CARC Party – International Working Group, National Direction / International Working Group
Milan, 22 March 2024
The current crisis is general crisis by absolute overproduction of capital, which began in the mid-1970s and since 2008 has entered its acute and terminal phase. It is a crisis by absolute overproduction of capital: at the world level and considering all productive sectors, the accumulated capital is so much that, if capitalists employed it all in their commodity-producing enterprises, they would extract a smaller mass of profit than they do by employing only a part of it. Thus the current crisis has its source in productive activities (the real economy), that is, in the structure of society (in this sense it is a “structural crisis”). Since capital exists in the form of money, conditions of production (technologies, raw materials, networks of communication and exchange, etc.), means of production, commodities and labor power, absolute overproduction of capital means that all of these forms of capital exist in quantities greater than the bourgeoisie can profitably employ in the production of commodities, so they remain unused, i.e. there is overproduction of each of them. It is a general crisis: it includes the economic crisis due to absolute overproduction of capital, which is its managerial aspect, the political crisis (of domestic and international political institutions, systems and relations) and the cultural crisis (intellectual, moral), which are the derivative aspects, dialectically related to the leading aspect; the environmental crisis, also generated by capitalism, has been added to the general crisis and has become a component and aggravating factor of it. So the current crisis affects the whole system of social relations and the system of international relations (in this sense it is a “systemic crisis”).
It is the second general crisis of capitalism: mankind has already once been in a similar situation at the beginning of the last century, in the period 1900-1945, and came out of it with the first wave of the proletarian revolution that led to the creation of the first socialist countries and with two World Wars, that is, with a combination of the elimination of capitalism in some countries and the destruction of the productive forces in such quantities as to allow the resumption of capitalist accumulation in others (and not with Keynesian economic reforms or Roosevelt’s New Deal).
In the 30 years behind us, unable to invest all its accumulated capital in commodity production, the bourgeoisie frantically sought other fields of capital investment.
In the 1970s and 1980s, excess accumulated capital was poured mainly into loans imposed on oppressed countries and then, in the face of the latter’s inability to pay interest, instalments and commissions, into concessions on the exploitation of natural resources and the purchase of industries and public services of these countries (Brady plan and the like), then into the recolonization of African and Asian countries in particular. Combined with this main field of excess capital venting, there were other auxiliary and complementary ones, among which particularly important was the privatization of industries, services and public goods in imperialist countries. This period was marked by a series of economic crises from 1973 to 1992 and the bubble in the Japanese economy that ended in the collapse of 1989.
In the 1990s and the early years of the new century, excess capital found an outlet mainly in globalization, in mergers and aggregations that created large global monopolistic productive enterprises, in the development of financialization, in large speculative works, and, above all and finally, in the gigantic development of speculative activities by which money creates new money.
This second period is marked by the economic crises of 1997, 1999 and 2001 (bursting of the bubble of the “new economy” consisting of information technology companies), the intensification of rearmament, the expansion of the network of U.S., NATO and Zionist military bases, operations to destabilize and promote civil wars (particularly in Africa), various wars of imperialist aggression, in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Afghanistan.
At the same time, the bourgeoisie has reduced the civilizational and welfare gains that the workers and popular masses of the imperialist countries had wrested from it as part of the first wave of the proletarian revolution and turned the institutions related to those gains, i.e., pensions, insurance, health care, education, etc., into financial enterprises. It has shifted to the advantage of commodity-producing capital and finance capital the terms of the distribution of the value produced, diminishing the share attributed to the working-class masses. It has increasingly financed public expenditures with public debt instead of taxes, expanding the field of activity of finance capital. At the same time, it eliminated the measures taken during the first general crisis to limit monetary maneuvers, such as the Bretton Woods Accords, and financial speculation, and moved money, finance capital and commodity-producing capital from one corner of the world to the other with unlimited freedom.
In this way, the imperialist bourgeoisie postponed and mitigated the fall of commodity-producing activities and, at the same time, created the circumstances and forms of the current crisis.
In 2008, with the financial crisis that began in the U.S., the second general crisis entered its terminal phase, characterized by the permanent combination of the financial crisis with the economic crisis. Financial and speculative activities have swelled to such a point that they are in a chronic convulsive state, the systematic disruption of financial and monetary institutions spills over into commodity-producing activities causing their rapid and catastrophic reduction resulting in an increase in the unemployed, bankruptcy of artisans and the self-employed, increased precarity, reduced wages, depletion of savings and growing debt, reduction of government revenues with taxes, fees, tariffs, etc, reduction of social benefits (health care, education, public services, subsidies, etc.) and, for businesses, fall in sales, increase in inventories, indebtedness, wage cuts, layoffs.
