THE POUND was sent crashing down yesterday against the US dollar and the euro prompting the bourgeois press to howl about ‘the end of the world’. On Wednesday, it was reported that sterling had hit its lowest level against the US dollar in almost a year with the pound hitting a low of $1.285 and dropping to 1.107 euros to the pound.
According to the bourgeois press, the currency traders, who make their money buying and selling currencies on the international market and speculating on which country is going to crash first, are rushing to sell pounds because of the fear that British capitalism is on the point of leaving the EU with a ‘no-deal’ Brexit.
It followed warnings from Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, last week that any Brexit deal that did not tie Britain into the single market would destroy the British economy.
The doomsday scenario being peddled is one of complete collapse – the end of the world as we know it as a result of the working class refusing to obey the orders of their masters and voting to leave the EU.
No criticism of course about the role of the currency traders who drive currencies down making imported goods much more expensive and so increase the cost of living for workers. For the bourgeoisie this is the natural order of things: the capitalist class is entitled to make their profits and the working class is destined to pay for them. What is really worrying them is not the prospect of the working class having their wages cut even further through inflation but the fact that Brexit is not just an isolated crisis, but a manifestation of a world crisis gripping capitalism internationally.
The EU itself is on the point of collapse with the most powerful German economy facing disaster as its crucial export industries like car manufacturing are being destroyed by Trump’s trade war on America’s rivals. Across the EU, the picture is the same; manufacturing industry declining while the banks in Italy, Germany, Spain and France are effectively bankrupt, holding massive debts that cannot be recovered.
In the midst of this stands a bankrupted British capitalist system, so weak that the ruling class is split. One section sees salvation in clinging to the wreckage of the EU, even if it means becoming nothing more than a vassal state to Brussels. The other believes the only hope of salvation lies in throwing themselves on the mercy of US capitalism and becoming a subject client state of American imperialism.
The worldwide economic crisis has produced an unprecedented political crisis for the ruling class with the Tory party quite literally tearing itself apart with the pathetically weak leadership of Theresa May now being openly challenged by Boris Johnson. The Labour Party is also being ripped apart as the right wing plots continually to destroy the Corbyn leadership with a lying campaign of anti-Semitism, driven by the fear that behind Corbyn stands the great mass of millions of workers and youth who hate capitalism and the poverty it inflicts on them while the bankers and speculators reap billions.
When the bourgeois press wail about the crisis as being the ‘end of the world’ the truth is that we are living through the end of the capitalist world! Capitalism has reached the end of the road. It can no longer provide anything for the peoples of the world except wars abroad to exploit the world’s resources for profit and simultaneously war against the working class at home to make them pay for capitalism’s crisis.
The issue that is confronting the working class in every country is to put an end to this decaying capitalist system through seizing the power with socialist revolutions and going forward to a socialist system which will expropriate the bankers and the bosses and place the banks and industry under the management of workers where production is for human need and not for the profit of a handful of capitalists. This demands the building of revolutionary parties of the Fourth International in every country to lead the struggle for workers power and the victory of the world socialist revolution.
