TALKIN' ABOUT A REVOLUTION

The Financial Times is worried that growing economic inequality is threatening to overturn the capitalist status quo and that 'it is only a matter of time before the pitchforks come out'.

THE POLITCAL CLASS and its allies in the media have been telling us that we are all delighted to see the back of 2020 suggesting, as both Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and CNN have commented, that 2021 offers us 'promise and hope'. However the economic and political landscape does not alter merely because of a change in year and some more thoughtful commentaries have offered something more than just political sugar to help swallow the most bitterest of political and economic pills.

The Financial Times, that august British defender of global capitalism, has taken a look at the state of the world at the start of 2021 and doesn't much like what he sees. Indeed its commentary is far more critical of our present economic conditions than anything you would get from a bog standard supporter of our own Labour Government.

It says, rightly, that the coronavirus has exposed the economic plight  of much of the working class. It comments that many of the 'unsung heroes' of the pandemic are '..underpaid, overworked, and suffer unpredictable work opportunities and conditions and insecurity while on the job. A neologism coined to describe them - the 'precariat - is apt.'

But the FT goes further in its analysis observing that 'over the past four decades, work has failed to secure stable and adequate incomes for growing numbers of people. This shows up in stagnant wages, erratic incomes, non-existent financial buffers for emergencies, low job security and brutalised working conditions..'

However before you go thinking that even the FT thinks that capitalism has past its use by date, what the business newspaper is really worried about is the growing threat (for capitalism anyway) of, yes, revolution. It suggests that the establishment approved 'representatives' of the working class - social democratic politicians and trade union officials mostly - are going to have  increasing difficulty maintaining their traditional control and influence. It writes:

'Groups left behind by economic change are increasingly concluding  that those in charge do not care about their  predicament - or worse, have rigged the economy for their own benefit against those on the margins. Slowly but surely, that is putting capitalism and democracy in tension with one another.'

The FT is stark in its warning to the capitalist establishment:

'..it is just a matter of time before the pitchforks come out for capitalism itself, and for the wealth of those who benefit from it.'

To prevent such a revolution, the newspaper says that 'the guardians of the economic orthodoxy' need to take the opportunity provided by the coronavirus and 'build back better' - as they originally promised. However that warning is going unheeded; the pandemic is only entrenching the economic inequality that the FT is concerned about and that its call for a capitalism that can be made 'to secure dignity for all' is a pipedream.

When the FT concludes that 'the alternatives are worse for everyone' what it is really saying is that it fears the overturning of our present destructive economic system. While it pleads for some half-baked 'incremental reforms', we're reminded of Karl Marx's observation that capitalism sows the seeds of its own destruction by providing its own gravedigger - the working class.