Paul Mason, in his latest essay, again gives us an analysis based upon idealism and subjectivism, not the materialism and Marxism he says he is promoting.
The essay is an attack on The Economist's cover story that liberalism has been undermined from within by “progressive liberalism”, and its advocacy of “woke”. To understand what lies beneath this, its important to understand the difference between classical liberalism and neo-liberalism. The former is the kind that Lord Acton promoted, whose more recent advocates were Mises and Hayek, and their followers, and whose present day manifestation comes in the form of of the Libertarians. Neo-liberalism is, in reality social-democracy. It is the liberalism that emerged out of the victory of the industrial bourgeoisie over the other sections of the bourgeoisie – commercial bourgeoisie and financial oligarchy – in 1848. It is the liberalism referred to by Engels in his 1892 German Preface to the Condition of the Working-Class, when he wrote,
“At the very moment when Chartism was bound to assert itself in its full strength, it collapsed internally before even it collapsed externally, on the 10th of April, 1848. The action of the working class was thrust into the background. The capitalist class triumphed along the whole line.
The Reform Bill of 1831 had been the victory of the whole capitalist class over the landed aristocracy. The repeal of the Corn Laws was the victory of the manufacturing capitalist not only over the landed aristocracy, but over those sections of capitalists, too, whose interests were more or less bound up with the landed interest - bankers, stockjobbers, fundholders, etc...
The revival of commercial prosperity, natural after the revulsion of 1847 had spent itself, was put down altogether to the credit of Free Trade. Both these circumstances had turned the English working class, politically, into the tail of the ‘great Liberal Party’, the party led by the manufacturers.”
The reality is that classical liberalism/libertarianism, as with Austrian School economics, represents the ideal type of that 18th/early 19th century form of capitalism, based upon the myriad of small private capitals, and the continued dominant role of the commercial bourgeoisie, and financial oligarchy and its symbiotic relation to the old landed aristocracy that had grown up over the 400 years of the development of capitalism since the 15th century. Its why it is most closely associated, today, not with actual Liberal parties, or the social-democratic parties that morphed out of them, but with conservative parties, such as the UK Conservatives, or the US Republicans.
By contrast, the liberalism that triumphed in 1848 over it, and which morphed into social-democracy, is that which recognised that the old form of free market capitalism, based upon that myriad of small privately owned capitals was dead. Capitalism was now the capitalism of the giant enterprise, of socialised capital, as against privately owned capital, and that this large-scale socialised capital required a social-democratic state, able to extend the planning and regulation that increasingly characterised the production and social relations within these huge corporations, and increasingly between them in the form of cartels, to the level of the state, and the national economy itself. It recognised the importance of free trade, but not of an unregulated free trade, but one based upon the breaking down of nation state barriers, and the planned and regulated extension of single markets.
And, as Engels states, this was also based upon a recognition of the short-term coincidence of interests between the industrial proletariat, and this large-scale industrial capital, and the functioning capitalists that were its personification. It comes out of the old Ricardian Socialism, in which the interests of the workers are served by the expansion of capital, a fact that Marx also recognised in terms of the basis of the improvement of workers living standards, even as that same development made them poorer, in terms of ownership of means of production, and also led to periodic crises of overproduction, which caused sudden catastrophic falls in living standards for large numbers of workers via unemployment.
But, its for this very reason that Paul's comment that it was not the growth of capital, but the role of the organised working-class that brought about improvements over the last 200 years is wrong. He's right that “Classical Liberalism” did not bring this about, but wrong that it was the organised working-class. Paul says,
“Whether we measure progress through technological change, rising real wages or the expansion of the franchise, women’s reproductive rights and the rule of law, the one force that “helped” above all to achieve these things was the organised working class.”
