The Crisis: Make the bosses pay! - Manifesto of the International Marxist Tendency – Part One

A global crisis of capitalism

The
world crisis of capitalism is a fact that nobody can ignore. The
economists only yesterday were assuring us that another 1929 was
impossible. Now they are talking of the threat of another Great
Depression. The IMF is warning of an increased risk of a severe and
protracted economic downturn on a world scale. What began as a
financial collapse in the USA has now spread to the real economy,
threatening the jobs, homes and livelihoods of millions.

Panic
has gripped the markets. Richard Fuld, the former chief executive of
Lehman Brothers, told the US Congress his bank had been blown away by
a “storm of fear”. That storm shows no sign of subsiding.
Not only banks but countries are threatened with bankruptcy, as the
case of Iceland shows. Asia was supposed to save the world from
recession, but the Asian markets were dragged into the general
maelstrom. Steep falls are being registered daily from Tokyo to
Shanghai, from Moscow to Hong Kong.

This
is the biggest financial collapse since 1929. And like the Great
Crash, it was preceded by massive speculation in the previous period.
The sheer scale of
speculation in the last two decades was unprecedented. Stock market
capitalization in the USA went from 5.4 trillion dollars in 1994, to
17.7 trillion in 1999 and 35 trillion in 2007. This is far in excess
of the amount of speculative capital that was present before 1929.
The world derivatives market is at least 500 trillion dollars, or ten
times more than the total world production of goods and services.

In
the years of boom, when the bankers succeeded in accumulating
incalculable amounts of wealth, there was no question of sharing
their profits with the rest of society. But now they are in
difficulty, they run to the government demanding money. If you are a
compulsive gambler who has borrowed
and lost a thousand dollars, which you are unable to pay, you
will be sent to prison. But if you are a wealthy banker who has
gambled and lost billions of dollars
of other people’s money, you will not go to prison but will be
rewarded with further billions of other people’s money from the
state.

Faced
with the risk of a complete collapse of the banking system,
governments are taking desperate measures. The Bush administration
has injected $700 billion into the coffers of the bankers in a
frantic attempt to breathe life into the moribund financial system.
This is the equivalent of about $2,400 for every man, woman and child
in the USA. The British government has announced a rescue package of
over £400 billion (proportionately far more than in the USA),
and the EU has added further billions. Germany’s rescue plan
amounts to about 20 percent of the gross domestic product of Europe’s
biggest economy. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s administration
pledged 80 billion euros to recapitalize distressed banks, with the
rest allocated to cover loan guarantees and losses. So far around
$2.5 trillion has already been spent worldwide and it has not halted
the downward spiral.

Desperate
measures

The
present crisis is far from having run its full course. It will not be
halted by the measures taken by governments and central bankers. By
throwing huge amounts of money at the banks, they will succeed at
most in achieving a temporary respite or marginally alleviating the
crisis at the cost of creating a huge burden of debt for future
generations. But every serious economist knows that the markets have
a lot further to fall.

In
some ways the present situation is even worse than it was in the
1930s. The huge wave of speculation that preceded the present
financial crisis and prepared it was several times bigger than the
one that triggered the crash of 1929. The amounts of fictitious
capital that has been pumped into the world financial system, and
which constitute a poison that threatens to destroy it altogether,
are so vast that nobody is able to quantify them. The corresponding
“correction”
(to make use of the current euphemism of the economists) will
therefore be even more painful and longer lasting.

In
the 1930s the USA was the world’s
biggest creditor. Now it is the world’s
biggest debtor. At the time of the New Deal, while attempting to
re-start the US economy from the Great Depression, Roosevelt had vast
sums of money at his disposal. Today, Bush has to plead with a
reluctant Congress to hand over money that it does not possess. The
approval of the gift of $700 billion to Big Business means a further
increase in public indebtedness. This in turn means a whole period of
austerity and cuts in living standards for millions of US citizens.

These
panic measures will not prevent the crisis, which has barely begun.
In the same way, Roosevelt’s New
Deal, contrary to the common perception, did not halt the Great
Depression. The US economy remained in a depressed state until 1941,
when the USA entered the Second World War and huge military spending
finally mopped up the unemployed. We are once more facing a prolonged
period of declining living standards, factory closures, the lowering
of wages, cuts in social spending and general austerity.

