History Repeating As Farce - Part 2

“When we think about this conjuring up of the dead of world history, a salient difference reveals itself. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time – that of unchaining and establishing modern bourgeois society – in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases. The first one destroyed the feudal foundation and cut off the feudal heads that had grown on it. The other created inside France the only conditions under which free competition could be developed, parceled-out land properly used, and the unfettered productive power of the nation employed; and beyond the French borders it swept away feudal institutions everywhere, to provide, as far as necessary, bourgeois society in France with an appropriate up-to-date environment on the European continent.”

Eighteenth Brumaire Ch. 1

Thatcher did not carry through a Revolution in the way the French Revolutionaries of 1789 did, but the economic and social changes she wrought were thoroughgoing, and, like the changes after 1789, were designed specifically to meet the needs of Capital. The actions of Thatcher, as with the similar actions of Reagan, in the US, were not some whim, but were conditioned by the very economic conditions which confronted them, and the specific conjuncture of the Long Wave Cycle, in which they occurred, which made the old Keynesian solutions, no longer applicable. They performed the task of their time. Thatcher unchained an established bourgeois democracy by introducing a deregulation of old restrictive monopolies, much as the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th Centuries broken up restrictive feudal monopolies, but she did so not in “Roman costumes”, but in Victorian costume, harking back to Victorian Values, to the principles of Free Trade, and to Empire. And with Reagan and other Imperialists they too swept away restraints to such Free Trade, and the ability of Capital to settle anywhere in the search of more and more profit.

But, under modern conditions Cameron's reflection of these measures cannot be other than farcical, because now is not then. The objectives which Thatcher had set were achieved. The working-class and its organisations were smashed. Any further attack on the Trades Unions could only ever have marginal impact, and might even be counter-productive. If it was ever necessary to achieve the absolute majorities in strike ballots that have been hinted at, then any strike that did occur, would pose the Tories with far more problems than they face now. If ever an absolute majority of workers do decide that enough is enough, and take action, then nothing will be able to stand in their way. In the meantime, it would mean that socialists would have to pay more attention to Marx's dictum about “winning the battle of democracy”, in gaining majority support for any action, and less time in manoeuvring and position seeking.

The deregulation that Thatcher and Reagan sought was introduced, and its end result was the accumulation of huge amounts of unsustainable private, debt, the lunacy of the Sub-prime crisis, which was a feature of it, and the virtual collapse of the Global Financial System, which could only be arrested by the very opposite of that deregulation, in the form of the nationalisation of the Banks and Finance Houses in the US, UK, and Ireland, a solution, which ultimately will have to be implemented in Europe too, before the debt crisis is over. And, of course, the farce of the repetition of those earlier events, under Cameron, is that the measures, now being proposed, in the form of austerity, are themselves being proposed as solutions to the build up of debt that arose as a direct consequence of the policies of Thatcher in the first place! Contrary to Cameron's propaganda, the deficit had nothing to do with profligacy under Labour. In the period after 1999 up to 2002/3, Labour was actually paying down the debt. Under Thatcher and Major, between 1979 and 1997, borrowing accounted for 3.4% of GDP; between 1997 and 2005 it averaged just 1.2%. Moreover, even when Labour did begin to act counter-cyclically, under Brown, the increase in the deficit was nothing extraordinary. It is clear from the data that the significant change DID come in 2008/9, when, even excluding the amounts pumped into the Banks, net debt rose from 36.5% of GDP, to 43.2%, a bigger cumulative rise than in the previous 7 years combined!

But, as Ann Pettifor has pointed out, it is not Public Sector Debt that is the real threat to the UK economy. It is Private Debt. Where Public Debt stands at around 70% of GDP, Private Sector Debt stands at around 450%! The Public Debt was created to deal with the Financial Meltdown that was the result of the deregulation of Financial Markets, introduced by Thatcher and Reagan, in the 1980's, and the massive accumulation of private debt is itself the direct consequence of that deregulation of Financial Markets, and of the encouragement to workers, the Middle Class, and Small Capitalists to drive themselves into penury, in order to keep the economy going, and to compensate for the fact that their real living standards were stagnating. And, today's image of Thatcher, wants those that have suffered, as a result of that process, to also be the ones who pick up the Bill that would otherwise be borne by the Banks, Finance Houses, and their shareholders. But, absent any credible alternative, a large portion of those affected, see no solution other than in a return to the cause of those problems in the first place. They cannot let go of the shade of Thatcher, even before she's dead, as the recent fascination shown over the film illustrates. As Marx put it,

“From 1848 to 1851, only the ghost of the old revolution circulated - from Marrast, the républicain en gants jaunes [Republican in yellow gloves], who disguised himself as old Bailly, down to the adventurer who hides his trivial and repulsive features behind the iron death mask of Napoleon. A whole nation, which thought it had acquired an accelerated power of motion by means of a revolution, suddenly finds itself set back into a defunct epoch... The nation feels like the mad Englishman in Bedlam who thinks he is living in the time of the old Pharaohs and daily bewails the hard labour he must perform in the Ethiopian gold mines, immured in this subterranean prison, a pale lamp fastened to his head, the overseer of the slaves behind him with a long whip, and at the exits a confused welter of barbarian war slaves who understand neither the forced labourers nor each other, since they speak no common language. “And all this,” sighs the mad Englishman, “is expected of me, a freeborn Briton, in order to make gold for the Pharaohs.” “In order to pay the debts of the Bonaparte family,” sighs the French nation. The Englishman, so long as he was not in his right mind, could not get rid of his idée fixé of mining gold. The French, so long as they were engaged in revolution, could not get rid of the memory of Napoleon, as the election of December 10 [1848, when Louis Bonaparte was elected President of the French Republic by plebiscite.] was proved. They longed to return from the perils of revolution to the fleshpots of Egypt , and December 2, 1851 [The date of the coup d’état by Louis Bonaparte], was the answer. Now they have not only a caricature of the old Napoleon, but the old Napoleon himself, caricatured as he would have to be in the middle of the nineteenth century.”

And all this to pay for the debts run up as a result of the policies of Thatcher.

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