THE major British banks want to be able to use a ‘wider range’ of collateral, meaning their very dodgy mortgage portfolios, for the billions of the taxpayers’ money that they want to get their hands on from the Bank of England. Indeed they are now demanding this as their right!
Previously the B of E governor, King, had been reluctant to allow this since he would be seen as rewarding and insuring banks and bankers who had failed, in order that they could carry on with their failure.
This flies in the face of the theory that flourished in the heyday of the bourgeoisie. This was that the beauty of capitalism is that only the fittest are able to survive, and that a boom when it transforms itself into a bust destroys all that deserves to perish, all that is weak, inefficient and false in terms of value, so that the system can recover.
Now the bankrupts are demanding rescue, and that the working class and the middle class must pay for it.
These are the same banks and bankers that will be screwing their mortgage holders for every last cent of interest, repossessing those who cannot pay, and sacking thousands of workers, as at Northern Rock, to build up their cash holdings.
The chief executives from HSBC, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays, Lloyds TSB and HBOS all held a meeting with Governor King on Thursday.
This was after speculators and hedge funds had been accused of rumour-mongering concerning the indebtedness of the HBOS to provoke a share crash (its share price fell by 17 per cent) so that they could buy cheaply in order make huge profits when shares rose again.
King is believed to be favourably disposed to underwrite the banks, and this is after ‘loaning’ up to £150 billion to the Northern Rock bank and auctioning off another £25 billion to provide the major high street banks with enough cash to carry on trading.
The bankers are demanding that they be put on permanent life support, to be financed by the entire working class and middle class giving up their living standards to save the banks, and the bankrupt and completely out of date and diseased capitalist system.
The bourgeoisie believes that this sick society is the pinnacle of human achievement. All thought of expropriating the bankrupt bosses and capitalists and going forward to a higher form of society, and a planned socialist economy based on the satisfaction of human needs, and liberating society from the boom to bust anarchy of capitalist production, they denounce as an unattainable utopia.
In historical terms the bourgeoisie are backward primitives, who view their own system of production as a thing of mystery, an enigma whose further development cannot be anticipated.
As Lord Levine the chairman of the Insurance Market said on Radio Four yesterday morning: ‘You can’t beat the market. the market makes its own fate.’
A thing that humankind has produced is its master, which has to be appeased.
In the old days such mysterious forces were appeased by human sacrifices to the particular god involved. Today this demands the sacrifice of the living standards of the entire working class and middle class.
In his volume 1 of Capital, Marx examines ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof’ and deals with ‘The mystical character of commodities’ and finds an ‘analogy’ in the ‘religious world’. He says ‘In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering relations both with one another and the human race’.
He adds that capitalism ‘is a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man instead of being controlled by him. . .’ and asks ‘Whence arose the illusions of the monetary system? To it gold and silver when serving as money, did not represent a social relation between producers, but were natural objects with strange social properties’.
This historically backward system of production is now in its death agony.
Marx, as well as analysing the contradictions of capitalism, identified its gravedigger, the working class.
That class will now be forced forward by the crisis and led by the revolutionary party will carry out its historic role to bury bankrupt capitalism to go forward to socialism.
