Boom or Bust

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explosive reaction by capitalism's most abused victims against their misery.

Limits to the political crises The counter-cyclical strategy was effective. It significantly postponed the day of reckoning. There has not been a major economic crisis in the imperialist centers since shortly after the end of the Second World War. And political crises, of which there have certainly been more than a few, have been objectively delimited by essentially uninterrupted economic stability. Capitalism was made secure in the strategic home-bases of imperialist nations for an unprecedented period.

This is the material basis for capitalism's post-war economic success. And, given the unsolved problem of revolutionary proletarian leadership, it explains why there has been no truly revolutionary crises in the imperialist centers since the missed opportunities following World War II.

The student-triggered French political crisis of 1968, for example, was deep enough to impel the working class toward a general strike during which workers occupied all major workplaces. But the reformist misleadership was able to block the revolutionary possibilities from following their logic and was able to relatively swiftly drag the workers from the field of class confrontation.

The objective pressures that led to the explosive strike did not run deep enough to provide the objective conditions necessary for solving the problem of leadership. A fighting proletarian leadership can be forged only in the course of a prolonged social, economic, and political crisis during which leadership is tested and retested during wave after wave of mass mobilizations and class confrontations.

Only the mass of radicalized students continued to engage in waves of mobilizations. This gave our French co-thinkers time to gain considerable influence and adherents among student activists. But French capitalism was able to grant enough concessions to its aroused workforce to forestall a cycle of mobilizations in which Karl Marx was the first to solve the mysteries of capitalist production which had eluded brilliant thinkers who came before him. While others, from Aristotle to Adam Smith to Benjamin Franklin, had grasped that labor-time was the source of value, it was Marx who discovered the secret of capitalist production. He proved conclusively, in his historic critical analysis "Capital," that all surplus value (profit) was derived from the unpaid labor-time extracted by capitalists from workers. Marx showed how this relationship creates an irreconcilable conflict of interests between labor and capital. What's good for the capitalists as a class is bad for the workers as a class-and vice versa. When workers are able to force a higher wage or better working conditions, it tends to depress profit. And when capitalists can force workers' standards down, profits tend to rise.

Marx showed how the cycle of boom and bust is intrinsic to the capitalist system of production. The Oct. 19, 1987, stock market crash is not, as many capitalist economic experts argue, caused by psychological factors or by mistaken policies at the highest levels of government, finance and industry.

While these factors may contribute capitalist economic stability upon the social and political crises that erupted in that period.

The United States today In the United States today, the workers have been experiencing a gradual decline in living standards. The main barrier to to the timing or the depth of the developing crisis, it is determined by inherent contradictions in the system itself. The cause of periodic crises of overproduction derives from an economic system in which wages are necessarily less than the new values incorporated in the products produced by working people.

This means that the product of society cannot be profitably absorbed.

Workers cannot buy back all the goods they produce. And while capitalists certainly can buy the entire surplus product, they can eat only so many steaks, use only so many cars and live only in so many houses. Unsold surpluses must accumulate.

War is inherent to capitalism. The huge military budget (over $30 million an hour today goes to feed the war machine) has two purposes. Its first function for each capitalist nation is as a tool for dominating world markets and enslaving the most helpless peoples...or, for weaker capitalist states, a means for defending thenselves against other predator nations.

The second function of military spending is to absorb the excess capacity of industry in an effort to slow down the saturation of the market with surplus goods.

• A point is reached, nevertheless, and intensifies.

The invidious role of bureaucratic treachery is the main obstacle to a mass fightback. The central labor bodiesstarting with the highest echelons of the AFL-CIO union bureaucracy—systematically allow each embattled sector, in turn, to stand alone against the full power of the ization of the working class. The army of permanent jobless, already numbering in the tens of millions, will grow.

Working people cannot and will not take this laying down. They will not accept mass unemployment and/or reduced living standards without a fight.

We can be certain that as the class struggle sharpens, a new generation of working-class fighters will emerge. A left wing will form in the unions in the course of the confrontations between labor and capital. The logic of this course of events, we can also be certain, will lead many of these militants toward socialist conclusions and a struggle which will be resolved only by a fundamental political, economic, and social transformation of society.

The economic theory of Karl Marx has been declared "dead," and ceremo niously buried many times over the last 125 years. But his ideas are alive and well. And we can be sure that as world capitalism stumbles along into its deepest crisis ever, Marx's scientific socialism will win countless new adherents.

Marx warned over a hundred years ago, the choice for humanity is socialism or barbarism. This grave, and all too real, choice in this age of potential nuclear •holocaust will ultimately galvanize tens of millions into revolutionary action.

Meany, the AFL-CIO president at the time, sanctioned Carter's strikebreaking. Worse yet, Meany and Co. did everything they could to block local and regional units of the AFL-CIO from giving support to the miners' struggle. The miners won despite the treason of the top bureaucrats.

Leaders of Socialist Action, at that time among the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party, played a significant role in