A huge cache of documents has revealed the criminality and corruption at the heart of capitalism’s biggest financial institutions. We cannot trust the ‘regulators’. To root out these evils, we need nationalisation and workers’ control.

An in-depth report published by Oxfam on 9 September entitled Power, Profits and the Pandemic shows how the capitalist class has lined its pockets throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the real economy has fallen off a cliff in recent months, stock prices have reached record highs. Capitalism is nothing but a casino. In place of this speculation and gambling, we need a rational socialist economic plan.

With mass unemployment on the cards, many are comparing the current crisis to the Great Depression of the 1930s. In both cases, however, these crises were not 'accidental', but a product of capitalism's insoluble contradictions.

On 8 July, federal finance minister Bill Morneau announced that the deficit had ballooned to an astronomical $343 billion. The total government debt load is predicted to surpass $1 trillion for the first time in Canadian history, reaching $1.2 trillion sometime next year. This unprecedented level of government spending begs the question: When will the shit hit the fan?

The capitalists and the stock markets were breathing a sigh of relief as new economic figures showed a slowing of the rate of the decline in the world economy. However, none of the problems have been resolved and the inevitable uptick after the easing of lockdown will not alter the prospect of a deep economic, social and political crisis.

This extensive work (originally published in March by Lucha de Clases in Spanish) exposes who controls the world’s economic and health resources, how we can break away from the exploitative and irrational capitalist system that is strangling public health, and how we can ensure healthcare for the working class of the entire world.

As society begins to reopen, the ruling class is hoping for a return to ‘normality’. But the future will look nothing like the past. A deep depression looms, threatening to throw us back to the 1930s. We must fight for revolution.

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Finding ourselves at the beginning of a new depression, interest in the last one has increased considerably. In this in-depth study of the Great Depression, Alex Grant (editor of marxist.ca) details the crash, the response of the ruling class, and how the workers fought back.

According to federal officials, the Trudeau government has finished with the emergency response phase to COVID-19 and now is moving onto the “recovery” phase. But the prospects for a healthy recovery are not looking good. The fact is that the coronavirus pandemic has only served as the knockout punch to a weak and feeble system. 

The bosses are pushing ever harder for workers to return to work. And the Tory government is giving them free rein to restart the economy without the necessary safety measures. The labour movement must organise a fightback.

In a report released on 29 April, the ILO forecast that 1.6 billion workers in the informal sector will lose 60 percent of their income after one month of the crisis. In the worst-affected countries, poverty rates among informal workers will increase to 84 percent. As the crisis bites, workers in insecure work will face disaster.

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed the underlying contradictions of capitalism, triggering a deep crisis on the scale of the 1930s. There will be no rebound after the lockdown ends, but a prolonged economic depression.

The IMF declared at the beginning of April that we have entered into “the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression”. Yesterday, their perspective was confirmed when figures released for the US showed a rate of 4.8 percent decline. Today, the figures are out showing a 3.8 percent contraction in one quarter in the Eurozone. The disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic sharpened an economic crisis that was already in the making.

The pandemic spreading across the world has triggered a global recession. The ruling class is scrambling to find means of cushioning this savage blow to the economy. In their desperation, they are breaking all the rules that have governed their policy for the past 80 years. The capitalist system is facing its worst crisis ever.