SOMETIMES the class enemy see further than we do. Or, to put it another way, Daily Telegraph writers point out things that the left is silent about, but would do well to attend to.

It was thus when the paper’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard took the left, or most of it, to task for opposing Brexit, when the European Union would surely obstruct the implementation of any socialist programme in Britain.

So too this week when columnist Tim Stanley observed that the forces which derailed the implementation of Liz Truss’s turbo-charged neoliberalism would “if we got a Labour leader who was a genuine socialist … destroy a left-wing agenda, too.”

He is right. Of course, it is absurd for the embittered Truss to claim that her agenda was undone by a “left-wing economic establishment.”

The establishment is, in fact, programmed to stabilise capitalism, ensuring its social reproduction and the smoothest possible functioning of capital accumulation.

To that end it will sometimes forgo profit to maintain class power and act to prevent capital’s blind accumulative urge from upsetting the systemic apple cart.

The decisive blow against Truss was dealt by the markets, which began pricing British government debt at destabilising interest rates on the assumption that the economy was being directed by morons.

In turn that forced the elite — Stanley fingers the BBC and the Civil Service in particular, but the decisive political actors were in the Tory Party  — to bring an end to Trussism double quick.

Of course, ideological free marketeers being laid low by the operation of the market was a treat for connoisseurs of irony.

But such extra-parliamentary power would, as Stanley points out, also have operated against a Corbyn government with full force. 

Its programme, however much of a democratic endorsement it had received, would have been held hostage by the bond markets who, as another Telegraph journalist observed at the height of the Truss crisis, are just “children chasing money.”

Would democracy have permitted such hostage-taking? We can be fairly certain that a Corbyn administration would have been riven between appeasers and intransigents on that point. 

No need to guess where the BBC and the Civil Service hierarchy would have stood. Not to mention those parts of the establishment that go about their business in uniform, or at dead of night.

Any future left government will likely face the same problem. However, no such government is presently in prospect, since the official opposition is now very much in the hands of the uniformed and the nocturnal operatives, behind the tailor’s dummy who purportedly leads it.

Notwithstanding, British capitalism is more enmired in crisis than any other. The IMF warns that the economy will perform worse than any other major country. It will be in recession when even sanctions-beset Russia manages some degree of growth.

As a generalisation, capitalist crisis is inherent in the subordination of the production of use values to the production of surplus value. This finds expression in an imposing range of problems, including overproduction, underconsumption and a falling rate of profit.

Marxists argue endlessly about the roots of capitalist crisis and what weight is to be given to the several factors. Of course, not all crises come dressed in the same raiment.

The 2008 crash was rooted in too much capital chasing too few profitable outlets, and the epic creation of fictitious capital.  

Marx’s formula of M-C-M' was reproduced with the C missing — money creating more money without any intervention in the production process, instead appropriating value already reproduced elsewhere. 

In Britain, Andrew Tyrie was tasked with cleaning up the banking industry’s act after the crash. He is now a Tory member of the House of Lords, as a reward for a job well done.

He announced last week that there is a fresh “crisis in capitalism,” being well-placed to recognise one, we can assume.

In his own words: “We have widespread public dissatisfaction with capitalism. People feel alienated, they feel they live in a rip-off economy, and it’s run for others not them.”

His lordship has a particular villain in his sights — the regulators who are supposed to tame the wildest spirits of capital in various key sectors in the public interest. 

Starmerites still tout them as an alternative to public ownership of the energy and water industries. Let Lord Tyrie disabuse them of their illusions: “Hardly any of them have done enough. Regulatory failure has contributed to the crisis in capitalism, both in the UK and in other countries.”

Regulators, he explained, have been “captured” by the businesses they are supposed to oversee. While Tyrie would not use such language, they are fully part of the apparatus of monopoly capitalism.

Corporate-friendly regulation, exemplified in soaring profits for energy firms while working people shiver in the cold and small businesses shut down, is indeed part of the problem. It does not exhaust it, however.

A large part of Britain’s malaise is the persistence of the pursuit of short-term profit over long-term investment.  

Neither capitalists nor the capitalist state seem capable of the latter. International research rates the quality of British management as about the worst.

This, 50 years after the Thatcher government campaigned to restore “management’s right to manage.”

As an initiative to re-establish what they regarded as the natural social hierarchy, it worked. As a plan to improve the British economy it has manifestly failed. 

State leadership is no better. The top Treasury civil servant at the time of the crash, Nick Macpherson, subsequently owned up to “a monumental collective intellectual error” in failing to see the crisis coming.
 
Even competence, should it put in an appearance, couldn’t cure capitalism of course. And I think they are smart enough to know they are in trouble.

So, let’s pay attention. If Tory writers tell us that public bodies are not neutral arbiters of our affairs, believe them.  

And if bourgeois specialists in crisis management advise that Britain is in the midst of one, then buckle up. It will be as bumpy as we make it.