Macron's Defeat Points The Way For Biden and Starmer

It is rare for a French President not to have the backing of a majority in parliament. It has happened only three times in the Fifth Republic, twice under Francois Mitterand, and once under Jacques Chirac, in 1997. Having five year terms for both President and Assembly, with elections in the same year, was supposed to make it even more unlikely, but Macron has managed to be so unpopular that he has achieved it. Where Macron has led, Biden and Starmer, are headed.

Back in 2017, I wrote that Macron's election was a pyrrhic victory, because it answered nothing, and simply pushed the resolution of contradictions down the road. I had set out the reasons why socialists should not support him as a lesser-evil, on that basis, earlier. The basic thesis I have outlined many times since 2008, and before, is that the collapse of the political centre is not some inexplicable phenomenon, but is directly related to a change in material conditions, determined by the long wave cycle, that makes the foundations upon which conservative social-democracy/neoliberalism, rested for 20 years, unsustainable.

From the mid 1980's on, after Thatcher defeated the miners in Britain, and Reagan the Air Traffic Controllers in the US, as totemic struggles that epitomised the defeat of labour by capital for an entire period ahead, the dominant ideas were founded upon the fact that profits were rising at a faster pace than capital accumulation – net output grew faster than gross output – with the effect that interest rates fell, and that facilitated a rise in asset prices. The idea was created that it was possible to create wealth, not from a creation of new value - or even new use values – but simply by a continual increase in the prices of these assets, with capital gains then being converted into revenues, by what the financial advisors refer to as “taking profits”.

In fact, its a delusion, and amounts to nothing more than a Ponzi Scheme, which more and more necessitates a narrowing of the capital base, and essentially asset stripping. As I set out in my book, Marx and Engels' Theories of Crisis, one way that economies dealt with the problem of falling wages making it harder to realise surplus value, because of the need to sell large volumes of wage goods, was to encourage the increase in household debt, and the scrapping of credit controls in both the UK and US, was one element in making that possible.

Prior to Thatcher's scrapping of credit controls, household debt (excluding mortgage debt) never exceeded 72% of GDP. In the years that followed it tripled, reaching 200% in 2010. Add in mortgage debt and the connection is even clearer, as was also made clear by the fact that the global financial crisis received its spark in the US sub-prime mortgage market, and was also signalled in the collapse of Northern Rock in 2007, having previously been handing out 125% mortgages willy-nilly. 

But, it wasn't just Thatcher and Reagan under whom this delusion was created. It was adopted by Clinton in the US, in the 1990's, as it was by Blair after 1997. It was the era of PEP's and private pensions, and the dream of a property-owning democracy, as well as the era of soaring credit card bills, store card debt, student debt, and equity release scams, soon to be followed by the era of Pay Day Loans charging 4000% p.a. interest.

In Britain, house prices quadrupled in the 1980's, before falling by 40% in 1990, itself following the greatest ever fall in global share prices, of 25% in one day, in the crash of 1987. But, that simply created the conditions under which the former sound money enthusiast Alan Greenspan, became the money printer in chief, putting a bottom under global asset prices, and creating a one way bet for speculators, which itself was guaranteed to drain money from the real economy, and potential money-capital away from productive investment. UK house prices did not recover their pre-crash levels until 1996, but, from 1997, as central banks pumped out more liquidity, they soared again, and a similar pattern occurred across the globe, prior to 2008.

But, as with all such Ponzi Schemes, there comes a point where there are no more bigger fools to be found, and the whole thing collapses, as it has done on several occasions since 1987, most notably in 2000, when the NASDAQ fell by 75%, and in 2008 with the global financial crash. What went along with all of this, from the 1980's, was that, whilst large amounts of large-scale, mature, manufacturing industry went overseas – most notably to China – and large scale industrial capital in the US, UK, and Europe became concentrated in service industry, and commercial capital – as I had predicted as far back as 1983 – it opened a door to a resurgence of the petty-bourgeoisie.

Not only were fields of small scale production left open for it to fill, but the very fact of large numbers of workers finding it difficult to find stable employment, made choices of self-employment, and family employment, more attractive, especially as the government introduced specific incentives to that end, such as the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. The environment created also facilitated the spread of such individualism, in the form of a return of the significance of private buy-to let landlords. It was the era of “White Van Man”, and of the independent trader symbolised at one end by Del Boy Trotter, and at the other by the Harry Enfield character “loadsamoney”, and the barrow boys become stock market traders.

