Saturday, 24 October 2026
Thursday, 22 October 2026
Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, II – Theoretical - Part 23
Of the billions paid into pension funds, each year, even the money that does go to buy shares or bonds, rather than line the pockets of the financial institutions, 70% of it goes to buy up existing shares and bonds, and so to simply inflate their prices, rather than financing additional, real capital investment/accumulation. That is the case with all transactions on the financial markets, which act primarily as casinos where the participants simply gamble on which stock or bond is going to race ahead, and which be left behind. As Marx put it,
“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.”
Marx saw no reason why the regular financial crises/crashes, as against the cyclical economic crises, resulting from an overproduction of capital, or an overproduction of commodities, should be a concern of the workers.
“As regards the fall in the purely nominal capital, State bonds, shares etc.—in so far as it does not lead to the bankruptcy of the state or of the share company, or to the complete stoppage of reproduction through undermining the credit of the industrial capitalists who hold such securities—it amounts only to the transfer of wealth from one hand to another and will, on the whole, act favourably upon reproduction, since the parvenus into whose hands these stocks or shares fall cheaply, are mostly more enterprising than their former owners.”(Theories Of Surplus Value, Part 2, p 496)
But, of course, now that the ruling-class is comprised entirely of such parvenus, and speculators, rather than industrial capitalists, and, because their entire wealth has become dependent on continually inflating asset/fictitious
capital nominal prices, it is no wonder that they use the state to ensure that condition persists, even where doing so, directly conflicts with the interests of real industrial capital. As Marx again put it,
"... the reduction of the money equivalents of these securities on the stock exchange list has nothing to do with the actual capital which they represent, but very much indeed with the solvency of their owners."(Capital III, Chapter 30)“Talk about centralisation! The credit system, which has its focus in the so-called national banks and the big money-lenders and usurers surrounding them, constitutes enormous centralisation, and gives to this class of parasites the fabulous power, not only to periodically despoil industrial capitalists, but also to interfere in actual production in a most dangerous manner — and this gang knows nothing about production and has nothing to do with it. The Acts of 1844 and 1845 are proof of the growing power of these bandits, who are augmented by financiers and stock-jobbers.”(Capital III, Chapter 33)
In previous financial crises, such as 1847, 1857, 1929, the state, responded to the events, and threat to production, by ensuring that credit was available for commodity circulation. In 1847 and 1857, as Marx and Engels describe, the financial crash itself had been provoked by the bursting of an asset price bubble, inflated due to low interest rates caused by burgeoning profits, which resulted in the supply of additional money-capital growing faster than the demand for it. The bubble burst when bad bank legislation (The 1844 Bank Act) unnecessarily caused interest rates to rise, because the Bank of England, reduced currency supply, in response to an outflow of gold. The resulting credit crunch led to a sharp curtailment of trade. But, as Marx and Engels note the real nature of the crisis was revealed because, when the Bank of England suspended the Bank Act, so as to facilitate additional currency supply, the crisis ended.
“By such artificial intensification of demand for money accommodation, that is, for means of payment at the decisive moment, and the simultaneous restriction of the supply the Bank Act drives the rate of interest to a hitherto unknown height during a crisis. Hence, instead of eliminating crises, the Act, on the contrary, intensifies them to a point where either the entire industrial world must go to pieces, or else the Bank Act. Both on October 25, 1847, and on November 12, 1857, the crisis reached such a point; the government then lifted the restriction for the Bank in issuing notes by suspending the Act of 1844, and this sufficed in both cases to overcome the crisis.”
But, in all these cases, including 1929, although the state facilitated the credit required to end the credit crunch restricting commodity circulation, it did not bail-out the financial speculators who had lost. As Marx notes above, some lost, others gained. In 1929, those like John Templeton, who sold prior to the crash, and, then, ploughed money in after it, when assets could be bought for 10% of their pre-crash prices, gained enormously. In 2008, and after, the opposite has been the case, as central banks have bailed out the speculators, whilst imposing credit restrictions and financial austerity on the real economy.
Tuesday, 20 October 2026
Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, II – Theoretical - Part 22
So, it is no surprise that, firstly, the ruling-class do not allow the workers to exercise any kind of control over their, now, huge pension funds. In Britain alone, those funds amount to trillions of pounds. It is the kind of amount of potential credit that Marx and Enegls noted could enable the effective expansion of the worker cooperative, to provide the same capitalisation as that enjoyed by the multinational corporations. Indeed, the workers' collective savings, accumulated in those pension funds, are currently a major source of the credit provided to those multinational corporations themselves, because those funds buy the bonds and shares of those companies.
It is clearly as impossible for each individual worker who contributes money to such a pension fund, to directly have a seat on a supervisory board of the fund as it is for every depositor of money in a bank. But that is the case in all sorts of similar situations, in modern society. Those societies, for example, hold elections to parliaments, where MPs are given the task of representing those collective interests. Those parliaments, of course, for all the reasons set out previously, are, themselves, a sham, because significant limitations are placed by the ruling-class on who gets elected, and, if the working-class overcomes even those constraints, the ruling-class simply sweeps away the façade of that democracy by use of its control of the state.
