Eighteen months ago, I asked the question whether western social-democracy could survive its economic war against Russia and China? The answer appears to be no. Western social democracy is breaking on the wrack of its own internal contradictions, exacerbated by its war on Russia and China.
In the US, the failure of Biden and the Democrats has shamefully opened the door once more to Trump, despite the fact that the US ruling-class and its state has done all it can to put Trump and his fascistic supporters in the dock. But, even behind bars, Trump looks attractive to a large swathe of the US petty-bourgeoisie, and backward layers, in a way that Biden does not to the US working-class. Biden, desperate for their votes, in Michigan, did manage to turn up on UAW picket lines – something that would have got him sacked from Starmer's hard Right, Blue Labour – and even to support their claim for higher wages. But, it was simply short-term opportunism, that contrasted starkly with his previous interventions to block the strikes of US dockers and rail workers, and to impose pay deals on them.
But the actions of the Democrats typifies the reasons that western social-democracy is breaking apart. In large part its down to its own internal contradictions of the antagonism between conservative social-democracy and progressive social democracy, the former representing the short-term interests of the ruling class owners of fictitious capital, the latter, objectively, representing the interests of large-scale, socialised, industrial capital. But, in part, it also reflects the fact, as described by the quotes provided from Trotsky, in my posts from 18 months ago, the fact that a large part of the “Left”, has itself subordinated itself, and, thereby, the working-class, to the interests of imperialism, sinking into a reactionary campist support for NATO imperialism, in its unfolding war against Russian/Chinese imperialism.
In the US, for example, it is apparent in the fact that the Democrats were willing to sacrifice the shut down of government, in order to try to avoid stopping providing yet more billions of Dollars in funding for the war it is fighting against Russia, in Ukraine. The Democrats, in other words, were prepared to sacrifice the interests of US workers, most directly all those workers employed by the US state, all those dependent on contracts from it, not to mention all those dependent on government programmes, in order to continue sending billions to Zelensky's, corrupt, anti-worker regime in Ukraine!
In the end, it couldn't do that either, because, not only did the deal to continue stop-gap funding for the US government, not contain funding for the imperialist war in Ukraine, but the Republicans themselves, then, have sacked House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the first time in history, which now looks set to paralyse the operation of the House of Representatives. It is, itself, an indication of the decomposition of US Social Democracy, that is fracturing and crumbling like RAAC concrete. The US has never been an example of even healthy bourgeois-democracy. Much like Russia or Ukraine, it is really an oligarchy, in which votes are literally bought and sold by a tiny number of billionaires, much as happened with the buying of votes, in Britain, prior to the 1832 Reform Act, to obtain seats in the “rotten boroughs”.
Legislation in the US system is always in the form of omnibus bills that attempt to secure enough votes to pass by offering up fairly open bribes to the representatives of different constituencies – so called “pork barrel politics”. This is necessary, because US political parties are not actually parties at all, but simply electoral machines designed to get politicians elected. The parties lack even the kind of internal democracy, and cohesion that European parties display, itself dissolving, and rather being just loose associations of individuals, gravitating around vaguely defined class interest.
Much as with Brexit, in Britain, Trump has been able to bring together a sufficient coalition of the petty-bourgeoisie and lumpen elements, to secure a sizeable core vote. But, Biden and the Democrats, as with social-democracy, elsewhere, is still trying to prop up the collapsed model of conservative social-democracy of the last 40 years, based upon the interests of the ruling-class, and its need to inflate the prices of its assets. Not only is that, now, impossible, but, in seeking to do so, it has turned away the votes of millions of workers, undermining its potential to secure an electoral majority.
The same picture is repeated across North America and Europe. In France, the two main social-democratic parties – Socialist Party and Republican Party – collapsed. On their ashes arose Macron, who then created his En Marche, as a supporting band. But, it represented only a change of names and faces, and as Macron has proceeded to attack French workers, so the same consequence is seen, of a further strengthening of the reactionary forces of the petty-bourgeoisie, as symbolised by Le Pen.
In Germany, as the US blew up the Nordstream pipelines that provided cheap Russian gas, the government has tried to deny that responsibility, given that it also acted to implement NATO sanctions against Russia that have hugely increased the costs of energy and food in Europe, as well as having a significant dampening effect on European, and so, German economic growth, in the last year. The German social-democracy, is also, thereby, crumbling, and pushing thousands of voters in the direction of the fascists and ultra nationalists.
