Global capitalism heading to an epoch of crisis, war, and revolution once again
The war in Ukraine and record-breaking inflation, these two events representing the world in 2022, represent that global capitalism is finally entering a new epoch. While by what name the new epoch will be called has not yet been known, its character is obvious. It is the epoch that the whole world will be covered with crises and wars, and so will have to be covered with revolution.
For the last 30 or so years, what makes global capitalism maintain 'relative stability and peace' has been so-called 'globalization' and 'financialization,' combined with neoliberalism. But as globalization no more gets to function properly due to its inherent contradiction and financialization has accumulated its inherent contradiction too enormously, global capitalism is entering into a new epoch filled with a series of severe fractures and ruptures. This change that had been proceeding in a not-well-visible way finally began to unfold in a shocking way anyone could notice through the war in Ukraine and record-breaking inflation.
The war in Ukraine
As everyone knows, the war in Ukraine broke out as tensions and conflicts between the US-Europe imperialist camp and Russian imperialism finally blasted. But, in its background, the full-grown US-China supremacy confrontation was laid that globalization inevitably has induced. In the background that the US-Europe camp had been upgrading the level of geopolitical encompass endlessly to provoke Russia until the war erupted, there was today's world dominance strategy of the US intending to complement weakened economic supremacy by strengthening military supremacy. The basis that made Russia take the risk of invasion of Ukraine would have been the result of strategic judgment that now Russia also could come forward to enlarge its influence actively because the supremacy of the US is weakening with the rise of China.
The war in Ukraine has shown that the confrontation between imperialist powers with the US and China at its peak is now starting to reach even military conflicts through proxy wars and local wars. The war in Ukraine has made the possibility a matter of hot concern worldwide that the US and China would engage in a direct military confrontation over Taiwan in the not-so-distant future. Given that the destined supremacy confrontation between the US and China continues in the future, the danger for the US and China to engage in military conflict over Taiwan will gradually increase. The danger of the Korean Peninsula to be fell into a place for another imperialist proxy war will also be the case.
Record-breaking inflation
The recorded inflation of around 10% in the US and Europe and several tens% in numerous third world countries are the first things in 40 more years since the stagflation swept away the 1970s. While there are various opinions on the cause of inflation, we can point out the rise of the real value of commodities due to the increase in the supply price, the rise of the nominal price of commodities due to the decrease in money value, and the rise of the prices of energy and foods brought about by the war in Ukraine and climate crisis as the causes.
In the early stage of this inflation, 'the increase in the supply price' looked to happen due to the disturbance of supply chains mainly caused by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. But as time has passed, other factors that are even much more structural have been pointed out. On the one hand, it is pointed out that as the 'inverse-globalization' current that goes against globalization has accumulated, the advantage of 'supply at the lowest unit price' brought by globalization has begun to diminish noticeably. On the other hand, it is pointed out that this is the result of having avoided industrial investment in even essential materials for the reason of low profitability, as the tendency to depend on financialization in coping with the decline in profit rate overall capitalist system has intensified. These two aspects suggest that this inflation was triggered by the results that globalization no more gets to function properly and financialization has made severe side effects.
It is pretty contentious whether 'the decrease in money value' due to the expansion of the money supply also is the cause of this inflation. Especially the fact that there was no inflation after 2008, even though the US, Europe, and Japan carried out long-term quantitative easing for more than ten years, is presented as the principal basis for the objection. The hyperthesis that, even though too much money is supplied, money that is not necessary for commodity circulation is hoarded without being used and does not affect the price level is also presented. But when we look into history, we can find several cases where the expansion of the money supply was a key factor in inflation. Cases that led to hyperinflation were typical. Also, we need to recall that, in the 1970s' world-sweeping inflation, not only the oil shock but also the decrease in the dollar value as a key currency acted as leading causes. The decrease in the dollar value had been brought about as the US had over-supplied the dollar to cope with the Vietnam War, and then its effect had been amplified as the gold convertible system had been abolished. While it can't be said that the expansion of the money supply always (and in proportion to expanded quantity) causes inflation, it would be a more rational hypothesis that when the money supply exceeds a certain 'critical point,' it could decrease the money value by increasing the quantity of money actually used in commodity circulation and cause inflation. The facts below can be suggested as the factors that made the 'critical point' be exceeded; 1) Tremendous amount of money, more than the total of quantitative easing over the past ten years, was rapidly injected to cope with the COVID-19 crisis after 2020. 2) Different from the past when the effect of quantitative easing was focused on the asset markets such as stocks and real estate by supplying money into the bond market, after 2020, considerable money was paid to ordinary people and directly injected into commodity circulation. 3) The resistance force that deters the start of inflation was weakened because factors on the supply side also acted together.
'The rise of the prices of energy and foods' caused by the war in Ukraine and the climate crisis seems to will find its place when the war in Ukraine is over, and the production of grains in particular regions hit by the climate crisis is recovered. But what if the war in Ukraine is not easily over? What if another war breaks out in other strategic regions? What if the production of grains is disrupted in more and more regions each year due to the increasingly deteriorated climate crisis? 'The rise of the prices of energy and foods' may not be a simple temporary factor.
Structural inflation and the direction of global capitalism
If now-unfolding inflation is caused by structural factors in many parts, this inflation will inevitably continue for some time. At this moment, central banks around the world, including the US Fed, have been aggressively raising interest rates. This may ease inflation to some extent. But, if the policies are loosened, inflation will likely surge again like an extinguished fire comes to revive.
Inflation inflicts considerable pain on workers and people by reducing purchasing power. Persistent inflation pushes workers and people so that they have no choice but to fight for survival constantly. This is why inflation has to be a severe headache for the ruling class as well. However, persistent inflation will also have a crucial meaning for the future direction of the overall capitalist global economy.
As will be explained in detail later, ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing, which have been like a savior for global capitalism since 2008, can work effectively only on the premise that inflation does not occur. So the fact that inflation will inevitably continue for some time indicates that there will be significant changes in the unfolding features of the capitalist economy.
Since 2008, the bubble of asset markets such as stocks and real estate has been a key instrument of offsetting the decline in profit rate overall capitalist system. Banks, the backbone of the capitalist economy, have gained more earnings from loans related to real estate and stock investments than industrial investments. The prices in asset markets, divorced from the real economy, rightfully have shown rapid decline signs periodically. But each time, interest rate lowering and quantitative easing have boosted the asset bubble again, playing a role of a solution.
But now, central banks worldwide have been raising interest rates rapidly to control inflation, increasing the burden of repayment of debts of households, corporations, and governments accumulated on an unprecedented scale. And this, in turn, leads to a decrease in real estate and stock prices and a credit crunch in the bond market. What if central banks worldwide stick to interest rate raising to make this situation continue for some time? On the one hand, many household bankruptcies will happen with big plunges in real estate and stock prices. On the other hand, many corporation bankruptcies will happen with the widespread failures to extend debt maturities. And they will lead to explosive increases in bad loans, which will lead to bankruptcies of financial institutions, furthermore, a financial crisis.
Therefore, central banks worldwide won't be able to continue raising interest rates. When there is a sign that inflation subsides even to some degree, they will not only hurry to stop raising interest rates but also carry out interest rate lowering and quantitative easing again, pursuing asset price escalation and debt enlargement. This is because only then will today's capitalist global economy, which is barely surviving by depending on financialization, be able to avoid sinking and continue to operate. The problem is, in that situation, whether inflation will subside quietly. What if various structural factors that caused this inflation remain still unresolved? It looks highly likely to do so. Then, interest rate lowering and quantitative easing by central banks worldwide will provide enormous energy to inflation, playing a role in provoking inflation to crazily hop around.
If then, central banks worldwide will have to turn to interest rate raising to control inflation again, which will escalate the danger of a bubble bursting in asset markets and a financial crisis occurring. So it won't be long before they turn again to interest rate lowering and quantitative easing to avoid a bubble bursting and a financial crisis. But this time, inflation will be more rampant. Even if a catastrophic situation can be luckily avoided once or twice, as this vicious cycle continues, the explosiveness of a financial crisis and the wave height of inflation will become increasingly higher. After all, it looks very likely that global capitalism is heading to either a great financial depression or hyperinflation, or even both of them.
Bourgeois economic analysts' views
The fact that capitalism has entered a new epoch and that the global economy is likely to run into a catastrophic situation is expressed, to some extent, even in some bourgeois economic analysts' views.
(Omission)
The epoch of crisis, war, and revolution
World war I broke out in 1914 as the result of more fierce concentration on a scramble for colonies by imperialist powers competing for supremacy, such as the UK, France, Germany, etc., to overcome economic damages after the severe global economic crisis in the early 1900s. World war II started in 1939 as the result of finally finding a solution to the Great Depression unsolved over ten years by imperialist powers competing for supremacy, such as the US, the UK, Germany, Japan, etc., in massive military spending expansion, the war economy, and even mass destruction and genocide.
If the capitalist global economy increasingly approaches toward great financial depression and hyperinflation in the near future, this will more rapidly increase the intensity of conflicts between imperialist powers already reaching the stage of proxy wars and local wars. At this moment, we cannot predict the concrete features of the future. But it is clear that the upcoming epoch will inevitably be an epoch marked by crises and wars. In an epoch full of bankruptcies, unemployment, poverties, and wars, even to which climate disasters add, the working class worldwide will have no choice but to rise up with strikes, revolts, and revolutions, even for survival.
This article is to explain overall backgrounds to help a more accurate understanding of the nature and meaning of the new epoch that can be summarized like above. For this, for example, answers to some following questions will be tried to suggest. If a transition to the new epoch is taking place now, what epochs have there been in the history of global capitalism? What are the factors that make epochs distinguished from each other in capitalism? How did the epoch of neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization that dominated global capitalism over the past forty years emerge? What inherent contradictions have operated, leading that epoch to end up? Finally, what is the position and implication of the new epoch in the history of global capitalism?
<1> Factors that make epochs distinguished in the history of capitalism
From its beginnings until now, capitalism has invariably been based on the endless exploitation of the working class. In addition, to divide the working class and sustain the exploitation system, it has continued oppression and discrimination against women, LGBTQ+, blacks and people of color, immigrants, disabled, etc. Furthermore, by absolutizing only the blind extended reproduction of capital, it has destroyed essential environments for human survival, such as the coexistence between nature and humanity or the harmony between urban and rural areas, to an irrecoverable degree.
But capitalism has not always shown the same features. Just like a person has gone through the stages of childhood, youth, maturity, and old age throughout a lifetime, capitalism has also passed through several epochs that have been considerably distinguished from each other in the relation between capitals, the relation between capitals and states, the relation between states, the mode of combination between exploitation and expropriation, and the level of class struggle.
It can be said that capitalism has passed largely through five epochs until now. The first is 'the epoch of free competition and bourgeois revolution' from 1776 to 1871. The second is 'the epoch of monopoly and full-scale imperialism' from 1871 to 1914. The third is 'the epoch of world wars, Great Depression, and workers' revolution' from 1914 to 1945. The fourth is 'the epoch of postwar boom and reformism' from 1945 to 1980. And the fifth is 'the epoch of neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization' from 1980 to recent days.
(1) Long-term realization of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall
(Omission)
Then, in the real history of capitalism, how has the tendency of the rate of profit to fall been realized? In this regard, An Argentinean, Esteban Ezequiel Maito, published a meaningful study result in 2014. It is an actual calculation of the average rate of profit in six core countries, including the US, the UK, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and the Netherlands, from 1869 to 2010. The study result says that the rate of profit started above 40% around 1870, repeated to tendentially decline, and then reached 10-15% these days.
(Omission)
(2) Desperate policies to offset the tendency of the rate of profit to fall
(Omission)
The core policy that capitalist states pursue to offset the decline in profit rate has differed in each period. For example, from 1871 to 1914, capitalist states' key policy to offset the decline in profit rate was 'capital export to colonies,' and from 1914 to 1945, it was 'wars.' From 1945 to 1980, it was 'expansion of effective demand,' and from 1980 to recent years, it was 'neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization.' The core policies have had to be changed in each period because, after some time passed, due to accumulated contradictions, they didn't correctly act anymore, or the counter-effectiveness became very severe.
(Omission)
(3) The degree of deepening in the capitalist crisis
(Omission)
The accumulation of contradictions has not been confined to the economic aspects. Contradiction has also accumulated in social, political, and international aspects. The explosion of contradictions in those areas has also aroused decisive crises in the old accumulation system or capitalism itself. For example, 'capital export to colonies', the core policy to offset the decline in profit rate from 1871 to 1914, raised the conflicts between imperialist powers around the repartition of colonies, finally bringing about World War I from 1914 to 1918. And the economic contradiction accumulated in that period finally burst into the Great Depression worldwide from 1929 to 1939, and social, political, and international contradictions aroused by the Great Depression burst into World War II from 1939 to 1945.
These show the big picture of capitalism's history. In the early phase, there is a period of growth with vigor. Then a period of contradiction accumulation with ostensible peace and stability follows. And then, when reaching a certain point, a period unfolds when, as accumulated contradictions explode, everything fiercely turbulences and collides with each other and so capitalism itself is decisively at stake.
(Omission)
(4) The mode of combination between exploitation and expropriation
In the Marxist tradition, 'exploitation' means stealing surplus value created by workers within the capitalist production process. Whereas 'expropriation' means robbing or thieving someone's property outside the surplus value production process.
The center of the capitalist production process is in organizing social production and, through that, exploiting surplus value. Enormously developed social production makes surplus value as enormous as its size. So the center of profits reaped by capitalists is based on exploitation. But the tendency of the rate of profit to fall makes capitalists endlessly crave additional profits based on expropriation to offset the tendency.
(Omission)
The mode of combination between exploitation and expropriation has repeatedly changed. When capitalists were able to earn profits smoothly, they relatively concentrated on exploiting surplus value. But when suffering from the decline in profit rate, capitalists more actively combined expropriation outside the surplus value production process to supplement reduced profits (or to offset a further decline in profit rate). The focussing point of expropriation has also changed. For example, while total plunder of colonies was at the center until the early 20th century, these days, financial expropriation is at the center.
(Omission)
(5) The degree of maturity in the revolutionary capability of the working class
(Omission)
The unity and class consciousness of the working class, and the extent of how mature its revolutionary capability is, affect the range and intensity of policies used by states to offset the decline in profit rate. More importantly, they decisively affect whether capitalism, in which contradictions finally explode, can revive with a young body and open another epoch by shaking off its contradictions considerably through harshly sacrificing workers and people.
(Omission)
The epoch of crisis and war bears the epoch of revolution. It is because horrible catastrophes of wars and great depression provide the urgent necessity and possibility for the workers' revolution. But the workers' revolution does not come true by itself. Only by building the revolutionary capability of the working class can we prevent capitalism, which has already fulfilled its historical vocation, from extending its lifespan at the expense of the working class and humanity through horrific barbarism.
<2> Four epochs before the epoch of neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization
How did 'the epoch of neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization' emerge? What inherent contradictions have made it end? What position and implication does the new upcoming epoch have in the whole history of capitalism? To answer these questions, we need to understand previous epochs. So let's briefly check the characteristics of the four epochs before the epoch of neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization around the contents necessary for understanding today's epochs.
(1) The epoch of free competition and bourgeois revolution (1776-1871)
(Omission)
(2) The epoch of monopoly and full-scale imperialism (1871-1914)
(Omission)
(3) The epoch of world wars, Great Depression, and workers' revolution (1914-1945)
(Omission)
(4) The epoch of postwar boom and reformism (1945-1980)
(Omission)
<3> The end of the epoch of neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization
As passing through the economic crisis of the 1970s, the profit rate in the overall capitalist system very severely declined, dropping to the ground. The capitalist class, which had repressed the worldwide uprising of the working class in the 1970s, has very aggressively pursued special measures to not only offset the decline in profit rate but even to raise it again since the 1980s. A set of measures that combine neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization dominated the world over the past 40 years.
(1) Neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization that swept away the world since the 1980s
Neoliberalism was the first measure that capitalist states pursued to offset the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and even raise the dropped-to-the-ground profit rate again. Neoliberalism, which encompasses specific policies such as mass layoffs, wage cuts, irregularization of the labor force, social welfare cuts, neutralization of labor unions, tax cuts for capitalists, deregulations, privatization of key industries, etc., to cut a long story short, puts its aim in strengthening the exploitation of workers as much as possible and giving all kinds of benefits to capitalists, artificially raising the profit rate of capital.
Neoliberalism, which was through the experiment by Chile's military regime in the mid to late 1970s and inaugurated by conservative governments in the UK and the US in the 1980s at full scale, dispersed to the whole world throughout the 1990s. This especially accompanied the process that social democrat governments became the executors of neoliberal policies in many countries. In those cases, they often utilized the method that 'democratically' promoted neoliberalism based on labor-management-government negotiation.
The result of neoliberal policies that forcibly decline the working and living standards of workers and artificially raise the profit rate of capital has been prominently represented, especially in the US. From 1979 to 2018, while the productivity growth in the US was 69.6%, hourly compensation growth was only 11.6%. In 2007, the real wage of the workers in the US was just 85% of that in 1974.
Therefore, neoliberalism was considerably effective in the recovery of the profit rate but soon reached its limit. It was because of the contradiction that was inherent in neoliberalism itself. The more each corporation recovered its profit rate thanks to neoliberalism policies, the poorer workers became, and the bigger the gap between production and consumption in the whole society became. Overproduction that became increasingly serious led to structural sale slumps and made significant barriers to the recovery of profit rates.
Additional measures were needed to complement the decisive limit of neoliberalism. So globalization and financialization were added.
Globalization, which combines 'globalization of production' and 'globalization of markets,' accelerated from the mid-1980s and started to unfold in all aspects with the launch of WTO in 1995. Global FDI inflow to global GDP increased from 0.4% in 1985 to 5.3% in 2007. Global exports of goods and services to global GDP increased from 16.9% in 1986 to 31.2% in 2008. In particular, the transition to a market economy in China in the 1980s and the collapse of East European countries and the USSR in 1989-91 destroyed the Stalinist camp, contributing largely to integrating the world into a single supply chain and single market.
The 'globalization of production,' which moved all or part of the production bases across borders to all corners of the world in search of cheap and submissive workers, contributed greatly to raising the profit rate of capital. Factory relocations to underdeveloped countries drastically decreased wage costs to the extent of even more than offsetting additional logistics costs. Threats of factory relocations became the most potent weapon of capitalists in developed countries to neutralize labor unions and compel them to retreat.
'Globalization of markets,' which integrated the world into a single market by breaking the trade barrier between countries, complemented the weakness of neoliberalism that increasingly enlarged the gap between production and consumption by dramatically expanding markets. Cheap imports, represented by Chinese products, made the workers in developed countries get by based on decreased wages, effectively blocking the wage decrease from leading to workers' struggles.
Factory relocation worldwide largely changed the landscape of capitalism. Factories, which concentrated in the US, Western Europe, and Japan, moved toward Latin America, Eastern Europe, and East Asia and then rushed into China as their final destination. Global capitalism reorganized itself around two axes China's production and the US's consumption.
Financial capital is originally capital that reaps earnings by receiving part of the surplus value acquired by industrial capital in the form of interests or dividends through loans or stock investments for industrial capital. While financial capital doesn't directly participate in surplus value production, it indirectly contributes to the surplus value production of industrial capital by collecting idle money in society and providing it to industrial capital. So interests or dividends are distributed to financial capital in return.
However, if stock prices continue to sharply rise up, financial capital can earn even much more returns through the margin between the purchase and sale of stocks than interests or dividends. If even the middle class and the upper layer of the working class are attracted to participate in stock markets by arousing the illusion of speculative unearned income, stock prices must naturally rise for a while. Financial capital can reap additional earnings also through high-interest loans to stock market participants. Rightfully, stock prices that distant far from their real value must inevitably plunge someday. But, usually, big owners already realize margins before the plunge, and most of the losses due to the plunge are passed to small investors.
Such financial expropriation can be used as a way to offset the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, but it has very large side effects. It is because when stock prices plummet, numerous people go bankrupt and, by the shock, even banks, leading to the overall economy immersing into a very tough situation. This was the case when the Great Depression began in the US in October 1929.
When coping with the Great Depression in the 1930s, the US introduced various regulations on financial institutions like banks. The most important was the prohibition of concurrent business of commercial and investment banks, which prevented commercial banks handling deposits from participating in high-risk areas like stock investments. Such regulations, introduced to hinder the recurrence of something similar to the Great Depression, continued for more than 60 years until the late 1990s. However, the US broke up such regulations on a large scale in 1999. Representatively, the prohibition of concurrent business of commercial banks, insurance firms, and investment banks was abolished. It meant to open the way for inducing even small money owned by the masses into speculative and high-risk areas as much as possible.
Like this, the process in which financial expropriation unfolds briskly under the active support of states is just financialization. Financialization, which became at full scale in the late 1990s, has been a device to supplement additional earnings by financial expropriation for capitalists who could not reap sufficient profits only with exploitation through surplus value production due to bottom-crawling profit rates in the overall capitalist system.
