The Japanese national economy is sliding into recession. It is shrinking instead of growing.

The facts of the case are rather banal, since recession is a periodically recurring "phenomenon" of a capitalistic economy. Capitalistic entrepreneurs, with their investment strategies, extend social production beyond the extent to which their commodity can be profitably sold, attempting to win the competition for revenue and profits. Investment is financed by credit in expectation of future returns. At some point, sales slump and traders and producers run out of cash. Capital advanced no longer yields a profit, credit granted and taken is no longer converted into capital, and debtors go bust, hurting creditors as well. By and large, financial difficulties increasingly occur among firms as well as between firms and banks, raising demand for credit, which is decreasingly met for exactly the same reason, so that difficulties to make payments become general. Production plants, which have been flourishing and expanding up to now, are closed down and the employees depending on them are laid off, because profit can no longer be realized.

Five years after the crash of the housing market in the United States, the crisis has become somewhat permanent. Experts see in the conditions of this sector of the national economy either the worst crisis since the Great Depression or, when prices and sales figures temporarily rise again a bit, the famous light at the end of the tunnel. All the same, Fed chairman Bernanke’s summary of the devastation that the mortgage crisis has caused homeowners, the financial world, and the U.S. economy in general is sustained by his concern for how long the downturn will continue or whether land is at last again in sight. He is also quite clear about the social and human costs of the crisis, namely, the growing number of those who are homeless or about to join them.

With their common market, the European states have removed tariffs and trade barriers to set down the same conditions for competition for capital based in Europe. But they didn’t come to an agreement concerning the working class. For the treatment of labour, the member states have reserved special rights for themselves so that they can use all elements of the proletarian standard of living as instruments in their competition against each other. Great Britain has even refused to sign the European Social Charter, however limited it is, and is adamant that no regulations imposed by the European Union should come in the way of national self-assertion. Today, “pro-European” Blair is just as determined to defend the British right to “opt out” against Brussels as “Euro-sceptic” Thatcher was in her time. He, too, insists that only reckless treatment of the working population ensures the nation’s competitive edge, his prime objective. And he sees himself corroborated by the course of events.

Every American President still declares it to be a decisive component of his program to want to take care of the living conditions of that section of its citizenry that never manages to take care of its own maintenance. However, the continual repetition of this message is never meant as an admission of some sort of failure on this front, as a national self-criticism perhaps. Poverty after all is the indestructible downside of American wealth: if, in defiance of all government efforts, growing wealth is accompanied by a tendency for the poor to become ever poorer in increasing numbers, then that’s just the situation that state power sees itself confronted by; a “challenge” it faces and for which it always seeks, and must seek, suitable “answers” anew.

1. Oil — a strategic good
2. Oil — an exquisite item of trade
3. Oil — a political object of "consumer countries"
4. Oil — The supply states' means of existence