Mainstream WeeklyIIntroduction
The crisis of capitalism (capital system) is deepening. It stems from its deeper internal contradictions which is essentially the crisis of profitability rooted in its development. No doubt capital system, historically speaking, is crisis prone. But it is equally true that it could open up a route to escape from it. It then goes on to repair its system that stopped meeting the conditions for its further expansion. A new development narrative surfaces to legitimise the function of the system through the institutions it built over the years. In all these actions of revival of the system, which must not go unnoticed, is that the development parameters remain unchanged, central to which is profitability. It is an uncompromising truth beyond which capitalism ceases to function. What it means is that profitability must not go down beyond a level that instantaneously invites stagnation and perpetual decline of the capital system and eventually facilitates it to get trapped by the crisis from which the system fail to rescue itself . It could rescue only with the help of external intervention as that of the state. While the global capitalism witnessed several such crises in the past and the one which is going on, the immediate factor that could be counted as responsible for it, is declining profitability.
While cyclical crisis which is said to be periodic downturns occurring once in almost every ten years such as 1980, the early 1990 and at the turn of the century , structural crisis that took place in 1830, followed by the great depression of the late 1870,then early1890 and then the great depression of the 1930.( Robinson,2025). The crisis that global capitalism witnessed in 1970 called for restructuring the global economy through globalization while Keynesian benevolence (welfare state through state intervention etc.) was dismissed. However, state intervention of Keynesian variety demonstrated enough of its indispensability for the global capital system to be rescued from falling into perpetual decline when it was stuck with a financial crisis in 2008.
Globalisation of the world economy was chosen as rescuer after 1970 crisis by global capital system led by the transnational capital. No country was left to have been integrated with the global capitalism. The paradigm of free flow of capital and goods, but not human beings (labor) ignited hope of the capital system of being repulsive against declining profitability, gained political legitimacy of all nation states. No doubt, it succeeded remarkably well but the global economy was left with an unprecedented concentration of capital at the hands of a few. Just 17 global financial conglomerates controlled $49.0 trillion wealth more than half the entire global economy (Robinson, 2025)). Besides, this is for the first time in the history of global capitalism that saw a massive rise in economic inequality in the world. The top 20 % controlled 95% of world