Understanding The US Political Crisis - Part 3

The Conservatives Forced To Live In The Social Democratic Present But Looking Back To The Liberal Democratic Past and Beyond

The classic representation of the social-democratic consensus described in Part 2 was the British Liberal Party at the end of the 19th Century, and start of the 20th. Its membership comprised both the Benthamite, Free Trade, Manchester Liberal industrialists, as well as their workers, who congregated in the local Liberal Clubs, which became a seedbed for the development of the Labour Party. As the epitome of that social-democratic ideal, described by Marx in his analysis of the Eighteenth Brumaire, of reconciling the interests of workers and industrial capital, it is no wonder that the intellectual vanguard of that ideology, the Fabians, were themselves opposed to workers splitting away from the Liberals and establishing their own Labour Party. You would not know that, of course, from the way the later history of the development of the Labour Party was written!

With workers obtaining the vote, however, and given the overwhelming size of the working-class compared to the exploiting classes, it was inevitable that the Tories would be forced, for their own survival to seek their own base of support within the working class. This was how the concept of the working-class Tory came about, as Disraeli, adopted the idea of “One Nation Toryism”. But, as Marx points out.

“In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe.

In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.

The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter... 

In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite different and that are now antiquated. In showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat never existed, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own form of society.”

(The Communist Manifesto) 

The Tories were saved from the kind of extinction that the Liberals now face, only because when the workers did decide that, as they formed the majority, there was no reason for them to play second fiddle within the Liberal Party, their decision to set up the Labour Party, denied the Liberals of the one thing they needed the workers for, votes. The rational thing for the industrial bourgeoisie to do under such conditions was to once again make common cause with the other exploiting classes in the Tory Party. In effect, the same kind of relation that existed within civil society, was thereby replicated within the political realm. In the factory Capital confronted Labour, but within a context in which the continued rule of Capital was not disputed. The conflicting interests of the two, was mediated by the role of the trade union bureaucracy.

The ideology of a bourgeois social democracy now permeated the society. Capital reconciled itself to the idea of making concessions to workers that were in any case required for the efficient extraction of relative surplus value, within the context of a stable social regime, so long as the workers reconciled themselves to the continuation of the rule of Capital and its need to continually expand, by extracting more and more profits from their labour. The social function of the labour bureaucracy was solidified, as the material representation of the social-democratic idea. It acted to convey bourgeois ideas into the working-class, and thereby socialised it. Whenever, the working-class threatened to go beyond the limits of what was compatible with the interests of capital accumulation, the labour bureaucracy was there as a safety valve, ready to absorb and control the pressure from below, and thereby to contain it.

At a political level, the bosses appeared in the same position. The first moves towards providing welfarist provision for the workers, therefore came not from the Labour Party, but from the Liberal Winston Churchill, who in 1909, introduced the first Minimum Wage, along with the introduction by the Liberals of National Insurance and the state pension, and the Tory Chancellor Neville Chamberlain, who in 1929, long before Beveridge, developed the basic ideas that were to become encompassed in the post-war Welfare State. Yet, every phenomenon bears the marks of its historical development. The Labour Party was born with the ideology of social democracy in its genes. The Tory Party, has never been able to remove the ideology of feudalism, and Mercantilism from its own genetic make-up. The Labour Party as the clearest manifestation of the ideology that underlies the nature of society as a bourgeois social democracy has always been, therefore, ironically the real representative of that ideology, which represents the interests of big capital, whereas the Tory Party in so far as it absorbed the interests of Manchester Liberalism with the collapse of the Liberal Party has always been at war with itself, as those ideas conflict with the interests of landed property, and of money-capital that represent the parties past, and its roots. But, just as it represents that past and a society that has past, the Tory Party also represents the interests of that section of capital also whose time has past, the small capitalists whose continued existence only reminds us of where modern big industrial capital came from more than 150 years ago.

But, in the US the development of the two major parties followed a different route, to arrive at a similar destination. In the US, the Democrats today occupy a position almost identical to that of the British Liberal Party at the end of the 19th century. On the one hand they represent the interests of Big industrial capital, but in doing so they require the support of the workers, who provide that support via their Trades Unions. No one can doubt that the Democrats are the party of big business, and yet the means by which they have represented those interests has always been within the context of that bourgeois social democratic ideology. That has been true of Roosevelt's New Deal, of LBJ's Great Society, and it is true of Obamacare. The central principle is that the working-class and big industrial capital have not only reconcilable, but shared interests. And, of course, so long as you accept the continuance of Capitalism they do.

The workers have no interest in returning to the past that the Tories or the Republicans represent; they have no interest in advancing the cause of the inefficient, more ruthless small capitalists, against that of the big capitalists who by comparison represent progress; and to the extent that a condition for the workers condition improving under Capitalism, requires that Capital expands, which can only be achieved on the back of extracting ever more relative surplus value, the workers have an interest even in co-operating in their own more effective exploitation – a reality that has been most pronounced in the world's most classic bourgeois social democracy in Germany.

Understanding that appearance and reality do not coincide that the real interests of classes and class fractions are often different from those espoused by those purporting to be their representatives, is fundamental to an analysis of current political regimes.

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