labour feverate value that Marx finalised in his writings. World trade has this thing. It has transformed the world from better planes. It was part of the development of capitalism, or in Marxist terms, part of the development of the productive forces, part of the development of machinery, new technology, and its application in production that enabled us to produce things in a much more efficient way, much less labour involved in each real product that we produce. For example, a very good example is back in the 1940s, a pen, like we're talking about pen or pencils. These used to be a luxury item that were only afforded by a very, very few people, very expensive items, whereas today you can get all the means for, I don't know how many you would get for a pound, but quite a few for a pound. They're not luxury. And that is because of the development of productive forces. And as part of that, one of the necessary components of this massive development of productive forces was the development of world trade. On a very banal level, how could we possibly produce mobile phones or lithium batteries, which are mobile phones or laptops or the new electric cars? How can we do that without the cobalt and the nickel that is produced in other parts of the world? Cannot get this out of the ground in Britain, you have to get from other parts of the world. But more importantly is that you concentrate production. Concentrate production in specific countries, specific factories around the world, and this massively improves efficiency. If you have to produce things in 2,000 factories around the world, each one will be relatively small and not be able to produce things very efficiently. You'd have to have small machines and so on. Big factories tend to have bigger machines and therefore produce things much more efficiently with much less labour time, much less effort input in, or time input in by each worker. And that's the whole point. The cheapening of raw materials is also done by producing in those countries where it's easier to get hold of them. So for example, it doesn't make so much sense to dig oil out of from shale oil production in the United States, which costs $60 a barrel to produce. When you could dig it out of the ground and saw the Arabia for $5 per barrel. In the situation of completely free trade, you wouldn't be doing that. Obviously there are other elements that come into the equation, which is why you have shale oil in the United States, but nonetheless you can see the difference there. The point is that in certain parts of the world you could dig these raw materials out of the ground a lot more easily than in other parts, so that's part of it. And Adam Smith explained that in his writing. Also then was elaborated by David Cardiwood, who adjusted some of these theories. So those are the two sides. The cheapness of certain parts of the world in instructing raw materials and the other parts is the economies of scale. You can also have things like access to transport networks. So right now electronics is very good to produce around the South China Sea, because all the other parts of the supply chain are located there. So if you want to produce, for example, LED screens, the screens for laptops and mobile phones and so on, it makes sense to produce it in that part of the world, because you don't have to ship all the components they need for the screen all across the world in order to behave with fabric production. And why it makes very little sense, which prompted to build a factory for production of screens in Michigan, because it's nowhere near where the other components are being produced. But it might still do it because of production. So World Trade massively cheapens commodities, that's the point, and frees up labour for other things. To produce even more commodities of different types, or to, for example, put into the service sector, healthcare and the like, which have massively expanded as a part of the economy, particularly in the West. So you look at the number of workers employed in the industry in the West. They are far fewer as a proportionate population, but they're producing far, far more than they did 50 years ago. And more service sector like healthcare, social care and so on that's taking up a bigger share of the workforce, and that's quite, we actually would like it that way, I think. We would like to spend more money on making sure that rather than us taking care of each other, we couldn't, I'm not very fond of the idea of putting a machine to take care of our elderly or a robot or propeller to be done by humans, whereas I don't have a problem with a robot producing more, more folk, if you understand what I'm getting at. Now the whole period after the World War II saw a massive expansion of World Trade, starting in the 1950s and the 1960s, but even more so after that actually. In 1970, the ratio of World Trade to GDP, so you take the amount of World Trade or the value of World Trade and you compare it to the size of the world economy. So the World Trade was 13% of GDP, so approximately one eighth of all production was meant for export. And by 1980 this had reached 21%, then in the 1990s there was another burst of growth and it hit 24% by no, sorry, at the end of the 1990s it had reached 24%, and before the crisis of 2008 it had reached 31%, so almost one in every three goods or services were produced for the world market. I suspect the proportion of goods produced for the world market is higher and services a bit smaller, but regardless. You can see the development there of the World Trade, so the World Trade has a much, much bigger proportion of total economy in the world and that is precisely the phenomenon which we describe as globalization. Alongside this kind of economic development, which obviously helped against this economic development came the political or diplomatic developments, which was the various agreements around free trade. So we have the general agreement on tariffs and