19.02.2009

Fighting Fund

Greedy bankers

Oh dear. Directors of the part-government-owned Royal Bank of Scotland won’t be allowed to keep the huge bonuses they had earmarked for themselves after chancellor Alistair Darling stepped in.

Despite receiving a £20 billion bail-out last year, RBS still intended to hand out £1 billion to staff at all levels. Of course, for those at the bottom, the so-called ‘bonuses’ are actually an essential part of their pitifully low pay, but for top managers and directors, they are a way of creaming off a share of the expected profits that banks rake in during normal times.

We communists have no love for these fat cats. However, neither do we single them out for special opprobrium - it is not the individual bankers who caused the economic crisis any more than individual capitalists or government ministers can personally be blamed for it. To point the finger at ‘greedy bankers’ (or any other section of the ruling class) is actually to exonerate the system which the entire establishment presides over and defends.

The RBS directors may well feel hard done by - it must be galling to see such an important source of income suddenly dry up. But unlike them the Weekly Worker always has to fight for every pound we get. We depend not on skimming off some of the surplus value created by productive labour, but on the conscious solidarity of our readers and supporters.

Pride of place among them this week is comrade AM for her £100 standing order. Then there is £60 from comrade TR, £50 from PK and £25 from HD. Thanks too to TT (one of 20,271 online readers last week), who contributed £20 via PayPal. In all we received £306 over the last seven days - which increased our February fighting fund total to £699.

But we need £1,000 every month with just over a week to go. I know that few if any our readers will be on RBS executive levels of income, but every little counts. Where they have their millions of pounds we have our tens of thousands of readers. So even a few pounds each would make a real difference. And its in the interests of the millions and the billions who live on this planet. After all, the Weekly Worker plays a unique role in the fight for the kind of party needed to make possible the supersession of the entire system of capital - greedy bankers included.