Let us start from the objective, material fact – the economic crisis.  It develops – we repeat this constantly because there are still very few people willing to take it in – from the mid-seventies onwards and it is a crisis of overproduction: having operated to the full at a breakneck rate in the three decades following the second world war (and the entity and intensity of this production – and thus of the exploitation of the world proletariat – were directly proportional to the destruction of goods, labour included, brought about by the world slaughter), the capitalist machinery jammed, precisely because it had produced too much. But, attention here, it jammed not in one country or another (as had happened occasionally in those same decades: cycles of crises are built into the DNA of the capitalist mode of production); it jammed all over the world at the same time, gradually affecting both countries that claimed they were safe from it (for example Russia) (1) and countries that were just approaching the threshold of the capitalist paradises (2). It is therefore a structural, systemic crisis that affects the whole mode of capitalist production.
From that time onwards (the mid-‘70s) the so-called “real economy” – i.e. the production of goods, with consequent production of plus value – precisely because the market was saturated, did not succeed in creating the right conditions for making a sufficiently intense and rapid valorization of capital  to try and contrast its bogey– the tendential fall in the average profit rate. The slither into an economic crisis was profound and generalized, though it came in alternating phases: and all the strategies brought into play (for example in the course of the ‘80s and ‘90s) to try and halt it, to find short-cuts that might somehow get round a production that was strangled and incapable of generating plus value (briefly, applying an oxygen mask to what was at this stage a true zombie), proved not only to be insufficient but to aggravate the situation still more.
We cannot here go into a detailed re-examination of the various aspects of the crisis as it has manifested itself from the mid ‘70s onwards:  we did this in the ‘50s (demonstrating the inevitability of it with theory and figures in hand, and with an examination of the close relationship between capitalism and crises), in the ‘70s (as the crisis drew closer and then exploded), in the ‘80s and ‘90s (tracing the various phenomena of reaganomics and thatcherism and their derivatives back to their material roots) and lastly, in more recent years (connecting yesterday to today on the thread of time). Readers who are seriously interested in understanding and grasping what is going on should refer to all this party work (not to the work of ‘experts’ or ‘intellectuals’) (3).
Two quotations will suffice as examples here, taken from our classics, which once again demonstrate the superiority of a materialistic analysis of reality compared to the gushing of economists, politicians, ministers, hack writers, totally incapable of understanding what is going on (4). The first quotation is taken from the Communist Manifesto (1948), and states:

“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” (Chapter I: Bourgeois and Proletarians).

The second quotation comes from an article by Marx for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, May-October 1850 and reads:

“As a rule speculation appears in periods when overproduction is in full swing. It offers temporary channels of outlet for overproduction and for this very reason accelerates the outbreak of the crisis and increases its virulence. The crisis itself breaks out first in the field of speculation and only later shifts to that of production. Thus, it is not overproduction but over-speculation, which in turn is only a symptom of overproduction, that appears, in the eyes of the superficial observer, as the cause of the crisis. The consequent disruption in production does not appear as the necessary consequence of its own previous exuberance, but as a simple counter blow from the collapse of speculation.”

