In Britain's two-party system, this was not just played out in the Labour Party, which represents the most rational expression of the interests of the bourgeoisie. It has played out, also, in the Tory Party. Labour represents the rational expression of the interests of large-scale, socialised capital, and, thereby, of the bourgeoisie, because it is based on the working-class, whose interests reside in a rational development and accumulation of large-scale capital, i.e. social democracy. It can appeal for the votes of workers on that basis, which is what makes Starmer's current reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalism, itself, irrational.
But, the Tory Party is based upon the petty-bourgeoisie, the 15 million or so people that own the 5 million small businesses, the self-employed and so on. Their interests are not at all represented by social-democracy, and its rational development of capital. They abhor it, as it sounds their death-knell, or at least is the basis of their own subordination to it. In government, however, Tory governments, like all Bonapartist regimes based on the petty-bourgeoisie, have always had to face the reality that the economy is based upon that large-scale, industrial capital, whatever they might proclaim with the invocation of the small business myth.
So, particularly under pressure from the permanent state apparatus, which always represents the interests of the ruling class, they have had to abandon their petty-bourgeois base, and pursue the interests of big capital. The experience of Truss, in the Autumn of 2022, was just the latest example of what happens when they try to diverge from that reality.
But that experience was, also, just a clear manifestation of how those underlying movements in class forces have played out in the Tory Party. In the last forty years, the petty-bourgeoisie grew prodigiously, on the back of deindustrialisation, casualisation and so on, and that necessarily was also reflected in the Tory Party. Brexit was its emblem.
“The Opposition is an expression of the class struggle. The organizational weakness of the Opposition by no means corresponds to its specific weight in the Party and the working class. The strength of the present Party régime lies, among other things, in the fact that it changes the relation of forces in the Party by artificial means. The present heavy bureaucratic régime in the Party reflects the pressure of other classes upon the proletariat.” (p 102)
That was true, but, in 1927, the long wave was also moving in a direction away from strengthening the position of workers. Today, the long wave has been moving in a direction towards the strengthening of workers, since 1999. It began to manifest, even in the mid 2000's, prior to the 2008 global financial crash, and even though, since 2010, states have deliberately slowed economies via austerity, lockdowns and policies of QE etc., to divert money away from the real economy and into the purchase of speculative assets, the underlying economic laws of capital, have continued to grind on.
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