Financial expropriation has not been confined to stock trades. Trades of corporations themselves to acquire corporations, raise 'values' through massive restructurings, and sell them again have also been an important area of financial expropriation. In the real estate market, something similar to the stock market has happened on a much larger scale. In this market, the size of mortgage loans is overwhelming, so financial institutions' earnings through them have been even more significant. In addition, the earnings from rising rents due to surging housing prices also have been considerable. As financialization expands, areas of financial expropriation have endlessly spread to the foreign exchange market, raw material market, futures market, and recently the cryptocurrency market.
Financialization greatly expanded the financial sector. In 2006, while the global GDP was $51.8 trillion, the sum of stock markets and bond markets in the world was $119 trillion. In 2007, the money managed by hedge funds, which could be called the vanguard of financialization, was $10.1 trillion. In the UK, In 2007, while manufacturing industries employed 3 million, the financial sector employed 6.5 million. In the US, total financial institutions' assets to GDP soared from 110.3% in 1985 to 224.2% in 2007. In the US, as a result of combining globalization and financialization, while the share of manufacturing industries in GDP reduced from 25.6% in 1947 to 11.2% in 2009, the share of the sum of finance, insurance, real estate, and rental & leasing in GDP grew from 10.5% in 1947 to 21.5% in 2009.
(Omission)
(2) The 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession
(Omission)
The 2008 financial crisis was the biggest event after the Great Depression in the 1930s in the history of capitalism. With the risk of going bankrupt of major financial institutions in the US and even other countries in a row, global capitalism was on the verge of paralysis. Financial expropriation through the surge in real estate prices and predatory loans, which made 2 million households homeless, gave enormous earnings to capitalists. But it came back as a boomerang and pushed the capitalists' ruling system itself to just before catastrophe.
Faced with the danger of the entire capitalist system's collapse, the capitalist class, which had been crying out neoliberalism and arguing 'leave it all to the market,' shamelessly provided astronomical bail-out money to financial institutions through states. According to a report by the Bank of England in November 2009, the bail-out money poured by the US, the UK, and Eurozone amounted to $14 trillion, accounting for one-fourth of global GDP in 2009.
Banks were barely prevented from bankruptcies, but consumer markets in developed countries rapidly shrank. In just three months after the break out of the financial crisis, global production and trade were reduced by more than 30%. In particular, in China, 20 million jobs disappeared around export industries in only three months just after the financial crisis. This time, for an economic boost, governments around the world poured tremendous finance. While developed countries around the US promoted consumption mainly using subsidies and tax benefits, emerging countries around China mobilized massive civil engineering and construction projects. For two years after the financial crisis, finance poured by governments worldwide to stimulate economies was estimated to surpass $5 trillion.
Meanwhile, central banks in major countries such as the US, Europe, and Japan implemented massive quantitative easing and ultra-low interest rates policies for a long time to boost economies. For example, the US Fed carried out three times of quantitative easing, a policy in which the central bank expands the money supply by purchasing bonds held by banks, on a scale of $3.6 trillion over six years from November 2008 to October 2014. And Federal Reserve maintained its standard interest rate, Federal Funds Rate, at zero (0.00~0.25%) over seven years from December 2008 to December 2015.
Like these, by mobilizing unprecedented tremendous bail-outs and stimulation policies, capitalist states could prevent the 2008 financial crisis from developing into another great explosive depression, which is full of massive bankruptcies and unemployment like the Great Depression in the 1930s.
But the Great Recession was unavoidable. According to the World Bank, the average growth rate of the world economy for 12 years from 2008 to 2019 was recorded at only 2.5%. This was much lower than the average growth rate from 1995 to 2007 at 3.4%, let alone the rate from 1961 to 2007 at 3.7%. Moreover, this figure was the result barely achieved by mobilizing for a long time astronomical fiscal expansion and unprecedented ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing for states worldwide to boost economies.
In some parts, the period of the Great Recession showed remarkable growth and aggressive investments among big-tech corporations like Apple, platform corporations like Amazon, and so-called 'green' corporations like Tesla. However, in overall aspects, the period showed extreme investment avoidance phenomenon due to profit rates' inescapability from bottom-crawling in the overall capitalist system.
One representative example that showed the investment avoidance phenomenon in the overall capitalist system was the expansion of 'share repurchase' in the US. Based on the Trump administration's policy that gave tax cut benefits to corporations retrieving their foreign investment back to the US, in the first quarter of 2018, US corporations retrieved $217 billion to the US, accounting for about 10% of total foreign investment money which is $2.1 trillion. However, only $2 billion was expensed on productive investment among $81 billion that the upper 15 corporations retrieved. Whereas, in the second quarter of 2018, the amount of share repurchasing by US corporations reached $150 billion which increased three times compared to the first quarter. That is, the most of foreign investments retrieved to the US were used in share repurchasing, which is for management right defending or stock price raising, instead of productive investment.
The investment avoidance phenomenon largely affected also the direction of loans by banks. While commercial and industrial loans accounted for 25.0% of total credit provided by US commercial banks from 1970 to 1981, but only 16.1% from 2008 to 2019. Whereas, the portion of real estate loans increased from 19.1% to 37.0% between the same periods.
(Omission)
After all, the period of the Great Recession was not a process of going ahead toward a new boom by resolving contradictions that were generated in the capitalist accumulation system, but a process of going ahead toward a large-scale explosion by more accumulating and deteriorating contradictions. The accumulation and deterioration of contradictions unfolded in both aspects of globalization and financialization.
(3) Reshoring, protectionism, and supremacy confrontation brought about by globalization
Globalization was a very effective instrument in offsetting the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and even recover profit rates by making it possible for capitalists to force low wages both in developed and emerging countries. And it also functioned to block low wages from leading to workers' struggles by maintaining low prices.
However, globalization, especially the 'globalization of production,' largely retreated through the Great Recession. Global FDI (net inflows) compared to global GDP, which started at 0.4% in 1985, reached 5.3% in 2007 as a result of a tendential rise, but then recorded 1.3% in 2020 as a result of a tendential decline. Global exports of goods and services compared to global GDP, which started at 16.9% in 1986, rose to 31.2% in 2008, but then tendentially declined, recording 26.3% in 2020.
In large part, the ratio of FDI inflows compared to GDP in main countries and regions saw its figure decline in 2016-20 than 2006-10. Specifically, the figure declined from 1.9% to 1.5% in the US, from 5.8% to 1.9% in Eurozone, from 3.7% to 1.5% in China, from 2.4% to 1.8% in India, and from 3.7% to 1.4% in Russia. Some countries and regions, such as Brazil and Southeast Asia, showed somewhat different patterns, but the ratio didn't rise notably, even in these cases. The retreat of globalization was a worldwide phenomenon not confined to specific countries or regions.
What made globalization retreat like this? It is because the contradiction inherent in globalization itself has created strong powers for inverse-globalization, such as reshoring, protectionism, and supremacy confrontation.
In the early period of globalization, the reason capitalists in the developed countries moved production bases en masse to emerging countries was, first of all, remarkably low wages in emerging countries. However, the wage gap between developed and emerging countries reduced as time passed. It is because wages in emerging countries rapidly rose as unity and wage struggle of workers grew with industrialization proceeding. In particular, large-scale wage struggles in 2010 in China, which became the 'factory of the world,' were an important turning point. In addition, in developed countries, wages of new workforces in manufacturing industries considerably declined as the two-tier wage system spread on top of overall wage stagnation.
The reduction of the wage gap between developed and emerging countries began to invoke doubts about the long-term benefits of production base movement to emerging countries when considering logistics costs etc. Roughly, with 2010 as the split point, many corporations in developed countries began to delay additional productive investment toward emerging countries and even take reshoring, which retrieves production bases in emerging countries back to developed countries. For example, in the US, in 2010-16, before the Trump administration, 438,000 jobs were already announced due to reshoring.
Unlike that reshoring was a relatively quiet economic phenomenon, the rises of protectionism and supremacy confrontation were powerful political phenomenons shaking world order. Neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization reintegrated, in effect, the world into a single order by encompassing the collapse of the USSR and Eastern European and the transition to a market economy in China. And in reverse, such a single world order was a political basis for making it possible for neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization to continue smoothly. In particular, when the 2008 financial crisis broke out, the fact that governments worldwide cooperated closely with each other based on a single world order had a decisive role in preventing the financial crisis from going ahead to a great explosive depression and making it mitigated to the extent of the Great Recession. But globalization brought about protectionism and supremacy confrontation that shakes such a single world order from the bottom.
In April 2009, when the second summit of G20 was held in London, leaders worldwide made an official resolution of the 'block of protectionism' for the joint response to the financial crisis. It was a commitment not to repeat the 1930s experience that countries worldwide fell into protectionism and largely exacerbated the Great Depression. But, workers and people in the US and Europe, devastated by neoliberalism and globalization and even experienced a more rapid setback in living conditions after the 2008 financial crisis, infused enormous energy into protectionist forces under the condition of the absence of revolutionary forces capable of leading them. Finally, in 2016, as Brexit was passed by a referendum in the UK and Trump was elected as president of the US, protectionism arose at the forefront of world politics and international relations.
Protectionist forces' coming to power further accelerated the reshoring that had already unfolded. As the result of the Trump administration's policy to provide tax cut benefits to companies retrieving their foreign investments, 637,000 jobs were announced by reshoring in 2017-20. (As we saw earlier, even though most of the retrieved money was used in share repurchasing, such an extent of the result was produced.) Protectionist forces' coming to power also functioned as a political force to shake the world order. The 'America First' policy that Trump raised made significant fissures in the relations with not only China but also traditional allies in Europe. The rise to power of protectionism, which hates foreign countries and immigrants, powerfully inspired all kinds of far-right forces worldwide which hate social minorities.
China, which had become the 'factory of the world' through globalization, has leaped to the extent of threatening the US's supremacy as the result of repeatedly rapid growth. The conflict between the US intending not to allow more chasing and China planning to reduce the time of chasing made the supremacy confrontation between them visible more early.
In 1982, when reform and opening-up policy was in the early stage in China, China's GDP compared to the US's GDP was 6.1%. For a long time, this figure modestly increased, reaching only 12.7% in 2001, when China joined WTO. However, after that, in only 6 years, this figure doubled to 24.5% in 2007. And through the 2008 financial crisis, in only 4 years, doubled again to 48.4% in 2011. In addition, China's GDP began to rank second in the world surpassing Japan's in 2010.
China's economic rise has invoked tension and confrontation between the US and China instead of their long honeymoon. In 2011, the Obama administration set the 'Pivot to Asia' as the top foreign policy of the US, which meant containment and siege against China of a 'potential threat.' Against this, China more strongly pulled the rein of chasing. In 2012, when China's GDP recorded 52.5% above half of the US's for the first time, Xi Jinping, who just rose to the General Secretary of the CCP, put forward the 'Chinese Dream' at the forefront, which was, in effect, the dream of China becoming the most powerful country in the world. Furthermore, in 2015, when China's GDP recorded 60.8% of the US's, China announced its 'Made in China 2025' plan, which intended to raise 10 core high-tech industries to the world's highest level by 2025.
In 2018, when China's GDP recorded 67.7% over two-thirds of the US's, the confrontation between the US and China flared up into an all-out trade dispute. In July 2018, the trade dispute between the US and China started, after the first attack by the Trump administration, with giving and taking retaliation tariffs of 25% on imports worth $34 billion. In 2019, the US enforced retaliation tariffs on additional imports worth $300 billion and sanctioned Chinese high-tech companies including Huawei, and against those, China reduced importing agricultural products from the US. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the trade dispute between the US and China has continued.
Through the trade dispute, the US expanded its tariff object range for Chinese imports largely expanded from 1.0% to 66.4%, and raised the average tariff from 3.1% to 19.3%. In 2019, the US could widen the GDP gap with China by using the trade dispute, but as China rapidly recovered its ability to cope, China's GDP reached 77.1% of the US's in 2021. The US's strong containment and China's vigorous chasing tell us that supremacy confrontation between the US and China will more and more inevitably intensify.
Before 2008, globalization functioned as an effective instrument to complement the weakness of neoliberalism and offset the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. However, after 2008, as a result of the unfolding of the contradiction inherent in globalization itself, not only did its original function remarkably mitigate but also it ended up creating political forces of protectionism and supremacy confrontation, which shake the world order and deepen decisively the crisis of capitalism.
(4) Financialization having headed toward a greater financial crisis
Unlike the real economy, which was stuck in stagnation and low growth after the 2008 financial crisis, global stock and real estate markets hotly heated up centered on the US.
Global equity market capitalization to global GDP, which was 115.5% in the 4th quarter of 2007, dropped to 54.6% in the 4th of 2008 through the financial crisis. But, after that, as a result of repeating tendential rises, it reached 128.1% in the 4th quarter of 2021 as a new peak. The figure at the recent peak was 12.6% points higher than before the financial crisis. It means that a giant bubble bigger than before the financial crisis was formed in global stock markets.
The US stock markets show more dramatic figures. The US's equity market capitalization to GDP, which recorded 164.7% in the 1st quarter of 2000 and 142.6% in the 2nd quarter of 2007, plunged to 94.9% in the 1st quarter of 2003 through the dot-com bubble crash and 74.5% in the 1st quarter of 2009 through the financial crisis. After that, as a result of repeating tendential rises, it reached 211.4% in the 4th quarter of 2021. The figure at the recent peak was even 46.7% points higher than before the dot-com bubble crash, and even 68.8% points higher than before the financial crisis. In the US stock markets, a huge bubble, which is much bigger than before the dot-com bubble crash or the financial crisis, was formed.
The US real estate market is also serious. The US's (S&P/Case-Shiller) home price index to consumer price index (for all urban consumers), which recorded 155.1% in May 2006, fell to 99.4% in February 2012 through the plunge of real estate prices and the financial crisis. After that, as a result of steady rises, it reached 178.1% in May 2022. The figure at the recent peak was 23.0% points higher than before the financial crisis. Even in the US real estate market, an enormous bubble considerably bigger than before the financial crisis was formed.
In other countries, also severe levels of bubbles were formed. In June 2022, Bloomberg analyzed that real estate bubbles bigger than before the 2008 financial crisis were formed in 19 countries, including South Korea, among all OECD countries, based on the calculation of prices compared to rents and incomes.
Before 2008, financialization was an important instrument for capitalists to reap additional earnings through financial appropriation, on top of super-exploitation by neoliberalism and globalization. However, the 2008 financial crisis proved that financial expropriation is a very dangerous instrument that could push the capitalist system itself to collapse. So it would have been a minimally rational choice for capitalists if they had maintained a distance from financial expropriation, at least for a while after the 2008 financial crisis. Just like they did for more than 60 years after the 1930s Great Depression.
But, as we saw, financial expropriation unfolded at a bigger scale after 2008. And as a result, giant bubbles, much bigger than the 2000 dot-com bubble crash and the 2008 financial crisis, have been formed in global capitalism.
What has made things become like this? To cut a long story short, it is because that capitalism has reached an extent where it can't exist without financial expropriation. Even though enormous neoliberal attacks poured globally to intensify exploitation for a long time, profit rates throughout today's capitalist system have not still escaped from the bottom. Moreover, globalization, which had largely been beneficial in intensifying exploitation, rapidly retreated after 2008. While the driving force of capitalism is the endless hunger for profits by capitalists, it has become impossible to satisfy their hunger for profits without massive financial expropriation properly. Now capitalism has reached a stage where it can't exist, without financial expropriation, in other words, without desperately pushing financial expropriation.
The role of states in inspiring and supporting financial expropriation was decisive in the formation of much bigger bubbles in real estate and stock markets since 2008, which made financial expropriation unfold at a much grander scale. While there were various laws and schemes in different countries, the key was ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing.
Major central banks, including the US Fed, began implementing ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing policies right after the 2008 financial crisis to recover real economies, which had been rapidly frozen due to the shock of the financial crisis. They were policies intending to supply sufficient money into the market for capitalists to make productive investments more easily. However, capitalists didn't actively make productive investments due to the bottom-crawling profit rates. After all, over-supplied money contributed more to raising stock and real estate prices. Anyway, for the capitalist class as a whole, that also was not bad. When capitalists couldn't gain sufficient profits through productive investments, it could be an excellent solution to supplement through financial expropriation. As this structure was fixed over time, ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing were de facto degenerated into instruments to support and raise stock and real estate prices.
However, especially because stock bubbles fiercely ballooned, major central banks had to worry about another financial crisis bursting. As a result, major central banks carefully raised interest rates again and entered quantitative tightening. For example, the US Fed raised the federal interest rate by 2.25% points over nine times from December 2015 to December 2018 and reduced its asset by $700 billion from September 2017 to August 2019. Its ostensible reason was 'normalization due to gradual recovery of the economy,' but preventing the bubble from violent exploding by carefully letting off steam would have been included in the real reason. But the Federal Reserve couldn't let off steam sufficiently because only slight amounts of the interest rate rising and quantitative tightening made the US economy rapidly decline. The Federal Reserve was forced to resume interest rate lowering and quantitative easing in September 2019.
In that situation, as the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, an unprecedented crisis phase unfolded temporarily. For example, the US saw 20 million jobs disappear for only a month in April 2020, which was three times of 6.7 million lost jobs for a year from September 2008 to August 2009 when the 2008 financial crisis broke out. According to IMF, from April 2020 to March 2021, governments worldwide spent $9.9 trillion to cope with the pandemic, and central banks poured $6.1 trillion into the market. This $16.0 trillion injected by governments and central banks worldwide amounted to 18.8% of the global GDP in 2020.
To cope with the economic crisis induced by the pandemic, the US Fed once again maintained its interest rate at zero from March 2020 to March 2022. Also, it carried out a much bigger quantitative easing of $4.8 trillion. At this time, the effects of the policies were similar to the past, but the extent of the effects was much more intensified. Once again, the zero interest rates and tremendous quantitative easing contributed much more to boosting stock and real estate prices than activating productive investment. As a result, giant bubbles of unimaginable levels have been formed in the global stock and real estate markets.
<4> Overturn the epoch of crisis and war into the epoch of revolution!
As we have seen so far, as profit rates in the overall capitalist system couldn't have escaped from the bottom even though repeated neoliberal offensives, as globalization had increasingly retreated, and as financialization had run toward a much bigger financial crisis, the epoch of neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization had been barely continuing. However, in 2022, the war in Ukraine and record-breaking inflation inflicted a strong shock, ending the old epoch and opening the door to a new epoch.
So, what epoch will the new epoch be? Above all, as economic contradictions accumulated in the previous epoch explode, it will be an epoch when capitalist economic crises fiercely erupt. In addition, based on geopolitical contradictions accrued in the last epoch, it will be an epoch when conflicts and wars between imperialist powers become everyday life. Furthermore, as economic crises and wars interlock together to worsen situations continuously, it will be an epoch when the working class and humanity are increasingly immersed in endless miseries. But precisely because of those things, it will be an epoch when class struggles resurrect and develop and when the prospect of a workers' revolution to abolish capitalism emerges as an urgent task and concrete possibility once again, not a vague prospect in the future.
(1) A new world order that the supremacy confrontation and protectionism are making
On what background did the war in Ukraine, which became the turning point for the new epoch, start? And how is it changing the world? To understand these problems, we need to understand the changes in the power relations among countries over the past 30 years.
When we look into changes in the portion of each country in global GDP in 1991-2020, we can get some results similar to what is commonly presumed. The most prominent change is China's sparkling rise and Japan's rapid drop. Also, we can see overall declines in European countries such as Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Spain, etc. The US rose, then largely fell through the 2008 financial crisis, after that, recovering again. We can also find tendential rises in India, Brazil, and Russia.
When we see changes in the portion of each country in global exports of goods and services in 1991-2020, China's remarkable growth is most visible again. Existing developed countries such as the US, Germany, Japan, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Canada, and Spain have commonly experienced tendential declines. On the other hand, emerging countries such as South Korea, Singapore, India, Mexico, Russia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Turkiye have shown steady growth trends, although not as much as China.
When we see changes in the portion of each country in global Foreign Direct Investment (outflows) in 1991-2020, we can see growths in China, Japan, Germany, Canada, South Korea, and Russia. And we can see drops in the US, France, the UK, and Switzerland. On the other hand, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, India, and Turkiye have continuously trivial levels. In the portion of FDI, we can confirm a greater tendency toward certain countries than exports. Also, we can identify each country has different trends within existing developed countries and do so within emerging countries.
However, when we see changes in the portion of each country in global military expenditure in 1991-2020, we can see considerably different situations from previous parts. Even though the US's decline and China's rise intercrossed, the gap is still pretty big. And Saudi Arabia, India, and Russia, which failed to make their existence prominent in economic indicators, ranked from 3rd to 5th in 2016-2020 after steady growth. On the other hand, the UK, France, Japan, Germany, Italy, and Spain showed steady declines. South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, Turkiye, and Iran maintained similar levels.
The comparison between global portions in some main aspects of each country in 2016-2020 shows where the power relations among countries, which put together economic and military powers, have reached these days through changes of the past 30 years.
The US still occupies the position of the world's most powerful country but depends more on military power than economic power. China has considerably caught up with the US in economic power and even surpassed especially in exports and FDI, but has not reached the US with the big gap in military power. The difference between the US and China in the interrelation between economic power and military power represents itself also through that the US's military expenditure to GDP is 3.4%, but China's is only 1.7%.
