They also describe the significant drop in inflation adjusted wages and purchasing power that accompanied the decline in profits and growth. That to keep workers consuming, the corporate sector compensated by giving them credit cards lending them the money at 18-20% interest that they were no longer paying in wages.
Fascism
In The Coming Struggle for Power, Strachey also writes about the important role of fascism in end stage capitalism. He explains how declining profits and growth result in reduced wages, poorer working conditions and a claw back of social welfare benefits enacted during more productive periods. This, in turn, leads to more conflict between workers and capitalists. Ensuring that production continues during a period of heavy stagnation necessitates the rise of fascism in which the capitalists themselves organize workers to install governments which enact laws unfavorable to working people.
The Astroturf (fake grassroots) origin of the reactionary Tea Party is an excellent example of corporate elites organizing working people around a right wing political agenda harmful to their own interests (that opposes, for example minimum wage increases, an extension of unemployment benefits and regulations enforcing workplace health and safety). Paul Krugman explores the origin of the Tea Party in the April 12, 2009 New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/opinion/13krugman.html). Despite the media spin portraying early Tea Party events occurred as spontaneous popular uprisings, Krugman points out they were actually organized and paid for by Freedom Works, a group created by former Republican majority leader Richard Armey, with generous support from right wing billionaires.
Implications for the Future
In The ABCs of the Economic Crisis, Magdoff and Yates, like Strachey, propose "socialism" as the solution to a failed capitalist system. However they are even less prescriptive than he is as to what this should look like and how it ought to come about. At the end their book they simply suggest that Americans come together to decide if our current system is worth fighting for (in the Middle East and elsewhere). They then itemize some of the human costs of our current way of life:
increasing
exploitation at work (all the lay-offs mean workers who are still on the job are
doing the work of 1.5 2 people)
increased
stress accompanied by poorer health
rising consumption that has polluted our planet and filled our homes with junk, impelling us to move into ever bigger houses, fuelling the growth of suburbs and exurbs that waste gasoline, power and water and destroy our natural habitat
They also offer some alternative priorities that are more worth fighting for: adequate food, decent housing, full employment, quality education, adequate income in old age for everyone; true universal health care, enhanced public transportation, a commitment to a sustainable environment, progressive taxation which reverses the process of taxing the middle class and poor to enrich a wealthy elite, a non-imperialist government and labor- and environment- friendly trade.
End of Capitalism Theory
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