Capitalist failure, then and now!
Scant attention has been paid to the 80th anniversary of the October 1929 Wall Street Crash. Preoccupied with their own present devastating global crisis, the moneybags, the capitalists, can hardly repeat their theme of yesterday – “it can never happen again” – when dealing with 1929. How much of it really has happened again? And what are the underlying causes of today’s crisis?
In the past, anyone, and particularly Marxists, who anticipated something similar to this event reoccurring – and the Socialist Party and the Committee for a Workers’ International did – were considered ‘economic catastrophists’ or ‘primitive slumpists’. However, we never approached economic prospects in such a crude manner as this. In fact, we opposed those who prematurely saw that ‘another 1929’ was just around the corner. Some Marxists fell into this trap in 1987. But before this crisis erupted, we did predict that this time it was likely to be a serous crisis, which the capitalists would be unable to avoid and get out of easily.
The capitalists, on the other hand, were in denial about the workings of their system. Something similar also existed prior to 1929, as John Galbraith in his celebrated book ‘The Great Crash 1929’ demonstrated. On 4 December 1928, the outgoing US President Calvin Coolidge – about to hand over to the infamous Herbert Hoover – declared: “In the domestic field there is tranquillity and contentment… and the highest record of years of prosperity… [We] can regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism.” Andrew W Mellon, Treasury Secretary under Hoover, also declared: “There is no cause for worry. The high tide of prosperity will continue.” An ex-Marxist, Werner Sombart, was also seduced by the 1920s’ boom. In 1928 he wrote: “Karl Marx prophesied… the catastrophic collapse of capitalism. Nothing of the kind has come to pass.”
Does this have a topical ring to it? Amongst others, Alan Greenspan, chairman of the US Federal Reserve for 19 years from 1987 to 2006, made similar statements extolling the ‘free market’ and Gordon Brown joined in, boasting that he had tamed capitalism and the economic cycle of ‘boom and bust’ had been conjured away. Brown even awarded Greenspan with an honorary British knighthood for presiding over a system which was supposed to guarantee an ever-upwards spiral of increased riches.
As with 1929, we said that the massive financial bubble would inevitably end in a ‘bust’. This was not wishful thinking on the part of socialists and Marxists. The economic cycle of capitalism, as Leon Trotsky pointed out, is as organic as “inhaling and exhaling” for humans. This cycle, as Marx wrote, developed over roughly eight to ten years in the heyday of capitalism until it reached an impasse in the First World War. The productive forces – science, labour and technique – had outgrown the narrow limits of private ownership by a handful of billionaires and the nation state.
Thereafter, the economic cycle, like the slowed-down breathing in an aged body, became shorter, the booms weaker and the crises deeper in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. However, the US, as the newly rising economic power of capitalism – it had overtaken Britain in this regard by the late 19th century – seemed to have escaped the economic difficulties affecting the rest of the world in the ‘roaring twenties’.
Capitalism abandons its historical mission
Under capitalism, the trigger for a crisis can come from different factors. Indeed, history never repeats itself in exactly the same way. The immediate impulse for the 1929 crash was the sudden collapse in shares on 24 October [Black Thursday] and another, greater collapse on 29 October [Black Tuesday]. The current world economic crisis was triggered by a banking crisis (linked to ‘securitisation’ – so-called loans to the ‘subprime housing sector’) and then spread to shares and the rest of the economy.
But the ‘impulse’ is not the main cause of a capitalist crisis. Karl Marx pointed out that capitalism was a system based upon the production of profit and not of social need. Profit came from the ‘unpaid labour’ of the working class. Therefore built into the very foundations of capitalism are inequality and the tendency of the working class being unable to buy back the full value of what they produced. Capitalism overcomes this contradiction for a time by reinvesting part of the surplus back into production. The only justification for capitalism historically is to use this surplus to develop the productive forces with the capitalists, according to Marx, acting as the ‘trustees’ of society. Once it abandons this mission – not developing but destroying wealth and industry – it also forfeits this role.
And in a crisis – spectacularly demonstrated in 1929 and its repercussions in the Great Depression and also in today’s crisis – capitalism abandons its mission. Investment in factories and increased production results in a greater supply of goods and services. But both in the period up to 1929 and in the last 20 years the capitalists cut the share of wealth going to the working class enormously, while at the same time piling up their own. As Stephen Foley pointed out in the Independent: “Tell me if this is a coincidence. The income of the top 10% of earners in the US has accounted for about 50% of the total [of national income] on only two occasions in the past 100 years, first in 1928 and then again in 2006-7.”
