Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, I – Historical - Part 9

In short, a parliamentary road to socialism is impossible, a dangerous delusion. But, that's not just the case in relation to socialism. The ambitions of the petty-bourgeoisie, as represented by Brexit, Trump, et al, also, threaten the interests of the ruling-class, which is why its state, what the Trumpists call “the deep state”, has acted to limit that damage by whatever means it could. We can only assume, in current conditions, that were Starmer (written before my prediction of the Blair-Right counter-coup was fulfilled) replaced by Farage, who would be forced, having presented his betrayal narrative, to even more extreme and irrational measures, that the capitalist state would be led, itself, to resort to even more drastic measures to constrain him, and the damage he might do.

“Saint-Simon showed the same superiority over his contemporaries, when in 1814, immediately after the entry of the allies into Paris, and again in 1815, during the Hundred Days’ War, he proclaimed the alliance of France with England, and then of both these countries with Germany, as the only guarantee for the prosperous development and peace of Europe. To preach an alliance with the victors of Waterloo to the French in 1815 undoubtedly required somewhat more courage than to declare a war of tittle-tattle on German professors.” (p 333)

The last sentence refers to Duhring's conflict with other professors at Berlin University, as referenced earlier. Unfortunately, the rapidly rising power of Germany, by the end of the 19th century, meeting the established power of France and Britain, at the same time as the rising power of the US and Japan, meant that, short of the workers of Europe, themselves, seizing power, and bringing about such a unity, its inevitable manifestation would come in the form of imperialist war and annexation.

Both France and Germany recognised the need to create a single European economy and state, but France, as the established power, saw it as its prerogative to dominate it, whilst Germany, as the rapidly rising power, sought to challenge that prerogative. Britain, as existing world hegemon, had no desire for a large European state on its borders, which would rapidly overhaul it. So, Britain acted to frustrate the ambitions of both France and Germany, setting one against the other. Millions died in the ensuing conflicts.

“If in Saint-Simon we find a masterly breadth of view, by virtue of which almost all the ideas of later socialists that are not strictly economic are found in him in embryo, we find in Fourier a criticism of the existing conditions of society, which, while genuinely French and witty, is none the less penetrating.” (p 333)

The bourgeoisie, in its revolution, had seen itself as representing the whole of society's interest. It mobilised the other oppressed classes on that basis, promising them Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. But, the antagonistic class interests mean that was never possible, and, as soon as that revolution was completed, that reality became apparent. Rather than Liberte, the glaring disparity between what was promised and what was delivered, meant that the bourgeoisie, as ruling class, and its state, had to impose its own restrictions on the freedom of the great mass of society, who saw no sign of the Egalite and Fraterenite, they had been promised. One of the most egregious examples of that, of course, was the denial of liberty to millions of colonial slaves. As Oliver Cromwell Cox has described, it was to try to reconcile this contradiction that the bourgeoisie put forward the idea that not all humans are “equally human”, so that some humans do not have the same right to freedom. It created racism. As Cox describes, before then, no such explanation, nor ideology was required, because previous modes of production never claimed that such equality of rights existed. They all took it as normal that society was divided into ranks based on status, into separate estates, each with their own specific rights and duties.

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Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, I – Historical - Part 8

Bourgeois ideology, and its superficial analysis, obscures this class nature of the state, as the means of enforcing the class rule of the ruling-class, its class dictatorship. It conflates it with the purely administrative functions of the state, particularly when it conflates the state with the government/political regime. Particularly within the political regime of bourgeois-democracy, and its current manifestation as social-democracy, it presents the elected government as, thereby, the government of “the people”, and this government of the people as synonymous with “the state”, or at least in control of the state, in the form of its permanent bureaucracy, military, police, courts and so on. The government is expected to govern on behalf of the whole people.

In fact, the elected governments are never the governments of the whole people. Besides the fact that “the people” are divided into classes with antagonistic interests, which leads to the formation of parties that, in whatever way, are based on securing the votes of electors from those classes, there are numerous other cross-cutting cleavages in society, along the lines of sex, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity and so on. Indeed, in some societies, where “the people” exists as a large undifferentiated mass, i.e. where the petty-bourgeoisie and peasantry forms the overwhelming majority, these other cleavages can often predominate, resulting in parties being based on these various communalist interests.

So, the idea that a party, based on whatever sectionalism it relies on for its voter base could ever be a party and government of “the whole people”, is absurd. The trades unions split from the Liberal Party to form the Labour Party, precisely because, once workers have the vote, and begin to use it, even to appeal to those workers on the same basis of the social-democratic, bourgeois ideology, it becomes apparent that the workers need their own party, just as they needed trades unions, rather than employer run staff associations. As Starmer and Blue Labour broke that link, and saw his voter base in that reactionary petty-bourgeois mass that voted for Brexit, and at the same time, attacked workers, the trades unions are faced with the same choice.

