[Speech at the Melbourne launch of the pamphlet Meltdown! A Socialist View of the Capitalist Crisis (Resistance Books: Sydney, 2009); March 19, 2009]
Our pamphlet tries to briefly sketch for the reader some the main features of the current economic crisis and its main social and political consequences.
The first point to grasp is that this is a not a normal recession of the kind which characterises the capitalist business cycle — that is, it is not one of the periodic downturns which inevitably follow a boom period.