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| The Thatcherite Brittain - "We are all Keynesians now." |
Back in October 2010, in the Weekly Worker, Jim Creegan replied to a letter I had written in relation to his article – Tea Party Rumblings On The Frenzied Right. In his original article, Jim had identified the Tea Party as representing the ideas of the US ruling class, and setting their sights against the politicians in Washington. In my reply I pointed out the logical problems with this argument. Whose interests exactly did Jim think the politicians in Washington represented, if not the interests of the ruling class, or fractions of it? Only if you bought the Tea Party propaganda that Obama was a socialist, could you not conclude that both Republicans and Democrats were representatives of Capital. The only difference, as with Labour and Tories in Britain, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in Germany etc. or Legitimists and Orleanists, as analysed by Marx in “The Eighteenth Brumaire”, is which fraction of Capital these different bourgeois parties represent.
In the latest Weekly Worker Jim has eventually conceded the point.
“A fundamental question has run throughout our coverage of the Tea Party over the last four years: is it an Igor-like servant of the big bourgeoisie, deformed but dutiful? Or is it rather a Frankenstein’s monster - a petty bourgeois rabble that has escaped the control of a ruling class that nurtured and encouraged it? The recent government shutdown and debt-ceiling crisis have now supplied a definitive answer: a Frankenstein’s monster.”
Not exactly an accurate representation of that debate, or recantation, but its a good start and a good sign. The mark of a good Marxist is not that they are always right, but that they can acknowledge when they were wrong. The Tea Party has never been a servant of big capital. On the contrary, like UKIP or the Tory Euroseptics, or the similar splinters of European right-wing populism, the Tea Party have always been a petit-bourgeois grouping that has been a thorn in the side of the interests of Big Capital. It has never been true that big industrial capital sought to promote the Tea Party, whose ideology is anathema to its interests. On the contrary, where they intervened, it was to bolster the Republican Establishment against challenges by the Tea Party to incumbents. If big capital could be charged with anything, it is not with promoting the Tea Party, but with being inadequately engaged in stopping them! That is a failing that the recent statements, after the Debt Ceiling débâcle, by The National Retail Federation, the US Chambers of Commerce, and others - See: US Political Crisis - Republican Civil War – suggest will now be remedied.
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| Big industrial capital in the US has been crippled by the costs of the health and social insurance it has to cover for its workers. It has long sought to shift those costs off its own shoulders in the way European capital did long ago with the establishment of socialised healthcare systems paid for by workers, the middle class and small capitalists. |
The fact is, as I pointed out to Jim in that letter, and in my further letter the policy of Keynesian intervention, required in the interests of big industrial capital, which continues to be dominant in the US, was not just something introduced to deal with the financial meltdown, nor was it just a policy introduced by the “socialist” Obama. Not only had Bush introduced a massive fiscal stimulus in response to the crisis, but in the preceding eight years, he had run up a massive budget deficit, the epitome of Keynesian intervention. In 2005, Bush had taken $750 billion of prescription medicine costs off the books of big private companies, and put them on to the books of the state. In other words, it was a large move towards socialising healthcare costs that were crippling big industrial capital.
And, the forerunners of the Tea Party, the Libertarians and their associates like Ron Paul had been arguing against such policies from way before that. The question is why is it that the Tea Party has been kept in its box in the US, and yet the same policies it promotes of austerity etc. continue to exert an influence not just over fringe groups like UKIP, and the Tory Right, but over Cameron, Osbourne and Clegg, and with their counterparts in Europe? That is a question I will examine next.
6 comments:
You say that the Tea Party is no servant of Big Capital -- do you think a lot of people are confused on this subject because they associate the Tea Party with the billionaire Koch Brothers? IIRC the Kochs are oil barons (would Marxist theory consider these to be an unusual kind of landowner?) rather than industrial capitalists.
You've also described the Tea Party as an essentially Midwestern formation -- isn't it in truth a more Southern formation, calling for the resurrection of the reactionary culture which lost the American Civil War?
For any social theory, including Marxism, you can only ever speak about tendential laws. In other words, there are always exceptions to the rule. In his analysis of Louis Bonaparte's coup, in the 18th Brumaire, Marx makes clear that what is important, is to look at what various groupings are saying, and to assess whose interests it reflects, rather than necessary to take to much account of who some particular party says they represent, or who says they back them. The Labour Party, for example, always said it represented the workers, but in reality, its ideology was always social-democratic, and therefore, designed to meet the needs of big industrial capital.
