Ayatollah Trump's Murderous Regime - Part 3 of 4

Only when Trump comes to directly threaten the interests of EU imperialism, by sharing his plans to annex Greenland, and to impose tariffs on imports from any EU country that does not accept his plans, do the EU politicians begin to bleat lamely. Interestingly, and contrary to the claims of Starmer and the British media, even the lame bleating of the EU, in the face of Trump's threats were enough to force him to capitulate as before (TACO).  But, as before, he is likely to return to those threats.

The liberal, Democrat politicians in the US, such as Governor Newsom of California, have relied on the US capitalist state to fight their battles against Trump, with varying degrees of success, given the craven nature of many of these officials, and given that Trump has stacked some of them with his appointees. Now, rather than risk unleashing the forces of the US working-class, by appealing to them, Newsom prefers to lament the failure of his fellow bourgeois politicians in the UK and EU to come to the aid of the Democrats, and US ruling-class.

Starmer continues to act as Trump's mouthpiece in Europe, though the words are muffled as they appear from deep inside Trump's arse, where Starmer has been stuck for the last year, as he tries to reconcile his continued, disastrous support for Brexit, with the increasing irrelevance of Britain, and its dependence on the EU for its economic survival. Starmer's gut wrenching sycophancy is only exceeded by that of the slimey head of NATO mark Rutte, a truly cretinous human being even compared with fictional characters such as Dickens' Uriah Heep. LBC's, Simon Marks made clear what is wrong with the continued argument of James O'Brien that, given Brexit, Starmer has no option but to try to appease Trump.

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Ayatollah Trump's Murderous Regime - Part 2 of 4

As I have described previously, the last 40 years has seen a large rise in the numbers of the petty-bourgeoisie. It has grown by 50%, and its social and political weight has grown accordingly. In many ways, it has parallels with the growth of the industrial working-class at the end of the 19th century. In Britain, which was the classic example, the working-class, after 1848, aligned with the industrial bourgeoisie, represented by the Liberal Party that itself emerged out of the struggle over the Repeal of The Corn Laws. The organised workers, via their trades unions, sat in parliament as Lib-Lab MP's. But, the rapid expansion of the working-class, and particularly its consequence in the development of mass trades unions of unskilled workers “New Unionism”, increasingly made that untenable, and the trades unions split to create the Labour Party.

The petty-bourgeoisie has always formed the mass base of the Conservative Party, and the core of its vote. But, as with the Labour Party as a party of workers, the Conservative Party, as a party of the petty-bourgeoisie, never pursued those interests. It was always, like the Labour and Liberal Parties, forced to represent the interests of the ruling class, i.e. of large-scale industrial capital. The petty-bourgeois, Tory wing of the Conservative Party, having won control only to face that same reality in the face of the disaster of Brexit, and, its farcical culmination in the shape of the Truss government, have tried to reconcile their fantasy with reality, via a typical “stab in the back narrative”, and the creation of their own independent “Brexit” party, now rebranded in its more honest, racist and jingoist livery.

Trump represents the same development in the US Republican Party. The huge economic power of the US means that the contradiction between illusion and reality takes longer to assert itself, and the huge military/strategic power of the US enables Trump to support his regime by leaning on the allies of US imperialism in Europe and Asia to bear the cost, which is now becoming manifest as Trump attacks those allies in Europe, but the process will play out all the same. What is being demonstrated at the same time is the thoroughly corrupt and decadent nature of the ruling-class itself, in the face of these attacks by Trump's petty-bourgeois regime, in pursuit not merely of the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie, but just of his own personal interests, and narcissistic psychology.

The ordinary citizens of the US, still without any adequate political leadership of their own, have shown more backbone, principle and strength of character than all of the bourgeois politicians and their institutions combined. As a consequence, Ayatollah Trump has unleashed his own, newly recruited, fascist thugs, many of them ones he pardoned, after they had been found guilty of insurrection on January 6th 2021, kitted up with the military equipment of ICE, to kill and terrorise them, in the manner of the Iranian regime. The Iranian regime is a clerical-fascist political regime, that of Ayatollah Trump a comical-fascist regime, marked by its farcical coup attempt 5 years ago, and by the demented, moronic rants of Trump and his sycophants, today, that simply bring the US itself into disrepute, across the globe. But, as Austin Powers noted, even clowns and carnies can be frightening, as well as nuclear weapons. Trump embodies both, a demented clown with his finger on the nuclear button.

