Letters

Digital currency

In the spring of 2018, the world’s mountain of debt reached $250 trillion. Now, as 2021 draws to a close, global debt (both public and private sector) has comfortably surpassed the quarter of a quadrillion mark and is about to crash through $300 trillion. What is most striking about this dismal fact is that the voices calling for debt to be reined in are far less audible than one might expect, and the concern that economists and bankers used to express at the uncontrollable rise in debt is less apparent now than it was three years ago. With all pretence of fiscal responsibility and accountability seemingly out the window, it is certainly pertinent to ask, ‘What are governments, central bankers and the globalist elites up to?’

On October 12 this year, the House of Representatives gave approval for the raising of the US government’s borrowing limit to $28.9 trillion, thus warding off the potential danger of a federal default yet again. While the compliant mainstream media hailed this move as a sensible step that helped avert a crisis, no-one was willing to highlight the fact that the absurd tax cuts given to big corporations and the very wealthy by Donald Trump in 2017 was one of the key reasons why the government’s debt was increasing so precipitously (the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was one of the largest ever transfers of wealth from the majority to the super-rich minority).

In 2015, global debt was under $220 trillion. This means that in just six years, the world has seen an increase in total indebtedness of around 35%! Meanwhile, the global debt/GDP ratio is now around 360%. While governments around the world continue to justify these obscene increases by pointing to the support measures they introduced after the onset of Covid-19, the numbers hide an irrefutable fact - incessant money printing has become the norm around the world, and the pumping of most of this bubble-generating money into financial and stock markets has made a mockery of conventional asset valuation. However, there is a deeper and far more sinister story behind the obvious manipulation of financial markets that’s taking place: namely the plan hatched by the elites who are rolling out the Great Reset to digitalise money completely and gradually phase out cash-based transactions. Given that global debt has now surpassed all manageable levels and is on course to crash the global economy, the technocrat fanatics/globalist elite/corporate oligarchy have begun to openly speak about digitalising all monetary transactions and utilising the tremendous advances in technology to facilitate it.

However, what they talk about less frequently is the new global digital currency that will eventually be introduced to replace the fiat currencies of today, which have been hyperprinted into oblivion, and also the possible sweeteners that will be used - such as the introduction of universal basic income (purely in digital form, of course) - to make these moves more palatable. While the World Economic Forum at Davos 2020 did openly discuss the need for creating a ‘credible and trusted’ global digital currency, what these unabashed subverters of democratic governance are not divulging is that detailed plans on what sort of digital currency will be unleashed on the world - and in what manner - already exist, and the ground is already being prepared for its introduction before the current decade is out.

Furthermore, the mendacious mainstream media will never give a platform to those who point out that the gradual abolition of cash transactions is nothing more than a nefarious assault on human privacy and the ability of people to physically touch and protect their money. The ability to make minor transactions in cash is vitally important to safeguarding privacy and keeping the prying eyes of technocrats (and potentially intelligence services) away from what people want to buy and sell. Moreover, the eventual replacement of cash with purely digital payment systems will inevitably be accompanied by the introduction of a ‘social credit’ system - like in China - that can be used to penalise and punish members of the public who fail to conform to arbitrary rules.

This relentless march towards all-encompassing, technology-based tyranny is the natural and inevitable endpoint of unfettered anarcho-capitalism - the concentration of all the levers of control on society in the hands of the unelected, self-appointed doyens of the capitalist/oligarchic elite, who, in collaboration with power-hungry fanatics of technocracy and a political class that has been almost completely bought over, will seek to bring their ultimate plan to fruition - the transformation of the world into a single market, controlled tightly from an obscure centre, and the transformation of all of the world’s workers into direct or indirect employees of a single global conglomerate with branches across the planet (without the right to union representation, of course).

As things currently stand, it is difficult to hope that these diabolical plans can be scuppered. The awakening that is undoubtedly occurring in certain strata of society - both spiritual and cognitive - appears to be too slow to create a tidal wave of pushback and disobedience that can derail the meticulously laid out schedule of events that are leading to the end dream of the oligarchy/technocracy/globalism cabal. However, all is not lost, and at times like this merely maintaining a sense of optimism and working at the grassroots level to institute disobedience are in themselves revolutionary acts - acts that can produce ripple effects and bring about unexpected victories. To quote Benjamin Franklin, “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to god”. Nevertheless, it is an inescapable fact that more time is needed for the awakening that’s occurring - particularly amongst the youth - to take hold and gather steam. If civil disobedience - a fundamental human right - can slow down the implementation of at least certain aspects of the aforementioned plans, we may be in with a chance to prevent absolute tyranny from being established and to finally dispose of the cancerous and destructive system called capitalism.

As we continue seeing the world’s hedonistic billionaires compete over whose phallic-shaped rocket can take them fastest and furthest into space, let’s hope that enough human beings are accessing real news on genuine/alternative news channels and understanding the true nature of what’s going on around them. Perceptive and sentient people must not go along with these subversive plans for humanity. Do not become accomplices. Remove your money from banks, hold on to it in your homes, insist on using it for your daily purchases, and build communities of like-minded people who are committed to maintaining cash as an integral part of daily life. Promote regionalism as an antidote to globalism. And for goodness sake, stop giving your votes to bought-off governments!