The
capitalists find themselves in a blind alley and can see no way out.
All the traditional parties are in a state of perplexity bordering on
a paralysis of will. President Bush has
told the world that “it’s going to take a while”
for his financial rescue plan to work. In the meantime, more
companies go bankrupt, more people lose their employment, and more
nations are being ruined. The credit crisis is beginning to throttle
otherwise healthy companies. Unable to raise capital, companies will
be forced to cut back first on fixed investment, then on working
capital and ultimately on employment.

The
employers are begging governments and central banks to cut interest
rates. But under present circumstances this will not help. The
coordinated cut of half a percent was followed by further sharp falls
on world stock markets. The turmoil in markets will not be resolved
by the interest rate cuts made by central banks. In the face of a
global recession, no one wants to buy shares and no one wants to lend
money. Banks stop lending because they have no confidence that their
money will ever be returned. The whole system is threatened with
paralysis.

Despite
the coordinated efforts by the central banks to pump money into the
system, the credit markets remain stubbornly frozen. The British
government gave the bankers a present of over £400 billions.
The reaction was a fall on the stock exchange. The rate of
inter-bank lending actually increased after the announcement of this
donation and the Bank of England’s announcement of a half a
percent rate cut. In the main these cuts are not being passed onto
borrowers and house-buyers. These measures have not solved the crisis
but only poured money into the pockets of the same people whose
speculative activity, if it did not cause the crisis, has greatly
exacerbated it and given it a convulsive and uncontrollable
character.

The
bankers never lose

In
the past the banker was a respectable man in a grey suit who was
supposed to be a model of responsibility who would subject people to
a severe interrogation before lending money. But all that changed in
the last period. With interest rates low and liquidity in plentiful
supply, the bankers threw caution to the wind, lending billions for
high margins to people who found they could not afford repayments
when rates rose. The result was the sub-prime mortgage crisis that
helped to destabilise the entire financial system.

Governments
and central banks conspired to fuel the fires of speculation in order
to avoid a recession. Under Alan Greenspan the Federal Reserve kept
interest rates very low. This was praised as a very wise policy. By
these means they postponed the evil day, only to make the crisis a
thousand times worse when it finally arrived. Cheap money enabled the
bankers to indulge in an orgy of speculation. Individuals borrowed to
invest in property or buy goods; investors used cheap debt to invest
in higher-yielding assets, or borrowed against existing investments;
bank lending outstripped customer deposits to an unprecedented degree
and dubious activities were kept off balance sheet.

Now
all this has turned into its opposite. All the factors that pushed
the economy up are now combining to create a vicious downward spiral.
As the debt is unwound, the shortage of credit threatens to bring the
economy to a grinding halt. If a worker makes a
mess of his job, he will get the sack. But when the bankers wreck the
entire financial system they expect to be rewarded. The men in smart
suits who have made fortunes out of speculating with other people’s
money are now demanding that the taxpayer bail them out. This is a
most peculiar logic, which most people find very difficult to
understand.

In
the years of boom huge profits were made by the banking and
financial sector. In 2006 alone the big banks made approximately 40
percent of all business profits in the USA. This is an
industry where top executives are rewarded 344 times more than the
average employee in the USA. Thirty years ago the average Chief
Executive Officer (CEO) made around 35 times the pay of a typical
worker. Last year, the average CEO of a top 500 listed company got
$10.5 million in “compensation”.

The
bankers wish us to forget all this and concentrate on the urgency of
saving the banks. All the pressing needs of society are to be put to
one side and the wealth of society in its entirety must be put at the
disposal of the bankers, whose services to society are assumed to be
far more important than those of nurses, doctors, teachers or
building workers. The governments of the EU and the USA spent in one
week the equivalent of what would be needed to relieve world
hunger for nearly 50 years. While millions starve, the bankers
continue to receive lavish salaries and bonuses and maintain an
extravagant lifestyle at the public expense. The fact that there is a
crisis makes no difference.

“In
everybody’s interest”?

Most
people are not convinced by the arguments of the bankers and
politicians. They bitterly resent the fact that their hard-earned
money is handed over to the bankers and the wealthy. But when they
object they are met with a deafening chorus of politicians, who tell
them: “there is no alternative”. This argument is
repeated so often and with such insistence that it silences most
critics, especially as all the parties are agreed on this.