Another prominent point is that India, Russia, and Saudi Arabia maintain relatively strong military power compared to their economic power. (Russia's nuclear weapon power rivals the US, but military expenditure would be a more proper indicator of overall military power.) To maintain such military powers, those three countries spent their military expenditure as 2.5%, 4.3%, and 9.3% of GDP. The figures are considerably or very high, compared to 1.7% of China, which has still focused on economic growth, and 2.6% of South Korea, which has been under constant war risk. Both of economic and military power of Turkiye is not strong, but its military expenditure to GDP recorded at 2.4% as a considerably high one.
On the other hand, existing developed countries except for the US, such as the UK, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada, and Spain, maintain military powers similar to their economic powers or relatively weaker than them. Whereas the UK and France maintain almost the same military power as their economic power by spending around 2.0% of GDP on military expenditure according to the NATO guideline, the rest countries maintain pretty lower military power than their economic power by spending 1.0 to 1.4% of GDP on military expenditure.
Such recent power relations among countries can be summarized as follows. While the supremacy confrontation between the US and China has reached its full-scale stage through China's rapid chasing and the US's containment policies, China is still quite inferior to the US in military power. The supremacy confrontation between the US and China has been and will be giving the possibility of changing power relations among countries by shaking the established order. And, India, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, which have rapidly strengthened their military powers to grab such possibility, are pursuing to enlarge their influence by utilizing the empty space of China's remarkable inferiority in military power to the US.
This can explain, to a large extent, the background for the breakout of the war in Ukraine and subsequent developments. The reason that Russia invaded Ukraine would have been not only because of Russia's fear of NATO's further enlargement to the east, but also Russia's strategic calculation that it would be an important opportunity to enlarge its influence if it successfully occupied Ukraine against NATO. India, which has been participating in the Quad aiming at surrounding China under the initiative of the US, is de facto supporting Russia in this war in Ukraine by refusing to participate in sanctions against Russia and increasing energy imports from Russia. Saudi Arabia, which was a staunch ally of the US, is joining hands with Russia to maintain the crude oil prices high refusing Biden's call for reducing the prices. Also, it is offering its hands to China by allowing Huawei, a target of the US's sanction, to participate in the construction of the futuristic city Neom in the middle of a vast desert.
So, when looking at the overall situation, the war in Ukraine can be said as a process where Russia, India, and Saudi Arabia, which became to maintain stronger military powers than their economic powers are further shaking the world order to grab the possibility to enlarge their influence as the existing world order based on the US's overwhelming supremacy begins to falter due to supremacy confrontation between the US and China.
Of course, when looking at the other parts, the war in Ukraine is also a process where the US, intending to maintain its existing supremacy, is counter-offending by actively supporting Ukraine's proxy war as leading NATO. It is also a process to make Western powers, which are greatly stimulated by the trials to reorganize the world order by some countries including Russia, take up assertive rearmament. In particular, Japan and Germany are commonly pursuing to expand their military expenditure to the level of 2% of GDP.
China is reciprocating carefully but clearly to the three countries that are shaking the world order. While avoiding direct support to Russia in relation to the war, China is de facto supporting Russia by not participating in the sanctions against it and increasing energy imports from it. China is seeking to resolve border disputes with India quickly, saying "we should not miss this crucial change in the international relations that couldn't be seen over a century." And China is trying to make a fissure in the only-in-dollar crude oil trade system, which has been one of the crucial axes for maintaining the US dollar as the key currency, by suggesting payment in yuan in crude oil trade as a reward for a stable large amount of import of oil and gas.
So, will the world order be reorganized into a structure of confrontation between the US-led camp and China-led camp around the supremacy confrontation between the US and China? There is a possibility of that, but another possibility seems bigger at this time. Now, the supremacy confrontation between the US and China will inevitably have continued until the winner is finally confirmed. But it is another problem whether other major powers also will be included as sub-partners within the structure of supremacy confrontation between the US-led and China-led camps.
Above all, the possibility for Russia, India, and Saudi Arabia to become sub-partners or firm allies of China still looks not so high. The strategic interests of those three countries are only in expanding their influence by utilizing empty space opened by the supremacy confrontation between the US and China. While they are improving relations with China according to their needs at this time, they will be likely to change their directions again in the not-so-distant future to meet their other needs. In other aspects, China is not yet strong enough to encompass those three countries under its leadership.
A more important reason is that the contradiction within the US-led Western camp is by no means trivial. Biden's foreign policy to revive the US's relations with traditional allies against Trump's America First policy seems to have become successful by recovering the unity of NATO through the joint response to the war in Ukraine. However, in August 2022, the Biden administration and Democratic Party implemented their America First policy, which is beyond Trump's one, by enacting the 'CHIPs and Science Act' and the 'Inflation Reduction Act.' Under the 'CHIPs and Science Act', only companies producing semiconductors in the US and abandoning investments in China for 10 years will be able to receive subsidies from the US government. And under the 'Inflation Reduction Act', only companies moving production bases for electrical cars and batteries to North America will be able to receive subsidies from the US government. Furthermore, even though the US energy companies earn ridiculously huge profits by exporting gas to Europe substituting Russia, the Biden administration doesn't take any action about that. Understandably, European countries, around France and Germany, are angry at such actions of the US striking blatantly the backs of allies' heads. So, European countries are hurrying to pursue their protectionism policy, including the European Chips Act, the Carbon Border Tax Act, the Critical Raw Material Act, etc.
The US's political situation where protectionism is already prevailing and its economic situation which would increasingly deteriorate tell us that the US would strengthen protectionism regardless of parties. If so, European countries would inevitably counterattack with their protectionism, and the US-led Western camp would inevitably lead to severe cracks. And then, at a certain point, the US would lose its power to bind European powers continuously under its leadership, especially if the supremacy confrontation between the US and China is not concluded with the US's unilateral win.
Therefore, afterward, it seems that the world order will likely have features that, on the one hand, the US and China engage in supremacy confrontation, but on the other hand, various powers pursue their independent directions based on protectionism and so make the structure of imperialist multipole confrontation. Russia, India, and Saudi Arabia are already pursuing the reorganization of the world order assertively. On top of that, in major European countries such as France or Germany, if protectionism fiercely expands or far-right forces come to power, those countries will likely reposition themselves as hegemons leading the surrounding region and escaping US supremacy. Turkiye, which doesn't hide its ambition to be a regional hegemon even though it doesn't have strong economic and military power yet, also could be a dark horse. Whereas, in Northeast Asia, including the Korean Peninsula, all countries will likely be under the structure of the supremacy confrontation between the US and China because of its strong impact due to geopolitical conditions.
A new world order, where the US-China supremacy confrontation and imperialist multipole confrontation coexist, would be considerably different from the single world order of the sole US supremacy, which made neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization possible. Even if a new world order converges simply to the US-China supremacy confrontation, it also would be pretty different from the single world order. Anyway, the new epoch will be a period of turbulence in which conflicts and wars between imperialist powers become everyday life and are increasingly intensified.
(2) Hyperinflation or great financial depression and massive imperialist war
What would have happened if, during the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic crisis, enormous fiscal spending of governments worldwide and ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing policies of central banks didn't implement? The results are almost obvious. The world economy would have entered into a great explosive depression (not inferior to the 1930s Great Depression) full of tremendous bankruptcies and unemployment.
Meanwhile, for a year after the break-out of the 2008 financial crisis and for a year after the break-out of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the average percentage change in the US consumer price index from a year ago respectively recorded -0.3% and 1.2%. If these figures had been over 7% or even around 10%, would such policies of governments and central banks worldwide have been possible? Or could they have had effects similar to what we experienced? It's not a simple question. Anyway, in such situations, enormous fiscal spending, ultra-low interest rates, and quantitative easing would have been by no means easy. It is because such policies could have provided huge energy to inflation. But doing nothing also would have been impossible, because the world economy could have slipped into a great depression unless doing something. So, the capitalist class worldwide would have had to find a miraculous balance point, not providing huge energy to inflation but capable of blocking a great depression. Only if such a balance point had existed.
What will happen if such situations repeat several times in increasingly worsened forms? They would be able to find such a miraculous balance point once or twice, but will it be continuously possible? What will happen if it is impossible? Hyperinflation? Great financial depression? Or both of them?
The problem is the possibility that such situations will be laid in front of us is very high. The possibility comes from two points. First, (as explained earlier) even though a tremendous financial crisis is already possible at any time due to unprecedented bubbles in the global stock and real estate markets, today's capitalism will inevitably form more enormous bubbles continuously because it has to pursue huge financial expropriation endlessly. Second, the new world order dominated by supremacy confrontation and protectionism substituting globalization will inevitably make the wave of inflation strike the world repeatedly.
Under the new world order, conflicts between imperialist powers, which will occur much more frequently due to supremacy confrontation and protectionism, will repeatedly put the global supply chain into chaos, if not necessarily leading to war. And such conflicts will force the global supply chain itself to be reorganized by the logic of supremacy confrontation and protectionism than the logic of the economy. That will mean considerable additional costs and inefficiencies economically.
In fact, the logic of the new world order to put ahead the supremacy confrontation and protectionism than globalization is already working. In 2022, despite suffering from significant inflation, the US has not revoked high tariffs on imports from China. Also, the US intends to exclude China from the high-tech semiconductor supply chain as a part of the supremacy confrontation and give massive subsidies only to companies to produce in the US as putting ahead protectionism. The logic of globalization, which is 'to produce at the cheapest place,' is assertively being denied by the US, which once forced globalization on the whole world with its power. Instead of long-term low prices that were possible by producing at the cheapest place, now a period to live with inflation will inevitably unfold as a long-term trend.
In 2022, major central banks, including the US Fed, have quickly raised interest rates to cope with inflation. For example, the US Fed has raised 4.25% points of the federal interest rate over seven times from March to December. As a result, the US inflation rate gradually declined from 9.1% in June to 6.5% in December. But the Consumer Price Index is still high, and the US Fed is forecasted to raise about 1% points of the federal interest rate additionally in 2023. Anyway, through that, this wave of inflation would be able to be repressed. But, from now on, the wave of economic stagnation induced by interest rate raising, through the rings of debt burden increasing, corporate credit crunch, household consumption shrink, and stock and real estate prices decline should be passed through.
It isn't yet evident what extent coming economic stagnation will be. However, considering the 2008 financial crisis broke out two years after the US Fed had raised 4.25% points of the federal interest rate in 2004-2006, the wave height of this interest rate raising, which will raise more during less period, could be not-so-small. In fact, the US's equity market capitalization to GDP recorded 162.1% in the 3rd quarter of 2022, which was 49.3% points lower than 211.4% at its peak in the 4th quarter of 2021. (In the dot-com bubble crash, the figure dropped by 69.8% points for 12 quarters, and in the financial crisis, 68.1% points for 7 quarters.) While the US real estate market, which formed a huge bubble equivalent to the stock market, is yet in a slight decline after reaching its peak in May 2022, the extent and speed of decline in that market also will largely affect the economic situation in the world, beyond the US. Meanwhile, according to the IMF, total global debts, encompassing household, corporate, and public debt, rose from 195% in 2007 to 256% in 2020. The fact that the burden and impact due to interest rate raising become more significant as much as debt increase could be an important factor in worsening coming economic stagnation.
But, looking at the other aspects, we can confirm some parts prepared better than the 2008 financial crisis. For example, the US has made the interest rates of almost all mortgage loans fixed after the 2008 financial crisis, which will be effective to some extent in mitigating the burden due to interest rate raising (at least in the US). Some analysts argue that the number of countries immersed in a foreign exchange crisis has been yet relatively small, different from the past cases, compared to the extent and speed of the interest rate raising of the US Fed because many countries have prepared based on past experiences. So there are some forecasts, mixed with hopes, that economic stagnation in 2023 will be relatively less serious. Whereas, there is another forecast that Japan and China will provoke a global economic crisis. Japan is maintaining its standard interest rate of minus due to its world's top-level state debt of 266% of GDP, even though inflation is reaching its highest point over 40 years. And China is already experiencing a huge real estate bubble bursting.
No matter how severe the economic stagnation in 2023 is, the real problem could be the next. It is because, due to huge accumulated state debts already reaching 100% of GDP on the average in the world, and due to the flame of inflation not easily extinguished, it will be challenging for governments and central banks to implement economic boosts through enormous fiscal spending, ultra-low interest rates, and quantitative easing. We could assume a scenario that economic stagnation begins not-so-seriously in 2023 but, as governments and central banks show their incapabilities for economic boosts, it increasingly worsens with prolonged extension and then finally enters into a severe economic crisis. Or we could assume another scenario that, as governments and central banks implement economic boosts beyond their capabilities, more huge bubbles are formed once again, and then much more rapid and strong inflation swoops the bubbles.
Anyway, it is impossible to anticipate the future concretely. The aspect and speed with which the situation unfolds will be changed by many variables that we can't know now. But, we can foresee the trend at least. That is, it is highly likely that the global economy will go ahead, by going through some twists and turns, toward either hyperinflation or a great financial depression, or even both of them.
What choice will the capitalist class make when capitalism reaches such a catastrophic situation? When reaching such a situation, the most reliable exit for the capitalist class would be the historical experience of Word War II, which made capitalism escape from the 1930s Great Depression and recover vigor to some extent by carrying out mass destruction and genocide. As such a long total war would not be easy nowadays due to abominable nuclear armaments that could destroy the earth itself, the capitalist class would pursue other forms of massive wars having similar effects. Conflicts between imperialist powers, with supremacy confrontation and protectionism putting ahead, that would be accumulated during the capitalist economy is heading to a catastrophe, would provide the capitalist class sufficient opportunities and causes capable of being used for such wars. To desperately make such extremely reactionary wars possible, the resistance of the working class must be repressed thoroughly, so the capitalist class would try to establish fascist regimes in many countries.
(3) For the reconstruction of class struggle and revolutionary development
Neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization, which swept away the world after the 1980s, unfolded on the basis of having calmed workers' explosive struggles worldwide in the 1970s. Therefore, before the 2008 financial crisis, workers' struggles worldwide were in stagnation more severe than ever before, even though exploitation and expropriation were considerably strengthened. (From a global perspective, South Korea's experience of going through a period of powerful workers' struggles from the late 1980s to the early 1990s was one of the exceptional cases, together with Brazil and South Africa.)
However, the 2008 financial crisis made the aspect of workers' struggles also considerably change. It is because the capitalist class worldwide inflicted tremendous offensives continuously to make the working class burden the sufferings and costs due to the financial crisis. Under the wave of the financial crisis, numerous workers and people became intensive victims of financial expropriation, being robbed of their houses or going bankrupt. Many governments, which spent astronomical finance through bail-outs and economic boosts to cope with the financial crisis, poured massive offensives, such as layoffs and wage cuts in public sectors, welfare spending cuts, pension reform, etc., to pass on the burden of exploding increase in state debts to workers. Private corporations worldwide also unfolded large-scale restructuring to shift the burden of credit crunch and consumption shrinking due to the financial crisis to workers. And across the period of the Great Recession, labor law reforms continued one after another aiming at the retreat of workers' rights and weakening of labor unions. Flexibilization of labor, which has expanded since the 1980s, more accelerated, making many more workers become into more various forms of unstable workers.
Against the relentless attacks of the capitalist class, and with anger on ruined life and a hopeless future, the working class and the oppressed have unfolded fierce counter-attacks around the world since 2010. In 2010-12, the first wave of struggles of workers and people worldwide unfolded, such as general strikes against pension reform in France, the Arab Spring, the 'Indignados' movement in Spain, the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US, general strikes against austerity in Greece, etc. And in 2018-20, the second wave unfolded, such as the Yellow Vest protests in France, protests for democracy in Hong Kong, people's revolt in Chile, the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, etc. In 2022, workers worldwide, who had taken pride in being truly essential for society during the COVID-19 pandemic, unfolded strong wage struggles against the deprivation of the right to live due to inflation.
And now, the working class in the world is facing a period that is highly likely to be filled with economic stagnation and economic crisis and finally led to a catastrophe such as hyperinflation or a great financial depression. And it is facing a period that is highly likely to be filled with repeated conflicts between imperialist powers putting supremacy confrontation and protectionism ahead and finally led to massive wars. The upcoming 'epoch of crisis and war' will push the working class in the world to extreme suffering and despair. The sole hope for the working class in the world will be in overturning this dark epoch to an 'epoch of revolution.'
So, how should the working class develop its struggle and movement to be able to overturn an epoch of crisis and war to an epoch of revolution? The concrete answer should be different in each country because of various aspects and degrees of the development of the class struggle. But the key directions wouldn't be quite different. Especially from the perspective of directions for which the South Korean working class's struggle and movement should go ahead, we can summarize those as follows.
First, we should open the way for workers' struggles based on working-class-unity, ones that broad working masses dynamically participate putting the demand for the whole working class. Regardless of regular or irregular workers, regardless of working in large companies or medium-small companies, and regardless of working in public or private sectors, all workers now should resolutely overcome trade unionism only focusing on short-sighted and narrow changes. We should learn the way to fight by being united as a single class by establishing demands of the whole working class and drawing in broad working masses while looking directly at the big picture to affect the destiny of the whole working class.
Second, the working class should try to unite broad oppressed people, putting itself as a core. For this, the working class should fight at the forefront of various social struggles, such as struggles against oppression and discrimination, struggles against climate disaster and environmental destruction, struggles for social rights to live and democratic basic rights, struggles against imperialism and imperialist wars, etc. Especially, the working class should make young people to be deprived of their whole future in the coming capitalism toward crisis and war be able to find their earnest hope for the new world in the struggles with the working class.
Third, the working class should reject all stupid dependence on all capitalist forces, and firmly develop the 'independence of the working class' only believing in united struggles of itself. And the working class should develop a revolutionary workers' political movement capable of leading the reconstruction, political development, and revolutionary leap of workers' struggles devotedly.
The only way capable of saving the working class and humanity from the upcoming suffering of catastrophe and danger of annihilation will be in the construction of socialism through workers' revolutions worldwide. Only by the construction of the global socialist system, in which the working class becomes an actual master in a state, workplace, and society and a democratically planned economy and self-management of producers are combined, will we be able to end exploitation, oppression, discrimination, poverty, barbarism, and war, which will have been endlessly repeated until capitalism ends, and go forward to a new world.
