Why the World Economy Is in Crisis | A Marxist Analysis

[applause] >> Okay, comrades. Um I think we've probably all at some point um in our in our lives as communists heard the accusation from revisionists, reformists, and academic Marxists that Marxism is somehow outdated and needs to be updated and modified. Uh you often hear this idea that we somehow live uh in a new epoch, which means we need new ideas. Um and these kind of revisionists, they say that that capitalism today, it's not like the capitalism in Marx's time that he was analyzing and explaining in Capital. They say that today we live under some sort of uh qualitatively different form of capitalism, or even some say a new type of economy, and a a new economic system altogether. You'll hear labels like neoliberalism being thrown around quite regularly by reformists. You'll hear from some of the sects uh this idea of late-stage capitalism, or post-capitalism. And uh I think a lot of comrades have asked what I think of the the latest trendy label, which is Yanis Varoufakis's techno-feudalism, which apparently we live under today. Now, putting aside all these uh all these kind of silly terms and labels, there is a a grain of truth to I think some of the claims that are being made here, which is the fact that yes, capitalism certainly has changed to a certain degree since Marx's and Engels's day. And Lenin actually recognized this, right? He wrote his famous book pamphlet uh Imperialism. Uh I don't think we've got it in stock at the moment here, but uh you can go and buy it on wellredbooks.co.uk. And he called imperialism the highest stage of capitalism. In other words, a new phase in capitalism's development marked by the dominance of uh the monopolies and of finance capital, marked also characterized by the the the integration and the saturation of the world market and the thorough development of the financial and credit system. And Trotsky also around this same time and after Lenin's death developed this idea. He talked about an an article called the capitalist curve of development. He said how you can trace a curve of capitalist development showing the evolution of capitalism as a system over over the years and decades. He said capitalism is like a living organism where it has a youthful dynamic phase, but it also has and he was commenting by his time it is already entering the senile, stagnant, crisis-ridden phase. And he referred to to this phase as the epoch of imperialist decay. And this was a term that Lenin had also used in Imperialism itself where he he emphasized how imperialism, one of the features of it was that it led to this relative stagnation of the capitalist system where increasingly you saw the capitalist becoming more parasitic, more rent-seeking as the bourgeois economist call it, trying to not make profits from industry, but from from from just monopoly pricing and so forth. They became more coupon clippers. In other words, people just owning pieces of paper that entitled them to a certain profit, a certain revenue without any actual involvement in real production. They became more speculative. And and all of this became rather than seeing an you know, investment in real production, you saw all of this parasitism and speculation becoming a real drag on growth and on productivity and leading to this stagnation that that Lenin and Trotsky described. And today we obviously see all of these same kind of symptoms of capitalism senile decay. And I'd say it's these symptoms that I've just mentioned that Lenin and Trotsky talked about they are often the same symptoms that these revisionists point to when they try and talk about ideas of late stage capitalism or techno-feudalism and so on and so forth. We see obviously today very stagnant growth if any growth at all, very stagnant productivity growth, rampant speculation and bubbles across the economy as as Ravi described in his introduction. And yes, enormous amounts of parasitic profiteering from the big monopolies and the financiers. The question we have to ask ourselves, the question I want to try and tackle today and I think we should try and explore in the discussion is does this represent a qualitatively new type of economic system as the the revisionists and reformists and academics assert? And does it invalidate Marxism as a method of analysis and thereby alter fundamentally the perspectives and the conclusions that we draw when it comes to the world economy? And I think to answer all of these questions, the first thing we have to do is to is to ask ourselves uh you know, examine what is Marxism? What is Marxist economics and what it is not. And uh and I think yeah, let's go back then to the fundamentals to what Marx was trying to do with his economic writings. He wrote extensively on the economy. You can I think still get all three volumes of Capital and and more. Read Understanding Capital, Reader's Guide first, okay, please. Um but uh yeah, he based himself with these economic writings, he didn't just suck it out of his thumb, he based himself on the best of what had come before in what was known as political economy, the high point of which was the classical economists, people like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, these bourgeois economists who tried, and Marx gave them credit for this, to actually analyze the economy as a science. They tried to develop economics as a science and Marx contrasted that with the the the vulgar economists who came after who were just apologetics for capitalism. That's what bourgeois economics is today. Doesn't try and really explain capitalism, just tries to justify the inequality, the