Once again, Simon Jenkins has made a complete wally of himself. Not content to become an apologist for Imperial Britain, he now turns his bourgeois attention to belittling the anti-capitalist protesters springing up in over 900 cities across the globe. Jenkins may play a useful role in protecting endangered castles and aristocratic homes via his exalted position in the National Trust, but he really ought not to dabble in more contemporary matters. And by contemporary matters I refer to any of the political tussles between the two great competing socio-economic classes that have at once simmered and raged over the past five hundred years that historic struggle between the capitalist bourgeoisie and the natural antithesis to that great class the global proletariat. Leave it alone Mr Jenkins because clearly you just don’t get it.

This is what the learned Mr Jenkins has to say of the growing street vanguard against capitalist greed:

Street protest against capitalism appears to have nowhere to go. The rioters of Athens and Madrid, the marchers of Milan and Frankfurt, the squatters of London and New York can grab a headline and illustrate a story, but then what? With no leaders, no policies, no programme beyond opposition to the status quo, they must just sink into the urban background. The Guardian 21/10/11

Jenkins continues throughout the rest of his Guardian Comment page demeaning and decrying the efforts of the street demonstrations and encampments. But he totally misses the point. After five thousand years of class society and more specifically, after five hundred years of capitalist expansion, it is becoming glaringly obvious that we can no longer continue to organise our planet along such grotesquely inhumane and unequal parameters. Planet Earth will soon be home to some ten billion inhabitants, the vast majority of whom will not be able to take clean drinking water or basic sanitation for granted. Hunger is already endemic across vast swathes of the globe and despite a rapidly growing technological capacity, capitalism has proved unable to distribute the fruits of human ingenuity and graft. Put simply, the rich are getting obscenely richer and the rest are left to scramble for crumbs. The street protesters get all this but I’m not convinced our Mr Jenkins does.

Mr Jenkins bemoans the fact that the protesters have no leaders and no programme. That is not important at this point in time. The protesters are making a clear statement that capitalism has reached the end of its creative remit. Industrial capitalism has given way to a parasitic finance capitalism. It has become a block on human progress. The planet needs something more collective, more egalitarian, more socially cohesive. Ten billion citizens will increasingly demand something more rational. The anti-capitalist street protests are in the vanguard of that demand. Even if this current movement quickly evaporates, as our Mr Jenkins predicts, it will return again and again in different forms and in different locations. Karl Marx was quite adamant on this point. Humans will keep returning to unresolved crises until a resolution is reached or the contenting classes destroy themselves in the process. That is a sobering thought for all of us.