The labour movement, globally, is dominated by social-democracy to an extent it has not been for more than a century. That social-democracy, always the dominant ideology of the ruling class, since the second half of the 19th century, is, itself, not only more conservative, but, in many instances, appeasing petty-bourgeois reactionary ideas, as with the UK Labour Party's collapse into Blue Labour nationalism, Brexitoryism, and flag-waving jingoism. The “Left”, itself a vague term, comprising a tiny number of actual Marxists, mostly outside the many micro-sects of faux-Marxists, centrists, Stalinists, anarchists, and left reformists, that make up the rest, is so small as to be essentially irrelevant. The actual Marxists continue to pursue the position of international socialism that “The Main Enemy Is At Home”, whereas the rest of what comprises that tiny Left act as cheerleaders and ideological cover for the opposing capitalist camps.
Large sections of the social-democratic leadership of the labour movements of Western Europe and North America have jumped on the bandwagon of supporting NATO militarism's war, against Russia, in Ukraine, whilst a much smaller section of those labour movements has attached itself to supporting the militarism of Putin's war, against NATO, in Ukraine. The arguments for doing so, by both of these capitalist camps, are identical, but simply a mirror image of each other. Both argue that they are supporting national independence.
The same arguments, and the same mirror images appeared prior to WWI, with French social-patriots arguing that it was necessary for workers to support their capitalist state, and its war with Germany, so that France's independence was not denied, by Germany, with German social-patriots saying the same in reverse. The same arguments were raised in WWII. These ideas that infect the labour movement do not appear from nowhere, they are based in material conditions, and class interests.
The basic source of these ideas infecting the labour movement, and which lead it to subordinate its interests to those of its main enemy, the bourgeois ruling class of its own country, is the petty-bourgeoisie, or more precisely, the professional middle-class. The ideas that dominate the labour movement, are not those of Socialism, but of social-democracy. Here, clarification of terms is required, because the term social-democracy has been intertwined with the term socialism for a long time, and needs to be unravelled.
Marx made sure, to refer to himself and the ideas he promoted not as social-democratic, but as communist. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he set out his definition of social democracy.
“The peculiar character of social-democracy is epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labour, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony. However different the means proposed for the attainment of this end may be, however much it may be trimmed with more or less revolutionary notions, the content remains the same. This content is the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie. Only one must not get the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within whose frame alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position they may be as far apart as heaven and earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter practically. This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent.”
Its not the vast array of British shopkeepers, or the other 15 million people that comprise the British petty-bourgeoisie of self-employed window cleaners, gardeners, small traders, small capitalists and their families that infect the labour movement with these ideas. On the contrary, they largely stand outside it, hostile to it, and make up the foot soldiers of reaction, now manifest in their takeover of the Tory Party. Rather, today, it is those elements that Marx refers to above, who can more easily be identified as a professional middle class of managers, whose sole social function is to mediate this antagonism between capital and labour, to convince workers that no such antagonism exists, and that the interests of workers and their own capitalist ruling class are the same, and can be managed by sensible negotiation, usually based on national interest. Social-democracy, as the dominant ideology of the bourgeoisie, in the age of imperialism, not only always promoted social-patriotism, but, as proponent of the interests of its own bourgeoisie, was almost invariably to be found supporting the colonial and imperial adventures abroad of its own ruling class too.
Even, where that is no longer tenable, and small states, like Britain, are led to join with other states, in the EU, these same elements continue to operate, on the same basis of promoting this common “national interest”, jockeying for position, on that basis, which is why the EU has not progressed quickly to becoming a unified state, but remains hamstrung as a confederation of separate nation states. The US required a civil war to bring about that change more quickly, and, as Engels pointed out, even that was not fully completed, leaving it with a Federal State, rather than a one and indivisible, unified state, which continues to plague it to this day.
That professional middle-class comprises the day to day managers of businesses, and their counterparts in the trades union bureaucracy, and given that the Labour Party was created by those trades unions, that ideology was embedded in it from the beginning. It is founded on a bourgeois ideology of managing capitalism more efficiently, and equitably. The same ideology is what allowed those trades unions, before that, to work happily, with the representatives of industrial capital, in the Liberal Party.
The ideology of Marx, of communism, is the abolition of the wages system, and ownership and control of the means of production, directly, by the working-class, via worker cooperatives, as set out in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, or as in Marx's Programme for the First International, and in Capital III, Chapter 27, and, thereby, the overthrow of bourgeois society and bourgeois-democracy, and its replacement by communism, the self-government of the working-class, having liberated itself from the shackles of capitalism. The programme of social-democracy, however, is defence of capitalism, and of bourgeois-democracy, and merely to bargain within the system for a bigger share of the pie for labour, whilst always recognising that, in the end, it is the growing of the pie by capital that must come first. In the age of imperialism, based upon large scale socialised industrial capital, in the form of oligopolies, whose mature, rational form is ultimately state capitalism, the epitome of its outlook is such state ownership and control.
As Marx put it in Wage Labour and Capital,
“And so, the bourgeoisie and its economists maintain that the interest of the capitalist and of the labourer is the same. And in fact, so they are! The worker perishes if capital does not keep him busy. Capital perishes if it does not exploit labour-power, which, in order to exploit, it must buy. The more quickly the capital destined for production – the productive capital – increases, the more prosperous industry is, the more the bourgeoisie enriches itself, the better business gets, so many more workers does the capitalist need, so much the dearer does the worker sell himself. The fastest possible growth of productive capital is, therefore, the indispensable condition for a tolerable life to the labourer.”
This was the inevitable result of the economics as set out by Ricardo, and which formed the basis of the ideas of the Ricardian socialists, but, as Marx sets out, this is only true so long as you accept that capitalism represents the end of history. If, like Marx, your analysis of the world, as it already existed, at the end of the 19th century, is one in which industrial capital has already become socialised capital, collectively owned by workers, although only controlled by them in the cooperatives, then this is no longer true, because different economic and social laws apply to such society, in which the workers, as collective owners of the socialised capital, employ themselves.
The application of surplus value/surplus product, as additional means of production, is, then, no longer determined by the ability for it to produce additional profit, but by its ability to produce more wealth for society, to lighten the labour of workers, and so on. The living standards/wages of workers are, then, no longer determined by the ebb and flow of demand for labour-power by capital, but by the conscious decision of workers, themselves, of how much of what they produce they wish to consume, as opposed to how much they wish to use to expand their production, and so on.
As Marx put it in Value, Price and Profit,
“At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!"”
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