In the minds of perhaps most workers in Britain, there is nothing that better exemplifies the grotesque inequality at the very core of the way our society is organised than the obscene and ongoing scandal of bankers’ bonuses.
Despite leading the world to near economic collapse and bringing about a situation in which millions of people’s livelihoods were threatened through their profligacy and blind faith in the anarchic, chaotic whims of the market, bankers and city financiers across the world are still pocketing massive bonuses on top of their already massive “wages.”
Despite small New Labour increases on taxation of the super-rich, despite the ostensible “nationalisation” of banks and mortgage-lenders like RBS and Northern Rock, it seems that the sheer greed and acquisitiveness of the capitalists who run these organisations is impossible to curtail.
In 2006, a study undertaken by the Independent calculated that the bonuses (just the bonuses, not even the salaries) paid to city financiers could have funded a 100% salary increase for every frontline nurse, fire-fighter and paramedic in the UK. Statistics like that speak for themselves.
Now, when those same financiers have seen their precarious house of cards come crashing down around them, we are being forced to pay, and they are still raking it in.
In 2009, Barclays paid out nearly £3 billion in bonuses. HSBC recently announced it was handing out £8 million in bonuses to just five bankers. Even bankers who have waived their bonuses — like RBS’s Stephen Hester — have publicly expressed their disappointment at having to do so.
The “Robin Hood Tax” on financial transactions proposed by the liberal left and much of the labour movement bureaucracy simply does not go far enough. It is a sticking-plaster on a gaping wound and, furthermore, probably entirely utopian.
To imagine that any immediately-available government — New Labour, Tory or coalition — would impose even this timid measure, when all three main parties have proved time and time again that they are committed to defending the right of capitalists to grow obscenely wealthy at the expense of other people’s livelihoods, is a fantasy.
The organised working-class movement needs to fight to impose its own programme, not just in terms of making demands on existing governments but in terms of seeking to become a government — that is, seeking to achieve working-class power.
A workers’ government would do away with the capitalist marketplace and banking system. It would replace the existing banks with a single, publicly-owned and democratically-controlled banking system.
Today’s bankers would undoubtedly baulk at what they would paint as an over-centralised, totalitarian scheme; let them! Our starting point is not the “right” of competing capitalist banks to exist, or the “right” of bankers to make money. It is the right of the working-class majority of society to decent jobs, decent homes, decent pensions and a decent standard of living.
A democratically-controlled banking system, whose resources could be used to guarantee that collective social provision, would be vastly preferable to the current model of competing financial institutions and products within which even something as basic as how we store our money is turned into a commodity.
But for such a banking system to be established, we require a government prepared to take on the rich, up to and including the expropriation of their wealth. We need workers’ rule. We need a workers’ government!
