The president is saying that he doesn’t expect for there to be a recession in the near future, and that if there is one, it will be small. He’s lying, as much as he was lying when he said the U.S. isn’t trying to prolong the conflict in Ukraine. If he weren’t downplaying things, cities across the country wouldn’t be preparing for the worst by trying to manage consistently undermet budgets. The truth is that a downturn is coming, and that it won’t be merely a routine recession. The 2008 crash showed that at this stage in the decline of our socioeconomic order, economic downturns can only take on gargantuan forms. This isn’t just because of the unprecedented financial bubble that’s been growing ever since the last one burst almost fifteen years ago. It’s because as far as the working class is concerned, economic disruptions no matter how “small” necessarily multiply in their destructive power. Especially when compounded by the variables from our modern world, such as viruses, inflation crises, and intensifying climatic disasters.
From the perspective of a proletarian in today’s America, who’s having their livelihood disrupted by inflation on top of half a century of neoliberal attacks against the working class, a depression is already happening. What happens next will only multiply the existing damage. The cautionless financial speculators who control the economy are about to replicate a bigger version of the crisis from 2008, except now it will be exacerbated by an even worse version of the 1970s stagflationary crisis. Yahoo observes how “There are signs that a debt crisis has already started taking shape, and a hard landing of the economy before the end of the year is now the baseline scenario, according to top economist Nouriel Roubini.” Time assesses that “The U.S. has already had two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth in the first half of this year, but job creation was robust, so we weren’t yet in a formal recession. But now the labor market is softening, and thus a recession is likely by year’s end in the U.S. and other advanced economies.”
When the evidence becomes undeniable that a crash is happening, the Biden administration will try to minimize it the same way they’ve done with the existing dire situation the working class is in: by relativizing how bad the people’s conditions are. The job market has only been “robust” from a narrow perspective of data analysis, like how one has only been able to say the economy has been “doing well” since 2008 from the insulated perspective of the bourgeoisie. The job increases that we’ve been seeing are only “increases” in the context of the unemployment explosion from 2020, which I concluded back then would never be truly recovered from.
A look at the real unemployment level shows this prediction to have been essentially accurate. Because the country has only “recovered” from the 2020 economic shock insofar as the capitalist class has managed to force through pandemic denial policies. Policies that have coerced workers into returning to their old routines. And those workers are now able to earn far less than they were only three years ago. As the Ludwig Institute said in its report finding that rural unemployment still hasn’t recovered, and that the “true rate of unemployment” is higher than official figures claim, our government has in effect accomplished nothing more than the forcing of the proletariat into an even more intense level of exploitation: “We think it misleads the American people to say, ‘Oh, we’ve got 3.6 percent of America that is unemployed, ergo, a huge percent of the population is employed,’ when in fact they can’t make above a poverty wage.”
These increasingly impoverished people, forgotten by their government in favor of a proxy war that’s making essentials more expensive for them, will be hit the worst by what American capitalism has for them next: an amalgamation of the most destructive aspects of the 2008 and 1973 economic unravelings. It’s like these and the other pivotal moments in the decline of the U.S. empire are coming back to hit it again all at once. We’re even seeing the same international actors from these crises return; OPEC, the entity that started off the 70s oil crisis by penalizing Washington’s geopolitical decisions, has made history repeat itself by siding with Russia to cut off oil. Which has destroyed Biden’s hopes for reversing inflation. This shows the U.S. has lost its war to protect the petrodollar, which has been behind Washington’s regime change campaigns within Venezuela and Iran. Those attempts have failed, and now the costs of those failures Washington has feared are here. The multipolar future has come, leaving Washington unable to alleviate the internal disasters which its own wars and hyper-capitalist policies create.
Our ruling class views us as expendables that can be sacrificed, if this is what’s needed to keep the machine of capital running. The European governments are subjecting their working classes to an energy crisis for the sake of appeasing Washington. And as the climate crisis hits Americans ever harder, they may soon come to experience the equivalent of Europe’s suffering when this factor combines with the coming crash. The IMF is only predicting that this downturn will be relatively mild because from the perspective of the IMF, which has exploited the pandemic to impose privatization and austerity onto 81 countries, the suffering the global working class will undergo due to this crisis is nothing more than a statistic. A statistic that can easily be distorted to fit the narrative capital wants to be put forth.
Our government won’t save us, because saving us is incompatible with the demands of capital and empire. The deterioration of the conditions of the people throughout the imperialist countries speaks to what Stalin wrote in his analysis on the self-destructive impacts of imperialist warfare: “This circumstance, in its turn, is notable in that it leads to the mutual weakening of the imperialists, to the weakening of the position of capitalism in general, to the acceleration of the advent of the proletarian revolution and to the practical necessity of this revolution.”
We’re being left behind, without any means to improve our circumstances by working within the confines of bourgeois “democracy.” Which means more of us will soon be forced to embrace a revolutionary solution. We’re faced with a mandate to mobilize towards the overthrow of the capitalist state, and the construction of a workers’ state. Monopoly capitalism is dying a natural death, creating the necessity for a global transition towards the model of planned economy. As long as the capitalist state remains in existence, this need won’t be fulfilled, and the consequential crises will continue to be displaced onto the proletariat.
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