 Just to start off with, if you're looking for investment advice, sadly I don't have anything because the nature of this talk is going to be on speculation and what exactly it is and why it's happening in this epoch because what we've seen in recent years is an increasing tendency for capitalism to indulge in these orgies of speculation which have really reached unprecedented levels. Last year, 2021 was the most speculative year in the history of capitalism. During the pandemic, the amount of money invested in crypto currencies like Bitcoin went from $350 billion to $2.9 trillion within a year and in the same period, the amount of money invested in NFTs, non-frontable tokens, went from $372 million to $17 billion. This was also the year where a group of amateur reddit traders pushed the price of GameStop shares from $17 to $340, specifically in order not only to make money but to have the short-selling hedge fund owners who are betting on the demise of the company on it going down. The question is therefore why is this happening so much? Why is it happening now in this epoch? The reality of this is that all of these forms of speculation, whether it's in crypto currencies or NFTs or in the legal and respectable areas like the stock markets or the property markets, all of it reflects an underlying necessity which is the overproduction and anarchy inherent within capitalism, the contradictions which lead to its crisis. And with every speculative bubble in history, there is a crash sooner or later and many ordinary people will lose out in the process of this due to the inherent volatility and instability that comes with it. The inherent speculation is a symptom of the impasse of capitalism and how it's unable to develop the productive forces in the same way as it did in the past. In the words of Marx, at a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or with property relations within the framework which they have operated here to. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Not simply remove speculation, you can't reform it out of existence and expect to magically transform capitalism into a rational, healthy system. Speculation is an intrinsic element to capitalism. To truly do away with it, we must abolish the capitalist system itself and replace it with a rationed, planned and democratically grown economy under socialism. Now capitalism traditionally is supposed to be based on production, on the creation of new value in the economy, genuine trade and investment, development of the productive forces by which I mean the production and distribution of the necessities of life, which include science and industry. What we need to survive under capitalism is producers' commodities or sale on the markets. We need food, we need shelter, etc. These are sold to us. All new value in the economy is produced by human labour. In other words, it's created by the working class in production and not only consumer goods as well. Things like raw materials and fuel are also commodities. This is our starting point. Now what would think that the point of the capitalist system is to produce commodities? Even if you're selling them for profits, even if you try to make money, you would think that they try and produce these items and sell them. Within capitalism itself, we have productive areas of the economy which produce value and surplus value in the form of goods and services, in the form of commodities, and we also have what we call unproductive areas which do not produce new value. What these unproductive areas do is extract a slice of value created in the productive side on the economy. They're a drain. Now, for us, it's important to remember this isn't a moral judgment. For example, nurses, doctors, teachers at the public sector are of utmost importance in society. It's more, no, but they're unproductive from capitalism's perspective because they don't produce value. They don't produce surplus value. So today, you have many advanced capitalist economy, sorry, including Britain. They become parasitic. They become rentier economies. That is that they are unproductive. They're rent-seeking. They're not based primarily on commodity production and exchange, but they're based on things like the financial services sector, other unproductive areas which do not increase the wealth in society. What they do is they distribute the wealth that already exists amongst the capitalists, like a giant casino, basically, and the end result is that you have the growth of these unproductive sectors and they become a burden on the productive economy. So we talk about all of these areas like productive and unproductive areas of the economy. So why is it bad to have unproductive areas increasing to such a degree, to have an economy based mainly on financial services and other unproductive things, like speculation? To understand why this is bad and the damage it can do, we have to understand the law of value and the difference between price and value. So as I mentioned, the necessities of life are produced as commodities. And of commodities, as Joe explained in the previous economic story, they must have a use value. They must be useful in society to somebody and someone. And they must have an exchange value which is objectively measured by the amount of socially necessary labour time that has gone into its production. Now exchange value, or just value, expresses the fact that all commodities are products of human labour and this social quality is expressed through exchange on the market. If there's more socially necessary labour at a time that has gone into a commodity, its value is higher. For example, if I were to offer you a choice between a car and a pencil without stating the price of the objects, all of you would obviously choose the car because