Reaction v Conservative Social-Democracy (1)
The actions of Corbyn's Stalinist allies have ensured that we will not see a Corbyn government, nor a progressive social-democratic government led by anyone else, in the near future. Still less are we likely to see anything approaching a Workers' Government. But, if we were, the fact that the ruling class's unelected judges have been invited in, to overrule the government, would be a dangerous precedent. Of course, the ruling class's judges are not impartial, as the liberal bourgeois politicians and media pundits would have us believe. The capitalist state is there to protect the interests of the ruling class, and the courts and the judges, just like the military, the Monarchy, the permanent state bureaucracy of the Civil Service, as well as its ideological arms in the schools and universities, the churches, and the welfare state, are all a part of that machinery. If ever we were to get even a progressive social-democratic government, let alone a Workers Government, all of these elements of the capitalist state would be used against it, in different measure, depending upon their success, and the extent to which the ruling class felt its interests to be threatened. By inviting in the ruling class's unelected judges, the liberal bourgeoisie have protected their own interests against the threat to the dominant section of the ruling class, which Johnson, and the reactionaries he represents, has presented to them. But socialists have no reason to support this undemocratic intrusion of the ruling class's judges. What we have here is a nascent reactionary Bonapartism, in the form of Boris Johnson, being confronted by a nascent conservative social-democratic Bonapartism in the form of unelected judges; neither represent the interests of workers. Its rather like the choice Egyptian workers faced of the Bonapartism of the reactionary Morsi or the Bonapartism of the conservative Al Sisi.
The involvement of the ruling class's unelected judges, now, as earlier, in relation to Gina Miller's original court case, shows a number of things. Firstly, it shows that the main class division over Brexit is actually being fought out between two fractions of the ruling class; a reactionary fraction backing Brexit, and a conservative fraction opposing it. On the one hand, we have the Tories who represent reaction. They represent the 15 million people that comprise the class of small private capitalists, the owners of the 5 million small private businesses and their families. This class fraction is also coterminous with the core vote for Brexit. For them, the social-democratic state that was created more than a century ago, and which represents the interests of the large-scale, socialised capital, that dominates the economy, along with the immediate interests of the organised workers within it, is anathema. This large-scale socialised capital has tried to suppress all of the contradictions, and the disadvantages that arise, for each individual capital, from competition. The very fact of the concentration and centralisation of capital itself represents an attempt to escape from competition, by destroying competitors, and gaining a large enough market share so as to be able to dominate the market.
But when, as happened by the latter part of the 19th century, this process of capital accumulation and the concentration and centralisation of capital, reaches a point where, even the largest of privately owned businesses is not big enough, so that this monopoly of private capital represents a fetter on the further accumulation of capital, this fetter is burst asunder. As Marx puts it, in Capital I, Chapter 32, the expropriators are expropriated. The private capitalists first expropriated the independent commodity producers, then larger private capitalists expropriated smaller private capitalists, finally very large private capitalists expropriated large private capitalists. Now unable to go further, even these largest private capitalists get expropriated, but now not by private capital, but by socialised capital, in the form of joint stock companies (companies not owned by individuals who, thereby, appropriate profits, but companies that are themselves an independent legal entity, a corporation, which raises capital by selling shares and bonds, and pays interest on this capital in the form of dividends and coupon) and cooperatives. It is now the company itself that appropriates profit as profit of enterprise, after it has paid interest, and uses this profit of enterprise for capital accumulation.
As Marx put it in Capital III, Chapter 27, where he continues this discussion of the expropriation of the expropriators, it represents the destruction of capital as private property within the capitalist system itself, and the socialised capital, which expropriates it, represents the transitional form of property between capitalism and socialism.
“The capital, which in itself rests on a social mode of production and presupposes a social concentration of means of production and labour-power, is here directly endowed with the form of social capital (capital of directly associated individuals) as distinct from private capital, and its undertakings assume the form of social undertakings as distinct from private undertakings. It is the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself.”
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