 Okay, well yeah, the Great Depression, and can it happen again? Well, when the world economy collapsed in the style of the pandemic, the IMF said that this would be the worst crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. And in Britain, the Bank of England said it would be the worst crisis actually for 300 years. And World GDP collapsed by 3.4% in 2020. In Britain, it collapsed by an astonishing 11%. And therefore, governments around the world rushed in to prop up capitalism. And they spent an unprecedented $16 trillion at least to keep the system from collapsing. And there was therefore a certain rebound in 2021. World GDP actually grew by 6%. And some sympathical commentators therefore thought that this was the start of a new roaring 20s of the 21st century. But already that optimism has turned to gloom. Inflation is spiraling out of control. And hopes of recovery have given way to fears of recession. There are many warning signs now that the world is heading towards a new deep world slump. Which poses the question, could something like the Great Depression happen again? Well, to answer that, we have to of course explain what happened during the Great Depression and crucially, why did it occur? But for Marxist, one of the most significant things that we can learn from that period is the effect that the crisis had on the consciousness of the working class. And also the impact that this therefore had on the class struggle. Now the Great Depression has gone down in history as really a kind of legendary crisis of capitalism in terms of both the dramatic crash on the US stock exchange but also the depth of the world's slump that followed. It's become really the benchmark by which all other slumps are measured. And it's widely seen as starting in the USA with the Wall Street crash of 1929. Now it should be noted that that crash was not just simply a one act drama. It unfolded over weeks, months and even years. There was actually a downward drift of share prices during the months of September and October of 1929. It was only actually on the Thursday the 24th of October when the real panic set in with the completely chaotic scenes on Wall Street. Now there were some ups and downs but by the next Tuesday the fall in one day on the stock exchange wiped out all the gains of the previous year. So this was really an unprecedented and spectacular collapse. Now that decline continued until mid-November at which point the government did step in to try and intervene. They cut taxes and they lowered the interest rate which did initially appear to stem the tide so that until the spring of 1930 the market actually rallied by the 44%. But it turned out to be what economists refer to as a dead-cap bounce and since by June 1930 the fall had resumed. Now there are a few ups and downs but the overall picture from then on was a steady decline over the next few years. Such that the stock market only reached rock bottom in July of 1932 at which point it bottomed out 89% down from its record high before the crash. Now the question that's been asked many times is why did this crash occur? And there have been many explanations ranging from the purely psychological for example some kind of mass panic just simply gripped the minds of investors or just to simply asserting that this speculative bubble had to burst which is of course true but none of these explain really why. Why was there a panic and why was there a bubble? Really it was the product of all the accumulated contradictions of the previous period resulting in a crisis of overproduction. So from 1900 to 1929 there had been a colossal development of the productive forces in the USA and by 1926 it was clear there was a feverish speculative element to this boom. Profits as well as the stock market were booming but with markets becoming saturated the ruling class could get richer through speculation on the stock exchange which had really developed a logic of its own, that of a bubble that actually invest in production and therefore the system was already reaching its limits in late 1928 to early 1929. And this is what we understand as Marxist as a classic case of overproduction which really is inherent in the dynamics of capitalism since production was for profit. And as Marx explained the working class produces all value in society in the form of commodities but their workers are only actually a paid portion of that value back to them in wages. However for the capitalists to actually realize a profit they have to actually sell these commodities that are produced by their workforce. You could ask well how can they do this therefore if overall workers only receive a fraction of the total value that they're producing. As the economists put it where will the effective demand come from in the economy to buy all these goods? Well as Marxist we understand there are three main methods that the ruling class can use to overcome this contradiction. We can see how all of them they were reaching their limits in the late 1920s. Firstly there's the expansion of world trade. Now remember this was our time when most of the world was already directly colonized by a few imperialist powers. The USA had expanded into areas of Latin America although with not direct colonies they effectively were. So places like Cuba, Nicaragua, also the Philippines and the Pacific. But there were limits to that expansion as of course all the imperialist powers were attempting to do the same thing. Now secondly much of the demand in the economy actually comes from capitalists themselves investing in more means of production. Things like more machineries, more raw materials, factories, infrastructure and so on. Things that are not purchased and consumed by the working class themselves. But actually investment was slowing down in the 1920s since markets were becoming increasingly saturated. And since most industries weren't even fully utilizing their existing productive