coming world slump CRASH out of the crash. with accuracy of course is the timescale take some months for the full effects of their way through the system, Equally. be soon a temporary rise in the stock three years after 1929 for Wall Street to were sevcral temporary rises. It will market — we should remember it took reach its eventual low point, and there the investment downswing to work we have no way of knowing whether the stock market crash will lead to the and duration of the slump. There may
banks and the major financial institu- tions: nationalising the major firms and monopolies; instituting a na- tional, and hopefully international. socialist economic plan; and fighting for workers' control over production as the only way of ensuring the imple- a socialist economic These are the kind of programmatic demands which need to be raised in both in struggles and in the political and iden- socialist from the right wing economic think- perspectives are a million miles away Such movement, debates. mentation ol labour logical plan. the Whatever the timescale and precise it is coming cannot be denied. In the - a cutback in kind of banking crisis which occured in the Us after 1929. The evidence we - scems to suggest that we won't see a banking form that the slump takes, the fact that end, slump and recession can only be got out of by making the working class pay — through lower wages and a higher rate of exploitation, and by a the welfare state. In other words. a new have so far — of central banks pump- ing money into the financial institu- tions to shore them up smaller "social wage collapse of this sort.
co-operatives, and inew forms of the scale of this crisis. You can't have of socialist planning, on a national ing of the Labour leadership. Bat they are also some way removed from the kind of fashionable and confused like the notion that "local plans*, small social ownership' were the answer. To be frank, all such ideas are badling around the edges in comparison with local enterprise initiatives or local co- ops without finance: and in a slump Nothing could more justify the idea ideas on the soft left in recent ycars - you won't get it. Period. co-operatives, those who tend towards moderation" and business as asual. It will shake level - both bourgeois and working The crash politically undermines all class politics. It will tend to streng- up and recompose politics it every Britain - dealing floor of Barclays de Zoete Wedd and ferocious attack on working class get a swilt. salutory lesson in some of How is all this going to change those who bought shares, are going tu myths of popular capitalism and a politics? The political consequences are going to be many-layered and but the outlines can be sketched. The crash is a blow to all the "