2023-02-05 | 조회 243
![[Statement] Israel and the United States must stop their genocidal plans against Palestinians immediately!](http://socialism.jinbo.net/data/file/news/thumb-1029917302_4MxAICJ5_889b430b70708c34ace0547c4bdb1b38951568b8_210x145.jpg)
[Statement] Israel and the United States must stop their genocidal plans against Palestinians immediately!Since the October 7th surprise attack by Palestinian fighters in Gaza, Israel, with the full backing of the United States, has declared a brutal genocide against the Palestinian people. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has called up 300,000 reservists to wage a "ruthless war," and U.S. President Biden has repeatedly pledged full political and military support for Israel. We firmly demand that Israel and the United States immediately stop this unscrupulous and brutal genocidal plan. They call this attack as "unacceptable terrorism," emphasizing the large number of Israeli civilians attacked and killed in the Hamas-led attack. But Israel has routinely attacked and killed far more civilians over the past several decades, ousting, imprisoning, discriminating, and oppressing millions of Palestinians. The U.S. has also consistently supported Israel's systematic racism, characterized by violence and murder, for decades to use Israel as a tool to maintain its imperialist global hegemony in the Middle East and around the world. Israel and the United States have no right or justification to talk about "civilian casualties.” They are the ones who caused this tragedy. Look at their shameless hypocrisy as they talk about "civilian casualties" and then plot a "civilian genocide" of even greater magnitude! We fully support the right of the Palestinian people to revolt against national oppression. We also fully support their right to engage in armed struggle against the bayonets of their oppressors. However, we never agree with attacks and abductions of civilians. We clearly criticize the methodology of Hamas in this respect, but at the same time we firmly support the Palestinian people's right to resist against national oppression and their right to engage in armed struggle. What are the alternatives to end this tragedy? Neither "Zionism," which is obsessed with expanding settlements in hopes of driving out all Palestinians, nor "Islamic fundamentalism," which denies the very existence of Israelis and targets civilians, can end this tragedy. History has shown that the "two-state solution" of establishing separate states for Israelis and Palestinians will never work if Israel's oppressive rule remains in place. We believe that the only solution is a single Palestinian-Jewish socialist republic in which Palestinians and Jews live in equal and peaceful coexistence. Such a republic can only be realized by overthrowing the Israeli oppressive regime through working-class internationalism that transcends the ethnic barriers of Palestine and Jew. The suffering of Palestinians may seem far away, but it's all around us. Excavators manufactured by HD Hyundai Construction Equipment were used by the Israeli army to destroy Palestinian homes and buildings in the West Bank. The West Bank was seized from Jordan by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, and the eviction of existing residents from militarily occupied land and the resettlement of new residents is a clear war crime in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions. Let's raise the voices of Korean workers and demand that HD HCE immediately end its war criminal business practices! In the face of tense developments that are shaking the world, we demand the following: = Israel and the United States must immediately stop their genocidal plans against Palestinians! = We fully support the resistance of the Palestinian people against national oppression! = Supporting the struggles of the peoples of the world against imperialist oppression, Let’s vigorously build international solidarity of the working class! 2023.10.10. March To Socialism.2023-10-10 | 조회 255
Building a powerful general strike is urgent to fight against the right-wing government’s attacks!The South Korean right-wing government, led by its president Yoon Suk-yeol, has been reinforcing a series of attacks on workers’ rights and unions in recent months. The government’s anti-worker and anti-union traits have been inherent since its inauguration last May. But they became blatant since successfully repressing truck drivers’ second strike last November to December, which demanded the enlargement of a standard-fare system that means a minimum wage for ostensibly self-employed truck drivers. The right-wing government's relentless attacks after that have made building a powerful general strike an urgent task for workers' counterattack. The right-wing government’s attacks on workers’ rights and unions In December, the government announced its intention to introduce a reactionary labor reform, including a measure to allow extending the working hours a week. According to the current labor law, the work week can’t exceed 40 hours. But if there is an agreement between the employee and employer, the work week can extend to 52 hours with 12 hours of overtime. And the law allows a flexible work system within six months, in which the work week can extend to 52 hours, 64 hours when overtime is added, in a specific week on the premise that the average work week doesn’t exceed 40 hours in the whole period. This government plans to extend the cap of the work week of a particular week in a new flexible work system. According to this government’s draft bill announced on March 6, the maximum work week in a certain week will be allowed up to 64 or even 80.5 hours if 11 consecutive hours of break time between work days are provided. The government plans to submit its draft bill to National Assembly around this June to July, while the center-right Democratic Party, the majority of parliament as the former ruling party, has not agreed on this government’s plan. On top of that, this government has been inflicting several attacks on workers' unions. The government is forcing unions to open their fiscal books publicly, especially to the capitalist government and audit specialists. The government's demand is based on a vague clause in the labor law about the supervisory right of government on unions in a very crucial situation, which hadn't been used for a long time by previous governments. There are two different types of unions in South Korea. The KCTU, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, was built in 1995 through the national unity of democratic unions, which mainly had been constructed based on each company as a result of the 1987 Great Struggle, which was a militant strike wave like an eruption of a volcano composed of more than 3,000 illegal strikes with 1.2 million participants within three months. Despite its bureaucratization, the KCTU still has some basic features as a democratic union. Fiscal transparency is one of them. The fiscal situation of the KCTU and its affiliated unions have been transparently shared with their members. But it is not the case for the FKTU, the Federation of Korean Trade Unions, which has been made up of totally bureaucratized unions filled with bureaucratic corruption since 1946. Given this situation, this government is utilizing the corruption of the FKTU to attack all unions, mainly targeting the KCTU. Against the intention of the government to undermine the fiscal independence of unions, the KCTU and its affiliated unions are rejecting the demand to submit their fiscal books to the authority. Also, this government is eagerly trying to demonize the KCWU, the Korean Construction Workers’ Union, and repress it. The KCWU is an affiliate of the KCTU and organizes around 80,000 workers in the construction sector, usually working under extremely unstable and dangerous working conditions. The KCWU has been using a tactic to demand construction companies to hire union members at a certain portion and has managed to change construction sites safer through its more than 20 years of struggles. However, this government defines KCWU’s demands as illegal threats and regards its struggles as the violence of gangster organizations. Especially the president, Yoon, called the KCWU ‘gangsters in the construction sector’ and ordered his government to eradicate the union from the construction sector on February 21. Against that, the KCWU held a national rally in Seoul with the KCTU, with more than 40,000 participants, on February 28. The reason this government’s attack focuses on KCWU first seems to have two factors. First seems a retaliation against KCWU, which most eagerly tried to organize a solidarity strike during the truck drivers’ strike in December. The second one looks like a preemptive measure to cope with a foreseeable situation where many construction companies go bankrupt due to the ongoing rapid downfall of housing prices with interest rate hikes, to make the workers burden the capitalist crisis without their union. A national rally in Seoul held by KCWU with the KCTU, with more than 40,000 participants, on February 28. (taken by Hankyoreh) Another attack of this government is to repress the KCTU and its affiliated unions using the notorious National Security Law. On January 18, the National Intelligence Service and police forcibly searched the offices of the KCTU and its affiliated union KHMU, the Korean Health and Medical Workers’ Union, based on a search and confiscation warrant for the alleged breach of the National Security Law of some union cadres. And on February 23, they searched the offices of the Gyeong-Nam chapter and Daewoo shipbuilding subcontracted workers’ branch of the KMWU, the Korean Metal Workers’ Union, which is affiliated to KCTU, likewise using the NSL. Forcible searches of the KCTU and its affiliates are the first after 2015. But forcible searches using NSL by NIS are the first after the 1996-97 powerful general strike against the labor reform and the law amendment to reinforce the former NIS. Backgrounds of the government’s attacks This president managed to be elected mainly thanks to the former government's failure. The former government was inaugurated in 2017 with big expectations and hopes of the ordinary people after the huge protests against the preceding president and impeachment of her. The former government tried to make itself up as something progressive, but it clearly served the interests of the capitalist class. A significant increase in the minimum wage had been one of the main promises in the presidential election of the former president, but the total increase in the minimum wage during the former government was smaller than the previous more right-wing governments. Furthermore, the former government reformed the law on the minimum wage to make almost all benefits added in the calculation of minimum wage, reducing many workers' real wages. The former government tried to be a mediator between the US and North Korea but did nothing except for just meeting both sides without any attempt to escape from the grip of the US, provoking North Korea's furious and aggressive responses. As soaring housing prices made ordinary people feel massive deprivation, the former government announced dozens of measures against realty speculation but always failed to confine housing prices because the measures were too trivial. The failure to stabilize housing prices was a decisive trigger to the collapse of the strong support for the former government. In other aspects, this president managed to be elected due to inciting and appealing anti-North Korean and anti-Chinese sentiments and the backlash against the feminist movement. He was elected with the smallest margin in the history of Korean presidential elections, and his party accounts for only a third of the National Assembly. To overcome such vulnerabilities, as a former prosecutor general, he has been utilizing direct or indirect threats based on prosecutors’ punishment power against political rivals. Also, he has been trying to mobilize strong support from right-wing forces. For that, his government has been strengthening the military alliance between US imperialism and South Korea. And it announced a measure to exonerate Japanese war-crime companies from a historical responsibility for forced labor during Japanese imperial domination of the Korean Penninsula on March 6, which was immediately praised not only by Japan but also by the US and even the EU as a good step for building solid relationships between allies. A series of blatant attacks on workers’ rights and unions are also for mobilizing strong support from right-wing forces and especially the capitalist class, who need more intensification of exploitation, given that Korean and global capitalism is heading into a deepening crisis. Building a powerful general strike is urgent! The right-wing government's attacks have angered many workers. The KCTU already passed a resolution for a two-week general strike in early July at its national representative assembly on February 7. But, given the government continues to accelerate its attacks, July would be too late for the workers to counterattack. The KCTU should build a strong general strike as soon as possible with urgent demands that include stopping the reactionary labor reform, crushing the repression against the unions, reducing the working hours to 30 hours a week (and redistributing all jobs to all workers, including the unemployed and underemployed), abolishing the National Security Law, rightful reparations from Japanese war-crime companies for forced labor during the colonial occupation, and nationalizing energy companies for energy price control and climate justice. For this, militant workers and revolutionary activists should organize active campaigns from below to call for building a strong general strike as soon as possible. Given the bureaucratized leaders of the KCTU are reluctant to head-on confrontations against the government, only can mobilizing the anger of ordinary workers and turning it into a strong desire toward a counterattack be the way to realize a powerful general strike by overcoming the barrier of bureaucrats. Overcoming narrow trade unionism is very important for building a strong general strike. In recent months, the president's approval rating has shown a tendency to go up every time this government steps up its attacks on the unions. That's not only because right-wing forces are mobilized but also because a not-so-small portion of ordinary workers are swayed by the government's propaganda because of their bad feelings about the unions. As of 2021, the unionization rate of workers in South Korea was 14.2%, and the figure was 46.3% in workplaces with 300 or more workers, but it was only 0.2% in workplaces with less than 30 workers, where about 60% of the total workforce is employed. However, for the past 20 years, most unions’ approach to this situation has been narrow trade unionism, in which unions focus only on the interests of their own members, seriously widening the gap in wages, working conditions, and job securities between regular workers in big companies and other workers. This wide gap allows the government's anti-union campaign to reach ordinary workers. Therefore, overcoming narrow trade unionism and restoring class-struggle unionism, which regards workers' unions as weapons of the working class in its class struggle against the capitalist class and was a strong tendency in the democratic unions for ten years after 1987, is crucial to the success of the workers' counterattack. Therefore, in order to make this general strike a decisive turning point for this, the demands for the vulnerable workers should be raised first, such as raising the minimum wage by 30%, recognizing the rights of subcontracted workers to negotiate with and strike against the main company, recognizing the rights of so-called self-employed workers and platform workers to negotiate with and strike against the real employer, and extending the prohibition of reparation for damages due to strike from legal strikes to all strikes. Making such demands become all unions' demands is also the task for militant workers and revolutionary activists to realize through assertive activities from below. Workers in South Korea have a historical tradition of strengthening their movement by organizing strong counterattacks against governments' harsh repressions. This was the way to build and defend the regional and national unity of democratic unions after the 1987 Great Struggle. This can also be the case at this moment. In particular, organizing a strong counterattack this year can be very helpful in reviving the workers' movement, which has been weakened in recent years by the illusion of the nature of the former government and the restrictions of COVID-19. In other respects, given that most of the older generation of the 1987 Great Struggle has been retiring, this struggle can be a good opportunity for the largely organized new union members since 2016, who make up about 36% of the KCTU's 1.1 million members, to organize a huge struggle and grow as a new protagonist of the Korean workers' movement. It will be of great significance in preparing the Korean working class for the great struggles and leaps against desperate attacks of the capitalist class in the coming deep capitalist crisis in Korea and worldwide.2023-03-11 | 조회 105
Global capitalism heading to an epoch of crisis, war, and revolution once againThe war in Ukraine and record-breaking inflation, these two events representing the world in 2022, represent that global capitalism is finally entering a new epoch. While by what name the new epoch will be called has not yet been known, its character is obvious. It is the epoch that the whole world will be covered with crises and wars, and so will have to be covered with revolution. For the last 30 or so years, what makes global capitalism maintain 'relative stability and peace' has been so-called 'globalization' and 'financialization,' combined with neoliberalism. But as globalization no more gets to function properly due to its inherent contradiction and financialization has accumulated its inherent contradiction too enormously, global capitalism is entering into a new epoch filled with a series of severe fractures and ruptures. This change that had been proceeding in a not-well-visible way finally began to unfold in a shocking way anyone could notice through the war in Ukraine and record-breaking inflation. The war in Ukraine As everyone knows, the war in Ukraine broke out as tensions and conflicts between the US-Europe imperialist camp and Russian imperialism finally blasted. But, in its background, the full-grown US-China supremacy confrontation was laid that globalization inevitably has induced. In the background that the US-Europe camp had been upgrading the level of geopolitical encompass endlessly to provoke Russia until the war erupted, there was today's world dominance strategy of the US intending to complement weakened economic supremacy by strengthening military supremacy. The basis that made Russia take the risk of invasion of Ukraine would have been the result of strategic judgment that now Russia also could come forward to enlarge its influence actively because the supremacy of the US is weakening with the rise of China. The war in Ukraine has shown that the confrontation between imperialist powers with the US and China at its peak is now starting to reach even military conflicts through proxy wars and local wars. The war in Ukraine has made the possibility a matter of hot concern worldwide that the US and China would engage in a direct military confrontation over Taiwan in the not-so-distant future. Given that the destined supremacy confrontation between the US and China continues in the future, the danger for the US and China to engage in military conflict over Taiwan will gradually increase. The danger of the Korean Peninsula to be fell into a place for another imperialist proxy war will also be the case. Record-breaking inflation The recorded inflation of around 10% in the US and Europe and several tens% in numerous third world countries are the first things in 40 more years since the stagflation swept away the 1970s. While there are various opinions on the cause of inflation, we can point out the rise of the real value of commodities due to the increase in the supply price, the rise of the nominal price of commodities due to the decrease in money value, and the rise of the prices of energy and foods brought about by the war in Ukraine and climate crisis as the causes. In the early stage of this inflation, 'the increase in the supply price' looked to happen due to the disturbance of supply chains mainly caused by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. But as time has passed, other factors that are even much more structural have been pointed out. On the one hand, it is pointed out that as the 'inverse-globalization' current that goes against globalization has accumulated, the advantage of 'supply at the lowest unit price' brought by globalization has begun to diminish noticeably. On the other hand, it is pointed out that this is the result of having avoided industrial investment in even essential materials for the reason of low profitability, as the tendency to depend on financialization in coping with the decline in profit rate overall capitalist system has intensified. These two aspects suggest that this inflation was triggered by the results that globalization no more gets to function properly and financialization has made severe side effects. It is pretty contentious whether 'the decrease in money value' due to the expansion of the money supply also is the cause of this inflation. Especially the fact that there was no inflation after 2008, even though the US, Europe, and Japan carried out long-term quantitative easing for more than ten years, is presented as the principal basis for the objection. The hyperthesis that, even though too much money is supplied, money that is not necessary for commodity circulation is hoarded without being used and does not affect the price level is also presented. But when we look into history, we can find several cases where the expansion of the money supply was a key factor in inflation. Cases that led to hyperinflation were typical. Also, we need to recall that, in the 1970s' world-sweeping inflation, not only the oil shock but also the decrease in the dollar value as a key currency acted as leading causes. The decrease in the dollar value had been brought about as the US had over-supplied the dollar to cope with the Vietnam War, and then its effect had been amplified as the gold convertible system had been abolished. While it can't be said that the expansion of the money supply always (and in proportion to expanded quantity) causes inflation, it would be a more rational hypothesis that when the money supply exceeds a certain 'critical point,' it could decrease the money value by increasing the quantity of money actually used in commodity circulation and cause inflation. The facts below can be suggested as the factors that made the 'critical point' be exceeded; 1) Tremendous amount of money, more than the total of quantitative easing over the past ten years, was rapidly injected to cope with the COVID-19 crisis after 2020. 2) Different from the past when the effect of quantitative easing was focused on the asset markets such as stocks and real estate by supplying money into the bond market, after 2020, considerable money was paid to ordinary people and directly injected into commodity circulation. 3) The resistance force that deters the start of inflation was weakened because factors on the supply side also acted together. 'The rise of the prices of energy and foods' caused by the war in Ukraine and the climate crisis seems to will find its place when the war in Ukraine is over, and the production of grains in particular regions hit by the climate crisis is recovered. But what if the war in Ukraine is not easily over? What if another war breaks out in other strategic regions? What if the production of grains is disrupted in more and more regions each year due to the increasingly deteriorated climate crisis? 'The rise of the prices of energy and foods' may not be a simple temporary factor. Structural inflation and the direction of global capitalism If now-unfolding inflation is caused by structural factors in many parts, this inflation will inevitably continue for some time. At this moment, central banks around the world, including the US Fed, have been aggressively raising interest rates. This may ease inflation to some extent. But, if the policies are loosened, inflation will likely surge again like an extinguished fire comes to revive. Inflation inflicts considerable pain on workers and people by reducing purchasing power. Persistent inflation pushes workers and people so that they have no choice but to fight for survival constantly. This is why inflation has to be a severe headache for the ruling class as well. However, persistent inflation will also have a crucial meaning for the future direction of the overall capitalist global economy. As will be explained in detail later, ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing, which have been like a savior for global capitalism since 2008, can work effectively only on the premise that inflation does not occur. So the fact that inflation will inevitably continue for some time indicates that there will be significant changes in the unfolding features of the capitalist economy. Since 2008, the bubble of asset markets such as stocks and real estate has been a key instrument of offsetting the decline in profit rate overall capitalist system. Banks, the backbone of the capitalist economy, have gained more earnings from loans related to real estate and stock investments than industrial investments. The prices in asset markets, divorced from the real economy, rightfully have shown rapid decline signs periodically. But each time, interest rate lowering and quantitative easing have boosted the asset bubble again, playing a role of a solution. But now, central banks worldwide have been raising interest rates rapidly to control inflation, increasing the burden of repayment of debts of households, corporations, and governments accumulated on an unprecedented scale. And this, in turn, leads to a decrease in real estate and stock prices and a credit crunch in the bond market. What if central banks worldwide stick to interest rate raising to make this situation continue for some time? On the one hand, many household bankruptcies will happen with big plunges in real estate and stock prices. On the other hand, many corporation bankruptcies will happen with the widespread failures to extend debt maturities. And they will lead to explosive increases in bad loans, which will lead to bankruptcies of financial institutions, furthermore, a financial crisis. Therefore, central banks worldwide won't be able to continue raising interest rates. When there is a sign that inflation subsides even to some degree, they will not only hurry to stop raising interest rates but also carry out interest rate lowering and quantitative easing again, pursuing asset price escalation and debt enlargement. This is because only then will today's capitalist global economy, which is barely surviving by depending on financialization, be able to avoid sinking and continue to operate. The problem is, in that situation, whether inflation will subside quietly. What if various structural factors that caused this inflation remain still unresolved? It looks highly likely to do so. Then, interest rate lowering and quantitative easing by central banks worldwide will provide enormous energy to inflation, playing a role in provoking inflation to crazily hop around. If then, central banks worldwide will have to turn to interest rate raising to control inflation again, which will escalate the danger of a bubble bursting in asset markets and a financial crisis occurring. So it won't be long before they turn again to interest rate lowering and quantitative easing to avoid a bubble bursting and a financial crisis. But this time, inflation will be more rampant. Even if a catastrophic situation can be luckily avoided once or twice, as this vicious cycle continues, the explosiveness of a financial crisis and the wave height of inflation will become increasingly higher. After all, it looks very likely that global capitalism is heading to either a great financial depression or hyperinflation, or even both of them. Bourgeois economic analysts' views The fact that capitalism has entered a new epoch and that the global economy is likely to run into a catastrophic situation is expressed, to some extent, even in some bourgeois economic analysts' views. (Omission) The epoch of crisis, war, and revolution World war I broke out in 1914 as the result of more fierce concentration on a scramble for colonies by imperialist powers competing for supremacy, such as the UK, France, Germany, etc., to overcome economic damages after the severe global economic crisis in the early 1900s. World war II started in 1939 as the result of finally finding a solution to the Great Depression unsolved over ten years by imperialist powers competing for supremacy, such as the US, the UK, Germany, Japan, etc., in massive military spending expansion, the war economy, and even mass destruction and genocide. If the capitalist global economy increasingly approaches toward great financial depression and hyperinflation in the near future, this will more rapidly increase the intensity of conflicts between imperialist powers already reaching the stage of proxy wars and local wars. At this moment, we cannot predict the concrete features of the future. But it is clear that the upcoming epoch will inevitably be an epoch marked by crises and wars. In an epoch full of bankruptcies, unemployment, poverties, and wars, even to which climate disasters add, the working class worldwide will have no choice but to rise up with