On the one hand, entire regions of old traditional industries saw the systematic closure of factories and mines and unemployment levels shooting towards 30%. What has been called industrial and agricultural desertification began to develop and has continued ever since. This lead to the closure of factories and mass unemployment at levels not seen since 1929. The 1980s began with an open recession that lasted until 1982 and which in many ways was worse than the previous recession in 1974-75: production stagnated (growth rates were negative in Great Britain and the European countries), unemployment grow spectacularly (in 1982, the USA registered in one month alone half a million job losses) industrial production fell in Great Britain in 1982 to the level of 1967 and for the first time since 1945, world trade fell for two consecutive years. The incurable illness of overproduction, in its turn, globally aggravated the imperialist tensions in such a way that in the last years of the decade there was a considerable aggravation of military confrontations and the development of the arms race at both the nuclear and the convention level. The oscillations between “recovery” which provoked inflation and sudden slow-downs ending in recession led to what was called “stagflation” (recession and inflation at the same time) and demonstrated capitalism’s serious situation and the insoluble character of these contradictions. This analysis will allow us to understand that the state’s policy of “accompanying the crisis in order to slow it down and spread it out” resolved nothing, nor did it bring about anything but the aggravation of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism.Īt the 2 nd International Congress of the ICC held in 1977, we highlighted the way that the expansionist policies employed by capitalism were becoming increasingly less effective and were comng to a dead-end. We are now going to look at the development of its evolution during the 1980’s. We analysed the evolution of the crisis and the response of capitalism in the 1970s. In the last issue of the International Review we saw how, since 1967, capitalism has confronted the open reappearance of its historic crisis, by developing state intervention in the economy in order to try to slow down and push its worst effects on to the periphery, the weakest sectors of its own national capital and, of course, onto the whole of the working class.