By-elections, last week, in England, and the Spanish General Election on Sunday, showed reactionary nationalism stalling, despite the lack of any credible, principled opposition being mounted against it. In England, the Liberals who, along with the Greens, SNP and Plaid Cymru are the only main parties opposing the reactionary, Brexitoryism of the Tories and Blue Labour, won a striking victory in Somerton and Frome. In Selby, the reactionary nationalists of Starmer's Blue Labour, scored a contrasting, but unconvincing win against their Tory twins, whilst failing to defeat them in Boris Johnson's former seat in Uxbridge. In Spain, a much predicted win for the right-wing nationalists of the Popular Party, and their ultra-right allies of Vox, failed to materialise, again despite no credible, principled opposition from either the PSOE, or its allies in the hodge-podge, rotten bloc, popular front of Sumar.
In the Somerton and Frome by-election, a Tory majority of 19,000, in 2019, was overturned by the Liberals, with a 29% swing, to give them an 11,000 majority. Blue Labour's vote share collapsed, falling 80% from 12.9% to just 2.6%. Nor can that be put down to simply tactical voting to ensure the defeat of the Tories. Blue Labour is far closer to the Tories than to the Liberals, whilst the Greens, are closer to the Liberals, and yet, seen, as more progressive. If it was simply tactical voting, then you would expect that the Green vote would have collapsed even more than that of Labour. The opposite happened. The Greens share of the vote rose by 100%, doubling from 5.1% in 2019, to 10.2%.
That represents a significant rejection of the reactionary, nationalist Brexitory policies of both the Tories, and Blue Labour, in favour of the pro-EU stance of the Liberals and Greens, despite the fact that the Liberals and Greens have, themselves, hardly been championing the cause of progressive internationalism, and a return to the EU. That is no doubt why the biggest winner in the by-election was “None of the Above”, as the turnout almost halved from 76% in 2019, to just 44%. Still, even if, in a General Election, the Tories picked up the majority of that missing 25,000 votes, they would still be struggling to overturn the Liberals current 11,000 majority.
That is not the case in Selby. The same drop in turnout was witnessed, falling from 72% to 44%. Although Labour saw its share of the vote rise from 24.6% to 46%, and the swing to it from the Tories being 24%, as against the 29% swing to the Liberals in Somerton, it was only enough to give Labour a majority of 4,000, which is more than likely to disappear come a General Election, as it would be expected the Tories would pick up the majority of the missing 20,000 votes. A further look at the two by-elections, shows the difference. Where Labour's vote share dropped by 80% in Somerton, the Liberal vote share in Selby fell by only 60%, and again, the Greens, seen as both more pro-EU, and more progressive (wrongly) saw their vote share rise by 60%.
The failure of Labour to secure any sizeable tactical voting from the Liberals or Greens, despite the fact that those parties had no chance of winning in Selby, is a result of the fact that their voters see Starmer's Blue Labour, rightly, as just an imitation of the reactionary nationalist, pro-Brexit policies of the Tories. Whilst Corbyn was also tainted with that same reactionary nationalism and Brexitism, at least, under his leadership, Labour was seen to have returned to its original social-democratic heritage, and, on Brexit, Corbyn was out of step with the vast majority of the party. But, under Starmer, not only is the reactionary nationalism and jingoism taken to the extreme, but his purges of the party offers no glimmer of hope that it might be reversed, any time soon, and that goes along with all of the rest of the petty-bourgeois, reactionary policies that Starmer is introducing that make Labour a party way to the Right of what it has ever been in the past. It is no longer even a social-democratic party geared to the interests of large-scale capital.
In Uxbridge, its weakness was even further exposed. There the fact that it is just a clone of Boris Johnson's Brexitory Party, gave no reason for anyone hostile to those reactionary nationalist politics to vote for it. Where, in Selby, a protest vote against a dysfunctional Tory Party was enough to have many Tory voters stay at home, in protest, enabling Labour to scrape in with a fragile majority, in Uxbridge, the petty-bourgeoisie found another reason to turn out to vote for the Tories rather than Labour – ULEZ. ULEZ is illustrative of the reasons for the failure of social-democracy, and rise of petty-bourgeois reaction, over the last 40 years.
