Skip to content

2015 - The storm clouds are gathering

Marxist Analysis · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The central thesis is that the world economy, far from recovering after 2008, is entering a new phase of deepening crisis that will inevitably produce explosive social and political convulsions. Alan Woods argues that the apparent stability of capitalism at the start of 2015 is a dangerous illusion — a mood of false confidence akin to the ballroom of the Titanic. The real dynamic is one of stagnation, rising inequality, and the exhaustion of every policy tool (quantitative easing, austerity, state bailouts) the ruling class has deployed. The article claims that the fundamental contradiction is not economic but political: the objective conditions for revolution are maturing across the globe, but the subjective factor — revolutionary leadership and organisation — remains catastrophically underdeveloped. This gap between objective possibility and subjective weakness is the central contradiction of the epoch, and its resolution will determine whether the coming upheavals lead forward to socialism or backward to reaction.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis is rooted in classical Marxist crisis theory, particularly Marx's law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and its corollary — that capitalism's ability to develop the productive forces is the ultimate measure of its viability. The article draws on Trotsky's analysis of the crisis of leadership, explicitly citing his 1938 formulation that the crisis of humanity reduces to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership of the working class. It also deploys the Marxist method of uneven and combined development, tracing how the global crisis manifests differently in each national context — from the Eurozone's internal contradictions (Germany vs. southern Europe) to the instability of the BRICs and the geopolitical chaos of the Middle East.

The piece sits firmly within the Trotskyist tradition, rejecting both reformist illusions (that capitalism can be managed humanely) and sectarian impatience (that small revolutionary groups can substitute for mass organisations). It draws on the experience of the Second International's collapse in 1914 as a historical parallel, arguing that the long post-war boom produced a similar degeneration of working-class parties — both social democratic and Stalinist — and that the current crisis is now dissolving those formations with comparable speed.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article was written in January 2015, at a specific conjuncture that it reads with considerable prescience. The key conjunctural features it identifies are:

  • The failure of quantitative easing: The US and Japan (Abenomics) had pumped billions into financial markets, but the money flowed into speculation, not productive investment. Inequality had reached unprecedented levels, with the rich pocketing state largesse while austerity was imposed on the majority.
  • The crisis of the Eurozone: Greece was heading toward a new explosion. After five years of austerity, Greek public debt had risen from 125% to 175% of GDP — the cuts had achieved the opposite of their stated aim. Syriza was poised to win the January 2015 election, and the article correctly predicts that a Syriza government would immediately face capital flight and sabotage from the banking system.
  • The slowdown of the BRICs: China's growth was decelerating, Brazil was in recession, India was in crisis (rupee collapse), and Russia was facing a serious recession driven by falling oil prices and sanctions over Ukraine.
  • Geopolitical instability: The US had destabilised the Middle East and was now bombing the same jihadis it had armed in Syria. The Ukraine crisis had exposed Europe's impotence — sanctions backfired on German exports. Russia's economic crisis would, the article predicts, eventually erode Putin's nationalist legitimacy.
  • The rise of new political formations: Podemos in Spain had emerged from nowhere in a single year. The Scottish referendum had produced a massive left-wing vote against the establishment. Pasok in Greece was collapsing. The article reads these as symptoms of the dissolution of traditional reformist parties.

Where the Argument Continues

The article leaves several threads that are developed elsewhere in the IDOM corpus and broader Marxist literature:

  • The fate of Syriza in government: The article warns that Syriza's reform programme cannot work on a capitalist basis and that capital strike will follow. This analysis is continued in later IDOM articles covering the Syriza government's capitulation to the Troika in July 2015, the imposition of the third bailout, and the subsequent collapse of Syriza's popular support.
  • The crisis of the Eurozone: The article's analysis of Germany's dominance and the impossibility of resolving the contradictions of the single currency is developed in subsequent pieces on the Italian crisis, the role of the ECB, and the rise of the far right.
  • The Russian crisis: The prediction that Putin's nationalist fog would lift and the Russian workers would move into action is taken up in later articles on the Russian economic crisis and the growth of social protest.
  • The question of leadership: The central theoretical problem — how to build revolutionary parties in a period of dissolution of the old formations — is the subject of ongoing discussion in Against the Stream episodes and in Woods's longer works, particularly The Bolivian Revolution and the Question of Leadership and Reformism or Revolution.
  • The Zimmerwald analogy: The article ends with the 1915 Zimmerwald Conference as a model for revolutionary internationalists today. This is developed in articles marking the centenary of Zimmerwald and in the RCI's ongoing work to build a new revolutionary international.

Connections

  • Trotsky, The Transitional Program (1938): The article's central claim — that the crisis of humanity is the crisis of revolutionary leadership — is directly taken from Trotsky's founding document of the Fourth International.
  • Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution: The method of analysing the relationship between objective conditions and subjective factors is drawn from Trotsky's theoretical framework.
  • Alan Woods, Reformism or Revolution: This book-length treatment of the same themes — the bankruptcy of reformism, the need for revolutionary leadership, the analysis of the current conjuncture — is the most developed statement of the position summarised here.
  • IDOM articles on Greece (2015): The series of articles tracking the Syriza government's betrayal and the Greek workers' response provide the concrete case study that tests the theoretical claims made in this piece.
  • IDOM articles on Podemos and the Spanish left: The analysis of Podemos's rise and subsequent trajectory continues the argument about the volatility of new formations and the need for a clear revolutionary programme.
  • Marx, Capital Volume 3: The theoretical foundation in the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the analysis of overaccumulation.

Key Quotes

  1. "Marxism explains that in the last analysis the viability of any socio-economic system is determined by its ability to develop the productive forces. That is the fundamental reason for the present crisis. Bourgeois society finds itself in a blind alley from which there is no way out."

  2. "Far from having succeeded in stabilising the situation, world capitalism is sinking deeper and deeper into crisis. As we said long ago, every attempt of the bourgeois to restore the economic equilibrium merely serves to destroy the social and political equilibrium."

  3. "It is the lack of the subjective factor – the revolutionary party and leadership – that is the main reason for the protracted character of the crisis. It is also this that gives it such a convulsive character. The central contradiction of the epoch is the glaring contrast between the maturity of the objective situation for revolution and the bankruptcy of the existing organizations."

  4. "The reformist leaders consider themselves to be great realists but in fact are the worst kind of Utopians. Cocooned in their comfortable offices and the rarefied atmosphere of the parliamentary debating chamber, they are completely out of touch with reality."

  5. "In a revolutionary period parties and leaders are subject to close scrutiny by the masses who are seeking a way out of the crisis. They develop a very acute sensibility and a critical attitude that was absent or poorly developed before."

  6. "Let us leave pessimism to the bourgeois and their reformist hangers-on. They have every reason to be pessimistic! But we have every right to be optimistic. We welcome the New Year with the spirit that our Age requires: a spirit of enthusiasm for the battle that impends, the battle between a worn-out, decaying and degenerate Order that has outlived its usefulness and is ripe to be overthrown, the battle of the future against the past, the battle for a new and better world: the battle for socialism."