Democrats
and Republicans, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats,
Conservatives and Labourites, all have joined forces in a veritable
conspiracy to persuade the public that it is “in everybody’s
interest” that ordinary working people must be robbed in order
to put more money into the hands of the corporate gangsters. “We
need a healthy (that is, profitable) banking system”, they
shout. “We need to restore confidence, or else we will have
Apocalypse tomorrow morning”.

This
kind of argument is intended to generate an atmosphere of fear and
panic, in order to make a rational discussion impossible. But what
does the argument really consist of? Stripped of all niceties, it
means only this: that since the banks are in the hands of the rich,
and since the rich will only “risk” their money if they
get a high rate of profit, and since they are not making profits at
the moment, but only losses, the government must intervene and give
them huge sums of money in order to restore their profits and
therefore their confidence. Then all will be well.

The
celebrated American economist John Kenneth Galbraith summed up this
argument in the following way: “The poor have too much money,
and the rich do not have enough.” The idea is that if the rich
are doing well, then in the long run some of the wealth will trickle
down and we will all benefit. But as Keynes remarked: in the long run
we are all dead. Moreover, this theory has been shown to be false in
practice.

The
argument that it is absolutely necessary to pump vast sums of public
money into the banks because if this is not done, a catastrophe would
ensue does not convince ordinary hardworking men and women. They ask
the very simple question: why should we pay for the mistakes of the
bankers? If they have got themselves into this mess in the first
place, they ought to clean it up. Apart from a considerable loss of
jobs in the financial and service sectors, the bank crisis affects
living standards in other ways. The upheaval in markets has sent the
stock market plummeting and devastated the savings of workers and the
middle class.

To
date, Americans’ retirement plans have lost as much as $2
trillion. It has meant that people who have worked hard all their
lives and saved money in the hope of earning a relatively comfortable
retirement are now forced to cancel their plans and delay their
retirement. More than half the people surveyed in a recent
opinion poll said they worry they will have to work longer because
the value of their retirement savings has declined and nearly one in
four has increased the number of hours he or she works.

Many
people are faced with repossession and the loss of their home. If a
family loses their house, this is said to be the result of their own
greed and lack of foresight. The iron laws of the market and the
“survival of the fittest” condemn them to homelessness.
It is a private matter and no concern of the government. But if a
bank is ruined by the voracious speculation of the bankers, this is a
terrible misfortune for the whole of society and therefore the whole
of society must unite to save it. This is the twisted logic of
capitalism!

This
shameful attempt to place the burden of the crisis on the shoulders
of those who can least afford it must be resisted. In order to solve
the crisis, it is necessary to take the entire banking and financial
system out of the hands of the speculators and bring it under the
democratic control of society, so that it can serve the interests of
the majority, not the rich.

We demand:

No more bail outs for the rich.
No reward for the fat cats! Nationalize the banks and insurance
companies under democratic workers’ control and management.
Banking decisions must be taken in the interests of the majority of
society, not a minority of wealthy drones. Compensation for
nationalized banks and other companies must be paid only in cases of
proven need to small investors. The
nationalisation of the banks is the only way to guarantee the
deposits and savings of ordinary people.
Democratic control of the banks. The boards of directors should be
composed in the following way: one third to be elected by the bank
workers, one third to be elected by the trade unions to represent the
interests of the working class as a whole, and one third from the
government.
An immediate end to the exorbitant bonuses, all executive pay should
be limited to the wages of a qualified worker. Why should a banker be
worth more than a doctor or a dentist? If the bankers are not
prepared to serve on reasonable terms, they must be shown the door
and replaced by qualified graduates, many of whom are looking for
work and willing to serve society.
An immediate reduction of interest rates, which should be limited to
the necessary costs of banking operations. Cheap credit must be made
available for those who need it: small businesses and workers buying
homes, not the bankers and capitalists.
The right to a home; an immediate end to repossessions, a general
reduction of rents and a massive building programme of affordable
social housing.