exploitation, the crisis, and so forth. But yeah, the the point of political economy was and Marx's economics was to try and study and uncover the fundamental laws and dynamics behind the motions of the capitalist system, just as scientists had done in the natural world, in physics, and chemistry, and biology. People like Darwin who discovered the laws of evolution to the all the the variety in in the biological natural world. Marx was trying to explain the fundamental laws of capitalism that led to all the phenomena that we see today in the economy. And in this respect, I say, yeah, Marx's magnum opus Capital is three volumes and and all his other writings, they're not a study of a particular era or a particular phase of a particular period of capitalism, either. Nor is is is Capital an attempt to try and explain just kind of surface level appearances or movements of the capitalist system. In other words, Marx never concerns himself with the movements of prices per se. He doesn't look at, you know, trying to explain why this or that commodity or good has this or that price at any time. He's not trying to uh look at that kind of level of detail. He's trying to explain the essential objective forces that drive and regulate the capitalist system as a whole, that drive the the capitalist mode of production and and and a society based on the production exchange of commodities. And uh and and what is a commodity? Yeah, it's these goods and services produced en masse for exchange. And and capitalism is a system where that's generalized, it's universal. Even workers sell the a commodity, their own labor power, to the capitalist. In other words, yeah, you have this commodity production exchange everywhere. And the laws of capitalism are the the the fundamental pressures that describe the motion, the exchange of those commodities. And in order to to to derive these, in order to uncover them, Marx shows, starting with analysis of that atomic building block of capitalism, which is the commodity, he uses this he he analyzes this and and from that draws out the essential economic regulator of capitalism, which is the law of value. That's an economic law based on the labor theory of value. I don't have time to really go into that today, maybe other comrades can come in on that. But to summarize, it's the tendency, all other things being equal, for commodities exchange according to the socially necessary labor time contained within them, which includes, on the one hand, the dead labor, as Marx called it, the the labor invested in all the raw materials, the machinery, the infrastructure that goes into production, and the living labor, the extra labor that the worker adds in the course of production, applying uh their labor to those raw materials and so forth to produce the final commodity. In other words, what you have with the law of value is uh an understanding that in the final analysis, and that's what I say, in the final analysis, on average, at root, society's economic resources, i.e., capital, labor, and so forth, will be distributed and allocated across different sectors, across different countries, across different industries, according to the relative amounts of labor uh contained within them. That's that's the general regulator of capitalism, right? There's all sorts of divergences and accidental, random kind of noise within that, but that's the general, that's the average thing that is is driving everything. That's the the below the surface, that's the real undercurrent that drives uh the capitalist economy. And that's the point is that, like any law in science, the law of value doesn't exist as some sort of mystical force imposes itself from without. It's not this invisible hand as as as Adam Smith called the the the the market forces. Rather, it's the result of many individuals coming together in their daily lives interacting economically and out of that chaos, if you like, a regulating order emerges, right? It's a dialectical law in that sense. It's a It's a lawful necessity, an objective pressure that arises dialectically out of all these many accidental, unconscious interactions and then imposes itself on us on on the capitalists, on workers through, yes, the movement of prices, through the the supply and demand, through competition, you know? That law then asserts itself, uh you know, like a like the force of gravity Marx describes, you know? We don't see it, but we feel its impacts uh every time we move. And uh furthermore, like a law of nature, the law of value doesn't exist or apply in some sort of pure, ideal, unadulterated form. It's a It's an abstraction, if you like. It's a a generalization based on certain assumptions, on certain conditions. Like in any science, you build a model, but the model's not real, per se. It's an approximation of reality. Uh and obviously, science tries to ever more increase the the precision of our models and and of our predictions. And uh and and you get a kind of a relative approximation approaching the objective truth. And what are the assumptions uh that that classical economy, that political economy makes to derive its law of value? These are the assumptions that the classical economists like Smith and Ricardo It's that yeah, supply and demand are in equilibrium, they call it, you know? Even today, the bourgeois economists talk about an equilibrium model uh of the economy. And in other words, yeah, in that equilibrium, when supply and demand balance, you've got prices on average equal their values. In real life, prices are diverging from values all the time through supply and demand, but when supply and demand match on average then you'll