‘THE recession has. . . certainly presented us with plenty of puzzles,’ says the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, Charles Bean.
Addressing the Royal Statistical Society, he said: ‘In the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the subsequent near-seizure of the global financial system in early October 2008. . . our Agents reported many of their contacts saying that “orders had fallen off a cliff” – the first real indication of the severity of the contraction that was to follow over the next nine months.’
In his speech, he painted a picture of Bank of England bosses scratching their heads, frantically trying to collect together more and more statistics and surveys of businessmen and what they think, to try and guess where the next crisis is coming from.
‘Almost certainly the seeds of the next financial crisis will sprout in a different corner of the financial system from this one,’ he told his audience. Bean suggested that the best the bankers could hope for in the future is to ‘be more alert’.
The collapse of the world banking system in 2008 has led to the biggest slump in British history, and the emergence of a coalition government determined to drive the working class back to the conditions of the 19th century.
What is now rapidly unfolding is a struggle between the working class, and the bankers, bosses and their government, which can only be resolved by the working class bringing the coalition government down and going forward to socialism.
In a Preface to his work ‘Capital’, the founder of scientific socialism Karl Marx quotes approvingly from an 1872 Russian review of his work that ‘The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned’.
The reviewer adds: ‘Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence.’
But Marx does not treat the ‘general laws of economic life as one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or the past.
‘This Marx directly denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist. On the contrary, in his own opinion every historical period has laws of its own.’
The reviewer continues: ‘Whilst Marx sets himself the task of following and explaining from this point of view the economic system established by the sway of capital, he is only formulating, in a strictly scientific manner, the aim that every accurate investigation into economic life must have.
‘The scientific value of such an inquiry lies in the disclosing of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development and death of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one. And it is this value that, in point of fact, Marx’s book has.’
Marx’s great discovery was the laws of motion of the capitalist system, which operate quite independently of whatever nonsense the bosses, and their economists, are thinking of at any particular time.
These laws of development led and lead capitalism to a ‘crowning point’ of the ‘universal crisis’ which drives forward the working class, regardless of its particular convictions, to be the gravedigger of capitalism, to carry through a socialist revolution.
Marx in this Preface jests that ‘by the universality of its theatre and the intensity of its action’ the crisis ‘will drum dialectics even into the heads of the mushroom upstarts of the new holy Prusso-German empire.’
What would he have said about the pathetic Mr Beans of the Bank of England, who are fumbling in the dark, clueless, as society is driven towards the socialist revolution. Surely it would be that they and the ruling class deserve to perish.
