[Marxism] PSUV document: Crack in the accumulation of world capitalism (march towards the global depression)

[Fred Fuentes <fred.fuentes@xxxxxxxxx>]

PSUV document: Crack in the accumulation of world capitalism (march
towards the global depression)

The following document was produced by the United Socialist Party of
Venezuela (PSUV) national leadership. It has been translated from the
Spanish-language original by Federico Fuentes for Links International
Journal of Socialist Renewal.

On March 21, all PSUV battalions met to discuss the document, together
with an article written by Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez (read it
HERE). The day after, Chavez announced his government’s anti-crisis
measures (see http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4314).

The document is significant not only for what it says, but also
because it is the beginning of a mass discussion on how to confront
the crisis in Venezuela in the lead-up to the PSUV’s August congress
(for more see http://www.escambray.cu/Eng/news/Wvenezuela090320434.htm).

* * *

Document of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela

I. Starting point: Capitalism is responsible for the crisis

The citizens of the world are witnesses to the new crisis in the
capitalist mode of production, universal in scale. No one doubts that
what we have, in its origin and foreseeable development, is a complex
and deep crisis that for sure, by generating structural changes and
re-accommodation of productive forces, will allow for the opening up
of a new historic stage of human civilisation.

During a fraternal discussion with compatriot Alberto Müller, he
warned of the danger of what he called “economistic bias” in analysing
the world crisis. Undoubtedly, this crisis, more than economic, was
already a historic one in the sense that it questions the paradigm of
modernity that sustains capital accumulation and the reproduction of
the system through the most grotesque financial speculation, explained
by state deregulation, dominant under the neoliberal format; the
accelerated deterioration of the world environment, particularly
through climate change; the starvation of millions of human beings in
Asia and Africa, not because of “scarcity” of food but rather the lack
of opportunity to access it; the insecurity generated by an energy
model that concentrates its use for the wellbeing of a minority of the
population of the planet; the disproportionate, wasteful and inhumane
spending on weapons of mass destructive that feed local wars,
consumerism sustained on credit, the deepening of the
scientific-technological gap in favour of the inhabitants of the
developed countries, among others.

The inherent contradictions of capitalism – a system based on
production for profit and not needs – remain, with the economic cycle
of boom and crisis over the last two decades, masking the
unprecedented funding of the system through the massive use of credit.
In fact, since the decade of the 1980s, the growth rate of financial
capital was greater than that of the real economy (industry,
agriculture, agro-industry).

The financial “bubble” originated out of the most unusual speculation
with the value of goods, that is, the housing market, led the US into
a devastating financial crisis that, in one foul swoop, wiped out the
investment banking sector, provoking an enormous destruction of
capital on the world scale, first, in finance, and afterward in
manufacturing.

>From this we can extract our first major conclusion: the capitalist
crisis of the 21st century is a crack in the accumulation of its
global financial sphere. That is why we are marching towards another
economic depression that is much deeper, graver and longer than that
of the 1930s.....rest at http://links.org.au/node/969

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