Economists like Paul Krugman assert that the social after-effects of the Great Depression curtailed the more avaricious appetites of the capitalists in the ‘Great Compression’ which followed in the 1950s and 1960s. Capitalism made enormous profits in this period but because of the huge expansion of industry, the working class’s real living standards also increased. At the same time, the ‘income gap’ was kept in check up to a point by the renewed strength of the labour movement on the back of the boom.
But this began to be undermined in the Reagan counter-revolution in the US and also by Thatcherism in Britain. The biggest US companies – not just in finance – paid their Chief Executive Officers 275 times the average of their staff’s pay in 2007, ten times the ratio of the 1960s. In both 1929 and today we saw the spectacle of ‘overaccumulation’ or overproduction – a glut of goods, services, agricultural production, etc – which in societies pervious to capitalism would have appeared as an absurdity.
But the ‘logic’ of capitalism is that the maximisation of profit is its alpha and omega, its very essence. But how can it be ‘logical’ in a world of scarcity to throw millions out of work, to stop producing goods that are needed by humankind on a world scale? For instance, if the need and the ‘market’ for cars are not there – as was undoubtedly understood even by the car workers themselves in the earliest stage of this crisis – why not convert production to socially useful work? Vital goods are still needed in Britain but particularly by the impoverished masses of Africa, Asia and Latin America? Moreover production can be quickly transformed to useful goods. During the Second World War production in factories in America was changed ‘overnight’ to make tanks and armoured cars, as easily as making ‘pancakes’.
Devastating social consequences of capitalist crises
The consequences of the 1929 crisis, beginning in the US, were devastating. By 1932, US unemployment had reached 23%, peaking at 25% in 1933. The Hoover administration’s approach was summed up by Mellon, who declared: “Liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate… it will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people.” Shades of David Cameron’s Tory party?
In June 1930, the US Congress approved the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised barriers to imported goods from abroad. This in turn triggered a ‘beggar my neighbour’ trade war which reinforced and extended the crisis. Unlike in the current crisis, 5,000 banks, mostly small ones, collapsed. In this crisis just 103, mainly small, banks in the US have gone under so far. With the notable exception of Lehmann Brothers, the capitalists have learnt from the Great Depression and bailed out the big banks. This has been an international phenomenon with the US and Britain to the fore.
Worldwide, credit lines have been expanded and extended to the banks, to the tune of $10 trillion, approximately 80% of the total annual gross domestic product (GDP) of the US, the biggest economic power on the globe. In Britain, the figure is $1.2 trillion in the form of directly guaranteed loans and equity investment, more than two thirds of the annual output of the entire economy, as the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King admitted recently. All of this will be paid for ultimately, of course, by ‘consumers’ largely the working and middle classes.
An economic crisis, particularly one as devastating as 1929 or today, has the same effect as a war. It results in the ‘slaughter’ of capital, resulting in idle factories and workplaces together with ‘idle hands’, that is mass unemployment. Moreover, this is not just a temporary interlude, as even the capitalist economists themselves concede. Will Hutton, a Keynesian economist, wrote that there is a ‘permanent’ loss of wealth in Britain of 5%. A recent report of the European Commission bluntly declared: “The crisis is the equivalent of capital destruction, reducing – at least for a time – the productive potential of the economy.” This means “that the economy will not return to its pre-crisis expansion path but will shift to a lower one. In other words, the crisis will entail a permanent loss in the level of potential output.”
In the US, the working week now is at an average of 33 hours. A victory for the labour movement’s demand for a shorter working week? On the contrary, it is the result of the forcible eviction from the factories and workplaces of millions of workers who may never work again. Mort Zuckerman, writing in the Financial Times, declared bluntly: “This is the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all job growth from the previous business cycle.” He also declared that the “household index”, which encompasses people who are unemployed and underemployed, has actually reached a record 17%. In September alone 785,000 Americans lost their jobs. In the first three months of this year three million jobs went. There has been a loss of jobs for 21 months in a row and if one takes into account part-time work and those who have just given up looking for a job, the unemployment rate is far higher than the official figures of just below 10%. In Britain alone, 750,000 workers have just disappeared from those “seeking work”.
The headline of the above article read: “The free market is not up to the job of creating work.” This admission from the mouthpiece of big business is a crushing condemnation of capitalism. It reflects a system, sick unto death, incapable of really integrating into production and society the most important productive force, the working class.
