May and Bonapartism

A couple of days ago, I pointed out that the very highly paid political pundits do not understand the British Constitution.  Yesterday, showed that Theresa May either does not understand it, or more likely that she intends to ignore it, as she has been trying to do over the last three years.  Ed Miliband put it to her that the government is accountable to parliament, and that when her deal was voted down today, she had a responsibility to come back to parliament, and discuss with MP's the way forward.  May responded that the government is not accountable to parliament, but to the electorate.  The same concept was put forward by Tory Brextremist Anne-Marie Morrison, on Newsnight, last night, when she claimed that the people had given the government the responsibility for implementing Brexit.  So, much for Brexit being about a return of parliamentary sovereignty!  These ideas are dangerous, and show the extent to which May is driving Britain towards Bonapartism.

Theresa May addresses a load of mugs in Stoke.

Yesterday, May demonstrated that trend, as she gave another of her monotonous speeches in front of a load of mugs at a potbank in Stoke.  The reason she chose Stoke I also set out yesterday.  It was again illustrated by Channel 4 News, later in the day, which in one of its vox pops interviewed an old Brexit supporting bloke in Hanley, who proclaimed "I hate the French.  I've never liked them".  Its reminiscent of a discussion I had some years ago, with one of my distant relations, while we were out walking the dog, on the local Rec., who set out his reason for not liking Gordon Brown had nothing to do with his politics, but was down purely to the fact that he is Scottish!  Having addressed the mugs at the potbank, May then came back to address another load of mugs sitting behind her in the Commons.

The government is not accountable to the electorate.  Because the government was not elected by the people, it was elected by parliament.  The people could not have given the government responsibility for implementing Brexit, because the people did not elect the government, parliament did.  The people gave parliament the responsibility for implementing Brexit, and it is for parliament, not the government to decide how that should be done.

It is only in Presidential systems, such as in France or the US, where the Executive, i.e. the President is directly elected by the people, and thereby has their own independent democratic mandate.  The danger of such power in the hands of an individual leading to Bonapartism, and dictatorship, currently being discussed in the US, as a result of Trump, is balanced by giving the parliament (in France the Assembly, in the US Congress) its own democratic mandate, and checking power on the executive.  That is not the case in Britain which has a parliamentary, not a Presidential system.  In Britain, it is MP's who are elected in a General Election.  They do not stand in such elections as Ministers or appointees to the Executive, but only as parliamentary candidates, to be a part of the legislature.  Only when they have been elected, does this legislature then elect the government.  That reality was seen in 2017, when before May could form her government, she had to get the backing of the DUP, or in 2010, when Cameron had to get the backing of the Liberals to form his government.

Otto Strasser

The government is the servant of parliament, and continues only for so long as parliament, i.e. all MP's allow it to do so.  May, is trying to undermine that constitutional reality, by claiming a direct mandate for the government from the people.  It is typical of the way Bonapartists proceed, as they make populist appeals to sections of the population they think will provide them with support.  In the US, Trump, who was elected President by appealing to the same kinds of bigotry amongst sections of the population that Brexit is founded upon, has been similarly trying to free himself of the constitutional checks and balances provided by Congress and the Supreme Court, as he pushes the US towards Bonapartism.  This drift is seen in Hungary, Turkey, Israel and elsewhere, the forces all driving in this direction, being a part of an international ideological trend called National Bolshevism, which emerged from the ideas of Strasser in Germany, in the 1930's, and whose current centre is in Russia.

That such a tendency should emerge at the moment is not coincidence.  Trotsky defined two types of Bonapartism.  On the one hand there is that Bonapartism that reflects a rising form of property.  For example, the Bonapartism of Napoleon, of his nephew, and of Bismark represented the rising form of capitalist property, against the declining feudal property.  It represented the fact that although the classes based on these two opposing forms of property were balanced, it was capitalist property that provided the way forward for the state, and the state, thereby, rose above society so as to promote the interests of that form of property.  In Germany, in the 1930's, however, capitalist property was in decline, represented by the depression of the 1920's and 30's, and although the German working-class organised in its millions in the German Socialist Party and Communist Party was strong, it was not strong enough to impose its own form of socialist property on society.  Bonapartism in Germany, therefore, was reactionary, and backward looking, rising up above society, to prevent forward movement, and to preserve the past.  In Italy, Germany, and Spain it took the specific form of fascism.

It is these conditions where society is irretrievably divided that creates the conditions for Bonapartism.  Politics abhors a vacuum, and where such vacuums arise, the state rises up above society to fill the gap, in the form of a Bonapartist regime.  The irretrievable divide can be due to a horizontal cleavage along class and status lines, or it can be a vertical or cross cutting cleavage, for example, where in addition to the vertical cleavages, it is divided along lines of race, religion, ethnicity, and so on.  In all these cases a strong state arises to impose its rule upon society.

