Has slavish pursuit of free-market capitalism been the cause of Europe, and particularly Greeces, economic woes?
Dr Isabella Margara What we are experiencing today – not only in Greece, but in all capitalist countries – is a crisis of overproduction. The exploitation of the working class and the other popular strata is intensified due to the fact that the bourgeoisie has been keeping for itself larger and larger parts of the produced wealth. Behind overproduction lies the over-accumulation of capital. The average profit rate is decreased in the main sectors of the economy. This leads to destruction of part of productive forces, closing factories, inflation, mass redundancies of superfluous workers as waste – in order to permit a new process of accumulation to begin, when new sectors of the economy will secure the increase of the average profit rate. This has nothing to do with the ‘management’ of the system by social democrats or liberals; it is an inevitable outcome of capitalism. The national deficits do exist. In fact, behind the debt are the huge tax reliefs for large monopolies, the massive