you understand the objectivity of it having a higher value. It requires more time and more skill to produce. The greater quantity and quality of raw materials are needed, etc. So profit comes from selling a commodity at its value. And of course it's formed in production itself, not in exchange, not in circulation. And the worker is not paid the full value of what they produce because the working day is made for two parts, the part where the worker produces value to cover their own subsistence and the part where surplus value is formed, value beyond what it costs to cover the wages of the worker. Now surplus value is then divided into rent, interest and profit. And of course the capital is pockets and profits, but should in theory be reinvested into profits in order to then increase production and then to make more profits in the end. So profit is quite literally the unpaid labour of the working class. And of course the capitalists, again as a starting point, should be employing human labour power in production in order to produce commodities and sell them for a profit. Now I'll return to this question shortly. In terms of the market price for a commodity, what it's sold for on the markets, this is often confused with value, but they are different, they're different things. The value of a commodity, as I mentioned, is socially necessary labour time. The price will gravitate around this value, but of course it can become divorced, the value and price can be separated due to supply and demand. If demand is high and supply is low, the price goes up. If supply is high and demand low, then prices are lower to try and attract more buyers. Now in the abstract, the cycle of capitalist production, as Marx explains it, in volume two of capital goes money, commodities, money with a dash on the end. So m, c, m dash, the dash representing extra. Now the capitalists invest money in commodity production, sells the commodity for a profit, and then ends up with more money than they started. That's m, c, m dash, basically that equation. But increasingly what you have is the capitalist faced with competition, uncertainty and oversaturated markets. They turn to making money from money itself to m to m dash, skipping out c altogether, skipping out commodity production. And this is because the point of capitalism is not actually to produce commodities, as you might think. It's to produce surplus value. They want profits. It doesn't matter actually where the profit comes from to the capitalist, whether they profit from Bitcoin investment or from commodity production, as long as they profit. So the reality is that if it's easier and quicker for a capitalist to benefit from speculation to profit from that, they will do that. Rather than bother with commodity production, buying raw materials, buying human labor power and producing for an already oversaturated market. And this is really the essence of why speculation in all its forms is so rampant today. It's because investment in real commodity production is not simply an attractive option anymore. It's not as profitable anymore. Now speculation is an attempt to undertake m to m dash, to make money from money. They're actually trying to benefit from the divorce between price and value of something. For example, you have someone that speculates what they're hoping is that tomorrow, the thing that they buy today for 10 pounds, for example, will be worth 20 pounds. Now let's say this takes place. You buy 10 pounds worth of value. Tomorrow you exchange for 20 pounds. 10 pounds of value exists still. There's no increase in the value there. But of course, the money exchanged has increased. And of course, the Macantalists, the dawn of capitalism, the vulgar bourgeois economists who followed Marx, they didn't understand this process because what they thought is that profit was being created in speculation basically, in circulation, in buying stuff for cheap and then selling it for dear. But of course, this is false. The amount of value is the same. So speculation doesn't make society any richer, basically. It doesn't increase the value that exists in the economy. And this is why rampant speculation is so harmful to the real economy. And it's not a sign of a strong and healthy, productive economy. In fact, it's a sign of weakness. It's a sign of frailty and speculation, ultimately, for this reason, is parasitic. It drains the economy. Because those who profit from speculation are quite literally siphoning off value from the productive sectors of the economy. The origin of speculation that we see worldwide today is a symptom of the global capitalist crisis. And it's many contradictions, namely that the pursuit of profits by individual capitalists through speculation and other means is entirely rational for that. It makes sense for the capitalist to maximize their profits. But the end result overall for capitalism is irrationality, it's chaos. It's a system where more and more rent and interest seekers are fighting for a slice of the value that is created in the productive economy. Now, hopefully I'll explain in the course of this discussion that this isn't a process that is confined necessarily to one country or even to one historical period of capitalism. By no means is it always and only happening in a period of crisis. So paradoxically, what initially begins as the source of enrichment for the capitalist, private property, commodity production and exchange, turns into its opposite. And production no longer becomes a viable option for them in an oversaturated market, which is dominated by major international monopolies. And so this is a natural push for the capitalist towards speculation. The surplus value that is extracted from the working class during production results in an inherent inability for the