get commodities exchanging according to the labor time, the socially necessary labor time. But that in turn, all that assumption assumes certain other assumptions, things like no barriers to the movement of capital, to the movement of labor. It assumes free perfect competition. And in other words, it assumes no monopolies, no no supply side kind of bottlenecks and shortages. So what it assumes that if there's a shortage, a lack of supply, then it can be increased by capital moving into a new sector to take advantage of the super profits that will arise in that field. Marx describes all of this in volume three of capital, the these these kind of assumptions if you like, but also how this law of value is derived from all these kind of interactions and so forth. And obviously in real life, you all these things that you Marx and his predecessors assume don't exist, all of them clearly do exist, right? We do have uh restrictions on capital that modify and blunt the law of value and its application. That prevent competition from operating fully and effectively. And the libertarians also point to this same phenomena, right? They they call it the distortion of price signals in the the kind of language of Hayek and von Mises, the the Austrian school of libertarians who who are firm reactionaries against Marxism. They actually threw out the whole labor theory of value. That's a whole another question, maybe someone can come in on that later. But the point they they highlight and that Marx himself recognized, yeah, that distortion of price signals, of of competition, the monopolies, the restrictions and so forth, the inability of capital to move around, all of that leads to an inefficient and misallocated misallocation of economic resources. In other words, in Marxist language, it means the the distribution of capital labor won't be in accordance with the labor theory of value, with the law of value. And that in turn is what helps to create bubbles and distortions in the economy. It prevents inefficient firms from going under and uh and the most efficient firms from uh from from from gobbling up the smaller ones. And this is what Lenin and Trotsky were were referring to when they talked about stagnation, uh decay, and parasitism uh in the imperialist phase of capitalism development because yeah, here you had uh monopoly capitalism developing uh and free competition turning into its opposite and therefore uh monopoly capitalism and finance capital became this barrier to dynamism uh to to capitalism dynamism. There In many respects, Lenin was actually uh actually agreeing with the libertarians, right? Obviously, from a opposite class perspective, from an from an actual real scientific understanding of uh capitalism. What you saw was monopolization in the credit system which had in the past helped to concentrate the forces of production. They'd helped to socialize production, helped to create these big efficient economies of scale as uh the bourgeois economists talked about, and even given rise in inside these big monopolies to certain elements of planning. And Engels talks about that in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, that the planning that exists within the firm, but then the anarchy of the market between the different businesses. And by Lenin and Trotsky's time, these same tendencies, which in the heyday of capitalism, in its dynamic phase, had helped to actually increase productivity by concentrating the productive forces, all of these by Lenin and Trotsky's time were now becoming retarding factors that become a fetter on the productive forces. They'd actually become a source of contradictions and uh and and crises. Now, in Lenin's time, you had uh revisionists and reformists, just as you do today, people like Kautsky, and they also invented terms to try and prettify uh the situation or try and confuse matters. Kautsky believed that capitalism was heading towards a a phase that we called ultra-imperialism. In other words, uh towards a new kind of stable equilibrium in which all the imperialist tendencies that Lenin was describing would actually resolve the contradictions of capitalism, i.e., the contradictions of private property and the nation-state. But, Lenin explained and answered Kautsky in in imperialism. He said, "No, actually, what imperialism had done, what monopoly capitalism and finance capital were doing was actually amplifying all these contradictions, far from resolving them." In other words, yeah, it it you you saw a situation where the law of value wasn't negated, but it was distorted in such a way as to give rise to deeper, wider, more destructive crises. And obviously, after Lenin's death, in Trotsky's time, you see the result of that with the 1929 Wall Street crash and the ensuing Great Depression, which Trotsky described as an organic crisis of capitalism, a crisis in which all these different contradictory pressures and tendencies of capitalism were coalescing and exploding to the surface and marking a turning point in that curve of capitalist development that he uh had outlined uh several years uh prior to the crash. And that's the point. And prior to to this turning point, in Marx's and Engels's day, capitalism had experienced regular, periodic, frequent uh crises, these kind of boom and slumps, which uh which Marx and and Trotsky described as like the the breathing rhythm of capitalism, the inhale and the exhale, at a frequency of around one a decade uh in in Britain, for example, in in Marx's time. These, as I say, they were part of the rhythmic breathing of capitalism that Marx explained and arose out of the very dynamics of capitalist