The agony of capitalism in its cyclical crises

(Summary of points made at a well-attended public meeting held in Genoa, Italy in February)

    Now even the press and TV, organs of bourgeois propaganda, are forced to admit: there is a crisis. It’s an objective fact, materially verifiable in the thousands of redundancies under way.

     All the defenders of this criminal society, from hack journalists to the official trade union leaders, are straining every nerve to repeat yet again the false and bastard thesis: we’re all in the same boat, bourgeois and proletarians, exploited and exploiters, united against the crisis.

     The word crisis evokes hunger and misery, but only for proletarians. For capital, it indicates an abundance of commodities that can’t be marketed. As always, the bourgeoisie will try to make the workers pay for its crisis, by increasing exploitation through wage cuts, redundancies, increases in workload and finally – but sooner than might be thought – a new world-wide slaughter.

     The same old cyclical alternation of capitalist accumulation has recurred in recent years, with phases of increased activity followed by periods of stagnation in production and trading for the various industrialized countries. There have been profound crises, recessions and short-lived upturns in the amount produced, with oscillations around an average tendency to slow down, to the point that the mass of capital has almost stopped increasing.

     A period of sweeping change in imperialism is now definitively closed: precisely thanks to its monstrous destructiveness in the Second World War, capitalism enjoyed three decades in which the machine of industry became gigantic, squashed the ex-colonial nations, and bought off the western proletariat.

    Capitalism has been pulled between highs and lows for more than a decade now, and it certainly won’t be given new impetus by the demagogy of official ideologues. Nor will capitalism respond to would-be repairmen with their opportunist propaganda of “planning” and “participation”.

     The party’s work involves registering the economic and social shocks of this dying society, delineating the historical curves which will lead to general crisis, the forerunner of future social subversion.

     The present crisis fits perfectly with the Marxist vision of the development and death of capitalist society.

     The convulsions of capitalist industry and finance are a sign and anticipation of forthcoming crises, considerably more serious in extent and depth. The wealthy classes will defend their privileges with all means – especially when the crisis eats into their returns, and when millions of proletarians see the collapse of this society’s false guarantees of work, wages and a roof over their heads.

     The workers will have to regain the path of healthy class tradition, a path signposted “revolution”. That’s the first step out of the present fetid murk of capitalism, towards the light of the future.