CAPITALIST ECONOMY

‘EXPANSION’ has established itself as the pre-election cant word. Its appcal in the first serious post-war recession is obvious.

It conjures up comforting visions of an endess procession ‘of new steelworks, hospitals and motor-cars. It bewilders the - honest rank-and-file member and trips easily off the tongue of the sleek Right-wing ‘expert’. Abe Moffat, communist Icader of the Scots miners, joins the throng of those who bow down before it.

The flagging of the great boom confirmed what many discerning defenders of capitalism, outside the Labour movement, knew quite well: that since the system cannot expand endlessly jt has phases of contraction.

That is the way the system works. As long as capitalism exists it is-profits, not social needs, that determine the extent of its expansion. , so Since it contains forces which tend to restrict the rate of Under capitalist conditions uninterrupted expansion requires the existence of hypothetical conditions not found outside the theorist’s imagination.

Nor does the Utopian world of the inveterate ‘expansionist’ . survive contact with reality.

Even with continued arms expenditure, budget deficits and Labour’s policy, the anarchy of the market would continue to impose itself and further disproportions might be added to it.

Today there are unsold stocks of coal. Tomorrow, who knows. . .?

All expansion under capitalism prepares the conditions for its own exhaustion. State action can influence, but not basically determine, its course.

Inflation, already feared as an outcome of the moderate stimulus given by the Tories, can check the process and raise nightmares of its own. ‘ ‘ And, of course, there just is no formula for expansion in one country if the rest of the world capitalist market is stagnating or contracting. ,

Tue NEWSLETTER the capitalist powers to exploit this issue for their counterrevolutionary aims;

4) The view of many independent socialists: recognition of the need for reforms in the Soviet Union, but a feeling