WHILE the entire world discusses the crisis of capitalism, the most pertinent question remains: Why is the severely critical capitalist order not falling down? 

We can see that the global crisis in capitalism is periodic, but capitalism never collapsed on its own, automatically. It continuously revolutionised itself to manage the crisis and survive. Now, let us try to sketch out the mechanisms adopted by capitalism for its temporary recovery in the contemporary world.  

Capitalism has five established avenues to come out of any crisis:

a) War, dollar and the geo-politics

Generating a war economy and armament business led by imperialist aggression, extortion, and exploitation is the primary means for imperialism to come out of the crisis. Military threats and wars, sabotages and economic blockades, interferences to sovereign politics of foreign countries all over the world, particularly in Latin America, Middle East, Asia-Pacific and Europe are the naked traits of the US-led imperialist geopolitics of our time. Trump’s war-cry to take over Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, or Gaza is all about the new attacks unfolding.

During the 15 months of the genocidal killings of 48,000 people of Palestine, mostly children and women, the US military funding to Israel reached its peak. The US paid Israel USD 3.8 billion each in 2023 and 2024. And in 2022 alone, the USA's top five weapon contractors made USD 196 billion in military-related revenue. 

Exploiting the troubled geo-political situation created out of the US sanction against Russia, the US energy firm Exxon Mobil registered a record double profit of over USD 55 billion in 2023. Cheniere Energy, the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the US, experienced a staggering 200 per cent increase in profits in 2022. Billionaires fortune money out of war! 

Actually, the US dollar and US-led financial sanctions are the strongest weapons of the country’s hegemony. 

The US have the currency advantage as the dollar is the medium of trade for the majority of nations. To overcome their domestic crisis, they can inject massive currency and raise the national debt (from approximately USD 10.7 trillion in 2008 to over USD 33 trillion by 2023); being the global reserve, the deflationary effect is neutralised by its global demand. War and the dollar are the two weapons of US imperialism to manage the crisis.

b) Creation of new branches of industry

During deep crisis, capitalism introduces new branches of the industry which were or are expected to be the most profitable at that specific juncture. In the era of speculation, the possibility of profit attracts investment.

The mass use of the Internet was introduced after the 2000 crisis. The call for the renewable energy transition was introduced into the popular discourse by the US corporations just after the 2008 sub-prime crisis. Global green energy investment is set to exceed USD 2 trillion in 2024. Huge investments were made in vaccine technology during 2020-21, the COVID-19 crisis.  

The latest branch of investment is obviously Artificial Intelligence (AI). Until December 2024, the US was the epicentre of its technological ownership and control. Thus, US business investment growth has outpaced even the rest of the G7 countries. The major AI chip designer Nvidia added more than USD 1 trillion in market value, equivalent to about one-fifth of the total gain for global stock markets in 2024, even surpassing Apple and Microsoft.

Strikingly, within the top 500 listed US companies, the growth, having been driven almost totally by the so-called ‘Magnificent Seven’ social media, tech and chip companies—the Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla— remained extremely uneven. These seven companies now hold a market capitalization of around USD 12 trillion, while the other 493 companies are suffering stagnation and decline. 

The USA’s exceptional growth was based on the speculation that no other country can have such developed AI tools, and Nvidia's Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are essential chips for the development of AI applications. 

Despite the sanction over the export of AI chips to China, Chinese company Hangzhou launched DeepSeek-R1 in January 2025. The startup’s AI assistant app has already surpassed major competitors like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude to become the Number 1 downloaded app. When compared to OpenAI, DeepSeek’s R1 slashes costs by a staggering 93 per cent per call. 