The motivation for ULEZ, to reduce dangerous carbon emissions into the atmosphere, not only to deal with its effects on climate change, but, also, and more immediately, to deal with the dangers to the health of workers, breathing in a cocktail of noxious fumes, is entirely progressive and commendable. It ought to be one of those policies that social-democrats can champion, and win support for. Of course, amongst many workers, in London, that is, indeed, the case. As with Brexit, its not amongst progressive, working-class, Labour voters that there is opposition. The opposition comes from the petty-bourgeoisie, but that petty-bourgeoisie, not only also votes, but its sentiments are also echoed amongst sections of the working-class.
The petty-bourgeoisie opposes ULEZ, because they see in it, another layer of costs and bureaucracy to pay for that eats into its small profits. And, the same is true of those poorer, and less affluent workers, who are the ones that have the old inefficient cars that get hit by ULEZ and similar policies. The problem with social-democracy, particularly conservative social-democracy is that it is managerialist and bureaucratic, and thinks that, just because it sees the progressive nature of certain policies, everyone else will do so too, and, if not, well too bad, because it will push through the policy anyway, seeking acceptance of it later. That was the approach of social-democracy to the EU, for example.
The idea that the role of a political party is to be proponents of an ideology, to go out and actually win support for its ideas is alien to social-democracy, and has become even more so in recent decades, when the focus has been placed, more and more, simply on populism and tailism. Starmer's immediate scapegoating of Sadiq Khan, for Labour's failure in Uxbridge, and fact that he seems to be prepared to abandon the remnants of its environmental agenda for the sake of a few votes, is again illustrative of it. In the case of his attack on the soft-Right Khan, its another warning, as I predicted before Starmer's election, that he will have to move continuously to the Right, making not only the soft-Left in danger, but a whole swathe of even the centre and soft-Right of the PLP.
In the 1950's, and early 60's, a raft of progressive social-democratic measures were introduced, by both Tories and Labour. The perennial London “pea-soupers” were turned into a thing of the past, as air quality was improved with a shift from the burning of coal, and production of town gas from coal, by the introduction of much cleaner, and more efficient, natural gas from the North Sea, as well as a shift to electricity. The general development was codified in various pieces of Environmental Health legislation, such as The Clean Air Acts. The reason these acts could be, and were introduced was that new technologies produced more efficient means of producing and using energy. That reduced costs for industry, and raised its rate of profit, but also, with rising living standards, and a need to reduce time spent on domestic labour, the use of gas and electric heaters, as well as of central heating made phasing out inefficient coal fires, and coal burning inevitable.
At a time of falling costs for these new types of energy and heating, as well as rising living standards that enabled worker households to be able to pay out for these new forms of heating that went along with improving their lives with things like fridges, TV's, electric washing machines, vacuum cleaners and so on, social-democracy was pushing on an open door. Its not so easy when living standards have been under pressure from ten years of government imposed austerity, when the boycott of Russian oil and gas and so on, has pushed up energy prices, and so on. Its in those conditions that social-democracy needs to work harder to engage in a determined struggle to advance its ideas, but also to offer workers incentives to adopt them. That, however, sometimes involves social-democracy providing those incentives at the expense of capital, and that is what it is never prepared to do.
In Spain, the PSOE, like other social-democratic parties, has failed to advance the interests of Spanish workers. It has been a part of the general EU support for NATO's war against Russia in Ukraine, including the boycott of Russian oil and gas, and food exports that has pushed up global prices for those commodities, with a consequent effect on the living standards of Spanish workers. The Right have benefited from that failure of the PSOE, just as they have done elsewhere, over the last 20 years, pushing easy, but false and reactionary nationalist solutions. It fuelled the rise of the BNP and UKIP in Britain, the FN in France, and their equivalents across Europe, as well as Trump in the US.
Yet, the reality is that a progressive social-democracy, attending to the needs of real, large-scale, industrial capital, could, in the last 20 years, have also supported the needs and interests of workers. The expansion of the EU, and of global trade was a progressive development that reduced costs of production, and boosted the potential for capital accumulation, as well as of raising workers' living standards. But, instead of facilitating that accumulation of capital, and rise in living standards, social-democratic governments, and states, looking to the interests not of that real industrial capital, but of the owners of fictitious-capital (shareholders, bondholders etc.), i.e. the ruling class, were transfixed with the idea of continually inflating this fictitious wealth, of the need to produce each year, additional capital gains that could form the basis of further borrowing, as the means of funding additional consumption.