working class to consume what they produce. Workers cannot collectively buy back the value of the goods that are produced across the entire market. So the market cannot keep up with the ever-expanding push for production. You have competition between capitalists driving them forward to increase productivity to exploit the working class more. You have situations where unemployment increases, wages are pushed down further, workers are forced to compete with each other for jobs. You have panic and fear setting in when the glut of a market is realized, then commerce and trade comes to a standstill. Investment ceases, credit dries up, factories and offices are closed down, unemployment increases, and the whole of society is thrown back into stagnation. This is the essence of the capitalist crisis. Now we have modern crises, which are expressed as crises of the financial system and the money system. But of course what lies behind those things fundamentally is capitalist overproduction. And of course again, this is what propels speculation to the heights that we see today. The reality for capitalists is that they're unaware of the dynamics and the laws of their own system. They don't realize when they speculate the overall drain of the economy when everyone does the same as what they're doing. Now this process has been accelerated, I'd say in recent decades, by a vast increase in what we call fictitious capital. Now Marx described fictitious capital as the money which acts as capital, money that is looking to make more money that's not connected to any real value in the economy. Now fictitious capital is in distinction to real capital, which Marx described as value that is capable of producing more value. For example, you have a capitalist that puts 100 pounds in the bank. That capitalist has their claim to that 100 pounds secure. Only they have that 100 pounds there. But of course if a capitalist then puts 100 pounds into shares or into government bonds or to derivatives or whatever else, what you now have is a claim on future value, claim on future profits in the form of the dividend, the shares paid or the bond paid out, et cetera. This is fictitious capital. It's not real capital because it's no longer involved in the process of making new value. It's not in production anymore. And of course the share, the bond, the derivative, all of these products, they're not real value themselves, but they're traded and they're exchanged as if they are real values. Now banks themselves, they play an essential role in the capital of the system. Marx has made this clear as does the credit system. What these things do is allow the capitalist to overcome bottlenecks, overcome shortages in production and circulation. Now Marx explains in capital volume two that financial services sector, amongst other things like insurance and other things like that, it represents for the capitalist an additional cost, an additional cost of circulation which doesn't add value to a commodity but is no less essential to the process. And of course it represents an increasing cost on society as capitalism develops as it becomes more complex as access to markets becomes more and more difficult, more and more convoluted and more complicated. And of course when this class of financiers speculate as middlemen, bankers, when it grows and all of these different types of weird and wonderful financial investments increase, you have these institutions which then loan out and invest more than they actually hold in the form of deposits. The term for this is actually in bourgeois economics called fractional reserve bank. The bank only holds a certain percentage, a small percentage of the deposits in readily available cash. Now the result of this is that millions of investors all across the world in the market, they hold claims on the same units of original value which hasn't increased. When shares, bonds, other financial products exchange, they're not actual values being exchanged, they're claims of future values which might not even exist at this present point in time. But government bond for example is a claim on future taxes. This is the fictitious nature of it, it's not real. It's impossible for all of these claims to be realized at once because if that happened theoretically, then the value to back them up simply wouldn't exist, they wouldn't be able to pay. Now the expansion of fictitious capital is a method that is used by the capitalist class historically for reasons which I'll explain. Now I think an important thing to remember about speculation and all of these different types of bubbles is that there really nothing new in the history of capitalism. You know, one of the most famous examples which I'm sure many of you are familiar with was the Dutch tulip bomb. In the late 16th and 17th century in the Netherlands there was an explosion of economic growth and you had a wealthy mercantilist class beginning to merge as a result of it. Now these merchants, they sought to fraud their wealth by collecting what were then exotic flowers, tulips. Now demand shut up for the bulbs of these flowers and you had tulip manias spreading across the country and everyone, rich or poor, sought to try and profit from them to speculate. You'd have people buying the bulbs on credit with the hope of selling them on later and eventually repaying the lot of them, exactly like the stock exchange investors just before the 1929 Wall Street crash in America. Now eventually in 1637 the tulip bubble burst and the price of the bulbs came crashing down. Now speculative bubbles also do form in periods of capitalism up-swing, in periods of boom. And I think a really good example of this is just before, sorry, is during the 1846 to 47 financial crisis which actually did lay the foundations for the 1848 