trade, or GATC, which was signed in 1947 by well, by 1949, 20 countries were involved in general agreement of trade. And this was followed by a number of other agreements to reduce tariff barriers, particularly down, we're talking about the West, so between Britain and France and the United States, and so on, other European countries. This was, there were multiple more agreements in the 1950s and 1960s. The membership, the number of countries involved in the GATC agreement, or agreements, so it went from 2049 to 37 in 1959 to 75 by 1968, and by the time when GATC was absorbed into the new World Trade Organization, that's 1994, it's 128 countries, and that's not half of the world, but that's, that's, that is half of the world's countries, but I suspect, I don't have the population statistics, but I suspect it's a far bigger share of the world population than the world economy, but it's particularly that will stay covered by this general agreement on tariffs and trade. They also then, in 1994, replaced, or rather they added a number of agreements to the GATC agreement, for example there the one with services, one in government procurement, purchases, and formed the WTA DO, and that also included this huge resolution mechanism, which you might have heard about where countries or companies can take other countries to court for their particular measures and so on. It never worked particularly well, but it produced a document, I wasn't around at the time, but nonetheless I found a document in our archives or on our website, that explains this process. The fact that we have entered an entirely new situation on the world scale is shown by the changed role of world trade. The massive development of world trade in the period 1948 to 1973 was one of the main reasons for the post war upswing in world capitalism. This enabled capitalism, partially and for a temporary period to overcome the main barriers to the development of the productive forces, that is the nation state and private property. Now, this introduces an interesting question here, what role does the nation state play in all of this? So I'm going to delve into this question a little bit. Now, when capitalism first emerges out of feudalism, it emerges as a national market. So capitalism, one of the tasks of the Warsaw Revolution is the creation of the national market. Before that you have lots of local regional markets, which are controlled often by feudal lords and so on. There can either be tariffs, this was the case in Germany famously. They put tariffs between different parts of Germany. So you travel from one town to the next and you will have to pay a tariff just to travel between those two things. So obviously the first task that capitalism set, or the Warsaw set themselves, is to abolish all these barriers within one nation. So to create a national market, that was the task to set themselves. And this over came then the regional feudal limitations to the development of productive forces. So you could develop productive forces then move into national framework. But what this means also is that eventually you get the national price for a product. A product costs a certain amount of money to buy because there's a national market. So it has to harmonize the prices of different parts of the country and you get the kind of free flowing trade between these different parts where you buy parts from different parts of the country and all the different producers in different parts of the country compete against each other. This is the national market. But as capitalism develops productive forces, machinery, the factories grow bigger and so on competition gives way to monopoly. So you have from having a large number of smaller producers, they increase to go bigger by eating up the competition or defeating them and making them bankrupt. And the companies go bigger and bigger and this goes hand in hand with the development of the machinery. So bigger and bigger machinery costs more and more money therefore makes it harder and harder for smaller, less capitalized companies to compete. And also for new entrants. So if you want to start a new company in the mid-19th century or to produce textiles, you do not it's not enough anymore to buy some handlooms, you know, loops to use your hand. I don't know exactly what they look like, but you know what I mean. But you now have to buy, you have to buy a power looms like a big machine and a steam engine as well to drive and run the machine. So this obviously means that the barrier for an entry is much bigger. This is basically a monopoly that has been created. Here you have the beginnings of international trade on a capitalist basis. But it's not just the export of your product, your commodities which is the first stage of things, but then eventually also the export of the machinery. The investments brought, that's one of the key developments that explains NATO in the mid-19th century. So rather than exporting your commodities to another country, you start investing in the factory in that other country and producing the things there, because it's cheaper than to produce in the country where it started off from. So you have the or maybe more to the point, you lend money. So you give the money to the bank and the bank in turn will lend money to some company abroad to set up a factory somewhere. And this is part of it. You have the process of development of the finance capital. So all the big profits that are made by the monopolies in Britain will end up in the British banks. The British banks then start lending the money to Russia or other countries in order for them to build factories to make profits in these countries and then pay back in interest some of the profits that have been made in Russia over there where it is. So you can see here the start, the world markets with commodities eventually want to be capital or money that is expanding and is spreading across borders. And this stage, when you start having the export of