Chapter 17: Economic Crises

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Crises and the Sharpening of the Contradictions of Capitalism

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Economic crises vividly reveal the predatory character of capitalism. During every crisis, while millions of people are in extreme want, doomed to poverty and hunger, vast quantities of commodities are destroyed because they cannot find a market—wheat, potatoes, milk, cattle, cotton. Whole factories, shipyards, blast-furnaces are closed down or sold for scrap, grain crops and technical crops are destroyed and plantations of fruit trees are cut down.

“During three years of the 1929-33 crisis 92 blast-furnaces were pulled down in the U.S.A., 72 in Britain, 28 in Germany and 10 in France. The tonnage of sea-going vessels destroyed in those years amounted to more than 6.5 million registered tons.

“The destructive effect of agrarian crises is clear from the following figures. In the U.S.A. between 1926 and 1937 more than two million farms were compulsorily sold for debt. The revenue from agriculture shrank from 6.8 billion dollars in 1929 to 2.4 billion dollars in 1932. During the same period sales of agricultural machinery and equipment were reduced from 458 million dollars a year to 65 million (one-seventh), and the demand for artificial fertilizers fell by nearly a half. The U.S. Government took all kinds of steps to reduce agricultural production. In 1933 10.4 million acres of cotton crop were destroyed by ploughing over, 6.4 million pigs were bought and destroyed by the State, and wheat was burned in the fire-boxes of locomotives. In Brazil about 22 million sacks of coffee were destroyed, and in Denmark 117 thousand head of cattle.”

Crises cause incalculable sufferings to the working class, the bulk of the peasantry and the working people as a whole. They bring about mass unemployment, which condemns hundreds of thousands and millions of people to enforced idleness, poverty and hunger. The capitalists make use of unemployment to intensify in every way the exploitation of the working class, and sharply to reduce the standard of living of all the working people.

“The number of workers employed in manufacturing industry in the U.S.A. fell by 11.8 percent at the time of the 1907 crisis. During the 1929-33 crisis the number of workers in America’s manufacturing industry decreased by 38.8 percent, and the total wages bill fell by 57.7 percent. According to American statisticians, 43 million man-years were lost between 1929 and 1938 as a result of unemployment.”

Crises enormously increase the insecurity of the working people’s lives, their fear of the morrow. Through spending years out of work, workers lose their skill, and after the crisis has ended many of them cannot return to industry any more. The housing conditions of the working people are greatly worsened; the number of homeless people wandering about the country in search of work increases. During crises the number of suicides caused by desperation rises markedly, and destitution and crime increase.

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