revolutions of class struggle which swept across Europe. Now this crisis was partly caused by railway mania which is basically when speculation took place and building of railroads. Now in the mid 1840s you had a frenzy in railway investments because you had investors piling into what was now a revolutionary form of transport, promising untapped growth and expansion. And then by 1845 you had railway investment being 7% of British GDP. And again, just like the situation today you had interest rates being lowered, you had railway stocks being made easier and easier for people to buy and it facilitated the creation of a bubble. And the value of these railway stocks were far higher than their capacity for profit-making. And what happened is that the bubble of course as all bubbles do eventually burst in the late 1840s. Many investors lost out of course but there was actually a tangible benefit in that thousands and thousands of miles of railways which were actually built and utilized productively in the economy. So the point here is that speculation can still take place in useful and productive areas like railways. It's not just crypto currencies, it's not just art and all these other things. The Wall Street crash in 1929, you'll all be familiar with that. Perhaps the best known example of a speculative bubble it triggered the world economic slump of the 30s. Now after World War I there was an explosion of fictitious capital during the war, thank you. Because of the war itself and of course in the years that followed during the we go. And this was a period of serious growth for American capitalism. But it was speculative in nature, superficial. And of course it laid the foundations for an even bigger crisis in 1929. So initially, stock markets, they serve as a way for new companies to raise funds, to expand, to attract investors to gain a piece of the company and entitlement to the future profits. But of course this stock, once you own it, is not just sort of kept and held by the capitalists. They buy and sell it as if it were a commodity in its own right with value. Even though of course it's not value, it's an entitlement to future value. Now the stock market develops in size and in complexity and there was a growing separation of the money markets from real production. The relationship between the stock markets and the real economy becomes inverted. And it no longer becomes a true representative, a direct representative of the real economy. It becomes a market for fictitious capital in and of itself, a vehicle for speculation. The capitalists become coupon clippers. They're divorced from real production. They just invest in unproductive speculation with the exception, sorry, with the expectation of receiving the average rate of profit. And because the goal of stock market speculators is to make money from the price of their investments, it doesn't matter whether the company itself is valuable, whether it's profitable, as long as the value of their assets, their holdings increases. In other words, a speculator can make money for company does well, but also they can make money for company does badly and go bankrupt. And that's what the hedge funds do when they bet against the panic, when they bet against game stock on companies going under. Now this is in short contrast to the productive capitalists who must make and sell real values, real commodities in order to financially gain. So back to the 1929 crash, you had companies expanding their profits, but of course the stock of these companies becomes inflated as a result as well. And eventually it becomes more profitable to speculate in the stock itself than to invest in a real company for the sake of a dividend return to push the company forward. And there's a vast separation of the value of the stock and the real value and profit-making ability of the companies, and it allows the speculation to run rampant basically to increase. And then of course by 1929, the system reaches limits. You have industry slowing down, there's an oversaturated market. There are several potential triggers like a regulatory investigation that took place into the overvalued shares, shares of a company called Boston Edinson, which scooped the investors on the market. But of course, whatever the incidental triggering was and it could have been many several things in combination, the underlying necessity of an economic slowdown was revealed in that crash. It caused panic and it started the mass share sell-off before rapidly spreading throughout the rest of the economy. So more recently the dot-com crash of the 2000s who had low interest rates and had cheap credit aligned for boom in these startup companies, which were taking advantage basically of the novelty of the internet, even if they had no viable business plan. You had investors throwing money into everything with dot-com in its name and you had technology shares inflated to absurd proportions before coming crashing swiftly down to earth. So what I'm trying to demonstrate here with all of these historical examples is that the fundamental dynamics of every bubble remains essentially the same. Investors pile in for whatever reason, the bubble is fueled and then all of them flood out when the bubble bursts and people lose money. In terms of the context for the current crisis, the situation that we're in now, we've basically entered into a new economic slump. Technically, we're in the session already in Britain and it's unprecedented. We're only two years after the previous crisis triggered by the pandemic and of course the current crisis we're in is in the context of the 2008 crash, which again, huge bubbles driven by speculation, particularly in housing and credit, coming crashing down. And in turn, I would say that 2008 is the result of processes