Crisis is the ending of something and the beginning of something new. Changes in social history are seldom done by a vote or the stroke of a pen. They are often violent and painful. The tendency of the old to fight for its existence and the birth pangs of the new are expressed as social struggle.
The shift from agrarian to industrial capitalism in the United States took the form of the Civil War. It took the Great Depression and all its social struggles to establish the domination of international over national financial capital. The shifting from direct to neo-colonialism took the form of WWII with all its destruction, suffering and death.
We are again at the verge of something big, new and dangerous. Over the centuries, capitalism has developed through various stages as the technology for producing things advanced. The advent of labor-replacing electronic technology over the past 50 years or so has allowed for the development of integrated world production and a global market. It also gave rise to a new form of financial capital based on international speculation rather than production. This new form of capital has come to domínate world exchange. This was inevitable as the value in commodities (based on human labor) was debased by automation and prices were set by what the market could bear. The result was that a vast amount of money was accumulated by the ruling class that could not be profitably invested in production, and so it was invested in speculation.
A market is more than a need for goods and services. It must be effective – it must have the money to pay. Given the productive capacity of the major countries, the market could not expand as fast as production. The Reagan administration attempted to expand the market internally by privatization of all public functions. That has run out of steam. There is no place left for the market to expand, and crisis is upon us.
Since the world is economically
integrated, the entire world will become unstable as change progresses.
Every sector of society will begin to polarize. Capitalists will fight
capitalists. Workers will fight workers. This vast instability gives
the revolutionaries an opportunity to move against an international
ruling class that is so powerful there is no possibility of unseating
them under any other circumstance. First the revolutionaries must have
clarity as to what they are fighting and what are the possibilities. We
can say that the financial stage of capitalism is over, and then it is
necessary for the revolutionaries to look for indications of how this
crisis will end and what can emerge from it.It is already clear that at least a section of the ruling class is struggling to form some kind of nationalized capitalism. We can be sure that the free-wheeling sector of finance – created by electronics – will not quietly submit to this kind of control. We are heading into a critical social struggle and a class struggle for political power will emerge within it. The working class will be pulled together on a political basis with a new section of the class – the dispossessed, whose jobs have been wiped out by electronics – playing a leading role. One of the key tasks of revolutionaries at this moment in history is to teach the dispossessed about the central role they have to play in the struggles to come.
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