accumulation. In other words, you'd get periods of of rapid investment and spurts of growth, but that would lead to over-investment, to speculation, to saturated markets, and then in turn to these downturns that Marx explained were crises of overproduction. Not Not being Not Not the case that Not enough was being produced, but too much for the market to absorb. And after World War I, then the rhythm fundamentally changes. Now, the slumps and the downturns became less frequent uh and less regular, but also deeper and more protracted. You see, for example, after 1929, they never There was no real solution to that crisis for until Second World War and the the rearmament and and the kind of Keynesian measures that had temporarily helped capitalism to get out of its rut, but it it it didn't crisis lasted a whole decade, very protracted, with its ups and downs, lots of class struggle, but nevertheless very qualitatively different from some of the crises that had come before and very global as well. That was the same in the 1970s, where a whole series of crises from the collapse of Bretton Woods to the oil shock uh to the Iran shock and so forth meant a whole decade of crisis in the advanced capitalist countries and beyond. And then think about since 2008, uh many here 2008 feels as historic as 1970s or Wall Street crash. I remember it happening. I remember George W. Bush, I think it was, going on TV talking about how capitalism had failed, which was quite something coming from the Republican uh president of the United States. But in any case, you think about 2008, there's been no real recovery since from that. And again, there's been added crisis on top of it, the pandemic, the Ukraine war, and so forth, and no real recovery. And the bourgeois economists, the bourgeois commentators, they noticed this trend as well. Um and they they noticed yeah, this lack of of of a real recovery, but also the drawn-out nature of the crisis. They notice it with interest on the one side saying, well, okay, there there's there's been no recovery, but there hasn't been a major crisis either in the last like however long that is, almost 20 years, right? You had the pandemic, which was a bit of an external shock, but there's been very few actual big deep slumps, if you like, since 2008. But they say, well, that's of interest, but it's also of alarm and concern for them. Like I'll read a couple of recent headlines from the bourgeois press. From the Financial Times, they had a headline recently called the downside of staving off recessions. The Economist ran a similar article, probably cuz they actually have some of the same journalists all hanging out in the same parties. But anyway, um they said recessions have become ultra rare, that is storing up trouble. And then I think this is a quote from one of these articles, I can't remember which. Said the US has only seen four recessions since 1982, but over the previous 40 years there were nine, and over the 40 years before that there were 10. So you can see recessions becoming less frequent, but at the same time these deeper and and and harsher. The Economist notes from 1300, going way back, to 1800, economic historians estimate that in England or Britain >> [clears throat] >> that there was a recession about half that time over those hundreds of years. In the 19th century, the country was in recession for only a quarter of the time, a share that fell still lower in the 20th century. And then they add, then today, aside from a contraction owing to the pandemic lockdowns, the world economy has not suffered a synchronized recession for over 15 years since 2008. So, as I say, capitalism has these these long drawn-out periods without a recession, but it's not all positive. Why? Because going back to what the libertarians I quoted earlier recognized, slums play an important role for capitalism, right? They They The bourgeois see these almost as like a a form of detox, you know, like a purging mechanism that helps to clear the decks for capitalism and that helps to sort the wheat from the chaff, if you like. It's precisely through crises, and Marx explained this as well in capital, it's through crises, through that anarchy of the market, that chaos of capitalism that the law of value operates and acts, helping to eliminate efficient firms, helping to reallocate capital to more productive and more in demand more productive business, more in demand sectors and industries. And it's what libertarian economist Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter he called this very positively capitalism's creative destruction. In other words, yes, there was destruction in these crises, but it helped clear the decks and lead to this new period of recovery and boom. And and and this and the libertarians, the bourgeois, they see that as a positive thing. Obviously, today there's a lot of destruction, not much creation. Um but nevertheless, this is what the the most arch defenders of the free market are calling for today, you know? Um but that's the point that today this purging mechanism has broken down and it's leading, instead of a detox, to all manner of build-up of toxins and bile within the capitalist system and in within the world economy, which which we can see. Um most notably, it's leading, as I said, to this decades-long slowdown and stagnation in growth and productivity, which in turn obviously means if the economic pie isn't growing, then it becomes a zero-sum game. It means, uh you know, less living standards for the for the working class, more class antagonisms, more social instability. In other words, yeah, there might not be such frequent crises, but neither