Citação: Sobre o "novo capitalismo de Estado"
“The bourgeoisie is trying its hardest to encourage work, with pension ‘reforms’, with the attack on so-called ‘welfare’ and the passage to workfare; it lowers wages, exacerbates underemployment or precariousness, increases the “industrial reserve army” (unemployment) in an attempt to re-establish the profitability of productive investment. In many countries it offers generous incentives for refurbishment of machinery, which constitutes, like the other forms of support, a nice breath of fresh air for the sectors/individuals involved, but — and we return to the starting point — however much money the state injects into the economic system, that injection cannot rejuvenate a decrepit organism, since the high organic composition of capital makes it difficult to increase that productivity (of surplus value) which is the alpha and omega of capitalism. This is not to mention that the money must be found through taxation, which, as we have said, has been lowered on capital for decades, and which causes the state's debt to further increase. Thus, there is too much capital in search of satisfactory returns which, due to the scarcity of opportunities, throws itself into speculation, obviously including both in public and private debt. According to the former governor of the Bank of France, between 2000 and 2020, “In total, on a world scale, the ratio is 23% of real value created by investment and 77% by the game of valorisations”, i.e. from the various forms of financial speculation. In the USA that ratio could be as high as 13% compared to 87%. At the beginning of 2022 global debt was estimated to be over “$300 trillion (1 trillion = 1000 billion). This figure, an absolute record in peacetime, represents 360% of world GDP”.
As we have seen, for over fifty years capital has been grappling with the manifestation of its main contradiction: the fall in the average rate of profit, trying everything to tame it, not least with ever more extensive use of the state. The ‘ecological transition’ itself which, if we are very optimistic, will at best limit the effects of the climate catastrophe that is now obvious — that legitimate daughter of the desperate search for profit under the pressure of the crisis — is not even conceivable without increased state intervention, however it is presented.
Attacks on working conditions and thus living conditions of the proletariat, environmental catastrophe, impending risk of generalised imperialist war, with its enormous burden of death and destruction: there is enough to raise awareness of the incompatibility between the existence of capital and our own existence, indeed, of life itself. But only the revolutionary proletariat, politically guided by its international party, has the key to getting out of this unsustainable situation: either communism or endless barbarism”.
Considerations on the New State Capitalism, The Internationalists, August 2023.