strikes, revolts, and revolutions, even for survival. This article is to explain overall backgrounds to help a more accurate understanding of the nature and meaning of the new epoch that can be summarized like above. For this, for example, answers to some following questions will be tried to suggest. If a transition to the new epoch is taking place now, what epochs have there been in the history of global capitalism? What are the factors that make epochs distinguished from each other in capitalism? How did the epoch of neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization that dominated global capitalism over the past forty years emerge? What inherent contradictions have operated, leading that epoch to end up? Finally, what is the position and implication of the new epoch in the history of global capitalism? <1> Factors that make epochs distinguished in the history of capitalism From its beginnings until now, capitalism has invariably been based on the endless exploitation of the working class. In addition, to divide the working class and sustain the exploitation system, it has continued oppression and discrimination against women, LGBTQ+, blacks and people of color, immigrants, disabled, etc. Furthermore, by absolutizing only the blind extended reproduction of capital, it has destroyed essential environments for human survival, such as the coexistence between nature and humanity or the harmony between urban and rural areas, to an irrecoverable degree. But capitalism has not always shown the same features. Just like a person has gone through the stages of childhood, youth, maturity, and old age throughout a lifetime, capitalism has also passed through several epochs that have been considerably distinguished from each other in the relation between capitals, the relation between capitals and states, the relation between states, the mode of combination between exploitation and expropriation, and the level of class struggle. It can be said that capitalism has passed largely through five epochs until now. The first is 'the epoch of free competition and bourgeois revolution' from 1776 to 1871. The second is 'the epoch of monopoly and full-scale imperialism' from 1871 to 1914. The third is 'the epoch of world wars, Great Depression, and workers' revolution' from 1914 to 1945. The fourth is 'the epoch of postwar boom and reformism' from 1945 to 1980. And the fifth is 'the epoch of neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization' from 1980 to recent days. (1) Long-term realization of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (Omission) Then, in the real history of capitalism, how has the tendency of the rate of profit to fall been realized? In this regard, An Argentinean, Esteban Ezequiel Maito, published a meaningful study result in 2014. It is an actual calculation of the average rate of profit in six core countries, including the US, the UK, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and the Netherlands, from 1869 to 2010. The study result says that the rate of profit started above 40% around 1870, repeated to tendentially decline, and then reached 10-15% these days. (Omission) (2) Desperate policies to offset the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (Omission) The core policy that capitalist states pursue to offset the decline in profit rate has differed in each period. For example, from 1871 to 1914, capitalist states' key policy to offset the decline in profit rate was 'capital export to colonies,' and from 1914 to 1945, it was 'wars.' From 1945 to 1980, it was 'expansion of effective demand,' and from 1980 to recent years, it was 'neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization.' The core policies have had to be changed in each period because, after some time passed, due to accumulated contradictions, they didn't correctly act anymore, or the counter-effectiveness became very severe. (Omission) (3) The degree of deepening in the capitalist crisis (Omission) The accumulation of contradictions has not been confined to the economic aspects. Contradiction has also accumulated in social, political, and international aspects. The explosion of contradictions in those areas has also aroused decisive crises in the old accumulation system or capitalism itself. For example, 'capital export to colonies', the core policy to offset the decline in profit rate from 1871 to 1914, raised the conflicts between imperialist powers around the repartition of colonies, finally bringing about World War I from 1914 to 1918. And the economic contradiction accumulated in that period finally burst into the Great Depression worldwide from 1929 to 1939, and social, political, and international contradictions aroused by the Great Depression burst into World War II from 1939 to 1945. These show the big picture of capitalism's history. In the early phase, there is a period of growth with vigor. Then a period of contradiction accumulation with ostensible peace and stability follows. And then, when reaching a certain point, a period unfolds when, as accumulated contradictions explode, everything fiercely turbulences and collides with each other and so capitalism itself is decisively at stake. (Omission) (4) The mode of combination between exploitation and expropriation In the Marxist tradition, 'exploitation' means stealing surplus value created by workers within the capitalist production process. Whereas 'expropriation' means robbing or thieving someone's property outside the surplus value production process. The center of the capitalist production process is in organizing social production and, through that, exploiting surplus value. Enormously developed social production makes surplus value as enormous as its size. So the center of profits reaped by capitalists is based on exploitation. But the tendency of the rate of profit to fall makes capitalists endlessly crave additional profits based on expropriation to offset the tendency. (Omission) The mode of combination between exploitation and expropriation has repeatedly changed. When capitalists were able to earn profits smoothly, they relatively concentrated on exploiting surplus value. But when suffering from the decline in profit rate, capitalists more actively combined expropriation outside the surplus value production process to supplement reduced profits (or to offset a further decline in profit rate). The focussing point of expropriation has also changed. For example, while total plunder of colonies was at the center until the early 20th century, these days, financial expropriation is at the center. (Omission) (5) The degree of maturity in the revolutionary capability of the working class (Omission) The unity and class consciousness of the working class, and the extent of how mature its revolutionary capability is, affect the range and intensity of policies used by states to offset the decline in profit rate. More importantly, they decisively affect whether capitalism, in which contradictions finally explode, can revive with a young body and open another epoch by shaking off its contradictions considerably through harshly sacrificing workers and people. (Omission) The epoch of crisis and war bears the epoch of revolution. It is because horrible catastrophes of wars and great depression provide the urgent necessity and possibility for the workers' revolution. But the workers' revolution does not come true by itself. Only by building the revolutionary capability of the working class can we prevent capitalism, which has already fulfilled its historical vocation, from extending its lifespan at the expense of the working class and humanity through horrific barbarism. <2> Four epochs before the epoch of neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization How did 'the epoch of neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization' emerge? What inherent contradictions have made it end? What position and implication does the new upcoming epoch have in the whole history of capitalism? To answer these questions, we need to understand previous epochs. So let's briefly check the characteristics of the four epochs before the epoch of neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization around the contents necessary for understanding today's epochs. (1) The epoch of free competition and bourgeois revolution (1776-1871) (Omission) (2) The epoch of monopoly and full-scale imperialism (1871-1914) (Omission) (3) The epoch of world wars, Great Depression, and workers' revolution (1914-1945) (Omission) (4) The epoch of postwar boom and reformism (1945-1980) (Omission) <3> The end of the epoch of neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization As passing through the economic crisis of the 1970s, the profit rate in the overall capitalist system very severely declined, dropping to the ground. The capitalist class, which had repressed the worldwide uprising of the working class in the 1970s, has very aggressively pursued special measures to not only offset the decline in profit rate but even to raise it again since the 1980s. A set of measures that combine neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization dominated the world over the past 40 years. (1) Neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization that swept away the world since the 1980s Neoliberalism was the first measure that capitalist states pursued to offset the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and even raise the dropped-to-the-ground profit rate again. Neoliberalism, which encompasses specific policies such as mass layoffs, wage cuts, irregularization of the labor force, social welfare cuts, neutralization of labor unions, tax cuts for capitalists, deregulations, privatization of key industries, etc., to cut a long story short, puts its aim in strengthening the exploitation of workers as much as possible and giving all kinds of benefits to capitalists, artificially raising the profit rate of capital. Neoliberalism, which was through the experiment by Chile's military regime in the mid to late 1970s and inaugurated by conservative governments in the UK and the US in the 1980s at full scale, dispersed to the whole world throughout the 1990s. This especially accompanied the process that social democrat governments became the executors of neoliberal policies in many countries. In those cases, they often utilized the method that 'democratically' promoted neoliberalism based on labor-management-government negotiation. The result of neoliberal policies that forcibly decline the working and living standards of workers and artificially raise the profit rate of capital has been prominently represented, especially in the US. From 1979 to 2018, while the productivity growth in the US was 69.6%, hourly compensation growth was only 11.6%. In 2007, the real wage of the workers in the US was just 85% of that in 1974. Therefore, neoliberalism was considerably effective in the recovery of the profit rate but soon reached its limit. It was because of the contradiction that was inherent in neoliberalism itself. The more each corporation recovered its profit rate thanks to neoliberalism policies, the poorer workers became, and the bigger the gap between production and consumption in the whole society became. Overproduction that became increasingly serious led to structural sale slumps and made significant barriers to the recovery of profit rates. Additional measures were needed to complement the decisive limit of neoliberalism. So globalization and financialization were added. Globalization, which combines 'globalization of production' and 'globalization of markets,' accelerated from the mid-1980s and started to unfold in all aspects with the launch of WTO in 1995. Global FDI inflow to global GDP increased from 0.4% in 1985 to 5.3% in 2007. Global exports of goods and services to global GDP increased from 16.9% in 1986 to 31.2% in 2008. In particular, the transition to a market economy in China in the 1980s and the collapse of East European countries and the USSR in 1989-91 destroyed the Stalinist camp, contributing largely to integrating the world into a single supply chain and single market. The 'globalization of production,' which moved all or part of the production bases across borders to all corners of the world in search of cheap and submissive workers, contributed greatly to raising the profit rate of capital. Factory relocations to underdeveloped countries drastically decreased wage costs to the extent of even more than offsetting additional logistics costs. Threats of factory relocations became the most potent weapon of capitalists in developed countries to neutralize labor unions and compel them to retreat. 'Globalization of markets,' which integrated the world into a single market by breaking the trade barrier between countries, complemented the weakness of neoliberalism that increasingly enlarged the gap between production and consumption by dramatically expanding markets. Cheap imports, represented by Chinese products, made the workers in developed countries get by based on decreased wages, effectively blocking the wage decrease from leading to workers' struggles. Factory relocation worldwide largely changed the landscape of capitalism. Factories, which concentrated in the US, Western Europe, and Japan, moved toward Latin America, Eastern Europe, and East Asia and then rushed into China as their final destination. Global capitalism reorganized itself around two axes China's production and the US's consumption. Financial capital is originally capital that reaps earnings by receiving part of the surplus value acquired by industrial capital in the form of interests or dividends through loans or stock investments for industrial capital. While financial capital doesn't directly participate in surplus value production, it indirectly contributes to the surplus value production of industrial capital by collecting idle money in society and providing it to industrial capital. So interests or dividends are distributed to financial capital in return. However, if stock prices continue to sharply rise up, financial capital can earn even much more returns through the margin between the purchase and sale of stocks than interests or dividends. If even the middle class and the upper layer of the working class are attracted to participate in stock markets by arousing the illusion of speculative unearned income, stock prices must naturally rise for a while. Financial capital can reap additional earnings also through high-interest loans to stock market participants. Rightfully, stock prices that distant far from their real value must inevitably plunge someday. But, usually, big owners already realize margins before the plunge, and most of the losses due to the plunge are passed to small investors. Such financial expropriation can be used as a way to offset the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, but it has very large side effects. It is because when stock prices plummet, numerous people go bankrupt and, by the shock, even banks, leading to the overall economy immersing into a very tough situation. This was the case when the Great Depression began in the US in October 1929. When coping with the Great Depression in the 1930s, the US introduced various regulations on financial institutions like banks. The most important was the prohibition of concurrent business of commercial and investment banks, which prevented commercial banks handling deposits from participating in high-risk areas like stock investments. Such regulations, introduced to hinder the recurrence of something similar to the Great Depression, continued for more than 60 years until the late 1990s. However, the US broke up such regulations on a large scale in 1999. Representatively, the prohibition of concurrent business of commercial banks, insurance firms, and investment banks was abolished. It meant to open the way for inducing even small money owned by the masses into speculative and high-risk areas as much as possible. Like this, the process in which financial expropriation unfolds briskly under the active support of states is just financialization. Financialization, which became at full scale in the late 1990s, has been a device to supplement additional earnings by financial expropriation for capitalists who could not reap sufficient profits only with exploitation through surplus value production due to bottom-crawling profit rates in the overall capitalist system. Financial expropriation has not been confined to stock trades. Trades of corporations themselves to acquire corporations, raise 'values' through massive restructurings, and sell them again have also been an important area of financial expropriation. In the real estate market, something similar to the stock market has happened on a much larger scale. In this market, the size of mortgage loans is overwhelming, so financial institutions' earnings through them have been even more significant. In addition, the earnings from rising rents due to surging housing prices also have been considerable. As financialization expands, areas of financial expropriation have endlessly spread to the foreign exchange market, raw material market, futures market, and recently the cryptocurrency market. Financialization greatly expanded the financial sector. In 2006, while the global GDP was $51.8 trillion, the sum of stock markets and bond markets in the world was $119 trillion. In 2007, the money managed by hedge funds, which could be called the vanguard of financialization, was $10.1 trillion. In the UK, In 2007, while manufacturing industries employed 3 million, the financial sector employed 6.5 million. In the US, total financial institutions' assets to GDP soared from 110.3% in 1985 to 224.2% in 2007. In the US, as a result of combining globalization and financialization, while the share of manufacturing industries in GDP reduced from 25.6% in 1947 to 11.2% in 2009, the share of the sum of finance, insurance, real estate, and rental & leasing in GDP grew from 10.5% in 1947 to 21.5% in 2009. (Omission) (2) The 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession (Omission) The 2008 financial crisis was the biggest event after the Great Depression in the 1930s in the history of capitalism. With the risk of going bankrupt of major financial institutions in the US and even other countries in a row, global capitalism was on the verge of paralysis. Financial expropriation through the surge in real estate prices and predatory loans, which made 2 million households homeless, gave enormous earnings to capitalists. But it came back as a boomerang and pushed the capitalists' ruling system itself to just before catastrophe. Faced with the danger of the entire capitalist system's collapse, the capitalist class, which had been crying out neoliberalism and arguing 'leave it all to the market,' shamelessly provided astronomical bail-out money to financial institutions through states. According to a report by the Bank of England in November 2009, the bail-out money poured by the US, the UK, and Eurozone amounted to $14 trillion, accounting for one-fourth of global GDP in 2009. Banks were barely prevented from bankruptcies, but consumer markets in developed countries rapidly shrank. In just three months after the break out of the financial crisis, global production and trade were reduced by more than 30%. In particular, in China, 20 million jobs disappeared around export industries in only three months just after the financial crisis. This time, for an economic boost, governments around the world poured tremendous finance. While developed countries around the US promoted consumption mainly using subsidies and tax benefits, emerging countries around China mobilized massive civil engineering and construction projects. For two years after the financial crisis, finance poured by governments worldwide to stimulate economies was estimated to surpass $5 trillion. Meanwhile, central banks in major countries such as the US, Europe, and Japan implemented massive quantitative easing and ultra-low interest rates policies for a long time to boost economies. For example, the US Fed carried out three times of quantitative easing, a policy in which the central bank expands the money supply by purchasing bonds held by banks, on a scale of $3.6 trillion over six years from November 2008 to October 2014. And Federal Reserve maintained its standard interest rate, Federal Funds Rate, at zero (0.00~0.25%) over seven years from December 2008 to December 2015. Like these, by mobilizing unprecedented tremendous bail-outs and stimulation policies, capitalist states could prevent the 2008 financial crisis from developing into another great explosive depression, which is full of massive bankruptcies and unemployment like the Great Depression in the 1930s. But the Great Recession was unavoidable. According to the World Bank, the average growth rate of the world economy for 12 years from 2008 to 2019 was recorded at only 2.5%. This was much lower than the average growth rate from 1995 to 2007 at 3.4%, let alone the rate from 1961 to 2007 at 3.7%. Moreover, this figure was the result barely achieved by mobilizing for a long time astronomical fiscal expansion and unprecedented ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing for states worldwide to boost economies. In some parts, the period of the Great Recession showed remarkable growth and aggressive investments among big-tech corporations like Apple, platform corporations like Amazon, and so-called 'green' corporations like Tesla. However, in overall aspects, the period showed extreme investment avoidance phenomenon due to profit rates' inescapability from bottom-crawling in the overall capitalist system. One representative example that showed the investment avoidance phenomenon in the overall capitalist system was the expansion of 'share repurchase' in the US. Based on the Trump administration's policy that gave tax cut benefits to corporations retrieving their foreign investment back to the US, in the first quarter of 2018, US corporations retrieved $217 billion to the US, accounting for about 10% of total foreign investment money which is $2.1 trillion. However, only $2 billion was expensed on productive investment among $81 billion that the upper 15 corporations retrieved. Whereas, in the second quarter of 2018, the amount of share repurchasing by US corporations reached $150 billion which increased three times compared to the first quarter. That is, the most of foreign investments retrieved to the US were used in share repurchasing, which is for management right defending or stock price raising, instead of productive investment. The investment avoidance phenomenon largely affected also the direction of loans by banks. While commercial and industrial loans accounted for 25.0% of total credit provided by US commercial banks from 1970 to 1981, but only 16.1% from 2008 to 2019. Whereas, the portion of real estate loans increased from 19.1% to 37.0% between the same periods. (Omission) After all, the period of the Great Recession was not a process of going ahead toward a new boom by resolving contradictions that were generated in the capitalist accumulation system, but a process of going ahead toward a large-scale explosion by more accumulating and deteriorating contradictions. The accumulation and deterioration of contradictions unfolded in both aspects of globalization and financialization. (3) Reshoring, protectionism, and supremacy confrontation brought about by globalization Globalization was a very effective instrument in offsetting the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and even recover profit rates by making it possible for capitalists to force low wages both in developed and emerging countries. And it also functioned to block low wages from leading to workers' struggles by maintaining low prices. However, globalization, especially the 'globalization of production,' largely retreated through the Great Recession. Global FDI (net inflows) compared to global GDP, which started at 0.4% in 1985, reached 5.3% in 2007 as a result of a tendential rise, but then recorded 1.3% in 2020 as a result of a tendential decline. Global exports of goods and services compared to global GDP, which started at 16.9% in 1986, rose to 31.2% in 2008, but then tendentially declined, recording 26.3% in 2020. In large part, the ratio of FDI inflows compared to GDP in main countries and regions saw its figure decline in 2016-20 than 2006-10. Specifically, the figure declined from 1.9% to 1.5% in the US, from 5.8% to 1.9% in Eurozone, from 3.7% to 1.5% in China, from 2.4% to 1.8% in India, and from 3.7% to 1.4% in Russia. Some countries and regions, such as Brazil and Southeast Asia, showed somewhat different patterns, but the ratio didn't rise notably, even in these cases. The retreat of globalization was a worldwide phenomenon not confined to specific countries or regions. What made globalization retreat like this? It is because the contradiction inherent in globalization itself has created strong powers for inverse-globalization, such as reshoring, protectionism, and supremacy confrontation. In the early period of globalization, the reason capitalists in the developed countries moved production bases en masse to emerging countries was, first of all, remarkably low wages in emerging countries. However, the wage gap between developed and emerging countries reduced as time passed. It is because wages in emerging countries rapidly rose as unity and wage struggle of workers grew with industrialization proceeding. In particular, large-scale wage struggles in 2010 in China, which became the 'factory of the world,' were an important turning point. In addition, in developed countries, wages of new workforces in manufacturing industries considerably declined as the two-tier wage system spread on top of overall wage stagnation. The reduction of the wage gap between developed and emerging countries began to invoke doubts about the long-term benefits of production base movement to emerging countries when considering logistics costs etc. Roughly, with 2010 as the split point, many corporations in developed countries began to delay additional productive investment toward emerging countries and even take reshoring, which retrieves production bases in emerging countries back to developed countries. For example, in the US, in 2010-16, before the Trump administration, 438,000 jobs were already announced due to reshoring. Unlike that reshoring was a relatively quiet economic phenomenon, the rises of protectionism and supremacy confrontation were powerful political phenomenons shaking world order. Neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization reintegrated, in effect, the world into a single order by encompassing the collapse of the USSR and Eastern European and the transition to a market economy in China. And in reverse, such a single world order was a political basis for making it possible for neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization to continue smoothly. In particular, when the 2008 financial crisis broke out, the fact that governments worldwide cooperated closely with each other based on a single world order had a decisive role in preventing the financial crisis from going ahead to a great explosive depression and making it mitigated to the extent of the Great Recession. But globalization brought about protectionism and supremacy confrontation that shakes such a single world order from the bottom. In April 2009, when the second summit of G20 was held in London, leaders worldwide made an official resolution of the 'block of protectionism' for the joint response to the financial crisis. It was a commitment not to repeat the 1930s experience that countries worldwide fell into protectionism and largely exacerbated the Great Depression. But, workers and people in the US and Europe, devastated by neoliberalism and globalization and even experienced a more rapid setback in living conditions after the 2008 financial crisis, infused enormous energy into protectionist forces under the condition of the absence of revolutionary forces capable of leading them. Finally, in 2016, as Brexit was passed by a referendum in the UK and Trump was elected as president of the US, protectionism arose at the forefront of world politics and international relations. Protectionist forces' coming to power further accelerated the reshoring that had already unfolded. As the result of the Trump administration's policy to provide tax cut benefits to companies retrieving their foreign investments, 637,000 jobs were announced by reshoring in 2017-20. (As we saw earlier, even though most of the retrieved money was used in share repurchasing, such an extent of the result was produced.) Protectionist forces' coming to power also functioned as a political force to shake the world order. The 'America First' policy that Trump raised made significant fissures in the relations with not only China but also traditional allies in Europe. The rise to power of protectionism, which hates foreign countries and immigrants, powerfully inspired all kinds of far-right forces worldwide which hate social minorities. China, which had become the 'factory of the world' through globalization, has leaped to the extent of threatening the US's supremacy as the result of repeatedly rapid growth. The conflict between the US intending not to allow more chasing and China planning to reduce the time of chasing made the supremacy confrontation between them visible more early. In 1982, when reform and opening-up policy was in the early stage in China, China's GDP compared to the US's GDP was 6.1%. For a long time, this figure modestly increased, reaching only 12.7% in 2001, when China joined WTO. However, after that, in only 6 years, this figure doubled to 24.5% in 2007. And through the 2008 financial crisis, in only 4 years, doubled again to 48.4% in 2011. In addition, China's GDP began to rank second in the world surpassing Japan's in 2010. China's economic rise has invoked tension and confrontation between the US and China instead of their long honeymoon. In 2011, the Obama administration set the 'Pivot to Asia' as the top foreign policy of the US, which meant containment and siege against China of a 'potential threat.' Against this, China more strongly pulled the rein of chasing. In 2012, when China's GDP recorded 52.5% above half of the US's for the first time, Xi Jinping, who just rose to the General Secretary of the CCP, put forward the 'Chinese Dream' at the forefront, which was, in effect, the dream of China becoming the most powerful country in the world. Furthermore, in 2015, when China's GDP recorded 60.8% of the US's, China announced its 'Made in China 2025' plan, which intended to raise 10 core high-tech industries to the world's highest level by 2025. In 2018, when China's GDP recorded 67.7% over two-thirds of the US's, the confrontation between the US and China flared up into an all-out trade dispute. In July 2018, the trade dispute between the US and China started, after the first attack by the Trump administration, with giving and taking retaliation tariffs of 25% on imports worth $34 billion. In 2019, the US enforced retaliation tariffs on additional imports worth $300 billion and sanctioned Chinese high-tech companies including Huawei, and against those, China reduced importing agricultural products from the US. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the trade dispute between the US and China has continued. Through the trade dispute, the US expanded its tariff object range for Chinese imports largely expanded from 1.0% to 66.4%, and raised the average tariff from 3.1% to 19.3%. In 2019, the US could widen the GDP gap with China by using the trade dispute, but as China rapidly recovered its ability to cope, China's GDP reached 77.1% of the US's in 2021. The US's strong containment and China's vigorous chasing tell us that supremacy confrontation between the US and China will more and more inevitably intensify. Before 2008, globalization functioned as an effective instrument to complement the weakness of neoliberalism and offset the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. However, after 2008, as a result of the unfolding of the contradiction inherent in globalization itself, not only did its original function remarkably mitigate but also it ended up creating political forces of protectionism and supremacy confrontation, which shake the world order and deepen decisively the crisis of capitalism. (4) Financialization having headed toward a greater financial crisis Unlike the real economy, which was stuck in stagnation and low growth after the 2008 financial crisis, global stock and real estate markets hotly heated up centered on the US. Global equity market capitalization to global GDP, which was 115.5% in the 4th quarter of 2007, dropped to 54.6% in the 4th of 2008 through the financial crisis. But, after that, as a result of repeating tendential rises, it reached 128.1% in the 4th quarter of 2021 as a new peak. The figure at the recent peak was 12.6% points higher than before the financial crisis. It means that a giant bubble bigger than before the financial crisis was formed in global stock markets. The US stock markets show more dramatic figures. The US's equity market capitalization to GDP, which recorded 164.7% in the 1st quarter of 2000 and 142.6% in the 2nd quarter of 2007, plunged to 94.9% in the 1st quarter of 2003 through the dot-com bubble crash and 74.5% in the 1st quarter of 2009 through the financial crisis. After that, as a result of repeating tendential rises, it reached 211.4% in the 4th quarter of 2021. The figure at the recent peak was even 46.7% points higher than before the dot-com bubble crash, and even 68.8% points higher than before the financial crisis. In the US stock markets, a huge bubble, which is much bigger than before the dot-com bubble crash or the financial crisis, was formed. The US real estate market is also serious. The US's (S&P/Case-Shiller) home price index to consumer price index (for all urban consumers), which recorded 155.1% in May 2006, fell to 99.4% in February 2012 through the plunge of real estate prices and the financial crisis. After that, as a result of steady rises, it reached 178.1% in May 2022. The figure at the recent peak was 23.0% points higher than before the financial crisis. Even in the US real estate market, an enormous bubble considerably bigger than before the financial crisis was formed. In other countries, also severe levels of bubbles were formed. In June 2022, Bloomberg analyzed that real estate bubbles bigger than before the 2008 financial crisis were formed in 19 countries, including South Korea, among all OECD countries, based on the calculation of prices compared to rents and incomes. Before 2008, financialization was an important instrument for capitalists to reap additional earnings through financial appropriation, on top of super-exploitation by neoliberalism and globalization. However, the 2008 financial crisis proved that financial expropriation is a very dangerous instrument that could push the capitalist system itself to collapse. So it would have been a minimally rational choice for capitalists if they had maintained a distance from financial expropriation, at least for a while after the 2008 financial crisis. Just like they did for more than 60 years after the 1930s Great Depression. But, as we saw, financial expropriation unfolded at a bigger scale after 2008. And as a result, giant bubbles, much bigger than the 2000 dot-com bubble crash and the 2008 financial crisis, have been formed in global capitalism. What has made things become like this? To cut a long story short, it is because that capitalism has reached an extent where it can't exist without financial expropriation. Even though enormous neoliberal attacks poured globally to intensify exploitation for a long time, profit rates throughout today's capitalist system have not still escaped from the bottom. Moreover, globalization, which had largely been beneficial in intensifying exploitation, rapidly retreated after 2008. While the driving force of capitalism is the endless hunger for profits by capitalists, it has become impossible to satisfy their hunger for profits without massive financial expropriation properly. Now capitalism has reached a stage where it can't exist, without financial expropriation, in other words, without desperately pushing financial expropriation. The role of states in inspiring and supporting financial expropriation was decisive in the formation of much bigger bubbles in real estate and stock markets since 2008, which made financial expropriation unfold at a much grander scale. While there were various laws and schemes in different countries, the key was ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing. Major central banks, including the US Fed, began implementing ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing policies right after the 2008 financial crisis to recover real economies, which had been rapidly frozen due to the shock of the financial crisis. They were policies intending to supply sufficient money into the market for capitalists to make productive investments more easily. However, capitalists didn't actively make productive investments due to the bottom-crawling profit rates. After all, over-supplied money contributed more to raising stock and real estate prices. Anyway, for the capitalist class as a whole, that also was not bad. When capitalists couldn't gain sufficient profits through productive investments, it could be an excellent solution to supplement through financial expropriation. As this structure was fixed over time, ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing were de facto degenerated into instruments to support and raise stock and real estate prices. However, especially because stock bubbles fiercely ballooned, major central banks had to worry about another financial crisis bursting. As a result, major central banks carefully raised interest rates again and entered quantitative tightening. For example, the US Fed raised the federal interest rate by 2.25% points over nine times from December 2015 to December 2018 and reduced its asset by $700 billion from September 2017 to August 2019. Its ostensible reason was 'normalization due to gradual recovery of the economy,' but preventing the bubble from violent exploding by carefully letting off steam would have been included in the real reason. But the Federal Reserve couldn't let off steam sufficiently because only slight amounts of the interest rate rising and quantitative tightening made the US economy rapidly decline. The Federal Reserve was forced to resume interest rate lowering and quantitative easing in September 2019. In that situation, as the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, an unprecedented crisis phase unfolded temporarily. For example, the US saw 20 million jobs disappear for only a month in April 2020, which was three times of 6.7 million lost jobs for a year from September 2008 to August 2009 when the 2008 financial crisis broke out. According to IMF, from April 2020 to March 2021, governments worldwide spent $9.9 trillion to cope with the pandemic, and central banks poured $6.1 trillion into the market. This $16.0 trillion injected by governments and central banks worldwide amounted to 18.8% of the global GDP in 2020. To cope with the economic crisis induced by the pandemic, the US Fed once again maintained its interest rate at zero from March 2020 to March 2022. Also, it carried out a much bigger quantitative easing of $4.8 trillion. At this time, the effects of the policies were similar to the past, but the extent of the effects was much more intensified. Once again, the zero interest rates and tremendous quantitative easing contributed much more to boosting stock and real estate prices than activating productive investment. As a result, giant bubbles of unimaginable levels have been formed in the global stock and real estate markets. <4> Overturn the epoch of crisis and war into the epoch of revolution! As we have seen so far, as profit rates in the overall capitalist system couldn't have escaped from the bottom even though repeated neoliberal offensives, as globalization had increasingly retreated, and as financialization had run toward a much bigger financial crisis, the epoch of neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization had been barely continuing. However, in 2022, the war in Ukraine and record-breaking inflation inflicted a strong shock, ending the old epoch and opening the door to a new epoch. So, what epoch will the new epoch be? Above all, as economic contradictions accumulated in the previous epoch explode, it will be an epoch when capitalist economic crises fiercely erupt. In addition, based on geopolitical contradictions accrued in the last epoch, it will be an epoch when conflicts and wars between imperialist powers become everyday life. Furthermore, as economic crises and wars interlock together to worsen situations continuously, it will be an epoch when the working class and humanity are increasingly immersed in endless miseries. But precisely because of those things, it will be an epoch when class struggles resurrect and develop and when the prospect of a workers' revolution to abolish capitalism emerges as an urgent task and concrete possibility once again, not a vague prospect in the future. (1) A new world order that the supremacy confrontation and protectionism are making On what background did the war in Ukraine, which became the turning point for the new epoch, start? And how is it changing the world? To understand these problems, we need to understand the changes in the power relations among countries over the past 30 years. When we look into changes in the portion of each country in global GDP in 1991-2020, we can get some results similar to what is commonly presumed. The most prominent change is China's sparkling rise and Japan's rapid drop. Also, we can see overall declines in European countries such as Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Spain, etc. The US rose, then largely fell through the 2008 financial crisis, after that, recovering again. We can also find tendential rises in India, Brazil, and Russia. When we see changes in the portion of each country in global exports of goods and services in 1991-2020, China's remarkable growth is most visible again. Existing developed countries such as the US, Germany, Japan, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Canada, and Spain have commonly experienced tendential declines. On the other hand, emerging countries such as South Korea, Singapore, India, Mexico, Russia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Turkiye have shown steady growth trends, although not as much as China. When we see changes in the portion of each country in global Foreign Direct Investment (outflows) in 1991-2020, we can see growths in China, Japan, Germany, Canada, South Korea, and Russia. And we can see drops in the US, France, the UK, and Switzerland. On the other hand, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, India, and Turkiye have continuously trivial levels. In the portion of FDI, we can confirm a greater tendency toward certain countries than exports. Also, we can identify each country has different trends within existing developed countries and do so within emerging countries. However, when we see changes in the portion of each country in global military expenditure in 1991-2020, we can see considerably different situations from previous parts. Even though the US's decline and China's rise intercrossed, the gap is still pretty big. And Saudi Arabia, India, and Russia, which failed to make their existence prominent in economic indicators, ranked from 3rd to 5th in 2016-2020 after steady growth. On the other hand, the UK, France, Japan, Germany, Italy, and Spain showed steady declines. South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, Turkiye, and Iran maintained similar levels. The comparison between global portions in some main aspects of each country in 2016-2020 shows where the power relations among countries, which put together economic and military powers, have reached these days through changes of the past 30 years. The US still occupies the position of the world's most powerful country but depends more on military power than economic power. China has considerably caught up with the US in economic power and even surpassed especially in exports and FDI, but has not reached the US with the big gap in military power. The difference between the US and China in the interrelation between economic power and military power represents itself also through that the US's military expenditure to GDP is 3.4%, but China's is only 1.7%. Another prominent point is that India, Russia, and Saudi Arabia maintain relatively strong military power compared to their economic power. (Russia's nuclear weapon power rivals the US, but military expenditure would be a more proper indicator of overall military power.) To maintain such military powers, those three countries spent their military expenditure as 2.5%, 4.3%, and 9.3% of GDP. The figures are considerably or very high, compared to 1.7% of China, which has still focused on economic growth, and 2.6% of South Korea, which has been under constant war risk. Both of economic and military power of Turkiye is not strong, but its military expenditure to GDP recorded at 2.4% as a considerably high one. On the other hand, existing developed countries except for the US, such as the UK, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada, and Spain, maintain military powers similar to their economic powers or relatively weaker than them. Whereas the UK and France maintain almost the same military power as their economic power by spending around 2.0% of GDP on military expenditure according to the NATO guideline, the rest countries maintain pretty lower military power than their economic power by spending 1.0 to 1.4% of GDP on military expenditure. Such recent power relations among countries can be summarized as follows. While the supremacy confrontation between the US and China has reached its full-scale stage through China's rapid chasing and the US's containment policies, China is still quite inferior to the US in military power. The supremacy confrontation between the US and China has been and will be giving the possibility of changing power relations among countries by shaking the established order. And, India, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, which have rapidly strengthened their military powers to grab such possibility, are pursuing to enlarge their influence by utilizing the empty space of China's remarkable inferiority in military power to the US. This can explain, to a large extent, the background for the breakout of the war in Ukraine and subsequent developments. The reason that Russia invaded Ukraine would have been not only because of Russia's fear of NATO's further enlargement to the east, but also Russia's strategic calculation that it would be an important opportunity to enlarge its influence if it successfully occupied Ukraine against NATO. India, which has been participating in the Quad aiming at surrounding China under the initiative of the US, is de facto supporting Russia in this war in Ukraine by refusing to participate in sanctions against Russia and increasing energy imports from Russia. Saudi Arabia, which was a staunch ally of the US, is joining hands with Russia to maintain the crude oil prices high refusing Biden's call for reducing the prices. Also, it is offering its hands to China by allowing Huawei, a target of the US's sanction, to participate in the construction of the futuristic city Neom in the middle of a vast desert. So, when looking at the overall situation, the war in Ukraine can be said as a process where Russia, India, and Saudi Arabia, which became to maintain stronger military powers than their economic powers are further shaking the world order to grab the possibility to enlarge their influence as the existing world order based on the US's overwhelming supremacy begins to falter due to supremacy confrontation between the US and China. Of course, when looking at the other parts, the war in Ukraine is also a process where the US, intending to maintain its existing supremacy, is counter-offending by actively supporting Ukraine's proxy war as leading NATO. It is also a process to make Western powers, which are greatly stimulated by the trials to reorganize the world order by some countries including Russia, take up assertive rearmament. In particular, Japan and Germany are commonly pursuing to expand their military expenditure to the level of 2% of GDP. China is reciprocating carefully but clearly to the three countries that are shaking the world order. While avoiding direct support to Russia in relation to the war, China is de facto supporting Russia by not participating in the sanctions against it and increasing energy imports from it. China is seeking to resolve border disputes with India quickly, saying "we should not miss this crucial change in the international relations that couldn't be seen over a century." And China is trying to make a fissure in the only-in-dollar crude oil trade system, which has been one of the crucial axes for maintaining the US dollar as the key currency, by suggesting payment in yuan in crude oil trade as a reward for a stable large amount of import of oil and gas. So, will the world order be reorganized into a structure of confrontation between the US-led camp and China-led camp around the supremacy confrontation between the US and China? There is a possibility of that, but another possibility seems bigger at this time. Now, the supremacy confrontation between the US and China will inevitably have continued until the winner is finally confirmed. But it is another problem whether other major powers also will be included as sub-partners within the structure of supremacy confrontation between the US-led and China-led camps. Above all, the possibility for Russia, India, and Saudi Arabia to become sub-partners or firm allies of China still looks not so high. The strategic interests of those three countries are only in expanding their influence by utilizing empty space opened by the supremacy confrontation between the US and China. While they are improving relations with China according to their needs at this time, they will be likely to change their directions again in the not-so-distant future to meet their other needs. In other aspects, China is not yet strong enough to encompass those three countries under its leadership. A more important reason is that the contradiction within the US-led Western camp is by no means trivial. Biden's foreign policy to revive the US's relations with traditional allies against Trump's America First policy seems to have become successful by recovering the unity of NATO through the joint response to the war in Ukraine. However, in August 2022, the Biden administration and Democratic Party implemented their America First policy, which is beyond Trump's one, by enacting the 'CHIPs and Science Act' and the 'Inflation Reduction Act.' Under the 'CHIPs and Science Act', only companies producing semiconductors in the US and abandoning investments in China for 10 years will be able to receive subsidies from the US government. And under the 'Inflation Reduction Act', only companies moving production bases for electrical cars and batteries to North America will be able to receive subsidies from the US government. Furthermore, even though the US energy companies earn ridiculously huge profits by exporting gas to Europe substituting Russia, the Biden administration doesn't take any action about that. Understandably, European countries, around France and Germany, are angry at such actions of the US striking blatantly the backs of allies' heads. So, European countries are hurrying to pursue their protectionism policy, including the European Chips Act, the Carbon Border Tax Act, the Critical Raw Material Act, etc. The US's political situation where protectionism is already prevailing and its economic situation which would increasingly deteriorate tell us that the US would strengthen protectionism regardless of parties. If so, European countries would inevitably counterattack with their protectionism, and the US-led Western camp would inevitably lead to severe cracks. And then, at a certain point, the US would lose its power to bind European powers continuously under its leadership, especially if the supremacy confrontation between the US and China is not concluded with the US's unilateral win. Therefore, afterward, it seems that the world order will likely have features that, on the one hand, the US and China engage in supremacy confrontation, but on the other hand, various powers pursue their independent directions based on protectionism and so make the structure of imperialist multipole confrontation. Russia, India, and Saudi Arabia are already pursuing the reorganization of the world order assertively. On top of that, in major European countries such as France or Germany, if protectionism fiercely expands or far-right forces come to power, those countries will likely reposition themselves as hegemons leading the surrounding region and escaping US supremacy. Turkiye, which doesn't hide its ambition to be a regional hegemon even though it doesn't have strong economic and military power yet, also could be a dark horse. Whereas, in Northeast Asia, including the Korean Peninsula, all countries will likely be under the structure of the supremacy confrontation between the US and China because of its strong impact due to geopolitical conditions. A new world order, where the US-China supremacy confrontation and imperialist multipole confrontation coexist, would be considerably different from the single world order of the sole US supremacy, which made neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization possible. Even if a new world order converges simply to the US-China supremacy confrontation, it also would be pretty different from the single world order. Anyway, the new epoch will be a period of turbulence in which conflicts and wars between imperialist powers become everyday life and are increasingly intensified. (2) Hyperinflation or great financial depression and massive imperialist war What would have happened if, during the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic crisis, enormous fiscal spending of governments worldwide and ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing policies of central banks didn't implement? The results are almost obvious. The world economy would have entered into a great explosive depression (not inferior to the 1930s Great Depression) full of tremendous bankruptcies and unemployment. Meanwhile, for a year after the break-out of the 2008 financial crisis and for a year after the break-out of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the average percentage change in the US consumer price index from a year ago respectively recorded -0.3% and 1.2%. If these figures had been over 7% or even around 10%, would such policies of governments and central banks worldwide have been possible? Or could they have had effects similar to what we experienced? It's not a simple question. Anyway, in such situations, enormous fiscal spending, ultra-low interest rates, and quantitative easing would have been by no means easy. It is because such policies could have provided huge energy to inflation. But doing nothing also would have been impossible, because the world economy could have slipped into a great depression unless doing something. So, the capitalist class worldwide would have had to find a miraculous balance point, not providing huge energy to inflation but capable of blocking a great depression. Only if such a balance point had existed. What will happen if such situations repeat several times in increasingly worsened forms? They would be able to find such a miraculous balance point once or twice, but will it be continuously possible? What will happen if it is impossible? Hyperinflation? Great financial depression? Or both of them? The problem is the possibility that such situations will be laid in front of us is very high. The possibility comes from two points. First, (as explained earlier) even though a tremendous financial crisis is already possible at any time due to unprecedented bubbles in the global stock and real estate markets, today's capitalism will inevitably form more enormous bubbles continuously because it has to pursue huge financial expropriation endlessly. Second, the new world order dominated by supremacy confrontation and protectionism substituting globalization will inevitably make the wave of inflation strike the world repeatedly. Under the new world order, conflicts between imperialist powers, which will occur much more frequently due to supremacy confrontation and protectionism, will repeatedly put the global supply chain into chaos, if not necessarily leading to war. And such conflicts will force the global supply chain itself to be reorganized by the logic of supremacy confrontation and protectionism than the logic of the economy. That will mean considerable additional costs and inefficiencies economically. In fact, the logic of the new world order to put ahead the supremacy confrontation and protectionism than globalization is already working. In 2022, despite suffering from significant inflation, the US has not revoked high tariffs on imports from China. Also, the US intends to exclude China from the high-tech semiconductor supply chain as a part of the supremacy confrontation and give massive subsidies only to companies to produce in the US as putting ahead protectionism. The logic of globalization, which is 'to produce at the cheapest place,' is assertively being denied by the US, which once forced globalization on the whole world with its power. Instead of long-term low prices that were possible by producing at the cheapest place, now a period to live with inflation will inevitably unfold as a long-term trend. In 2022, major central banks, including the US Fed, have quickly raised interest rates to cope with inflation. For example, the US Fed has raised 4.25% points of the federal interest rate over seven times from March to December. As a result, the US inflation rate gradually declined from 9.1% in June to 6.5% in December. But the Consumer Price Index is still high, and the US Fed is forecasted to raise about 1% points of the federal interest rate additionally in 2023. Anyway, through that, this wave of inflation would be able to be repressed. But, from now on, the wave of economic stagnation induced by interest rate raising, through the rings of debt burden increasing, corporate credit crunch, household consumption shrink, and stock and real estate prices decline should be passed through. It isn't yet evident what extent coming economic stagnation will be. However, considering the 2008 financial crisis broke out two years after the US Fed had raised 4.25% points of the federal interest rate in 2004-2006, the wave height of this interest rate raising, which will raise more during less period, could be not-so-small. In fact, the US's equity market capitalization to GDP recorded 162.1% in the 3rd quarter of 2022, which was 49.3% points lower than 211.4% at its peak in the 4th quarter of 2021. (In the dot-com bubble crash, the figure dropped by 69.8% points for 12 quarters, and in the financial crisis, 68.1% points for 7 quarters.) While the US real estate market, which formed a huge bubble equivalent to the stock market, is yet in a slight decline after reaching its peak in May 2022, the extent and speed of decline in that market also will largely affect the economic situation in the world, beyond the US. Meanwhile, according to the IMF, total global debts, encompassing household, corporate, and public debt, rose from 195% in 2007 to 256% in 2020. The fact that the burden and impact due to interest rate raising become more significant as much as debt