capacity so actually on average about 20% went unused by the late 1920s. Why then invest in expanding production if you couldn't profitably use what you already had? But also if you do invest in more means of production to actually profitably use them you actually then have to produce even more commodities which themselves need to market. So it just sets this problem up but on a higher level. And thirdly credit is used to bridge the gaps in demand. So massive amounts will enter other countries so that they can buy American exports. There was also a huge expansion of credit domestically so that people would buy things like cars or other big ticket items on payment plans. There was also a massive expansion of credit to buy shares on the stock exchange in order to kind of feed this bubble. There were the buy shares or they called on the margin which meant that for example you could buy shares priced at say a thousand dollars by only actually spending at just a hundred dollars and borrowing the rest from a bank. It would then take those very shares as collateral for the loan. But all these things have a limit so the economy was actually starting to slow by mid-1929. For example car production which is really a staple of the US economy more than halved in just the seven months from March to October of that year after which it then collapsed even more dramatically. Now no one knows what really sparked the crash. There were various incidents popping up that began to spook investors but whatever it was it was really the accident that allowed for the necessity of the slump to kind of express itself. Either bubble had to burst and what happened on the stock exchange was merely the surface feature of this far deeper process of overproduction and all the contradictions had built up over a number of years to a tipping point to the point where it just took one small incident or incidence to transform the quality of the economy from a boom to a slump. It's much like a forest fire. You know it dries out over a long period but it can take just a single spark to set the whole thing ablaze. So when what were the consequences? Well the crisis on Wall Street quickly then rippled through the rest of the economy and cause became effect and effect became cause. So they entered into a downward spiral all sorts of secondary factors then came into a play which deepened that slump. So the collapse of share prices meant that these loans taken out to buy shares on the margin were quickly called in by the banks. But of course the banks collateral for these bad loans were the very same shares that had dramatically collapsed in price. So credit which had previously been used to expand the boom now turned into its opposite and instead these unpayable debts had to be repaid and it led this wave of defaults therefore led to a whole crisis in the banking system. And with no federal insurance on bank deposits a collapse of a bank meant losing your entire life savings. Hence ones on the banks became extremely commonplace so that between 1929 and 1933 over 9,000 banks in the USA collapsed. Even before the crash companies were cutting production as I said the market was saturated and now both this demand and credit dried up so did investment and production. There was also the kind of unsound balance of foreign trade so the USA had become a creditor nation in the world following the First World War and after the crash credit then dried up so that bankers demanded payments from these debtor countries in gold but of course these debts couldn't be repaid. So debtor countries then had to eliminate their deficits either by exporting more goods to the USA which actually then were blocked by tariffs or by reducing their imports and thereby cutting the market for American goods even further. Again you can see how cause became effect and effect became cause. Millions of workers were then made unemployed as they can no longer be profitably exploited by the employers and that led to a vicious circle of a further collapse in demand and a wave of corporate bankruptcies. The Federal Reserve Board Index of Industrial Production declined by almost 50% between 1929 and 1932 but private construction declined even further by 80% and the crisis of overproduction is most graphically illustrated by the figures for capacity utilisation. So in 1920 it was at 94% it then averaged 84% over the course of the 20s by 1930 it collapsed to 66% and it reached a lower of 42% in 1932 but in July of that year steel operations in the USA were reaching only 12% of their capacity and therefore the only way that the ruling class could eliminate the so-called excess capacity was to close down factories and lower prices. Now this introduced deflation into the economy since of course the unemployed couldn't afford to spend and those that could of course reluctant to spend on things today when they could expect prices to be cheaper in the future. So then what were the effects of the crash? Well with any crisis under capitalism it was of course the working class and poor who were made to put the bill and there was a massive attack on the already low standards of living of workers and poor farmers and therefore the economic crisis was transformed into a huge social crisis unemployment skyrocketed. So in 1929 a significant 1.5 million people were actually already unemployed before the crash which was about 3% of the workforce but that leapt to more than 12 million people by 1932 and it estimated 13 million by March of 1933 although it's true that no official records were kept so the real figure could have been a lot higher. But this was about 25% of all workers and actually 37% if you exclude farm workers. Overall an estimated 34 million Americans belonged to families where there was no regular full-time wage earner and with no federal system of social security workers were forced to turn to what kind of limited charitable relief existed or else faced salvation