The year 2013 ended with the share price index of the 100 largest companies listed in the City, the so-called FTSE 100, just a fraction of a percentage point under its highest point ever. And 2014 began with this index rising again, with experts predicting that it will soon reach an all-time high.
The last time the FTSE 100 reached such a level was way before the 2008 banking collapse - on 30th December 1999, when the mad speculation of the "New Technology" craze was going full-steam ahead. We all know what came afterwards: it all ended in tears. Share prices dropped by nearly 50% over the next three years before rising to another peak in November 2007 and nosediving again as a result of the present crisis.
Today, the banking system remains crippled, feeding on a public-funded lifeline, while investments are way below their pre-crisis level. The crisis is definitely not over. Yet, the capitalists' gambling machine is running wild again, as if there was no crisis, threatening the economy with yet another crisis within the crisis. So what is really going on?
Record capitalist looting
Of course, there is an element of speculation in this frenzy - the same companies which won't invest in the economy use their stockpiles of cash to gamble on the stock market and make neat profits.
But speculation as such cannot explain everything. The capitalists can also work out their sums. Since 2009, the total amount of dividends paid by companies to shareholders has increased by over 10% a year, on average. In 2014, it is predicted to reach an all-time high of £102bn - a 28% increase over 2013! So, yes, a capitalist class which never looks beyond its own short-term profits has every reason to feel optimistic about its future - even if it's really groping in the dark!
Regardless of the crisis - or rather, thanks to it - capitalist profit-making has been steaming ahead. The bosses have never had it so good, because they have been able to use the crisis as an efffective weapon in their class war against workers and to step up their looting of the economy, as never before.
They've used the rise in unemployment as an instrument of blackmail, to squeeze the standard of living and conditions of the working class. At the same time, their politicians - both ConDem and Labour - have been bending over backwards to find new ways to divert a growing share of public funds towards the coffers of their capitalist masters. The on-going rolling back of the welfare system, cuts in services and the state's increasing handouts and tax breaks to the bosses illustrate this.
It is this increasing parasitism of the capitalists on the economy - and on the working class - which feeds the growth of their profits in the middle of the longest world economic crisis to date.
Defending working class interests
But if the capitalists were so successful in using the crisis to their advantage, it's because the parties and leaders who claimed to represent workers' interests have abdicated their responsibilities.
Miliband's party may still call itself "Labour". But while relying on working class votes, it has long been an instrument of the capitalist class. Its role in promoting the casualisation of Labour under Blair and then its bailout of the bankers, are there to expose its real nature.
As to the union leaders, the response of TUC leader, Frances O'Grady, to the capitulation of the Unite leadership in the Grangemouth dispute, last October, speaks volumes. In an interview with the Guardian, she stated that the only problem in this dispute was the support given by the government to the refinery's owner, Ineos. As if past Labour governments had ever supported workers taking action against their employers!
Nevertheless, this was all O'Grady had to offer when she said: "We cannot organise company by company and ... we cannot fight alone. We need a much bigger campaign that is supported by civic society and a government that recognises that the balance of power has gone too far against workers." In other words, her only proposal is for workers to vote Labour in 2015 and, until then, to keep their heads down during the bosses' attacks!
Well, in fact, experience shows us that the last thing workers can do is to rely on politicians like Miliband to defend their interests - whether they are in opposition or in office. O'Grady only got one thing right, although that's not really what she meant - that working class cannot just organise company by company, because in the face of the capitalists' all-out offensive, it will need all its collective strength to stop them and to start regaining the ground lost. And that is the only possible way of turning the tide.