is there the economic dynamism and social peace that that brings. And that's why the bourgeois are worried by this development that that that we've highlighted. The question again to come back to is why is this the case? Why is it that the development and and crisis of capitalism take on this form in the modern epoch? Um and I think in short it can be put down to precisely the development of the productive forces over the last century in two aspects. On the one hand, yes, you've got as Lenin explained this growth of monopoly capitalism and finance. You've got today you can very clearly see this with the growth of of big tech which curbs competition. It sucks up capital, you know, all of the the investment in the world now is going into into AI stocks and shares. Uh it's encouraging all that in speculation and bubbles that we just talked about and is preventing new dynamic businesses from emerging. If if you're a startup now anywhere in the world, you're whole a particular a tech startup, your whole model, your whole strategy is just to get to the point where one of the big monopolies buys you up basically. And and actually these big firms, yes, they're investing massive amounts of data centers, but they're also sitting on piles of cash and and not developing the productive forces outside of this. So, yeah, the the development of monopolies and particularly at today the big tech monopolies that dominate the world economy, all of that explains one side of the stagnation we see. As well as also, I should add, the development of finance capital, all the the rentier economy that I talked about earlier based on short-term speculation rather than long-term productive investment and nowhere embodies that better than British capitalism where there's been a complete hollowing out of British industry in order to to encourage financial services and speculation in the City of London. I'll talk about that in the next session on the decline and fall of British imperialism. But yeah, that's one side of the stagnation and is a reason why modern crises have this depth when they do occur because you think about it now the productive forces are huge, right? The size and the scale of the productive forces, the integration of the world economy. We saw this in 2008, you know, the idea of the banks and industries that are too big to fail and the fact that, you know, when America sneezes the rest of the world catches a cold, right? That is a new phenomenon if you like that that or not but it's a it's a it's a a development of things that already going in Marxist time that he talked about even in the Communist Manifesto taken to their extreme obviously meaning extremely deep and destructive crises. But I say the second important factor in this whole process and a very important factor that we we must not overlook is the growth and the strength of the working class that accompanies this development of the productive forces. Think about by the time of the 1930s that by that time the working class was huge. It was numerous, it was organized and in the advanced capitalist countries it was extremely strong and the Great Depression therefore provoked powerful movements of the working class in America and Europe on top of those that already occurred on the back of the First World War and and the Russian Revolution. And these movements in the 1930s they had the potential to overthrow capitalism if it weren't for the lack of revolutionary leadership. Now we obviously study that period and learn from it to to draw that vital conclusion I just mentioned, the lack of the revolutionary leadership, the importance of that. The bourgeois also learns from from history to a certain degree, although as I think Hegel said, the only thing you learn from studying history is no one's ever learned anything from history. Um but the ruling class was extremely scarred, I'd say, from these experiences of the 1930s. As I say, monopolization by that point meant the creation of these businesses and banks that were deemed too big to fail. And the growing strength of the working class also became a factor in their thinking, i.e., the threat of revolution that could overturn the whole system and uh and take everything away from the ruling class. And that meant that this creative destruction that Schumpeter in that period had talked about was therefore no longer an option given the catastrophic economic, social, and political consequences that it would involve. And that's why after the 1930s, and even during the 1930s, fearful of losing everything, the they the ruling class massively expanded the role of the state, loosened the taps, if you like, proverbially, the fiscally and monetarily, and they increasingly came to believe in the need for greater state intervention in to get them out of capitalist crisis. And that was embodied in that period in the ideas of Keynes, John Maynard Keynes, or Keynesianism as it's referred to today. Which in summary, again, maybe someone can develop this later, but in summary, it's the need for the capitalist state to save and bail out the capitalist system. It's the need for the capitalist to be saved from themselves, in effect, by the the the state apparatus. And uh and what it meant concretely was the introduction of economic tools like government stimulus, demand-side management, as the bourgeoise call it, particularly after World War II. They had this Keynesian consensus where even the Tories and Labour both followed the same Keynesian policies trying to maintain demand in the economy, stimulate the economy, manage the economy, regulate it uh in the interests of capitalism as a whole. But all of this