THE Tory Party has been driven to the brink of hysteria by the fact that the capitalist world banking system is on the brink of collapse, with banks too frightened to lend to each other, in a world that is dominated by a capitalist crisis where production is falling and indebtedness and inflation rising rapidly.
What has made this crisis unbearable is that the weakest link in the banking chain, so far, the Northern Rock Bank, was yesterday nationalised after the Labour government gave up its attempt to sell it to Richard Branson or some other bourgeois.
The problem was that the would-be buyers were looking for a cheap buy, with the government remaining as a main prop of the bank, with a guarantee that they would make profits, out of the public purse, like the privatised railways.
It is no consolation to Cameron and Osborne, the public school, silver spoon duo, who are currently leading the Tory Party, that nationalisation of the Northern Rock Bank was something that Brown and Darling wanted to avoid at all costs ,and want to end as soon as possible.
This is why they have pumped £100 billion into the bank, while they have searched for months in the hope that a ‘patriotic’ bourgeois could be found to take on the bank, without requiring a continuing and outrageous subsidy.
But no such patriotic bourgeois could be found.
So Brown the bungler – who sold almost half of Britain’s gold reserves for a pittance, and then declared that there was never going to be a recession in the UK again, since he had straightened out capitalism’s tendency to go from boom to bust and vice versa – was forced to do the unthinkable, nationalise the Northern Rock Bank, out of fear of the working class.
Even the Tories were not prepared to allow the bank to go bust, and possibly bring down other banks, in a display of the ruling class dictum that only the fittest deserve to survive. The reason being was that this would damn capitalism in the eyes of millions of workers, for being what it is, a backward, reactionary system, in fact, a dead man walking, towards the abyss, and requiring to be put out of its misery by a socialist revolution.
What Brown has done for the bankers and the bosses is to buy them just a little time, nothing more or less. The idea that the whole of the banking system can be put on life-support care is humbug.
Forget it that the Northern Rock nationalisation act has wider powers for the government to take control of all failing banks and building societies for 12 months – this is the surest possible road to state bankruptcy, and visualises a really reactionary utopia of a capitalist system that not only lives off robbing the working class of its surplus value, but which also seizes its wages, rent and food money, with massive taxation to rescue the banking system from going bust!
This is truly a system on a life-support machine, being kept alive for no reason than the requirements a bankrupt ruling class.
The time has come to bury capitalism.
The working class, its historical gravedigger, needs a programme of action for this crisis.
This must be:
• No sackings at Northern Rock with it to be put under workers’ management. In fact – all banks that require a government life-support scheme must be nationalised.
• All the factories and industries that will be threatened with closure in the days ahead must be nationalised and put under workers control.
• Workers’ living standards must be protected by the TUC adopting its own cost of living index and demanding three-monthly wage rises that correspond to rises in that cost of living index.
• There must be a general strike to bring down the Brown government to bring in a workers government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers and bring in socialism.
Put an end to Capitalism on a life-support machine! Forward to the British and world socialist revolutions!