and therefore unable to pay the rent millions of people ended up homeless and were forced to travel the country in search of work. Hundreds of thousands ended up living in what became known as Hoovervilles which were kind of shanty towns built on derelict land such as rubbish dumps. Now in the context of these conditions the bosses tried to restore profitability by driving down wages and increasing hours which is the very logic of capitalism. And therefore sweatshops started to appear all over the place. You know starvation wages were very common as was child labour. Many people were working 70 hours or more just to get by and with the shock of the crisis and of this threat of destitution also a lack of leadership from the working-class organisations the bosses were largely successful in these attacks. And what were the global consequences of this? Well the crisis in the USA very quickly became a crisis of the whole world system because in 1929 there were just four countries which contributed 70% of world GDP. These were the USA, Britain, Germany and France all of which saw a dramatic collapse in their production since the system was so interconnected. In June 1930 the US government introduced tariffs to protect US agricultural capitalists and that had a devastating impact on the agricultural economies of Central Europe as their main market was then effectively closed off. And they borrowed heavily from French and British banks as had German industry and when they began to default on their debts it led to the collapse famously of the credit and start back in Vienna and that then rippled through the whole of Europe and ultimately the world economy. You know it drove Britain and France into financial crisis and that then caused bankruptcies in the US banks since the whole system was interconnected. And eventually the financial crisis forced Britain off the gold standard which then saw its currency massively devalued but soon every country followed suit as they were trying to maintain their share of a declining world market through things like competitive devaluations, tariffs, import quotas in other words through a trade war. Now the result was that in the USA imports and exports declined by 70% between 1929 to 1932 and world trade in 1933 was less than a third of its 1929 total. Now the collapse in world trade was inevitable due to this unavoidable slump in production and investment and policies of protectionism and devaluation inevitably followed which then exacerbated this slump and it was these that really turned it from a recession into a deep global depression. Now ultimately these policies of protectionism they were a product really of the two main barriers to the development of the productive forces. On the one hand the private ownership with the means of production, i.e. production for profit but also the nation state in a competition between the ruling class of different countries. So whilst today you've got all these bourgeois strategists warning against protectionism they can warn all they like but ultimately it's built into the very logic of competition as when there's a scramble for a share of a declining world market each national ruling class has a very powerful interest to pass the burden of its crisis onto others and protect its own market. So how did the ruling class respond? Well by 1933 the world was therefore in the midst of a severe depression and from the standpoint of the ruling class conditions in the USA were getting critical. How about Hoover who was the president at the time of the crash generally followed a kind of laissez-faire policy in terms of handling the crisis and his policy was that really the state shouldn't intervene at all. Now it's true that taxes and interest rates were lowered in order to try and encourage investment but since avenues for profitable investment had declined and were so small these measures actually have very little effect. Hoover's commitment to balance budgets also had the government expenditure this period was actually cut back and unlike in 2008 the banks were just simply allowed to collapse wiping out deposited savings in the process and since there was no welfare the ground was being prepared for a social explosion and therefore people began to get organized. Unemployment councils were established all over the USA and were typically led by communists and they organized people to resist evictions as well as pressure the relief commission to provide aid to families. The more alarmingly for the ruling class were the increasing number of clashes with police by the poor taking matters into their own hands. So from 1931 onwards hundreds or sometimes thousands of unemployed workers would storm factories demanding to be employed or they would storm government buildings demanding food and shelter. Also farmers were being thrown off their land and after a while of the banks foreclosing mortgages there was widespread violence and rebellion in the countryside as communities organized themselves to fight off bailiffs and the police often with arms in hand you know when they were trying to foreclose them. So in 1933 in January Edward O'Neill who was the head of the Farm Bureau Federation he warned the Senate committee in his words that unless something is done for the American farmer we will have revolution in the countryside within less than 12 months. And increasingly workers began to organize kind of self-help groups to try and bypass the restrictions of the market. So in the coal region of Pennsylvania for example tens of thousands of unemployed miners started digging small pits on company property and then trucking bootleg coal to the cities and they sold it below the market price. And when the police arrested them and tried prosecuting them for this they found no jury would convict them as it was a kind of basic class solidarity. And this kind of development was extremely dangerous from the point of view of the ruling