Our friend D.H., who last week called attention to a magazine article
written in 1968 by a former Chase Manhattan Bank economist, Michael Hudson,
amid the collapse of the London Gold Pool, showing how control of the gold
price was the primary mechanism of imperialism --
http://www.gata.org/node/15147
-- has located another magazine article from that time, an article
possibly of even more interest because of its direct connection to
international political rivalry.
The second article was published in the April 1968 edition of The Labour
Monthly, the de-facto organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and
written by the monthly's editor, the international Communist agent Rajani
Palme Dutt:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajani_Palme_Dutt
Dutt recognized what the central banks and foreign offices of the Western
powers themselves recognized, though the latter certainly didn't want to
acknowledge it in public, only in private, as, for example here:
http://www.gata.org/node/13310
That is, they all recognized that maintenance of the imperial currency,
the U.S. dollar, required suppressing the price of its main potential
competitor, gold, and pushing it out of the world financial system.
In his "Notes of the Month" column in The Labour Monthly's April
1968 issue Dutt wrote:
"In the Notes of December 1966, under the title 'Deflation,
Devaluation, and Damnation,' we anticipated that the present stage of the
developing crisis of capitalism would not necessarily repeat the forms of
1929-31, since modern capitalism, through the further fulfillment of its laws
of motion already laid bare by Marx and by Lenin in terms of the specific
conditions of successive preceding periods, had reached to forms going beyond
the concrete conditions of those preceding periods.
"On the basis of the concrete conditions of world capitalism in its
present phase we offered the prediction that the next stage of its developing
crisis would be likely to break out in the first place on the question of
gold, the attempted replacement of gold by the dollar through the
artificially imposed maintenance of a low price of gold, and the consequent
prospective crash of this unstable system, which would lay bare all the
contradictions and once again reveal the basic role of gold in the economy of
capitalism."
And then quoting from his commentary of two years earlier, Dutt wrote:
"There is no more vivid expression of the general crisis of
capitalism in the economic sphere than the collapse of the old pre-1914 gold
standard -- for the present 'gold exchange standard' is a very different
system, manipulated by the most powerful finance-capitalist interests,
dominantly American; thinly concealing the ceaseless battle, alongside
cooperation, of the currencies of the rival imperialist blocs, of the dollar,
sterling, the franc, and the mark; and only revealing in the last analysis,
when the chips are down, the ultimate basis still in gold as the final
measure of value."
Of course Dutt's communism turned out to be an even less satisfactory system
of totalitarian governance than the form of capitalism he criticized, in
large part because it lacked subtlety and was too easily understood and thus
too easily seen as responsible. The system could rule only with its guns
drawn.
For the Western financial and governing class, the wonderful thing about
gold price suppression and currency market rigging is that hardly anyone
can figure them out and so the governing system's guns don't always have to
be drawn.
But GATA is working on that, and the evidence is that the top levels of
the remaining quasi-communist powers, Russia and China, have figured
out gold price suppression and currency market rigging for some years now and
are accumulating gold in preparation for busting the Western imperial system.
When will this overthrow take place? GATA has no idea. With its meager
resources GATA merely rummages through the traces left by the contending
powers in the hope of hastening the day. In pursuit of that objective your
secretary/treasurer will embark tomorrow on what the great Oz called "a
hazardous and technically unexplainable journey into the outer
stratosphere," so these dispatches may be a bit irregular for a while.
In the meantime, the April 1968 Labour Monthly's commentary, "Gold
Crisis," is posted in PDF format at GATA's Internet site to show that
the current struggle is actually pretty old and enduring:
http://www.gata.org/files/LabourMonthlyOnGoldApril1968.pdf