In the past, we saw moralists, third-campists, and other social-imperialists justify the role of US imperialism and its allies in acting as some kind of “lesser-evil”, on the world stage. The Zionists and pro-imperialists of the AWL, for example, sought to justify an attack by the Zionist regime on Iran's nuclear facilities, by pointing to precisely this kind of irrational zealotry of the mullahs that might lead it to use nuclear weapons. So, who do they now want to bomb the US, given the irrational Trump has his finger on the button?

Similarly, having sent his fascist goons to murder innocent civilians on the streets of Minneapolis, Trump's regime follows the play book of the Zionists, by simply lying, and claiming that Rene Good was a terrorist!. Clearly absurd, but no more absurd than the same claims made by his predecessor Biden that the students on campuses across the US protesting against genocide in Gaza, were all, also, anti-Semitic supporters of Hamas, nor the claims of Starmer's Blue Labour government that the supporters of Palestine Action are members of a terrorist organisation!!

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Ayatollah Trump's Murderous Regime - Part 1 of 4

Over the last few weeks, Iran has experienced the latest round of mass protests against the reactionary regime of the Ayatollahs that have broken out, sporadically, ever since they seized power, in 1979, following the overthrow of the equally vicious regime of the Pahlavi's, installed by US imperialism, as it overthrew the elected government of Mossadegh in 1953. As in the past, those protests have been met by severe repression and violence by the regime. During the same period, the regime of Ayatollah Trump, in the US, has been similarly murdering and attacking innocent civilians on the streets of Democrat controlled cities.

The political regime of the Ayatollahs, in both cases, Iran and the US, is a regime resting upon a large petty-bourgeoisie. The same has been true in Britain, for the last 15 years, and in Russia, as well as in China. These political regimes, as with all political regimes that rest upon the petty-bourgeoisie/peasantry, are Bonapartist, taking advantage of the weakness of the ruling-class. Marx analysed these relations and phenomena in relation to Bonapartism in France, and Trotsky updated that analysis to respond to the particular form of Bonapartism that is fascism and Stalinism. Trotsky, also, made the point that, in terms of the political regime, as against the state itself, the political regime of Stalin was distinguished from that of Hitler, only by the greater brutality of the former.

Fascism, as Trotsky describes, is not a description of the class nature of the state, but is a description of the form of political regime/government, just as is bourgeois democracy, or proletarian democracy. The political regime is merely a superficial appearance, whereas it is the objective material reality of social relations, i.e. the dominant forms of property, themselves based upon the dominant forms of production, that determine the class nature of the state. Fascism is the ideology of the petty-bourgeoisie, and like the petty-bourgeoisie/peasantry itself, it is necessarily wracked by contradictions, because the petty-bourgeoisie/peasantry is far from being an heterogeneous class. It is why, as Marx explained, the petty-bourgeoisie/peasantry can never itself become the ruling-class.

To the extent it ever seizes control of the political regime, it does so as a result of the weakness of the main classes of modern society – bourgeoisie and proletariat – and, even then, can only do so by lining up behind a “strong man” who imposes some kind of order upon them. But, as I set out in relation to the Chinese Revolution of 1949, which was really a Peasant War, led by Mao Zedong, control of the political regime does not change the fundamental laws of society and history. Such regimes are forced, in the end, to choose between bourgeois property or proletarian property forms (even in grossly deformed manifestations), or else, as with Pol Pot, to become failed states, as with many across the globe, in poorly developed countries. As long ago, as Engels “The Peasant War in Germany”, Marxists understood this distinction, and reality.

The peasantry, in the past, when it rose up against its rulers, typically used acts of terrorism, sabotage and wanton destruction, burning buildings and so on. As Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky described, such methods go nowhere, despite what the Anarchists and Populists proclaim. It is only when a large-disciplined and clear sighted industrial proletariat acts as the vanguard that these disparate, heterogenous and disorganised forces of the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie, can be drawn in behind it. The Bolshevik formula of Lenin and Trotsky of “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat Leading The Peasantry”, summed it up.

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Predictions For 2026 - Prediction 3 - Inflation Returns - Part 5 of 7

What has changed, and characterises the conditions of the last 40 years, is that the ruling-class, as a global class of rentiers, has become dependent upon speculative capital gains on its assets. In the 1980's, the huge rise in productivity from the microchip revolution, led to a massive rise in the rate of relative surplus value, and simultaneously slashed the value of constant capital, both circulating constant capital (materials/components/energy) and notably of fixed capital. That created a huge rise in the rate of profit, but the same factors meant that, as in past such periods, it was followed by a period of stagnation, as the corollary of higher productivity was a slower growth of employment to achieve any given increase in output. In addition, as Marx sets out in Capital III, and in Theories of Surplus Value, this rise in productivity means that even where the physical mass of capital rises, the value of this capital rises much more slowly, or even falls.

