“In another passage he contrasts “small-scale people’s industry” to “large-scale, capitalist industry.” If you were to ask what is the distinguishing feature of the former, you would only learn that it is “small” and that the instruments of labour are united with the producer (I borrow this latter definition from Mr. Mikhailovsky’s above-mentioned article). But this is certainly far from defining its economic organisation—and, moreover, is absolutely untrue.” (p 206)
I have previously written about the small business myth. It is mostly promoted by conservatives who are the ideological and political representatives of such small private capital, but it is also purveyed by left populists. The underlying idea goes something like its small businesses that predominate in the economy, they account for the majority of output and employment. It is sometimes complemented by the idea that such small business represents the ideal organisation of the economy, based upon free competition, and that monopolies, therefore, are a distortion of the normal functioning of the economy. Of course, its nonsense. If we take Britain, its true that its 5 million small businesses constitute the majority, compared to the few hundred large businesses, as represented by, say, the FTSE 250. Its true, as an aggregated total, those 5 million account for the majority of output and employment, but, as with the Narodniks, this superficial aggregation leads to a complete distortion of reality.
Dividing the output of the 5 million small businesses amongst them shows that, individually, they account for very little compared to the concentrated economic power of the large companies. Moreover, the 5 million figure itself hides a wide array of different sized companies, from those employing a few hundred workers down to those that comprise a self-employed individual and their family. Even amongst the larger small companies, they exist only on the basis of undertaking sub-contract work for a large company, which means that they are dependent upon, and subordinated to it. The smallest companies depend on the revenues of workers in their locality, for example the wages of the car worker, shipyard worker and so on, out of which they pay the window cleaner, or buy items from the corner shop.
Again, its true that, in aggregate, the 5 million small businesses account for the majority of employment, but each business employs only a handful, compared to the thousands, or even tens of thousands employed by a large company. In China, for example, Foxconn employs 1 million workers. Moreover, the 5 million small businesses are not the same 5 million small businesses from one year to another. Large businesses tend to endure for decades, if not centuries, but 25% of new small businesses go bust within six months, 75% go bust within five years, with a consequent effect on the workers they employ.
There is a tendency amongst populists, including left populists, to try to present these small private capitals as somehow being less objectionable than the large monopoly capitals, even though the former actually represents the less developed, more reactionary forms of capital, whereas the latter represents the mature form of capital, socialised capital as the transitional form of property, as Marx defines it. An example is found in relation to Brexit, and the last British General Election.
Brexit was a reactionary, populist agenda, driven by the right-wing of the Tory Party, and its outriders in UKIP/BP. It reflected the views and interests of this class of small capitalists, of whom the Tory Party is the political representative. Yet, all of these small capitalists, symbolised by the ubiquitous white van man, were portrayed as being “working-class”, and in some way representative of the core working-class vote, along with those other peripheral layers amongst the retired and elderly, where support for this reactionary agenda was found.
Insofar as left populists did not, themselves, line up on the side of reaction, in support of Brexit, after the referendum, many of them did collapse into the position that the referendum result had to be “respected”. Despite the fact that the EU and local elections, in 2019, showed that those voters most certainly did not represent Labour's core vote, the Stalinists and Left Populists continued to orientate towards them. The result, in the General Election, was inevitable. Those small capitalists that backed Brexit, and whose political representative is the Tory Party, voted solidly Tory, and drew the associated reactionary social layers along with them. Labour failed to give a clear, principled and progressive alternative, and so saw its vote shredded.
A similar thing can be seen in France, where the Gilets Jaunes are a similar movement of the reactionary small capitalists, whose initial cause, around which they mobilised, was increases in fuel duties, which hit these small businesses profits, along with other increases in taxes.
No comments:
Post a Comment