Another world war? (2026)

Book Review from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Economic Foundations of Capitalism’s Rise and Decline. Communist Workers Organisation. 2026.

‘For global capitalism the devastation of world-wide imperialist war is the solution to its ineluctable profitability crisis’. This — that a third world war is needed for capitalism to continue — is the position that this 100-page book seeks to defend.

The argument starts from the view that under capitalism there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall as capital accumulation proceeds, due to an increasing proportion of capital being invested in plant, machinery and materials rather than in employing workers (whose labour is the only source of profits). This was something noted by Marx but he also noted other tendencies, arising too from capital accumulation but conversely tending to raise the rate of profit, such as plant, machinery and materials becoming cheaper and increasing surplus value per worker. So, what happens over any given period — which tendencies prevail and so whether the rate of profit does actually fall — is unpredictable. There are also other factors that reduce profitability, such as overproduction in an important industry having a knock-on effect on the rest of the economy resulting in a general slump in production.

The book hopelessly mixes up all the various tendencies, elevating a theoretical slow long-term tendency for the rate of profit to fall into ‘the drive towards the collapse of the capitalist system’. The authors also see this as, in the shorter term, the cause of slumps but to do that there would have to have been a fantastically rapid increase in mechanisation and productivity. They are correct, though, that an important way out of a slump is the restoration of the rate of profit due to devaluation of the capital invested in the plant and machinery.

According to the CWO, a new factor entered into the equation at the beginning of the 20th century: capitalism, after coming to dominate the whole world and creating the basis for a world socialist society, passed its peak and entered into a period of decline which they call ‘decadence’. In this period, the boom/slump cycle continues but:

‘Capitalist competition is no longer a purely economic battle between firms but imperialist rivalry between “great powers”; where, in short, the massive devaluation of capital required to assuage the crisis of low profitability and achieve a new round of accumulation is obtained by the destruction of capital values via war’.

‘The history of capitalism since the start of the twentieth century’ we are told, ‘has been this cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction’. That the First World War was caused by imperialist states being driven to war as the only way out of a fall in the rate of profit doesn’t hold. Conflict between the ‘great powers’ over sources of raw materials, markets and investment outlets makes more sense. Replacing the destruction caused during the Second World War will have been one explanation for the resumption of capital accumulation in the postwar period but by no means the only one and would have been completed within a decade or so. Another, more significant factor will have been the expansion of the world market as more and more parts of the world were industrialised.

Whether or not the rate of profit has fallen since the 1970s is a moot point since it is not easy to calculate. On some assumptions it has; on others it hasn’t. In any event, a hard-to-calculate and unknown average rate of profit will not have been a factor influencing decisions to invest by those in charge of capitalist enterprises; shorter-term and particular sectoral considerations will have been the deciding factors.

The question also arises as to why the long gap between the end of reconstruction and the outbreak of the Third World War. The authors provide an economic history of the period since the 1970s but don’t answer this question. They describe well enough the extent of the non-productive, financial sector that has grown on the basis of the real, productive sector of the capitalist world economy, but can’t explain away the real capital accumulation that has taken place.

When they write that, if socialism is not established, ‘capitalism could continue on its demented course for centuries’, it is not clear what they mean. Is it that capitalism could continue after a nuclear world war or that capitalism might not lead to one for centuries?

In short, the CWO have not proved their claim that present-day capitalism must, for capital accumulation to continue, lead to a Third World War (they are suggesting it’s going to be between China and the US). As long as capitalism continues, there will be wars but there is no compelling reason why there should be another world war, this time between states armed with nuclear weapons. It is not entirely impossible of course, but it wouldn’t be to restore the rate of profit.

Adam Buick

Letter: Airbrushed (2014)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Airbrushed

Dear Editors

On 12th July at Sheffield Anarchist Bookfair the Communist Workers Organisation (CWO) held a meeting titled ‘The only war which is worth fighting is the class war’. The subject was the First World War and at 8 minutes 21 seconds in, the speaker representing the CWO stated ‘I won’t go into the various British ones today but the only group – and it was a group rather than an organisation – that can claim to have had any real anti-war policy completely was the Socialist Labour Party’.

In Revolutionary Perspectives issue 4 (Journal of the CWO) dated Summer 2014, the article ‘Social Democracy, the First World War and the Working-class in Britain’ starting on page 14 discusses ‘The Response of Socialists in Britain’ even discussing the Socialist Labour Party (De Leonist) on page 18.

For all the CWO airbrushing of consistent SPGB opposition to the First World War, it is ironic the same CWO speaker once debated the SPGB accusing the SPGB of being ‘schooled in Stalinism’.