This is idealist and subjectivist. It puts forward the idealist notion that the determining ideas, values and culture based upon them, in any society, can be determined by a class other than the ruling class. In addition, it suggests that the relations between classes, are not objectively determined by the existing material conditions, but are simply subjective in nature, and determined purely on the basis of bargaining between the two classes, greedy, evil bosses on the one hand, and militant or submissive workers on the other. This is the very antithesis of the materialist method developed by Marx and Engels, and their followers.
Engels spelled it out in the above work.
“The history of these Unions is a long series of defeats of the working-men, interrupted by a few isolated victories. All these efforts naturally cannot alter the economic law according to which wages are determined by the relation between supply and demand in the labour market. Hence the Unions remain powerless against all great forces which influence this relation. In a commercial crisis the Union itself must reduce wages or dissolve wholly; and in a time of considerable increase in the demand for labour, it cannot fix the rate of wages higher than would be reached spontaneously by the competition of the capitalists among themselves.”
The idealist and subjectivist method of Paul is typical of the approach of reformists and syndicalists. It is an approach that has bedevilled the labour movement since its inception, because it continually frames everything in terms of this perpetual bargaining and negotiation, an essentially bourgeois, trades unionist consciousness, not a socialist class consciousness. It implies that if only workers are militant enough, and organised enough, they can obtain whatever concessions they require from capital. It is the ideology of Rosa Luxemburg, whose ideas, in this regard, Paul has previously praised, and who thought that, out of such militant actions, a proletarian class consciousness could miraculously emerge spontaneously, rather than it simply reproducing the same old reformist, trades union consciousness that would just as quickly dissipate, and lead to widespread demoralisation, and a reactionary backlash, once material conditions arose in which such bargaining, inside the system, could no longer bring forth even modest improvements. Its symbolised in Britain by the notions of the IS/SWP whose politics amount to such spontaneism, and calls for “more militancy”, in relation to trades union activity, and “build a bigger demo”, when it comes to other social actions.
But, as Engels says, it is impossible, and self-deluding, leading inevitably to such demoralisation of the working-class. If workers raise their wages and conditions above a level at which the capitalist can make profits, leading to a crisis of overproduction of capital, then the result is simply that large numbers of businesses go bust. They close down, and catastrophe results – usually not for the capitalist who has taken out large profits for years before, but for the workers thrown on to the dole. Any hope of building solidarity between the workers, as they now scrabble and compete vigorously with each other for whatever work can be obtained, disappears, despite efforts to unite the unemployed, a task as difficult as that of uniting a disparate and atomised peasantry.
As Trotsky put it,
“In all capitalist countries the working-class movement after the war reached its peak and then ended, as we have seen, in a more or less pronounced failure and retreat, and in disunity within the working class itself. With such political and psychological premises, a prolonged crisis, although it would doubtless act to heighten the embitterment of the working masses (especially the unemployed and semi-employed), would nevertheless simultaneously tend to weaken their activity because this activity is intimately bound up with the workers’ consciousness of their irreplaceable role in production.
Prolonged unemployment following an epoch of revolutionary political assaults and retreats does not at all work in favour of the Communist Party. On the contrary the longer the crisis lasts the more it threatens to nourish anarchist moods on one wing and reformist moods on the other.”
And, what determines whether capital can raise workers' living standards without threatening its own profits, is precisely its level of development of the productive forces, which it is forced to continually develop, in order that each individual capital is able to be more efficient than its competitors. The only sense in which the claim about the role of the working-class is true is this. At times of capitalist boom, the demand for labour, as outlined by Engels, expands so much that labour shortages arise, and this leads to rising wages, as the capitalists compete for labour. Eventually, and also as a result of the extension of the boom as rising wages means a rapid growth in demand for wage goods, and the producer goods to make them, leads to even more capital accumulation, capital becomes over-accumulated, and profits turn into losses. To resolve this crisis, capital is forced to innovate even more intensively, so as to replace labour with machines and technology. The workers are then laid off, and replaced by machines, which creates the unemployment that leads to the demoralisation and division of the workers, as their wages, and, for many, even their living standards fall. Only in that sense, and accidentally, does the action of the workers, lead to capital revolutionising production faster, and, thereby raising social productivity, and thus the potential for living standards.