that have taken place in the world economy since the 1970s. It forms the context for the booms and slumps that follow. In Britain, you had industrial production in this period being consciously destroyed by the ruling class, former nationalized industries being privatized. The service sector consciously promoted and pushed forward in emphasis on finance and legal services. Deregulation is also pursued to increase profits to make a quick book today at the expense of tomorrow, trade union rights and the conditions of the working class were also severely attacked in this period as well. Now all of this is done to restore the profitability of the capitalist system, but the problem is it's short-sighted. Rather than thinking about the fate of capitalism and the health of capitalism in the decades of following, the ruling class at the time, they decided to just make a quick book and worry about the consequences later. And I'd say that similar processes took place across Europe and in the USA as well. Now, the 1990s and the early 2000s saw a period of relative stability, relative growth, but again, it's based mainly on debts, on fictitious capital as opposed to a real boom in real commodity production and exchange. Now, as a result of all of these factors in combination with each other, we have in Britain a lopsided economy. It's sick, it's a run-to-year economy. And that's part of the reason why crises like 2008 are so devastating because so much of the economy is tied up in debt, it's tied up in speculation. Now, in terms of the 2008 crisis, you had speculation in mortgage-backed securities, of course, triggering the 2008 crash. And it's expressed, you can see, there's a financial and a monetary crisis, a credit crisis. Different crises are expressed in different ways initially, but of course, you look underneath and what you see is, of course, the crisis of overproduction. The financial system has become bloated, inflated and filled with debt precisely because the capital is sought to maximize their own profits cheaply and easily with unproductive speculation as opposed to real production. And the result of this is creation of a ticking time bomb. Now, huge amounts of taxpayer money was then used to bail out the banks and the institutions, which was then also followed cruelly by 10 years of brutal austerity, cuts to living standards. And just like what happened after the 1970s crash and just like what happened after the Great Depression as well. Now, right now, in this current period, there's an enormous property bubble taking place in China. I've been mentioned several times already over the course of the weekend. And it shares many similarities to what happened in 2008 in the crisis in the Western economies. And it's on the brink of bursting. You have property developments making up 30% of Chinese GDP. Evergrande, the largest property developer has borrowed astronomical amounts of money to fuel its developments. On the assumption that property crisis will simply keep on increasing. But of course, home sales by value is about 17% in September of last year and 19% in August of the same year. You have cases of properties being sold with 30% discounts. Hundreds of developments have been sold to investors. Many of them ordinary people being left uncompleted entirely. Despite the huge interventions, the huge Keynesian measures undertaken by the Chinese state, soon relate to this bubble will burst as it always does. Now, pension funds have been mentioned already again on the weekend. They won the brink of crisis. Now, these pensions invested heavily in what was called liability driven investments, LDIs, which are basically sold by fund managers as safe and risk free areas. They're not meant to be risky products. Except the problem is they invested heavily in these complicated financial products which do resemble the mortgage backed securities of 2008. And the assumption made by these investors was that government bonds would remain safe, that prices would remain stable, and interest rates would remain low. But that confidence plummeted. It was shattered overnight, basically. You had rates, interest rates, rising to significant levels and government bonds falling in value almost overnight. And the pension schemes were hit by margin calls to cover emergency cash and then were forced to sell their guilt holdings, which showed the price spiraling down even further. And again, I mentioned this earlier but the damning thing about this is that LDIs are supposed to be risk averse. They're supposed to be safe investments and yet they're still subject to the same volatility and risk as all speculation ultimately is under capitalism. There's no safe areas, really, if you think about it. Thank you. So what the pandemic hits in 2020, the signs of a new slump were everywhere. The pandemic only triggered the crisis. Once again, you had vast amounts of debts and credits, rock bottom interest rates and government spending was used to prop up the world economy. And a enormous amount of money was used that went straight into speculation. It went into housing. It went into the stock market, into cryptocurrency. And again, this I think is what lies behind the explosion and subsequent crash of things like Bitcoin. Now all of this Canadian spending thrown at the economy by the ruling class after 2008, it creates stability in the short term, yes. But it creates instability in the long term with speculative bubbles with inflation and it prepares an even bigger crisis for the future. And this is painfully clear, I think, when you consider that the unprecedented stimulus from the pandemic has not actually stopped us from entering into a recession less than two years afterwards. But on the other hand, of course, what you have is the Hayekians, the