The
cause of the crisis

The
root cause of the crisis is not the bad behavior of some individuals.
If that were true, then the solution would be simple: get them to
behave better in future. That is what Gordon Brown means when he
calls for “transparency, honesty and
responsibility.” But everybody knows
that international finance is as transparent as a cesspool, and that
the banking fraternity is as honest as a Mafia Convention and as
responsible as a compulsive gambler. But even if all bankers were
saints, it would not make any fundamental difference.

It
is not correct to attribute the cause of the crisis to the greed and
corruption of the bankers (although they are exceedingly greedy and
corrupt). Rather it is an expression of the sickness of a whole
system – an expression of the organic
crisis of capitalism. The problem is not the greed of certain
individuals, nor is it the lack of liquidity or the absence of
confidence. The problem is that the capitalist system on a world
scale is in a complete blind alley. The root cause of the crisis is
that the development of the productive forces has outgrown the narrow
limits of private ownership and the nation state.
The expansion and contraction of credit is often presented as
the cause of the crisis, but in fact it is only the most visible
symptom. Crises are an integral part of the capitalist system.

Marx and Engels explained this long ago:

“Modern
bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and
of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of
production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer
able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up
by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and
commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces
against modern conditions of production, against the property
relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois
and of its rule.

“It
is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical
return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its
trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part
not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created
productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there
breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed
an absurdity – the epidemic of
over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state
of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of
devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence;
industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is
too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much
industry, too much commerce.

“The
productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to
further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on
the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by
which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters,
they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the
existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society
are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does
the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced
destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the
conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the
old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and
more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises
are prevented.”

These
words from The Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, are as
fresh and relevant today as they were then. They could have been
written yesterday.

The
most important question, in any case, is not banking but the real
economy: the production of goods and services. In
order to make a profit, these must find a market. But demand is in
steep decline and this is exacerbated by the lack of credit. We are
faced with a classic crisis of capitalism, which is already claiming
many innocent victims. The collapse of house prices in the USA has
meant a crisis in the construction industry, which has already shed
hundreds of thousands of jobs. The car industry is in crisis, with
sales in the USA at their lowest point for 16 years. This in turn
means falling demand for steel, plastic, rubber, electricity, oil and
other products. It will have a knock-on effect throughout the
economy, signifying rising unemployment and falling living standards.

Capitalist
anarchy

For
the last thirty years or more, we have been told that the best
possible economic system was something called the free market
economy. Ever since the late 1970s the mantra of the bourgeois
was “let the markets rip” and “keep the state out
of the economy.” The market was supposed to possess magical
powers that enabled it to organize the productive forces without any
intervention by the state. This idea is as old as Adam Smith who in
the 18^th century spoke of the “invisible hand of the
market.” The politicians and economists boasted they had
abolished the economic cycle. “No return to boom and bust”
was repeated time and again.

There
was no question of them following any regulations. On the contrary,
they loudly demanded that all regulations be abolished as
“detrimental to the free market”. They therefore made a
bonfire of all regulations and allowed the market forces free reign.
Greed for profit did the rest, as enormous amounts of capital moved
from one continent to another without any hindrance, destroying
industries and bringing down national currencies at the click of a
computer key. It is what Marx called the anarchy of capitalism.
Now we see the results. With $700 billion from the US government and
over £400 billion from the British government, the state will
be involved for many years. £400 billion is the equivalent of
one half of the British national income. Even if this is paid back
(which is supposing a lot) it means many years of tax increases, cuts
in social spending and austerity.

A
very old law, the herd instinct, governs the conduct of the markets.
The faintest scent of a lion prowling in the bush will send a herd of
wildebeest into a panic that nothing will halt. This is the kind of
mechanism that determines the destinies of millions of people. This
is the crude reality of market economics. Just as the wildebeest can
scent a lion, the markets can scent the imminence of a recession. The
prospect of a recession is the real cause of the panic. Once this
happens, nothing can stop it. All the speeches, all the interest rate
cuts, and all the handouts to the banks, will have no effect on the
financial markets. They will see that the governments and central
banks are afraid, and they will draw the necessary conclusions.

The
panic that has swept markets threatens to overwhelm all attempts by
governments to contain the crisis. None of the desperate measures
taken by the Fed and the British and European governments and central
banks have succeeded in halting the stampede. This scandal is all the
more shocking because the very people who are now screaming for state
assistance are the ones who were always shouting that government has
no place in the workings of the economy and that the free market must
be allowed to operate with no regulations or any other form of state
interference.

