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Can capitalism recover and deliver for the majority of people?
The great Russian revolutionary Lenin said there’s never a really hopeless situation for capitalism as long as workers allow it to survive.
Sooner or later the system can recover from any crisis. It would be difficult for it to return to the pattern of the recent past, as the financial system has been seriously weakened.
While the slump continues, it’s important to see that it’s uneven. One section of the system, the historical core in North America and most of Europe, is still quite depressed.
But if we look at China and the economies associated with it, which include Germany and Brazil, they are growing quite quickly.
This reflects the way in which the Chinese state threw everything into preventing a protracted economic slump.
The fact that this bit of the system is growing is a further destabilising factor, however.
It produces tensions between the US as the dominant capitalist power, and China—increasingly seen as the major challenger. That makes it harder to manage capitalism.
But even if they do find a way of muddling through, what produced the crisis was the logic of capitalism and the system—a system that is driven by blind competition in pursuit of profit.
That system will continue to produce crises and continue to try to solve them at the expense of working people and the poor.
So the only real guarantee of escaping crises like this one is to get rid of capitalism altogether.