GORDON Brown, the man who sold off a good portion of the British gold reserves for a relative pittance, and boasted that he had broken the boom to bust cycle that is part and parcel of the capitalist system, was singing an entirely different tune over the weekend.
This was as he faced a rapidly deepening world crisis of the capitalist system, whose epicentre is the most powerful capitalist economy in the world, the one that the whole of the capitalist world depends on, the USA.
In a rare moment of enforced objectivity he said of the British economy: ‘I think that the important message to be sent is we have done everything in our power to maintain the stability of the British economy.’
In other words the matter is now out of ‘our hands’, with the laws of the capitalist crisis determining the direction that the world capitalist economy, including the British economy, is taking as masses of paper currency and promises to pay of all kinds, all masquerading as money, are remorselessly being destroyed.
This crisis is creating not just shares crashes and financial bankruptcies. It is creating the situation for runs on the most exposed paper currencies, such as the dollar and the pound sterling.
The prospect is that under crisis-ridden capitalism world trade will be driven back to an exchange of commodities through barter, as it was in many cases in the period after 1929.
The system is being driven into slump, into a massive sharpening of the class struggle – over which class is to bear the burden of this crisis – and towards a new imperialist war to redivide the world, and to world revolution whose semblances we already see.
In this situation, Britain is one of the most vulnerable of the capitalist economies. Far from being stable it is entirely unstable, after Labour governments and the banks liquidated manufacturing industry, in favour of a casualised deregulated cheap labour economy for the benefit of the world’s gangmasters.
The main ‘economy’ is the activities of a handful of parasites, finance capitalists in the City of London, engaging in global exploitation and looting, who are now desperately worried that their equity capitalist and mortgage deals are collapsing.
Britain is now a nation of debtors, who are in the grip of £1.4 trillion of domestic debt to the big banks. This is after being encouraged by the government and the banks to take advantage of once cheap credit, to borrow and borrow, so as to keep the remnants of the British capitalist economy afloat.
There is now a worldwide inflation of gas, oil and all metal prices. In Britain, additionally, there is a gigantic inflation of house prices, with millions of people mortgaged up to their necks and sinking fast, dreading the next increase in interest rates, and the ones to come after it, as the bankers announce that the defence of sterling and not jobs or homes is the major issue.
More than any other of the major capitalist countries there is no way forward for the working class and the majority of the middle class in Britain except through a socialist revolution to expropriate the bosses and the bankers and to bring in a planned socialist economy.
In the period immediately ahead the working class will be revolutionised by the crisis and the middle class will be driven to the left as the bankers move to make them pay with their jobs and homes for the capitalist crisis.
The main issue facing the working class, is the building of a new leadership in the workers’ movement since the present leaders will roll over in front of the bosses and the bankers and tell the workers that nothing can be done about the crisis of capitalism.
This is of course a major lie. We urge workers and young people to join the WRP, the British section of the Fourth International. It is the party that will lead the British socialist revolution.
