Crisis of World Capitalism:
a Marxist Perspective
Less than ten years ago the totalitarian Stalinist regimes of East Europe and the USSR collapsed and we witnessed an unraveling of the post-World War II equilibrium based on a division of the world between imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracies. The economic hegemony of the United States, which emerged early in the 20th century and had served as the cornerstone of the world capitalist system, has fatally eroded and rivalries among Greater Europe, North America and Japan are asserting themselves in world politics.
The prolonged post-War capitalist boom has ended, a quarter of the world is in recession and the most dynamic states of the "New Economy" have crashed: Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, Brazil, Japan... Commodity deflation is clobbering the backward countries while stock market collapse threatens even the older capitalist states, including the US. The advanced capitalist economies are lurching from recession to "jobless" or "payless recovery", while global competition is driving continuing layoffs, mergers and the wholesale destruction of social welfare nets. The "Second" and "Third" worlds are sliding back to colonialism and barbarism, and we see the spread of social destruction, economic collapse and imperialist plunder in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Russia. The political crisis in the United States is itself an expression of the instability and insecurity of the American ruling class. Ever since Bush "won" the Cold War nothing seems to go right for American capitalism.
At the end of 20th century the insoluble contradictions of capitalism are reasserting themselves: firstly, the contradiction between the globalization of the world economy and the system of individual nation-states; secondly, the conflict between, on the one hand, the need for a democratic plan to manage the natural resources of Earth and to develop the social resources of humanity, and, on the other hand, the system of private property with its cruel, market driven laws.
These contradictions are now pushing mankind into a convulsive era of economic crashes, wars and revolutions. We shall provide a Marxist analysis of the factors shaping our world and see how to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership in the working class.