Jon D. White 

(by email)

Reply:

Strange indeed, and for two reasons. The first being the clear and principled opposition to the war from the SPGB (on the basis that it was a capitalist war and not in the slightest about the interests of the working class).  Second, the SLP was split into two factions, one pro-war, the other anti-war (with articles in their paper The Socialist reflecting this division at the start of the conflict). It was only some months into the war that the anti-war faction won out and the SLP clearly stated its opposition to the slaughter. We know that the CWO as ‘left communists’ venerate the SLP because after the conflict the majority of its membership left to join the pro-Bolshevik Communist Party of Great Britain at its foundation, but the SLP’s attitude to the war has been well documented and there is no excuse for such shoddy historical revisionism. – Editors.

SPGB Meetings (1984)

Party News from the October 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

There's an audio recording of the debate with the Communist Workers' Organisation at the following link.

Update:

Just realised that there's also an audio recording of the 12th October 1984 Islington Branch meeting, The Miners' Strike — a Marxist analysis. The speaker was Steve Coleman.

Socialist Party Meetings (1994)

Party News from the May 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Party News (1984)

Party News from the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Debates.

Late October. Doncaster. The Socialist Party was in debate against the local Young Tories. An audience of 40, including 30 non-members, listened to the case for capitalism, as defended by a young lawyer who argued that without the laws of property society would descend into chaos. The socialist speaker had to explain that capitalism is in chaos and that only socialist production for use will enable people to bring social affairs under control. Several striking miners were present and they were left in no doubt that the solution to the problems of capitalism involved much more than defeating "Thatcherism" and electing a Labour government of capitalism. The case for revolution received an enthusiastic reception from quite a few of those present and our comrades in Doncaster are looking forward to the speedy growth of the Party in the South Yorkshire area. The local Labourites agreed at the end of the meeting to hold a debate with us in the near future. Will they be true to their word?

In the same week. Islington branch ran a debate against a bunch of Leninist jokers who take themselves more seriously than any workers are ever likely to: the Communist Workers’ Organisation. They were arguing that a majority of workers can never achieve socialist understanding under capitalism but, instead of drawing from this unhistorical assumption the logical conclusion that socialism is therefore impossible. the CWO plans to set up socialism (as a leadership) without the workers being conscious.

The debate, which attracted an audience of 60, most of them non-members, proved to be an interesting education class in the follies of Leninism, part of the education being provided by the socialist speaker and the other part being demonstrated by the idiocies uttered by the bogus communists of the CWO. The latter organisation — about twenty of them throughout the country — regard themselves as the revolutionary vanguard of what they call "the class". According to them, office workers, foremen, policemen and trade union officials are not members of the working class.

In their published statement on the post-revolutionary transition period we are informed that the vanguard will set up a "proletarian state" — for, according to these Leninists, it is an anarchist fallacy to imagine that the state will disappear immediately in a socialist society. Their speaker stated (into the microphone, and obtainable from the Tapes Committee) that “there will need to be a socialist police force". Their second speaker, a Leninist caricature who ought to audition for Citizen Smith, thought that workers can't understand socialist ideas and they won’t understand them until the socialist revolution takes place.

A couple of silly romanticists salivated over the fact that the CWO's revolution would involve "a scries of bloody battles" (but not just yet) and that the CWO was all in favour of the miners using class violence (which the Leninist vanguard was prepared to endorse on a theoretical level, but would leave the miners themselves to the practical activity of serving the prison sentences).

The CWO, like a few other obscure Leninist sects with whom the Socialist Party has debated, has an infuriating habit of speaking in language that few workers can understand: when they attend a meeting they arc "making an intervention"; anyone with whom they agree is part of "the revolutionary milieu"; and democracy is only a "bourgeois fetish". The Socialist Party was accused of paying too much attention to "democratism”.

These would-be state-capitalist dictators are a laugh a cliché; the young Tories of Doncaster, confused and anti-working class as they were clearly shown to be,d could give the CWO lessons in political integrity. But we have more than a strong suspicion that public debating will not be engaged in by the CWO again in a hurry; after all. if you think that workers are too thick to understand the case for socialism — which is what the CWO position amounts to — why bother talking to the dummies?

Steve Coleman

Activity in Paris

It seems that several years of hard work by very few members has finally begun to pay off, with the possible formation of a regular discussion group in Paris. Our French language journal, Socialisme Mondial, now has about eighty subscribers. A series of press advertisements has produced a modest but steady response and a list of over one hundred current contacts throughout France. Recently, a couple of members visited about ten contacts in the Paris area, some of whom are now fully in agreement with the socialist case and could form the nucleus of a group there. We have also been exchanging literature with several other groups in Paris calling themselves "communist". Some of these contacts have proved quite fruitful. We can, then, report that a small but determined group of French workers is in the course of emerging from the political wilderness to challenge the stale myths of capitalism in all of its forms.

Clifford Slapper