It has not at all been the action of the organised working-class over the last 250 years that brought about those changes, but the action of capital itself in its process of development. Whatever happened to workers during that period, and to their living standards was not a consequence of the action of workers, but of capital. Without capital having developed the technology to such an extent that living standards could be raised alongside profits, then no amount of militancy, no degree of workers organisation could have raised those living standards. The fact that it is during periods of capitalist prosperity that workers organisation begins to be restored, and that during periods of boom it reaches its most militant and developed levels, and particularly at the juncture when the boom turns into crisis, is an illustration of that, as much as the fact that it is once the crisis becomes prolonged, and turns into stagnation that the workers become weak and demoralised, that their organisation begins to fall apart, and some of the improvements they previously enjoyed, are taken away. Its not an organised working-class that makes possible improvements in its condition, but improvements in its condition resulting from economic expansion that makes possible a more organised and militant working-class, and vice versa.
Take a situation where a business is presented with such demands, and goes bust. This was not infrequent in the 1970's. The workers take over the business; again something seen in the 1970's. But, now the real relations are exposed. The workers in the resulting cooperative, such as, say that at the Triumph factory in Meriden, can no longer fall back on the idea that the reason for their lack of improvements in living standards is the result of greedy bosses. They are their own boss. Indeed, the question of any improvement in their own living standards, is now mostly outside their own control. That is so, not only because they cannot control the demand for their products, but also, because the determinant of their living standards is not just whatever money wage they pay to themselves, but what that money wage will buy, which is itself a function of the development of productivity by every other capital!
The improvements that have arisen over the last 250 years are not at all, as Paul claims, attributable to the role of the organised working-class, but to the role of industrial capitalism itself, which raised productivity, and, thereby, made possible those improvements in living standards, including the improvements in a whole range of areas of social provision that were important for the bourgeoisie itself. Its what Marx refers to, in The Grundrisse, as The Civilising Mission of Capital.
As Engels also points out,
"Again, the repeated visitations of cholera,
typhus, small-pox, and other epidemics have shown the British
bourgeois the urgent necessity of sanitation in his towns and cities,
if he wishes to save himself and family from falling victims to such
diseases. Accordingly, the most crying abuses described in this book
have either disappeared or have been made less conspicuous. Drainage
has been introduced or improved, wide avenues have been opened out
athwart many of the worst “slums” I had to describe. “Little
Ireland” had disappeared, and the “Seven
Dials” are next on the list for sweeping
away. But what of that? Whole districts which in 1844 I could
describe as almost idyllic have now, with the growth of the towns,
fallen into the same state of dilapidation, discomfort, and misery.
Only the pigs and the heaps of refuse are no longer tolerated."
(loc cit)
Much of this, as Engels says, amounted to hiding the problem, rather than removing it, as with the case of slums. But, the point was that capitalism made these changes in the general environment, resulting from the establishment of environmental health legislation, and departments out of its own self-interest. When the US started quarantining commercial ships from Britain for several weeks, because of the prevalence of cholera in Liverpool, it was that which caused the UK government to take measures to stop the spread of the disease. The ruling class in Britain, was actually behind that in Germany, under the government of Bismark, to introduce National Insurance and a welfare state. It did it not under pressure from the organised working-class, but out of its own interests.
A collectivised, single-payer National Insurance scheme was the most efficeint means of providing for the needs of workers for health care, and retirement, freeing resources, and reducing the value of labour-power, so raising the rate of surplus value. Large, Fordist, National Health Services, enabled huge resources to go into developing medical treatments and medicines, as a result of economies of scale, and all of those products then became available at much lower cost, not just to workers, but to the bourgeoisie itself.