Moreover, the elected governments rarely obtain a majority of votes, let alone a unanimity of votes of “the people”. The more parties contesting elections, the more democratic and proportional the voting system, the smaller the share of the vote does any given party tend to obtain. In Britain, the voting system amounts to ballot rigging by the main parties, so that the Blue Labour government obtained a huge majority of seats, but only a third of the votes cast, and only about a fifth of the total electorate.

But, even where a government is elected with a clear majority, the idea that it can govern on behalf of “the whole people” is facile, precisely because “the people” only exists as an abstraction, and, in reality, its main dividing lines, based on class, are ones that represent irreconcilable, antagonistic and contradictory interests, based on the ownership and control of different forms of property.

The idea that the elected government, representing “the people”, is “the state”, or controls the state, is also facile. Hobbes, in Leviathan, spoke of “the people” only being sovereign on one occasion. That is they appoint a sovereign to represent them, and having done so, they must submit to the rule of that sovereign. Moreover, that sovereign is, then, able to appoint its successors. The idea clearly appeals to Trump, and the same logic is applied by the Brexiters to claim that “the people” voted in 2016 for Brexit, and the matter can no longer be considered, even though only 37% of the electorate vote for it, and, today, a clear majority oppose it! Truly absurd.

But, the real insight of Hobbes was that the real sovereign is not “the people”, nor the monarch, nor parliament. The single act of appointing the sovereign is the act of the revolutionary class, in creating the permanent state that represents its interests. Monarchs, like parliaments, come and go, but the permanent state remains throughout and that state appoints its own replacements, on its own terms. The government, particularly in the political regime of social-democracy, plays the useful role of perpetuating the illusion that elections really mean anything substantial, a symbol that it is a democracy of the people by the people, and for the people, when, in fact, these governments are never able to overrule the interests of the ruling-class, as defended by its state. Indeed, as Lenin described, in “State and Revolution”, and Ralph Miliband also set out with specific reference to Britain, even the parliamentary system puts huge obstacles in the way of the working-class creating a party that truly represents its interests, far less that it could form a majority in parliament, and even less that it could simply legislate on behalf of workers, and against the interests of the ruling-class. Even Wilson faced the threat of a coup, all the stops were pulled out to prevent Corbyn even leading Labour to electoral victory, even though he represented little more serious threat to the ruling class than Wilson.

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Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, I – Historical - Part 7

“In his Letters from Geneva, Saint-Simon lays down the proposition that “all men ought to work”. In the same work he also recognised that the Reign of Terror was the reign of the propertyless masses.

“See,” he calls out to them, “what happened in France at the time when your comrades held sway there; they brought about a famine.”

But to recognise the French Revolution as a class struggle (and not simply as one between nobility, bourgeoisie, and those without any property, was, in the year 1802, a discovery of the greatest genius.” (p 332)

At the time of Saint-Simon, “the propertyless” was mostly the petty bourgeoisie and urban proletariat. The petty-bourgeoisie and peasantry overwhelmingly predominated over the industrial proletariat, as, indeed, was the case in Russia in 1917, as Lenin describes in “Left-wing Childishness”. Today, however, the industrial proletariat forms the majority in all developed economies. It constitutes around 70% of the population, but that means that around 30% is still constituted by the petty-bourgeoisie, and its size has grown by 50% since he 1980's.  With the working-class bereft of any Marxist leadership, it has, as social-democracy, inevitably, failed, led to the advance of the petty-bourgeoisie. It is reactionary, even compared to the bourgeoisie, but its numbers, and appeal to simplistic solutions, based on lies, and a focus only on what it is against, has consolidated it electorally, and enabled it to draw behind it the other backward social layers of society.

Brexit has not yet led to “famine”, as Saint-Simon described in relation to France, or as occurred under Stalin, Mao and others, but it has led to a significant deterioration in Britain's economy, with a consequent effect on its poorest, who are the biggest contingent of those that voted for it. As the petty-bourgeois nationalists, be it Farage, Badenoch or Starmer continue to cling to their Brexitism, in the face of that reality, the more they resort to Bonapartism and authoritarianism. If Burnham fails to break with Brexitism, he will be led down the same path, and his support for reactionary policies such as regionalism, already place him on that path.

In the US, the same is seen with Trump, the global figurehead of that petty-bourgeois nationalism. Despite the huge advantages of the US economy, and its continued inertial force, Trump's idiotic policies of economic nationalism, protectionism, tariffs and so on, are creating a similar chaos in the US. Only the capitalist state is mitigating its effects, and slowing the progress of that chaos.

Engels continues.

“In 1816, he declared that politics was the science of production, and foretold the complete absorption of politics by economics. Although the knowledge that economic conditions are the basis of political institutions appears here only in embryo, what is already very plainly expressed is the transition from political rule over men to the administration of things and the guidance of the processes of production — that is to say, the “abolition of the state”, about which there has recently been so much noise.” (p 332-3)

As Engels set out in The Origin, the state only arises as a consequence of class society. In all previous society, there are bodies comprising the whole of the society or clan. Even with the AMP, the body that, eventually, becomes the state, after a very long period of time, begins not as a state, but, merely, as an administrative, bureaucratic, technocratic body serving the interests of the whole society. The state arises only at that point at which the productive forces have sufficiently developed that a section of society can separate itself into a separate class or caste, whose ownership or control over the means of production gives them a qualitatively different share in the distribution of society's output, and, also, enables them to utilise it, to employ its own bodies of armed men to guarantee its continued position in that regard. Often, these are people it recruits from outside the given society to fulfil that function.

