The G8 (Group of Eight) kicked off its three-day meeting in Toyako on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido on July 7, with world leaders bunkered in what the Independent (UK) described as a “fortress”. More than 20,000 police are surrounding the meeting venue, while navy destroyers and aircraft from Japan’s officially non-existent war machine enforce a no-fly zone over the island. The Japanese government has taken these measures ostensibly to prevent terror attacks, but a more realistic aim is to silence grassroots protests against the viciously pro-big business and anti-poor policies of the G8. Even in Tokyo – over 600 km away – a massive police presence is reported. Some journalists and activists arriving for the G8 meeting have been detained and interrogated for as long as 17 hours upon arrival in Japan.

“There are so many police officers, asking for your license, where you are going and what you are up to,” said Filipino activist Renato M. Reyes. “The G8 are very afraid of people criticizing them. They are afraid because they feel guilty about something,” he said.

Despite this, protesters took to the streets in a succession of colorful marches over the weekend. An estimated 5,000 demonstrators marched through Sapporo, the nearest city to the G8 venue on Saturday, chanting slogans against global warming, poverty, and rising food prices. Participants included left-wing trade unions, globalization critics, and pro-Tibetan rights groups. They banged drums and carried banners with messages such as “Shut Down the G8” and “Down with imperialism.” One banner declared: “No to the hypocritical G8 Summit promoting the destruction of the global environment.” Four people, including a television cameraman, were arrested and police tactics were generally described as heavy-handed.

“We were surprised by the excessive force used by police in today’s demonstration,” said Ko Watari, from a Japanese legal network that monitors police activities.

Chinaworker.info wishes to congratulate the demonstrators – from Japan and many other countries – on their determination to get their message across despite this intimidation.

Global capitalist crisis

This G8 summit takes place as the capitalist system is sliding into its most serious global crisis for six decades. The signs of this are everywhere in soaring fuel prices (oil hit a new record of $145-a-barrel last week), chaos in the international banking and credit sector, and a tsunami of food price rises that threatens mass hunger and starvation. Global food prices have gone up 80 percent in the last three years and this has pushed up to 100 million people back below the poverty line.

Even the choice of summit venue has an unintended symbolism. The luxurious Windsor Hotel was opened in 1993, but closed four years later, a victim of the crisis that followed the bursting of Japan’s “bubble economy”. This was a Japanese forerunner to the subprime crisis now weighing down US capitalism and spreading worldwide. The hotel reopened after a five-year hiatus in 2002, as Japan’s economy staged a partial recovery based on its growing trade with China.

The deepening crisis of capitalism permeates the G8 itself, which one capitalist commentator described as a “pathetic gathering”. The G8 is known as a talking shop that rarely produces any real agreement, and mostly issues empty “declarations” that are forgotten almost before the participants have boarded the plane home. Nor could it be otherwise – the capitalism system, which puts company profits before all else, defies by its very nature any efforts to plan or coordinate resources at an international level, or in the interests of the poor majority and the environment.

An unofficial forum that was founded in 1975, the G8 is increasingly out of date even from a capitalist standpoint, given that large economies such as Brazil, India and China are not members. China’s president Hu Jintao is in attendance for one day, as are the leaders of Brazil, India, Mexico and South Africa. But the formal membership of the G8 is confined to the US, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia. The EU is represented by the Commission president, Jose Manuel Barroso, who gets to sit with the “grown ups” (there are nine seats at the top table).

The governments of Britain and France amongst others, have proposed that the eight be expanded to a G13 with the five emerging powers as full partners. But this idea has met with strong resistance from Washington and Tokyo, anxious to guard Japanese capitalism’s claims to Asian leadership from an ever-stronger Chinese challenge. Inter-imperialist tensions, reflected through an array of shifting alliances and counter-alliances, are set to increase as the global economic crisis deepens.

The role of this G8 meeting, like its forerunners, will be to attempt to fine-tune existing policies on currencies, trade and geopolitical issues. Increased pressure on “rogue states” such as Iran, North Korea and Zimbabwe will be one area in which G8 leaders will attempt to cement an agreement. The G8 leaders’ position on these issues stinks of hypocrisy. Among the G8 governments are the five leading arms exporters in the world. These governments are the main global ”proliferators” as far as weapons of mass destruction are concerned, but they expect us to believe them when they accuse other – economically much weaker – governments of endangering world peace. Total military expenditure worldwide was $1.2 trillion in 2006, of which the US alone stood for half. This sum is ten times as much as the 22 major donor countries spent on so-called development aid in the same year ($103.9 billion).