Now
they complain bitterly that the regulators were not doing their job.
But until recently all were agreed that the job of the regulators was
simply to leave the markets alone. The watchdogs are quite right when
they argue that it is not their job to run banks, because that was
the mantra for the last 30 years. From London to New York and
Reykjavik regulators failed to rein in the “excesses” of
the financial industry. For the last three decades the advocates of
market economics were all demanding the abolition of regulations.

Competition
between financial centres for business was supposed to guarantee that
the market would operate efficiently, thanks to the invisible hand of
the market. But the bankruptcy of these laissez-faire policies was
cruelly exposed in the summer of 2007. Now they are all beating their
chests and wailing at the consequences of their own actions. Society
is now paying the bill for the policies whereby the capitalists and
their political representatives attempted to keep the boom going by
constantly inflating the speculative bubble. All were involved in
this massive fraud. Republicans and Democrats, Labour and
Conservatives, Social Democrats and former “Communists” –
all embraced market economics and applauded this merry carnival of
moneymaking.

It
is very easy to be wise after the event, as every drunk will tell you
the morning after a drunken binge. Then they all swear that they have
learned the lesson, and will never drink again – an excellent
resolution that they sincerely mean to maintain – until the
next drunken party. Now the financial regulators are sticking their
nose in to even the smallest aspects of the banks’ affairs, but
only after the banks were on the verge of collapse. Where were they
before?

Now
everybody blames greedy bankers for the crisis. But only yesterday
these same greedy bankers were universally hailed as the saviours of
the nation, the wealth creators, the risk-takers and the job-givers.
Many in the City of London and Wall Street are now faced with losing
their jobs. But the traders will have made millions from short-term
bonuses for market speculation. Traders’ bosses in the
boardroom let the casino continue because their pay was also linked
to short-term results.

Belatedly
the authorities are attempting to impose curbs on bankers’ pay
as the price for bailouts. They do this, not out of principle or
conviction but because they fear the reaction of the public to the
scandal of huge bonuses being paid out of public funds to the very
people who have caused the chaos in the economy. The bosses are
oblivious to the mood of anger and hatred building up in society. At
any rate, they are indifferent to it. But politicians cannot afford
to be totally indifferent to the voters who can kick them out at the
next elections.

The
problem they face is that it is impossible to regulate capitalist
anarchy. They complain about greed, but greed is at the heart of
market economics and must not be stinted. All attempts to limit
“excessive” remuneration, bonuses, etc., will be met with
sabotage. The Market will express its disapproval with sudden falls
in the price of shares. This will serve to concentrate the minds of
the Lawgivers and compel them to pay attention to the real
Electorate: the owners of wealth. When a worker sacrifices a pay
increase this year, that money is lost forever. But the same rule
does not apply to the bankers and capitalists. Even if the latter,
for cosmetic reasons, agree to restrict their bonuses for this year,
they will make up for this great “sacrifice” by
increasing their bonuses next year. It is not at all difficult.

The
idea that men and women are incapable of ordering their affairs
better than this is a monstrous slander against the human race. For
the past 10,000 years humanity has shown itself able to overcome
every obstacle and advance towards the final goal of freedom. The
marvellous discoveries of science and technology place in our hands
the prospect of solving all the problems that have tormented us for
centuries and millennia. But this colossal potential can never be
developed to its full extent as long as it is subordinated to the
profit system.

For
a better life

Incredibly,
in their efforts to defend capitalism, some commentators are trying
to blame the consumers and house buyers for the crisis: “We
were all to blame,” they say, without even blushing. After all,
they argue, no one was forcing us to take 125 percent mortgages or to
chalk up debts to pay for holidays
abroad and designer shoes. But in a situation where the
economy is developing fast, and credit is cheap, even poor people are
tempted into “living beyond their means.” In fact, at a
given moment real interest rates in the USA were negative, which
means that people were punished for not taking out loans.

Capitalism
constantly creates new needs and advertising is now a vast industry,
utilizing the most sophisticated means to convince consumers that
they must have this and that. The lavish lifestyle of rich
“celebrities” is dangled before the gaze of the poor,
presenting them with a distorted view of life and brainwashing people
into aspiring to things that will never be theirs. Then the bourgeois
hypocrites point an accusing finger at the masses who, like Tantalus,
are condemned to watch a feast while suffering all the torments of
hunger and thirst.