capital, this is what then and then described as the higher stage of capitalism or imperialism. And obviously we haven't left that stage, we're still living in that stage of capitalism today. So in order for the productive forces to develop in each nation, they need to then expand beyond the narrow limits of the national market. So one point they had to expand beyond the limits of the regional market, now need to expand beyond the limits of the national market. And this has important consequences. I'm returning again to this document from the 90s. The intensification of the international division later, the lowering of tariff barriers and the growth of trade to circulate between the advanced capitalist countries act as enormous stimulus for the economies of the national state. It's from the complete contrast of this memberment of the world economy in the period between the wars when protectionism and competitive evaluations helped to turn the slump into the world of this depression. So the upswing of the post-war period was both the cause and the effect of development of the world trade. But remember with dialectics, right, often the cause is an effect and the effect is the cause. You have the upward spiral that we call it with the optimistic language. Upgoing spiral. And so if that is the question of free trade or all the advantages of free trade and why the free trade exists, why the world market is created then you have the opposite side, protectionism. And what is the logic of protectionism? By the mid-19th century British industries reigned supreme on the world market. Using cheap commodities British industries conquered the world. They knocked out the entire textile industry in India with big consequences but also in all parts of the world. The cheap commodities that British industries produced basically changed the face of the earth. This was the era of British free trade. And this was reflected then in the domination in the British parliament but of the weeks the week party or the, you call them liberals but it's more equitable than weeks but that was the name. And the repeal, the famous language which studies British history the repeal of the Corn Laws which was agricultural tariffs which protected British agriculture but these were repealed in this period. And this enabled the bosses to keep the wages of the British industry low because cheap bread, cheap grain means cheap bread. And also that benefited them by then being able to export all their manufactured goods all over the world. But this posed a problem for other nations whose industries were not as efficient for as well-developed. And they needed some means of protecting their industries from these cheap British commodities. As Engels put it in 1881 these other countries did not see the beauty of a system by which the more momentary industrial advantages possessed by England should be turned into means to secure together the monopoly of manufacturers all the world over and forever. So i.e. to conclude the language basically the point being the other countries didn't see the beauty of the Britain just being able by virtue of the wantons of free trade, Adam Smith and so on destroy all the industries in Germany in Sweden and so on and then reign supreme forever and ever. So they took measures to stop this. And in Sweden for example they introduced a system of export restrictions a bit called I think why you restrict your exports but the point is this. The British industries are sucking in raw material iron ore, wood and so on and but supplying Britain with increasing amounts of unprocessed raw materials would not help develop the Swedish industries which obviously would keep economic development. So they put restrictions on how much unprocessed raw materials were allowed to export. They even banned a number of raw materials exported to force the developing processing of these like the steel making of the steel the making of the paper the making of the boards and so on force that processing to take place in Sweden and therefore they could then develop the Swedish industry. So when the Swedish industry caught up by the mid to late 19th century they then lowered these restrictions and were able to compete on par with the British industry. Similarly they caught in the US civil war the South in the Southern state they were advocating free trade because they wanted to export cotton without restrictions to the cotton mills in Lancashire in England whereas the North were in the industrial heart of the United States was they wanted to put protective barriers to protect themselves against these very same British industries so this was part of the whole struggle in the civil war the whole key question in the civil war was the cotton trade and lived to that the question of slavery. By the end of the 19th century British industries were no longer dominant and this changed them facing increasingly competition abroad particularly from Germany and the United States and now this changed politics in Britain and you have the turn to the Tory party from slavery as they are called today the Tory party who was then the advocates of protectives and they gained back power in the British parliament towards the end of the 19th century. And in the British empire this played out in what was known as the imperial preference whereby you would give preferential access to goods of commodities that came from other parts of the British empire. This was introduced in Australia and Canada and a number of other British colonies in this period. Effectively thus borrowing the United States at least restricting the access to these central markets which remember the British empire was by far the biggest restricting the access for German and US industries to these markets. So this was important part then in why German industries who had emerged and have found the limits of the national market German industries who now needed to export abroad they needed to find markets for their goods