THE DEEP political and economic crisis engulfing British capitalism and the ruling class was forcibly expressed when yesterday’s Daily Telegraph published a comment article with the headline ‘Capitalism as we know it has failed. Not even the Tories can defend it.’
Such a doom-laden headline would have been unthinkable in the past for a newspaper acknowledged as the authoritative voice of the Tory party and the capitalist class.
The author of the article, Nick Timothy, is a former Chief of Staff to Tory Prime Minister Theresa May and clearly a man with his finger on the pulse of a Tory party and sections of a ruling class in acute crisis and desperately seeking a way out.
The article itself opens with an attack on the ‘political choices and corporate behaviour’ of businesses that have cut workers’ wages through ‘offshoring production’ to low wage countries.
He complains that businesses have ‘replaced full-time employees with rights and pensions, with part-time contractors and gig economy workers’ and bemoans the fact that the restrictive laws introduced by governments to curb strikes ‘has given employers monopoly powers: that is, the ability to lower the price of labour because of their relative power over workers.’
All these changes, Timothy explains, have ‘caused the economic elites of the West to get richer’ while at the same time have ‘also relentlessly and systematically damaged the interests of the Western working – and increasingly middle – class.’
To read in the Telegraph an article condemning the bosses and bankers for getting richer at the expense of the working and middle classes is without precedent.
While loudly complaining that the crisis means ‘We are serfs to debt, trapped by low pay and bloated assets’ significantly Timothy offers no way out except that it ‘should be up to conservatives to change it – and not just defend the indefensible.’
In other words, Timothy is calling for a new form of capitalism, without detailing what that form should be except that it is up to the Tory party and ruling class to determine exactly what form it should take.
A new form of capitalism would require a new party of the ruling class to impose its policies on the working and middle classes along with rebellious youth.
There are precedents for ‘new forms of capitalism’ in history and new ‘parties’ arising in times of acute crises for the ruling class to wage the war on workers required to keep capitalism from being overthrown.
In the 1930s, the ruling class in Italy and Germany turned to fascism to discipline workers and destroy their organisations.
In Chile, during the 1980s, the ruling class and their US imperialist backers turned to the military dictatorship of General Pinochet to brutally suppress and murder thousands of workers and youth in the name of saving capitalism from socialist revolution.
The capitalist state, as Marx and Engels analysed, can exist in many forms, from bourgeois democracy to military dictatorship and fascist rule.
While bourgeois democracy is the preferred state for the ruling class in periods of relative class peace, at times like the present, when capitalism is in acute crisis and has no option but to drive a rebellious working class into the gutter of mass unemployment and poverty, then what is required is a state capable of smashing the resistance of the working class.
There is no suggestion that Nick Timothy, or the Telegraph, is advocating the transition to a police/military dictatorship or the creation of a fascist party to take power, but the unanswered questions posed by him in this article open the door for precisely this type of ‘new party’.
A new party of the capitalist class, with its base in the deranged petty bourgeois impoverished by the crisis and desperate for a way out as the old Tory party is too weak to wage the class war, is required today.
The working class must take warning from the increasing demands for a new form of capitalist society, and force the leaders of the TUC to act by mobilising the full strength of the working class in a general strike to bring down this collapsing Tory government and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
Capitalism is in its death agony and the time has come to end it with the victory of the socialist revolution.
