Boris Johnson, Leader of The Labour Party

In 1940, Boris Johnson's hero, Winston Churchill, unable to get a parliamentary majority, on the basis of votes from his own Tory Party, became Prime Minister, thanks to the support of the Parliamentary Labour Party, setting in place the conditions for a National Government. Last night, Johnson, himself unable to obtain a parliamentary majority on the basis of Tory votes, as 99 of his MP's voted against him, remained as Prime Minister thanks to the votes of a cretinous and subservient Parliamentary Labour Party, under Starmer, which has again come to Johnson's rescue. Had Labour and other opposition MP's voted against Johnson's government, it would have lost, and Johnson's Premiership would have been in tatters.

But, Labour's parliamentary cretinism, shown throughout the last few years, saved Johnson, once more. As he has done time and again, Starmer acted as Johnson's loyal lieutenant. Johnson and his wing of the Tory Party has a ring through Starmer's nose, which he uses to drag the Parliamentary Labour Party along behind him. Johnson is de facto Leader of the Labour Party, or at least the Parliamentary Labour Party, which, increasingly, exists as a separate party, split off from the Labour Party itself. As I wrote, predicting this outcome, the other day, Johnson is, in reality, a conservative social-democrat, at odds with the reactionary, petty-bourgeois majority of his own party, and with more in common with a conservative Labour Party, increasingly characterised by a Blue Labour ideology of reactionary nationalism, ideologically indistinguishable from Johnson's Toryism. That Johnson would push through these measures against the opposition of his own party, and on the basis of a bloc with Starmer's PLP, I had predicted several days ago. It is a bloc of conservative social democracy, but held together on the basis of a confluence of a wide range of contradictory, short-term interests.

In recent months, Paul Mason has been writing about fascism, the main highlights of his thoughts coming in his book “How To Fight Fascism”. Paul's analysis of fascism is seriously flawed, and its necessary to distinguish between fascism and Nazism. The bloc between Johnson and Starmer's increasingly nationalistic, Blue Labour, is not fascist, but it is national socialist (Nazi) in nature. Fascism relates to a political methodology in which physical violence is used to break up the organisations of the working-class, by terroristic methods. It relies upon the actions of stormtroopers, usually drawn from the ranks of the petty-bourgeoisie and lumpen proletariat. But, national socialism, be it of the variety of Nazi Germany, or of Stalin's Russia, or of the type contained in the Oswald Moseley Memorandum, which drew support from Right and Left, including the likes of Nye Bevan, does not require such organisations, because it operates directly via the state itself, a state that is increasingly totalitarian in nature, and in conditions where the working-class has already been atomised, and its organisations been incorporated into the state, acting merely as transmission belts of its ideas into the masses. As I have written elsewhere, this national socialism, is essentially social-democracy without the democracy.

Social-democracy is the ideology that represents the interests of large-scale, socialised capital, and its need for a large, interventionist state to plan and regulate the economy. As Lenin describes in State and Revolution, the most effective means for the ruling class to achieve that is via bourgeois-democracy itself, which creates the sham of control of the state by society, a state, which, in reality, always acts in the interests of the ruling class, which exerts its social dictatorship through it. But, social-democracy, like the form of property – socialised capital – it is based upon, is itself contradictory in nature, bearing within itself the unfolding future socialist society, as well as the present capitalist society. As Marx puts it,

“The capital, which in itself rests on a social mode of production and presupposes a social concentration of means of production and labour-power, is here directly endowed with the form of social capital (capital of directly associated individuals) as distinct from private capital, and its undertakings assume the form of social undertakings as distinct from private undertakings. It is the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself...

The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage... The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.”

(Capital III, Chapter 27)

And, social-democracy, therefore, as the reflection of these material forms and conditions in the realm of ideas, is also riven by this same contradiction. On the one hand, conservative social-democracy represents the interests of the dominant current forms of that property, and, in particular, the interests of the dominant section of the ruling-class, the top 0.01% that exercise control over the majority of shares, and through which, on the basis of present company law, they exercise control over the real capital they do not own, and which is the collective property of the associated producers (workers and managers).

Conservative social-democracy does this, even where representing those interests is detrimental to the interests of the socialised capital itself. For example, because the dominant section of the ruling class has found itself dependent for its wealth and power on the price of its assets – shares, bonds, and property – rather than on the revenues appropriated by owning those assets (dividends/interest, rent) conservative social-democracy, and the social-democratic state apparatus has found itself protecting those asset prices at all costs. So, every time bond, stock and property markets have crashed, as interest rates began to rise, the state has stepped in to inflate them once again, including introducing fiscal austerity to slow economies, alongside QE to divert money and money-capital away from the real economy, and into financial and property speculation.

