WHEN the catastrophic financial crisis hit the capitalist world order a few years back and quickly metamorphosed into a great recession, we brought out a slim pamphlet titled “Capital in Crisis: Causes, Implications and Proletarian Response”.

“Capitalism has learnt to live with crises and through crises”, the opening sentences read, “but some of them are epochal. Such was the Great Depression of 1930s. Will the one that is currently unfolding prove to be another?” We hinted it would and quoted veteran Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson: “This debacle is to capitalism what the fall of the USSR was to communism.” However, mindful of the experience of the many convulsions – like the dot-com bubble burst of early 2000s – which threatened to but ultimately did not develop into a global systemic crisis, we resisted the temptation to jump to a very definite conclusion at that early stage.

But today on the strength of evidence of the last four years we can say: yes, it is an epochal crisis in the sense that the structures and strategies of capitalist accumulation in the current neoliberal mode are in crisis, are permanently failing to deliver the way it did since 1980s. We have therefore named it more specifically as a crisis of neoliberalism and expanded our analytical horizon accordingly, starting from Marx and Lenin and drawing substantially on the works of later Marxists as well as heterodox economists. Whereas in the previous pamphlet the popular struggles engendered by the unfolding crisis were briefly highlighted, in the present one we have also tried to learn how the dynamics of class struggle crucially influenced – or overdetermined, if you will – the specific course of reform or restructuring that followed every structural crisis in history. How, for example, valiant struggles of the American working class in the upbeat international environment of 1930s forced the New Deal on the bourgeoisie and how in an opposite political milieu setbacks in workers’ struggles paved the way for the neoliberal “structural readjustment” following the structural crisis of 1970s. Such review is important, we thought, for understanding the class dimensions, political implications and possible outcomes of the current crisis – an understanding without which we the global 99% cannot hope to “seize the crisis” (as Samir Amin has put it) for advancement of our own cause as against that of the 1%.

Global experience in the age of imperialism, which Lenin defined as moribund monopoly capitalism under the domination of finance capital, brilliantly confirms and enriches the Marxist-Leninist explanation of business cycles and capitalist crisis. We hope the present publication, which updates and broadens the discussion started earlier, will help activists and observers gain deeper insights into the economic crisis and its political implications.