Lame duck leaders – lame promises

The high proportion of “lame duck” leaders attending this year shows the complete lack of popular support or legitimacy for the G8. George Bush is “the most unpopular president in modern American history” according to CNN, with a record-breaking disapproval rating of 71 percent! Gordon Brown of Britain and Nicholas Sarkozy of France have also hit bottom in opinion polls lately, with barely a third of the British and French electorates expressing any confidence in them. Japan’s Yasuo Fukuda, however, steals the “gold medal” for unpopularity with just 18 percent of the Japanese public behind him.

For Bush, who has only 200 days left in office, this is his last G8 summit. According to Swedish Television’s commentator, Bo Inge Andersson, the US president is: “a symbol for the declining power of the G8. When he came to his first meeting the US was an obvious superpower, rich and powerful. Now his – and the United States’ – reputation is jaded and the economy is in crisis.”

On a similar note, The Australian’s reporter Peter Alford commented that: “Failure this year could call seriously into question the viability of the Group of Eight… struggling now for relevance against huge shifts in the world’s political and economic geography.”

As if to compensate for its dwindling power, this is the most expensive G8 meeting ever held. The Japanese Government has spent $560 million (3.85 billion yuan) on the summit, more than three times what the same event cost in Scotland three years ago. As a spokesperson for the poverty campaign Oxfam pointed out, $560 million would be enough to buy more than 100 million bed nets to protect the world’s poorest people from malaria, or to cover the treatment costs of four million HIV sufferers for a whole year.

Broken promises: Africa and climate change

Protest groups in Hokkaido point to the blatant double standards of the G8. In the last year its member governments have overseen a massive bank bailout that will soon reach the level of one trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000). At the same time they have reneged on their promises, made in Scotland in 2005, to increase aid spending in Africa by a miserly $25 billion by 2010. So far the G8 has boosted its aid to Africa by only three billion dollars. Some countries, like France, have actually cut back since the 2005 meeting. “They’re gradually stepping away from the promises they’ve made,” said Oxfam activist Max Lawson. “For rich countries this is peanuts. For African countries this is life or death.”

Socialists have always pointed out that the so-called “aid” of rich imperialist countries is in reality just another means to exert economic pressure and control over African and other neo-colonial countries. Much of the ”aid” from imperialist countries is actually a form of state export support for their own multinationals – aid programs are tied to the purchase of goods from the donor countries. Rather than a few crumbs from the table of the capitalists, socialists advocate that the banks should be taken into democratic public ownership along with other major companies. The banks in many G8 countries have already been “saved” from bankruptcy by a big injection of taxpayers’ money (unfortunately more will almost certainly be spent), but without ceding an inch to democratic public control, to prevent them doing exactly the same things again.

Public ownership and control, as part of a socialist reorganization of society on an international scale, would release the resources for massive non-profit investments in African countries decided on a fully democratic and equal basis. This, rather than the microscopic drip-feed of capitalist “aid”, would open the way for a huge flourishing of economic development, agriculture and science in Africa and elsewhere.

On climate change there is stalemate, with Bush opposing a Japanese and EU proposal for G8 agreement on a targeted carbon dioxide emission regime to succeed the – largely ineffectual – Kyoto Protocol. The US president refuses to sign up for any greenhouse treaty that does not include commitments to specific reductions by major emerging nations – particularly China. While Brazil’s President Lula has supported a vaguely worded commitment to emission cuts, the governments of China and India still insist that the G8 states shoulder the main burden of targeted emission cuts. All that is likely to emerge from Toyako is a G8-backed technology development fund to combat climate change, initially set at $6 billion – an underwhelming sum!

On a capitalist basis, each national government fights to protect its companies and sources of energy, in order to survive in the world market. The unseemly dogfight over carbon emissions is therefore “logical” from a capitalist standpoint, just as it is insane from the standpoint of planetary survival. The only way to resolve this stalemate is to take the economic power out of the hands of the capitalists and reorganize society along democratic socialist lines.