1930

Some notable events, 1930

January 7: The Charleston Riot: communist organized protests stage occupations against Jim Crow. Rail stations and roads are blocked by barricades, major public accommodations subject to sit ins, as dock workers shut down the city’s port.

January 18: The Ford Motor Company signs an agreement with the city of Cologne, Germany, to build a large automobile plant.

January 23: The Watsonville Insurrection: an attempt to employ Filipino and Chinese laborers as union-busters in California backfires spectacularly as the immigrants refuse to cross the picket line. The landlord’s violation of the social peace results in local and migrant farmworkers establishing a soviet, throwing up barricades, and seizing arms from local prominents.

January 28: Spanish dictator Manuel Primo de Rivera is removed by the Army.

February 1: From the ashes of a previous organization the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth Association (or Thanh Nien), the Communist Party of Vietnam is formed in Hong Kong by Ho Chi Minh

February 6: Black Thursday: Panic on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, as stock prices plummet.

February 10: Black Monday: with many margin-calls made over the weekend, the NYSE drops 12.5 percent, the worst single day loss in the institution’s history.

February 11: Stock markets in the US enter free fall, as the NYSE average falls a further 11.7%. Hopes of a quick recovery are quashed, but many industrialists continue to make public appeals to rally the market.

February 18: After comparing photographs taken from telescopes at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh seemingly confirms the existence of “Planet X”, a ninth planet beyond Neptune, subsequently named Pluto, ( in part an homage to the Observatory’s benefactor and Planet X originator Percival Lowell, who died in 1916)

February 25: The stock market’s brief rally in the past week collapses, as the projected “Buying Frenzy” fails to materialise. Instead, the index falls a further 9.1%.

March 5: Danish painter Lili Elbe undergoes the first complete sex reassignment surgery in Berlin, under the supervision of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld.

March 14: Demonstrations in Madrid for the restoration of democracy are attacked by the military. The loss of faith in the military government prompts King Alfonso XIII to set a timetable for democratic elections.

March 22: Josef Stalin issues a decree ordering the “liquidation of the kulak class.” ‘Kulaks’, an epithet for wealthier peasants, are to be completely expropriated, and resistance is to be met with physical elimination.

April 1: The Fifteenth United States Census begins. Total US population is 133,038,108, of which nearly 40 percent are under the age of 20.

April 5: The Indian independence movement stages a mass civil disobedience campaign against the British Raj’s salt tax. Numerous leaders, including Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, will be arrested for their involvement.

April 6: The International Left Opposition is founded in Paris, France.

April 13 : The last of Samantha Waver’s children, Aaron Waver, is born.

April 14: The 1930 Major League Baseball season begins. For the first time since the color-line was drawn in 1886, black players are in the Major Leagues.

April 15: “Twinkies”, a banana cream filled cake created by Continental Baking Company employee James Dewar, makes its debut commercially.

April 17: DuPont Chemical patents neoprene synthetic rubber, under the trade name DuPrene.

April 30: Sergei Eisenstein arrives in Los Angeles, signing an almost unheard of $100,000 contract with Paramount pictures.

May 5: Declining economic conditions push the US Congress into passing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, after over a year of consideration.

May 12: Congressman Norman Thomas is arrested, along with many other demonstrators, in Central Park, New York City. Thomas’ rhetoric of a “workers’ offensive” to transform society is used a pretext to revoke the public gather permits for breaching New York’s criminal syndicalism laws.

May 27: The 282 metre tall Reynolds Building opens to the public. It shatters the record for tallest building and stands as a monument to American engineering.

June 1: After his defiant labor defense speech is reprinted nationwide, Norman Thomas is catapulted to a national spotlight. Free speech marches in major industrial centers begin, carrying banners demanding “Free Norman Thomas and the Central Park Twelve”.

June 5 : Japanese Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi takes steps to inflate the economy and to take Japan off the gold standard, implementing protectionist trade policies and attempting to stem Japan’s trade deficit. These actions devalued the yen, thus lowering the price of Japanese goods in world markets, and increasing exports.

June 6: The Central Plains War: with the economy of the Republic in crisis, and the Nanjing government shored up by a trickle of Soviet economic and military aid, a coalition of anti-United Front warlords attempt to overthrow the Nanjing government and the “Red General” Jiang.