came at a cost because, yeah, this Keynesian consensus, it was a a factor. Ted Grant explains it in his his excellent article on will there be a slump, which we've got in the latest uh paper. He explained that was a factor amongst many in the unprecedented economic upswing of the post-war boom. But it also led to growing contradictions for capitalism globally over those decades and and after capitalism became more and more addicted to the debt and credit that came with this state intervention. The crisis as I say they became less frequent but they came deeper and the recoveries became weaker. The growth became more anemic. And you can see that as I say the drawn-out nature of the 1970s crisis. In Japan, there was a big crisis at the end of the '80s early '90s. A huge bubble developed over that in that decade. There was Japan like China today was considered this place where there's booming capitalism at a time where other capitalist economies were struggling. But it was all a big bubble basically in stock in stocks and shares in land and it will burst at the end of the 1980s and led to what they call the lost decades for Japan. There's basically almost no growth in the in the decades that ensued this. And today obviously you see the the same globally basically in all the advanced capitalist countries since 2008 particularly in in Britain actually which has been one of the the biggest laggards in this in this period of perma crisis as even the bourgeois have have coined it. Now yeah, all of these contradictions the symptoms of this disease senile phase of capitalism they're very easy to see quantitatively actually. Um you can you can get the statistics quite easily online if you if you look. Keynesian deficit financing as they call it and bailouts has led to a massive rise in global public debt. The highest that's ever been seen outside of wartime. Uh in around 1980 which is when it really starts to expand it went from about 45% across the world in total of GDP. 45% of world GDP was was you know that was the the size of the the the total government debt. Today it stands at over 100% and if you take public and private debts it's household debt, business debt, all this kind of thing. That rose from around 120% in 80 1980 of relative to GDP to 350% just about 5 years ago which was the peak as as all this credit was used to artificially going particularly through the 80s and the financialization you saw under Thatcher and Reagan and so forth. And similarly all these kind of inflationary policies such as cheap credit, the easy money as they call it, it's massively eroded the the purchasing power of of the working class, right? It's it's led to this huge inflation. Before the 1930s had the gold standard which was basically a monetarist as they call it way of trying to pin prices down and it's prevent inflation. It kept prices relatively steady until it collapsed with the Great Depression of the 1930s and all the contradictions of the nation-state and of of private property. By the 1950s on average globally prices were roughly double what they'd been before that in in 1918 after the World War I. By the 1980s they were eight to nine times as big as they'd been at that level and today prices are 18 to 19 times globally what they were a century or so ago. So you really see the huge impact of these inflationary policies on consumers on ordinary people. But that's only consumer prices. Let's not forget the bourgeois don't care about consumer prices, they care about asset prices and that cheap credit has also massively inflated asset bubbles and speculation. I found something online called the everything bubble index which is basically take all of these assets that the bourgeois put their money in land, stocks, shares, all these kind of things, bonds. And by the 1980s, um that composite everything bubble asset was about double in value in real terms what it was compared to 1918. Today, it's now 16 times what it was a century ago in terms of assets uh because of the growth in credit, the financial deregula- deregulation, the floating currencies that ensued after the the collapse of Bretton Woods. All of that encouraged this kind of inflation and asset bubbles and so on. Obviously, some of that's down to actual economic growth, real housing being built and so forth, uh real uh businesses being created. So, if you strip away the the impacts of real economic growth and look at uh things relative to to GDP per capita, those asset bubbles have increased uh by a factor of five since the 1980s, which is massive uh inflation uh in in uh the wealth going to the rich, obviously, on the the the richest capital, as Marx called it. And then finally, there's the zombie firms uh as as the bourgeois call them, which is these businesses that are basically only kept alive by cheap credit. They're not profitable. They should go under, but because of all those sim- you know, factors I described earlier, they stay alive, right? They're the undead of uh of the business world, right? Neither dead nor alive, uh not put to their grave because they've got this uh drip feed of of cheap credit. In 1980, 2% of listed public companies in the advanced capitalist countries was zombie firms. Today, it's 15% in the advanced capitalist countries, a huge increase in this this this army of the the unliving, or the undead, I should say. Um and uh that's leading to a massive drag on productivity growth because again, as I say, the whole point of recessions is to move the capital away from these dead firms into the more living ones, right? Without that, you get a drag on productivity. And in 1980, productivity growth was 2.8% across