History Repeating As Farce - Part 4

In 2008, there was a catastrophic illustration of the chaotic and contradiction riddled nature of Capitalism, as the recklessness of the financial markets – which had been stimulated by the policies of Thatcher and Reagan, and their successors, (deregulation, monetarist stimulation etc.) – erupted into the Global Financial Meltdown, which threatened to bring what had been, until then, a reasonably healthy, growing global economy to its knees.

It led to massive state intervention to bail-out the Banks. In fact, it illustrated the truth about Neo-Liberalism. It had nothing to do with shrinking the size of the State. Neo-Liberalism was merely the ideological representation of the interests of Money Capital as against Industrial Capital. The State remained as central as it had always been, but its intervention was now based upon Monetary Intervention, rather than Fiscal Intervention, and that, in turn, was dictated by the needs of Money Capital rather than Industrial Capital. When that Money Capital needed to be bailed-out, the State was there to do it, even if the longer term cost, to pay for it, would be aimed once again at Industrial Capital. But, as I wrote at the time - Where We're Going - it transferred the problem from US and UK and European Banks to the US, UK and European States, whose own sovereign debts and creditworthiness were called into question. That was to manifest itself in the printing of money in the US and UK to cover these debts, and in the peripheral Eurozone crisis for those economies that did not have that option.

The US and UK were left with huge debts to repay. Under such conditions, the question becomes who will pay? In the early 1980's, Thatcherism arose, in large part, because, on the back of the strength that workers had built up, during the Long Wave Boom, from 1949 to 1974, they had been able to resist the demands of Capital, when that boom ended. It was fought out in the great class battles of the early 1980's, culminating in the Miners Strike of 1984-5. It might have been that this was played out once again; the workers and their natural allies amongst the middle class insisting that the Bankers pay for the crisis they had caused. But, as Marx says in the Eighteenth Brumaire,

“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, in Britain, the nation remains spellbound by the ghost of Thatcher, even before she is officially dead. Politicians of all parties and their advisors proclaim, “We are all Thatcherites now!” Labour Prime Ministers invited her to Downing Street, and Hollywood makes films about her. Despite the grim reality of Thatcher's Britain, which caused Public and Private squalor, which hollowed out not just the country's economy, but its morality, the myth has been perpetuated.

Campo, Foggy Osbourne & Cleggy

No wonder then that the Thatcherite mantra about the size of the State (which itself was a deception, because it grew under Thatcher too!) and the need for austerity, to balance the family books like those of a household, appealed, and continue to appeal to a majority in a nation that has not yet exorcised the ghosts of the 1980's. They could not get rid of the ghost of Thatcher as the 2010 Election proved. And now we have Thatcher herself caricatured by Cameron, as he has to be in the second decade of the 21st Century, with Nick Clegg and the Liberals in the role of “The Wets”.

“The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content – here the content goes beyond the phrase.” (ibid)

In looking for a path forward, workers cannot look back to the 1970's and 80's either, any more than Cameron's harking back to then can provide a solution for Capital. The “more militancy” approach of the 1960's, 70's and early 80's proved a dead-end. It did not lead to some Luxemburgist spontaneous spill-over into revolutionary action or consciousness. It never could have done. It led only to a more militant Economism, Reformism, and Syndicalism, sometimes manifest in industrial struggle, sometimes in electoralism in the Labour Party for demands to be raised on the Capitalist State to act as the workers' benefactor. It is a far cry from Marx's analysis in relation to the State where he wrote,

“ All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it. The parties, which alternately contended for domination, regarded the possession of this huge state structure as the chief spoils of the victor.

But under the absolute monarchy, during the first Revolution, and under Napoleon the bureaucracy was only the means of preparing the class rule of the bourgeoisie. Under the Restoration, under Louis Philippe, under the parliamentary republic, it was the instrument of the ruling class, however much it strove for power of its own.”

Chapter 7.

For one thing, the working-class of today, and its organisations are not those of the 1960's and 70's. The working-class is weak, disorganised and lacks leadership, rather like the workers in France in 1851. But, why would workers want to simply revisit the failed tactics and strategy of those times? Its certainly true that for Big Capital the use of Keynesian intervention, which is one aspect of Reformism, offers a better solution, under current conditions, than Misean, Neo-Austrian austerity, and for similar reasons to those which led to the historic class alliance between Big Capital and Labour, represented by the Social Democratic consensus; a better alternative for Labour too. The stark contrast between the US and the UK demonstrates that. The US, which has adopted significant Keynesian stimulus has seen growth strengthening, and unemployment falling. The UK has seen the opposite. But, a better alternative is not the same as the best alternative!

As I pointed out recently - Civil War In The Capitalist Class these different interests between Money Capital, and Industrial Capital appear to be playing themselves out in a real struggle. Within that context, the ideas that have dominated the previous period can continue to hold considerable sway. Moreover, as I also previously argued - High Pay, Capital and the Tories - we should not equate the statements and actions of some of the bureaucratic managers of Capital with the interests of Big Capital itself. These bureaucrats, rather like the Trade Union and Labour bureaucrats, have interests of their own, separate to those of the class they serve. The Bureaucrats and managers of organisations like the CBI are more akin to the small capitalists than to Big Capital. In the US, this is often more apparent than here. There, Capital is more brutal in bringing these bureaucrats to book, when they step over the line in pushing their own interests as the example of Dennis Kozlowsky and Tyco demonstrated.

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