In Britain, today, we have such a situation, and something similar exists across Europe, and in North America.  It takes the form of a division between modernism and reaction, of bigotry versus rationalism, and it often, therefore, assumes the form of a division between a modernist, rationalist, educated youth, versus a frightened, less well educated aged and ageing population that seeks solace in the use of scapegoats and easy solutions to a world that is changing by the day around it.  The idea that this divide is between a traditional working-class, and some form of metropolitan middle-class elite, is totally false.  The idea that it is Labour voters that pushed through the Brexit vote is totally false.  Around, 75% of Labour's 2017 voters, voted remain, and continue to back opposition to Brexit.  Those Labour voters are overwhelmingly working-class, even if the nature of that working-class does not fit the old, subjectivist, and bourgeois notions of what constitutes the working-class.  In fact, the changed nature of the working-class, as better educated, and involved in white collar jobs, in services, which accounts for 80% of the economy, is one reason that the divide is also between the young, better educated sections of the population, that predominantly occupy those jobs, and the older, less well educated sections of the population.

Channel 4's survey shows that trend toward support for Remain amongst the working-class, in Labour seats strengthening.

The division in many ways is similar to the division along religious lines that the English Civil War, and in part the Great French Revolution took, even though these were only symptoms of the underlying divisions in society which underlay those struggles.  The real underlying nature of the division in Britain today, and this is reflected in the situation in Europe, and in the US, is the division between the actual socialised nature of capitalist property, and the continued private control over that property, by shareholders.  It is that, which creates a division between the requirements of the dominant form of property as socialised capital, and the needs of shareholders, as well as the interests of small scale privately owned capital.

When you measure your wealth and power each day by the
price of your shares, you have an incentive to have the state
keep those prices inflated.

Large scale socialised capital, has long since taken the form of the multinational company.  The requirements of this capital are aligned to social-democracy.  They require long-term planning and regulation of the economy, in order to make the long term investment plans required when you are spending tens of billions of dollars, on which you expect to make a profit.   The share and bondholders of these companies, in the longer term, require that such conditions exist, so as to maximise those profits, and thereby pay higher amounts of interest on their shares and bonds.  Given that the vast majority of privately held wealth is now in the form of these shares and bonds - fictitious capital - rather than ownership of industrial capital (productive-capital and commercial capital), their interests are obviously paramount for the capitalist state.  But, over the last thirty years, and particularly the last 20 years, those interests have been manifest in a distorted way.  Rather than an attempt to maximise profits, the aim of the state has been to inflate, and keep inflated, asset prices, i.e. the prices of shares, and bonds, and along with it, property on which a lot of fictitious capital in the form of mortgages, held by banks and financial institutions rest.

That drive to inflate asset prices so as to sustain the paper wealth of those share, bond and property owners, has been contrary to the needs of the underlying socialised capital itself, because it has diverted potential money-capital (from realised profits) into such financial and property speculation, and thereby away from real investment in capital.   In so doing, it undermines economic growth, and in order to keep interest rates low, on which high asset prices depend, in the last ten years, it has been accompanied by austerity, which reduces economic growth even further, and that means that the future growth of capital, and thereby of profits is undermined, so that the growth of interest and rents is undermined, so that share, bond and property prices become undermined, requiring even more money-printing so that those prices can be reflated each time they inevitably crash.

So, we have an inevitable cleavage here, based upon contradictory interests.  The immediate interest of the owners of shares, bonds and property, is to keep the prices of those assets inflated, and rising.  That actually undermines their own long-term interests, because it undermines the accumulation of capital.  For so long as they can be deluded into the belief that the asset prices can rise irrespective of profits, and the growth of real capital, they suffer from a kind of "false consciousness", not understanding their own position, and long-term interests.  The central banks are now having to impose that reality on them, as global interest rates have started to rise again, anyway, threatening to collapse the entire financial edifice even more catastrophically than in 2008.

The state, acting in the interests of the dominant form of capital - socialised capital, in the shape of the multinational companies - must not only try to further those interests by creating the macro-economic conditions of planning and regulation required by this more advanced, more mature form of capital, but it must do so in the terms required by that capital in the modern world, which is one in which the fetters of the old nation state have been burst asunder, and social-democracy itself, is only conceivable on a continental scale.  The state itself is being pulled in two directions, to move forward in developing social-democracy at this minimum international level, and also to respond to the needs of those sections of the capitalist class, holding fictitious capital, and suffering with a false consciousness, as they seek to keep the prices of those assets inflated.  This is a struggle that plays out inside the Tory Party between its social-democratic wing, and its reactionary wing, as well as playing out inside the Labour Party between its conservative (Blair-right) wing, and its progressive (Corbynite) wing, although Corbyn himself, remains captured by a reactionary, nationalist, Stalinist ideology of social-democracy in one country.  Its not in workers interests to go back to a less mature form of capitalism, based on private capital and the nation state.  Our interest lies in driving development of capital forward, and pushing through it, by a struggle for industrial democracy, and control over that socialised capital.  But, that can only be done at a continental level.

