Chapter 4 – Permanent Revolution
In
the 1970's, social-democracy was prepared to envisage
co-determination, as indeed it had existed without any serious threat
to capital, for decades, in Germany, provided it was contained in a
corporatist, bureaucratic framework, that limited workers real control
of production, but, at a time of heightened class struggle, it was
certainly not prepared to push that forward, against resistance from
conservative political forces, representing the interests of share
and bond holders and other money lenders, by mobilising the
working-class to overcome their resistance.
And,
social-democracy was itself fatally flawed by the fact that its
left-wing was heavily influenced by the reactionary ideas of
Stalinism and national socialism, most visible, in Britain, with the
anti-EEC stance of the Bennite Left, and the ideas of the Alternative
Economic Strategy.
Having
failed to push through the necessary social-democratic measures, to
limit the power of fictitious capital, social-democracy found itself
incapable of keeping its side of the bargain with workers, to ensure
that their living standards continued to rise year on year. And, so
workers increasingly abandoned the social-democratic parties,
enabling conservative parties to win elections and form governments.
Those conservative governments then pursued policies that favoured
fictitious capital over real, industrial-capital.
Asset
price bubbles inflated in stocks, bonds and property, creating the
delusion that wealth could be created by such paper capital gains,
rather than the requirement for the expenditure of labour, in the
production of real goods and services. Debt financed consumption was
confused with affluence and wealth creation. It bred political
delusions about the nature of wealth creation, and individual
aspiration that fed conservatism. And, having rejected the idea of a
political battle against conservative ideas in the 1970's, the
social-democratic parties, desperate to win elections themselves,
certainly were not going to undertake such a task in the 1990's and
2000's.
Having
seen a large portion of their core vote desert them – the feature
that has confronted Clinton in the rust-belt, and Labour in the
decayed urban areas recently – the dominant social-democratic
politicians instead sought to triangulate so as to win over
conservative voters, which inevitably required promoting conservative
ideas.
Finally,
where the requirements of social-democracy did impose itself upon
conservatism, the contradictions this implied were dealt with
bureaucratically. Conservative governments, including notionally
social-democratic governments implementing conservative policies,
pursued the needs of extending the European Single Market (the same
can be said for NAFTA, in relation to the US) not on the basis of a
political campaign that carried along the working-class behind it,
but by bureaucratic agreements over the heads of populations.
Indeed, it would have been difficult to have implemented such
agreements with mass working-class support, because in the form that
conservative governments took forward these new arrangements, they
were immediately hostile to workers interests.
That
was illustrated by the rejection of the EU Constitution, drawn up by
D'Estaing, and its subsequent adoption in the form of the Lisbon
Treaty. But, it is also the reason that a pro-EU referendum campaign
of the sort undertaken by Cameron and the Blair-rights was never
likely to garner mass working class enthusiasm.
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