Just
as the bourgeoisie as a whole needed the support of workers to defeat
the landed aristocracy, so the tiny numbers of the big industrial
capitalists are unable to defeat the much larger number of small and
medium capitalists, and those that share their outlook, without the
support of workers.
The
British Liberal Party reflected that compromise, and the de facto
alliance between these industrial capitalists and workers, and the US
Democrats reflect it also. For a time, parties like the Labour Party
and European social-democratic parties appeared to represent
something different, but in reality, all they represented was a
greater strength of the interests of workers within that compromise.
In respect of the Labour Party, its commitment to the maintenance of
capitalism, as the basis of furthering the interests of workers was
never in doubt, and the interests of workers were always subordinate
to those of big capital.
That
is now simply more manifest, in the policies and actions of European
social-democratic parties in general, and this was facilitated by the
split in the international labour movement, into the Second and Third
Internationals. There is then no real substantive difference between
these parties and the US Democrats. They are all bourgeois workers
parties, in the sense that they are parties with a bourgeois
ideology, specifically geared to the interests of big industrial
capital, that depend upon the support and activism of workers in
order to win elections.
Ultimately,
big industrial capital requires the election of these
social-democratic parties, or for the social-democratic wings of
conservative parties to be strong enough to represent its interests,
as against a reversion to more primitive forms of capital. The
economic power of big capital can usually outweigh the measures
undertaken by conservative governments to benefit small capital, but,
at times, the measures undertaken by those governments fundamentally
threaten big capital. The austerity measures undertaken in the UK
and parts of Europe, and advocated by the Tea Party in the US, have
weakened the economic recovery after 2008. The US bore most of the
cost of undertaking the required fiscal stimulus, therefore. But,
the other consequence has been to strengthen conservative forces in
Europe, even more, as a result of the resulting economic weakness.
Not
only has this strengthened right-wing populism, but it has
strengthened nationalistic tendencies, thereby undermining progress
towards a single European state, which is a fundamental requirement
of big industrial capital. If it is to be achieved, big industrial
capital will require social-democratic governments across the
dominant states of the EU, it will require co-ordinated fiscal
expansion across the EU, to boost economic activity and employment,
so as to undermine the tendency towards economic nationalism, and
thereby create the material conditions to swing public opinion behind
the need for greater political integration and the creation of a
single federal state. Either that, or as happened in the US, it will
be brought about forcibly by war.
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