June 12 : Aeon Dawn: Aletheian Truth is published, the next entry in the series which has come to be increasingly openly critical of the present state of things as the young characters of the series grapple with those who have the power to end suffering but refuse for one reason or another.

June 18: Workers’ Party Congress: Jay Lovestone is recalled as Secretary-General, and replaced by Earl Browder. The party officially changes its name to “Workers’ Communist Party of America”. Browder’s fiery speech rouses delegates, declaring that the final crisis of capitalism is at hand.

July 3: Expelled from the Nazi Party, Otto Strasser establishes the “Combat Group of Revolutionary National Socialists”, more commonly known as the Black Front.

_July 10:_The Shadow makes his debut as the narrator of The Detective Story Hour

July 16: With ultimatum deadlines passed, the US’s major trading partners have all enacted retaliatory tariffs, resulting in a collapse of world international trade.

July 18: Chancellor Hermann Müller’s grand coalition collapses. With the Reichstag at cross purposes over Zentrum’s internal devaluation schemes and the intractability of the right, Müller calls new elections.

August 1: Out of work dockworkers and sailors occupy the harbors and wharfs in New York City, demanding immediate release of backpay and a reduction in the work day to allow jobs to be spread more equitably.

August 8: George L. Harrison, Chairman of the Bank of the Republic, gives a report to the US Congress on the health of the US economy. In his address, he claims that the recession is a temporary adjustment, and that the continued maintenance of sound money according to a real bills doctrine will maintain business confidence in the coming quarter. In fact, the average yearly inflation of -6.6% over the course of the year had lit a bomb under the economy.

August 13: Leon Trotsky’s meeting with the leadership of the Left Fraction of the Workers’ Party goes poorly. The large group, representing nearly a quarter of the party’s 1,450,000 members, sees little point in affiliating with the International Left Opposition.

August 18: Sinkin’ in the Bathtub, directed by Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising and starring Ising’s character Foxy, is released by Warner Bros, the first of the Looney Tunes series.

August 27: Spanish Republicans of all tendencies sign a pact to overthrow the monarchy by any means necessary.

September 1: Communists, trade unionists and the unemployed turn out worldwide for International Unemployment Day. Chosen by the ECCI, by suggestion of the American delegation, to coincide with the old US Labor Day, the event brings workers into conflict with police

September 12: Twelve members of the California Workers’ Party are arrested in San Francisco, charged with illegally furnishing arms and volunteers to the Republic of China.

September 21: The House Internal Security Committee publishes a supposed list of known or suspected communists in academia, arts, and entertainment. Chairman Hamilton Fish III takes to the radio to call upon Americans to expel and blacklist suspected communists. The list includes several prominent supporters of the DFLP, straining the Alignment.

September 26: US Army Intelligence begins Operation Corvid, the covert and illegal infiltration of domestic veterans groups, trade unions, and the Spartacus League.

October 8: The St. Louis Cardinals defeat the Philadelphia Athletics, 3-2, in the World Series, thanks to new pitcher Satchel Paige.

October 9: The initial warlord offensives into United Front core areas are stopped at the Battle of Nanchang. Jiang, once conciliatory in his efforts to unify China, now agrees to Chen Duxiu’s proposal to begin purging reactionary collaborators, landlords and exploiters who sided with the anti-KMT clique.

October 12: The Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern) holds its International Conference, hosted by the New York Bureau. Topics include developing a stronger partnership between the communist Profintern and the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World, ongoing relief strategies amid the unemployment crisis, and strike tactics.

October 21: The NSDAP becomes the second largest party in the Reichstag after the SPD, with 99 seats.

October 25: Samantha, Spartak, and Samawal’s small group completes a pro-WCPA animated short called “Carrion Capitalist Conspiracy” which features the now rather famous political cartoon character “Ivory J Bones”, a necromantic skeleton in a business suit deliberately peddling conspiracy theories about jews, racial minorities, feminists, and “cryptic communists” to distract small shop owners and other well to dos from him leaching from their pockets himself.

November 2: Ras Tafari Makonnen is formally coronated as Emperor of Ethiopia, under the name “Haile Selassie”.

