The other element of the narrative I do not disagree with is that many of these people see the institutions of the state, acting in the interests of some metropolitan elite, as bringing in all of these changes over their heads. A long time ago, now, I wrote that the social-democrats, as representatives of the ruling class, had failed to undertake the open political struggle against the petty-bourgeoisie, on a range of issues from the EU (I wrote this long before the EU referendum), racism, sexism, homophobia and so on. They had failed to do so, because a) such a political struggle would involve them going into battle with people who are also seen as part of the bourgeoisie, just its minnows, and would also require mobilising advanced workers too, and b) the ruling class, and social-democracy saw no need to do so, because they thought they could just continue to proceed on the basis of bureaucratic decree, and the control they exercised over the state.
The relationship between the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie, as a transitional class, is itself, necessarily contradictory. The material interests of the petty-bourgeoisie are contradictory to those of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie seeks measures that inherently benefit large-scale socialised capital, and which, thereby, hasten the demise of the small capitalists, and vice versa. Yet, the petty-bourgeois always looks up towards the bourgeoisie, when considering its future trajectory, never down towards the proletariat, which is its far more likely fate. Similarly, the bourgeoisie looks down to the petty-bourgeoisie, as a romantic reminiscence of from whence it came, even as it proceeds to crush it. As Lenin describes, in his polemics against the Narodniks, the bourgeoisie is actually progressive vis a vis the petty-bourgeoisie, and, in all those aspects where the bourgeoisie is progressive, its interests are aligned with the proletariat, not the petty-bourgeoisie.
So, long as the two main bourgeois parties were pretty much in lock step on all of these issues, that was fine, but it broke down, as soon as that unity fractured, and the Tories were captured by their reactionary petty-bourgeois base, primarily over Europe, but with the same reactionary ideas feeding across a wide spread of these “cultural” issues. Then, the ruling class could only deal with its petty-bourgeois whipper snapper, by relying even more on the state, even more on bureaucracy to frustrate the wishes of reactionary petty-bourgeois governments, which enraged the petty-bourgeoisie even more, driving it too to respond with ever more Bonapartism. It leads to a clash of two Bonapartes, one representing the ruling class, and operating via the state, and the other representing the petty-bourgeoisie, and operating via, governments, or large social movements.
The recent events in Canada have been a good manifestation of it. On the one hand, we have the mobilisation of a sizeable petty-bourgeois mass, responding to widespread bureaucratic measures in relation to vaccine passports. In response, the state reacts by even more heavy handed bureaucracy and Bonapartism, by introducing the Emergency Powers Act. But, Paul can't say that this is just an example of culture wars, unrelated to class. The basic division, here, is a division between the ruling class, its state, and the petty-bourgeoisie. It takes this form, because both of these classes are led to respond in this way, because neither represent a majority, and absent from the field of battle is, in fact, the class that does represent a majority – the working-class.
(The nature of those vaccine passports, lockdowns and other state reglementation can be compared to Lenin's support for the position of the liberals in Russia in opposing internal passports, and other petty rules that today would be termed the "nanny state". See, for example The Heritage We Renounce, Section III. The Narodniks, representing the petty-bourgeoisie favoured all sorts of regulations to restrain capitalist development, and which also meant that the peasants were denied the freedoms that capitalist development brought compared to the previous mode of production.
"The Narodnik is stubbornly determined to believe in a non-existent non-capitalist development which is a figment of his romantic imagination, and therefore ... and therefore he is prepared to retard the present development, which is proceeding along capitalist lines. The Narodnik’s attitude to such problems as the social-estate exclusiveness of the peasant community, collective responsibility, and the peasant’s right to sell and give up his allotment, is not only one of extreme caution and fear for the fate of the “foundations” (the foundations of routine and stagnation); more than this, the Narodnik falls so low that he even welcomes the police rule forbidding the peasants to sell land. To such a Narodnik, one might retort in the words of Engelhardt: “The muzhik is stupid, he cannot manage his own affairs. If nobody looks after him, he will burn down all the forests, kill off all the birds, denude the rivers of fish, ruin the land and himself die out.” Here the Narodnik quite definitely “renounces the heritage,” becomes a reactionary.")
Its only the workers that could respond to the petty-bourgeois reaction, without the need to rely upon the Bonapartism of the state, but the ruling class will not mobilise it, in that way, because to do so runs the risk that the workers will go beyond the bounds set for it, and push for its own interests – permanent revolution. For example, in relation to the pandemic, the rational response was not a blanket lockdown of society, which, as Professor Woolhouse has shown, signified that society had “gone mad”, but was a policy of focused protection, along with the introduction of widespread workers' control of production, and committees of workers' inspection to ensure that workplaces were safe. But, of course, the ruling class was never going to concede the latter, which would amount to it ceding control of the means of production, which is its basis of class rule. Instead, it reached for its normal means of social control, the bureaucratic state apparatus.
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