The technical composition of capital, as Marx describes, in these conditions, rises but the value composition may fall, meaning a fall in the organic composition of capital. Not only, then, does the rate of profit rise, but it creates a huge release of capital, which may, also, persist year on year for several years, as the new technologies bring above average, year on year rises in productivity, reducing the unit values of the commodities that physically constitute capital. That is what happened in the 1980's and 90's, causing interest rates to fall, and asset prices to rise. The Dow Jones rose by 1300% between 1980 and 2000, whilst US GDP rose by only 256% in that period. The ruling-class, as well as states became dependent on these capital gains on assets, as they basically asset stripped their economies, realising a portion of these capital gains to supplement their revenues.

In addition, a large part of the expansion of industrial capital, in the developed economies, became an expansion of commercial capital, rather than productive-capital. Surplus-value was increasingly produced by low paid labour in newly industrialising economies in Asia, but was realised by commercial capital in the developed western economies, as large areas of previous urban, and industrial land saw coal mines, steel works, tyre manufacture, pottery manufacture and so on, disappear, and be replaced by new retail parks.

The asset stripping of real industrial capital was manifest in the fact that, as the growth in the mass of surplus value/profit eventually slowed, because capital itself was being accumulated more slowly – and more slowly in the developed economies, as it accumulated faster in the developing economies – in order to maintain, revenues from the ownership of assets (rent on land/property, interest/dividends on financial assets, as well as taxes to the capitalist state) the proportion of these, relative to profits, grew whilst the proportion of profit of enterprise/retained profits available for investment, fell. Haldane noted that dividends rose from 10% of profits in the 1970's, to 70% of profits by the early 2000's.

It was the explosion of this contradiction that spelled the end of the delusion that real wealth could be created by continual asset price gains. But, appearance and reality can diverge for a long time, especially where a ruling class, and its state have become fixated upon the delusion, and use their power to cling to it by all means, even as doing so undermines their position even more. So, when reality began to impose itself, and capital continued to accumulate, and interest rates began to rise, causing asset prices to crash, the ruling-class and its state, sought to simply inflate them once more.

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Predictions For 2026 - Prediction 3 - Inflation Returns - Part 4 of 7

The 2008 global financial crash showed that the limiting role of surplus-value on the continued expansion of revenues derived from assets had asserted itself. In Capital III, Marx notes,

“It would be still more absurd to presume that capital would yield interest on the basis of capitalist production without performing any productive function, i.e., without creating surplus-value, of which interest is just a part; that the capitalist mode of production would run its course without capitalist production. If an untowardly large section of capitalists were to convert their capital into money-capital, the result would be a frightful depreciation of money-capital and a frightful fall in the rate of interest; many would at once face the impossibility of living on their interest, and would hence be compelled to reconvert into industrial capitalists.” (p 378)

Marx and Engels noted that a social revolution had already occurred by the latter part of the 19th century. Private ownership of industrial capital had already become an anachronism. Capital was, even by then, socialised capital, the collective property of the “associated producers” within each large company, be it a cooperative or a joint stock company.

“This result of the ultimate development of capitalist production is a necessary transitional phase towards the reconversion of capital into the property of producers, although no longer as the private property of the individual producers, but rather as the property of associated producers, as outright social property. On the other hand, the stock company is a transition toward the conversion of all functions in the reproduction process which still remain linked with capitalist property, into mere functions of associated producers, into social functions...

This is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-dissolving contradiction, which prima facie represents a mere phase of transition to a new form of production. It manifests itself as such a contradiction in its effects. It establishes a monopoly in certain spheres and thereby requires state interference. It reproduces a new financial aristocracy, a new variety of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators and simply nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation promotion, stock issuance, and stock speculation. It is private production without the control of private property...

The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.”

(Capital III, Chapter 27)

When Marx and Engels say that socialism is inevitable, this is not a prediction of the future, but a statement of the facts that already existed at the time they said it. This social revolution had already occurred. Production had been socialised, and industrial-capital had, then, been socialised along with it. The collective owners of industrial-capital – at least of large-scale industrial capital, monopoly-capital – were the workers (associated producers), but they did not yet exert control over their own property. The ruling-class, had become a class of rentiers, owners of fictitious-capital, not industrial capital, and they, now, obtained their revenues, not from profits but from interest/dividends as well as rents from the ownership of financial and property assets.