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The Hypocrisy of NATO's Illegal War On Iran - Part 21

Considered from the perspective of industrial capital as an abstraction, all of these different standards, rules, regulations and so on are irrational, but industrial capital, like everything else in the world, does not exist as an abstraction, but as a reality. That reality is one in which industrial capital developed within the context of the nation state, and each of those nation states created their own standards, rules, regulations, laws and so on, in order to protect and advance the interests of industrial capital, not in the abstract, but in the concrete reality of that state.

Britain adopted the standard gauge for railways in the 19th century, as noted earlier. One of the reasons for adopting it, rather than the broad gauge used by Brunel, was that the Stephensons had built more engines and track, using their standard gauge, and so were able to convince parliament to adopt it, even though there are numerous reasons for thinking that the broad gauge was technically superior. A similar thing occurred with the adoption of VHS as the standard for video recorders, even though Betamax was technically superior. As the leading industrial power, in the 19th century, Britain exported locomotives across the world, as well as building railways in its colonial Empire. In so doing, it created the same standards used for production in Britain, and so gave its own manufacturers an immediate advantage. Had motor vehicles been developed earlier, most of the world would drive on the left side of the road and have right-hand drive cars, as in Britain, rather than left hand drive cars, as in the US, where, from the start, most of them were produced.

In the post-war era, although the first programmable, electronic computer was built in Britain, and used at Bletchley Park to decrypt German codes, it was the US, which dominated the global market for mainframe computers. The number of these computers in operation was tiny, compared to the number of computers produced and used today. They were nearly all used by governments or large corporations. Countries like Britain, therefore, subsidised and protected their own small mainframe computer companies like ICL. But, ICL was never going to be able to dominate the global mainframe computer market, in the way that IBM did, because the limited size of the UK market meant it did not have the scale of production enjoyed by IBM. Had Britain been part of the EU, in the 1950's, it might have been able to help create a European mainframe computer industry of a size that could have competed with the US, but it wasn't.

Moreover, the US developed its computer industry in large part to assist in its military capability. The computers controlled missiles and so on. Given that the US produced the majority of the weapons systems used by NATO, and deployed in Europe, it ensured that it was those US computer standards that were adopted. In the 1980's, when the microchip revolution took place, it was, then, the US which dominated the market for personal computers. Even when other countries, and companies produced personal computers, they quickly had to be sold as being “IBM compatible”. Similarly, the operating system used on those “IBM Compatible”, PC's had to be Microsoft's DOS, a factor which enabled Microsoft to dominate the global software market.

This is also seen, in relation to the Internet, and global communications systems. The difference is that the US, in the 1980's and after, having shifted a large part of the production of hardware to other parts of the world (mostly Asia), content that 90% of the value of the end product came from the skilled complex labour, embodied in the intellectual property, retained in the US, opened itself up to the possibility that having become the dominant producers of the hardware, companies in these other regions would, also, develop their own firmware, and software. They would, inevitably, develop their own standards and protocols. As the world's largest market for almost everything, China has a huge advantage in that regard. The Chinese state, as the centralised planner of the economy, has a massive advantage in being able to pursue that course.

The EU, developed its own Atomic Energy Industry, to be able to compete with the US, and belatedly, the EU has been prompted by the regime of Trump, to begin separating itself from the US domination of the Internet and technology.  The EU Parliament has already banned use of several US platforms for its MEP's and staff, and has developed EU alternative systems.

Amazingly, even in the 21st century, the railways continue to play a significant role in that respect. China has developed its high speed trains linking up the vast expanses of the country. But, as part of its “Belt and Road” strategy, it has provided the capital for railways to be constructed across Asia. The real significance of railways has always been in relation to the movement of freight, particularly bulk freight. Over short, local distances, railways are too rigid to be useful means of passenger transport. They lost out, prior to car ownership, to buses, which could provide flexible routes. But, buses too are too rigid, compared to private motor cars. Over longer, inter-city, journeys, trains are less rigid but, as families bought cars, and as companies provided company cars for their representatives, and as motorways were developed, trains could not compete. Only on much bigger land masses could high speed trains compete, over even larger distances, for passenger traffic, and there, they initially faced the already established airlines.

Railways, like canals, are significant as a means of, effectively moving bulk freight, particularly over large distances, and that is what China has done, spreading out from China itself, into Eurasia, and across to the Middle East and Europe. Last year, it sent a freight train from China to London. As I have set out before, Eurasia is a rational economic entity, just as is the EU. Trade within these two entities, inevitably increases, and drives towards, the adoption of common rules, standards, laws, regulations and so politico-economic integration and centralisation. But, the fact that the EU and Eurasian bloc share a common land mass, also means that trade between these blocs, will also increase, relative to with the US etc.

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