INFLATION is today what it has always been – a device for attacking the living standards of working people, ensuring that real incomes fail to keep up with the impact of a depreciating currency. 

Wage earners and retired workers, whose income depends entirely on monetary values, are always the hardest hit by this depreciation. Workers cannot transfer their wealth into more stable stores of value, whether it be gold, works of art or landed property. 

Inflation is therefore a front in the class struggle. It is a means of transferring wealth from the working class to the employing class, by creating a disjuncture between nominal and real currency values. 

Workers can, through their trade unions, counteract this by ensuring that real wages maintain their value, by rising at a level symmetrical with the devaluation of the currency.  This was done with some success in the 1970s, when the trade union movement was very powerful in many sectors of the economy. 

Then, the state intervened to set national pay norms, after a façade of consultation, which ensured that as inflation fell nominal wages still rose by a lesser amount. Since trade union power impeded measures to raise the rate of exploitation in the workplace, political action was essential to give capital breathing space. 

Today, inflation is back with a vengeance. There are differences with the 1970s, however.  

Firstly, today’s rise in prices comes against a background of more than a decade of stagnation in real wage rates. 

Working Britain has not had a pay rise of any substance since the crash of 2008. Successive disruptions to the world economy have left millions of families dependent on credit to maintain living standards. Only the bourgeoisie and sections of the upper salariat have been able to contemplate real improvements over this period. 

The slack has scarcely been picked up by state expenditure, since the Tories have only lately started to tiptoe away from the savage austerity measures imposed by the Cameron-Clegg coalition and subsequently. 

The strength of the trade union movement of the 1970s was broken by a combination of repressive legislation and, particularly, mass unemployment. Unemployment is at a low level today, but trade unions are scarcely a force in too many industries. 

Instead we have a much-touted “flexible labour market”, with millions driven into marginal and insecure employment with limited scope for organised resistance of employer exploitation. However, this has not helped the British economy become more productive – its growth rate remains anaemic to say the least.  

So here we have a novelty – rising inflation in a contracting economy that cannot, even by the most demented capitalist columnist, be blamed on trade union militancy or the “greedy workers” beloved of Thatcher-era tabloids.   

It is instead an expression of the crisis of an unbalanced capitalist economy which can only create the space for accelerated accumulation by diminishing still further the share of national production accruing to labour in wages or social benefits. 

This is a volatile situation. The erudite Financial Times sage Martin Wolf wrote recently that “high inflation and falling incomes are a particularly noxious combination. Upheaval will follow.” 

Perhaps we are seeing the early signs of that. The TUC has organised its first demonstration for some years on this Saturday, the 18th. It is good that is has done so, and it is even better that railway workers are planning strike action to protect their jobs and incomes.   

Unite the union, too, seems to be fighting and winning a number of less high profile disputes across industry. It may not be the 1970s, but it is not the noughties either. 

The ruling class is responding. The Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, warns that it is wrong to try and ensure that wages keep pace with prices. 

And ministers, having got over their hypocritical fit of the vapours when ferry firm P&O unlawfully sacked their union workforce and replaced them with agency labour, now propose to change the law to allow all employers to do the same thing.

Proper upheaval therefore requires a political strategy alongside an industrial one.

The law matters. It does not matter as much as organised power on the shopfloor, but politics is the only means of generalising that power into a social force able to challenge the cabinet and the Baileys, as well as bad bosses. 

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Boris Johnson barely survived a no-confidence vote by his own MPs. He has presided over a chronically mishandled coronavirus response, shocked the country with his pandemic partying and is caught in a cost-of-living crisis that he hasn’t got a clue how to handle.   

His only response to all of this is to dream up demagogic right-wing stunts to appease his more neanderthal backbenchers. 

Yet a poll published at the weekend showed that the public believe he is a better bet as Prime Minister than Keir Starmer. 

OK, it’s only one poll.  Maybe winning back Wakefield in the forthcoming by-election, a seat only lost by Labour in 2019 because of the Brexit flip-flop masterminded by Starmer, will put a better gloss on things. 

But if the Tories eventually trade out Johnson for someone more conventional and more competent, then Starmer’s only perceived advantages over the incumbent will have been negated. Since he is, at this writing, under investigation by both the police and the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner his ethical edge over the amoral Johnson seems attenuated too. 

It is beyond clear that Labour has a chronic problem with the politically pallid policeman in charge.  If the Labour left isn’t giving serious thought as to how to bring the Starmer leadership to an end, it too is failing working people. 

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Yesterday’s report on the anti-Blair protest at Windsor has given rise to some confusion. Let me reassure readers I am not a Labour MP. I have begged Keir Starmer to find me a safe seat but he hasn’t got back to me. He must have run my name past Paul Mason…