Pride before the fall: crisis of the capitalist establishment | World

  • “The most clearly short-sighted and venal layers of the ruling class and their representatives have been thrown to the surface” ⤴️
  • “a special crisis of British capitalism, which is on track to be the worst-performing G7 economy in 2023, with national debt exceeding 100 percent of GDP for the first time in 62 years.” ⤴️
  • “There is always a grimy underbelly of corruption and internal wrangling for personal power within capitalist institutions. In periods of stability, this is easier to conceal, and the masses are more-or-less content to go along with the show, or ignore politics altogether.” ⤴️
  • “In reference to the crisis of the interwar period, Trotsky writes in Their Morals and Ours (1938):” ⤴️
  • ““The economic life of mankind landed in an impasse. The class antagonisms became sharp and naked. The safety valves of democracy began to explode one after the other.” ⤴️
  • “The 2023 Edelman Global Trust index, which measures public faith in various institutions, found that just 37 and 45 percent of UK and US-based respondents trust their government.” ⤴️
  • “The degeneration of the British capitalist class into speculative gamblers – having sold off the family silver through privatisation and underinvestment in industry – has also pushed a gang of self-interested charlatans to the political forefront.” ⤴️
  • “the conditions of confusion and decay favour the advancement of rank careerists and petty demagogues. They don’t care about the legitimacy of the system as a whole but only their own personal advancement, and publicly tear strips off one another while shamelessly abusing their privileges.” ⤴️
  • “Battles within the Tories are being dragged continually into the open.” ⤴️
  • “the deep crisis of US capitalism has put the brakes on various promises made during Biden’s election run.” ⤴️
  • “And according to Newsweek, 40 percent of the public still believe the 2020 election was “stolen”.” ⤴️
  • “A Gallup poll found that confidence in 14 major institutions (The Presidency, the Supreme Court, Senate and Congress, etc.) averaged 27 percent, the lowest point since 1979.” ⤴️
  • “Any lingering illusions of SCOTUS being a ‘neutral’ arbiter of justice have been demolished.” ⤴️
  • “These institutions fight each other to the advantage of one or other wing of the US bourgeoisie, but at the expense of the whole.” ⤴️
  • “President Emmanuel Macron is the epitome of bourgeois arrogance. He also heads a weak government, lacking a majority in the Assembly, meaning he was forced to employ article 49.3 of the French Constitution to ram through a bill to raise the retirement age by two years without a vote. This threw petrol on the flames of a mass strike and protest movement that was already reaching insurrectionary proportions” ⤴️
  • “he warned that: “the mob, whatever form it takes, has no legitimacy in the face of the people who express themselves through their elected representatives.”” ⤴️
  • “confidence in the Met collapsed from 70 percent in 2016 to 45 percent in 2022.” ⤴️
  • “Pew reports that the share of Americans who express “great confidence” in the military to “act in the public’s best interests” has fallen 14 points since November 2020, from 39 percent to 25 percent.” ⤴️
  • “Even among Republicans (who are typically staunchly pro-Army), approval for the military fell from 81 to 71 percent between 2021 and 2022, according to Gallup.” ⤴️
  • “National Centre for Social Research on the approach to King Charles III’s coronation found that just 29 percent of Britons think the monarchy is “very important”: the lowest proportion on record, down from 35 percent just since 2022. Amongst 18-34-year-olds, the figure was just 12 percent.” ⤴️
  • “the Archbishop’s Council, the leading body of the Church of England, had sacked the Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB) set up to monitor how the Church deals with abuse. The outgoing ISB complained the Church had interfered with its work to the point that it could not function.” ⤴️
  • “The number of Americans who identify as Christian has declined by six percentage points since 2017 (according to Gallup).” ⤴️
  • “Not only overtly partisan, privately-owned platforms like Fox News, but ‘impartial’ state bodies like the BBC are increasingly revealing their allegiance to the political establishment.” ⤴️
  • “former Director Chairman Richard Sharp was forced to resign after it turned out he co-signed an £800,000 loan for none other than Boris Johnson. On a number of occasions, the BBC has bowed to pressure by the Tory right to suppress perceived criticism, while no such standards constrain attacks on left-wingers and striking workers.” ⤴️
  • “In 2003, 80 percent of British people trusted the BBC to tell the truth. Today, the number has collapsed to 38 percent.” ⤴️
  • “the absence of a clear, class-based explanation from the left has opened the field for reactionary rags and petty demagogues to exploit justified scepticism by peddling conspiracy theories, lies and reactionary chauvinism. The only purpose of this rubbish is to distract people from the real source of society’s ills: crisis-ridden capitalism.” ⤴️
  • “Britain: a country where the Prime Minister was appointed in a palace coup at the urging of the markets; where both the main parties have a consensus on carrying out austerity and attacks on workers; and where the media and police have demonstrably colluded with the government out of mutual interest.” ⤴️
  • “the world is in a ‘democratic recession’. How close might it be to a democratic depression, in which democracy is subverted even in states where it was long thought robust? Market capitalism, too, has lost its ability to generate widely shared rises in prosperity in many countries…” ⤴️
  • “there will be no return to general prosperity, nor will the legitimacy of capitalist institutions be restored.” ⤴️
  • “big part of the reason for the erosion of trust in elites has accordingly been a long-term relative economic decline of significant parts of the working and middle classes, worsened by economic shocks, notably the global financial crisis.”” ⤴️
  • “The justified disgust felt by the masses towards the old order must be channelled towards the task of building a new and better society.” ⤴️