Once again we see laid bare the true face of capitalist power. Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, has stood before a gathering of Britain’s private equity fatcats and promised to sweep aside what remains of state regulation. She has already sacked the chair of the Competition and Markets Authority, shut down the Payments Regulator, and curtailed the Financial Ombudsman Service. Now she declares that more regulators will follow. These words are not meant for the workers, who endure low wages, exploitation, and the destruction of their communities; they are meant for the financiers, the parasites who live from the toil of others.
What is regulation? In a capitalist state, it is not the rule of the workers over the capitalists, it is but a fragile brake upon the greediest appetites of monopoly capital. Even these modest constraints — the Competition and Markets Authority, the environmental bodies such as the Environment Agency and Natural England — are intolerable to finance capital in its present crisis. Reeves insists that regulators are a “boot on the neck” of business. The capitalists demand unlimited freedom, but freedom only for themselves: freedom to raise rents, freedom to pollute rivers, freedom to squeeze the worker dry and cast them aside.
When Reeves proclaims that regulators are strangling enterprise, she reveals the inverted reality of capitalist rule. It is not business that suffers the boot, but the working masses, whose labour produces all wealth and yet who are treated as expendable. The capitalists complain of being suffocated while they choke the very life from the people.
The capitalist state, as we always stress, is an instrument of class domination. Reeves’ government now openly demonstrates its function as the management committee of finance capital. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is being “reoriented” to promote growth, which in practice means ensuring that developers and speculators receive a free hand. Even the Financial Conduct Authority is being pressed to subordinate its supervisory work to the demands of “growth,” with Reeves praising its chief executive for compliance. To dissolve regulators is not to “free” society, it is to dismantle even the flimsy protections that shield workers, tenants, and nature itself from capitalist plundering.
Here the class interest is transparent: capital seeks to deepen exploitation and remove obstacles to profit. The workers’ interest is just as clear: to resist, to expose the falsehood that “growth” under capitalism means general prosperity. For the worker, capitalist growth means longer hours, higher rents, poisoned air, and the erosion of all collective safeguards.
Thus we must draw the lesson. The question is not one of “better regulation” under capitalism. The question is one of power: who rules? So long as finance capital commands the state, the state will dismantle every obstacle to its tyranny. Only when the workers seize power, destroy the rule of capital, and construct a socialist order will regulation cease to be a mask for class robbery and become instead the conscious planning of the economy in the interests of the many, not the few.
