The failure of the working-class to sweep away this class of money-lending leaches, whose immediate interests are antagonistic even to that of real capital, and which has led to money being diverted into useless speculation, blowing up asset price bubbles that subsequently burst, with serious effects on the real economy, is the consequence of its political leadership collapsing into the pre-Marxist, moralistic socialism of the likes of Sismondi. But, there is a material basis for that too, resulting in yet another contradiction that has reached the point of crisis.
In the post-war period, Stalinism still exerted a huge dead weight on the global working-class. It reflected the interests of the petty-bourgeois bureaucracy in the USSR, and its satellites. In the developed capitalist economies, the Stalinist parties simply merged into the wider social-democracy, itself reflecting that large professional, middle-class layer that saw society as a mechanism, and its social role being to ensure its smooth operation, mediating between capital and labour. As a new Left emerged critical of the role of Stalinism, it too was a reflection of the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie, this time as reflected in its largely studentist, and academic membership. It carried with it the same petty-bourgeois moralism, and the same views of reliance on the role of the state, and managerialism in effecting change.
For much of the post-war period, as global capital expanded, as part of the process of long wave uptrend, running from 1949 to 1974, these deficiencies could be accommodated, and were disguised as the rising social weight of the working-class imposed itself. But, it was always a dead end. As soon as the period of uptrend ceased, and a new period of crisis began after 1974, all of the limitations of the political leadership of the labour movement, began to become apparent. For a while, the strength of the working-class compensated for it, as seen in the victory of the British miners, in 1972 and 1974, over Ted Heath's Conservative government.
But, the limitations, even then, were apparent, in the demands and slogans put forward, such as “Labour Take the Power”, as though power rested in parliament rather than in the state, and the limited aspiration expressed by “General Strike To Kick Out The Tories”, as though, if workers had reached the level of class consciousness to engage in such an overtly political general strike, they should limit their sights only to a change of bourgeois government, rather than seizing state power themselves!
When the Heath Conservative government was kicked out by the voters, the reality, manifest in Wilson, and then Callaghan's Labour governments was not that different, and not surprisingly, as the underlying ideology of Heath and Wilson, of conservative social-democracy, was, essentially the same, “Buttskellism” as it was termed in the post-war period. Wilson, followed by Callaghan, simply continued the struggle against the working-class, intensified as the decade progressed, and the crisis phase of the long wave cycle became more acute. And, when Thatcher took over that task, in 1979, the conditions were already set for the working-class to be defeated, as the political leadership of the class was totally inadequate, armed not with the arsenal of Marxism, but that of petty-bourgeois socialism, reformism, statism and syndicalism.
The Left, today, continues to be useless, operating on the basis of mantras and formulations based on misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. It proceeds as though capitalist property, today, is, essentially, the same as that of the early 19th century, and that its ownership is basically the same, of the “monopoly of private capital”, only, now, in the form of capitalist monopolies, and share ownership. It misses, almost entirely, the significance of the fundamental change in the nature of capitalist property, into socialised capital, and the social revolution it signifies. Consequently, it can make no distinction between the objective interests of the ruling class as owners of fictitious-capital, as against the interests of the dominant form of property, i.e. large-scale socialised capital.
When it examines, therefore, the actions of states, it cannot understand the contradictions inherent within them, leading to all sorts of contortions to explain its actions. That is even more the case when it, also, has to explain the actions of governments. We are repeatedly told, for example, that, in Britain, the Tory Party (and, today, it is best described as a Protectionist Tory Party, in its early 19th century connotation, rather than a Peelite Conservative Party, as it emerged from the Repeal of the Corn Laws) is the bourgeoisie's “first team”, as against Labour being its second team. Yet, from the mid 90's, at least, the Tory Party's agenda was clearly that of the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, not that of the ruling class, and its pushing through of Brexit is totemic of that.
No comments:
Post a Comment