class as workers were beginning to organize production and distribution themselves and bypass the market. Now Roosevelt was elected in 1933 and he had no alternative really but to act. He therefore reorganized the banking system and introduced what was known as the New Deal which ultimately was a program of reform legislation kind of designed to try and save capitalism from itself. It set up work fair schemes which employed millions of workers on construction and conservation projects although not on full wages mind you. And this was essentially a Keynesian project to try and what they call prime the economy and lift it out of crisis through government spending. They also passed the National Industrial Recovery Act which was really designed to try and stop this race to the bottom by the capitalists. And it set minimum wages, hours and prices and also put quotas on the output which was effectively like a system designed to give bosses monopoly powers over whole industries in order that they could boost their profitability. Really this was a task like a mission that the market had failed and there really needed some form of planning in order to get the system back on its knees again. Mind you it wasn't planning in a socialist way you know but planning by the working class in order to meet the needs of society. This was planning by the bosses in order to boost their own profitability. Now over the course of the new deal various other reforms were carried out in order to try and stabilize the system. Rums on banks were put to an end through a federal insurance scheme on deposits and for the first time in US history a nationwide system of unemployment benefits and old age pensions was introduced. And all of that therefore meant a sharp break with this previous policy of laissez faire capitalism by the state apparently mustn't intervene. And it was a task acknowledgement that if capitalism was left to the mercy of the market the resulting destitution would threaten the very viability of the capitalist rule. Now these policies did have an effect in alleviating the effects of the depression. After reaching rock bottom American GDP did begin to pick up between 1933 and 1937. However a majority of the working class and poor conditions only went from really bad to just bad. Even at its peak the public works program only employed a quarter of the total unemployed. And unemployment in the 1930s never fell below eight million people. Minimum wages during this period were only just enough to cover the most basic necessities. And those on relief even through work programs or social security felt even worse. But with the economy seemingly back on track by early 1937 Roosevelt came under enormous pressure from the capitalist class to turn to a policy of balanced budgets as the budget deficit had mushroomed. Which he succumbed to this pressure by scrapping these relief programs and raising taxes. And that policy did eliminate the federal budget deficit by 1938. However the switching off of life support to the economy was often a dramatic fall again in the economic activity. The quick question of a lack of profitable markets still remained. And this is something that fundamentally Keynesian policies are unable to address. Production did not reach levels of 1929 again until 1941 when employment was still 10%. It was only the impact of the Second World War which really revived the economy. And this was something that Keynes would later acknowledge. With of course the military mopping up unemployment there was massive expenditure and military production and so on. But as we know this resulted in the deaths of about 85 million people worldwide and destruction on the continental scale. I was interested to see the effects on the class struggle which for us as Marxists are key. Because as we know it's great events that transform consciousness on a mass scale. The crisis and collapse and living standards were certainly a big shock to millions. And this would lead to a profound questioning of the system. There wasn't an immediate impact in terms of industrial militancy. It actually took a few years for the initial shock and kind of despair from the crisis to wear off. Especially when there was such high unemployment and destitution, most workers probably didn't want to rock the boat and put their heads above the line. But nevertheless there was a lot of anger building up. Many people they felt powerless to do anything. And this was of course as well linked to a lack of leadership from the workers organizations. But when the economy turned up a little from the depths of 1933, workers therefore saw their chance to fight back. The real turning point though was in 1934 there was an explosion of industrial militancy. And it was the right to organize an union recognition which were the main focus of this wave of strikes. Now of course the capitalist employed the support of the police, the courts and gangs of hired thugs to try and viciously smash any strikes. And these strikes were not like the kind of ones you might have been to today. These were vicious battles where the police would often open fire on picketers, they would launch tear gas, they would send in fascist gangs and so on. Now a series of these large strikes developed in the spring of 1934. In Minneapolis, which was a key distribution city, truck drivers organized a solid strike to demand recognition of the Teamsters Union. And after four months of being on strike and many violent clashes, during which in one incident the police shot 67 strikers and they killed two. Ultimately after four months the employers conceded. In San Francisco there was a strike of the longshoremen which is the dockers, the union recognition. That turned into a general strike in July of 1934 and the employers are ultimately gave into the union's demands. Elsewhere there was a strike of 325,000 textile workers across the American South which then quickly spread