The Political Situation (9/14)
Large sections of big socialised capital are restructured. For example, new technologies in the print industry undermine the craft unions in that industry, and, as with the Miners Strike, the strong state is used to crush the resistance of those unions, at repeated battles, at Wapping etc. The British car industry, represented by BL, more or less disappears, but is replaced by a strengthening of foreign car producers. Alongside Ford, Chrysler and GM, the Japanese producers like Toyota, Nissan and Honda appear, with brand new, purpose built factories, utilising, from the start, all of the new technologies, and with the corresponding, productivity raising, working practices, enforced by single union agreements with essentially company unions. But, alongside this also goes simply a large scale destruction of much big socialised capital, via the process that was termed de-industrialisation.
In Capital, Marx describes the way in which the operation of The Law of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, works to resolve crises of overproduction. Crises of overproduction are caused by a squeeze on profits, as both absolute and relative surplus value fall, because the social working day cannot be expanded, and the demand for labour exceeds the supply, causing wages to rise. To deal with this squeeze on profits, capital undertakes a technological revolution, whereby new labour-saving fixed capital is introduced. As it raises productivity, more raw material is processed by the same amount of labour, so that c rises relative to v + s, so that c + v rises relative to s, causing the rate of profit to fall. But, Marx says, this process inevitably goes along with both a rise in the rate of surplus value, s/v, (both because wages fall, and because higher productivity reduces the value of labour-power), and with an increase in the mass of labour employed, as capital accumulates, so that the mass of profit rises. The reduction in labour employed is only relative to output, the mass of labour employed grows absolutely. The fall in the annual rate of profit (Law of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall) arising from the increase in productivity, is only a very slight fall, if any, compared to its long-term trend, but represents a large increase in the rate of profit compared to the squeeze on profits in the preceding period, which led to the crisis of overproduction. The mass of profits grows even more substantially, and there is also a sizeable release of capital resulting from rising productivity, and moral depreciation.
In some industries, in Britain, this process could, indeed be seen. For example, the restructuring of the car industry meant that, although many producers and plants disappeared, and the number of workers was reduced, output rose from 1.3 million vehicles in 1980 to 1.56 million in 2004. This was, however, significantly less than the 2 million vehicles produced in 1970. But, elsewhere in the economy, entire industries more or less disappeared. The steel industry was reduced to a fraction of its former size, the coal industry disappeared entirely, industries like the ceramics industry, shrank to almost nothing, other than the growth of niche, high value production of speciality ceramics. Large swathes of industry simply relocated to Asia, where new purpose built factories based upon automation could be introduced, and take advantage of plentiful supplies of cheap, unskilled machine minding labour.
Instead of the expansion of capital described by Marx, and the accumulation of capital in a large number of new areas of production, unemployment in Britain, continues to rise during the 1980's. Thatcher uses the windfall opportunity of North Sea Oil and gas revenues, not to be able to enhance this process of capital restructuring and accumulation, but as simply a means to batter down an already defeated working-class further, with ever more draconian limitations on workers' rights. As an increasing proportion of output shifts overseas, capital moves into the antediluvian forms of merchant capital, as one new shopping centre after another is developed selling these imported, cheap commodities, with the merchant capitalists deriving their commercial profits from the surplus value created by the foreign workers that produced them. And, whilst these shopping centres provided employment for some workers, and so wages, many other workers were faced with the potential of precarious employment, unemployment or self-employment that largely represented masked unemployment or underemployment.
All of this enhanced the position of the small capitalist as against the big capitalist as the former found these conditions particularly to their liking, able to hire and fire as they pleased. Indeed, the conditions were so favourable that some of those that entered self-employment, as a last resort, were able to make a living. As the army of Del Boys, and white van men expanded, so the petty-bourgeois mentality that goes with it, expanded too. A look at the number of Tory Councillors across the country who are self-employed window cleaners, gardener,s and such like, illustrates the trend. And, this was not without its political consequences in the 1980's and 90's either. As these petty-bourgeois social elements increased in importance within the ranks of the Tory Party, so the party was pushed to reflect their interests too. The social-democratic wing of the Tory Party, dominant from the 1950's onwards, had to be crushed. Thatcher pushed ahead with an agenda that was increasingly dominated by the interests of this pettiest of petty-bourgeoisies, whether it was the introduction of Enterprise Zones, or the Poll Tax, and, of course, her adoption of Euroscepticism, in the late 1980's.
The latter was her downfall, as the social-democratic wing of her party waged one last stand, and ditched her in favour of Major. But, that led simply to appearance and reality being forced into alignment as, throughout the 1990's, Major had to confront the “bastards”, whose influence was growing. After 1997, the representatives of the petty-bourgeoisie inside the Tories exert their dominance with one Leader after another. But the middle-class representatives of big socialised capital, along with the dominant section of the ruling class, the owners of fictitious capital, had, by then, found a new champion, who more accurately represented their interests. They discovered the Third Way of Blair.
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