abroad but they had no colonies and this comes then the idea which was formed in the German ruling class of the need to re-divide colonies in the world between the different powers and Germany of course so they would get a share of the markets. And yes so this is also the period that we're talking about is when Lenin described as imperialism the highest state of capitalism and when the world was divided between the imperialist nations. So actually in the mid 19th century there were less colonies than in 1820. The number of colonies in the world was actually declining all the way until about 1860-1870 when then suddenly there's a massive increase and the British, the French in particular but also Germany they would later on they would start dividing up the whole world between themselves in particular Africa. And this also coincided then with the first tremors of the crisis that came where to come in the 1920s and 30s or 30s in particular. But the first tremors of that crisis came in the early 20th century and you start having the limits of capitalism, the limits of the whole expansion of capitalism was starting to be seen in this period and this then was the background to World War I. So the question of global economic crisis, imperialism and free trade and protectionism, those things are all very closely interrelated. And we should remember that war is only politics by other means as Klausowitz said and Trotsky separately said that politics is only concentrated economics. So i.e. you have the economics of the development of productive forces, development of the industry, monopolization, exhaustion of the world market, sorry, national market, exhaustion of the world market, all of this has political consequences and dimensionally also military consequences. The First World War, or after the First World War the First World War solved all of these problems just to exacerbate them and after this they then developed a real period of protectionism. The fifth called protectionism, we call it beggaring all their neighbors, which then has been translated in modern times to beggar their neighbor, which means to turn your neighbors into beggars, the neighboring countries their neighbor countries workers into beggars that's what I mean. He was describing with this phrase, he was describing the attempt to turn to cure recession and employment within your own country by exporting it to other countries. The way to do this is to shift consumption from goods imported from abroad to goods that are imported or produced domestically. Of course in conditions of recession or even more depression these contradictions are massively exacerbated so you have the problem of unemployment exacerbated, the extortion of the world market, domestic market, all these problems are massively exacerbated in its period of economic crisis. So in the middle of the Great Depression the British introduced what they call the Imperial Preference also in Britain which meant that the British market was then had restrictions from all over the Western world with preference then from colonies. The three President Hoover introduced an act called the Buy American Act which forced government contractors to preference and obviously government being probably the biggest consumer in any country forced government contractors to preference domestically produced goods quite a complicated thing but that's what this act did. And there were many other countries that enacted similar policies in this period of time. So this is the kind of similar scenario that we're facing today. 2007 and 2008 really put an end to the expansion of free trade that had something called the Doha round of trade negotiations that were meant to under the umbrella of the WTO. Trade negotiations were meant to remove agricultural tariffs for agricultural subsidies particularly in the US and Europe and this was meant then to also then the way for developing world of the underdeveloped countries or whatever you want to call them, former colonies they were meant to then reduce some of their tariffs in response. That was the aim of this what they called the Euro going round. But this by 2007-2008 this basically died. There's no serious attempt to revive it ever since. So this process of ever decreasing tariffs and so on was brought to an end with the crisis in 2008 and at the same time Obama was the president at that time launched the slogan Buy American. Some of you might remember that he also, this Buy American act of debt of Hoover in 1933 actually remained on the statute books of US all through this period but it was undermined by various kind of agreements that made. So these agreements where the under the guise of WTO or GATS they all kind of undermined this act that reduces effectiveness and all kinds of limitations, planes with power. But in Obama's presidency they basically beefed it up. So in his 2009 recovery act so this was the depth of the recession just after 2008 then we beefed up this act again to give it more powers to basically force the government contractors again to buy more American goods. And he tried to do it even more in a way called the Job Act of 2011 but the Republicans stopped him. So there's a bit of a change to guard there but he basically had plans to even further introduce more protectionist measures but it was locked. Trump of course as you know was a big fan of protectionism but even the measures that he took were restrained by the rules of the WTO which he had to follow at least to some extent. But now obviously you have Biden coming in and Biden has a way to revoke some of Trump's most extreme or sort of most, we say, hair-raising measures the ones that affected Canada, Europe obviously Biden's policy is to try to be friends with Canada and Europe unlike his predecessor. His general approach is that not that of free trade but he wants to modernise the rules of the WTO. Now modernising the rules of the WTO, it's not lost in anyone what that means that means