The conservative social-democratic ideology that has dominated the last thirty years, based upon the false consciousness of the owners of fictitious capital, had the other effect that whilst the paper wealth of the main owners of that fictitious capital expanded astronomically, it was not in any sense related to a growth in the economy or of real capital.  In the last thirty years, and particularly the last twenty, global capital grew, especially as the new long wave uptrend began in 1999, but not by anything like the rise in paper wealth.  The Dow Jones rose by around 1300%, between 1980 and 2000, or about 5 times the growth of US GDP. 

Even since 2009, the Dow Jones has gone from around 7500 to a peak of 27,000 last year, or a rise of about 300% in 9 years.  Its this rise in paper wealth that is the reflection of growing inequality, not any changes in incomes.  And, the concomitant has been that all those, in Britain, Europe and the US, who either do not own property, own only a modest house, and have no shares, bonds, or funds invested in those markets, have seen the gap between what they have, and what the rich, or even those who do own a more than modest home, or money tucked away in ISA's and so on, grow wider by the day.  They have seen any savings they have in the bank return them no interest, and thereby effectively become worth less every day.  As house prices have soared, the chance of them being able to ever buy a house becomes a distant horizon, sinking further and further from view.

That Blair-right/Thatcherite centre ground of yesteryear has created that problem, and that is why Corbyn's failure to address the reactionary demand for Brexit, which opens the door to those Blair-rights, who seemed consigned to the dustbin of history is so deplorable.  That politics cannot provide a solution, any more than can Macron in France.  By opening a door once more to that centre-ground, just as Hollande did in France, aided in the last election by the division caused by the economic nationalist agenda of Melonchon, it creates the conditions for inevitable disillusion, which will indeed provide fertile ground for the fascists and ultra nationalists.

The Tory Party Base

The Tories themselves are also divided between their social-democratic wing, reflecting the need to recognise the reality of the current social-democratic state, and their reactionary wing, which represents the interests of the small private capitalists, the self-employed and the layers attached to them. It is this wing that seeks to push through Brexit. But, it is this wing that represents the majority of Tory members, and its core vote. That is what has torn the party asunder for the last thirty years. On the one hand as an aspirant party of government, it recognises the nature of the social democratic state, which today requires membership of the EU. On the other, its party base demands the opposite.

British society is suffering multiple cross-cutting cleavages. Historically, when such divisions have persisted for any length of time, they only become more intense, and they drive inexorably to a resolution by a civil war. That is why the calls for “Just get On With It”, or for politicians to find some common ground are facile. This will be resolved by one side of the argument imposing its will on the other, which can only be done by fairly forcible means.  The alternative to a civil war is the imposition of a Bonapartist regime, and that is clearly what May is driving towards, in similar manner to Trump, Erdogan, et al. Given that the forward, modernist form of property is that of large-scale socialised capital, and progressive social-democracy, which requires the very opposite of the solutions that May and Trump, and Erdogan are pushing, it is clear why they have all faced opposition from the forces of the permanent state in their respective countries. It is not in the interests of the dominant section of capital, which represents its more progressive elements, to allow the forces of reaction to prevail. They would prefer the forces of reaction to be defeated by democratic means, but that requires that the progressive forces upon which that socialised capital has depended, i.e. the organised working-class, to take up that challenge. It is also in the interests of the working-class to defeat the forces of reaction represented by May, and more radically by by Bojo, Mogg and forces to their right.  Unfortunately, in Britain, those forces of the working-class that should be mobilising to defeat reaction, are led by Corbyn, who continues to promote a reactionary, economic nationalism, himself, not that much different from May or Mogg, and certainly little different to that proposed by the BNP et al, and in France, it is presented with the fake left politics of Melonchon, etc, whose programme last year was barely discernible from that of Le Pen. This weakness of the progressive forces, is what creates the current impasse, which opens the door for Bonapartism.

But, the challenge is this. A Bonapartism driven by Brexit, and May, or those that replace her, will be of that reactionary type described by Trotsky in relation to Nazi Germany. It will be one trying to turn the clock back, not one facilitating the birth of new forms of property.