Capitalism may be unwell but it is not dead.

While I have mentioned wages and jobs, how do workers resist the fall in value of their homes and superannuation? Wage increases to offset the loss of value seems to me to be an approach, but it won’t happen.

But enough of tea leaf reading.

There is another factor in all of this - the weakness of the radical left. Our ideas about the labour theory of value, exploitation, the need to resist the bosses’ attacks and ultimately for democratic revolution have little traction in any sector of society let alone the working class.

That doesn’t mean this will always be the case, and certainly at the moment there is a greater questioning about the system than I have ever known. That doesn’t mean the conclusions drawn will be revolutionary.

During the Depression the German ruling class supported Hitler to destroy the organised working class and thus, through attacks on wages and conditions, to drive up profit rates. The failure of the Stalinists to unite with the social democrats in the fight against the Nazis allowed Hitler to succeed.

Indeed the main revolution during this period - the Spanish revolution - was arguably not a product of the Depression but the last gasp of the revolutionary movement unleashed by World War I.

Similarly after World War II, revolutions broke out. Greece is one example. Japan had major class conflicts. In Britain the people threw out Churchill. They wanted a better world. One English Lord and Minister said that if the politicians did not give the people reform they would give the politicians revolution.

Mass revolutionary challenges to capitalism from the working classes can occur at anytime but it may be that the sufferings of war can sometimes create the conditions for a revolutionary response.

But that also depends on the strength of the working class. A declining economic climate does not create a strong working class; it creates a frightened one. And as unemployment increases, the working class loses its economic power to disrupt the flow of profit and learn through its own actions its strength and its ability to run society democratically.

Fear is not an organising tool.

The task for the radical left at the moment is to patiently explain our ideas and, where we can, help workers understand the strength they have in society as the creators of its wealth and to use that strength to defend their economic and social positions.

Of course the Keynesians are winning the battle of ideas at the moment but Keynes did not save the world from the Great Depression. War did. Keynesianism doesn’t address the crisis of profitability at the heart of today’s problems.

Capitalism may be unwell but it is not dead. Its condition may well worsen but the alternative - barbarism - will be worse. There is an historic need for a mass revolutionary movement with the ideas and actions to replace the crisis ridden system. We on the revolutionary left must build and build and build, even if it is only the ones and twos. That can become the tens and twenties. And the trickle becomes a tide. Our time will come. And then the working class can build on capitalism and create a new world where the economic crisis is consigned to a museum and war and want becomes a memory.