nationwide. By mid September there was 421,000 textile workers in strike before Roosevelt intervened to try and cut that wave. Many of those strikes though in 1934 and particularly those in mass production industries did actually end in failure. And in most part that was due to the conservatism of the leadership of the American Federation of Labor and its policy of organizing workers along craft lines rather than as a whole industrial plant. Now however pressure from below would end up transforming those union structures. So over the course of 1934 to 35 hundreds of thousands of workers in mass production industries began to organize and that led to a development of a split from the AFL to form the Congress for Industrial Organization, the CIO and that took place in 1935. And the growth of the CIO after that was spectacular. There was clearly a militant mood had built up within the working class and it was desperate to find an expression. And that rising militancy as well was reflected in the change of the tactics of strikers. So in the mid 1930s strikers began to occupy their factories rather than picket them from the outside in order to prevent the use of scabs. And that tactic of the sit down strike very quickly spread. And within four years of its foundation the CIO organized four million workers. But that general rise in militancy also had the effects of whipping the AFL into shape. So by 1939 it also reported four million workers which was the highest level since its 1920 peak. And therefore the situation was in the space of just a few years completely transformed which is something today that kind of left reformists seem to not be able to imagine. Now in the space of four years the total percentage of workers organized in the USA rose from just 8% to 22%. And that of course was an enormous step forward for the working class. It was an important conquest. But despite that enormous potential that existed to harness that militant mood into a struggle for socialism the union leadership still lagged very far behind. As ultimately there were reformists. Now they saw the class struggle as being limited to simply just economic demands with no perspective of transforming it into a political struggle for the working class to take power. And politically they just encouraged workers to support the Democratic Party rather than lead a struggle to create a mass working class party. Now to the question could the Great Depression happen again? Well I think it depends on what you mean by this because for hundreds of millions of people worldwide in the ex-colonial countries especially but increasingly in the advanced capitalist countries every day for decades has been like living through the depression in terms of the unemployment, the slum living conditions, the hunger, the destitution and so on. And in terms of a worldwide crisis of capitalism leading to widespread misery for workers around the world this has already happened several times in history. Most significant was the crisis of 2008. In the USA unemployment in 2008 rocketed to 15 million people which was that compared to 13 million at the height of the depression. And between 2007 and 2012 more than 4 million US homeowners had their properties foreclosed. Now that doesn't mean that they all ended up on the streets but there has been an explosion of 10 cities in America since then which is the kind of modern day Hoovervilles. Now worldwide unemployment increased by at least 30 million from 2007 to 2010 to over 210 million people worldwide. Now that as well doesn't include the so-called informal jobs which never means the real figures like to be far, far higher. So in absolute terms many, many millions of more people were affected since 2008. Although of course the population in this period is far larger than it was in the 30s but in relative terms the crisis was more kind of severe in the 30s at least in the advanced capitalist countries. In the USA GDP fell by 27% during the Great Depression compared to 4.3% in 2008. And US unemployment in the depression as I said was 25%. In Britain it was 20%. These levels have only been surpassed very briefly during the pandemic. So if by could the depression happen again is meant you know could we see such a dramatic collapse in production and high levels of unemployment in the advanced capitalist countries? Well I mean the ruling class likes to say that they've learnt the lessons from the Great Depression. They like to say that it can never happen again which is very optimistic but it means really they don't understand why capitalism goes into crisis. You know there is some truth to it though in the fact that some lessons I think have indeed been learnt from that. So in the first few years of the depression as I said the US government essentially just stood back and allowed the market to collapse. In 2008 I think they'd learnt from that and is why despite the years the mantra of the ruling class had essentially been that the state shouldn't be involved in the economy. When the financial system faced a complete meltdown with the collapse of Lehman Brothers governments around the world essentially wrote the banks and big businesses a blank check. In the USA the state spent $632 billion in propping up the banks and big monopolies including the car industry. But overall when you include federal reserve loans quantitative easing and other measures they spent a whopping $4.6 trillion overall. Similarly in Britain the state spent 137 billion pounds in bailing out the banks. But the Bank of England then spent 895 billion pounds in quantitative easing to prop up the economy over the decades since. Even more dramatically governments around the world have spent trillions of pounds trying to keep the system afloat during the COVID pandemic. So some would say okay great we'll never have another depression as governments can simply just spend their way out of the crisis. Which sounds very good. But there's