Introduction to "Wall Street Crash -- What does it mean?" by Sam Marcy
This pamphlet was published in February, 1988, four months after the 1987 Wall Street stock market crash. It is filled with Marxist insight into the nature of the capitalist system together with valuable information illuminated by those insights. The central role of the stock exchange in the capitalist system; the role of the stock exchange in promoting colonialism; the central contradictions of capitalist overproduction and the anarchy of production are all described in order to lay bare the underlying forces behind the 1987 stock market crisis.
The basis for the revival of the class struggle was the changed character of the working class. Technology was undermining the predominance of the higher paid and expanding the lower paid work force. This new work force was composed of more and more Black, Latin@, Asian, women, and lesbian, gay (and now it is recognized) bi and trans workers This new oppressed, low-paid work force would bring the energy of the oppressed into the class struggle and would be able to lead the struggle under conditions of economic crisis. The Wall Street crash of 1987, a year after High-Tech, Low Pay was published, seemed to foreshadow that crisis and open the road to an early revival of the class struggle.
Below is a quote from the upcoming book "Colossus with Feet of Clay" by Fred Goldstein which explains both why Marcy's prognosis under the circumstances of the time was correct but was superseded by catastrophic world developments that could not be anticipated. .
"Marcy and other communists were rightfully anticipating that the high-tech assault on the workers would lead to an upsurge of the class struggle in the near period. The basis for this prognosis was both subjective and objective. The process of pauperization of the working class would project the more militant sections of the workers forward, while the increase in the productivity of labor would turn out more and more commodities which would be harder and harder to sell in the limited world capitalist markets. This would intensify the classical capitalist malady of overproduction, accelerate an economic crisis and stimulate the class struggle."
"But the collapse of the USSR transformed the world situation and, along with it, the immediate prospects for class struggle in the U.S. and the imperialist camp as a whole."
In fact, the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the USSR from 1989-1991 opened up a period of the first territorial expansion of imperialism since before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The sphere of exploitation of imperialism had been contracted steadily for 75 years under the impact of socialist revolutions and national liberation movements, including the Chinese socialist revolution of 1949 which removed one fourth of humanity from imperialist domination. With the collapse of the socialist camp, hundreds of millions of workers were newly available for super-exploitation and the anti-labor offensive that Marcy refers to in the pamphlet intensified in the U.S. and other capitalist countries.
Whether or not the present gyrations of the stock market are a harbinger of a major capitalist collapse or not, whether or not the sub-prime mortgage crisis will ripple through the capitalist economy and precipitate a crisis of overproduction, the pamphlet by Marcy gives invaluable assistance in sharpening the tools of analysis in the present situation and in preparing for the coming struggle of the workers and the oppressed.