But, that does not change the underlying principle that democracy is the means by which the collective interests of millions of individuals can be aggregated and effectively manifest. We might, as Engels noted, need to counter the threat to universal suffrage by, also, ensuring universal conscription and military training, so that the workers defend their collective decisions arms in hand, organised in militia rather than a standing army; we might want to replace representatives with delegate, based upon a direct democracy and right of recall, but the principle remains.
Shareholders, after all, do precisely that. They vote at regular shareholders general meetings to elect Directors, who act to represent their interests. So, on what basis can workers, who contribute in aggregate, billions of pounds a year to their pension funds, on which their retirement depends, be denied the same right? Given that these are workers pension funds, the funds of workers employed collectively, in given companies, industries, local and central government, etc., there is no reason that these workers should not elect the supervisory boards of those funds to ensure they are used in the interest of workers.
Instead, workers are denied any such control in breach of even the most basic bourgeois property law. Control is given to representatives of the companies, but, for the reasons set out earlier, those representatives are, in fact, representatives not of the company, but of shareholders, i.e. creditors of the company. In addition, these pension funds sub-contract the actual day-to-day financial management of the fund to financial institutions and banks. Who controls those banks and financial institutions – shareholders. Numerous investigations have shown that a huge chunk of the money that workers pay into their pension fund does not even go to the purchase of shares or bonds, but is simply paid out – as much as 60% - in commissions and other fees, to those institutions!
“... the BBC's Panorama on Monday, showed who the real villains are when it came to workers Pensions. It was, not surprisingly, the same Financial Institutions that caused the Financial Crisis, and which is the reason the Tories are now trying to load the cost of that on to workers with cuts in services, and in pensions.It found that the investment of workers funds was almost like the kind of Ponzi scheme that others have recently been jailed for. It involved, workers money being taken in by Pension Companies, who then placed it with other institutions based on how much of a kick-back those institutions would give them, and a large cut in commission, and administration charges was deducted by each of these institutions. In total these organisations were deducting so much that workers pensions were being reduced by anything between 30%-60%.“In one HSBC pension plan, £120,000 paid in over 40 years would result in fees and commissions totalling £99,900.”
Sunday, 18 October 2026
Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, II – Theoretical - Part 21
That points to where the real basis of the workers' struggle, today, resides. In the same way that in the 18th and 19th centuries, the struggle of the bourgeoisie, backed by the petty-bourgeoise and proletariat was for political democracy and freedom, the struggle of the working-class, today, is a struggle for industrial democracy, as the necessary condition for their real freedom. The bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie, in the 18th and 19th century, did not have to wage a struggle for control over their property. Within each enterprise, they exercised such full control already, on the basis of existing laws of private property. Rather, the struggle was one for political freedom and democracy, so as to reflect their position in society, as ruling class, and, thereby, to remove all of the fetters on the expansion of bourgeois production, in general.
The petty-bourgeoisie, and small private industrial capitalists, today, continue to exercise control over their private property, but, today, the limitation of that is precisely that they are subordinated, in the market, to the power of the mammoth socialised capitals. Their freedom and control is, ultimately, as much a delusion as is the political sovereignty of small nation states, in a world of huge imperialist powers. It illustrates why the demands of the petty-bourgeois nationalists for the right of national self-determination are an even greater reactionary delusion, today, than they were a century ago, when Lenin wrote,
“As the party of the proletariat, the Social-Democratic Party considers it to be its positive and principal task to further the self-determination of the proletariat in each nationality rather than that of peoples or nations. We must always and unreservedly work for the very closest unity of the proletariat of all nationalities, and it is only in isolated and exceptional cases that we can advance and actively support demands conducive to the establishment of a new class state or to the substitution of a looser federal unity, etc., for the complete political unity of a state.”
The petty-bourgeois nationalists demand to “Take Back Control”, as, for example, put forward by the Brexiters and Lexiters, was soon exposed for the reactionary delusion it is. The Brexit negotiations showed just how little “control” even an imperialist nation state like Britain has, when it comes to its relations with other, much larger, imperialist states and blocs of states. But, the fact that, for much of the last 70 years, the socialist movement has been dominated by that kind of delusional, petty-bourgeois nationalism, when it comes to acting as cheerleaders for one petty-bourgeois nationalist movement or another, on the basis of their “anti-imperialism”, paved the way for that delusion, when it came to Brexit, just as it does with Ukraine and Israel/Palestine.
Like the petty-bourgeoisie, and small private capitalists, the workers in the worker cooperatives, also, exercise control over their property, but face the same reality that this freedom and control is extremely limited, because they must compete, in the market, usually against much bigger capitals.
The important role of the worker cooperative, today, therefore, remains in the form that Marx posed it, in 1864.
“The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labour need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the labouring man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart. In England, the seeds of the co-operative system were sown by Robert Owen; the workingmen’s experiments tried on the Continent were, in fact, the practical upshot of the theories, not invented, but loudly proclaimed, in 1848.”
Saturday, 17 October 2026
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