a problem though which is that governments themselves don't actually have any money of their own. And that's one of the fundamental problems of Keynesianism. Which is that they either have to raise taxes which will either eat into consumer demand or cut into the profitability of the capitalist which are the two very things that they're trying to boost. Or they must borrow it and therefore increase their debt and with it their debt repayments. So in other words it must be paid back with interest. You know effectively means expanding the market today or even just propping it up at the expense of tomorrow. Well failing that they effectively print it which of course will lead to inflation down the line as we're seeing across the world today. But going back to 2008 bailing out the banks caused governments to run up huge budget deficits leading to a dramatic rise in borrowing. In Britain it took nine years of austerity from 2010 to 2019 to bring the budget deficit down from 10% of GDP to just 2%. And as Trotsky remarked about the crisis of Europe in the early 1920s. He said the capitalist attempts to restore economic equilibrium would ultimately have the effect of dislocating the social and political equilibrium. And this is precisely what you've seen around the world over the past decade or more. The services and welfare budgets were slashed during this period with devastating results. And to restore profitability the ruling class of course went in general offensive against the working class to make them pay for the crisis with attacks of jobs, wages, terms and conditions, pensions and so on. Now these things are not the only factor but they're a significant contributor to the polarization that's developed within society. And the fact is that for millions of people living conditions have actually declined over the past decade and society is visibly going backwards despite the fact that the economy is supposed to have recovered since the 2008 crash. But the reality for millions of people is that life has actually got worse whilst a layer at the top are getting richer and richer and invisibly so. And that's generating an enormous sense of frustration of bitterness, you know, kind of anger against the ruling class. In other words, the conditions again are being prepared for social explosion. Now with the massive government spending associated with the pandemic, you know, the war in the Ukraine and the energy crisis, this situation is being repeated on an even higher level. The very measures that governments took to try and keep the system afloat are actually contributing to inflation and instability all across the world. And that in itself means the class struggle is already heating up as workers are forced to go on strike or else see their living standards collapse. And it's forcing the ruling class to increase interest rates, which will tip millions of people over the edge as mortgage rates go up and with them rents. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of so-called zombie companies around the world which are only surviving on the basis of cheap credit. And worldwide, rising interest rates and inflation is tipping entire countries into bankruptcy as we saw recently with the events in Sri Lanka. And as Ben Curry mentioned last night, Bloomberg has warned that there's another 19 countries who are at high levels of debt distress and therefore a high risk of default in the short term. Now some might say yes, but can't the governments in at least the advanced capitalist countries just spend their way out of the crisis like before? And it is true that where possible, governments will try and throw whatever money is necessary to keep the system from collapsing when push comes to shove. But ultimately these things come at a cost as we've seen over the past decade and ultimately they have their limits. So global debt has gone from 195% of world GDP in 2007 to 350% now or more. And at some point or other, every government has its limit as experienced painfully by the Southern European countries like Greece, Spain and Italy during the last Eurozone crisis. And as the clowns in the Tory government found to their surprise when they attempted to implement 45 billion pounds of unfunded tax cuts and spend 120 billion pounds on energy bills, while at the same time stating that they wouldn't cut public spending, although obviously that was a lie. Now those things might sound very good to the Tory rank and file, but it didn't impress the serious people on the international money markets. Almost immediately there was a collapse in the value of the pound and the cost of government borrowing shot up, which nearly very nearly tipped the financial system into a complete meltdown, which eventually forced the government to U-turn. Now British capitalism stands out actually as one of the weakest countries of the advanced capitalist countries. And it's been in decline really for more than a century. But the limits experienced by the British government in dealing with this crisis will at some point or other be experienced by governments all over the world. As ultimately it's not governments that dictate to markets, but it's the markets and ultimately the law of value which dictate to governments. And as Marx explained, crises are inevitable features of a system based on private ownership and production for profit, where the anarchy of the market rules. So as long as capitalism is not overflowing by the working class, the question is not so much can the Great Depression happen again, but really what will the next world slump look like? I think it's unlikely to look just like the 1930s. You know, it is useful of course to look back and learn the lessons from the past, but there are limits to any parallel. In the 1930s the situation was characterized by deflation, by falling prices, and even falling faster wages and mass unemployment. Now the world situation is characterized by stagflation in