THE FICTION of a ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ for British capitalism is now firmly rejected by even the most loyal of Tory newspapers, the Telegraph, with the admission that recession is inevitable and indeed should be welcomed.
This position was forcibly expressed in an article at the weekend by the Telegraph’s economic commentator Jeremy Warner headed: ‘Only a brutal Darwinian process can reset Britain’s economy.’
The ‘brutal Darwinian process’ that Warner is advocating is to welcome a recessionary crash as a means of weeding out all the weak companies that have been kept alive through near-zero interest rates and the massive injection of ‘free’ money under Quantitative Easing schemes.
Survival of the fittest – let the weak go to the wall taking with them the jobs and livelihoods of millions of workers – is the only future capitalism has to offer.
Warner is bitter that for over a decade the Tories and the Bank of England have desperately tried to avoid recession ‘by propping things up with near free money’ which has resulted in ‘mountainous debt, rampant inflation and a government poised to reap the whirlwind with a crushing election defeat.’
He damns Tory ministers who ‘went against every Tory instinct in their bodies’ by taking ‘an almost socialistic approach’ during the pandemic by ‘virtually bankrupting the country’ by ‘paying people to stay at home’. Similarly, he condemns the Tory cap on energy prices of £1,500 per household when the price of gas and oil was shooting through the roof driven by the sanctions on Russian energy.
In Warner’s world, these are examples of the Tory government’s misguided humanitarian instincts overriding their true nature which should be to force workers to work in deadly conditions or starve during the pandemic, and go without heating when energy prices went wild.
The truth is that the Tories were forced to take these steps, fearful that a powerful working class would rise up, refusing to have their lives endangered and their families frozen while the bosses and bankers sheltered in their luxury mansions and the giant energy companies and their shareholders made massive profits.
Warner of course has no problem with all the trillions of worthless paper money pushed out after the 2008 financial crisis to bail out the banks, this was necessary to save the entire capitalist world banking system. What he blames is any government spending on workers or on ‘a strongly growing public sector where productivity improvement is notoriously difficult to achieve’.
This is a roundabout call for savage cuts in public expenditure focused on its largest sector the NHS.
Recession makes such cuts not just achievable but an absolute necessity, as the survival of the fittest for the ruling class means throwing the working class to the wolves.
This means a return to the 19th century where workers were paid just enough to ensure they could attend work and health was solely for those who could afford to pay the exorbitant cost of private medicine.
Not that Warner welcomes this, but he insists: ‘Overall productivity won’t increase until the dead wood has been cut away. It’s a brutal, but necessary, Darwinian process. Sadly, it usually takes a bad recession to make it happen.’
This article, whether Warner intends it or not, expresses the outlook of a ruling class that has long abused and distorted Darwin’s theory of natural selection in the biological world to justify their own political, social and economic views.
The ideas promulgated by ‘Social Darwinists’ is used to justify imperialism, racism and social inequality on the grounds that some races and classes are ‘superior’ and that capitalism is the ‘fittest’ social and economic system in the world and deserves to survive at all costs.
In fact, capitalism is in its death agony and not fit to survive. The gravedigger of capitalism is the powerful working class and the time has come in the UK to force the TUC to organise this strength of the only progressive class in society to put an end to British capitalism.
The TUC meets on Monday September 11 – join the lobby to demand a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government and socialism. This is the only way forward.