That picture was played out in last week's Slovakian elections too, where a reactionary, pro-Russian party was able to win. Despite labelling itself as social-democratic, SMER is a petty-bourgeois, nationalist, and socially conservative outfit, which indicates the way, such nationalism infects politics, as can also be seen with Blue Labour.
In Britain, this collapse of social-democracy is acute, as the Tories, like the Trump Party, in the US, are irredeemably lost to the ideas of reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalism, but Blue Labour has also abandoned the ground of social-democracy, as it chases after them, in a goose chase after the votes of a minority of bigots and racists. The best hope, of the ruling-class, for social-democracy, would be the Liberals, but the behaviour of the Liberals, together with their attendant gaggle of opportunists, in 2019, in opposing Corbyn, destroyed any such possibility.
This is a picture seen on numerous occasions, as I have set out in the series of posts on Lessons of The Chinese Revolution, but is also described by Trotsky in his writings on events in Germany, leading up to the victory of Hitler, and drive to WWII, as well as in his writings on Spain. In the year of the 50th anniversary of Pinochet's coup in Chile, the same lessons could be observed, and, yet, the “Left”, many of whom continue, no matter how ludicrously, to continue to claim lineage from Trotskyism, are again repeating the mistakes of the social-chauvinists in WWI and II, and of the Stalinists and centrists in China, in the 1920's, and Europe in the 1930's.
Having created the conditions in which large sections of society were driven into the hands of fascists and nationalists, the social-patriots, Stalinists and centrists compounded the problem, by seeking to oppose fascism via a subordination of workers interests to those of the liberal bourgeoisie, in the rotten blocs of the Popular Front.
In China, Stalin repeatedly held back the spontaneous actions of the revolutionary workers and poor peasants, in order to retain the “bloc of four classes” with Chiang Kai Shek. Trotsky warned it would lead to disaster, and, when, in April 1927 that disaster came, in the form of a coup by the KMT, and the slaughter of thousands of Chinese workers, the Stalinists, simply brushed it off, claiming they knew it was coming all along, because they knew that the bourgeoisie was only supporting the revolution “for its own interests”. Those same Stalinist arguments are presented, today, by the likes of the AWL's Jim Denham, as they defend their Popular Front with the Ukrainian oligarch's, and NATO, which Denham claims “defends workers interests”.
In Spain, the Stalinists repeated the error forming a Popular Front with liberal politicians who did not even, any longer, have the support of the bourgeoisie, which had itself gone over to Franco, despite the fact that the Stalinists again demanded the Spanish workers subordinate their own interests to it. Having failed to provide adequate leadership for the working-class, therefore, as in China, the revolution was lost, and the counter-revolution triumphed. It was the same errors that led to the overthrow of the Popular Front government of Allende, in Chile, in 1973. And, throughout the 1930's, that Stalinist strategy of the Popular Front, demobilised the working-class, misled it, and subordinated it to the interests of a bourgeoisie that simply utilised it for its own ends, before discarding it.
So, the arguments put by, for example, the pro-imperialist, Paul Mason, that we need such a Popular Front, today, fly against all the lessons of history, a history, which, as a former member of a Trotskyist sect, he should know. He writes,
“The Popular Front is the easy bit: the left and the centre, including truly centrist Republicans, have to construct a political alliance - at the top and the grassroots - to defend democracy.”
He says, this after having set out the extent to which Biden and the Democrats have failed to win support for their own, such wishy-washy liberal politics! He doesn't seem to have understood the lesson repeated countless times through the history of the last century that the reason they failed to mobilise support from workers, was precisely the wishy-washy nature of those politics that gave no solution to the working-class, and, instead, subordinated their interests to those of the bourgeoisie, for the sake of this illusory unity of the Popular Front. Instead, much as with his own trajectory from “Trotskyist”, to left social-democratic cheerleader for Corbyn, to pro-imperialist cheerleader for Starmer, his solution is to liquidate the working-class even further, and subordinate it even further to the immediate interests of the bourgeoisie.
