En Passant

‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ Gramsci.

The disasters of the free market will lead to radicalization and political polarization argues Socialist Worker US.

Michael Roberts explains the reasons for the market chaos going on across the globe on his excellent blog site the Next Recession. He says among other things: ‘The reasons are clear. The Chinese economy, now officially the largest in the world (at least as measured by the IMF’s rather weird purchasing power parity method), is slowing fast. To read the whole excellent article click here.

THE EUROPEAN debt crisis keeps getting worse despite a series of attempts to bail out debt-wracked countries in the eurozone, the 17 countries that share a common currency.

As the European crisis worsens, perhaps engulfing France next, the temptation for the ruling class to reach for solutions outside the democratic norm will become greater.

Whether they do or not depends on a range of factors, including the depth of the crisis and the strength of our side. We should be preparing now to defend democracy. Every union struggle, every demonstration against the problems capitalism creates, every occupation deserves our support and helps build our strength.

So far we in Australia have escaped the worst of the crisis but if the local economy does continue to falter, Australian bosses will be just as ruthless in their determination to make the rest of us pay.

Many factors are driving the worldwide market mayhem, including the fiasco in Washington over raising the U.S. government’s debt ceiling and the spreading “sovereign debt crisis” in Europe.

But looming behind them all are the deep-seated weaknesses in the world economy more than two years into the “recovery” following the Great Recession–and the failure of the responses to the crisis by the U.S. and other powerful governments.

Stock markets are both the casinos of capitalism and its canaries. At the moment the punters aren’t gambling and the birds are gasping. Across the world stock markets have begun falling and some economists are predicting this is just the beginning of a sustained decline. The bourgeois euphoria over the US debt ceiling spending cuts settlement has given way to deep concerns about Italy’s solvency and the seemingly permanently stalled American economy.

This is a mutating economic crisis. This is a crisis whose weak link keeps shifting, and as a result, we need to see it in all its dynamism–the way in which it keeps mutating and generating new kinds of illnesses within the system, so while it looks like the last one has been cured, in fact, all they’ve done is move the damage somewhere else.

The coming together of the enthusiasm and the militancy of the movement of the squares with the power of the working class movement is the best way forward. The squares must play a part in escalating to strike action, and the workplaces need the direct, mass action that is on display in the squares.