The fact that the crisis is serious and certainly not over is also demonstrated (as well as by the overall growth in unemployment and its inevitable future effects, both economic and social) (5) by the insistence with which, when there is no sudden intoxication over the tiniest, momentary claim to signals of a “change in the trend”, the “experts” resume their calculations regarding the “crisis of ‘29” (their recurrent nightmare), comparing it – in a manner that is, it must be said, largely improvised, as is typical of “bourgeois science” – with the present situation. And nonetheless it is not a cheerful picture. For example, the Italian economic daily Il Sole - 24 ore of 25/10/2009 publishes two graphs and a table, which juxtapose the crisis then and the present one: one regards the shrinkage in industrial production, the other Wall Street listings, and the third public intervention. Here are some interesting figures: Dow Jones did not return to pre-crisis figures until 1954 (i.e., 25 years later); between ’29 and ’33, unemployment rose to 25% of the labour force (today, after two years we are already at 10%, officially); the average loss of family assets was 3% (in the past two years we have already reached 17%); extra public spending in present-day dollars was then 500 billion (today 11 000 are allocated and 2 800 have been spent). It can also be seen from the graphs that 15 months from the peak of the crisis shrinkage was greater then than it is now (but the graph goes on for 50 months: there’s still time!); as regards stock exchange listings, the crisis was more violent in the first ten months, whilst in terms of salvaging operations the fear of a vertical financial crash has been enormous… (6)
Once again the Il Sole – 24 ore of 25/10/2009, in another article (7), warns us, alarmed, that this year the big American banks will record profits superior to those of 2007 and that, at the same time, the credit crunch for companies is without precedent (another bubble on the horizon:  hold tight!). In addition, at the end of 2009, the world’s unemployed will number 61 million, a… side effect of the present crisis. To save the banks (which nevertheless continue to go bankrupt: in the United States there are now over 140 bankruptcies, some of which involve institutes with important roles, such as the finance company Cit, which crashed right at the beginning of November 2009), national states have enlarged their public debt monstrously (almost all of them by something like 100%) (8): in particular, the cost of the American programme (Tarp) could reach 23 thousand billion. The central banks, says George Soros (who deals with these things), don’t know which way to turn: it is hoped (!) that the new bubble gathering on the horizon may act as a driving force for recovery; if, however, this fails to happen, we shall plunge into an even more devastating crisis. This is what bourgeois science boils down to!
Let us leave all this now and take a look at how the political-strategic scenario is changing. Without doubt – if we return to the evolution of inter-imperialist relationships over the past twenty years – its links to the development of the economic crisis clearly reveal themselves. To those who maintained that the collapse of Russian and the east-European countries (idiotically referred to as the “collapse of communism” by those who have never understood what capitalism is and what communism is), we replied that, on the contrary, the transformation of those régimes (where, to put it briefly, the state controlled an economy that was entirely capitalistic) was a signal of the planetary spread of a crisis that had for years already been tormenting the so-called “West” (to use the equally idiotic bourgeois geopolitical terminology). Only a few months went by and the bloody sequence of wars at the threshold of Europe began: the first Gulf war, the war in the Balkans, the second Gulf war – with progressive intensification of their more destructive and bloody sides – breathlessly presented as “wars on terrorism”, “wars for democracy”, “humanitarian wars”, “pacifist wars”, etc. etc., but increasingly capitalist and inter-imperialist wars for the control of areas of strategic importance for raw materials or their transport routes. To sum up, once more wars whose objective was the attempt by individual imperialist powers more or less directly involved in them to contrast the tendential fall trend in the average profit rate.
Today the scenario has changed again and is continuing to change, characterized by total instability.
Indeed, the fear that an explosion in the eastern Middle-East (Afghanistan, Pakistan, western India) might attract greedy competitors to this strategic area (China and Russia) emboldened by the American weakness after eight years of warfare, is pushing the USA to broaden its war efforts and drive them to the utmost. On the other hand, Tibet and the Muslim western Chinese area, Georgia and the Ukraine are the new visiting cards (with hilarious claims to “human rights” on the one hand and the Islamic, Tibetan and Georgian “fight against terrorism” on the other), so that … the engine driver is not disturbed. The most bitter contradiction is nevertheless in the belly of the European ally, who cannot wait to get out of the theatre of war, because its interests are only secondary and derivative (too onerous to deal with) and under these circumstances it is suffocated by internal economic interests: Barak Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize and the UN’s acceptance of an increase in the American contingent presented themselves as an opportunity and a means for persuading the “well-wishers” to stay but the failure of the election comedy in Afghanistan (cheating, candidatures subsequently retracted) and the terrible “Taliban” (?!) attacks on the UN’s armies and headquarters have again demonstrated how extremely dangerous the situation is, as well as the general impotence of those involved.  
For their part, at the moment China and Russia are in a state of political alert on several fronts, whilst exchanges between soaring Chinese industry (GNP 9%) and Russian raw materials involve a huge and immensely rich sweep of territory. China in particular is on the tracks of all kinds of raw materials and strongly in need of them: a chase that ranges from Africa to Latin America, from Australia to Cape Town, whilst the Asian front China-Korea-Japan is changing rapidly, driven by huge overproduction of consumer goods and the massive financial plethora. Sooner or later in the two seas of China and Japan we shall be witnessing a clash between the world’s colossuses, with three pawns acting as shock-absorbers: the two Koreas and Taiwan.
In turn, the Fertile Crescent-moon area is changing rapidly, with the fear of an overall conflict growing relentlessly. Increasing American weakness is having its  effect on Israel and the Palestinian Territories: it is this same weakness that has caused Turkey to refuse joint military exercises with Israel in Turkish territory and is obliging Abu Mazen to withdraw from the electoral contest next January. It is also exasperating the “Iran affair” and rendering it increasingly dangerous: alternating between the constant threat of armed intervention and an out-and-out dance of courtship by Americans, Russians, Germans and French for the uranium that is to be enriched somewhere or other; in the meantime, the Iranian régime is trapped in its corner and must tighten the noose around the necks of its opponents, who, on entering the scene against the Government, would be able to count on a dense “network of  protection”: a long line of “democrats” is waiting at the patient’s bedside for the slightest sign of collapse. And so, oil or no oil (Iranian or Iraqi), political or social crises, never-ending wars: as we have always known, stability in the area is impossible, within this framework of inter-imperialist relations. If Iran served as an American “ally” against Iraq, closing its border (as did Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey in the two Gulf wars), thus limiting the scenario, today a game is being played in which the borders are much wider: the Russian Caucasus, the bordering Russian-Chinese lands and the entire middle-eastern area, if not India herself.
Meanwhile Europe, in the midst of an economic and political crisis, beyond the positive appearance of Ireland’s and the Czech Republic’s endorsement of the Lisbon Treaty, is falling apart in the methane-industry alliance between Russia and Germany, the Opel (USA)–Magna (Russia) disagreement and the re-launching of the American missile bases in Poland-Czech Republic (directed east or west?). And whilst we realize that the Mediterranean and Baltic seas will soon be guarded by American ships carrying nuclear missiles, the east-European pawns fall silent, or fail to awake unless commanded by the great impulses coming from abroad. In time, the European continent, a jungle of nationalisms, will once again be opening up Pandora’s vase.
This is only the brief sketch of a picture to which we shall have to return, dominated as it is by extreme fluidity: but with the aggravation of every “new episode” in the world economic crisis, it becomes clearer. A picture which, if not immediately, pre-announces new world slaughter, when the precipitation of contradictions and impact with the dead-end of the crisis will drive the dominant imperialist powers well beyond their current strategy of blows beneath the belt, threats and reprisals, attacks through third parties, more or less mafia-style warnings, cooked up in the pots of occult diplomacy (and involving their respective secret services). It becomes ever more crucial and urgent for the world proletariat to return to the stage in an openly antagonistic position to the demands of national capital and for the international communist party, its revolutionary avant-garde, to take root in it.