Just after the introduction of DeepSeek in the market competition of AI, Nvidia saw $600 billion of its market value disappear; Microsoft shares declined by 2.1 per cent, and Alphabet stock price plunged by 4.2 per cent, while DellTechnologies's share price dropped by 8.7 per cent. Apple shares rallied by 3.18 per cent, while Vistra stock dropped by 28.3 per cent. It shows the vulnerability of the speculative market and the instability of the US growth. Certainly, the storm that can root out the empire is yet to come!

c) Production by cheaper labour, accumulation by higher productivity

The International Monetary Fund - World Bank-controlled free flow of finance is accompanied by the deregulated movement of goods and capital across borders. But the labour remained significantly restricted. The international labour market is fragmented, and there exists a huge gap in the prices of labour power in the global north and global south, representing the colonial time wage differences.

This feature has shifted the manufacturing and service industries to the global south while the capital centers of brand-houses are concentrated in the global north. International finance dictates that all countries of the global south implement inhuman labour policies to ensure maximum extraction of surplus and squeeze the petty-production beyond the sustainable level, and thus impose terrible livelihood conditions on the people.

On the other hand, with high productivity growth in emerging technologies and high-priced commodities, the global north wipes out all competitors of other regions, thus holding the command over global capital. 

Certainly, only the firms with large capital can invest in machines and increase productivity. Their profit rises for the time being, compared to other firms. Companies mainly introduce automation in areas that may boost profitability, such as marketing, accounting, or fossil fuel technology. So, productivity growth is not general for the whole economy and does not meet social needs.

At the same time, due to the crisis, the contradictions between imperialist countries are sharpening again; it is actually originating from the differential productivity growth of the US and the euro area. The labour productivity growth in the euro area before the pandemic was 0.5 per cent; after the pandemic, the annual average came down to 0.2 per cent. On the other hand, the non-farm business labour productivity in the United States since 2018 has remained at around 1.8 per cent. To tackle the crisis, the European governments are imposing austerities upon the working class, and the far-Right forces are taking advantage of the anger of the people. 

d) Monopolisation through Centralisation and Primitive Accumulation

While the general rate of profit falls, the monopolies can extract a higher rate of profit by setting the monopoly rate. Through this process, the big companies swallow the smaller ones during times of crisis. At the same time, monopoly companies compel the national governments to hand over all the public properties and natural resources to them at throwaway prices.  

Another significant trend can be seen through the critical examination of the World Inequality Data. 

The data reveals that, since 2008, the share of income of the top 1 per cent has remained almost the same, i.e. 21 per cent, but the share of the top 10 per cent has fallen from 56.6 per cent to 53.5 per cent. 

The top 1 per cent is squeezing even the rest of the top 10 per cent of the world; the centralisation of capital is also happening within the top 10 per cent. Another important feature that the data revealed is that the rate of accumulation by the top monopolies has not slowed down during any segment of the mentioned period, be it critical or normal!

e) Attack on working class

In addition to the four mechanisms mentioned above, the creation of massive unemployment, reduction of wages, extension of working hours, and thereby transferring the burden onto the working class are the most common and favoured mechanisms of the capitalist class to recover from the crisis.

The global unemployment rate has been around 5 per cent in recent years. Officially, in May 2024, while US part-time jobs rose by 286,000, full-time jobs fell by 625,000! The number of Americans doing multiple jobs hit 8.4 million in May! Everybody needs two jobs to make ends meet now.  

The real wages have declined in the majority of the G20 countries, and the number of workers living in extreme poverty has grown by about 1 million globally. The fall in wages is also visible in the declining labour income share, from 52.9 per cent in 2019 to 52.3 per cent in 2022. 

All these are capitalist onslaughts to extract more surplus out of labour and reduce its bargain capacity by creating precarious employment and unemployment. 

Now that we have identified the major ways of the ruling class’s response to crisis and its political ramifications, we have to block all the escape routes and rise against all the attempts of capitalism to recover.  

The workers of the global south have to integrate their struggle with that of the north. We have to organise the workers in different stages of production, at different locations of the value chain, commodity-wise and company-wise, and lodge international movements to bend the heads of capital – the serpent has to be hit at all points along its length.