Video: Socialist Alliance talk on the global financial crisis
Socialist Alliance member Barry Healy presents a talk to the Western Australian Socialist Alliance on the topic of the global financial crisis. It was given in October 2010.
The global financial crisis feels like it came out of thin air. The mainstream media talk of it as an aberration in the normal operations of capitalism. Politicians talk about "the recovery" as though the worst is already behind us.
Is any of that true?
What if the GFC is just the latest in a series of bigger or smaller shocks that have dogged capitalism from its outset because there are inherent faults in the way the system operates? What if "the recovery" is as phoney as the weapons of mass destruction that justified the invasion of Iraq?
The crisis has not hit Australia as hard as other countries – will that last?
To get to grips with these issues we need to take a long view of history and examine capitalism from its birth to what could be its death agony.