The propagandists for the bourgeois order are rushing to try and defend the capitalist system as being blameless as far as the crisis is concerned, and deny that even in its most prodigiously inflationary developments it contains the germ, as yet undeveloped of a full-scale financial crash, a slump of the system as a whole, and a socialist revolution.
Fearing revolutionary developments to overthrow capitalism from the working class leading a middle class, who are about to have their lives turned upside down and inside out, they cry out that ‘Capitalism is not to blame for the debacle’, that it is ‘The central bankers who created the credit bubble’.
Some, like Sarkozy, shout that it’s the speculators who have done it and that they should be hunted down. Others blame the bankers who have been ‘asleep at the switch’ when it was their job ‘to lean against the wind’ when ‘corporate credit becomes freely available at ridiculously low spreads’.
However capitalism was crisis-ridden from the moment that it appeared on the earth, since it is based on the exploitation of the working class, the creation by that class of surplus value which the bourgeoisie wrests from it, and the class struggle it immediately foments between exploiter and exploited.
Capitalism and all of the different aspects of its crisis are indivisible, whether it is the class struggle, or the contradiction between the needs of the productive forces to develop and the barriers of the private ownership of the means of production and the nation state.
This contradiction bring to us the booms, when there is a scarcity of labour power, and the slumps when there is mass poverty in the midst of luxurious plenty, wonderful advances for medicine and genocidal imperialist wars of conquest with millions of corpses. It also drives forward the socialist revolution, out of the very essence of capitalism, something that terrifies the propagandists of the bourgeoisie.
As well it brings with it a financial crisis, when all promises to pay collapse, when banks and whole industries go bust, when commodities are sidelined, and all that matters is first of all possession of banknotes and then gold.
Marx had the following to say about this in Capital, volume 1: ‘In so far as actual payments have to be made, money does not serve as a circulating medium, as a mere transient agent in the interchange of products, but as the individual incarnation of social labour, as the independent form of existence of exchange value, as the universal commodity.
‘This contradiction comes to a head in those phases of industrial and commercial crises which are known as monetary crises. Such a crisis occurs only where the ever-lengthening chain of payments and an artificial system of settling them has been fully developed.
‘Whenever there is a general and extensive disturbance of this mechanism, no matter what its cause, money becomes suddenly and immediately transformed, from its merely ideal shape of money of account, into hard cash.
‘Profane commodities can no longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes valueless, and their value vanishes in the presence of its own independent form. On the eve of the crisis the bourgeoisie, with the self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity, declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are money.
‘But now the cry is everywhere: money alone is a commodity! As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth. In a crisis, the antithesis between commodities and their value form, money, becomes heightened into an absolute contradiction.
‘Hence, in such events, the form under which money appears is of no importance. The money famine continues, whether payments have to be made in gold or in credit money such as bank notes.’
It is at this point that the truth stares point-blank into the face of humanity. There is no way out except through the socialist revolution. There is not a second to be lost in the building of the WRP and the Fourth International.
