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What Comes After Capitalism?

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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

Most Marxists believe there is a grave risk that when capitalism fails it will bring down civilization with it. Which is why they argue for workers to hasten its demise and prepare to replace it with some other form of social organization.As a Marxist, Strachey advocates for the end of class society and for workers to run their own government and own the companies where they work. Like Marx and Lenin, Strachey believes workers' most powerful tool is their ability to organize and bring society to a standstill by withdrawing their labor. However he also argues that the workers' "revolution" cannot be worked out on paper in advance. In his later life, Strachey believed this was the great historical mistake of Marx and Lenin, and ultimately the Soviet experiment. They were too prescriptive in creating an enlightened "vanguard" to work out all the details of the Revolution on behalf of working people. As history shows, this vanguard only served to replace the capitalist elite it overthrew (not only in the USSR, but in China, North Korea and Cuba), producing some of the most despotic totalitarian regimes in history.

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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I am a 63 year old American child and adolescent psychiatrist and political refugee in New Zealand. I have just published a young adult novel THE BATTLE FOR TOMORROW (which won a NABE Pinnacle Achievement Award) about a 16 year old girl who (more...)
 
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