There
is nothing immoral or illogical about aspiring to a better life. If
men and women did not constantly aspire to something better, there
would never be any progress. Society would sink into a stagnant and
inert condition. We should certainly aspire to a better life, for we
only live once. And if all that we can hope for is what exists now,
the outlook for humanity would be grim indeed. What is certainly
immoral and inhuman is the rat race that is created by capitalism,
where individual greed is held up, not merely as a virtue but as the
mainspring of all human progress.

The
capitalist class believes in the so-called survival of the fittest.
However, by this is meant survival, not of the fittest and most
intelligent people but only of the rich, however unfit, stupid, ugly
or diseased, and no matter how many perfectly fit and intelligent
people die in the process. The idea is systematically cultivated that
my personal advancement must be at the expense of everyone else, that
my personal greed must be satisfied through the loss of others, and
that in order to advance, it is necessary to trample others
underfoot. This kind of vicious bourgeois individualism is the
psychological and moral basis for many of the ills that currently
affect society, gnawing at its entrails and dragging it down to the
level of primitive barbarism. It is the morality of dog eats dog, the
concept of “each man for himself and let the devil take the
hindermost”.

This
miserable caricature of natural selection is a slander on the memory
of Charles Darwin. As a matter of fact, it was not competition but
co-operation that was the key to the survival and development of the
human race from its earliest origins. Our early ancestors on the
savannah of East Africa (for we are all descended from African
immigrants) were small and weak creatures. They lacked strong claws
and teeth. They could not run as fast as the animals they wanted to
eat or the predators that wanted to eat them. According to the
“survival of the fittest” our species should have been
extinct approximately three million years ago. The main evolutionary
advantage our ancestors possessed was co-operation and social
production. Individualism under these conditions would have spelt
death.

Changing consciousness

One
has to ask the advocates of the theory of the so-called survival of
the fittest a simple question: why is it that the banks, which have
been shown to be completely unfit for survival, are not
allowed to die but must at all costs be saved by the generosity of
that very society that was supposed not to exist? In order to save
the weak and unfit banks, run by stupid and inefficient bankers, the
fit, intelligent and hardworking majority is supposed to sacrifice
itself gladly. But society is by no means convinced that to serve
this worthy cause, it must do without such superfluities as schools
and hospitals and accept a regime of austerity for the foreseeable
future.

The
economic shocks that are daily reported in the newspapers and on
television screens tell a story the meaning of which is clear to all:
the existing system is not working. To use an American expression: it
is not delivering the goods. There is no money for health care,
schools or pensions, but for Wall Street there is all the money in
the world. In the words of America’s
greatest living writer, Gore Vidal, what we have is socialism for the
rich and free market economics for the poor.

Many
ordinary people are drawing the correct conclusions from this. They
are beginning to question the capitalist system and look around for
alternatives. Unfortunately, no alternatives are immediately obvious.
In the USA, they look to Obama and the Democrats. But Republicans and
Democrats are only the right and left boot of Big Business. Again,
Gore Vidal stated, “in our Republic
there is one party, the Property Party, with two right wings”.
Obama and McCain both loyally supported the $700 billion bailout of
Big Business. They represent the same interests with only slight
variations in tactics.

These
facts will have a powerful effect on consciousness. It is an
elementary proposition of Marxism that human consciousness is
profoundly conservative. People generally do not like change. Habit,
tradition and routine play a very important role in shaping the
outlook of the masses, who normally resist the idea of major
alterations in their lives and customs. But when great events shake
society to its foundations, people are compelled to reconsider their
old ideas, beliefs and prejudices.

We
have now entered just such a period. The long period of relative
prosperity that has lasted two decades or more in the advanced
capitalist countries left its mark apart from a relatively mild
recession in 2001. Despite all the manifest injustices of capitalism,
despite the long hours of work, the intensification of exploitation,
the gross inequality, the obscene luxury of the wealthy shamelessly
paraded alongside the growing numbers of the poor and marginalized –
despite all this, most people believed that the market economy worked
and that it could even work to their benefit. This was particularly
true in the United States. But for a growing number of people it is
true no longer.

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