Capitalism's terminal crisis and the global cooperation of eco-socialists

By Grant Morgan
Unity (Aotearoa)
July 23, 2911

Global capitalism faces a constellation of existential crises similar to those which collapsed every previous civilization. This terminal crisis will in the years to come bring about profound social, ecological and political upheavals.

Evidence of the crises propelling the world system towards it’s collapse in a historically short timeframe can be seen in trends visible to us today:

• ongoing financial upheavals in Europe and America, along with the dangers of an asset bubble collapse in China, any of which could again plunge the world into economic slump, and right now are sparking trans-continental outrage among victims of government austerity plans;

• willingness of oppressed majorities in the Arab world to risk their lives to topple undemocratic neoliberal regimes;

•  moves within the global scientific community to identify specific extreme weather events with the onset of climate change;

• the ever upwards spikes in energy prices towards economically and socially catastrophic levels as peak oil is passed and capitalism comes up against the physical limits of fossil fuel industrialization;

• insane leveraging of financial instruments as the global marketplace becomes ever more dependent on profits made from money (M - M+) rather than commodities (M - C - M+), creating a system that limps onwards only by undermining its historic basis of survival, which is commodity production;

• escalations in global food prices in the wake of climate change events, oil price hikes, water shortages and futures speculation in farm products, sparking fears, shortages and riots in many countries, and

• mired in the bog of war across the Middle East, with the greenback weakening as the world reserve currency, US imperial hegemony is ebbing away ever more quickly, yet China is beset with economic, political, social and ecological problems which are growing at a faster pace than the global reach of its Communist Party rulers, creating a leadership vacuum at the heart of the world system, and

These and other world historic upheavals, in combination, point towards the end times of the 500-year-old civilisation we know as "global capitalism".

The world's social, economic, political, ecological and ideological conditions are pushing the international left towards a single imperative: cooperate or become spectators to historic events. Either promote a Global Uniting, or see a socialist alternative perish along with capitalism.

To organise sufficiently large-scale change, a qualitatively large number of eco-socialists must get beyond the idiocies of "left competition". And this must happen on a world scale, since only a Global Uniting will be able to save humanity from the catastrophes of collapsing capitalism.