Recent weeks have been quite extraordinary in terms of financial meltdown. Witness the nationalisation of banks in America and the UK and across the rest of Europe. Witness the bare ars*ed hypocrisy of pundits who have proclaimed the glories of the market for the past three decades only to squeal very loudly that state intervention is needed to save the banking system.

Make no mistake; those who got super rich by all the double dealing and dodgy trading and credit based on fresh air have retained their fantastic wealth. The people who will pay for this of course will be us - either through cuts in public spending, tax rises, energy price rises, bank rates going up - whatever. The banks want their money and we’re more likely to pay for this than hedge fund managers. 

Just remember back to a few months ago when the NHS was in ‘crisis’ - there was a lot of finger wagging by politicians, a lot of puerile moralising about balancing budgets, no blank cheques, efficiencies…blah blah blah. How much did the NHS ‘owe’? About £520 million. Yes; a fraction - a mere fraction of what the banks have already received. Was there talk about writing that debt off? Of course not. 

One of the other issues this throws up is where exactly is the information age in all of this? Surely the control of information should have prevented so much malarkey rotting the system from within? It seems odd that no less a person than Gordon Brown claims to be ignorant of the sharp practices that have caused such pain in the markets. However, help may be at hand.

Reports are circulating on the internet today of the government’s plans to spend £12 billion on a huge database that will ’scan every call, text and email’. Now is this possible? And if it is, surely the place to pilot and test this would be in the City of London - surely then if the banking crises is partly the result of dodgy dealing then someone in Scotland Yard - or perhaps the Bank of England - or even Alaister Darling - could be listening to the trading floor all day with a pair of headphones. Ha! There’s a bit of short selling on Northern Rock..ah! now there’s talk in the pub about shafting HBOS…oooh…naughty traders are planning to drive down the shares of Bradford and Bingley. 

This whole scheme could actually pay for itself - the £12 billion could soon be re-couped through savings that would be made by not having to use public money to bail out the financiers. Because they wouldn’t be able to wreck such havoc in the first place. 

Except this is about more than information. This isn’t just because the information was weak, or wrong, or even fraudulent. It’s to do with the creation and destruction of value and the categories outlined in Volume of Das Capital. It is a crisis of production as much as of banking. It’s a very reformist notion that somehow lesser or greater inputs of information - or in this case (public) money - can sort this out in the short or even medium term. It has also dented the dominant ideology; a much more complex mix of information, knowledge, ideas and experience. How this all develops is speculation; but these are events of potentially great significance - in terms of ruling classes, working classes and struggles between the two.