The Political Situation (7/14)
In general, these forms of bigotry, inherited from previous modes of production, are a hindrance to large-scale capital, precisely because they act to cause frictions in the free movement it requires. In general, large scale capital prefers to deal with organised labour, company bureaucrats sitting one side, trades union bureaucrats the other of the table, haggling over what is affordable, what in the best interests of the company, in the long-term, as being also the best interests of the workers, given an acceptance, by both parties, of the continued existence of capitalism itself. Its why, in the 1980's, when big industrial companies like Nissan and Toyota set up in Britain, they did so on the basis of single union agreements, and why Thatcher did not go for actually destroying unions, but for strengthening the role of the bureaucracy within them, incorporating whole swathes of lay union officials into that bureaucracy, reducing the capacity of the rank and file to take wildcat actions, or to remove right-wing bureaucrats.
For the reactionary, petty-bourgeois socialists, the “anti-capitalists/imperialists”, this fact that such free movement, and large single markets is in the interests of large-scale capital, is enough for them to be against it. Wherever this large-scale capital places a plus sign, they automatically respond by placing a minus sign. In so doing, they line themselves up on the same side of the barricades as the small capitalists, who have real material interests in opposing big capital, and of opposing such free movement, and single markets. A small, self-employed British plumber or joiner in the early 2000's could make hay as prices for plumbing work, and joinery skyrocketed. The same for the small firms employing such people, who saw their profits surge. When the Polish plumbers began to fill the gaps, prices for plumbing work, and other such trades fell, and the profits of these small capitalists, and self-employed dropped sharply.
The small capitalists abhor unions, even of the tame, bureaucratically controlled variety. They prefer to be able to keep their small workforces divided against each other, so as to suppress their organisation, wages, and conditions. For these small capitalists, which employ a higher proportion of workers to capital than larger firms, the wage bill forms a larger component of costs, and so they are all the more concerned to keep wages down. The ability to employ workers whose status might be questioned, and who are, thereby, led to keep their heads down, and not rock the boat, is an incentive for such small capitalists. These backward sections of capital, therefore, are bastions of these reactionary, nationalist ideas and bigotry. These firms that have no real contact with a wider international economy have every reason to want to “take back control”, so as to remove all of the civilising regulations that the EU, or other large single markets, might impose on them, which represent the interests of big capital.
In the 1980's, conservative parties like that of Thatcher in Britain, and of Reagan in the US, played to their own bases, much as Johnson and Trump are doing today, in order to garner the electoral coalition required to get elected. Those electoral bases are overwhelmingly within the ranks of these small capitalists. The fact that the ruling class, at that time, resorted to these solutions, a milder version of the resort to fascism in the 1930's, was driven by the fact that the alternative, was that presented by progressive social-democracy. The latter itself was confused. On the one hand, it comprised the thoroughly nationalistic ideas of the Alternative Economic Strategy, mimicking the Mosely Memorandum of the 1930's. It reflects the Fabian/Lassallean infatuation with statism, which becomes conflated with Leftism. On the other, it is manifest in the growth of worker owned cooperatives, the development of the Lucas Plan, and growth in the ideas of the Institute for Workers Control. More significantly, it sees the Bullock Report commissioned by the Wilson Government, which recommends that workers, via their trades unions, should elect 50% of the members of company boards. The policy copies the co-determination laws already well established in Germany, and also of the EU's own Draft 5th Company Law Directive. In other words, the solutions of workers control that workers were themselves imposing, by direct action, in the 1920's, re-emerge in a bureaucratised, corporatist form in the 1970's. The owners of fictitious capital had no more intention of allowing them to be introduced than they did in the 1920's. But, now, they do not have to confront the organised working-class to that end, but only its elected representatives. Its enough to replace progressive social-democrats with conservative social democrats, be they inside the social-democratic parties or without them. Direct confrontation with the workers can be limited to simply defeating the Economistic strikes of the workers, such as the Miners Strike of 1984-5, or the US Air Traffic Controllers Strike, and, for that, the power of the capitalist state, mobilised by a conservative government, still within the confines of bourgeois-democracy, though pushing it to its outer limits, is sufficient. But, it is the fear that, as in the 1920's, the limited demands of progressive social democracy, for corporatist extensions of industrial democracy, might link up with the direct action of workers, and be pushed further towards meaningful workers' control of production that really scares the owners of fictitious capital. They have already lost their social function in production, and if they were to lose their control over socialised capital too, all that is left to them is to sit back and draw their interest/dividends, their existence as a class becoming ever more tenuous, and irrelevant.
No comments:
Post a Comment