ANY LINGERING doubts about the morbid terror that is gripping the capitalist class were dispelled this weekend when 50 of the leading bosses from finance and business lined up to despairingly admit that the capitalist system is ‘broken’.
The occasion for this collective outpouring of grief and tangible fear for their future was a panel convened by the Financial Times to discuss the future of British capitalism. The answer was only too clear, it has no future, it is broken beyond repair and rotten ripe for overthrow.
The discussion was opened by former government minister, investment banker and currently Chair of Santander UK bank, Baroness Shritta Vadera who set the tone of despair saying: ‘The underlying promise of western capitalism – that a rising tide lifts all boats – has been broken’ and that a ‘better model is needed’.
She was quickly followed by Robert Sanwell, former chair of Marks and Spencer who lamented that capitalism had ‘lost its way’ with companies and investors fixated on ‘short termism’. Carolyn Fairbairn, director general of the bosses organisation the Confederation of British Industry, could only say that capitalism had taken wrong turnings.
She said: ‘The financial crash, a fixation on shareholder value at the expense of purpose, and the toxic issues of payment of tax and executive pay stand in the way of redemption.’ There will be no ‘redemption’ for capitalism.
It is a system that has produced child poverty on a scale not seen in modern times, which has waged war on the most vulnerable through its Universal Credit system that has left thousands of families without a penny for food or rent for weeks and months as it drives to make the working class pay for the bankers crisis.
The working class is not in any mood to ‘forgive’ this capitalist system or the bosses and bankers who have grown obscenely wealthy on the backs of impoverishing workers. It is this overwhelming fear that the working class has reached the conclusion that capitalism is indeed broken beyond repair and needs to be overthrown that is driving this confessional.
This was most clearly expressed by Anne Richards, chief executive of the asset management company M&G. She said: ‘In the current era, best described as “the age of anxiety”, we will see capitalism rejected unless it finds a way of fundamentally addressing this anxiety.’
All these speeches from leading capitalists are a kick in the teeth to Theresa May, who stated last month that free market capitalism is ‘the greatest agent for collective human progress ever created’. But it will be welcomed by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn who has dropped any mention of the word socialism, refuses to call for the working class to take action to bring down this hated Tory minority government and is completely dedicated to the position that the banks can be tamed with a few regulations and that the capitalist crisis can be abolished with a few reforms.
With the Tories in tatters and on the verge of collapse these same bosses and bankers, who recently were denouncing Corbyn as a dangerous maniac, are clearly now reaching out to the Labour Party in the hope that they will hold back the tide of revolution by diverting it through the treacherous belief that capitalism is all powerful and must be kept alive at all costs.
The spectre that terrifies both the reformists and the capitalists is that of the Russian Revolution.
100 years ago the working class, under the leadership of Lenin and the Bolshevik party, smashed capitalism in Russia destroying forever the idea that capitalism is the only possible future for humanity.
Today, workers in Britain and around the world are learning that capitalism is broken and can never be repaired. The urgent task is to celebrate the anniversary of the Russian Revolution by building a new revolutionary leadership in the working class that will take this mass movement forward to smashing capitalism for good through the victory of the socialist revolution.
Come to the Anniversary Rally of the Russian Revolution on November 12, join the WRP and build the revolutionary leadership necessary to take the working class to power, putting an end to capitalism for good.
