The Labour Party was created as a party that reflected this dominant role of the working-class, in elections, but which carried over the same political ideology – social democracy – of the Liberal Party, based upon the interests of industrial capital. In the process it carried over the contradiction inherent in that, i.e. on the one hand the interests of the actual socialised capital, the capital of the associated producers, and on the other hand, the interests of the shareholders, the owners of fictitious capital, that exercise control over the former. This contradiction creates the antagonism within social-democracy, and thereby also within the Labour Party, between progressive social-democracy representing the interests of the actual socialised capital, and conservative social democracy representing the interests of shareholders/fictitious capital.
The Labour Party was created as a party of workers, but with a bourgeois ideology, or as Lenin described it, a bourgeois workers' party. In fact, it is for that reason that, today, it is the Labour Party, even a Jeremy Corbyn Labour Party, just like the Democratic Party in the US, and the various social-democratic parties across Europe, that objectively represent the interests of industrial capital, whereas the conservative parties represent the interests of those groups that the Tories have always represented, the landowners and financial oligarchy, the owners of fictitious capital, as well as those remnants of the era of private capitalist property, who represent a petty-bourgeois mentality, for whom all rational advance of large-scale capital simply indicates to them their demise, and collapse into the ranks of the proletariat. It is this division that is the basis of Brexit, and of Trumpism.
Brexit is, in fact, the manifestation of this struggle between two contradictory class interests, based on two opposing forms of property, and the social relations that rest upon them. It is based on a conflict between socialised capital, and small private capital, between that form of property that Lenin previously described as “the most striking embodiment of the material realisation of the economic, the productive and the socio-economic conditions for socialism”, as the “complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs”, as against the remnants of the pre-20th Century forms of capital as private property. The former is the basis of social-democracy, the latter of 19th century political liberalism, founded upon individualism and the free market. The former is founded upon regulated free trade, and economic planning to create the long-term stable conditions required by massive levels of capital investment, for capital accumulation. It necessarily requires this regulation and planning to take place over an expanding geographical area, as the capital accumulation itself occurs over such a wider area, by multinational capital, and as it is manifest in a global economy, and global division of labour.
It is this which constitutes imperialism, as a global system of industrial capital, based upon a hierarchy of states, operating a rules based system designed to defend all bourgeois property rights, and to extend such regulation and planning. That is in contrast to colonialism, which was based upon the dominance of feudalism in alliance with the rising merchant and financial bourgeoisie, which sought to carve out colonial empires, and establish monopolies, defended by protective barriers, enforced by the military power of the individual nation state.
The struggle over Brexit is a struggle over the continuance of the social-democratic state that has been in place for more than a century, or its replacement by a liberal-bourgeois state, like that which existed prior to 1848. The forces of reaction have won the first round in that struggle, by winning the Brexit referendum, and securing a reactionary government on the back of it. But, control of the government is not control of the state. The interests of the British state remain inextricably tied to the interests of socialised capital, which is the form of large-scale industrial capital. The existing social-democratic state could only be replaced a a consequence of a social revolution, which changes the underlying social relations. That can only take the form of a socialist revolution, which placed control of the already socialised capital in the hands of the workers (i.e. the second half of that requirement for Socialism described by Lenin above), or alternatively of a counter revolution which destroys the existing socialised capital, in the form of the joint stock companies/corporations/cooperatives, breaks it up, and places it once more into the hands of a plethora of small private capitalists.
This latter, of course, is not just the programme of the Moggites and assorted Libertarians, but also of the Stalinists and their fellow travellers, expressed in their “anti-monopoly alliance”, as well as in their support for Brexit. In reality, not only is the call for monopolies to be broken up reactionary, but it is also Utopian, for the reason Lenin sets out in Imperialism.
“Kautsky broke with Marxism by advocating in the epoch of finance capital a “reactionary ideal”, “peaceful democracy”, “the mere operation of economic factors”, for objectively this ideal drags us back from monopoly to non-monopoly capitalism, and is a reformist swindle...
Let us assume that free competition, without any sort of monopoly, would have developed capitalism and trade more rapidly. But the more rapidly trade and capitalism develop, the greater is the concentration of production and capital which gives rise to monopoly. And monopolies have already arisen—precisely out of free competition! Even if monopolies have now begun to retard progress, it is not an argument in favour of free competition, which has become impossible after it has given rise to monopoly.
Whichever way one turns Kautsky’s argument, one will find nothing in it except reaction and bourgeois reformism.”
A social counter-revolution, in Britain, is not going to happen, because the fortunes of the state depends upon large-scale industrial capital, which must assume the form of socialised capital, and that socialised capital also depends upon the existence of a social-democratic state. The hopes of the petty-bourgeois Moggites and Libertarians, and the petty-bourgeois Stalinists, and their fellow travellers, for such an overturn, and change in direction of the wheel of state, is like the similar dreams of the Narodniks for such an eventuality a pious wish. Moreover, in a globalised economy, a small state such as Britain depends on being inside a larger economic bloc, like the EU. That is why Brexit is ultimately doomed.
If you want to see what an actual social counter revolution looks like, as opposed to simply a political counter-revolution, then its necessary to look at Cambodia under Pol Pot, though China under Mao's Great Leap Forward came close, before he was forced to change course. Even the political counter-revolution in Russia and China has not fully overturned the previously established social relations. In China, state owned enterprises still predominate, and Xi appears to be strengthening them. In Russia, Putin's kleptocratic regime is little different to that of late stage Stalinism, in that country. The social relations in Central and Eastern Europe have been overturned, but required large amounts of capital from the EU, plus the ability for Eastern European workers to escape the chaos that was caused in that process. And, even then, many of the ideas that arose on the back of those social relations continue to pervade those societies 30 years after the collapse of the previous regimes.
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