libertarians, who represent the other side of the same coin thinking that they can avoid crisis merely by monitoring tightly, by increasing interest rates, by cutting government spending. And what this does is provoke an immediate crisis and confrontation with the working class instead of just kicking down the can down the road like the Keynesians do. Now neither the Keynesians nor the libertarians have a solution for the working class. Neither of them are interested in preventing crisis or solving the contradictions which are inherent within capitalism. Now the expansion of financial services, the ever-increasing growth in speculation, these things are direct products of how the ruling class has attempted to get out of each crisis through debt, through credits, things like quantitative easing and government-driven stimulus packages. Now as each crisis becomes more and more acute, the bubbles become more and more absurd. And this of course is in a period where vast amounts of the real economy and lockdown, for example, was frozen. All of the money pumped in, $10 trillion I think in the space of two months alone during the pandemic, all of these things, much of it went into direct, sorry, directly into the hands of workers through stimulus checks, through furlough schemes. And of course, all of these recipients of that money put it into the only viable profit-making area at the time, which is speculation. And of course, many ordinary people were amongst those who put their earnings and savings into stocks and shares and cryptocurrency. In fact, many of these people were laid off workers who turned to amateur trading in order to make a living. Even outside of the conditions created by the pandemic, there is so much chaos and uncertainty in the real economy that the capitalists still prefer speculation to real investment because the most profitable sectors of the real economy remain dominated by giant monopolies, many of which profiteer from scarcity like the fossil fuel industry, for example. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and NFTs are no different to any other kind of bubble. Normal currencies are backed by central banks and backed by governments. But crypto is decentralized. It's not controlled by any one person. And the Bitcoin network is maintained by volunteers who receive Bitcoin in return for maintaining the network. And all Bitcoin transactions are maintained by the blockchain, which is a digital ledger which provides records of transactions. Now, cryptocurrency fanatics can talk as much as they want about the future of money on all of these things, the potential. But at the end of the day, the only reason anyone invests in cryptocurrency is to make money, is to speculate and to make profits. And the price of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies is incredibly volatile. They rise and fall as much as 50% in a matter of hours which makes them completely unsuitable as a means of exchange and as a store of value. Sorry, Bitcoin and other crypto currencies also have no inherent value in themselves because of course they're not products of socially necessary labor. So they're not backed by any real value in the economy. And so they can never be a viable currency under capitalism. But of course the thing about capitalism which is so incredible is that because commodity's production and exchange dominate society, these relations are so ingrained in society, literally anything can be bought or sold as if it were a genuine commodity, whether it has value or not. And this is what Marx called commodity fetishism. The idea that the economy appears to us as relations between items and things, but actually there are social relations, relations between real people. And of course the point that crypto currency will never be viable as the currency was demonstrated I think by the various crashes and bubbles which have repeatedly taken place over the past few years. And it's also the same story for NFTs. There's craze around non-fungible tokens. Now when we say NFT, most people think digital art but of course the NFTs are not the artwork itself. They're not the asset connected to them. It's a unique digital token that is stored on the blockchain. It's a digital certificate of ownership which doesn't control the asset in any way but what it represents is an attempt to introduce artificial scarcity into the digital world because of both images, files, data, all of these things can be instantly transferred and replicated on computers with zero labor at the click of a mouse in fact. Now the buyers of the NFTs are hoping that they appreciate in value due to their one-off nature. The art itself, most of which is terrible, that's irrelevant. The reality is that most of the arts around NFTs is juvenile, it's disgusting, it's horrible. But of course, it's not about the art. The NFTs are designed for speculation and profit making with buying and selling in mind. It's almost like a science effect that they're connected to these artworks. And capitalism, if you look at its history, always seeks to find unique items that can be bought and sold for speculation. So there's nothing new really in this sense about NFTs. What marks them out, I'd say, is unique is the fact that they've been designed to artificially generate scarcity where it shouldn't exist at all. Millions and millions have been spent on NFTs and the artwork is of course atrocious but for me that is just an indication of the rottenness of the capitalist system that this is the sort of level of speculation that exists today. Now the stock market is perceived as at least being in some way linked to the real economy but the link is so distorted that it doesn't provide a real accurate reflection of economic growth. Tesla, Elon Musk's company, is vastly