THE CRISIS of the British capitalist state has been highlighted by the News International scandals which will do for the British ruling class what the Rasputin scandals did for the Tsarist autocracy.
His comings and goings with princesses, ballerinas and countesses, coupled with his role in advising the tsarina and the autocracy on war policy, completed the discrediting of Tsarism, and was the straw that broke its back, opening the door to the Bolshevik revolution.
With the News International scandals, has come the spectre of a once-mighty imperialist power in the grip of all powerful media capitalists, who believe that they, not the elected government, speak for the nation, and just to make sure, has police chiefs and leading politicians at their beck and call, even to the point where the police felt bound to decide not to continue with police inquiries and the PM became part of their social circle, wishing their leading representative ‘LOL’.
The phone hacking and many other illegal actions served to provide sensational circuses to absorb the attention of the ‘nation’, freeing the politicians to get on with the job of delivering what big business wanted.
So far, police chiefs and Downing Street press chiefs have fallen and will be followed by cabinet ministers and even the government as the full strength of the poison that was produced and its results are revealed, when Pandora’s Box opens, in a number of pending trials.
The enslavement of the bourgeois political class by the press barons, who had them dancing to their tune, is just one of the demoralising consequences of the decline and pending fall of British imperialism.
They have lost their empire, the basis of class peace at home. They have de-industrialised, closing down whole industries such as the coal mining industry, following the lead of Thatcher, who asserted that they could depend on the banks.
These have now collapsed, pushing the capitalist system into the greatest crisis of its entire history.
Now, with no assets of any kind – except cunning – they are taking on the working class and the middle class to destroy the Welfare State and create a cheap labour state able to rival South East Asia, as its only road to survival.
However, the state itself is now reeling. The ruling class have had to slash their armed forces and plunge the military into chaos as the ‘strike fighter’ debacle shows. At the same time, the Police Federation is accusing the government of ‘being on the precipice of destroying’ the alleged finest police force in the world.
Now, with the European Union and the eurozone facing huge economic, banking and political crashes, the bourgeoisie is screaming that more cuts are required to save the UK. ‘Blue Sky’ thinkers at 10 Downing Street are demanding that there be an additional £25 bn of cuts carried out.
However, the global financial institutions have a £335.8bn exposure to Greek debt, including the British banks, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Yesterday in his financial statement, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, said of the fallout from the developing euro-collapse, ‘It’s impossible to quantify.’
So there you have it. The UK has a senile ruling class, a diseased capitalist state, and a parliamentary front that has staggered from the expenses scandal to worshipping the designs of News International. This is the superstructure of an industrial and banking base that is collapsing and will drag us down with it, if we let it.
Such a system deserves to perish. As Marx pointed out, the historical role of the working class is to be both the gravedigger of capitalism, and the architect of a socialist society. There is not a moment to lose organising for this to be done.