SHADOW Chancellor McDonnel’s speech to the Labour Party conference was remarkable for its lack of treatment of the crisis of capitalism. He focused on the 2008 banking crash, which took place under the Brown Labour government, after Brown had boasted that he had resolved the crisis of capitalism and that there would not be any more boom and bust episodes.
McDonnell, after Brown, treated the crisis as past history. He will get an even bigger shock than did Brown! He refused to deal with the crisis as it is erupting again today with a massive world indebtedness, currently with the Deutsche Bank crashing and fears that it is struggling under the weight of a £35 trillion portfolio of complex, high-risk derivative trades – and that its collapse will bring the entire financial system crashing down.
According to the IMF, the bank is so closely entwined with other lenders that its failure will trigger a wider economic collapse across Europe. Instead of dealing with this crisis McDonnell proposed a deal with the devil. Talking about the Brexit negotiations, he stated: ‘In the negotiations we also want Britain to keep its stake in the European Investment Bank. At the centre of negotiations is Britain’s financial services industry.
Our financial services have been placed under threat as a result of the vote to leave. Labour has said we will support access to European markets for financial services. But our financial services must understand that 2008 must never happen again. We will not tolerate a return to the casino economy that contributed to that crash.’ As if the capitalist crisis can be avoided by a deal with the bankers of the City of London.
Warming to his theme he declared: ‘We will support financial services where they deliver a clear benefit to the whole community – not just enriching a lucky few. We’ll work with the finance sector to develop this new deal with finance for the British people.’
Further: ‘After Brexit, we want to see a renaissance in British manufacturing and, as we’ve committed ourselves, our government will create an entrepreneurial state that works with the wealth creators, the workers and the entrepreneurs to create the products and the markets that will secure our long term prosperity.’
He is actually proposing a corporatist capitalism with the primacy of the bourgeois ‘entrepreneurial state’ ‘that works with the wealth creators, the workers and the entrepreneurs’ and regulates the warfare between the two, in the interests of capitalism as a whole.
In return for the recognition of the primacy of the capitalist state there is to be assistance from a £250 billion National Investment Bank. This state will run capitalism ‘properly’. ‘There will be no more support for TTIP or any other trade deal that promotes deregulation and privatisation, here or across Europe. And we’ll make sure any future government has the power to intervene in our economy in the interests of the whole country.’
This corporatist state will mean: ‘We’ll introduce legislation to ban companies taking on excessive debt to pay out dividends to shareholders. And we’ll rewrite the Takeover Code to make sure every takeover proposal has a clear plan in place to pay workers and pensioners. . .
‘Under the next Labour government, everyone will earn enough to live on. When we win the next election we will write a real Living Wage into law. We’ll charge a new Living Wage Review Body with the task of setting it at the level needed for a decent life. Independent forecasts suggest that this will be over £10 per hour. This will be a fundamental part of our new bargain in the workplace. . . We’ll repeal the Trade Union Act.’
The truth is that the ruling class will fight desperately to expand its zero-hour slave labour economy, and to keep its anti-union laws and for its right to be bailed out during an economic collapse, and will treat McDonnell’s corporatist government as it did the miners – as the enemy within. The most that a Corbyn government can do is to unwittingly prepare the way for a socialist revolution!
