THE economic and political crisis gripping capitalism is causing despair and despondency amongst the bourgeoisie and its media representatives at the highest levels.
This week, Tory PM Rishi Sunak jetted off to Washington for a ‘summit’ with President Biden that consisted solely of Sunak pleading for US support in making the UK the centre for a global regulatory framework to control Artificial Intelligence (AI).
So weak is Sunak, that even the usually loyal Daily Telegraph commented that: ‘Washington doesn’t care about British Prime Ministers.’
Why should they? Sunak is dead in the water politically, and the UK is a capitalist basket case both economically and politically, with Sunak leaving behind a Tory government up to its neck in yet more scandals over its refusal to release messages to the Covid inquiry that it set up.
Sunak has also left behind an economy that is recording the highest rate of inflation out of all the ‘advanced’ G7 economies and is on the edge of recession.
However, it is not just a British crisis, Biden has his own enormous problems.
The US economy is in recession and only kept from default by a desperate last minute deal to raise the debt ceiling.
It is beset with the crisis of an administration that is being torn apart in a war between the two main capitalist parties and a US working class that is increasingly asserting itself against a system that has driven its wages down to 1970s levels through massive inflation.
Sunak is wasting his time in the USA since Biden is in no position and has no desire to help Sunak and crisis-ridden British capitalism out of its death agony.
AI and the revolutionary impact that it has for UK workers has become an increasing worry for the Tories as shown by a Telegraph headline yesterday: ‘Prepare now for the jobs apocalypse – before AI leaves us all on the dole.’
While downplaying the claims that AI will lead to the end of the world soon, the author of the article, Philip Johnson, makes the salient point that the big worry is that the consequence ‘already happening now, is the replacement of potentially millions of jobs by robots’.
AI means the end of capitalism, and its gravedigger, the international working class is on hand to do the job.
‘What is to be done with them? How would they live?’ Johnson asks as he considers a world where educated highly skilled members of the middle classes leave university with no jobs and no prospects of ever getting one.
This, of course, is the fate that every worker in industries shut down over the decades of capitalist decline has faced.
They were left to rot on poverty level benefits, fit only to be driven into low paid menial work, and really of no concern to the ruling class.
But now with the prospect of AI taking over at breakneck speed the very real worry is that millions of workers and the middle class will be permanently out of work, with only one way out of the crisis, that is through the British and world socialist revolution.
Johnson dismisses the idea that the state will have to pay the unemployed: ‘Paying people to do nothing is the ultimate in welfare state fecklessness,’ but he then adds: ‘But what if doing nothing is the only option?’
With no revenues coming in from taxes, the capitalist state, already swamped by massive debt, would not have the money to pay any benefits unless, as Johnson says, ‘it taxes the robots’.
In fact, the only option for the capitalist state is to crack down hard on the working class by imposing a brutal police/military dictatorship over them to hold back a revolutionary surge as workers and youth refuse to passively accept being starved to keep this collapsing capitalist system staggering on.
What is clear is that capitalism, in its final stage of imperialist decay, is incapable of advancing scientific and technological developments.
Developments like AI cannot be advanced for the benefit of humanity under a capitalist system that places the profit of the bankers and bosses above all else, including the lives of workers and masses across the world.
The working class and its allies amongst the masses of the world are stronger than the bankrupt capitalist class and its state.
With huge productive forces at its disposal, the maxim of a workers state will be as Marx envisaged, ‘From each according to their ability to each according to their need.’ The urgent issue is to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to provide the leadership for the working class to take power and consign capitalism to history’s dustbin with the victory of the world socialist revolution!
