Marxists have long since been conscious of the nature of the state, its industrious defence of the capitalist class, and its prejudice against working people. But much of the public are unaware of just how incestuous the capitalists and governments really are. Will Roche continues with his second in a series of three articles on monopoly capitalism.

To mark the 60^th anniversary of Trotsky’s death we published a series of articles on our Trotsky.net website in the year 2000, among them this article on capitalist development. The purpose then was to underline the fact that although capitalism was experiencing a boom, the period we had entered was actually one of overall capitalist decline. As we explained in the introduction “Rather than a new upswing, capitalism is heading for a new slump and a downward curve of development similar to the interwar period.”

There has been no levelling off of the global economy, as economists predicted. Although industrialisation has expanded to lesser-developed countries, it has generally been along lines determined by global corporations based in advanced capitalist countries. From colonialism, we have moved into the age of multinational corporate domination.

“Now we must expect the opposite: profound, long, and painful crises, while the upward movements are weak and short-lived. If the old cycles were the mechanism of a broad upward movement, the new ones can only be the mechanism of capitalist decay.” Written almost 80 years ago, but extremely relevant to today’s situation.

We are publishing two old documents on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which were part of a debate in the early 1980s within the then Militant Tendency. Marx had predicted a tendency for the rate of profit to fall as a result of what he called the rising organic composition of capital. In his document, AG disagreed with Marx. He saw the fall in profits as being fundamentally caused by rising real wages biting into the surplus. This had serious implications as it led him to cast doubts on Marx’s theory. MB’s reply is mainly concerned with pointing out that Marx’s theory was fundamentally correct and that it is still a useful guide to understanding reality.

In his document, AG disagreed with Marx. He saw the fall in profits as being fundamentally caused by rising real wages biting into the surplus. This had serious implications as it led him to cast doubts on Marx’s theory. MB’s reply is mainly concerned with pointing out that Marx’s theory was fundamentally correct and that it is still a useful guide to understanding reality.