The passage below is excerpted from "Prospects for Socialism in America," a resolution adopted by the SWP at its 1975 convention. The book is copyright © 1994 Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.  
 
 
BY JACK BARNES  
The effects of the combined social and economic shocks of the last half decade, coming on top of the changes in attitudes wrought by the movements of social protest and the radicalization of the 1960s and 1970s, have brought us to the threshold of a new period in the transformation of the political consciousness of the American working class.

A different stage in the process of radicalization is opening; new types of struggles are coming onto the agenda.

This resolution examines on a world scale the roots and the various components of the crisis of American capitalism. These are compared and contrasted both to the post-World War II period of capitalist economic boom and political reaction, and to the depression and labor radicalization of the 1930s. The goal is to explain the dilemma faced by the ruling class, the structural and ideological changes taking place in the American working class and among its allies, and the revolutionary perspective inherent in the radicalization of the working class that is just beginning to unfold.

In the three decades since World War II, recessions have occurred in each of the major capitalist powers. Each of these separate slumps, however, was cushioned by the fact that industrialization, productivity, employment, and trade continued to run their expansionary course in at least several other capitalist countries. The current American depression is not only the longest and deepest of the six U.S. postwar slumps; more important, it is a component part of the first world recession since 1937-38, simultaneously affecting all the major capitalist economies.

This recession on a world scale is a product of the increasing exhaustion of many of the motor forces that fed the quarter century world capitalist boom--for instance, the reconstruction of European and Japanese industry, the massive growth of the automobile and related industries in the 1950s and 1960s, the mechanization, automation, and computerization of whole new branches of industry.

The expansionary stimulants of deficit financing and massive credit growth, used to help bring capitalist economies out of slumps in the last quarter of a century, have turned into perilous measures. Government-engineered inflation is less effective and more dangerous than ever before as a means of bringing capitalist economies out of a recession. It can threaten to soar out of control even in the midst of a depression.

The war in Indochina brought clearly into the open the shift in the world relationship of class forces against imperialism. It demonstrated the new limits imposed on the use of American imperialism's massive military machine. The imperialist giant today finds itself increasingly hobbled not only by the nuclear power of the Soviet Union, but by the absence of semicolonial allies and clients with solid popular support in their own countries, by the drain on U.S. capital that propping up dictatorial regimes entails, and by political opposition from the American people.

The defeat in Southeast Asia was a setback of historic proportions for U.S. capitalism.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the powerful working-class offensives registered in the May 1968 prerevolutionary upsurge in France and the "creeping May" in Italy in the autumn of 1969 demonstrated the growing trend toward broad social crises in the heart of the imperialist powers of Europe. This trend has been reconfirmed by the revolutionary ferment that exploded in Portugal in the spring of 1974.

From being an allied reserve, offering military, political, and economic support for embattled American imperialism vis-à-vis the colonial revolution and the workers states, sectors of European capital are becoming an additional source of weakness.

As the oil crisis, the prelude to the 1974-75 depression, demonstrated anew, American imperialism remains by far the single most powerful force in the world capitalist arena. Its economic output alone is as great as all the other major capitalist powers put together.  
 
 
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