EDITORIAL
The Future Capitalism Prepares:
Deeper Economic Crisis & Spreading War

Dec 22, 2024

Capitalism has two pillars that anchor its future today: economic crisis and global war.

The economy may not have collapsed in as extreme a way as it did in 1929—not yet. But the financial maneuvers carried out by the capitalist class to increase its share of the wealth are pushing the world in that direction.

Exploitation of labor—which is the basic factor of capitalist society—is unremitting and grows more extreme each passing year.

We measure its impact in our declining standard of living, our inability to buy what we once had. A quarter of the population pays rent and utilities that eat up their whole paycheck. Credit card balances go up. The number of decent paying jobs plunges. Younger people work two or even three jobs, just to survive. Young people no longer young still live in their parents’ homes, for lack of rent money. Older people work long past the age of retirement. Grandmothers, great grandmothers take care of children so parents can work more hours. All the public services useful for the population—schools, child care facilities, public health, public transit, roads, bridges, dams, levees, parks—are starved for funds, which subsidize business profit.

The interlocked side of the equation sees wealth rapidly accumulate in the hands of a small number of people, the capitalist class. Instead of investing back in production, they leech profit to put it into financial speculation.

Stock market indexes soar. But that’s only a small part of speculation. The capitalists buy countries’ currencies, then sell them, interfering with world trade. They tout the cryptocurrencies they create in order to push their prices higher. They buy land in order to sell it. They buy real estate, to sell it. They buy pharmacy chains and hospitals, only to put them into debt, then close them. All of this drives inflation. And all of it prepares for the next catastrophic collapse of financial markets, and with it the whole economy.

The answer the capitalists will have for this collapse is the same one they had in 1929: go to a global war, in which all the major powers line up against each other to re-divide the world’s wealth.

In one sense we are already in a global war. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are only a small part of it. There are wars throughout Africa. The Middle East is aflame. So is Western Asia. Eastern Europe is on the edge. If we measure by the numbers killed, we could already call this World War III. But the difference—so far—is that the major capitalist powers have not solidified their alliances. They shrink from sending their own troops. But they are involved, just as the U.S. is involved in the Ukraine war and the Middle East wars.

Today, the U.S. spends more on war than what the next nine countries put together spend. It has 750 military bases in 80 countries. In other words, it already has troops in far-flung places. Patrolling the world’s seas are 21 U.S. aircraft carriers, accompanied by battle ships.

The U.S. may use surrogates—like NATO, Ukraine and Israel—to carry out its big wars today.

But it is spending for, planning for its next major war. And it is demonizing China today, preparing us to accept war against China tomorrow.

For more than a century, capitalism has produced only economic crisis or war or both. Face it! This will be our future until the working class rips power out of the hands of the capitalist class, until the working class uses its position in the very heart of the productive economy to reorganize society, to build and create a collective society that can benefit everyone.

Over 100 years ago, the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg framed the issue this way: until the working class finds its way to build socialism, we will live—and die—caught in capitalist barbarism.