November 4: In off-year elections in the US, the Workers’ Party and the DFLP make significant gains in state houses and local government at the expense of the Republican and Democratic Parties respectively.

November 5: Novelist Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt, Arrowsmith) is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first American to be granted this honor.

November 14 : Inukai Tsuyoshi is shot inside Tokyo Station by a young IJA officer for his conciliatory policies towards China. He survives, however, and there is a small crackdown on patriotic societies. This would lead to the right-wing radicals having a temporary dissolution, which would be exploited by several individuals.

December 14: The American Federal Bank, one of the largest private banks, is taken into receivership under the New York Superintendent of Banks, with all 68 branches closing. Executives at the bank spin conspiracy theories that the Workers’ Party had conspired to cause a run on the bank, and that the Soviet Union was financing short-sellers.

December 20: President Hoover signs a bill earmarking $110 million for public works and $45 million for drought relief, far short of the amounts his DFLP allies had pushed for in Congress.

December 31: Bank runs have caused the closure of 680 banks in the last quarter, accounting for over $600 million in lost deposits. Year end unemployment stands at 8.5%, Real GDP growth -7.2%.

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“Chapter V: North America in the 1920s” from The Development of Agrarian Socialism
(This contribution was written by an old colleague, Illuminatus_Primus, who has gone dark presumably for RL reasons. If you’re out there old friend, I hope you are doing well.)

It goes without saying that modern agrarian socialism – the substantiation of “the workers’ leadership” of the lower agrarian classes proposed by socialists going back to the First International and even before – was largely a repeatedly failed project, until the American Socialist Revolution of 1933. The fictitious ‘leadership’ which the Bolsheviks were ostensibly to exercise over the peasants in an overall worker-peasant alliance framework, was accepted on all sides of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party prior to 1917. It has remained a canard of Trotskyists to reject the revolutionary potential of smallholding farmers, including tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and freeholding single-family subsistence farmers, unless they are organized either in separate parties which remain politically and numerically subordinate to revolutionary workers’ parties, or unless agrarians are organized in a subordinated semi-autonomous mass organization to the revolutionary workers’ party.

…Dismissing for a moment, the matter of in what fashion farming classes relate to revolution systematically, we may consider the particular formation of an agrarian socialism, and a union between labor and farming as beginning in the 1890s and developing progressively, until the entire farming class (aside from the largest landowners) was radicalized by the stock market crash of 1929, and the subsequent mass credit crunch. Overnight countless individual family farms were annihilated by debt and foreclosure. The trickle of farmers into pro-United Front farmer organizations, the adjunct Yeoman Farmers’ Association in ‘fraternal association’ itself with the International Workers’ Solidarity Union labor federation, or outright into the two workers’ parties and their mass organizations became a mass torrent.

…Although the process of agriculture reform in the American Socialist Revolution is often summed up casually as “collectivization”, this deeply understates the complexity of the land picture between different rural people’s class groupings, geographical, and agricultural orientation. The collectives ranged from often anarchist or libertarian-agitated, fully autonomously-collectivized small farmers and rural workers’ communes on one hand, to the forced “collectives” common to the U.S. South.

Collectivization occurred in several waves. First of all, it is important to note that there was a strong cooperative movement in relative terms prior to the Revolution, and in many ways these were looked to as a reference-point, in the construction of even the first spontaneous agricultural collectives. Immediately following the declaration of martial law, there was a general breakout of mass resistance and wildcat strikes and some early militias, even before the Solidarity Central Workers’ Council called for a universal general strike.

In many areas, anarchist ideology had at least passively and broadly been digested by many left-leaning and radically-inclined workers and poor farmers and tenants in conjunction with that seemingly universal poor farming mistrust of outside power and hatred of the big banks and land companies. Lastly, there was a contribution to that peculiarly American popular patriotism and paeans to liberty and freedom.

Since the rise of the socialist and revolutionary milieu in late 19th and early 20th century America, American anarcho-individualism, hitherto limited to a philosophical and utopian enterprise, began to digest Proudhonism and develop a “small town socialism” with a role for property and relatively free of ‘top-down’ state control. This was particularly considered a political alternative for them, as Communists and the wave of anarcho-syndicalist agitation in the unions and even in some farmer organizations.