The measures taken by international financial and political institutions and individual country governments since 2008 have deepened the economic crisis, severely worsened the living and working conditions of the mass of the population, and increased the devastation of the environment. The bulk of these measures have concerned the manifestations of the
crisis in the financial sphere, particularly from 2010 onward speculation on the public debt securities of Greece, then Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, and have consisted of increasing and repeated injections of money to banks, financial companies, stock exchanges, their clients and agents. In the same way as those who try to put out a fire by throwing gasoline on the fire, these measures have only increased the mass of money in the hands of people who have no other goal but to increase it more and more, who the more they have the more they demand, who the more they have the more they try to increase it by multiplying speculative activities.
The interpretation of the nature of the current crisis is an area of class struggle. On the interpretation of the nature and cause of the current crisis also derives the way out and the political course to be followed, in the same way that the cure of a disease depends on the diagnosis of the disease. In the dominant culture, the current crisis is currently regarded as
- a cyclical crisis, that is, one that is part of a “normal” (except for the size) alternation of cyclical cycles and that, like all cyclical crises, will sooner or later cease of its own accord, because the disruption of the productive system, by reducing productive capacity, creates the conditions for the resumption of production; thus for the popular masses and their organizations it would be a matter of tightening their belts while waiting for better times, at most of convincing or inducing governments to adopt counter-cyclical, “damage control” policies, with public spending plans and social shock absorbers. This interpretation of the current crisis is also supported by political parties and exponents who claim to be faithful to the principles of the communist movement, but in fact dogmatically transpose into the present Marx’s analysis concerning the crises of capitalist countries in the pre-imperialist phase (when free competition among many independent capitalists dominated) and finds an apparent basis in the fact that even in the phase of absolute overproduction of capital the real economy proceeds between ups and downs, zigzagging, in accordance with the anarchic nature of the capitalist system of production;
- or a financial crisis, due to unbridled liberalism, “deregulation” in financial and banking activities, speculation and globalization or the creation of the euro: the crisis now expresses itself in these aspects as well, but each of them in turn was generated by the need of the capitalists to move freely in search of means to valorize their capital, which an important part of them could no longer find in capitalist enterprises; the solution would consist in regulation of the financial market, controls on financial institutions, taxation of financial transactions, and for the popular masses and their organizations it would be a matter of convincing or inducing governments and international institutions to introduce rules and forms of control.
Both of these interpretations of the nature of the current crisis have in common that they either ultimately give it as possible to solve the crisis in a basically peaceful way, by the same authorities and classes that dragged us into the crisis, while still remaining within the framework of a perhaps reformed and corrected capitalism or they take it for granted that revolution will break out.
Instead, the solution of the general crisis by absolute overproduction of capital implies a general upheaval of the system of relations within each country and internationally to create the political power structure that
- to the firm created and managed by the capitalist to increase his capital, replaces the productive unit built and managed by the organized workers that produces the goods and services that the organized workers recognize as necessary for the decent life of the population, at the level of civilization that humanity has now reached
- to the system of international relations based on competition and competition among countries and industrial and financial groups, which inevitably sooner or later results in war, replace a system of international relations based on solidarity, cooperation and exchange among countries.
In summary, the solution to the current crisis is the establishment of socialism and the beginning of the transition to communism.
The terminal phase of the crisis aggravates the political crisis within each country and internationally. Within each country political marasmus, instability, and ungovernability grow, the hegemony of the ruling classes over the popular masses, that is, their ability to direct their consciences and control and direct their activities, is in free fall, the internecine warfare among bourgeois groups is skyrocketing.
In every imperialist country, the general crisis widens more and more sharply the furrow that divides society into two opposing parts: on the one hand, the popular masses, composed of those classes that have to work for a living and can live only if they can work (workers, civil servants, unemployed and precarious workers, pensioners, self-employed workers, small owners, small traders, etc. ); on the other hand, the imperialist bourgeoisie, composed of those who live off the labor of others and who, if they work, do so only to increase their own wealth (industrialists, bankers, businessmen and mafiosi, big officials, high-ranking prelates, bourgeois politicians, artists and successful figures of bourgeois culture, etc.).
The crisis exacerbates the imperialist bourgeoisie’s war of extermination against the popular masses in every corner of the world: it is a war that causes tens of millions of deaths every year from hunger, misery, exploitation, wars, occupational diseases, depression, alcohol and drugs, environmental pollution, work accidents, traffic accidents, predictable and containable catastrophic natural events such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, etc. No war in human history has ever claimed as many victims as this war of extermination, caused solely by the persistence of the capitalist system and bourgeois domination, does every year.
The crisis sharpens the contrasts between imperialist groups and the use of war as a means of settling accounts with each other and with those who obstruct their interests and business or do not accept their domination, to open the way for the exploitation of the resources and masses of the people of the oppressed and ex-socialist countries, to stifle the revolt of the oppressed peoples and to prevent the rebirth of the communist movement. They are wars of imperialist aggression even though the imperialist groups present them to the popular masses of their countries as humanitarian wars, wars against dictators and for freedom, wars for “peace” and “exporting democracy,” etc., and have them approved by the international bodies they and their states have created: the UN, EU, NATO, etc.
