CONSUMER PRICES the combination of the generalised economic tecession with an exceptionally high level of organisation, numerical strength and militancy of the working class. This in turn is combined with a severe political weakness of the capitalist system as a whole.
The past 25 years have seen a big shift in the relation of class forces in favour of the working class. has the ruling class been able to inflict on the working class defeats so grave that the workers would be unable to respond to a large increase in unemoloyment.
Under these conditions, the decisive sections of big business calculate that barbarism.' 15 to 20 million unemployed in lhe United States, 5 million unemployed 3 million unemployed in France and that the very survival of the system would be in danger in the short term. That is the fundamental reason why it will react to the rec ession through massive measures aimed at inflationary boosting of the economy.
ing in this way.
blue sea it will choose the devil it knows -whatever the long term consequences.
The decline in standards of health, Nowhere an even sharper rate than the fall in ing units built in Britain and the United States fell by nearly 50 per cent last autumn (The Economist, 30 November 1974). In countries with a welfare state, living standands have been further croded by in West Germany, Japan and Italy and Britain would immediately provoke a social and political crisis of such scope Big capital is perfectly conscious of the long term risks it is courting in actIn Japan the anarchie nature of post-war industrialisation has led to the concentration of 41.5 per cent of the population in three urban centres -Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya which occupy only 17.3 per cent of the total livable land. This has placed unbearable psychological pressures The records of labour accidents show that live to six thousand deaths result from some three hundred to four hundred thousand labour accid ents a year. There were 3,873,167 watkers injured and 61,507 killed in labour accidents berwcen 1963 and 19731 Yet social security spending per capita in Japan is barely a filth of that of the West European countries. Only 18 percent of her roads are paved, and only 14 per cent of the population had access and peasants.
The generalised recession of the international capitalist ссолому confirms that the system is sick, that it 1s in its historical death agony. But we know that death agony does not mean automatic disappearance, that the economic crisis does not in itself produce a victorious socialist revolution.
LEADERSHIP The generalised recession has broken out in a historical context infinitely more favourable to the working class than that of 1929-32 But if the crisis of revolutionary leadership is not resolved; if the revolutionary workers party is not built in time; if the class consciousness of working people does not rise to the beights of historic requirements: and if the economic contradictions meanwhile
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*Thus the generalised recession al- so recalls the timelessness of the burning alternative: socialism or