The future portends intensified class struggle.

Capitalism over the past ten years or so has produced a technological
revolution in its means of production involving the transformation of
information technology. Over the same period it has succeeded in
recomposing the working class. This has led to deskilling of traditional
trades, unprecedented flexibility of labour power and mass casualisation
of labour power. To achieve this a ideological and political offensive
was successfully launched against the working class. This has led to a
significant weakening of the organised working class. Many corporations
can now successfully establish plants in the imperialist heartlands on
the condition that trade unions are  excluded from the workplace. On the
whole the reformist leadership of the trade union movement are quite
willing to cooperate with anti working class policy in the interests of
supporting capitalist investment. Indeed the prevailing leadership of
the working class has been a decisive factor in contributing to the
success of the capitalist attacks on the working on the ideological,
political and economic levels. These changes have brought about an
enormous increase in the intensity of the exploitation of labour power
together with its rate of exploitation. The result is a corresponding
fall in the value of labour power.

These changes have exercised strong counter tendencies offsetting the
tendency of the general rate of profit to fall. This has led to the
economic recovery and boom experienced by capitalism over the recent
past.

However capitalism is now experiencing recurring economic decline. This
time the economic downturn may be on a scale not experienced since the
early seventies. Capital's problem is that the aforementioned counter
tendencies have been progressively exhausting themselves. Consequently
capital has been over producing itself on the basis of the current rate
of exploitation of labour power. The only conditions that can lead to
economic recovery is an increase in the technical composition of capital
on a scale that produces a corresponding increase in the organic
composition of capital that leading to an increase in the rate of
surplus value on a scale sufficient to compensate for the fall in the
general rate of  profit. Given the degree to which the technical
composition of capital has been increased as a result of the recent
technological revolution in the means of production it is highly
unlikely that this can be followed by a revolution on a scale large
enough to restore profitability. Consequently the bourgeoisie will be
forced to mount a large-scale offensive against the working class in
order to create the political conditions that facilitate pushing the
price of labour power well below its current value. To achieve this an
enormous deterioration in the wages, conditions of work and social
existence of workers will be a necessary feature of this process.
Mounting such an offensive against the proletariat can only mean the
sharpening of class contradictions.

Together with sustained attacks on the working class growing capitalist
contradictions will tend to generate increased inter-imperialist
rivalry. Such rivalry developing into conflict can explode into
inter-imperialist war in which the future of humanity becomes
questionable. Under these conditions the working class, in its own class
interests and in the interests of all future humanity, must organise
itself on a communist platform if it is to successfully  meet these
challenges and turn them around into an attack on the bourgeoisie
leading to the establishment of world communist social relations.

Karl Carlile
Be free to visit the web site of the Global Communist  Group at
http://homepage.eircom.net/~beprepared/