increase could be an important factor in worsening coming economic stagnation. But, looking at the other aspects, we can confirm some parts prepared better than the 2008 financial crisis. For example, the US has made the interest rates of almost all mortgage loans fixed after the 2008 financial crisis, which will be effective to some extent in mitigating the burden due to interest rate raising (at least in the US). Some analysts argue that the number of countries immersed in a foreign exchange crisis has been yet relatively small, different from the past cases, compared to the extent and speed of the interest rate raising of the US Fed because many countries have prepared based on past experiences. So there are some forecasts, mixed with hopes, that economic stagnation in 2023 will be relatively less serious. Whereas, there is another forecast that Japan and China will provoke a global economic crisis. Japan is maintaining its standard interest rate of minus due to its world's top-level state debt of 266% of GDP, even though inflation is reaching its highest point over 40 years. And China is already experiencing a huge real estate bubble bursting. No matter how severe the economic stagnation in 2023 is, the real problem could be the next. It is because, due to huge accumulated state debts already reaching 100% of GDP on the average in the world, and due to the flame of inflation not easily extinguished, it will be challenging for governments and central banks to implement economic boosts through enormous fiscal spending, ultra-low interest rates, and quantitative easing. We could assume a scenario that economic stagnation begins not-so-seriously in 2023 but, as governments and central banks show their incapabilities for economic boosts, it increasingly worsens with prolonged extension and then finally enters into a severe economic crisis. Or we could assume another scenario that, as governments and central banks implement economic boosts beyond their capabilities, more huge bubbles are formed once again, and then much more rapid and strong inflation swoops the bubbles. Anyway, it is impossible to anticipate the future concretely. The aspect and speed with which the situation unfolds will be changed by many variables that we can't know now. But, we can foresee the trend at least. That is, it is highly likely that the global economy will go ahead, by going through some twists and turns, toward either hyperinflation or a great financial depression, or even both of them. What choice will the capitalist class make when capitalism reaches such a catastrophic situation? When reaching such a situation, the most reliable exit for the capitalist class would be the historical experience of Word War II, which made capitalism escape from the 1930s Great Depression and recover vigor to some extent by carrying out mass destruction and genocide. As such a long total war would not be easy nowadays due to abominable nuclear armaments that could destroy the earth itself, the capitalist class would pursue other forms of massive wars having similar effects. Conflicts between imperialist powers, with supremacy confrontation and protectionism putting ahead, that would be accumulated during the capitalist economy is heading to a catastrophe, would provide the capitalist class sufficient opportunities and causes capable of being used for such wars. To desperately make such extremely reactionary wars possible, the resistance of the working class must be repressed thoroughly, so the capitalist class would try to establish fascist regimes in many countries. (3) For the reconstruction of class struggle and revolutionary development Neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization, which swept away the world after the 1980s, unfolded on the basis of having calmed workers' explosive struggles worldwide in the 1970s. Therefore, before the 2008 financial crisis, workers' struggles worldwide were in stagnation more severe than ever before, even though exploitation and expropriation were considerably strengthened. (From a global perspective, South Korea's experience of going through a period of powerful workers' struggles from the late 1980s to the early 1990s was one of the exceptional cases, together with Brazil and South Africa.) However, the 2008 financial crisis made the aspect of workers' struggles also considerably change. It is because the capitalist class worldwide inflicted tremendous offensives continuously to make the working class burden the sufferings and costs due to the financial crisis. Under the wave of the financial crisis, numerous workers and people became intensive victims of financial expropriation, being robbed of their houses or going bankrupt. Many governments, which spent astronomical finance through bail-outs and economic boosts to cope with the financial crisis, poured massive offensives, such as layoffs and wage cuts in public sectors, welfare spending cuts, pension reform, etc., to pass on the burden of exploding increase in state debts to workers. Private corporations worldwide also unfolded large-scale restructuring to shift the burden of credit crunch and consumption shrinking due to the financial crisis to workers. And across the period of the Great Recession, labor law reforms continued one after another aiming at the retreat of workers' rights and weakening of labor unions. Flexibilization of labor, which has expanded since the 1980s, more accelerated, making many more workers become into more various forms of unstable workers. Against the relentless attacks of the capitalist class, and with anger on ruined life and a hopeless future, the working class and the oppressed have unfolded fierce counter-attacks around the world since 2010. In 2010-12, the first wave of struggles of workers and people worldwide unfolded, such as general strikes against pension reform in France, the Arab Spring, the 'Indignados' movement in Spain, the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US, general strikes against austerity in Greece, etc. And in 2018-20, the second wave unfolded, such as the Yellow Vest protests in France, protests for democracy in Hong Kong, people's revolt in Chile, the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, etc. In 2022, workers worldwide, who had taken pride in being truly essential for society during the COVID-19 pandemic, unfolded strong wage struggles against the deprivation of the right to live due to inflation. And now, the working class in the world is facing a period that is highly likely to be filled with economic stagnation and economic crisis and finally led to a catastrophe such as hyperinflation or a great financial depression. And it is facing a period that is highly likely to be filled with repeated conflicts between imperialist powers putting supremacy confrontation and protectionism ahead and finally led to massive wars. The upcoming 'epoch of crisis and war' will push the working class in the world to extreme suffering and despair. The sole hope for the working class in the world will be in overturning this dark epoch to an 'epoch of revolution.' So, how should the working class develop its struggle and movement to be able to overturn an epoch of crisis and war to an epoch of revolution? The concrete answer should be different in each country because of various aspects and degrees of the development of the class struggle. But the key directions wouldn't be quite different. Especially from the perspective of directions for which the South Korean working class's struggle and movement should go ahead, we can summarize those as follows. First, we should open the way for workers' struggles based on working-class-unity, ones that broad working masses dynamically participate putting the demand for the whole working class. Regardless of regular or irregular workers, regardless of working in large companies or medium-small companies, and regardless of working in public or private sectors, all workers now should resolutely overcome trade unionism only focusing on short-sighted and narrow changes. We should learn the way to fight by being united as a single class by establishing demands of the whole working class and drawing in broad working masses while looking directly at the big picture to affect the destiny of the whole working class. Second, the working class should try to unite broad oppressed people, putting itself as a core. For this, the working class should fight at the forefront of various social struggles, such as struggles against oppression and discrimination, struggles against climate disaster and environmental destruction, struggles for social rights to live and democratic basic rights, struggles against imperialism and imperialist wars, etc. Especially, the working class should make young people to be deprived of their whole future in the coming capitalism toward crisis and war be able to find their earnest hope for the new world in the struggles with the working class. Third, the working class should reject all stupid dependence on all capitalist forces, and firmly develop the 'independence of the working class' only believing in united struggles of itself. And the working class should develop a revolutionary workers' political movement capable of leading the reconstruction, political development, and revolutionary leap of workers' struggles devotedly. The only way capable of saving the working class and humanity from the upcoming suffering of catastrophe and danger of annihilation will be in the construction of socialism through workers' revolutions worldwide. Only by the construction of the global socialist system, in which the working class becomes an actual master in a state, workplace, and society and a democratically planned economy and self-management of producers are combined, will we be able to end exploitation, oppression, discrimination, poverty, barbarism, and war, which will have been endlessly repeated until capitalism ends, and go forward to a new world.2023-02-05 | 조회 243
For a peaceful Korean Peninsula, the whole unity of the workers of the world for peace, not nuclear armament!The US-South Korea joint air exercise 'Vigilant Storm' ended on November 5. In response to the exercise, North Korea fired dozens of missiles into the West Sea, and also conducted a group flight of military planes with a strong character of armed protests. On the last day of training, the US military then deployed two B-1Bs, one of the three major US strategic bombers. In response, North Korea fired four short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs) into the West Sea on the morning of the 5th. What deserves more attention than the formidable weapons system revealed on the surface of this situation is the global military confrontation surrounding the Korean Peninsula. This tension arose at a time when the imperialist war for hegemony that had broken out in Ukraine was leading to endless clashes. It also occurred amid heightened tensions over a clash between the United States and China as the Xi Jinping administration officially declared its will for Taiwan unification, including the use of force. In a broader context, the tensions that developed on the Korean Peninsula from the end of October to the beginning of November are an extension of the growing confrontation for hegemony between the two camps of imperialism on a global scale. The overwhelming economic dominance of the US, which has ruled the world as the only hegemon since the fall of the USSR, is crumbling. To compensate for this, the military superiority of US imperialism must be more overwhelming. This means that the military significance of the Korean Peninsula becomes more critical to US imperialism. This is because the Korean Peninsula is in a decisive geopolitical position to directly attack inland China from land by mobilizing the military forces of the United States, South Korea, and Japan. The Vigilant Storm exercise was actually a threat from US imperialism to the Chinese government. The rulers of North and South Korea The fate of the rulers of North and South Korea is deeply subordinated to this confrontation over hegemony between imperialism. This was the case with the Korean War that broke out in 1950 and the changes that occurred in North and South Korea after that. The Korean War was nothing more than a proxy war between the US and the USSR. The rapid economic development that took place in South Korea over the next several decades was fueled by the large-scale economic support of South Korea by the United States, aiming for a 'showcase' effect in the imperialist competition for hegemony. After the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s and the dissolution of the Cold War system, American imperialism and the West, which longed for a growth engine for global capitalism, opened up economic development opportunities for China, which had contributed to isolating the USSR. In the worldwide system of vertical division of labor, China accelerated industrial development by attracting large-scale capital, while the United States and the West reaped enormous profits by inflowing monopoly capital into China. During this honeymoon period, South Korean capital also benefited enormously. Large-scale trade exports and capital inflow to China were made, and this became an opportunity for a new leap forward for South Korean capital, which had been facing a decline in the rate of profit since the mid-1980s. As South Korean capital put each of its two legs on each side of US and Chinese imperialism economically, the South Korean government attempted to cross a precarious tightrope diplomatically between the two. However, as the economic honeymoon broke up recently and the fierce confrontation for hegemony began in earnest, the South Korean government was forced to choose between the two imperialist camps and is being incorporated more deeply into the US imperialist camp. During this period, North Korea was isolated from the world economy like an isolated island. China has provided some economic support to North Korea because of the need for a buffer to check the military alliance between the US, Japan, and South Korea and filter direct attacks from US imperialism. Nevertheless, the Chinese rulers, who were in the process of rapid economic accumulation, did not have the strength to provide sufficient aid to North Korea, nor did they have the will to do so. This became the background for the accelerating economic downturn in North Korea and the rapid widening of the economic gap with South Korea. The shadow of the crisis inevitably overshadowed the North Korean system. To overcome this crisis, the card that the North Korean rulers took out was the development of nuclear weapons. On the one hand, it was a means of mass control to elicit the legitimacy of domination, putting forward nationalism. On the other hand, it was to derive political and economic interests such as China-Vietnamese reform and opening-up, which guarantees the security of North Korea's existing ruling system, using 'nuclear,' out of the struggle for supremacy between the two imperialists. But this tactic was a double-edged sword. Pouring North Korea's already scarce social resources into nuclear development was to inflict enormous sacrifice and suffering on the North Korean workers. It could be maintained temporarily, but it should be a dangerous factor in threatening North Korea's ruling regime in the long run. The need to expand nuclear development and ballistic missile testing, and to negotiate a 'big deal' with the imperialist forces using these means of pressure, has become more pressing to them. Albeit broken up at the last minute, the big deal negotiations between the Trump administration and the North Korean government clearly stated that. The first reason the big deal broke up was that the US could no longer provide as strong economic compensation as it had provided to South Korea in the past. Next, the condition of the big deal that the US government demanded from the North Korean government was a clear promise that North Korea would be a dagger aimed at China under the neck. For the North Korean government, that meant giving up even aid from China and enduring huge tensions with China. This choice was risky when the United States did not guarantee sufficient economic support promises to revive and develop the North Korean regime as Vietnam did. Hence, the big deal failed. Since then, North Korean rulers have been leaning toward Chinese imperialism. An interlude in which the rulers of North and South Korea pursued a certain peace while performing dangerous stunts between the two imperialist camps could no longer be screened. What does this mean? The bloody winds of the imperialist war for hegemony are raging in the Korean Peninsula once again. The fate of the Korean Peninsula will not be determined by the rulers of the two Koreas, but by a vast global flow. Today's national self-determination right As a result of the unavoidable self-contradictions of the reactionary bureaucratic ruling system, the ruling class in North Korea is engrossed in adventurism. That's nuclear armament. From a formal point of view, even though it is a reactionary system, the demand for self-determination of a weak country like North Korea looks pretty justified. And support for that means support for the country's right to autonomous arming, and naturally, this seems to should be linked to support for North Korea's nuclear armament. Nuclear armament feels like a legitimate national resistance against the United States as the imperialist hegemon power. But "All theory is gray. But forever green is the tree of life." We must approach self-determination right concretely in the context of today's world capitalism and the task of revolutionary struggle in the world. What is the situation today? All capitalist countries are being forced to choose between the US imperialist camp and the Chinese/Russian imperialist camp as an intermediate or subordinate partner. Even if they are not strong imperialist countries, all capitalist countries are being forced to assume a part of a specific imperialist camp. Let's look at Ukraine's national liberation slogan against Russian imperialist aggression. The demand for national self-determination by the working class, which is not only independent of but also against American and Western imperialism and fighting against Russian imperialism as part of the socialist revolution, is virtually non-existent in present-day Ukraine. What actually exists is only the movement of the reactionary Ukrainian ruling class, which argues the national defense war by putting forward the slogan of national self-determination but comprises a chain of the US imperialist camp and conducts one axis of the imperialist hegemony war. Therefore, we basically define the war waged by the Ukrainian government as nothing more than a proxy war for the US-Western imperialist camp and do not support it. Another key that cannot be overlooked when considering the subject advocating self-determination right is whether it reflects the initiative and independence of the oppressed masses. This is the core reason we support the Vietnam War for National Liberation in the 1970s but do not support today's hypocritical self-determination of the Ukrainian ruling class. The 'nuclear armament' raised by the North Korean regime is also placed in such a context. As seen not only in North Korea but also in countries in the Middle East and Africa, the characteristic of today is that the national self-determination right pursued by the ruling class is effectively incorporated as a part of the imperialist hegemony camp. The 2003 Kurdish independence movement in northern Iraq can be a prime example. To secure national self-determination from the oppression of the Iraqi government, they adopted the route of gaining some autonomy in cooperation with the US invading Iraq. Conversely, today, the prospect of genuinely realizing national self-determination rights cannot help being inevitably integrated into a part of the prospect of the workers' world revolution. The formula of the permanent revolution, in which the democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution, must be extended to the prospect of the permanent revolution, which organically combines the full realization of the national self-determination right with the world socialist revolution led by the working class. North Korea's nuclear armament North Korea's nuclear armament must also be analyzed and judged in the context of the times and in the specific context of whether it promotes the revolutionary movement and unity of the working class. First of all, North Korea's nuclear armament reflects the interests of the ruling class in North Korea, which seeks to survive among imperialist powers. Although it advocates national self-determination, in reality, this nuclear armament is at the cost of tremendous sacrifice and suffering of the North Korean working class. And it is subordinated to the vile purpose of securing an economic foundation for the survival of the ruling class in North Korea through deals with imperialist powers. To increase its value at the deal, the ruling class in North Korea is using nuclear weapons as an adventurist means of speculation. The process of increasing the range of long-range missiles such as ICBMs is to keep stepping on the accelerator pedal of adventurism toward the edge of the cliff. It is because the crisis of the North Korean system is getting more serious, and the 'golden time' is not much remained. But just before the long-range nuclear missile capable of hitting the US mainland is technologically complete, US imperialism will pull the trigger with reasonable cause to wage war on North Korea. The outcome of that war will be obvious. North Korea would fall under the rule of US imperialism, which would be enough to threaten China. Only one thing can become an obstacle to such a war: the danger of escalation into a world war through China's intervention. But this is the worst-case scenario for Chinese rulers. If they do not intervene, they will hand over North Korea to the United States. What if they intervene? They will have to fall into an unwanted world war or Quasi-world war. Given that it is still unfavorable to challenge the hegemony of the United States head-on, China's hegemony tactic is to wait and persevere for a while until it accumulates more power, not giving the cause for provocation to the US. So the Chinese rulers hope that North Korea remains not a powder storehouse of war but a buffer zone to interrupt the US blockade of China. For that reason, on October 28th, at the UN General Assembly First Committee (in charge of disarmament and international security), China voted in favor of a draft resolution "to condemn the six nuclear tests conducted by the DPRK (North Korea) and call on that country to abandon its nuclear weapons program." However, the ruling class in North Korea, standing in the face of increasing contradictions and instability of the system, cannot afford to wait leisurely. By strengthening its nuclear armament, the ruling class in North Korea should pressure the ruling class in China in order to obtain sufficient aid. If that doesn't work, it will try a new big deal with the US. Either way, the adventurism of the ruling class in North Korea is the deed to push the entire Korean Peninsula into the midst of the war over imperialist hegemony. Next, North Korea's nuclear armament will only push the working class of the two Koreas into a fierce mutual confrontation, giving North and South rulers excuses to expand military expenditure, reinforce public security ruling, and attack the workers' movement. In particular, it will provide the right-wing forces in South Korea an opportunity, under the pretext of North Korea's nuclear armament, to evolve into fascism and attack the South Korean workers' movement strongly. Suppose a war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula under the current circumstances. In that case, the North and South Korean working classes will be divided and massacre each other in the second massive Korean war. A division like that between the working classes in the two Koreas will be the greatest disaster above all. Here, the historical significance of national self-determination right as a means of removing obstacles that weaken the revolutionary unity of the working class disappears without a trace. Conversely, the independent workers' organizations that the South Korean workers' movement has built up through decades of struggle and the democratic rights it has won will be burnt to ashes in an instant. It will allow the military and fascist forces to dominate South Korea and will put South Korea under the US imperialism hegemon even more severely. Due to bureaucratic control and oppression, North Korean workers don't have any independent workers' movement. South Korean workers' movement is not yet ready to engage in a revolutionary struggle based on a revolutionary internationalist line. Such situations make it impossible to expect other results right away. On the other hand, US imperialism has a favorable option in its hands that can be used effectively at any time. US imperialism has an excuse to attack North Korea at any time as part of a war for hegemony against China, using the nuclear armament of the North Korean rulers as an alibi. In particular, when the US-China confrontation over hegemony blazes up as a military confrontation, for example, when China's invasion of Taiwan becomes a reality, North Korea's nuclear armament will become an excuse for a proxy war and drive the entire Korean Peninsula into an imperialist battlefield. All of these are the roles that North Korea's current nuclear armament can realistically perform. It is entirely inconsistent with the reason that revolutionary socialism supports national self-determination right. Nuclear armament is only operating as a crisis-overcoming program for the ruling class in North Korea, only as a huge adventurist maneuver. Tactics that the North Korean ruling class mobilizes Even as the ruling class in North Korea, this adventurous gamble is very dangerous. It is because there is a great risk of overthrowing their ruling system. So they go to great lengths to minimize that risk. However, the means they mobilize are not the united power and revolutionary potential of the North and South Korean working classes. On the contrary, they raise the bets of adventurism. The first means they are trying to mobilize is to use Chinese imperialism, one axis of the imperialist conflict over hegemony, as a shield. That point is fully reflected in North Korea's actions against the "Vigilant Storm" combined air exercise between the US and South Korea. It is significant that the four missiles on Nov. 5th were launched for the first time from Dongrim, which is in close contact with Chinese territory. When a missile is launched from a region closest to China, a counter-response by the US military will inevitably bombard that region with a missile if it decides to go to war. It will provoke China to have no choice but to intervene in the war. In a nutshell, the North Korean ruling class is trying to create a safety plate to protect the regime of North Korea using the possibility of a war against North Korea developing into a world war in which China participates. The second means the North Korean ruling class intends to mobilize is to warn that North Korea cannot be attacked without the US army's casualties. This point is reflected in the launch of ultra-low-angle, short-range missiles. These missiles clearly target the US Air Force Base in Osan and the US Base in Pyeongtaek. It shows that if the US attacks North Korea before the nuclear missile that strikes the US mainland is technologically complete, North Korea will respond by blowing up US bases in South Korea. But what are the consequences of this? The US base is located in the middle of Osan and Pyeongtaek, where large numbers of Koreans live. In the end, hitting a US base with a missile will inevitably result in the mass killing of not only the US military but also the Korean workers and people. Whatever the state of the military alliance between the US, Japan, and South Korea, this will lead to an immediate South Korean intervention in the war and will put the South Korean workers and people under the sway of war and fascism in one stroke. In the end, the North Korean ruling class is taking the world war and the great war on the Korean Peninsula hostage as means to reduce the risk of system collapse that an adventurous maneuver can cause to them as well. The demands of the working class on the Korean Peninsula We do not agree with North Korea's nuclear armament, which only provides an excuse for imperialist aggression and threatens national self-determination right, rather than expanding national self-determination right. We also oppose North Korea's nuclear armament, which could act as a means of undermining the revolutionary unity of the working class in North and South Korea and the world. While opposing North Korea's nuclear armament, we must desperately find a way to protect North Korea's self-determination right, especially to promote the revolutionary unity of the working class around the world and lead to the United Socialist Republic of South and North Korea and the United Socialist Republic of the World. We must find a way to unite workers worldwide revolutionarily while fighting against both imperialist camps. What could be such a path? We propose the following path to the working class in North and South Korea. - North Korea's abandonment of nuclear armament and the US army's withdrawal from the Korean Peninsula! Abolition of nuclear armament in all countries! - Abolition of all treaties that promote war! Abolition of mutual defense treaty between the US and South Korea! - Denouncement of the armistice agreement, declaration of the war's end, and conclusion of a peace agreement! Enacting of mutual non-aggression treaty between North and South Korea! - Prohibition of large-scale military operations by the United States, South Korea, and North Korea on the Korean Peninsula! - Disarmament in South and North Korea! Welfare Fundraising for Workers! - Humanitarian aid to North Korea! Provide North Korea with food, medicine, and energy immediately! - Stop all imperialist intervention in North Korea! Abolish the economic blockade on North Korea! - Abolition of public security apparatus, guarantee of freedom of thought, and guarantee of full rights of workers' organizations, in North and South Korea! - Guarantee of free come and go between North and South Korea! - International unity of the working class for peace, neither American imperialism nor Chinese imperialism! - Construction of a socialist Korean Peninsula through the workers' revolutions in both South and North Korea! Establishment of the United Socialist Republic of the World!2022-11-10 | 조회 225
