Capitalism cannot survive as an agency of woke policing
“The Crisis of Capitalism.” For more than half a century, in the era of post-Caxton hot-metal printing, every micro-circulation Trot samizdat had that headline permanently set in type. Any dip in sterling, any prolonged strike or economic downturn brought the apocalyptic prediction onto the front page, thrust aggressively in the faces of uninterested commuters, by vendors who appeared to have spent the previous night sleeping under a hedge.
“The Crisis of Capitalism” became the Left’s equivalent of the existential threat proclaimed by millenary cults waiting eagerly on mountain tops for global extinction. There were moments, occasional setbacks, notably in Britain in the 1970s, when the forecast of meltdown in the capitalist system temporarily assumed quasi-credibility, but such experiences were short-lived. Then the Soviet Empire, the standard bearer of the binary alternative to capitalism, went into involuntary receivership and was liquidated by Mikhail Gorbachev.
With socialism imploded due to its impracticability, the entire pretentious vocabulary of “dialectical materialism”, “thesis and antithesis”, “praxis” and the whole yawn-inducing accumulated Marxist garbage, beneath which university library shelves groaned, became a dead language. Marxism was imposed on Russia by savage brute force in 1917 and was, by any sane assessment, well past its sell-by date by 1918. Some of its less knuckle-training disciples had become aware of that as early as the 1920s, hence the emergence of the Frankfurt School, which became the Revolution’s Plan B and had its 1917 moment in 1968.
The target of this neo-Marxist second wave was the culture – a far more deadly aggression than the mere seizure of political power – and we are experiencing its lethal effects today. Education is being destroyed: in colleges and universities by the elimination of freedom of speech and thought.
In every area of daily life, the rainbow flag flies. How does this putsch, whereby those claiming to represent 3.1 per cent of the population have occupied the commanding heights of society to dictate to the remaining 96.9 per cent, affect the contemporary capitalist system? To find out, denounce the trans tyranny in a public forum and then try to retain or acquire a bank account. The entire banking system has been captured by the acolytes of the rainbow aberration. Welcome to Rainbow Capitalism.
Debunking was formerly, in our once free society, the dialectical system of open exchange of arguments whereby lunatic ideas were discredited. No more: the defence mechanism of those whose anti-scientific fantasies could not survive five minutes’ exposure to counter-argument is now debanking.
Heretics will have their bank accounts closed and no other institutions in the cartel will offer alternative services. This is a temporary, relatively crude, interim measure until the imposition of CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) eliminates cash and every transaction a citizen makes will be subjected to ideological surveillance. If you attempt to order a book by a gender-critical author, or even buy a bag of doughnuts, provoking the ire of health-fascist algorithms, the transaction will be blocked. It is the future of Western society, under the tyranny of the United Nations, the European Union and the World Economic Forum.
The WEF has just held its summer meeting, not in Davos but in Red China. That is a perfect encapsulation of the marriage between Marxism and bastard capitalism increasingly controlling what, with apparently no conscious irony, out-of-date commentators still refer to as “the Free World”. China’s e-CNY pilot scheme, covering 260 million “wallets” in 25 cities, is a major stride in its “social credit” system, whereby consumers earn approval or the converse, according to how in tune with the regime’s thinking their transactions are.
Clearly, the totalitarian social credit system is already in operation in Britain. No need to quibble over whether Nigel Farage allowed his deposits at Coutts to fall below the required level, just look at the other victims. A vicar, whose opinion was canvassed by the Yorkshire Building Society under a “feedback” scheme and who expressed discomfort with his bank’s premises being festooned with rainbow flags, had his account cancelled.
Other victims include Toby Young, his Free Speech Union and Daily Sceptic blog which had their accounts closed by PayPal; Triggernometry, a free speech YouTube show and podcast, which had its account closed by Tide, an online business bank; and, most recently, Metro Bank refused to open a new business account for Our Duty, a group of more than 2,000 parents opposed to medical transitioning of supposedly “transgender” children.
Do you detect a pattern? All of the victims are, in one sense or another, conservative. Whether supporting Brexit – along with the majority of the British electorate – in defiance of the establishment, opposing the rainbow tyranny, or simply defending free speech, arguably the worst of all offences, all such strands of opinion are being excommunicated by the woke financial establishment. But why have the temples of capitalism – the banks – converted to the new neo-Marxist religion?
Stupidity, of course, is one reason: do not forget that, in every area of the establishment today, we are governed by fools. You need look no further than Threadneedle Street, where Andrew Bailey’s catastrophic tenure has been an object lesson in how not to run an economy. It is unsurprising to discover that, while the Bank of England was still printing money, in the face of advancing inflationary reality, it was preoccupied with preparing a 103-page supplication to Stonewall for endorsement.
