Capitalism, in basic terms, means that capital is more valuable than the workers who produce the wealth in which it trades. This means that, during the periodic crises that capitalism faces, government resources will be spent on shoring up investments by shareholders, bailing out banks from their speculations, subsidising failing corporations with public funds, introducing laws that maintain the value of commodities above their fallen market value, artificially holding up the strength of a given currency, and all the other measures taken by governments to try to protect capital investments and financial markets from collapse, while workers will be abandoned to unemployment, homelessness and poverty.
This can only be done following the formal declaration by the government of a national or even an international ‘emergency’. At this point, the state interference in markets from which so-called free-market capitalists demand to be freed is equally loudly demanded from them. This means that the state — which is to say, the various apparatus by which the wealth produced by the labour of the workers is extracted as both surplus value in production and in a myriad of taxes on consumption — writes out a blank cheque to capitalists, to be cashed until such time as their losses are fully recuperated, and at whatever the cost to the workers who will pay it.
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Wessex Solidarity 
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