THE Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has blurted out the truth that has been more than obvious for a number of years to millions of workers – that the UK capitalist economy is broken.
The reason that he has breached his vow of silence on the issue is that the anger of millions of workers is growing by the hour, and the country is heading for a revolutionary explosion, where poverty, depravation, families going hungry, and capitalist catastrophies, such as the Grenfell Inferno, are forcing the masses along the road of revolution to put an end to capitalism – the system which a long line of Archbishops of Canterbury have given their blessing to for centuries.
The appearance of the problem is that 10 years after the financial collapse of 2007, the masses have never been poorer and the rich are richer than ever before. Like the Bourbons the capitalists have learnt nothing, and are enriching themselves just as the next great banking crash is being prepared with a massive mountain of deliberately created debt at its centre.
People used to laugh as Marx’s works showed that the dominant tendency under capitalism was for the rich to get immeasurably richer while the workers of the world got poorer and poorer. Imperialism, by its super exploitation of hundreds of millions of colonial slaves, was able for a time to buy off a section of the metropolitan working class to maintain the capitalist order, but two world wars and a number of economic and financial collapses have put an end to that – now China is the workshop of the world and the US and UK sees more and more workers going hungry.
Justin Welby now bleats: ‘Our economic model is broken,’ and adds, ‘Britain stands at a watershed moment where we need to make fundamental choices about the sort of economy we need. We are failing those who will grow up into a world where the gap between the richest and poorest parts of the country is significant and destabilising.’
Welby is now dominated by the fear of revolution. He was commenting on the report by the Institute for Public Policy Research Think Tank, of which he was a part, that stressed the current patterns of economic growth delivered most of the gains to the corporations and the richest in society, as workers struggled to make ends meet after ‘the longest period of earnings stagnation for 150 years’.
The interim report of the Commission proposes ‘fundamental reform’ of the British economy ‘on a scale comparable with the Attlee reforms of the 1940s and the ‘Thatcher revolution’ of the 1980s. Their bracketing together of Attlee and Thatcher shows the crisis that their outlook has sunk them into.
Attlee came forward in 1945 with millions of troops returning home to prevent a socialist revolution by bringing in the NHS and the Welfare State. Thatcher’s mission was to put an end to this Welfare State to save British capitalism through destroying the nationalised industries, selling off the council houses, bringing back anti-union laws and outlining that it was the banks that held the future in their hands, and the masses had to hope that a minor part of their wealth would trickle down to them.
Blair adopted Thatcher’s policies lauding bankers and the export of jobs for the benefit of the banks, and engaging in wars on their behalf. According to this duo the role of the working class was to work in the service industries for very low pay. These policies, that only the banks mattered, led to the 2007 crash and ten years of austerity so far.
What is frightening Welby is that the working class is now breaking with capitalism and mobilising to fight it. The vote for Brexit was the appearance of this movement in the form of ‘to hell with all of the established order’. It is not just British capitalism that is broken. World capitalism with the US and EU to the fore are also on the rocks.
This is the centenary year of the 1917 October revolution that Lenin and Trotsky understood correctly to be the beginning of the world socialist revolution. The current rapidly developing world crisis of capitalism is laying the basis for the victory of this socialist revolution in the UK, US and throughout Europe.
Let Welby ring the alarm bells – the working class must answer by building up the Fourth International to lead the developing worldwide socialist revolution to its victory, to put an end to capitalism from the UK to the US and throughout Europe to create a better life and a future for all!
