THE run on shares last Friday, particularly bank shares, devastated capitalists and capitalism.
The Royal Bank of Scotland saw its shares crash by 25 per cent, Barclays by 34 per cent, HSBC by 70 per cent, Lloyds TSB by 22 per cent and HBOS by 29 per cent. This was after the British government pledged rescue money totalling some £500bn!
This morning the Royal Bank of Scotland will be seeking £15bn cash aid from the government, HBOS £10bn, Lloyds TSB £7bn, and Barclays £3bn.
Bourgeois experts are predicting that Monday will see another nosedive by share markets that will bring down one or more of these banks.
According to the ‘Sunday Telegraph’: ‘The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) lost 25 per cent of its value last Friday. Another three days like that, and RBS will be worthless.’
The Telegraph was forced to surmise that ‘If bank shares continue to fall, the government’s £50 billion for “recapitalising” the sector will be more than enough to buy most of it outright. Furthermore, it seems that the markets will only believe the government’s guarantee “not to allow any British bank to fail” once it has taken the banks into state ownership.
‘State ownership may be the only way to prevent a total failure of the banking system. . . It must be a strictly temporary measure.’
What a position the bosses and bankers and their propaganda media chiefs have reached, when they are too weak and frightened to allow the crisis to take its course, so that the law of value can destroy all fictitious value, and a part of the productive forces, so that in due time capitalism can stagger forward again, which is the established bourgeois theory.
We have always been told by the bourgeoisie that the ‘markets can do no wrong’, and that they should be trusted, and worshipped.
Now we are being told that these godlike markets will ‘only believe the government’s guarantee “not to allow any British bank to fail” once it has taken the banks into state ownership.’
It seems that the markets have become as feckless as their bourgeois masters.
In fact the Labour government is poised to continue with the policy that Mussolini adopted in Italy, that of nationalising failed bourgeois holdings, building them up with state funds, and handing them back to the bourgeoisie.
Today, however, capitalism is much older and much more senile, and colossally indebted. To save them, Brown and Co will have to preside over the pauperisation of millions of workers.
They will have to cut their wages, their jobs, slash their pensions and their benefits, and repossess tens of thousands of their homes – all so that this obviously bankrupt system can carry on for a little longer before it plunges humankind into another worldwide imperialist war.
It was Karl Marx who showed that the working class has a historical role that is the absolute opposite of the role that Brown is planning for it, of providing permanent life support for the banks with its own life blood.
Marx showed that the more capitalism developed, the more that it produced the working class, whose exploitation produced surplus value, profit and the further development of the bourgeois order itself.
At the centre of the relation between the two classes is a class struggle, between exploiter and exploited, now open, now hidden, sometimes taking the form of strikes, at other times the form of revolution.
He hailed the working class as the only really revolutionary class under capitalism, its grave digger whose victory would lead to a socialist society.
This revolutionary role of the working class is now set to erupt worldwide against governments like the Brown government who are seeking to bleed the working class to pay for the bosses’ crisis.
Marx called to workers: ‘Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic Revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite.’
Today’s Marxists are building the WRP and the Fourth International to mobilise the working class to carry out its historic role, and place the bourgeois order into its grave. Join the WRP today.
