(The following article is from the February 15-28, 2009, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)

People's Voice Editorial

We join wholeheartedly in celebrating the collapse of neoliberal dogma, the bizarre idea that feeding profit-hungry capitalists with every conceivable tax break and privatisation scheme will result in eternal growth and riches for all. But it would be wrong to believe that neoliberalism itself is the cause of the present global downturn.

     In the short term, neoliberal policies pursued by all the leading imperialist states accelerated the accumulation of capital, temporarily countering the historic tendency for the rate of profit to decline. But the growing gap between real and paper wealth eventually had to give way to a new crisis.

     Other structural contradictions of capitalism have emerged, such as the staggering annual total of $1.2 trillion in military expenditures. Or consider the cost of environmental devastation. A recent WWF study, The Living Planet, reports that every year 30% more resources are being consumed than the Earth can replenish, leading to deforestation, degraded soils, polluted air and water, and dramatic declines in numbers of fish and other species. The planet is running up an ecological debt of $4-5 trillion dollars every year - double the estimated losses faced by the world's financial institutions.

     The deepening global depression is not the result of free trade, deregulation, privatization, anti-labour employment policies, etc. Rather, it is the inevitable outcome of the systemic crisis of capitalism itself. As long as this destructive system continues to dominate the planet, humanity will face recurrent, ever more severe crises. The alternative must be spoken clearly: build a powerful people's resistance to drive a final stake through the heart of neoliberalism, and move forward to socialism, the only hope for survival.