But hope springs eternal. “We have avoided a repetition of the Great Depression,” say the spokespersons of capitalism. There is probably some truth in this. Marxists always recognise that there is no ‘final crisis of capitalism’. At a certain stage unless the working class seizes hold of the direction of society through socialist planning, capitalism will find a way out, albeit on the basis of continued suffering of the working class and the poor. Is there presently a recovery, ‘green shoots’, or rather ‘green weeds’? The latter seems to be the case as far as the British economy is concerned, as the latest figures of a continued slide in production indicate.
World economy ‘over the worst’?
Moreover, two economists, Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O’Rourke, in their paper ‘A Tale of Two Depressions’ indicate that the jury may still be out as to whether capitalism is ‘over the worst’. The massive worldwide stimulus packages, historically low interest rates, etc., are bound to have had an effect, they concede. Industrial production is slowly recovering and this diverges from the Great Depression when the decline in industrial production continued for fully three years. But has ‘demand’ increased, leading to rising production? Consumer spending is down, house prices continue to fall and production is largely building up stocks and inventories.
Global stock markets have recovered some of their losses, as Eichengreen and O’Rourke concede: “Nonetheless, the proportionate decline in stock market wealth remains even greater than at the comparable stage of the Great Depression.” There is a “collapse of global trade [which], even now, remains dramatic by the standards of the Great Depression.” In industrial production, the big four EU nations – Germany, Britain, France and Italy – are doing badly: “Today’s German and British industrial output are closely tracking their rate of fall in the 1930s, while Italy and France are doing much worse. The North Americans (US & Canada) continue to see their industrial output fall approximately in line with what happened in the 1929 crisis.” Japan has the worst figures, with “industrial output in February was 25 percentage points lower than at the equivalent stage in the Great Depression. There was however a sharp rebound in March.”
Keynesian economists like Krugman continue to hope that we are experiencing “only half a Great Depression”. But this is a global recession, as was 1929, “with even larger falls [than in 1929] in manufacturing production, exports and equity prices”. But academic discussions about ‘depression’ or ‘recession’ will pass the mass of the working class by, besieged as they are by rising unemployment and cuts in living standards even in the ‘recovery’.. Is Latvia, with a fall in GDP of 20% in the year to August 2009 in a ‘depression’ or merely a ‘recession’? Do the people of California, which if it was an independent nation would have “the eighth largest economy in the world”, feel that this is a ‘recession’ or a ‘depression’? State staff is being paid in IOUs, unemployment is at its highest for 70 years and teachers are on a hunger strike
Like the fall-out from Hurricane Katrina, impoverished crowds in California – more people than the 1,500 treatments that were available – queued in a car park for hours for free healthcare, dental treatment and food. George W Bush deployed tens of thousands of US troops against ‘failed states’ like Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, the former ‘Sunshine State’ of California is on the verge of becoming the “first failed state in America”. [Professor Kevin Starr, quoted in The Observer, 4 October 2009.] Any ‘recovery’ will therefore be largely in the pockets of the bosses and their hangers on.
Moreover, if David Cameron has his way and puts the already weakened public services in Britain to the sword, this will enormously aggravate the situation. Cameron wishes to take away from British ‘veterans’, senior citizens and others, already existing gains such as old age pensions and the winter fuel allowance. The effects of such methods were shown in the 1930s. In 1936, the US Congress passed a bonus bill for veterans of the First World War. But then in order to balance the budget in 1937, Roosevelt withdrew this and other measures, which led to a 13-month long recession and unemployment soared again to 19%. The US was on the verge of an even greater crash than 1929. What saved capitalism then and underpinned the whole of world capitalism for a long period afterwards was massive arms production with the approach of the Second World War and in the war itself.
Glass-Steagall Act removed by ‘liberal’ Clinton
1929 and the Great Depression which followed etched itself into the consciousness of the American people, as it did in Britain and the world. Restrictions were introduced in an attempt to control and curb the greed of the bankers. The Glass-Steagall Act and other measures remained in place for over 65 years. It took a ‘liberal’ US President Clinton in 1999 to remove these restrictions. These, together with Thatcher’s ‘Big Bang’ of financial deregulation in Britain set the scene for the orgy of speculation which prepared the way for the present crisis.
Have the capitalists – particularly the bankers – learnt from the present crisis, never mind that of 1929? On the contrary, swollen with public money, they have once more unleashed capitalism’s ‘animal spirits’ and awarded themselves colossal bonuses – worth at least £6 billion in the case of Britain. In the US, Goldman Sachs awarded its top bankers $23 billion bonuses for 2009. This prompted one journalist, in Rolling Stone magazine, to declare that this firm was “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”. One Wall Street banker simply said the directors were “a bunch of clever thugs”. This company was bailed out with $10 billion from the US government, which has now been generously ‘paid back’, but it has also issued $21 billion in bonds, backed up by the Federal Deposit Insurance Company.