On the one hand, these policies were spawned naturally, from the economic developments of the 1980's, and, on the other, were facilitated by the growth of the reactionary, petty-bourgeois wing of the Tory Party, at the expense of its conservative social-democratic wing, epitomised by Thatcher's adoption of Euroscepticism. The consequence was an inevitable and significant strengthening of the petty-bourgeoisie, and so a subsequent, further strengthening of that ideology, manifest not only within the Tory Party, but in groupings to its Right such as UKIP, with similar developments in the US (Tea Party/Trump), and in France (Le Pen) and so on.

What this represents, as I said in the early 2000's, is that society had divided again into two large polarised class camps, and the large fudged middle, inflated on the air of speculation, that had been constructed from the mid 1980's onwards, had collapsed like a souffle. On the one hand is the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, on the other is the progressive working and professional middle class. However, whilst the traditional parties of the petty-bourgeoisie (Tories, Republicans) have been captured by the reactionaries that have sought to find solutions in a return to the past – its notable that Tories now talk openly about wanting to rip up agreements, for example, on the railways, introduced to protect workers, from the 1970's, and so reduce workers conditions to levels even below those of 50 years ago – the working-class and middle class, have not been able to secure control of their traditional parties (Labour, Democrats, Socialists), despite some false starts in the shape of Corbyn, Sanders etc.

Those parties remain firmly in the control of conservative social-democrats like Biden, Starmer and so on, and, in France, as the French Socialist Party collapsed in ignominy, following Hollande's Presidency, Macron became its inheritor. That collapse had been seen previously with pasokification.

These conservative social-democrats, were based on an ideology that itself is simply a reflection of the interests of the ruling class. However, that ruling class, today, is one whose wealth and power itself rests upon the ownership of fictitious capital, and which, in the last 30 years, has depended upon that continual increase in asset prices that is no longer possible. It is a class whose interests, as Marx describes – sucking interest/dividends from profits – are inimical to the industrial capital, upon which the mode of production, and so the state itself rests.

That large scale industrial capital, is, in fact, the collective property of the associated producers (workers, managers, technicians, administrators), but who do not exercise control over it, that control being exercised by shareholders and the executives they appoint. That same lack of control, is mirrored politically in their lack of control over the social-democratic parties themselves.

That ruling class, as a bourgeois class, has always had an affinity with the petty-bourgeoisie, even though its interests are directly threatened by it, whereas, objectively, it has an imminent coincidence of interest with the working-class and professional middle class, against that reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, which has become increasingly assertive, increasingly willing to turn to fascistic methods and parties to pursue its interests, methods which threaten the political regime of the ruling class itself. 

The ruling class sees the petty-bourgeoisie in terms of its own past, of where it came from, and, in some cases, that is within their living memory. But, also, as Marx described in his 1850 Address to the Executive of the Communist League, and as Trotsky describes, it is the basis of the theory of permanent revolution. The ruling class might have an immediate coincidence of interest with the working class to fight the petit-bourgeois reaction, just as, in the past, it had such an immediate coincidence of interest to do so to fight the old landlord class, but it always views the working-class through the lens of it being a revolutionary class, tending always to go beyond the bounds of any immediate struggle, and, thereby, to overwhelm it, and supplant it. In control of the state, they will always use that, rather than ally with workers to defeat its immediate enemies if possible.

The ruling class, and, specifically, the conservative social democratic politicians that represent its interests have allowed that reactionary petty-bourgeoisie to develop, because instead of confronting it in open political struggle during the last 40 years, they were prepared to sit on the soggy middle ground consensus they had constructed, and to rely on a combination of inertia, and bureaucratism, utilising the power of the state to simply steamroller through its interests, and suppress its opponents.

I argued more than a decade ago that such an approach was short sighted and bound to come back on them. As it did with Brexit, Trump and so on. Instead of actually confronting all of the bigotries that were carried forward from past modes of production, and for which the petty-bourgeoisie is a susceptible vessel, the liberal bourgeoisie instead settled for a managerial solution, outlawing various ideas, as though this could remove them from people's heads, with a consequent result that it simply drove them underground, and acted to build up an increasing resentment against “the establishment”, and “the metropolitan elite”, a negative populist sentiment that could be easily combined with solutions from both the authoritarian Right or Left, and which has created the basis for the various Red-Brown fronts.

