Big Capital failed to carry through its own revolution consistently, particularly in Britain, and instead of confronting these ideas openly, that permeate the whole of society, and which would, therefore, require it to confront them within the ranks of its own class, it preferred to proceed bureaucratically. Instead of waging an open political struggle against these ideas, it chose police methods, attempting instead to outlaw such ideas through legislation such as Race Relations and other such laws, which have, and could only have, the opposite effect to that which was intended. The classic manifestation of that is in relation to the EU, where, rather than waging an open struggle, for the establishment of a new democratic EU State, it has proceeded by the same kind of bureaucratic methods, attempting to establish such a state by stealth.
These struggles are also playing out in a similar, behind the scenes, manner within the Tory Party itself, which is why it periodically breaks out in open warfare over Europe. The outcome of these struggles will no doubt illuminate the complex web that ties sections of the gutter press, to sections of the Tory Party and their co-thinkers within UKIP, to sections of Money Capital based in the City, to sections of the State, in the same way that such links were exposed over phone hacking.
This has echoes itself of the situation that Marx was describing in the 18th Brumaire. After, the French Revolution, as part of the land reforms, which broke up the power of the old feudal aristocracy, the peasants were encouraged to also borrow large amounts of money to develop their new properties. Having done so, they were to find later that, having increased output, food prices fell, meanwhile the mortgages on their properties increased. Instead of being exploited by the old Aristocracy in the form of Rent, they were now being cruelly exploited by the Aristocracy of Finance in the form of Interest. Marx writes,
“After the first Revolution had transformed the semi-feudal peasants into freeholders, Napoleon confirmed and regulated the conditions in which they could exploit undisturbed the soil of France which they had only just acquired, and could slake their youthful passion for property. But what is now ruining the French peasant is his small holding itself, the division of the land and the soil, the property form which Napoleon consolidated in France. It is exactly these material conditions which made the feudal peasant a small-holding peasant and Napoleon an emperor. Two generations sufficed to produce the unavoidable result: progressive deterioration of agriculture and progressive indebtedness of the agriculturist. The “Napoleonic” property form, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the condition of the emancipation and enrichment of the French countryfolk, has developed in the course of this century into the law of their enslavement and their pauperism. And just this law is the first of the “Napoleonic ideas” which the second Bonaparte has to uphold. If he still shares with the peasants the illusion that the cause of their ruin is to be sought not in the small holdings themselves but outside them – in the influence of secondary circumstances – his experiments will shatter like soap bubbles when they come in contact with the relations of production.
The economic development of small-holding property has radically changed the peasants’ relations with the other social classes. Under Napoleon the fragmentation of the land in the countryside supplemented free competition and the beginning of big industry in the towns. The peasant class was the ubiquitous protest against the recently overthrown landed aristocracy. The roots that small-holding property struck in French soil deprived feudalism of all nourishment. The landmarks of this property formed the natural fortification of the bourgeoisie against any surprise attack by its old overlords. But in the course of the nineteenth century the urban usurer replaced the feudal one, the mortgage replaced the feudal obligation, bourgeois capital replaced aristocratic landed property. The peasant’s small holding is now only the pretext that allows the capitalist to draw profits, interest, and rent from the soil, while leaving it to the agriculturist himself to see to it how he can extract his wages. The mortgage debt burdening the soil of France imposes on the French peasantry an amount of interest equal to the annual interest on the entire British national debt. Small-holding property, in this enslavement by capital toward which its development pushes it unavoidably, has transformed the mass of the French nation into troglodytes. Sixteen million peasants (including women and children) dwell in caves, a large number of which have but one opening, others only two and the most favored only three. Windows are to a house what the five senses are to the head. The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly emerged small holdings and fertilized them with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks the blood from their hearts and brains and casts them into the alchemist’s caldron of capital. The Code Napoléon is now nothing but the codex of distraints, of forced sales and compulsory auctions. To the four million (including children, etc.) officially recognized paupers, vagabonds, criminals, and prostitutes in France must be added another five million who hover on the margin of existence and either have their haunts in the countryside itself or, with their rags and their children, continually desert the countryside for the towns and the towns for the countryside. Therefore the interests of the peasants are no longer, as under Napoleon, in accord with, but are now in opposition to bourgeois interests, to capital. Hence they find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task it is to overthrow the bourgeois order. But “strong and unlimited government” - and this is the second “Napoleonic idea” that the second Napoleon has to carry out – is called upon to defend this “material order” by force. This “material order” also serves, in all Bonaparte’s proclamations, as the slogan against the rebellious peasants.
