This article is reproduced from the Class Consciousness Project, with thanks.
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The recent conference organised by the Labour government saw prime minister Keir Starmer doing the only thing that he really enjoys, hanging out with and grovelling to the richest people in the world. Sir Keir and his deputy Angela Rayner (the fanfare of the common woman herself) spent two days telling people like Larry Fink (of BlackRock infamy) how much they would welcome these Wall Street parasites’ ‘investment’ in Britain.
As with the previous Tory governments headed by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, many of Starmer’s plans revolve around selling off large parts of Britain and calling it ‘investment’. We know from the admissions of the poisonous plastic-faced poltroon Wesley Streeting that the Labour party plans to continue its decades-long track record of selling off the health service to (largely American) corporations. And we see from Starmer’s sustained act of genuflection last week that this is a policy he intends to apply as widely as possible.
The involvement of Wall Street vampires such as BlackRock should send a clear signal to all workers about what this government is really all about. Its role will be to ensure that monopoly corporations and hedge funds can make gigantic profits out of us.
One way of achieving this will be via endless state subsidies that go to private companies to ‘encourage’ (read: bribe) them to ‘invest’ (ie, to subsidise and ensure their profit margins).
The other way will be via lowering the price of labour-power (wages) in Britain to the point where employing them in certain industries becomes profitable again. This is the only way that the ruling class can actually achieve any level of the re-industrialisation that all bourgeois political parties say they want. Industrial production will only return to these shores if the companies concerned can make the same profit from the labour of workers employed here as they would do from employing workers elsewhere.
This is what lies behind the commitment of both labour and the Tories to the setting up of ‘special economic zones’. These would be used to establish areas where taxes are lowered, regulations torn up, and the cost of labour-power is drastically lowered. By creating a non-unionised and even lower-rights section of the workforce that can be hyperexploited, some level of industrial production might just be seen as viable in 21st-century Britain.
The British ruling class’s strategists aren’t totally stupid. They know that if they tried to do this all in one go, there would be a revolt. So their plan is to start fairly small and then gradually to expand employment in such ‘exceptional’ zones.
Over time, they would likely become the only place that millions of workers were able to find work. They would thus be forced into them, just as they were into the mills two centuries ago, by the fact that other avenues of employment have steadily dried up.
That is the plan, and Starmer did not design it; he is merely delivering it on behalf of the ruling class. Such attacks from the ruling class are to be expected, but the reason why the capitalists have turned to the Labour party for their implementation is because they need Starmer and his collaborators in the trade union leadership to sell this rotten stuff to the working class – and to derail any opposition.
Once again it becomes clear that the first enemy the working class needs to overcome is its own supposed leadership. Working-class resistance will emerge to this assault, as it has to many others, but it must break free of the treacherous control of the TUC hierarchy if it is to succeed in any of its objectives.