In other words, Socialism to American smallholders and tenants became a well-entrenched milieu within traditional agricultural Populism. Therefore, the relations between industrial socialism – an intrinsically urban phenomenon – and rural mass politics were hardly as alienated and foreign as in Europe between the European social democratic and communist parties and even trade unionism. Rather, by the late 1920s, and especially by 1933, they were completely entwined. Furthermore, the American smallholder was not a peasant. He was thoroughly dependent on big banks, milling and other ‘specialists’-for-hire, and rented mechanization and industrial equipment, he had come to regard Big Capital as his enemy. The American smallholder had no dream of simply slicing up the remaining archaic old landlords and dividing them up to live an idyllic rural self-sufficiency without intervention from outside the old community. As Charles Post and the ‘Marxist-Brennerist’ School has documented, the American farmer had by the Civil War become fully absorbed into market-relations in a dependent fashion.1​

For decades the American family farmer continued in the fashion as a competitive if pressured capitalist competitor. But by the rise of the farmworkers’ unions by the end of the second decade of the new century, and the Progressives’ alliance with cartelizing Capital, put the family farmer in desperate straits. The labor supply was increasingly organized and absorbed by the corporate farms and secondary farm industries, while the ersatz Staatssozialismus of the Progressives led to higher costs on everything from machine renting, to farm loans, to land rent and tax. The American family farmer was at risk of pauperization….

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The Great Depression​

“Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”

-Irving Fisher​

Periodic crisis in capitalist political economy had been a known phenomenon for centuries. North America and Europe had experienced period investment panics and concurrent declines in real production & employment roughly every decade in the 19th Century. And while they were never able to resolve the root cause of crisis, bourgeois political economists had developed strategies to mitigate their effects.

The last major panic had occurred in 1906-7, geographically centred in the United States. A recession in the United States produced a short-term liquidity crisis in the financial centre of New York City as the nominal values of the major trusts the underpinned the entire economy shed almost fifty percent of their face value in a three-week period.

The resulting bank run was averted by financier J.P. Morgan, who convinced a large trust of bankers to shore up the system with an infusion of capital. Though the worst was averted, the knock-on effects reverberated through the global economy as employment contracted, and firms consolidated under the tighter control of large corporate entities like the trusts in the United States, the zaibatsu in Japan, and the konzern in Germany.

Whatever financial crunches or cyclical economic depressions might have developed in the ensuing decade was totally overshadowed by the calamity produced by the Great War. State mobilisation in the war effort, the harsh disciplining of labor, and the destructive liquidation of capital maintained stability at horrendous cost. And when the war ended, the worst period of economic and political instability yet seen gripped both victor and vanquished alike.

No part of the global political economy escaped the revolutionary offensive of 1917-23. In the lands of the former Vierbund , communists attempted to seize power in urban centres while nationalists picked over the bones of the shattered empires. The paroxysm of civil war and mass ethnic cleansing ripped apart Eastern Europe.

In Britain and France, radicalised workers and returning soldiers paralyzed the industrial centers with periodic strikes, and frustrated many attempts to intervene in the Soviet Revolutionary War, or to extend aid to nationalist groups in Eastern Europe. In the United States, the crisis was at its most acute in 1920 as soviets briefly took the direct administration of production in many urban centers before retreating.

The next decade would be known as the Roaring Twenties. Recovery from the devastation of the war was relatively rapid even in Europe, and the proliferation of new technologies infused a sense of wonder and magic to the once foreboding future. And while as always those at the top gained the most, at least in terms of wages and employment levels workers made some gains over the decade.

The next crisis came not with war and imperialism, but from a cyclical contradiction in political economy. While it once again was centred in the financial powerhouses of the United States, the scope was truly global. Certain alarm bells had already been ringing for over a year before Black Thursday. Speculative bubbles in precious metals driven by central bank policy had caused the Chinese yuan to enter a deflationary crunch as silver flooded out of the country at the exorbitant international prices. This in turn had negated China’s comparative advantage and crashed the post-Warlord Era recovery in the ensuing balance of payments crisis. The once cowed warlords revolted against the central government in Nanjing. The Central Plains War further deepened the Kuomintang reliance on the United Front as the republic descended into once final round of bloodletting in the quest for unity.

