Meltdown! A socialist view of the capitalist crisis
Tony Iltis, Lee Sustar, John Bellamy Foster, Phil Hearse, Adam Hanieh, Dave Holmes
Published by Resistance Books
2009, 56pp, ISBN 978-1-876646-16-5, Pamphlet
$6.00
The world capitalist system is facing its gravest crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The stockmarket crash has spread to the ‘real’ economy. A question mark hangs over industrial giants like General Motors.
Washington has thrown an estimated $7.6 trillion to the predatory bankers and their gang whose insatiable greed caused the problem in the first place! Australia and other Western governments are following suit. At the bottom of the social heap, unemployment is rising sharply, as are home evictions and financial distress, but little government help is forthcoming here.
What lies behind this eruption of chaos and misery? The articles in this collection provide a socialist take on the ‘free market’ meltdown. They show that what has happened stems from the deepest wellsprings of the capitalist system.
The only realistic solutions are those which challenge capitalist ownership of the economy on which we all depend. We need to fight for public ownership and control of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy. Production must be oriented to satisfying the needs of the mass of the world’s people, not the greed of a handful of capitalist plutocrats.
Let’s allocate resources to provide jobs for all, end homelessness, tackle Third World poverty, and take emergency action on climate change. All this is possible if we organise to fight for it.
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