But, this is precisely where the distinction between the Libertarian/Classical Liberal and the neo-liberal/conservative social democrat is important. The latter are the representative of the shareholders in all of the large industrial corporations, whose profits depend upon all of those measures introduced by the social-democratic state over the last century. That is complicated by the fact that these politicians too pay tribute to the liberal mantra that it is the small capitalist that is the backbone of the economy, and particularly amongst the more petty-bourgeois social-democratic elements feel bound to issue the usual complaints about the nature of monopoly and power of big business. But, it doesn't change the nature of what they represent in terms of the role of the state in planning and regulating, and bailing out those owners of fictitious-capital, nor of the continued attempt to create ever larger single markets such as the EU. Hence their opposition to Brexit, and all of the ideas of the populists and reactionaries that go with it.
The Libertarians/Classical Liberals are, however, the representatives of the small private capitalists, and also of all those traders in the financial and commodity markets who prosper on the existence of as much volatility and opportunities for arbitrage as possible. For them, unregulated free markets are a precondition, as is as many borders and frictions between them as possible. The existence of multiple currency regimes arising from such national borders is a bonus. For them, regulated markets, planning of the macro-economy, and the resultant reduction in volatility is anathema. Its amongst that cohort that can be found the supporters of Brexit, of the small state, and of unregulated markets, as well as all the other reactionary concepts that goes with it. And, whilst this section of society certainly constitutes a sizeable section of affluent, and wealthy individuals, an elite, they most certainly do not represent the interests of the ruling class itself, or of its state. They are indeed, as Paul describes, representatives of a world long gone, and not coming back.
He says,
“Claiming to be a “classical liberal” in a world of tech monopolies, surveillance states and central bank money creation is like claiming to be a “pre-1905 Bolshevik” or a Bismarckian state socialist under the same conditions.”
Quite true, so why then does Paul give them an importance they do not deserve? Why does he slip from this correct assessment into one in which he essentially equates this anachronistic group with the ruling-class? They are not that, and the fact that, a confluence of events and factors has led to their political representatives winning governmental office in Britain following the Brexit vote, and temporarily in the US, under Trump, again following that Brexit vote, should not blind us to this fact, any more than, occasionally, a progressive social democratic government may arise that may even step slightly beyond the bounds that the ruling class and its state seeks to constrain them within. The US ruling class and its state, constrained and then removed Trump, limiting, if not preventing, the damage he could inflict. They are now systematically undermining his entourage, and all of those neo-fascist organisations associated with it.
In Britain, the ruling-class and its state, having lost the EU referendum, used all of its constitutional channels to constrain it. The Brexit that Johnson was able to implement was, no Brexit at all, with Britain still effectively tied to the single market and customs union, but with out any political say in it. It is most stark in relation to the Northern Ireland Protocol, but on issue after issue, in sector after sector, Britain has had to come to terms with the EU, and its predominant position, in relation to individual agreements, which now form a honeycomb of caverns sitting beneath, and undermining the whole superficial appearance of Brexit. Sooner rather than later, as the inane nature of Brexit, and the calamities it is already inflicting on the economy become apparent, Britain will have to re-join the Single Market and Customs Union, formally, as a prelude to its re-joining the EU itself. That is so, because, Britain remaining outside the EU is not a long-term option for capital and the ruling-class. Britain is not the hegemonic power it was in the 19th century, which enabled it to remain aloof from the attempts to forge a single European state, and indeed to oppose such a development as a threat to its hegemony. It cannot stand for long outside the EU or the US, and the latter is too remote to be a viable option. But, the UK, is still too big, unlike say Norway or Switzerland, for the EU to simply ignore as a competitor, particularly one that has historical links to the EU's main competitor, the US.
Britain will be back inside the EU, and the right-wing populists, and classical liberals will have to accept it, just as they will have to accept the defeat of Trump. The sooner, Starmer and the LP recognise that reality, and begin to align themselves with the forces of progress, and start campaigning to re-join the EU, the better it will be for them.
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