Within the United States itself, the Bank of the Republic signalled the alarm several times in 1929 over the overleveraging of credit, particularly the practice of buying stocks on margin. Under the rules of the day, investors needed only a ten percent down payment to purchase stocks for speculation. Creditors would loan the other ninety percent with specific repayment guarantees. This was in effect a bet that the value of the stock would continue to appreciate significantly; at the end of the term the speculator hoped to sell the stock, repay the loan plus the required interest and fees, and net a profit.

In the late Twenties, trading volumes at the New York Stock Exchange and others across East Asia, Europe and North America rapidly increased. Significant percentages of this came from credit financed stock speculation. There are multiple things to consider before making a quick, “common sense” moral judgment of these practices though. The first is that all stock prices are speculative, so condemnation of speculators is foolish. The stock price is more than just a share of a company’s assets minus its liabilities, it is also a bet on the company’s current and future revenues and the appreciation of its assets. The speculative function of a stock market cannot be divorced from its role in companies raising capital from investors.

The second thing to consider is that investment bubbles do not in themselves cause crisis, they’re just another symptom. While they are an easily visible and visceral inciting incidents, to blame them is to ignore why there existed such a glut of capital in the first place bereft of more grounded investment opportunities.

These alarms raised by regulators triggered momentary dips in the various exchanges and indexes, but bereft of less risky investment opportunities the trend of speculation continued as investors doubled down and shamed cautionary voices for “inciting panic”.

The next three years would be a global economic crisis unparalleled in history. There were numerous other depressions that were longer, but none would cause such a rapid decline nor herald such a period of calamity.

What made the Great Depression ‘great’ then? There are numerous elements to consider, and an exhaustive study of their interplay is far beyond the scope of this timeline. In summing up these factors, we shall express skepticism towards any ‘single cause’ theory, even Marxist crisis theory. While Marxists correctly identify the root of cyclical crisis in the increasing organic composition of capital (the increasing reliance on capital intensive vs. labor intensive production) and the corresponding tendency of the rate of profit to fall, this does not seek to account for all the intervening factors. It is a tendency, not an iron law of history.

Some of the other factors will have varying levels of global or local significance, which we will note.

The first that must be considered is the increasing penetration of market relations. 19th century crises occurred among populations that were less fully integrated into a global market. While the self-reliance of American settler-farmers is usually overstated, in previous epochs the large rural populations had some degree of self-sufficiency to weather crisis. Banks had fewer means to repossess land. Family units engaged in more subsistence level production of daily necessities, from food to clothing. And though he was reliant on seed and fertilizer for his livelihood, the farmer could sustain himself on some level by direct subsistence.

By 1930, the rural population of Europe and the Americas had shrunk dramatically, especially in proportion to the urban population. Farms had consolidated and were more strongly dependent on commodity exchange. Cottage production declined as it was more efficient to purchase necessities and concentrate labor on the production of farm products for sale. Farms relied more heavily on seasonal wage labor, commercial seed and fertilizer, and mechanization. A more or less permanent relief crisis had afflicted farmers in North America where this process was the most advanced, as productivity increases had caused supply gluts that put farmers teetering on the edge of insolvency. There was more food being produced than could be consumed, and each farmer attempting to maximize his own self-interest contributed to the general misery of farmers by attempting to produce more for sale.

In the United States, the population balance swung from a 39-61 percent urban-rural split to a 59-41 percent split from 1900 to 1930. The balance of this urban population became heavily weighted towards to wage-workers, as capital intensification drove consolidation. Artisan production gave way to modern mass production techniques. This increase in wealth also meant greater interdependence. The large industrial firms based a basic contradiction between the need to minimize the costs of production, chiefly labor, as well as to maximize revenues. But the nature of industrial economy is that workers are also the largest consumer bloc; increasing the level of exploitation is rational on the short-term, individual scale, but collectively irrational.