The rise of the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie has found its political outlet in the capture of conservative parties by that wing, but the working-class remains effectively without a political leadership and voice to express its interests. Its parties remain in the thrall of conservative social-democrats who cannot accept that the conditions required for their ideas ceased to exist back in 2008, and that the surreal measures taken since then, with negative yielding bonds, central banks being the buyer of last resort for vast quantities of worthless paper, asset prices requiring the real economy to be destroyed even to prevent them crashing, are simply the manifestation that such conditions are no longer sustainable.

But, the longer the conservative social democrats continue to exercise control over those parties - the measures being taken to expel opponents inside the LP, showing the extent to which they will go to hold on, by hook or by crook, to such control – the greater will be seen the irrelevance of such parties themselves, and the greater will be the power and influence of the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, and its political representatives who increasingly will come from the ranks of the authoritarian Right. As Trotsky put it,

“Fascism is a form of despair in the petty-bourgeois masses, who carry away with them over the precipice a part of the proletariat as well. Despair, as is known, takes hold when all roads of salvation are cut off. The triple bankruptcy of democracy, social democracy, and the Comintern was the prerequisite for the successes of fascism. All three have tied their fate to the fate of imperialism. All three bring nothing to the masses but despair and by this assure the triumph of fascism.”

(Phrases & Reality)

The Marxist Left has been too small to offer any road ahead for a very long time; the social-democratic Left, like Corbyn, Sanders and Melonchon, like the Comintern referenced by Trotsky, has itself no way forward, as it has been infected with statism and economic nationalism too. The liberal bourgeoisie does not have that limitation. Though, even when it comes to arguing for, say, the EU, it does so on the basis of arguing that it is beneficial to the national interest, rather than a perspective of internationalism, but it is hog-tied to trying to pursue the market oriented policies, and ideas based upon inflating asset prices whose day has passed.

What has been needed, even for the interests of large-scale socialised capital, was a recognition of the need for increased regulation and planning, which is precisely why a European state is required in place of small nation states. And to pursue such a course, liberals needed to join with socialists not in trying to bureaucratically outlaw various reactionary ideas and bigotries, but to politically confront and defeat them, to drive them out of society entirely, in a way that was done, for example, in the 1950's and 60's in confronting the various forms of religious bigotry, in fights over censorship, blasphemy laws and so on. The liberals have not been able even to do that. So, now we see that Biden's shaky centre coalition, which defeated Trump, has now collapsed, and as with Macron, his personal popularity has plumbed the depths, as is also the case with Starmer. They are unable to rouse any enthusiasm for their warmed up policies of the last thirty years.

In order to further the development of large-scale socialised capital, which is the dominant form of property, upon which the future of the state depends, but which is, as Marx says, also the transitional form of property between capitalism and socialism, property which is the collective property of the workers, it required that the control by shareholders, whose interests are inimical to it be challenged, and that a struggle for industrial democracy be conducted.  That is the programme of progressive social-democracy, but is, for that reason, anathema to the politics of conservative social-democracy, which seeks to simply freeze the development of capital in its present state.

The reversal of Roe v Wade, by the US Supreme Court is symptomatic of the conservative and limited politics of conservative social democracy, and the way the liberals have allowed a resurgent petty-bourgeoisie to take the initiative. Unable to move forward, which would require accepting the agenda of progressive social democracy, they have been dragged backwards, illustrating the old adage that politics, like Nature, abhors a vacuum.  

Liberals have had 50 years to have enshrined the principles of Roe v Wade in federal law, thereby, preventing this week's events from happening, but they have failed to do so. Having achieved the legal ruling they were happy to sit on that managerial solution rather than going on to wage the kind of political war against that bigotry that even European and British liberals undertook, to confront the bigotry of the religious zealots. In the US, which, in large parts, resembles the kinds of medieval zealotry of badly educated, third world, rural populations, such a struggle was even more necessary. It is a country where the ideas of The Crucible still hold sway, but which has, at the same time, the world's largest nuclear arsenal. It is a country in which the ideas of the Endtimers are a stones throw away from the Presidency.