The reason for the rise of Franco, apparently, was not the contradiction of the class interests of Spanish workers and the Spanish bourgeoisie, but that the Popular Front between the workers and bourgeoisie was so successful that it provoked a violent response. The lesson to that is presumably, don't be so successful, don't be so adventurous in the demands you seek to achieve!
“When you do it right - as the French liberal, socialist and communist parties did between 1934 and 1937 - the ethos of the whole of society changes. But sometimes the ethos of the far right is so strong, and so well-rooted, that the success of the Popular Front simply triggers violence. That's what happened in July 1936 in Spain and, in a smaller way, on 6 January outside the Capitol”.
(ibid)
That is nonsense on steroids. The French Popular Front demobilised a rising, revolutionary strike wave, and paved the way for fascism. The Spanish Popular Front openly attacked workers' strikes in Spain, and, yet, despite all of that the Spanish bourgeoisie threw its weight behind Franco, because its class interests were still threatened, much as the German bourgeoisie threw its weight behind Hitler, in 1933, and the Italian ruling class behind Mussolini in 1922. That is quite different to the condition, currently, in the US, or Europe.
The ruling class is not throwing its weight behind fascism. On the contrary, the fascists and nationalists are based upon, and representing the interests of the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, which is, itself, antithetical to the interests of the ruling class, currently. Mason says,
“It will not matter that the majority of American voters and business want and need the rule of law. It will be rapidly eroded. The book burning and abortion bans that characterise Republican governance at state level will move to the next level: the nature of American capitalism itself.”
(ibid)
This is bourgeois liberal cretinism. It accepts without question, the liberal bourgeois idea that the state is synonymous with government, which clearly it isn't, as Allende could attest to were it not for the fact that that delusion resulted in his murder by the forces of the state! Nor, as some of those that have been discussing the 1973 coup, in Chile, recently, seem to think, could that simply have been avoided by having the Popular Front government backed up by extra-parliamentary mobilisation. Firstly, in respect of Chile, that requires understanding the relation between the actions of the government, as a Popular Front, on the consciousness of the workers, themselves, which is fundamental to whether and how they can be mobilised.
Secondly, it depends upon the nature of any such mobilisation. If their role is merely as walk-on, support for the government, that will inevitably act to demobilise them, and would, in any case, be insufficient. The reason that the soviets worked in 1917, is precisely because, they held the real power in society, as against the Provisional Government. Finally, the organised armed power of the soviets still has to contend with the established and significant armed power of the state. Again, the soviets succeeded in 1917, because, for months they had been eroding the armed power of the state itself.
The same is even more true in respect of any such petty-bourgeois rebellion. The petty-bourgeoisie is amorphous and individualistic, making organising it like herding cats. It lacks the economic and social weight of the proletariat, because it does not have the latter's relation to production. Even more, then, does it rely for the success of any rebellion on a network of well established organs of alternative power. A few bands of survivalist militia nuts in the woods, and spontaneously produced "flash mobs", simply don't cut it.
The whole of Mason's analysis is liberal superficiality, devoid of any class analysis. Take, for example, his comment,
“All this after Biden has wowed the business world with an agenda-setting industrial strategy, got inflation down below 4% and has regularly added upwards of 150,000 jobs to the economy per month.”
(ibid)
Its not Biden that has got inflation down below 4%, but the Federal Reserve, though the policies of Biden during lockdowns, of handing out huge sums of helicopter money to households, were responsible for that inflation surging in the first place. Whether that inflation – which is actually likely to be higher than 4%, for workers – stays down, as the Federal Reserve responds to the demands of capital to protect profits from rising wages, is another matter. Nor is it Biden that is responsible for the US economy generating 150,000 jobs per month, which is a function of the long wave cycle.
And, its that same fact, that we are still in an early phase of the long wave uptrend, resulting from the fact that, after 2010, global economic growth has been deliberately slowed, which means that the rate and mass of profit remains high, with no immediate reason that capital needs to resort to fascism, to protect profits against wages. That is what is fundamentally different to the 1930's, or even the 1970's. The biggest threat to the ruling class, comes, not from workers, requiring it to utilise fascism against them, but comes from the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, and the fascists associated with it. That is precisely why, contrary to Mason's argument, the ruling class and its state will crush, by whatever means necessary, those fascist elements, as it did in Germany in the 1920's.
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