"Women! Life! Freedom!" woman workers of Hyundai cut their hair for solidarity with Iranian peopleHyundai Glovis worker and Hyundai heavy industry subsidiary worker in South Korea cut their hair shouting "Women, Life, Freedom", as a solidarity action with Iranian people who are protesting against the dictatorship for women's right.2022-10-24 | 조회 181
Solidarity message from a leader of delivery worker's union in South Korea to Italian delivery workersPark-JeongHoon, a leader of 'rider union' in South Korea, is sending message of condolence to Sebastian, who died of accident in Italia. he said that there was similiar death of rider due to fatal accident while riding, but CoupangEats, which is delivery platform company, didn't give any condolence message but just sent repeatably 'promotion' messages. Park emphasized the international unite of delivery workers against these delivery companies which don't care about the death of delivery workers. ----brief explanation---- Korean Riders' union staged their first strike on Oct. 18 against CoupangEats, 2nd largest food delivery platform in Korea. The union points out cuts in basic delivery fees, opaque delivery fee decisions, and frequent industrial accidents. Korean Riders' union's demand on 18 Oct. strike - Raise up basic fee (for short delivery distance) - Make a fair standard on extra fee per kilometers - Support rider's insurance payments - Provide information on algrithm and data closely connected with working conditions Basic fee (under 650m delivery distance) had been sharply cut from 3,100 won to 2,500 won by 20% last year. (2,500 Korean won is not more than 1.8$) "No" "too early to adopt" "unprecedent in platform economy" "too risky to be documented" ... During 24 negotiation rounds, CoupangEats' answer has been always like this. Now Korean riders begins to act starting strike on 18 Oct. "Unity makes changes" - riders union's famous motto Riders' union is now organizing 2nd strike on 27 Oct. with Coupang fulfillment workers and couriers.2022-10-21 | 조회 226
Our PositionMarch to Socialism notifies Our Position to advanced workers and all comrades fighting against capitalism and asks them to go together toward building a socialist workers' party. 1. Abolishing capitalism 2. Socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class 3. Building a socialist workers’ party 4. The internationalism of the working class 5. The workers’ united front and leading all-working-class-united struggles 6. The hegemony of the working class --------- 1. Abolishing capitalism Capitalism is a class society in which a handful of capitalists owning the means of production exploit workers of a majority. As capitalist society grows, this exploitation continues to enlarge. While the wealth, extravagance, and power of a minority of the owners grow perpetually and absurdly, the conditions of workers get worse relatively and even absolutely when capitalism goes into crisis. For the same reason, all developments of production capacity due to advancements in science and technology in capitalist society turn into instruments of increased exploitation to fire workers, intensify labor intensity, and force dangerous work and low wages on workers. As a result, unemployment, relative poverty, humiliation, alienation of work, increasing labor intensity, deprivation of rights, and instability of life are attacking more and more workers. While the amount of production grows explosively according to the endless accumulation instinct of capital that knows no limitation, workers' purchase ability compared to that shrinks less and less. As a result, it is more and more difficult for commodities to find appropriate markets, leading to unlimited competition, overproduction, chronic recession, panic, and imperialist war. International monopoly capitalists represented by multinational companies are thrusting social inequalities to the end and spreading the contradiction of capitalism in all corners of the world. With spreading to the whole world, competition has been much more sharpened. But, in other aspects, the trend of counter-globalization started after the global financial crisis in 2008, and even the trend of separation between blocs began to spread rapidly after the break-out of war in Ukraine in 2022. This reflects the inherent tendency of capitalism that production should be more developed by closely connecting worldwide but it is unceasingly disturbed and braked by competition between capitalists in different countries, especially imperialist hegemony wars. The more fatal limitation of capitalism is revealed clearly in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. As the rate of profit has declined due to the contradictions and limitations of capitalism itself, recessions have become chronic, and the danger of another great depression is threatening the whole world. But the crisis control ability in capitalism has been continuously drying. Today capitalists are heading into a stranded situation between inflation and deflation due to almost bankrupted fiscal states of countries and disturbed values of currencies etc. Together with this, as the uneven development of capitalist countries disturbs the hierarchical order of imperialism unceasingly, the confrontation over supremacy between advanced imperialist camps, including the US, and chasing imperialist camps, including China, is more and more intensified to call the specter of enormous world war. The unlimited desire of the capitalist accumulation system has threatened even the overall ecosystem of the earth, so the climate crisis is heading to a dangerous stage as much as unrecoverable. Various disasters, such as drought, flood, pandemic, famine, ecosystem disturbance, etc., are rapidly spreading. Hunger, increment of unemployment and inequality, chronic recession, barbarization, crime, environmental destruction, illness, and war; all of these are explicitly the present figure of world capitalism. As the capitalist system has decayed, the reactionary, violent, and savage character of the capitalist state apparatus also has been becoming more blatant. The capitalist state, armed with violent police and army as well as bureaucratic legislative, administrative, and judiciary apparatuses, etc., has consistently played the role of the executive committee of the capitalist class, repressing strikes and protests violently as well as enacting and forcing unjust laws for capitalists. This nature of the capitalist state has been most clearly revealed in imperialist oppression and confrontation over supremacy. In foreign policies, even the capitalist states with the most democratic cover have blatantly revealed their actual figure as violent imperialist forces armed with guns, cannons, missiles, and nuclear weapons and committing massive slaughter. The capitalist system is becoming more reactionary. Capitalists feel that they have to offend workers' organizations more viciously to recover the falling rate of profit by intensifying the exploitation of workers. As well as the acceleration of political offensives such as claims and provisional seizures for damages by strikes, fascism-like far-right forces intending to annihilate workers' organizations including trade unions are continuously spreading in the capitalist class. The policies of discrimination and exclusion against social minorities such as migrants, women, LGBTQ+, disabled, etc., are enlarging to divide the working class and eliminate its ability to defy. Today, the emancipation of workers and people, as well as the progress of humankind, can only be realized in the revolutionary struggle to abolish capitalism. Even though how much difficulty this struggle slaps, there is no other way but this through which the working class and humankind can escape from the terrible misery of capitalism. 2. Socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class Capitalism is also conceiving the revolutionary conditions which will overthrow itself. The accumulation process of capitalism, which concentrates and centralizes means of production and socializes production processes, has also created huge workplaces in which numerous workers concentrate and workers' social networks. Workers, forged by collective work in workplaces and closely connected socially, have become able to unite and fight against the capitalist class powerfully and unfold not only struggles in workplaces or industries but also even nationwide struggles with the unity of whole workers. In addition, capitalism has given birth to enormous numbers of new workers worldwide, spreading the wave of workers' struggle to whole countries. Vast numbers of new workers are being created in China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc. The possibility of uniting internationally across borders and unfolding immense struggles for emancipation is growing daily. All of these are leading this time to the era of struggle for the complete emancipation of the working class, that is, the era of socialism. Socialism will introduce social collective owning and running of means of production and planned production by the whole society. Furthermore, socialism will thoroughly combine this planned economy with a self-controlled production process in which workers themselves democratically decide and horizontally cooperate. So it will abolish all classes together with the emancipation of the working class and inequalities generated from class division. And it will go toward a communist society that uses all results of developments of production ability to secure complete welfare and full-scale self-realization of all people in society, based on the principle of the community as "production according to ability and distribution according to needs." Socialism can only be realized by the movement of the working class itself. The working class can be emancipated through the realization of socialism only when establishing workers' power based on the initiative and activeness of the working class itself. It can build socialism only through workers' organizations rooted in workplaces which are units where producers work, such as workers' council-type states. Workers' organizations are muscles of workers' power as well as pillars of socialism. Workers' power will elect, recall, and control all government officials from below and integrate legislative, judiciary, and executive into one within its hands. Through that, it will gather the strength and wisdom of the whole working class, abolish capitalism, and open up a socialist society. The above is the ultimate purpose of the workers' movement that revolutionary workers in all countries pursue together. March to Socialism acts to realize just the same ultimate purpose as that. We are willing to participate in every footstep that the Korean workers' movement sets in the course of completing such a great mission with all our might and lead practically ahead of it. While doing so, we will always clearly suggest the movement's aim, that is, building a socialist society. 3. Building a socialist workers’ party The crisis of the Korean workers' movement that has continued since the mid-1990s is the result of accumulating bitter historical defeats in several layers that have been generated by the fact that most leaders have feared unfolding daring and full-scale workers' united struggle and going ahead to build a combative and revolutionary working class party based on that. In order to overcome this, while making workers' struggles go ahead to combative and class-united orientation, we must create a socialist workers' party that integrates the most active militants of the working class into one organization under the prospects of socialism. March to Socialism is an organizational instrument to serve that. This time should be the process in which the working class is forged through a blast furnace of class struggles as the protagonist capable of exhibiting the potential of socialism. And this time also should be the period in which socialists lead such class struggles and so prepare to build a socialist workers' party capable of leading the future struggles for workers' emancipation. The socialist workers' party that we want to build is an organization of the most advanced workers, who lead class-oriented struggles of workers and guide the prospects of building a socialist society, as well as a real workers' party, that is deeply rooted in working masses by being based on workplace cells or district cells. This socialist workers' party can only be built by active militants who raise the class struggle ability of the working class through intense practices and guide the working class to the line of socialism on the road of such class struggles. To complete such duties, we must thoroughly sever ourselves from the bourgeois-like-transformed fake socialist system and make the distorted socialism by them restored rightly. The communist parties in the former USSR after the Stalinist counter-revolution, former Eastern European countries, North Korea, and China have been the parties of rulers who speak socialism but actually oppress and exploit the working class. The reformist parties in Europe and Latin America have led workers' struggles to the road of reformism and protected the capitalist system. As fighting against those forces that have transformed and distorted socialism, we will strive to build a socialist workers' party that restores the real tradition of socialism. We want to be a core and impetus for building a socialist workers' party by vigorously pushing forward socialist political activities unfolded on the wide land of workers' struggle and in the middle of the live workers' movement. We will synthesize practical activities, that organize class struggles and actually push forward workers' movements, and theoretical activities, that issue goals and prospects of movements, into unified socialist political activities. We will strive to make the process of intense answering the demands of class struggles generated from reality the most active chance for socialist propaganda, agitation, and individual organization. In doing so, we will learn together with workers from all experiences of class struggles and strive to be grown as an alternative leadership for class struggles. To successfully unfold the struggle of building a socialist workers' party, March to Socialism will strive to lie its foundational basis on the workplace cells of workers armed with socialist thoughts and closely connected with all struggles of the working masses. It is because the organization we want to build is the one that leads workers' struggles and is run by the initiative of militants connected with workplaces and acting in a socialist way. March to Socialism accepts the thought of democratic centralism, summarized by the free discussion and unified action, as the basic principle for running our organization. This means that all discussions within us are implemented in a comradeship way, bolstering unification toward the rightest orientation and that we pursue organic cooperation between all comrades as the principle for activity and development within us. And by applying democratic centralism, March to Socialism will constantly adapt its activities to the needs of the actual workers' movement and so go vigorously toward building a socialist workers' party. 4. The internationalism of the working class The Korean working class is a part of the international working class that struggles for workers' emancipation worldwide. Only workers' internationalism can open the future of socialism. As production and exchange have developed internationally, the building of socialism can only be realized through the international unity of the working class. The objective condition for this has continuously matured. Based on the higher level of globalization of capitalism, the foundation for more closely connecting and integrating workers' movements of all countries is getting increasingly abundant. Defending workers' internationalism is practically getting more critical in the aspects of developing workers' struggles, too. The factory moving of multinational companies has been forcing the Race to the Bottom on all workers worldwide. In order to fight against that, the international unity of workers, shouting "workers of all countries, unite! overturn the world!", has been getting increasingly important. If workers don't go ahead toward socialist unity through workers' internationalism, they will have to surrender to nationalism, like the strengthening of national competitiveness, and fall into class collaborationism. And workers in different countries will have to be divided, and aim guns at each other in front of wars which will be more frequently generated as imperialist competition gets increasingly acute. March to Socialism will defend workers' internationalism against nationalist currents, fight against imperialist oppression and wars, and accept it as a decisive task to spread this cause in the Korean workers' movement. We will unite with socialist forces worldwide, lead ahead united struggles of workers worldwide, and eventually go ahead toward building a revolutionary socialist international organization. 5. The workers’ united front and leading all-working-class-united struggles The capitalist class ceaselessly attacks workers, partially or fully. Therefore workers must repeatedly choose whether they stand on the stage of the battle or are destroyed and submitted. As the primary instrument for fighting against capitalists' attack by raising the class struggle ability of working masses, March to Socialism takes notice of workers' united front that unites workers into an independent rank. It is because the power of workers' struggle is basically generated by the broad unity of workers, and only through the growth of this struggle working masses can choose the real working class party and overcome the reformist leaders. Today, Korean socialist forces have not grown meaningfully. Therefore, the gap between objective situation and subjective ability is enormous. When socialists actively intervene in class struggles, workers' united front can be a powerful instrument to reduce this gap. First of all, we take note of trade unions. It is because trade union is the most popular organization for the unity of workers in which workers organize themselves independently in the present in South Korea. Furthermore, we build and participate in the organization of advanced workers that can play a role as the impetus for workers' struggles. Through these various layers of workers' united fronts, while intervening in and influencing class struggles with the biggest ability we have, we will strive to develop the class struggle ability of the working class. When the united power of the working class is properly realized through a united front, and so the workers' movement goes ahead, the decisive question, "where this power should go ahead for our emancipation," will be put in front of the workers' movement. Like this, the popular bridge going for the political and revolutionary movement will be able to be laid through the unity of the working class. And if socialists' active political activity combines with that situation, we are confident that socialism will be positioned as the conviction of the working masses at that period. And by acting in a way that does not impair the unity principle of the workers' movement and closely be connected to the struggle experience of workers themselves in a united front, we will go toward practically eliminating the influence of opportunist and reformist forces. Especially concerning the trade union movement, March to Socialism considers the objective situation of bureaucratization of today's Korean trade union movement, which is a common phenomenon in all capitalist countries. Of course, we will not avoid activities connected with the official system of trade unions. We will instead strive to make such activities active instruments representing the interests and demands of rank-and-file workers. Only when we utilize the official system of trade unions in the orientation of depending on real influence in rank-and-file union members and growing the subjectiveness and activeness of them, we can continue to fight against reformist and trade-unionist bureaucrat layers and enlarge such fighting, so we can make trade unions change into the organization for the struggle of working masses. Even though there would be various forms and methods, we will strive to construct the rank-and-file union members' movement within and without the trade union movement based on the spirit of the workers' council. And we will give our all efforts and supports to make combative and class-oriented advanced workers' united fronts that lead such rank-and-file union members' movements go forward. In these workers' united fronts, we will work shoulder-to-shoulder with workers but strive to be the decisive core of them while adhering to independence with a socialist flag. March to Socialism argues that organizing all-working-class-united struggles is the most prioritized practical task in the current class struggle. Unless united power, the class struggle ability of workers will become powerless, and the confidence and dynamic for socialism will be nothing but exhausted. The Korean capitalist class has divided the working class by nurturing the irregular work system and trade-unionist bureaucrat layers. And this has paralyzed the struggle ability and social hegemony of the Korean working class. To block this retreats and give an impetus to vigorous advance, we must put up the line of all-working-class-united struggle to the fore, so we must construct the front of "the capitalist class versus the working class." We will clearly issue that even the gains workers win can return to nothing anytime unless continuous advance on the basis of the all-working-class-unity. We will take the lead in advocating the line of the all-working-class-unity, regardless of whether organized in trade unions or unorganized, whether regular or irregular workers, whether women or men, whether workers in big companies or small companies, whether workers in the public or private sector. It wouldn't be excessive how much we emphasize the importance of vigorous and dynamic energy that young workers show when we break through bureaucratic and trade-unionist habitual routines, restore a class-oriented, democratic, and combative movement, and make it go ahead. Their energy will be a strong power that encourages the unity of all generation workers and the march of the workers' movement. In the process, new protagonists leading the advanced workers' movement and the socialist movement will grow. We will strive to go shoulder-to-shoulder with them and guide them toward victory. We will strongly emphasize that even though how much glitter the gain of workers' struggle, this victory is just nothing but a part of the enormous battles needed for the complete emancipation of the working class. To promote such awareness and make workers' struggles go further, we will suggest "action programs" that connect the current struggle and socialism. And we will help and lead workers to grow their ability and confidence that independently run and control the future workers' state and socialist society based on the experience of running popular organizations of workers. Also, we will strive with all our political abilities for the most advanced workers forged from such workers' united fronts to grow as the protagonists of building a socialist workers' party. 6. The hegemony of the working class March to Socialism will fight against all kinds of social oppression and discrimination, such as patriarchy, racism, meritocracy, etc., that suppress women, LGBTQ+, disabled, migrants, etc., and connect these struggles with workers' struggles against capitalist exploitation. We emphasize that only the working class can be the consistent militant against all social oppression and discrimination and, on the other aspect, only through struggles against all social oppression and discrimination the working class can unite as one and mightily fight against the rule of the capitalist class. Of course, the eventual instrument for overcoming all social oppression and discrimination is the socialist revolution. It is because all social oppression and discrimination are rooted in class hierarchical order under the capitalist exploitation system and the desperate needs of the capitalist class that can maintain their rule only through dividing the working class. But it is not automatically realized for the working class to grow as the protagonist to create a socialist new world. It needs a series of historical processes in the movement of workers themselves that workers vomit up filth capitalism has planted, and organize and forge themselves according to the principle of a socialist community. The process of workers' fighting against capitalist exploitation and all forms of social oppression and discrimination and so uniting as one has decisive importance in such processes. Socialist organizations should be the ones that embody such figures of socialist society ahead of any other. For this, March to Socialism will fight with the most decisive attitude against any oppression and discrimination that could be generated inside. And we will participate in struggles with the most energetic attitude against all forms of oppression and discrimination. Furthermore, we will combine struggles against social oppression and discrimination as well as struggles against climate crisis with the workers' movement. March to Socialism will fight for the enlargement of democratic rights. The decaying capitalist system has been consistently retreating in the political arena, too, leaving only a shell democracy. There have been numerous retreats in the democratic arena, such as corruption, collusion with capitalists, rejection of people's control, bureaucratic oppression, violence of state apparatus, bad laws, etc. Against this, we will fight for full-scale enlargement of the democratic rights of workers and people. Enlarging such democratic rights will be a popular weapon for the working class to unfold struggles against the capitalist system. Furthermore, in those struggles workers and people will be vividly aware unless destroying the capitalist political structure and establishing workers' power based on direct control and operation of workers and people, the fundamental rights of workers and people will not be realized. Comrades! We never agree with those who say another world is impossible. The potential power of the working class is endlessly abundant, and victory is possible! March to Socialism invites you to the road to victory! For the socialist workers' party and the emancipation of the working class! (This document was adopted unanimously by all participants in the founding congress of March to Socialism in South Korea on Oct 1st, 2022.)2022-10-16 | 조회 308
Founding Declaration of "March to Socialism" in South KoreaWe recognize that the crisis of capitalism is deep and wide. The deepening crisis of capitalism strangles our life through imperialist war, catastrophic climate disaster, enlargement of unemployment and irregular work, inflation, and increasing oppression of women and hatred against minorities. We recognize that a Socialist Revolution is not something coming someday in the long future but today's task. Fascism is raving; Liberalism has regressed; Social Democracy that subsisted through arbitrating workers and capitalists has collapsed. Now capitalism is the system in which any forces fail to settle the crisis and end up regressing, the system which heads to the devastating crisis of the third world war, and the system which mobilizes all reactionary instruments for its subsistence even though its historical lifespan is already ended. It is only the Socialist Revolution that gives way to sending capitalism to its grave, abolishing exploitation, and eradicating all remnants of oppression against minorities. Just for that, we recognize the urgent need for a Socialist Workers Party. As a part of the working class not only in South Korea but also worldwide, we demand a Socialist Workers Party that struggles together with workers, leads the working class to state power, and eradicates all kinds of exploitation and oppression. We stand here based on this recognition. We, who have fought the periods of defections and surrenders and overcome the days of liquidations and skepticism, have confidence that there is a light future in the Korean socialist movement. And we bear it in our mind that the new socialist organization should be a fundamental core for building Socialist Workers Party, not another sect. So, we announce our resolution to the workers and people as below; First, we proclaim the building of a new socialist organization, "March to Socialism." Second, we resolve to enlarge our socialist political activities in all directions. Third, We will go ahead toward building a real Socialist Workers Party through our activities in "March to Socialism." October 1st, 2022, Seoul All participants of the founding congress of "March to Socialism"2022-10-16 | 조회 528