THE Communist Party’s programme, Britain’s Road to Socialism (2020), includes a new section on the “general crisis of capitalism,” noting that the long post-WWII economic expansion in the West had come to an end.

Another dimension of capitalism’s general crisis has come to the fore in recent decades, one which threatens the very future of humanity, namely, the combined environmental and energy crisis: global warming and climate change, caused by capitalism’s “rapacious short-term drive to maximise monopoly profit.”

Other dimensions arise on this material base: social oppression and inequality, cultural domination and degeneration and — reflecting and reinforcing all these aspects — political crisis. In the major imperialist countries, the ruling class finds it increasingly difficult to rule in the old ways, although the working class has yet to understand the need to fight for state power in order to rule in a new way and construct the socialist alternative to capitalism.