weakening. So I basically give national states more power to introduce protectionist measures. That's what he would like to do. Although as the business press were, although they were generally pressed about this proposal this, they said well at least he's in favour of rule space and national trade even if he wants to weaken the rules. So their sort of expectations of politicians in this period is not that they would increase free trade rather that they would not introduce so many protectionism that's the level of ambition. And behind this is two pressures. On the one hand the crisis is threatening to ruin industries and jobs in the United States and in Europe and so on which is why they try to take measures to protect their own industries. It's also happening in China where the governments at various points have introduced measures that effectively dumped some of their surplus capacity onto the world market. So they're all involved in this basically because the market is no longer expanding in the way that it was back in 2006. So this economic crisis on the one hand, on the other hand these last 30 years of economic development has produced a new world power. So China has had in the last 30 years since the mid-1990s, yeah those last 30 years has had 7-10% annual growth in labour productivity so every year a Chinese worker has become 7-10% more efficient. And there's no other place on the planet practically where this similar kind of development has taken place. In fact in Britain the productivity of the workers have been falling not quite over the last period. And this means that the amount of value that a Chinese worker produces has gone from $3.8 to $13.8 per hour if you understand what it means still far below the data of the West but nonetheless there's a massive increase and that's as the average as well. In some industries this will be far higher. Falling labour costs for spending on capital means that China has now become one of the world's biggest industrial nations. But as I said China still lags behind and the IMF estimates that the average productivity in industry in China is 5% of that global best practice. Now I don't exactly know what global best practice means in practical terms but yeah they have an imaginary most productive scenario with present technologies and so on. And China is at 35%. Now I guess no one is at 100% but Western countries would be at a higher point for sure. Only in the most advanced areas like cities around the Pearl River Estuary, Shanghai or Beijing you would get a GDP that is similar to that of Spain or Portugal. That's the kind of on average level of Chinese industry of technology is that. It's lower basically but the West. However China is much bigger country in terms of population than the US or Europe, well yeah I was in Europe twice as a population Europe. That's so although each on average the productivity is lower, still the mass of wealth created means that China is now approaching not quite there yet but approaching the economy is the same, almost the same size as the US economy. So basically and this obviously means something the world relations right? It means something called world relations to the balance of world trade and so on. And this is not lost on the Europeans and the Americans who basically are trying now to restrict further development of China. That's the kind of attempt basically to hold China's development back and what particularly provoked them I'll provoke the wrong word but what particularly brought them worried was the plan of I forgot what it's called it is the industrial plan it's called China 2023 2025 what was it? It's like the industrial plan basically which included China developing a world-class semiconductor industry, aerospace industry and third one I forgot them. Anyway the free key kind of growth fields in the world economy, key important industries without implications for all kinds of other things including military purposes of course. So and this was a big warning sign then to the Americans and the Europeans who started thinking well actually China might not just be this sort of country we can treat paternalistically and invest and get some profits from but actually this would become a serious contender or 3G is the first right? Start to run out of time here turning into Fred Weston here Fred always runs over, it's a law of nature now the US remains however of course the superpower, its military expenditure is more than twice that of China it's also more than all, so if you have US spending most on this military they're spending more on their military than the next 10 countries combined. So the US remains a supreme on a world scale, we shouldn't forget that When it comes to consider a country like Taiwan obviously this question of the balance of power between US and China has some rather important implications because Taiwan is the country for producing semiconductors which are the components for every electronic device we have now. It's the only country almost 92% of the smallest semiconductors or nanometers or less are produced in Taiwan. So if for example the US were to embargo or US were to embargo block China's access to these semiconductors that would have tremendous implications for Chinese industries and military as well. Just like the US had just done with and US and Europe have just done that to Russia so US and Europe now sanctions any company that will sell semiconductors to Russia and the Chinese government are looking at this and they're thinking well look if they can do this to Russia they can do it to us. Now what does that mean for Taiwan? It means that it sharpens the struggle over this island which is producing these semiconductors who will be the ones that we're able to control economically or politically this island because this is where you get your semiconductors from which is the key to everything and so this is what the context of Nancy Pelosi's this is to Taiwan was. It's also why the Chinese