ED BALLS, the Schools Minister, and the former economics advisor to the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, over the weekend dropped his political master right in it, when he told the Yorkshire Labour Party conference that the current global capitalist crisis was ‘the most serious for over one hundred years’.
For good measure, he added, it was ‘more extreme and more serious than that of the 1930s’ and that Labour’s policy of light touch regulation of the banks had helped it on.
Speaking about ‘seismic events that are going to change the political landscape’ he referred to the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and declared that far right parties would grow during the current capitalist crisis, whose impact on ordinary people would be greater than that of the 1930s depression.
Balls for good measure added: ‘We now are seeing the realities of globalisation, though at a speed, pace and ferocity which none of us have seen before.’
Balls insists that the Bank of England agrees with his analysis and quotes the assistant governor of the Bank of England, Charley Bean, as saying: ‘This is a once in a lifetime crisis, and possibly the largest financial crisis of its kind in human history.’
Balls has drawn back since his weekend statements, but once Pandora’s Box has been opened it can never be closed again.
In fact, as the governor of the Bank of England admitted, this is the greatest capitalist crisis since 1914, when the banks almost collapsed on the eve of the First World War and had to be put under state control.
Lenin in his work Imperialism described the period that began in 1914 as the highest and last stage of capitalism, an epoch of wars and revolutions, principally socialist revolutions.
The First World War concluded after the capitalism chain broke at its weakest link, with the Russian Revolution, when first of all the working class overthrew Tsarism in February 1917, and then completed the job when the working class took the power in October 1917.
This was the revolution that brought the slaughter of the First World War to an end when it spread to Germany in January 1918.
The next great world crisis was in 1929 when the Wall Street crash led to the 1931 national government in Britain, complete with dole and public sector wage cuts, and in 1933 led to the legal coming to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, thanks to the policy of the Stalinised German Communist Party of ‘after Hitler – our turn’.
This period culminated in the Red Army’s occupation of Berlin, and revolutionary situations all over Europe, the defeat of Churchill in Britain, and the election of a Labour government that was forced by the working class to bring in the nationalisation of the basic industries and the Welfare State.
Ever since, the British capitalists have been seeking to demolish that great achievement not of reform but of revolution.
Now history is gathering speed for another great leap forward. This time capitalism is being destroyed by its contradictions, which are driving forward the world socialist revolution.
Already the banks, bankers and capitalism are discredited and hated for the way that they are destroying the productive forces.
Already the bourgeoisie has had to apologise for the catastrophe that its rule and its system has created.
The scene is now set for a historic settlement of accounts between the disintegrating ruling classes of the world and their grave digger, which Marx long ago identified as the working class.
The crucial issue for this period is the building up of the revolutionary leadership of the Fourth International.
This will lead the struggle for workers power internationally, win the majority of the middle class to its banner, bar the road to the fascists and carry through the world socialist revolution.