Tigran Kalaydjian
Surrey

Site for struggle

Tony Greenstein tells us:

“It is as if the whole Corbyn era, when hundreds of thousands of people streamed into the Labour Party, and the radical manifesto of 2017, when Labour secured the largest swing since 1945 - in the teeth of wall-to-wall opposition from the British state and its lackeys in the media - had passed Jim and Stan Keable by” (Letters, November 4).

Oh dear. All we know, apparently, is that “Without organisation the working class is nothing”, and Tony reckons that the CPGB has no idea as to how to advance from where we are. Because, presumably, we still haven’t built the party that the working class needs. It may have come to Tony’s attention that nobody else has either. All these years and no mass party.

Many have pointed out that the left is weak and has been for some time. There are historical reasons for this, many of which are set out repeatedly in the Weekly Worker, as well as in our Communist Forums and Communist University sessions. The only large-scale victory of a mass communist party took place in Russia in 1917. It was immediately beset by imperialist armies, along with the ‘white’ forces of reaction. The Russian leaders expected a more thoroughgoing revolutionary sweep in Europe and a few years later we had the Stalinist takeover.

I’m sure Tony is aware of all this, but does not perhaps agree with the vital role of an organised Marxist party. The working class needs an independent party not bound to union leaderships or any clique or bureaucracy that places itself above its members.

We’ve read too that Tony was impressed by the Corbyn project that “frightened the ruling class from Washington to Tel Aviv” - I’m sure it did, which is why they dealt with it. Tony blames the Labour left, but what else did he expect from them? Many are Labour left parliamentarians and what takes priority? They’ve climbed the greasy pole of local politics (not many trades unionist nowadays - actually not an awful lot of local politicians either) and made it into parliament, and they want to stay there!

Tony suggests that we, the CPGB, put forward “a choice between a Starmer-led Labour Party or a Marxist party”. No, Tony, we reckon that a mass Marxist party is the only way to get rid of a Starmer, or any other bourgeois leader of the Labour Party.

Tony says: “Yes, it is true that Roger Silverman and myself, and also Ken Loach, are focused on the 150,000 that have left the Labour Party (as well as the 150,000 who are going to leave the party). That doesn’t seem a bad place to start.” Fair enough, but to start doing what? As I asked in my letter (October 28) regarding Tony and Roger Silverman, “What do they want? A home? For the 2019 manifesto?”

You and Roger, Tony, might get a mass party (I’m not confident, as I’m sure you’ve guessed). Will it be as big as the mass support that Lula had in Brazil, along with the rest of the ‘pink tide’ in South America? Or what about the ‘Arab Spring’? Will you get the crowds of Tahrir Square?

But there have been other mass movements: Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion … and where have they gone? We need mass Marxist parties to actually lead the working class in taking power. In the CPGB we have a Draft programme. We want to convince those who see themselves as Marxists and/or communists to join us in fighting for that programme, or one amended by a mass membership.

So why bother with the Labour Party? It has a rotten leadership - is that new? But millions vote for it, many of them identify with it, it has its union affiliations - it is a site for struggle. It may have some of those communists in it - or at least potential communists. The Weekly Worker, as you may have noticed, Tony, has regular articles on the goings-on in the revolutionary left groups - not to take cheap shots, but in the hope that more and more comrades will join the struggle for a mass Marxist party.

Jim Nelson
email

Jihadism

While I agree with Yassamine Mather’s statement that Islam as such is not the reason for jihadism (‘Bitter fruit of imperialism’, November 4), I would like to have her explain the fact that this sort of international terrorism is not practised by people from other ethnic/religious communities, notwithstanding the fact that they too may have experienced and are experiencing the catastrophic onslaught of imperialism.

Could it be that what is special is the fact that Muslims see themselves as the heirs of a great civilisation, which has lost out to the imperialist (‘Christian’) west, and that this fact, in addition to all economic hardship, is a deeply felt affront against these people’s sense of pride?

A Holberg
Bonn

Restore profs

Count the spoons whenever anyone says ‘woke’ - they are probably going to do the opposite of what they are saying, if they are not already doing it.

Is the government going to create a position for professor Kathleen Stock? Or are one or more peers or backbench MPs going to offer her a professorial fellowship in their offices, with a remit to carry on doing what she has been doing? It might have to be called something else officially, but the pay would be as near as possible to her previous rate, and she would enjoy the closest thing to academic freedom that the rules would allow. Is that going to happen? Well, there you are then.

The same applies to supposedly pro-Palestinian parliamentarians, and to ostensible opponents of the neoconservatives’ pro-Wahhabi war in Syria. The University of Bristol’s own lawyer found that professor David Miller had no case to answer, yet he is still out of his job. Where is his professorial fellowship in parliament?

There are a lot of by-elections coming up. At least one of them needs to be won by a candidate who promises to restore both professor Stock and professor Miller to their proper eminence.

David Lindsay
Durham