On the Next Great Recession

A Brief Note by Michael Pröbsting, Revolutionary Communist International Tendency, 19.1.2016, www.thecommunists.net

The capitalist world economy is close to another Great Recession, or has even already entered it. This is due to the combination of several interrelated factors:

* The stagnation which the world economy has been experiencing ever since the onset of the Great Recession which opened the current historic period of capitalist decay in 2008/09;

* The decline of the rate of profit in the US and other important economies;

* The downturn of the Chinese economy (today the second biggest imperialist country);

* The recession which other important capitalist countries (Japan, Russia, Brazil) have already entered.

For Marxists this development comes as no surprise. We already predicted such developments in our last World Perspectives document which we published a year ago, in January 2015. In that document we wrote “All in all, there are strong indications that 2015 will not ‘finally’ see a recovery but rather another recession. We believe that this recession will be even worse and deeper than the one of 2008/09, which was already the worst recession since 1929.” The downturn of US industrial production in 2015, the collapse of the Chinese stock market, and other developments confirm this analysis.

By next week the RCIT will be publishing an extended analysis of the state of capitalism in the world today as well as the current global political situation. Until then, we would like to draw our readers’ attention to our previous study of the accelerating contradictions of the capitalist world economy which analyzes the background for the current downturn and which we released in January 2015: Perspectives for the Class Struggle in Light of the Deepening. Crisis in the Imperialist World Economy and Politics. Theses on Recent Major Developments in the World Situation and Perspectives Ahead (January 2015) 11 January 2015, in: Revolutionary Communism No. 32, http://www.thecommunists.net/theory/world-situation-january-2015/