Losing His Wragg

The Chair of the Parliamentary Administration Committee, Tory, William Wragg, has come out to attack Boris Johnson and his government for “blackmailing” Tory MP's, into supporting the Prime Minister. Wragg has already come out to admit that he is one of those that is calling for Johnson to resign. Johnson is facing a coup attempt launched primarily by the reactionary wing of his party, centred upon the hard-line nationalists and Brexiters of the ERG, and hence the prominent role of people like David Davis, Lord Frost, and Andrew Bridgen. Compared to those forces, Johnson is a moderate progressive, which just shows why tactics and strategy based upon lesser-evilism, or “my enemy's enemy is my friend” will always lead you into dangerous territory. Opposing the greater evil represented by Johnson's detractors does not at all involve giving any support to Johnson and his supporters in the process.

Johnson is under attack from his Right, an attack, which the opportunists of the PLP are themselves lining up with, as they collapse, at an increasing rate, into their own cesspool of reactionary nationalism, because he is being forced, by reality, to backtrack on the inevitable consequences of Brexit. The first salvo was fired by Frost when he resigned from his position as Brexit Minister, in consequence of Johnson again having to capitulate to the EU over the Irish Protocol. Wanting Johnson and his government out is one thing, siding, opportunistically, with Johnson's opponents, to his Right, to achieve it, is another entirely.

The basis of Wragg's charges of “blackmail” is itself ludicrous. What it amounts to is this. In 2019, voters, in a range of seats across the country, where there had been large Brexit votes, based upon the support of a large, reactionary petty-bourgeoisie comprised of “white van wo/men”, and supported by a sizeable number of lumpen elements, were basically bribed by the Tories to vote for them, in order to obtain state spending in their areas, the generic term for which has been labelled “levelling up”. In many of those seats that then returned Tory MP's, the government did, indeed, provide funds for various spending, even as it denied such funding to other, more deprived constituencies, that returned Labour MP's. In other words, the voters in those seats were “blackmailed” into voting Tory, on the basis that, if they didn't, they would not get these funds, what in the US is called “pork barrel politics”.

Now, as some of those Tory MP's that were elected on the basis of the bribes that Boris Johnson promised voters, in those seats, turn on Johnson himself, as he backtracks on Brexit, Johnson is responding by, in turn, threatening to remove the initial bribes. The charge of “blackmail” is then rather absurd and hypocritical, because none of those Tory MP's objected to the initial bribery and blackmail of voters that Johnson and his government engaged in to get them elected in the first place.

And, the charge of blackmail is itself particularly absurd, because the whole of bourgeois-democracy – indeed of capitalism itself – is founded upon such blackmail, without which it would collapse. Bourgeois democracy, is based upon patronage, which is inherently a form of blackmail and bribery and corruption. The Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet are appointed by party leaders, giving them great power to bribe and blackmail MP's to support them, in order to obtain and retain such ministerial positions, for example. The government whips have always used such means to encourage MP's to toe the line.

But capitalism itself is founded upon blackmail. Capital says to the worker I will employ your labour-power, and I will pay the full price of that labour-power, however, the condition for me doing so is that in addition to the necessary labour you need to undertake to reproduce your labour-power, I insist that you work additional surplus labour, so that I can appropriate it as profits. The worker may appear to have a free choice in making such a deal, but, in reality, has none, because capital owns the means of production without which the worker cannot work, and without the ability to work, the worker has no independent means of living. So, fundamental to capitalism itself, is the blackmailing of the worker to provide free labour to capital, as the basis of profits, on pain otherwise of starvation for them and their family.

To call for an end to the blackmail and bribery that is inherent within capitalism, and of the bourgeois-democracy that arises upon it, is, in reality, to call for the end of capitalism, and bourgeois-democracy itself. Much as I would welcome such a development, if it signalled the arrival of Socialism, and proletarian democracy, the reality, however, is that no such prospect exists currently, and so the actual alternative would, in fact, mean only a further twist in the spiral of reaction that the forces of the petty-bourgeoisie, and the economic nationalists within both Labour and Tory parties are driving forward.