The Tea Party, like that same set of ideas in the Tory Party, UKIP etc. represents the interests of the small capitalists, those who benefit from the extraction of absolute surplus value, whose interests are more nationally based, who gain from various forms of protectionism and from low taxes etc.
Both the Republicans and the Tories - and the same applies in European parties - find themselves under current conditions having to accommodate those views, because otherwise they risk losing that part of their constituency without which they would have no chance of winning elections.
The Republicans, as with the Tories, have their own social-democratic wing, people like Heseltine, Clark etc, who also represent the interests of big industrial capital, and at times, like the post-war period when that section of capital, and the ideas that represented its interests were predominant, they were able to dominate those parties, because all sections of capital saw no threat from those ideas.
Ultimately, in just the same way that at time the LP poses Left, but tacks right when in office, so right-wing parties, pose Right, but then in office tack Left, in order to ensure the interests of big capital are met, where that conflicts with the interest of small capital. But, to be clear, that depends upon sufficient pressure being applied to those parties. Its not some automatic process.
What I've said about the Tea Party is that they represent that the interests of small capital, including those of the essentially peasant elements of US society, as well as the social layers attached to that, which can include the stock market traders etc. where the kind of individualist ideas of the peasantry represented by people like Hayek and Mises are heavily represented.
I wouldn't limit those social layers to being just the Mid-West or the South etc.
Another question: AIUI social democracy is essentially a coalition between the workers and Big Capital directed against the reactionary elements of society (landed interests, Money Capital and small capital).
If that is the case, why did very few social-democratic governments seriously push for land value taxation, to shift the tax burden off workers and capitalists and onto landowners?
On the Koch Brothers as oil barons. Technically, you would say that if they owned the land from which the oil is extracted, they would be landowners. The Gulf Monarchies, for example, are typical, feudal regimes. Their share of surplus vale comes from rent, charged for the extraction of oil. But, of course, these regimes also own oil companies, and extract, refine and sell oil themselves.
As I said in the earlier comment, you can only deal in tendential laws. The truth is always concrete. Similarly, the kind of capital that historically was tied to such production tended to be commercial capital and bank capital. It grew up over a long period before the development of industrial capital in a symbiotic relation with feudalism.
So, commercial capital acted as an advanced guard under Colonialism for feudalism, whilst money capital funded such ventures. The landed aristocracy established their own foreign, large landed estates from which foodstuffs and materials were extracted, the trade financed by money-capital (the banks were often themselves often also owned by aristocratic families) and the commercial monopolies sold the commodities. But, often the commercial firms would themselves get involved in establishing plantations etc.
This is a significant difference of the economic relations under Colonialism, and those under Imperialism in the 20th century, when big, multinational industrial capital becomes dominant, and starts to organise production in these economies on the basis of industrial production, and the extraction of relative surplus value, which requires social democracy. That has been the material conditions behind the establishment of bourgeois social democracies in Latin America, and was behind the "Arab Spring".
George,
When you say coalition of workers and big capital, let me re-emphasise that this is not some kind of open Popular Front. It is a modus vivendi, a convergence of interests within the confines of Capitalism. I am most certainly NOT saying that the contradiction of interests between workers and big capital does not exist.
I am saying that within certain limits, big capital has found a way - via Fordism and Keyensianism - particularly during periods of long wave boom, to ensure that workers real wages continue to rise, that a degree of social security is provided via Welfarism etc., and the workers via the labour bureaucracy have for now settled for it, as no better alternative has been provided for them.
As for your question. In the 19th Century, the big bourgeoisie and their ideologists proposed nationalisation of the land for precisely this purpose. They argued that if the capitalist state owned the land, rents would go to defray the cost of running the state, which would thereby reduce the amount that needed to be taken in in taxes, thereby increasing profits.
But, I'm not sure that a land valuation tax would work in the way you expect. Landowners obtain rent because of two different factors. Firstly, there is a monopoly ownership of land, i.e. you can't really increase the supply of it, when demand for it, and its price rises.
Secondly, there is Differential Rent, which arises because some land produces higher profits than other land, and so its price is higher. I think a land valuation tax would simply result in higher land prices, which would thereby just result in higher costs for capital, and a higher value of labour power, as housing costs rose.
Besides, part of the reason that big capital is more in favour of welfarism etc. is precisely because it largely avoids tax altogether. Welfare is paid for by workers essentially as with any other commodity they buy, except its bought collectively through an insurance payment. The other costs of running the state are picked up in the taxes of the small capitalists - which is why they are more concerned about tax rates and the size of the state - and by the landowners, but who as stated above essentially recover it in their rents.
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