When that fool's paradise collapsed in 2008, they still sought to restore it, unable to change their mindset and conception of how the world functions. So, rather than seeing the solution in the need to actually create new value, and surplus value, via the accumulation of additional capital, they saw any such development, occurring naturally, despite their efforts to frustrate it via fiscal austerity and so on, as deeply troublesome, because that economic expansion, and capital accumulation, meant rising employment, and rising demand for capital causing interest rates to rise, the same rising interest rates that had caused asset prices to crash. All efforts were deliriously put into holding back the real economy, real capital, real value creation, in order to ensure the renewed inflation of purely illusory paper wealth, the rise in meaningless asset prices, as the form of wealth of the ruling class.
At first, it is only the lower ranks of the working-class that most notably suffer from that. Its they that do not own a home, whose paper price inflates hugely each year, who probably do not have a company, let alone private pension, or savings tucked away into mutual funds, whose paper valuation again inflates each year with other asset prices. Even some of the petty-bourgeoisie, can often turn its attention to this development, and expand its activities into becoming buy to let landlords, increasingly interested, not in the rents, but in the same annual inflation of property prices, and consequent capital gains. Its those elements excluded from that fantasy of rising asset prices that first become alienated, and, as always, provide a pool in which the reactionaries can fish. But, as asset prices continue to rise, so this pool of people grows larger, because an increasing number of people cannot afford to buy a home, or to move up to a better home, like every Ponzi Scheme, if you were not in near the beginning, it costs you more to buy in at the later higher prices, whether it is a house, a pension, or the purchase of shares, meaning that the returns, from doing so, are increasingly diminished, and your risk of making a capital loss rises significantly.
In Britain, the US and across the EU, despite this abysmal performance by social-democrats, the reactionary nationalist Right are failing to make further headway, from that they have made in the last 20 years, and that is a sign of the underlying objective changes in material conditions, and its reflection in ideas. A decade ago, it was manifest, confusedly in the rise of Sanders, Corbyn, Syriza, Podemos, the Left Bloc and so on.
The confused, inadequate nature of those initial responses, themselves still stuck in the realms of social-democracy, saw them collapse when tested, but the course of history has simply, as it always does, flowed into other channels. It is flowing into the channels of industrial action, as workers feel a new found strength and confidence, as economic expansion has continued despite the best efforts of conservatives, and labour shortages have forced employers to compete for labour, via higher wages.
That kind of industrial, sectional economic struggle can never be sufficient, as Marx described in Value, Price and Profit, and as Lenin described, because what workers need to move forward is a political struggle, a class struggle. But, the two are not divorced. As Marx put it, workers cannot wage a class struggle unless they can first, at least, wage a struggle to defend their standard of living, and as Lenin put it, whilst strikes are not instances of class struggle, they are schools for class struggle. And, there is also a connection between economic strikes and political strikes. Those of us who lived through the similar period of the 1950's, and 60's are aware of that, as the state sought to constrain the wildcat strikes of an emboldened working-class, with laws, which, in response, led to workers engaging in political strikes, such as that for the release of the Pentonville Five.
The task of Marxists analysing these developments, and their precedents, is to insist on revolutionary optimism. The reactionary nationalists have hit a high water mark, and despite the miserable performance of social-democracy, the conditions are moving against them, and also against conservative social-democracy itself. But, we also need to learn the lessons of the 1960's, and 70's too, when revolutionaries, were caught up in that rising tide of economism, and growth in the size and influence of progressive social-democracy. We are not social-democrats, even progressive or Left Social Democrats.
We are Marxists, revolutionary, international socialists. Social-democracy, even left social-democracy, is the ideology of the bourgeoisie, ultimately representing its objective interests. We march with it for part of the way, in so far as it strengthens the position of the working-class to fight, as Marx describes in Wage-Labour and Capital, because the working-class is strongest when real capital itself expands more rapidly, and facilitates that opening up of ideas, discussed by Lenin above, of the need for workers control of production, and so on. However, our goal is not simply this improvement of conditions within capitalism, including workers' control of production and so on, which the ruling class would, in any case, never concede, unless forced to do so by an armed working-class. Our goal is the overthrow of the existing wages system itself, and its replacement by international socialism.
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