As Marx again put it,

“Since property here exists in the form of stock, its movement and transfer become purely a result of gambling on the stock exchange, where the little fish are swallowed by the sharks and the lambs by the stock-exchange wolves. There is antagonism against the old form in the stock companies, in which social means of production appear as private property; but the conversion to the form of stock still remains ensnared in the trammels of capitalism; hence, instead of overcoming the antithesis between the character of wealth as social and as private wealth, the stock companies merely develop it in a new form.”

(ibid)

And,

“The credit system, which has its focus in the so-called national banks and the big money-lenders and usurers surrounding them, constitutes enormous centralisation, and gives to this class of parasites the fabulous power, not only to periodically despoil industrial capitalists, but also to interfere in actual production in a most dangerous manner — and this gang knows nothing about production and has nothing to do with it. The Acts of 1844 and 1845 are proof of the growing power of these bandits, who are augmented by financiers and stock-jobbers.”

(Capital III, Chapter 33)

In the end, the prices of these assets, of fictitious capital, is determined by the capitalised value of the revenues. If those revenues - dividends, interest, rent – start to fall, because their source, surplus value/profit, begins to be squeezed by rising wages, as economic growth leads to a rise in the demand for labour-power, undermining the production of absolute and relative surplus value (the end point of which is manifest as a crisis of overproduction of capital), they can only be raised by reducing the share of profit – profit of enterprise – going to enable capital accumulation, and that further hobbles the production of future profits, merely exacerbating the problem it faces.

Moreover, as Marx says in The Poverty of Philosophy,

“Socialists know well enough that present-day society is founded on competition...

It must be carefully noted that competition always becomes the more destructive for bourgeois relations in proportion as it urges on a feverish creation of new productive forces, that is, of the material conditions of a new society.”

(Chapter 2)

And, although, socialised capital, represents capitalism in its mature phase, as a transitional form prior to socialism, and is characterised by the fact that it borrows from the future socialist society all those aspects of monopoly, planning and regulation, it cannot escape the fact that it remains founded upon such competition, even if it becomes transformed into monopolistic competition. In a period of rapid economic growth, every capital seeks to to obtain its share of the growing market, which necessitates capital accumulation, and in a crisis of overproduction, every individual capital again seeks to defend its share of a shrinking market, sending its competitors to the devil.

“In practical life we find not only competition, monopoly and the antagonism between them, but also the synthesis of the two, which is not a formula, but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. Monopolists are made from competition; competitors become monopolists. If the monopolists restrict their mutual competition by means of partial associations, competition increases among the workers; and the more the mass of the proletarians grows as against the monopolists of one nation, the more desperate competition becomes between the monopolists of different nations. The synthesis is of such a character that monopoly can only maintain itself by continually entering into the struggle of competition.”

(ibid)

So, a necessary contradiction and antagonism arises between these two forms of property, two forms of capital, real industrial capital, which in periods of rapid economic expansion is forced to have to accumulate, and which, in conditions of squeezed profits is increasingly forced to borrow to do so, causing interest rates to rise, as against fictitious-capital, which, in conditions of asset price bubbles, cannot afford to see higher interest rates – even though that means higher revenues for them, in the shape of dividends/interest – because the consequence is to reduce the capitalised value of assets, causing asst price bubbles to burst, and financial crises to ensue.

The only immediate solution for the owners of fictitious capital, in such conditions, is then to artificially restrain the growth of the economy, so as to hold back the demand for labour-power and rise in wages, to hold back the demand for money-capital to finance capital accumulation, and, thereby, to hold back the rise in interest rates, so as to prevent asset prices from crashing. After the financial crash of 2008, that is precisely what capitalist states did, by introducing fiscal austerity to prevent economic growth from again causing interest rates to rise. It was supplemented by QE, which was used to directly buy up worthless paper assets, to reflate their prices, creating a new set of speculative bubbles that again diverted money and money-capital away from the real economy, slowing it further, and providing the liquidity for a further inflation of asset prices.

But, that is to provide a short-term solution based upon an even greater level of fiction, which only defers and increases the scale of the crash when reality inevitably asserts itself. Moreover, the contradictions resulting from such a solution themselves simply multiply, as happens with every Ponzi Scheme.