The Independent declares that not to bail out the banks would “result in a depression”. Mervyn King demurs: “If the banks are too big to fail, then they are too big.” He wants to break them up and separate their ‘retail’ (High Street) and ‘investment’ (casino) functions, in order to avoid another banking crisis similar to that we have passed through. A new word – ‘plutonomy’ – has been invented to describe society today, one of unprecedented inequality.
Yet this crisis is not just in the banking and financial sector but, as in 1929, rooted in the contradictions of capitalism itself, analysed above. Moreover, nothing can fully check these ‘vampires’ or ‘squids’ – not even obscene bonuses can be eliminated, only curbed, as Obama has proposed – within the framework of capitalism. Only by nationalising the banks and the main giants of the financial sector would it be possible to begin to introduce measures which benefit of the mass of the people and not a handful of ‘coupon clippers’. This in turn could be a step towards the establishment of a state monopoly of foreign trade and a socialist planned economy. Without decisive measures an economic recovery will not be seen as such by millions; it will be “joyless, jobless, creditless”.
The most crucial difference at this stage between the events of 1929 and the current crisis is the political effects. In both crises the result was a massive increase in ‘social tension’, a huge development in the class struggle. In the US, for instance, in the ten years following 1929, millions poured into the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO) trade unions. The Teamsters’ rebellion in Minneapolis unfolded, led by Trotskyists. Huge battles took place with many workers in the US killed in bloody confrontations with the police and other state forces.
Worldwide, the 1930s were characterised by revolution and counter-revolution. Capitalist commentators usually concentrate on the rise of Hitler and the triumph of Franco. But before this the working class of Germany was enormously radicalised, as was the Spanish working class form 1930 onwards. The working class and the labour movement had the opportunity to take power but failed because of faulty leadership. This allowed the Nazis in Germany to triumph followed by Franco’s fascists despite the heroic resistance of the Spanish working class who initially controlled four fifths of Spain.
On the industrial plane – particularly in the US – so speedy and deep was the industrial decline that trade unions and the working class appeared to be paralysed. Nevertheless there was some enormous political fermentation, leading to substantial growth of left and socialist parties. Despite the monstrosities of Stalinism, the planned economy in Russia also proved a great attraction for workers against the background of mass unemployment. ‘Non-capitalist’ Russia was economically immune from the Great Depression. When 6,000 positions in Russia were advertised by a New York agency, 100,000 workers applied! Unfortunately, many of them later fell under the blows of Stalinist paranoia during the Great Terror of 1937-38. However, with workers’ democracy, the idea of a socialist planned economy – particularly now against the background of a world stalked by hunger, unemployment and misery – can have a great attractive power to the working class and the poor.
Huge anger but working class yet to move decisively to the Left
Today, the mass of the working class is angry and disappointed with economic developments but has not yet moved politically decisively towards the left. If there are “dispersed agencies of opposition” to capitalism, as some have argued, then this results from the lack of a pole of attraction for the mass of the working class in the search for an alternative. This is the crucial difference at this stage between 1929 and its aftermath, and today. But such are the blows that capitalism is preparing against the working class that, in time and with the help of socialist and radical forces, a layer of workers will find a road to a left and socialist alternative. They in turn will affect and galvanise the mass of the workers into action.
On the other hand, some can be temporarily seduced by the nationalistic, right-wing nostrums of the BNP (British National Party) and other far-right organisations. However, they cannot provide an alternative, because they are rooted in capitalism, despite their demagogic attempts to appear radical. But the lesson of 1929 is that capitalism offers no way out and will inevitably break down periodically.
We will experience not just one crisis but a chain of crises of capitalism which can unfold over the coming years. There is no prospect of world war as a way out for capitalism. The only ‘war’ being prepared is by the capitalists against the rights and conditions of the working class.
The most powerful factor in society is the working class but it is presently politically disarmed. This arises from because there are no mass independent workers’ parties. This is why the demand for a new mass workers’ party is starkly posed and is urgent in Britain, in Europe and the world. The real lesson of 1929 and today’s crisis is that capitalism offers no way forward. Capitalism has failed and will fail; the working class is the bearer of all real progress. But in order to play this role, it must organise, as Marx said, as a “class for itself”. For this to happen it should discard discredited leaders and organise new parties which can act as levers to combat capitalism and change society in a socialist direction.
[A version of this article will appear in this week’s issue of The Socialist, weekly newspaper of the Socialist Party (CWI) England and Wales]
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