Does it seem reassuring that the nation’s finances should be in the hands of people who believe, as the Bank of England claims to do, that people “of any gender” can get pregnant and offers financial assistance to staff who want to change gender? Most of the UK banks have signed up to Stonewall’s insidious Diversity Champions Scheme. Why? Why should it matter to powerful institutions to gain the approval of a group of obsessive lobbyists, representing a vanishingly small minority of the British public?
Yet the banks compete frenziedly, like dads at the school sports day, for Stonewall’s gracious approval. HSBC, which allows customers to identify as “gender neutral”, is the top-ranked bank on Stonewall’s Equality Index. Barclays, which offers private medical cover for employees changing sex, and Nationwide, which promotes use of pronouns by staff in emails, are listed among Stonewall’s top 100 employers. Lloyd’s Banking group, which includes Halifax and Bank of Scotland, has previously been rated as top employer. TSB belongs to the Champions Diversity Scheme, while Santander is on the Stonewall Index.
Incredibly, these large institutions attach ludicrous importance to ranking high in ratings run by an organisation from which even the BBC has felt it politic to withdraw. Do the member banks seriously imagine that potential customers say to themselves: “Gosh, this bank is really pro-transgender, I must give them my money”?
Stonewall has pulled off a remarkable coup whereby not only is it allowed to deluge banks, corporations, the civil service, local authorities and the police with propaganda for a crazed delusion that defies scientific reality, but is even paid to do so. The only comparable precedent is Mark Twain’s hero Tom Sawyer bluffing his friends into whitewashing his aunt’s fence.
When is there going to be a proper investigation into Stonewall? And who is going to conduct it, when even the police are feudatories of this sinister lobby group, sporting rainbow epaulettes and lanyards on their uniforms – the colours of a political movement? For the Rainbow cause is a political movement: when you have an agenda to change society, a flag and activists, you are a political entity. So, why are the police permitted to be parti pris? If you doubt that, recall the caring, nannying attitude they have adopted to Just Stop Oil protesters blocking ambulances, contrasted with the unceremonious arrests of JSO demonstrators when they dared to obstruct a “pride” parade.
On that occasion, last weekend, we saw the return to Britain of wars of religion for the first time since the seventeenth century. The climate religion and the rainbow cult had a skirmish that reflected the broader dissolution affecting the woke movement. There are three pillars of wokeness: race, rainbow and climate alarmism. The race hysteria has already inflicted serious damage on capitalism. In the US, following anti-discriminatory regulations passed by Bill Clinton, mortgages were awarded under insane criteria to ethnic minorities. In one instance, a $500,000 mortgage was approved on the security of a welfare cheque.
For years, under threat of prosecution, American lenders threw money into a pit, while the housing market was run by the Department of Justice instead of the Fed and Wall Street. The outcome was the crash of 2008, with severe global consequences. Yet that was the merest hiccough, compared with the dangers of the financial and corporate world’s somnambulist succumbing to cultural neo-Marxism. Last year global indebtedness passed the $300 trillion mark. The strain on the illusion we call fiat currency is extreme: it is not impossible that world capitalism could collapse overnight, more spectacularly than the old Trots’ worst predictions.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that capitalism no longer enjoys the support of its natural collaborators. The 2008 crash and bankers’ bonuses, combined with the bleeding of taxpayers for bailouts of undeserving institutions, alienated a Western public that had previously been unreflectingly capitalist. Now, the rainbow imposition has become a provocation too far. Why are our streets smothered in the aggressive emblem of a cult that threatens not only people’s employment, but their children?
The spectacle, in New York, once the undeclared capital of the world, of naked men parading in front of young children, while chanting “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children!” exhibited an unacceptable level of decadence. Children are at risk in schools where parents are repelled more determinedly than predators. Every bank or retail outlet that displays the rainbow symbol is proclaiming its support for that agenda. That is not only immoral, it is also, in business terms, insane.
Institutions seem to assume that, provided they form a cartel of unanimous wokery, they are immune to sanctions. They should take a look at the retail sector in America, where the backlash has begun: do the names Anheuser-Busch, Target and Disney hold no resonance for them? Even Larry Fink, of BlackRock, formerly the chief prophet of corporate wokeness, is beginning to row back on some of his aggressive prescriptions. Desperate firms have reached the point where, no matter how fiercely they are harangued by BlackRock and its allies, they will go out of business if they comply.
Capitalism needs to put several light years between that dystopian world and the institutions that service people’s daily activities. The government needs to take immediate, fast-track legislative action to prohibit banks from manipulating accounts on ideological grounds and the public needs to make it clear – as the American public has already done to Target, Disney and Transheuser-Busch – that if financial and corporate organisations attempt to police their thoughts and political preferences, there will be severe consequences.
Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life