the advanced capitalist countries. Today, it's about 0.8%. So, you can see how all of these things are interconnected. And uh you can see where this this stagnation, this decay that Lenin and Trotsky talked about in their day and that we talked about today, you can see where they come from. But say most importantly, the biggest factor is the biggest uh result of all of this is uh all this kicking cat down the Sorry, kicking the can down the road. All of that paves the way for bigger crises, right? And that's what Marx explained even in the Communist Manifesto. He said, "The capitalists can always get out of a crisis, but only by paving the way for more destructive, more widespread crises later on." And we can see how that's the case today, right? All of these measures have been taken particularly since 1980s. All of that's led today to this huge AI bubble, a massive global debt crisis, and that the rise of the bond vigilantes, as they call them, who are going to make themselves heard uh in relation to Burnham, I'm sure. The And also massive overproduction in countries that have tried to use state intervention to save themselves, like China, which is conducted the biggest Keynesian program in history in recent years. It's massively subsidized its industries to try and build up these competitive monopolies on industrial scale, which it is doing and it's challenging the US in many sectors now. But all of those state capitalist policies that China deploys, it's it's created a huge overproduction that China then has to dump onto the world market, which exacerbates imperialist tendencies, national tensions, spills over then into trade wars, protectionism, and so forth, which further destabilize things economically, politically, and so on and so forth. And the other side of it is every time the bourgeois uses these kind of tools, these weapons, the fiscal stimulus, the cheap credit, what they do is they use up their ammo that's available for them to fight the next crisis. And uh that means yeah, today all these sky-high debts they've got means they can't afford further bailouts. If there was another big collapse of the banks, they wouldn't have the money to to save them like they did in 2008. They've created these inflationary pressures, which means they can't now print money to to to help get them out or stave off the next recession. Um and and there's lots of other inflationary pressures as well that are adding to all of this. And then obviously they've conducted years of austerity since 2008 and decades of attacks on living conditions even before that, which mean that there's now no semblance of of social or political stability. There's no strong governments that the capitalists need to carry out the cuts they need to to save their system, to save particularly places like Britain. Um there's no there's the there's clearly no stable government that can carry out the cuts that British capitalism needs. Hence why we've had seven prime ministers in in 10 years, you know, Britain being ungovernable. British capitalism is ungovernable and capitalism generally that is ungovernable in this period. The The capitalists can't get the the strong government they need to implement the the cuts they need. And so yeah, we could So I think all of that shows the impact of all of these uh measures uh that that that the capitalists have used to get out of the crisis. The quite The final question just to end on though is when's the next crisis going to happen? I don't know. In a short If I knew, I'd be a very rich man by placing bets on uh what do they call it? Bet for No, what's the what's the new one? The prediction markets. Polymarkets, yeah. Um Uh I'd be a very rich man if I knew how to predict exactly when the next crisis is going to come from. Marxism isn't about that, right? It's not a crystal ball. Um and to to a certain degree it doesn't really matter >> [laughter] >> from our point of view. And in fact, we don't even need another big crisis to happen in order for our perspectives to be born out or other for for us to build most importantly, right? We can't say where the next crisis will come from. We can't say in what form it will come. There's lots of different places it could could be the tech bubble. It could be the bond crisis and and and the debt crisis. It could be inflation. It could be militarism. It could be another war. It could be lots of things. All of that in itself is a sign of how pregnant with crisis the whole system has become that any of these accidents, if you like, could could burst the next bubble or could you know, lead to the next big slump. But as I say, at the same time, we don't have to wait for that next next major slump. We don't need another 1930s in order to see revolutionary explosions. They are already happening today across the world. The Gen Z revolutions, the revolutions over not just economic things, but political, you know, corruption and the hatred of the ruling class, the X 10 scandal. All of these are leading to an enormous anger to a a revolutionary transformation in consciousness in one country after another. And that's the point. Consciousness is already being shaken and transformed. We study economics not in the way the academics do, not in the way the the people placing bets on the market do. We study it because we want to understand the perspectives for the for the future. We want to understand the impact on consciousness and we want to use it to be able to connect with the most advanced layers of workers and use to explain why capitalism inherently cannot be reformed, cannot be patched up, but needs to be overthrown. >> [applause] [applause]