The terminal phase of the crisis aggravates the cultural crisis. The bourgeoisie in the imperialist era has ceased to play a progressive role and has allied itself with the remaining feudal classes, especially the clergy and the Roman Catholic Church in the struggle against the communist movement. At the cultural level, it has gradually abandoned the promotion of scientific research and understanding of the physical reality in which we live, recovering all forms of superstition and belief to assert that its rule corresponds to the “natural order of things.” In an even more serious form it acts to prevent, distort or direct in a reactionary direction the research and elaboration of understanding relating to the human species: to individuals and society.
The terminal phase of the crisis aggravates and extends this tendency. The economic marasmus with its harboring of marginalization, unemployment, precariousness and exploitation undermines all the customs, certainties and values that had been established during the period of capitalism with a human face in the camp of the popular masses, and with that it fosters the spread among the popular masses themselves of anti-social and self-destructive behavior. The ideas, conceptions, conventions, and habits of the past are no longer valid in the new situation. The communist movement must
not promote or even impersonate regret of the past, but on the contrary must put itself at the head of change, elaborate, spread, root among the popular masses by practice and practical experience ideas, conceptions and behavior appropriate for the construction of the socialist revolution.
The masses can no longer live as before and, in their own way, spontaneously resist, individually or collectively. In order to prevent this from being transformed into conscious organization and revolutionary mobilization, the bourgeoisie increasingly focuses on maintaining the political and cultural backwardness of the masses with an articulated system of diversion and evasion from reality, disinformation and intoxication of public opinion. In this way it seeks to prevent the masses from learning to assimilate and understand the lessons that the direct experience of the crisis brings and to prevent a strong vanguard of a new consciousness and morality from emerging from them, becoming increasingly independent of its influence.
With a special focus on the young, the bourgeoisie thus by all means foments extreme individualism, mindlessness, resignation, disengagement and escapism; promotes all kinds of vices; nurtures fears, superstitions and commonplaces toward diversity such as racism, homophobia, etc.; impoverishes school systems, giving space for the revaluation of fascism and recovering old reactionary theories. Scientific understanding of reality is reserved for the scions of the bourgeoisie, what should become the future ruling class of bourgeois society, fully restoring the class character of schooling. Unable to prevent the upheaval of their lives and their mobilization, the bourgeoisie, at the moral and intellectual level, attempts to push the masses to the level of brutalization and ignorance necessary to entrench them in its service in reactionary mobilization.
For the first time in human history, the general crisis of capitalism is combined with the environmental crisis. Capitalism by its very nature must endlessly expand production and consumption. It, therefore, has plundered the earth and altered the environment, moreover in a chaotic manner dictated by the profit of individual capitalists, individual commodity producers, and individuals. Pollution, devastation and plundering of the environment have now reached a level that endangers the survival of the human species and the planet. Various proposals for solutions to the environmental crisis, such as green economy and degrowth, have run in the current culture, both of which are unworkable solutions and both ultimately contribute to dissipating the struggle to eliminate the system of social relations that generates pollution and plunder of the planet. Conducted to their fullest extent, on the other hand, they imply the establishment of socialism: a new system of social relations that simultaneously corresponds to the needs of the masses of the people, is democratic, environmentally friendly, adequate to the material and intellectual productive forces existing today, and corresponds to the most advanced sentiments and conceptions.
The environmental crisis converges with the general crisis to make the establishment of socialism and the transition to communism indispensable for the survival of humanity as well as for its progress. Humanity has all the material forces and all the knowledge necessary to end the environmental crisis and to establish a new positive relationship between the human species and the rest of nature, different from and superior to the one it has had throughout the course of its millennia-long evolution.
As for the present, the trend toward war that the crisis generates has its most advanced form in the war that the International Community of American, European Imperialist Groups promotes and fuels in Ukraine. The development of the crisis makes clear the alternative between revolutionary and reactionary mobilization, between socialist revolution and war, that either socialist revolution will prevent war or war will generate revolution. The clash is already manifested
in the resistance that the masses of the people and peoples around the world are putting up to the attack of the imperialist bourgeoisie. This resistance already turns into attack as it did on October 7 in Palestine. The transformation into attack of the spontaneous resistance of the popular masses and peoples throughout the world against the progress of the crisis is the essential task of the Caravan of the (new)PCI of which the CARC Party is a component. Support for this resistance also lies in the name of the CARC Party, Committees of Support for Resistance – for Communism. We turn resistance into struggle for communism, to make Italy a new socialist country and thus contribute to the revival of the International Communist Movement and the new wave of proletarian revolution.