responded so strongly there was a political element to that you know the need to sort of shore up your own support and so on but it's economically of crucial importance at this moment in time. And speaking of barriers to entry the Chinese the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturing company which is this company produces 92% of the smallest their expansion plans over the next 10 years includes $100 billion worth of investment so you can imagine the level of investment is needed to maintain these kind of industries obviously both China now and the United States and Europe they're all struggling now to build up their own semiconductor industries their own chips manufacturing industries in order not to be so reliant on Taiwan. Now this is the end of globalization because you can no longer rely on the world trade the world market for the supplies of your own industries for example if China were to blockade Taiwan which militarily which it could very well do it's got the capability to do that it's not far from the Chinese coast if it were to do that block the entire European and US industries from accessing the semiconductors then the consequences would be tremendous for the economies of Europe and United States. Now you might never do that but the threat might be sufficient right? So these that mean that not just for so these countries don't feel like wow look we've got to do something China need to feel like what we've got to do something Russia feels we've got to do something so all of them need to produce or they build their own national industries so you're destroying basically rolling back on the world market you can no longer rely on the world market every single company will be thinking the same thing Intel will be thinking well look we need to re re they had used to have their own chips on they're thinking why we need to rebuild our chip making productive capacity and I think they've been given some ten billion dollars or something from the American state in order to start this process I think the CEO of Intel spoke publicly about this and he said we should produce the entire supply chain should be inside the borders of the United States that's what he said I think it's utopia they're never going to achieve it but you get to just where they're trying to go and all this will have consequences for the cost precisely what that was Miff and Ricardo and others economies the same also you know the neoliberal economies they're all said no all that is happening if you don't lose protectionist measures it's going to make everything more expensive right you're going to reduce the efficiency in the world economy it's going to basically sink you it's going to lead to a depression or a collapse in the economy and they all know this it's not rocket science they all read the textbooks at least most of them not sure about this trust but don't run by them but you know they know this is taking place but yet it cannot stop this process from taking place that's also why we shouldn't conceive of free trade or protectionism as a policy but it's part of the general process and at the heart of this crisis that's taking place in world relations and world trade lies the crisis of capitalism that started in 2008 what position so and the consequences will be obviously the other thing they're facing right now is the problem of inflation and inflation what's going to be the consequence of all this for inflation well if everything for all these key components in our products become more expensive commodities become more expensive consequences going to have more and more inflation more cost of living crisis more strikes in order to try to catch up workers trying to catch up and keep their wages in line with inflation and so it's going to increase the instability on the world scale what position do we take so of course historically the market the world market the invisible hand and so on they play the progressive role they develop the productive forces and so on but it's not the question we can't just turn back the clock right arbitrarily like liberals would like us to just let's just turn the clock back to 2006 or 1973 or 1968 or whatever it's not how history worked let's just turn the clock back because we would like to take but we must understand this whole development of capitalism that whole period of expansion of economic growth and so on that's come to an end really now truly finally it was a bit of a hiccup in the 70s now it's truly come to an end and that means that all these things all these stability which the ruling class could rely on for decades and with that also is the expansion of free trade globalization and so on and we have a return to protectionism because of the instability that is in the system itself and our role is to explain why this is taking place and the consequences going to have and fundamentally how well the one how a free trade is actually very recent why we're here in the first place free trade led to the crisis protectionism will deepen it even if there were to introduce magically some free trade policy we just need to another crisis anyway because free trade is not a solution to the problem the problem is capitalism and we are socialists we're Marxists, we're evolutionaries and we see in the collapse of globalization only another stage in the collapse of the capitalist system as a whole and we see the great benefits of free trade but the increase of world trade on the base of capitalism is finished it's not going to be revived and that's it only on the base of working class taking power can we reestablish world trade and world relations on a healthy basis and this of course will then propel a massive leap forward in development of production, development of human of material wealth in society and development of humanity as a whole but it can only be on the base of the working class taking power and basically on the basis of the world socialist revolution and that's what we're here for