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SNNS 26

 

Predictions For 2026 - Prediction 3 - Inflation Returns - Part 3 of 7

This long period in which Keynesian economics seemed to work, led to ideas about a crisis-free capitalism, which many on the Left, also, adopted at about the time that the conditions which made it possible came to an end. That was the period of the end of the long-wave uptrend around 1974, as a crisis of overproduction of capital set in. The indications of that had been apparent for some time, though are easier to see with hindsight. The more the 1960's progressed, the more it was clear that capital was expanding at a faster pace than the labour supply. All of the productivity gains from the previous Innovation Cycle, which peaked in 1935, and created large surplus populations, had waned. Capital accumulation, which was intensive during the 1940's and 50's, based on the application of that new technology, became extensive, thereby using up labour supplies at a faster pace. It was the other side of slowing productivity growth.

A feature discussed by Marx in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 21, became manifest. As capital accumulated extensively, and the demand for labour rose relative to its supply, workers not only demanded enhanced rates for overtime work, but also, began to demand shorter hours, and longer holidays etc., thereby, reducing the scope for expanding the social working-day, and absolute surplus-value. On the contrary, that began to fall, and was no longer compensated by rising levels of relative surplus-value from rising productivity. As capital competed for scarce labour, relative wages also rose, as Glyn & Sutcliffe described, leading to a squeeze on profits, which reaches a crescendo, and crisis of overproduction of capital in the mid-70's. It was this, and the failure of both neoclassical and Keynesian economics to understand the difference between these two types of crisis (overproduction of commodities and overproduction of capital), as well as their failure to understand the difference between money and money-capital, which characterised the period between 1974 and 1987.

There is a commonality in the analysis of both the neoclassical/Austrian School economists and the Keynesian/post-Keynesian economists. It is the failure to understand the nature of money and of capital. The neoclassical/Austrian School economists believed that all that was required was to increase profits. That could be done by reducing wages, or reducing taxes, or interest rates. But, as previous similar periods showed, if their goal was to bring to an end a crisis of overproduction of commodities, and persistent stagnation of the economy, that would not work, basically for the reasons Sismondi had set out, and which Ricardo, Mill, Say et al had rejected.

Falling wages means that a large part of aggregate demand is undermined, and, although, in periods of frantic economic activity – booms – firms might use higher profits to invest in expansion speculatively, they do not do so in conditions of economic stagnation. Similarly, in such conditions, if the rate of interest is reduced by central banks with the intention of stimulating investment, it becomes, as Keynes noted, following also Marx's analysis set out in Capital III, like pushing on a piece of string. Nor does cutting aggregate demand by cutting state spending, so as to cut taxes work, in such conditions.

Firms rather than using increased profits for expansion, increase their holdings of money-capital. Of itself, this increase in the supply of money-capital from realised profits, relative to the demand for that money-capital for investment (investment/real capital accumulation not acquisition of fictitious-capital/speculation) causes interest rates to fall, and so causes asset prices to rise (capitalisation), which gives an incentive for such speculation. In previous long-wave cycles, such periods of stagnation, are also characterised by intensive rather than extensive capital accumulation.

For the Keynesians, they believed that if the state intervened, as it had done repeatedly after WWII, to stimulate aggregate demand, then, firms would respond to the rising demand, invest in new capital, and so the economy would rebound. The post-Keynesians, and supporters of MMT, basically see this operating not by the state raising taxes or borrowing, but by creating money out of thin air, by increasing liquidity, monetising the debt of the state used to expand the economy. They see this as no different to what the state did using QE, to bail-out the banks. The refrain being if the central banks could “print money” to bail out the bankers, why not to finance capital investment in infrastructure and so on. In the post-war period, when Keynesian state spending expanded massively, and huge amounts of infrastructure as well as welfare states were created, that is exactly what they did, just as similarly happened at the start of the Industrial Revolution. But, assuming that can happen now fails to understand the nature of capital, and the role of the capitalist state, including its central banks.

It also misunderstands what has happened in the last 40 years, in the developed western economies, in which the ruling-class has become characterised not just by its ownership of fictitious-capital (shares, bonds, derivatives) but by its reliance for its wealth and power on speculative gains on those assets, rather than on the revenues accruing to them, as interest/dividends. The scope for increased interest/dividends (and rents) is limited by the accumulation of industrial capital, and so on the expansion of surplus value/profit. In other words, if the rate of surplus value is constant, the mass of surplus value, out of which interest/dividends, as well as rents and taxes are paid can only increase if the mass of capital employed, itself increases.  But, any increase in capital accumulation threatens rising interest rates, from still historically very low levels, and a consequent crash in asset prices.

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