In the end, justifying further austerity measures became impossible, especially for populist governments claiming to represent ordinary working families, and promising to “level-up”. And, when they used COVID as justification for austerity by another name, by directly closing down large areas of economic and social activity, via lock-downs and lockouts, the consequence was also to pump liquidity directly out into the real economy, causing inflation to rocket, creating conditions for interest rates to rise even faster, in the near future, and so causing asset prices to crash.

Whenever restrictions are relaxed, all of the liquidity again surges out into demand, multiplying the problems even more, forcing firms to accumulate capital, to meet this sharply rising demand at an even greater pace, so pushing the demand for labour, and wages higher, and squeezing profits further, making the need to resort to borrowing even greater, and so pushing interest rates higher still, and this at a time when the demand for money-capital has been sent to new heights as a result of governments needing to borrow at unprecedented levels to cover their income replacement schemes etc.

On the other hand, progressive social-democracy represents the interests of the socialised capital itself, as against the interests of fictitious-capital, whose long-term interests also depend upon it, but whose short term interests, in respect of asset prices, contradict it. Those interests of socialised capital, are manifest in the requirement for greater state planning and regulation, and on a wider scale, creating ever larger single markets, in which capital can compete on a level playing field, with standardisation and so on required for efficient production on an ever larger scale. It also requires greater industrial democracy as the means by which the collective owners of this socialised capital are better able to express those interests, as against the short-term interests of the owners of fictitious-capital, i.e. shareholders. It is easy to see, why, therefore, the latter, and their political representatives within the ranks of conservative social-democracy are hostile to any such development.

In the 1920's and early 30's, when large class conscious working-classes, providing the foundations of large, progressive social-democratic parties, began to push forward that agenda, and its revolutionary wings began to do so more directly, via factory occupations and implementation of workers' control, the owners of fictitious-capital, responded by resorting to fascism, to break apart those labour movements. In the 1970's, progressive social-democracy again began to raise similar demands, even if in toned down versions. The Bullock Report in Britain, proposed that trades unions should elect 50% of company board members, as was already the case in Germany, and the EU put forward similar proposals in its Draft 5th Company Law Directive. But, the working-class was weak, compared to the 1920's, and its organisations weaker still, at least ideologically, riven with statism, reformism and syndicalism. In the end, the ruling class did not need to resort to fascism, as it had in the 1920's. It was able to suppress the working-class simply via the operation of a strong state, and the complicity of conservative social-democrats.

Today, the conditions are completely different. There is neither a crisis of overproduction of capital, as existed in the 1920's and 1970's, nor is there a large, organised, class conscious working-class, being led by large progressive social-democratic, let alone revolutionary parties. The ruling class does not need fascism to batter a threat from workers. The threat it faces is almost entirely of its own making.

The threat it faces is two-fold. On the one hand, the positions it adopted in the 1980's and 90's, facilitated the rapid growth of the petty-bourgeoisie – the owners of the 5 million small businesses in Britain, and their increased social weight is what changed the nature of the Tory party, making it a bastion of reactionary nationalism, as manifest in Brexit. Their interests are antagonistic to those of large-scale, socialised, and multinational capital, and so also to the interests of the dominant section of the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, the problem it faces is the need to expand the economy, to accumulate capital, and so profits, but that doing so, will cause the demand for labour to rise, wages to rise, and the rate of profit to be squeezed, and, more immediately, that interest rates will rise, causing asset prices to crash catastrophically.

Its problem is how to solve this dilemma, given that repeated austerity ran its course in slowing the economy, and the use of direct constraints on the economy, in the form of lockdowns and lockouts, under the cover of anti-COVID measures, have become increasingly impossible to justify, in the face of widespread immunity, vaccination, and a dominant strain of the virus that is now seen to be even milder than its earlier variants. In order to carry off this strategy, what the ruling class and its state require is not fascism, but national socialism and, at the very least, a strong authoritarian state, if not one that borrows increasingly from the toolkit of totalitarianism. The use of the war metaphor has been typically overused during the pandemic, but in many ways, it is apt, because in times of war, some form of totalitarianism is always resorted to, including in the form of national governments that make political opposition near impossible, and in the form of a heavy dose of propaganda to overwhelm any potential critical views, not to mention a state backed up by authoritarian and emergency laws, to sweep up anyone that manages to overcome these other obstacles.

In all these aspects, Boris Johnson and his government have already made large strides, and they have been supported at each stage by Starmer and the conservative social-democrats of the PLP. What is more horrific, is that they have been supported by large sections of the Left itself in perpetrating this systematic attack on the rights of workers, and on workers liberty.