And these trends are not limited to the US, but the United States’ position as the most advanced industrial economy post Great War meant that these trends are at their most intense there. Across Europe and the Americas, trade unions whether reformist or revolutionary fought to increase their wages while capitalists fought to hold wages down as much as possible while increasing labor productivity. The aggregate of this trend was a modest increase in real wages over the 1920s coupled with a dramatic increase in productivity and thus exploitation. This scissors crisis between production and consumption offers another factor in explaining the “Greatness” of the Great Depression. The glut of commodities being produced and the glut of profit found each other in an increasing use of credit to sustain consumption levels as productivity diverged from wages.

This dovetails into Keynesian theories of declining aggregate demand. To counteract the contraction, in Keynes’ view governments needed to use their privileged fiscal status to run deficits to absorb the credit glut and stimulate demand through public works financed by this deficit spending.

This basic conceptualization would be formalized based on a study of the Depression itself, where the prevailing “common sense” orthodoxy demanding fiscal prudence and balanced budgets in peacetime was actually counterproductive. Governments attempted to slash expenditures and raise taxes, thereby contributing to the ongoing demand crisis. Nowhere was this more true than in the United States, where the Republicans, Progressive and Business Wing alike, treated the Depression as a matter of moral profligacy by reckless speculators and tried to impose fiscal discipline at first, and only too little, too late saw the political necessity (let alone the economic efficacy) of public works projects.

But collapsing demand alone could not explain the credit crunch. Other theorists, notably Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz examined the role that monetary orthodoxy played in the Great Depression. With few exceptions, states had since the late 19th century tied the value of their currency to a fixed weight of gold bullion, convertible on demand. Those that did not generally had a colonial relationship with another state, and pegged a fixed exchange rate between the local currency and the mother country. In an era before reliable long distance communication, this smoothed the transaction cost of international trade.

But it also tied the value of money to the amount of a commodity in circulation, which could not be easily controlled. Local disruptions could easily allow a balance of payments crisis with hard currency being vacuumed out of a country by individual actors seeking the highest returns available.

Monetarists placed the target squarely on the contraction of the money supply during the Great Depression. Money in modern fiscal systems is produced not merely by the minting of coins or the printing of notes, but by the process through which central banks loaned money to other banks, who in turn loaned money to other banks, firms or individuals. Banks had to maintain certain reserve requirements; a 10 percent reserve meant a bank had to maintain 10 percent of its total assets in liquid form available on demand for withdrawals. The rest could be loaned out through various financial instruments.

Bank runs began very early in the Great Depression, as individuals liquidated their savings to following margin calls on stocks, commodities and assets, as they tried to get out from under bad debts. Maintaining reserves for daily operations, let along legal reserve requirements, required those banks to suspend lending or call in loans. Fears of bank instability among the broader politic led to individuals converting deposits to cash.

Destiny is the path taken to avoid it. Perceived fears of the insolvency of banks became real as depositors tried to turn their assets into cash, resulting in bankruptcy. Those who got in first got out with their savings intact, the rest saw their entire life’s savings evaporate as banks went into receivership.

With the sudden contraction of the money supply caused by the loss of hundreds of millions in deposits, the available money to purchase goods or services in the economy contracts. Prices must fall for the market to clear, but they cannot change rapidly enough to account for the changing monetary situation. The economy contracts and with it firms go into the red, and workers are laid off.

This pressure hits debtors the hardest, who must now repay loans, contractually valued at the same nominal amount, with money that is worth more than it was when the loan was taken. In other words, the real interest rate has increased. Worse, deflation also means that the value of assets in the economy, say a house, will depreciate. Severe enough deflation means that the market value of the house may be less than the outstanding value of the loan. This pressure leads to stress selling as individuals attempt to get out from under increasingly onerous debt burdens, but like the bank run it only places more deflationary pressure as money is saved rather than spent.

But whatever the causes, the reality of the Great Depression serves as a cold reminder that political economy is an alien and inhuman force. As Marx put it in the Manifesto :

“Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.”​

This grim prophecy will play out in the two decades following Black Thursday. Hitherto unimaginable horrors will be conjured as the thin masque of civilisation is torn away. Industrial barbarism will be visited upon every continent, until the world plunges headlong into unrelenting total war.

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1. The mythology of the self-sufficient family farm is major part of the historic romance in the US, and it’s also quite ironically the least true in the United States. See Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class-Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620–1877 , (Boston: Brill, 2011) for more information.