Economic Cycles and Crises

There are cycles and crises of a) capital and b) the capitalistic system. The current meltdown of market economy is a crisis of the capitalistic system altogether, and not merely one of capital's periodic crises. Despite the fact that this insight has now dawned even on the ideologists of the system, its political functionaries are undertaking the vain endeavour of attempting to curb the crisis and stimulating the economy by means of financial incentive programmes.

Economic stimulus packages during the crisis are utter nonsense. If they do manage to have an effect, then only to make the disease that brought on the crisis chronic. This disease, however, is the acute drop in the rate of capital's profit.

Against this dangerous, and in the last instance of history terminal disease, there is, for the time being and until the next crisis, only one remedy: the destruction of capital, which must not stop until the mass of profit that is generated by society again leads to an increasing rate of profit of the surviving total capital. Even though destruction of capital implies scrapping of real capital on the one hand, and short-time work and redundancy of human capital on the other hand, it is first and foremost, however, a sudden fall in value size of still functioning capital. This alone is the disease's cure, which openly breaks out with the acute drop in the profit rate. The actual cause of the disease lies in the increase of the productive force of labour, the relative underconsumption of the masses, and the resulting overproduction in relation to the solvent needs.

The increase of the productive force of labour leads to a fall in value of the labour products, and this is also one of the objective causes for the fall in value of the labour force and its relative immiseration. Through the importation of foreign labour force – which causes the labour force to become dirt cheap – the relative immiseration ultimately accelerates towards an absolute immiseration, and this causes the basket of consumer goods to shrink. In the crisis, this enforced underconsumption of the masses (who are filled with needs without being adequately solvent) hits upon the relative overproduction. This must lead to drops in sales and cessation of production.

Parliamentarianism is the totalitarian system currently dominant in the Western Bloc, which forms the government out of the parliamentary majority. Because civil society constitutes the government in the totalitarian parliament, the possession-civic private interest which allies itself with the competence-civic private interest (for the sake of preserving jobs), can help itself directly to the public purse. This leads to an inflation of the measures taken by the state to support the economy and to a corresponding increase of the national debt.

The national debt will again be eliminated through monetary inflation brought about by the printing of money. The general public will thus pay for the measures taken to support the economy with the devaluation of their monetary savings. Not only the state that casts off its debts, profits from the inflation, but also the heavily indebted possessor of real capital. Even in the case of a positive monetary reform, in which each person were to start anew with forty Deutschmarks, the proletariat, sub-proletariat and precariat would have nothing else in their hand, whereas the possessors of capital would continue to hold the lendable means of production. Inequality and injustice would remain as before.

During the economic world crisis of 1929-33, Germany prudently kept a balanced national budget, since inflation had been experienced only a few years previously (1923). The course of the economic global crisis so far has created an agglutinated aggregate risk, comprised of price collapse, drop in production, mass unemployment, and coercive measures by the state, the likes of which the capitalistic system has not witnessed before. The measures of state coercion are being increased and devalued: state inflation.

What surplus value is to capital, increasing power is to regimen, and purport is to ideology. In such an uncontrollable crisis, the political standard bearers of the rule of capital are increasingly denied allegiance. Their democratism and bureaucratism that is justified through their relative wealth, is first subverted by corruption, no-go areas, zones liberated from democracy, nepotism, defiance of authority, tax strikes, unrest, or declarations of autonomy, and is later fully smashed by strong community leaders. But already before this sets in, the ruling ideology can have fallen into an identity crisis, since neither traditional thought patterns, nor keen humanism can any longer support the belief in the outgoing system. Civil society becomes depressed, and all those involved become increasingly aware of its general inability to act.

Economic crisis, decline of power, and depression result in a crisis of the system on a dramatic scale, for which an equal cycle of revolution can be expected. But, of course, nothing is certain, for the counter-revolution sleeps not, and the revolution is still rubbing its eyes in wonderment, utterly surprised by its new prospects.