overvalued in its shares. The 2021 valuation would imply that it owns 118% of the electronic vehicle markets which require about 31 million sales a year. Last year it sold 308,000 cars. So we have to draw some general conclusion I think from the various examples of speculation that are outlined. And the overall point I think to make is that speculative bubbles in whatever form they come, they're an inherent feature of capitalism which is driven by profits. It's irrelevant that shoe lips have value although Bitcoin does not or that the art attached to NFTs is bad because the reason for bubbles forming in the first place is the need to make profits. Speculation is not just confined to socially useless things like Bitcoin or company stocks but speculation permeates the entire capitalist system and it affects even necessities as well. You have speculation in food prices causing wild swings in price that can raise food for ordinary workers across the world. You have speculation in land, in currencies, power speculators and one of the biggest is housing because of course that's an absolute necessity for workers and yet speculation adds to the shortage of affordable housing stock which is driven beyond the needs of ordinary, the reach of ordinary workers. None of these examples which I've mentioned have anything useful to give to society. None of it enriches society in any way. All of it's there to make profit at the expense of someone else. Now all of these examples I would say demonstrates what is an underlying necessity and that is the anarchy of the capitalist mode of production where society is subjected to blind market forces, instability and crisis. And of course crisis is the product of what is completely rational for the individual capitalist which is investments in areas which make easy profits. And if all capitalists follow this path the result is what we have today, instability and chaos. We see the bubbles and crypto currencies, NFTs and the property giants like Evergrande and all of these volatile bubbles. They're all hard bringer of the new world slump which lies ahead just like they were in 2008 and in 1929. I'll try and bring things closer but all of this money that is going into speculation instead of real production is not without consequence. And the serious members of the bourgeois class do realize this and they're afraid of it. No one, Smith of Bloomberg said the following. It's not just a tech or a unicorn bubble. We're in everything bubble. Valuations across the board are simply too high. What happens when China's housing and stock market bubbles crash? What happens when the Federal Reserve raises interest rates? We've entered into a new economic crisis following devastating drops in the value of various forms of speculative investments but there are more shocks coming. The vastly inflated property market will be hit very soon as interest rates increase to tackle inflation. An increase in the cost of borrowing, of course, will further damage an already weak and inflating world economy. And all of this speculation and debt creates a volatile mix which can combust at any point in time. And of course I'd say we can expect more speculation and more manpower to come. As the capitalists desperately go from one thing to another to try and protect their wealth. The reformists are wrong when they say you can just remove speculation or reform it away and restore a nice possible system. No such form of capitalism ever existed. It's a complete utopian illusion. Capitalism is so bloated and contradictory that it can't develop the productive forces anymore without dealing itself with multiple blows and ever increasing amounts of capitalists fight each other for a slice of wealth made by the working class internationally. The reality is that capitalism itself must be abolished if we're gonna see an end to this speculation but also to the crisis, the inequality and the chaos that's inherent within it. By nationalizing the commanding heights of the economy under workers control, we can utilize all the productive forces worldwide for the good of society. We can nationalize and merge the big banks and financial institutions which are the arteries of the capital system at the moment. We can then use the vast amounts of capital that they have and put it directly into building and production in the nationalized economy. We will then use the financial and the technological resources to end climate change, to feed the world 10 times over and to finally provide a good standard of living for everyone. And all of the money that has gone into speculation can be used to fund the NHS, to pay for free education, to undertake a mass house building and infrastructure program which doesn't exist under capitalism. And of course, all of this will be paid for by expropriating the billionaire capitalists who hold their wealth and speculate wealth that they didn't produce themselves. And capitalism now has ultimately become a barrier to the further developments of society and therefore it has to be replaced with socialism which is a higher stage based on conscious planning of the economy. And only then will we no longer be subject to the blind economic forces to the anarchy of the market that we can have control over our lives, over our destinies. And this is ultimately what Marxism is all about and what socialist appeal and the international Marxist tendency are fighting for. So I urge any of you who agree with the ideas that I outlined today, who agree with the discussions you've heard so far, if you haven't already done so please, seriously you consider joining socialist appeal on the INT and help us in the revolutionary fight to build a fair and equitable society free from the swindling and the gambling and speculation of the casino capitalism.