[Marxism] World Depression: Regional Wars and the Decline of the US Empire (Part I)

[David Walsh <davidrail68@xxxxxxxxx>]

World Depression: Regional Wars and the Decline of the US Empire
Part I

By Prof. James Petras

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12955

Global Research, March 30, 2009

Introduction

            All the idols of capitalism over the past three decades crashed...  
The assumptions and presumptions, paradigm and prognosis of indefinite progress 
under liberal free market capitalism have been tested and have failed.  We are 
living the end of an entire epoch:  Experts everywhere witness the collapse of 
the US and world financial system, the absence of credit for trade and the lack 
of financing for investment.  A world depression, in which upward of a quarter 
of the world's labor force will be unemployed, is looming.  The biggest decline 
in trade in recent world history â down 40% year to year â defines the 
future.  The immanent bankruptcies of the biggest manufacturing companies in 
the capitalist world haunt Western political leaders.  The âmarket' as a 
mechanism for allocating resources and the government of the US as the 
âleader' of the global economy have been discredited.  (Financial Times, 
March 9, 2009)  All the assumptions
about âself-stabilizing markets' are demonstrably false and outmoded.  The 
rejection of public intervention in the market and the advocacy of supply-side 
economics have been discredited even in the eyes of their practitioners.  Even 
official circles recognize that âinequality of income' contributed to the 
onset of the economic crash and should be corrected...  Planning, public 
ownership, nationalization are on the agenda while socialist alternatives have 
become almost respectable. 
            With the onset of the depression, all the shibboleths of the past 
decade are discarded:  As export-oriented growth strategies fail, import 
substitution policies emerge.  As the world economy âde-globalizes' and 
capital is ârepatriated' to save near bankrupt head offices â national 
ownership is proposed.  As trillions of dollars/Euros/yen in assets are 
destroyed and devalued, massive layoffs extend unemployment everywhere.  Fear, 
anxiety and uncertainty stalk the offices of state, financial directorships, 
the office suites the factories, and the streets

            We enter a time of upheaval, when the foundations of the world 
political and economic order are deeply fractured, to the point that no one can 
imagine any restoration of the political-economic order of the recent past.  
The future promises economic chaos, political upheavals and mass 
impoverishment.  Once again, the specter of socialism hovers over the ruins of 
the former giants of finance.  As free market capital collapses, its 
ideological advocates jump ship, abandon their line and verse of the virtues of 
the market and sing a new chorus: the State as Savior of the System - a dubious 
proposition, whose only outcome will be to prolong the pillage of the public 
treasury and postpone the death agony of capitalism as we have known it.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dave Walsh

www.socialistviewpoint.org

www.wercampaign.org


"If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of 
mine."
Che


      


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