In addition to the mortgage which capital imposes on it, the small holding is burdened by taxes. Taxes are the life source of the bureaucracy, the army, the priests, and the court – in short, of the entire apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical. By its very nature, small-holding property forms a basis for an all-powerful and numberless bureaucracy. It creates a uniform level of personal and economic relationships over the whole extent of the country. Hence it also permits uniform action from a supreme centre on all points of this uniform mass. It destroys the aristocratic intermediate steps between the mass of the people and the power of the state. On all sides, therefore, it calls forth the direct intrusion of this state power and the interposition of its immediate organs. Finally, it produces an unemployed surplus population which can find no place either on the land or in the towns and which perforce reaches out for state offices as a sort of respectable alms, and provokes the creation of additional state positions. By the new markets which he opened with bayonets, and by the plundering of the Continent, Napoleon repaid the compulsory taxes with interest. These taxes were a spur to the industry of the peasant, whereas now they rob his industry of its last resources and complete his defenselessness against pauperism. An enormous bureaucracy, well gallooned and well fed, is the “Napoleonic idea” which is most congenial to the second Bonaparte. How could it be otherwise, considering that alongside the actual classes of society, he is forced to create an artificial caste for which the maintenance of his regime becomes a bread-and-butter question? Hence one of his first financial operations was the raising of officials’ salaries to their old level and the creation of new sinecures.”
I have included this lengthy description in full, because it is so clearly a parallel for what we see today. For Napoleon read Thatcher, for the nephew read Cameron. For the old feudal property read Council Housing and large scale manufacturing employment, and for the new peasant property read owner occupation, self-employment, and the encouragement of small businesses, buy-to let, and a host of other enterprises whose existence are dependent upon unsustainable levels of private debt, and unsustainably low interest rates. And increasingly, those that lose their jobs are being encouraged to go into debt, and to imperil any money they have, through self-employment. As the unsustainable levels of interest threaten to collapse into a new Credit Crunch, as we see the reality of private debt, and the real level of interest rates being manifest in the return of the usurers offering Pay Day Loans with an interest rate of up to 4000% p.a., we see the beginning once again of “distraints, of forced sales, and compulsory auctions.” Many of those things have already occurred in the US, in Ireland and Spain, and must happen here too before too long. Already, as the property site Property Snake shows, even asking prices for houses are down by as much as 50%, and selling prices are on average 40% below average asking prices!
But, its upon this social strata, of the petit-bourgeoisie, of the aspiring Middle Class, particularly its more reactionary sections that Cameron is based, just as was Louis Bonaparte.
Over the last 30 years large sections of the population were encouraged to become home owners, and to take on huge amounts of debt to achieve it. They have given up a certain amount of security as tenants, for the insecurity arising from the possibility of being unable to pay their mortgage. They have exchanged the exploitation of the landlord, for the exploitation of the Bank. In fact, many, like the French peasants, described here, are really in a position not of home owners, but of tenants of the Bank or Building Society. Moreover, the Tory ideology also continually stresses the idea that everyone can simply become some kind of self-employed petit-bourgeois, despite the fact that all the evidence shows that the vast majority of such enterprises fail within just a few years, usually owing large amounts again to the Bank.
If it is not investment in such puny Capitals, it is the idea of investing in “human Capital”, an idea which chimes with the aspirations of the Middle Class, whose children then also become enmeshed in a web of unending debt to cover Tuition Fees, and other expenses. The irony being that the very policies of austerity that the Government is pursuing will be the very policies that lead to the unemployment that will make those debts impossible to repay, and which will then lead to personal defaults on debt, and which will in turn cause a tremendous crash in the prices of property.
The question here then is whether, under such conditions, Cameron will find himself pushed aside by some Crapulinsky, whether the bourgeoisie will find themselves the subject of attacks by an army of those “scum, offal and refuse” that comprise the lumpen proletariat. As Marx points out above, the conditions that created the ruin of the small holding peasants were conditions which made them the natural allies of the urban proletariat. But, the politicians of that proletariat, be they the official leaders within the Labour Party, or their would be replacements in the various left sects have tied themselves too closely to the ideas of statism, and the high taxation policies that go with it, and which were criticised by Marx above, to be able to win over these social groups. Far more likely that they will be pushed even further to the Right under such conditions.
Marxists have to offer workers, and their natural allies within these intermediate classes, an alternative.
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