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The world in 2023 crisis war and revolution

Marxist Perspectives · 2023-08-23

Core Argument

The central thesis is that the world has entered a qualitatively new phase of capitalism's "death agony," marked by the simultaneous breakdown of globalisation, the return of inflation, intensifying interimperialist rivalry, and a rising tide of class struggle. The article claims that the post-2008 era of quantitative easing and near-zero interest rates merely postponed the reckoning, creating a mountain of fictitious capital and unsustainable debt. Now that central banks are forced to raise rates, the contradictions are exploding all at once: economic nationalism is replacing free trade, the dollar's rise is crushing peripheral economies, and the war in Ukraine is accelerating the fragmentation of the world market. The argument insists that the bourgeoisie has exhausted its ammunition — it cannot repeat the monetary fixes of the last crisis — and that every road now leads to slump, social explosion, and the necessity of revolutionary leadership.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis is rooted in the classical Marxist theory of crisis, drawing directly on Marx's law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the counteracting tendencies outlined in Volume III of Capital. The article deploys the concept of fictitious capital to explain the post-2008 bubble, showing how central bank asset purchases and credit expansion distorted market mechanisms without resolving the underlying contradiction between the growth of productive forces and the limits of private ownership and the nation-state. The argument that globalisation temporarily overcame these limits — only to reproduce them on a vaster scale — echoes Lenin's theory of imperialism and Trotsky's law of uneven and combined development. The treatment of war as "the continuation of politics by other means" is explicitly Clausewitzian, mediated through Lenin's adaptation. The article also draws heavily on Trotsky's method in "The Third Period of the Comintern's Errors" to argue that consciousness does not develop mechanically but through sharp conjunctural fluctuations, and that the subjective factor — revolutionary leadership — is decisive. The rejection of reformism is total: the "progressive" governments of Latin America, Syriza, Podemos, and Corbyn are all shown to have capitulated because they never challenged the capitalist framework itself.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article is a snapshot of mid-2023, written after the Truss crisis in Britain, the Ukrainian counter-offensive of September 2022, and the onset of aggressive Fed rate hikes. It identifies several specific conjunctural features:

  • The return of inflation as a direct consequence of the pandemic-era bailouts and supply-chain disruption, exacerbated by the Ukraine war and energy sanctions. The article notes that global trade growth fell to 1% in 2023 (WTO data).
  • The dollar's rise as a destabilising force: the Fed's rate hikes are exporting recession, with emerging-market currency reserves falling by over $200bn in a year (JPMorgan). The article draws a parallel to the 1931 Creditanstalt collapse.
  • The war in Ukraine as a proxy conflict in which US imperialism aims to bleed Russia, not to achieve Ukrainian victory. The article cites General Milley's admission that military victory is "maybe not achievable" and reveals secret US pressure on Zelensky to negotiate.
  • The crisis of the German model: the end of cheap Russian energy and the rupture of Ostpolitik, with Germany's €100bn military package signalling its subordination to US strategic interests.
  • The Chinese slowdown: GDP growth of 2.8% in 2022, the lowest since 1990, with a $7.8tn shadow-banking debt mountain threatening a financial crash.
  • The wave of strikes in Britain, France, the US (Starbucks, Amazon, rail), and the general strikes in Greece and Belgium, alongside the Sri Lankan insurrection and the Iranian uprising.

Where the Argument Continues

The article is a world congress document — a strategic overview rather than a tactical programme. It leaves several questions open:

  • The rhythm of revolution: it explicitly refuses to predict where the next explosion will occur, noting only that the potential exists in France, Italy, Iran, Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan, Argentina, or China. This is taken up in subsequent IDOM articles on specific countries (e.g., the French pension struggle, the Iranian women's uprising).
  • The question of fascism: the article argues that the ruling class "burnt its fingers with fascism in the past" and is unlikely to repeat the 1930s model, but it does not fully develop the analysis of right-wing populism (Trump, Meloni, Bolsonaro) as a distinct phenomenon. This is addressed in later Against the Stream episodes on the far right.
  • The environmental crisis: the article identifies the ecological catastrophe as a product of capitalism but does not elaborate a transitional programme for the climate struggle. This is developed in IDOM's "Ecosocialism" series.
  • The Chinese revolution: the article predicts a "social explosion" in China but acknowledges the opacity of the totalitarian state. The 2024-25 wave of factory strikes and the property crisis are analysed in subsequent IDOM pieces.

Connections

  • Trotsky, "The Third Period of the Comintern's Errors" (1930): the key theoretical reference for the argument on consciousness and the subjective factor.
  • Marx, Capital, Volume III: the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the counteracting tendencies.
  • Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: the framework for understanding interimperialist rivalry and the domination of finance capital.
  • Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: the analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy, applied here to the Chinese and Cuban regimes.
  • IDOM's "The World in 2024" and subsequent world congress documents: the continuation of the strategic perspective.
  • Against the Stream episodes on Ukraine, China, and the cost-of-living crisis: tactical elaborations of the analysis presented here.

Key Quotes

  1. "The advent of globalisation was an expression of the fact that the growth of the productive forces has outstripped the narrow limits of the nation state. It helped the capitalists to – partially, at least – overcome the limits of the national market for a period. However, globalisation did not abolish the contradictions of capitalism. It only reproduced them on a far-vaster scale. And now this has clearly reached its limits."

  2. "The goal of US imperialism is not – and never has been – to defend a single inch of Ukrainian territory or help the Ukrainians win a war, or in any other way. Their real aim is very simple: to weaken Russia militarily and economically; to bleed it dry and to inflict harm on it."

  3. "The distortions created by government intervention only serve to exacerbate the contradictions, which will finally be unleashed with redoubled force and violence. That is just what we are witnessing at the present time. In an act of desperation, governments attempted to solve, first the crisis of 2008, then the Covid pandemic, and now the energy crisis by spending vast amounts of money that they did not possess, contributing to the present chaotic situation in the world economy."

  4. "The political mood of the proletariat does not change automatically in one and the same direction. The upturns in the class struggle are followed by downturns, the flood tides by ebbs, depending upon complicated combinations of material and ideological conditions, national and international."

  5. "Without correct leadership, the revolution can only succeed with great difficulty, and most often, it cannot succeed at all. The conclusion is inescapable. The events in Sri Lanka showed that, when the masses lose their fear, no amount of repression can stop them. With no leadership, no organisation and no clear programme, the masses took to the streets and overthrew the government with the ease of a man swatting a mosquito. But power was lying in the streets, waiting for somebody to pick it up. It would have been sufficient for the leaders of the protests to say: 'We have the power now. We are the government.' But those words were never spoken."

  6. "The capitalist system is no longer capable of using all the productive forces – including the labour power of the working class – that it has brought into being. This is an indication of the limits that the capitalist system has reached. This does not mean that the capitalist system is about to collapse. Lenin explained that the capitalists will always find a way out of even the deepest crisis. The question is: at what cost to humanity, and to the working class in particular?"