The Banana Monarchy and Voodoo Economics - Part 9 of 9

The measures of reactionary petty-bourgeois governments, at that time, which deregulated, and removed various rights and freedoms from workers, and introduced anti-union laws, did not, of themselves, fundamentally change the relations between capital and labour, more than was already the case arising from changed material conditions in the power of labour as against capital, resulting from the stage of the long wave cycle. Innovation had introduced labour saving technologies, workers were laid off, their bargaining power was denuded, unions were useless in such conditions in trying to bargain a better deal, and, under such conditions, the reason for workers joining such unions are also eroded, weakening the unions further. As Engels had put it,

“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.”

(Engels Condition of The Working Class in England p 243)

The new laws facilitated the reactionary, anti-worker policies of the small capitalists, but, as again Engels had pointed out, for much of the large-scale businesses, unions had long since been incorporated into a social-democratic model, in which workers were to be imbued with the notion that society was generally a harmonious whole, in which the interests of workers and capital were intertwined, and only sensible negotiation between professional negotiators on each side was required, to ensue their mutual benefit.

"and thus a new spirit came over the masters, especially the large ones, which taught them to avoid unnecessary squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and power of Trades’ Unions, and finally even to discover in strikes — at opportune times — a powerful means to serve their own ends."

So, the big capitals, did not seek to ban unions, but, instead, simply further incorporated them via single union agreements, and whole swathes of lay union officials, who might have acted as a base for rank and file resistance, as the shop stewards movement had done in the 1950's and 60's, were absorbed into the ranks of the full-time bureaucracy.

But, those conditions are, again, now changing, as they were in the early 2000's prior to the 2008 crash, and the imposition of austerity, lockdowns and so on, in the intervening period. One consequence of the appeasement of the interests of small capital, was that its significant expansion, since the 1980's, was itself premised upon a continuation of conditions in which workers could not move to higher paid jobs elsewhere, that the low interest rates continued, that low wages would continue to be subsidised by the state out of welfare benefits, and so on. Its what contributed to the massive drag on productivity rates. Around 20% or about 1 million of the 5 million mostly small businesses in Britain are zombie companies, reliant upon a continuation of those conditions, and, even then, only able to pay the interest on their loans, and not to repay the capital borrowed.

As interest rates rise, wages rise, workers find they can easily move jobs, find the mettle to form unions and so on, the days of those zombie companies are numbered, and a good thing too. Socialists are not Sismondists, and economic romanticists, wanting to preserve those reactionary forms of capital, as against large-scale capital. Quite the contrary. If those small capitals go out of business, as part and parcel of an expanding economy, and growth of large-scale capital, that, in itself, will be a highly progressive development, and, along with it, will also go a weakening of the reactionary petty-bourgeois ideology that currently dominates both the Brexitories and Blue Labour.

A growth of large scale capital, means a growth of workers employed within it, and the potential for them to join unions, to enjoy more civilised conditions, to enjoy all that comes from such collective and cooperative labour, in terms of the development of their class consciousness. It strengthens the ideas of progressive social-democracy, if not immediately of Socialism, and diminishes the ideas of reactionary petty-bourgeois nationalism, and anti-capitalism. Under those conditions, attempts by a reactionary Brexitory government to introduce Enterprise Zones, Freeports and Charter Cities will be dead in the water, neutered at birth in their effect, and also the concomitant idea of trying to impose further anti-working class measures on the right to strike and so on, will be met with the same response that they received in similar conditions in the 1960's.

The times they are a changing.

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