The Capitalist Crisis and Its Political Implications

The deep crisis in the capitalist world’s economy does not let up and threatens to go into the dreaded depression that everyone fears, although there are writers who think it is at that stage already. In any case, this is much more than a structural crisis of capitalism. This is a crisis of civilization that demands a transformation in the roots of cultural patterns and the system of production and consumption as the only way to preserve the life of our species. Capitalism threatened to wipe out civilization in the terrible years of war between 1914 and 1945, exacerbated by the Great Depression of 1929 and culminating with the massacre of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who knows how that drama might have concluded if not for the defeat of the Nazism by the Red Army.

The current disorder began in 1973, when President Richard Nixon cut short the U.S. economy’s slide into the abyss. This was caused by the costs of the Vietnam War, rising oil prices and the decline in the rate of profit. Unilaterally and dictatorially, he untied the dollar — the international currency — from the gold standard and set it to “float.” He put the well-being of other countries — especially the poor ones — at risk to benefit “Yankee” capital with the Bretton Woods agreements, which dictated the rules of the international economy under the leadership of the United States after World War II.

Since then, Washington embarked on a mad whirl of printing dollars and debt instruments without a productive backup, which inundated the global financial circuits with devalued currencies and has carried out the biggest scam in the history of mankind. Financial speculation came to occupy a much more relevant role in the production and trade of the money supply and it reinforced neoliberal policies; this was experienced in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) and elevated to a dogma of faith worldwide by the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990).

These policies downsize the state, restrain wages, dismantle the gains of workers, free the movement of capital but not of labor, privatize public assets, socialize the losses of corporations, create speculation even with food, bring about inclement environmental degradation and start a new series of colonial wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya), which led to the economic meltdown openly manifested in the housing bubble’s bursting on Wall Street (2008).

Cited by few writers, another root cause in the geopolitical order of the huge international offensive of capital against workers and oppressed peoples was the collapse of the Soviet Union and other countries of the socialist experiment in Eastern Europe, which were pushed by serious errors and deviations by their party leaders. But at the same time, they are the bearers of valuable experience in human liberation and were the balancing factor, so far, in the international scale of power. The capitalist onslaught was favored by the subjective traumas caused by the unexpected catastrophe, deepened by a vulgar anti-socialist campaign that lasts to this day, and by the desertion of the ranks toward economic liberalism — almost with no exception — by the European social domes and associated parties elsewhere, as well as by many scholars. Meanwhile, a number of parties and groups of Marxist and socialist orientation have been slow to overcome the shock and give a correct reading of the new reality.

In 2010, the so-called sovereign debt crises broke out in Europe, with serious social consequences, accentuated by the ultra-liberalism of Mrs. Merkel. Spain has come back into recession and is threatened with the rapid decline of the importance and size of its economy, which is not so far from bankruptcy, given the fragility of its banks and extreme austerity measures ordered by Berlin, fulfilled to the letter by the gentleman Rajoy. If such is the case, it will drag all of the European Union down with it; this will hit the U.S., which has essentially the same problems overlapped by the suicidal injection of liquidity, and is, after all, largely responsible for the crisis. But even with this worldwide impact, there is light at the end of the tunnel.