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One of the verities of Marxist orthodoxy is that capitalism is its own gravedigger. In Capital volume three,¹ Marx showed that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall leads capital to cut back investment and reduce industrial production. The result is mass layoffs, rotting machinery, and declining wages while capitalists await the revival of economic activity. But lacking resources, the working class and other oppressed strata cannot patiently endure the depression. Unions and other workers' organizations often mount protests, demanding food, income, and jobs. According to conventional Marxist wisdom, given these measures, the depression does not ordinarily end in revolution or substantive social change. Capital will make some concessions to forestall these events; for decades, these compromises satisfied a considerable portion of the underlying population. However, as each successive crisis deepens, the cost of concessions rises because the level and scale of privatization increases. What is brought to the foreground is both the formal and pragmatic contradiction between labor and capital, and this becomes a sometimes hidden and other times open fight as the force of the determining event in history. And, most importantly, workers become more class-conscious and finally refuse to accept that, inevitably, they must bear the largest burden of the crisis. At a certain point, the contradiction between labor and capital becomes the determining event in history. In other words, given strong, class-conscious mass labor and socialist organizations, the crisis no longer can be ended peacefully; the working class and its allied strata and classes raise the ante.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137387189_9

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