Vol. 71/No. 11      March 19, 2007

The crisis underlying the stock market's occasional drops is also the one driving the imperialist masters to growing competition among themselves for domination of the world's markets and resources, to brutal wars abroad, and to unrelenting assaults on the living and job conditions of working people at home. This crisis is not conjunctural. It is rooted in the economic downturn that began about 30 years ago with the exhaustion of the economic boom that grew out of the preparations for World War II.

Since the late 1960s, the average rate of industrial profit has been sliding downward. That has made productive investments—such as building factories, mines, and mills, expanding services, or acquiring capacity-increasing equipment—less profitable for capitalists.

Instead, the superwealthy families that own industry, most land, and financial institutions largely favor gambling on Wall Street and other stock markets.

The reason for such unchecked speculation is greed, which, under capitalism—a truly dog-eat-dog system—is not a character flaw, much less an attitude alien to business. Greed is inherent to capitalist competition.

Driven inexorably by the necessity to compete or die, capitalists, without exception, act pragmatically—on the basis that what has been happening will continue to happen. They seek to maximize profits by moving in directions that currently bring the highest returns.

Today the propertied families of finance capital, and their hired circles of managers, politicians, technicians, academics, and professionals are incapable of believing what's happening to the mountains of paper values they've piled up recently. What seemed like free money over the past two decades for the well-healed has today inflated bubbles of debt that will bring down major banks, brokerage firms, insurance companies, pension and health trusts, and industrial and commercial corporations. The recent spike in bankruptcies of major U.S. mortgage firms is a case in point.

At the same time, we have to recognize that the price gyrations of capitalism's "paper economy" do not affect only speculators, or middle-class professionals and others who play the markets. The trading in stocks and bonds is inseparable from the production and circulation of commodities. A Wall Street bust will have a ruinous impact on the toilers, the vast majority, too.

The only effective way to counter capitalism's unnerving instability registered in the stock market's recent blip is to build a communist movement that can lead working people to make a revolution, take power out of the hands of the profiteers, and join the worldwide struggle to build a society based on human solidarity—one that will surely abolish the stock market and return to humanity the wealth stolen by the Wall Street gamblers.
 
 
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Stock market jitters show capitalism’s world disorder  
 
 
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