a combination of stagnation and rising prices, which at the end of the day results in the same thing, which is a collapse in the living standards for workers. And in the 1930s, the situation was actually resolved relatively quickly in the space of a decade. Really it could go either one of two ways. Socialist revolution or fascism and world war. And due to the betrayal of the Stalinists in the communist international, especially in Spain and Germany, they ended up being resolved by the latter. Now today the avenue of world war is blocked off, but that's not to say there won't be proxy wars like in the Ukraine, but also the social base for fascism, the middle class has been severely eroded. And fascism really would require an enormous defeat of the working class before the ruling class could go down that path. So even now as well, the collapse in production, it might not be so deep, but this process of crisis would be much more drawn out. As I'd argue, actually nothing fundamentally has been solved since the 2008 crisis. And capitalism has never really returned to good health. And the situation that we're in today is really a kind of continuation of that crisis. Now despite shortages of some basic components, things like semiconductors and of course energy, and other supply chain issues, there is still actually enormous overcapacity in the world economy when it comes to things like steel or cars. Now of course the crisis doesn't mean a permanent decline, there will be ups and downs of course, but the general epoch that we're in is one of crisis stagnation and extreme instability politically. Another key difference to today compared to the 1930s is obviously that in the advanced capitalist countries, there's at least some kind of welfare provision, but of course it's clearly not enough today. And it's under enormous pressure. So even today in Britain, you read that there's nearly 10 million adults and four million children going hungry. There's now reports of children going to school in flip flops with just a single slice of bread in their lunchbox. And that is before another worldwide deep slump which is implicit at some point on Lava if capitalism is left to stumble on. And the massive debts accumulated worldwide to keep the system afloat will at some stage turn into the opposite an enormous drag on the system. The speculative bubbles that have been built up over the past decade or more and things like the stock exchange, they were at some point burst. And already the massively inflated crypto market crashed earlier this year by paying at least $2 trillion out of that market. The S&P 500, which is the main Wall Street stock exchange index is risen dramatically from where it was just before the pandemic crash. But since the start of this year, it's already lost 23% of its value and it just keeps on going down and down. There's some quite respected people on Wall Street who've been sounding the alarm for quite a while. So Michael Burry, who people might know as the man played by Christian Bale in the film The Big Short, who famously predicted the 2008 crisis and made an absolute fortune from it. He's been warning about a 1929 style crash now for some time. He thinks this year is when it's gonna break. He recently sold his entire stock portfolio as he thinks the market is soon about to crash. He's put his money where his mouth is. Also, there's this kind of Neurio Rubini who Alan Woods mentioned last night, the cycle Dr. Doom. He's one of the only mainstream economists who predicted the 2008 crisis. He's warned of what he calls the mother of all debt crises in the coming decade. Now look, we don't have a crystal ball, but whenever this bubble births and however deep is the crash, we can be sure of one thing, which is that the ruining class will attempt to make the working class pay for this crisis as they have with every crisis of capitalism before and since. And from studying the Great Depression, we can safely say that the consciousness of the working class will be shaken from top to bottom by these events as well as its organizations. Now a deep crash, as I said, doesn't necessarily immediately lead to an upturn in class struggle. Now with huge job losses and if there's a lack of leadership, it can take some time for workers to recover their confidence. But as seen in 1933, when industry did start to pick up, which is inevitable, the class struggle erupted in a huge way. Now it completely transformed the trade unions and the political organizations of the working class worldwide. And that was actually a global process. This, however, is something that's already taking place around the world today with the existing crisis. Now the conditions and consciousness before a crash is also important in terms of how the working class responds. And the consciousness, particularly of the younger generations today, has already been shaped by more than a decade of crisis. And actually the only thing holding things back at the moment is not the absence of another world slump, but it's the lack of a far-sighted revolutionary leadership of the working class at all levels. And it's this that ultimately must be urgently built if we're not to see a complete collapse of living standards of millions of people across the world. Because as Marxists, we know there's no final crisis of capitalism that they can't recover from. Capitalism will not automatically transform itself into socialism, no matter how deep a crisis it enters into. Capitalism has to be consciously overflowing by the working class, armed with a socialist program and organized in a revolutionary organization. And that ultimately is the whole point of this festival. To arm ourselves with the ideas necessary so we can build a revolutionary leadership that's capable of playing the decisive role in these enormous struggles to head. So I would say that please, if you're not a member already, join us in that task. Thank you. Thank you.