Below are interrelated excerpts from “What the 1987 Stock Market Crash Foretold,” a Socialist Workers Party resolution published in New International no. 10. It will help readers of the Militant place today’s economic and social crisis within the longer arc of decline of the world capitalist system. Copyright © 1994 by New International. Reprinted by permission.
The falling average rate of industrial profit accruing to the ruling capitalist families in the imperialist countries lies behind the evolution of the economic factors that make the initiation of a worldwide depression inevitable in the coming years. …
Government intervention in this destabilizing process will grow by leaps and bounds. But no alternative economic policies followed by the employing classes or by their states and political parties can avert these consequences of the evolution of the falling average rate of industrial profit. …
To reenter a road of accelerating and self-feeding capital accumulation, the exploiters must inflict crushing defeats on the working class; drive under giant quantities of the weakest and most outmoded capitals at home and abroad in a ruthless competition for markets and profits; and invest in new industries and technologies that qualitatively expand their productive capacity.
This course would require the capitalists to jack up the rate of exploitation of the working class to a degree that could only be achieved by longer hours of work and intense speedup. To accomplish this, in turn, would require chronic unemployment and defeats of the unions on a massive enough scale to sap workers’ confidence, intensify competition and deepen divisions among them and with their allies, diminish their level of organization, and thus destroy their capacity to fight. …
These attacks will be met by growing resistance by working people around the world — from fights for jobs and a shorter workweek, to revolutionary national liberation struggles. …
The mightiest class battles of human history will provide the workers and exploited farmers in the United States and many other countries the opportunity to place revolutionary solutions on the order of the day.