As noted in an earlier link to a previous post, every moment of time contains a past, present and future. The process of deindustrialisation, in the 1980's/90's, in developed economies, increased the social weight of the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, as its already sizeable numbers increased by another 50%. It was this that enabled, in the late 1980's, that reactionary petty-bourgeoisie to exert its influence inside the Conservative Party, in Britain. Thatcher went from being a representative of conservative social-democracy (neo-liberalism), and prominent advocate of a European Single Market, to being a reactionary, petty-bourgeois, nationalist, increasingly the figurehead for a growing Euroscepticism inside the party.
The US already existed as a large, single market. Its Civil War, just as with the European Wars, most notably that of 1914-18, and its continuation in 1939-45, was fought precisely for this purpose of establishing such a single state and single market. But, neither was fully completed. As Engels noted, the federal nature of the US already acted as an impediment on the further development of capital, and the reality of that has been seen, as the forces of petty-bourgeois reaction, based around Trump, continue to utilise the division between the states and states' rights, as against the federal state. In the EU, the continued role of the separate interests of nation states, has held back its process of political union, and the strengthened position of the petty-bourgeoisie, has been significant in that, whether in the form of UKIP in Britain, Le Pen in France, or other similar forces.
It is precisely, in this realm of bourgeois-democracy, of parliamentary elections, that the strength of the petty-bourgeoisie resides, just as, in the past, as Lenin and Trotsky described, it was where the strength of the peasantry resided. It is in this realm that the numbers of the petty-bourgeoisie count, especially when supplemented by its attendant social layers from amongst the lumpen proletariat, the backward sections of the working-class, and so on.
With the working-class severely weakened, from the 1980's onwards, the main class battles have taken place between this reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, and its parties, against the ruling-class and professional middle-class, and its parties and its state. The bourgeoisie has been consistently losing those battles, because the one thing that enabled it to win them, since the 19th century, as described by Engels, in his later prefaces to The Condition of the Working Class, social-democracy, which enabled it to mobilise the votes of millions of workers, has itself been compromised by the failure of conservative social-democracy, and its hostility towards progressive social democracy, which it conflates with socialism. In fact, what would, at least temporarily, save that bourgeoisie, is progressive social-democracy, just as it did after WWII.
Progressive social-democracy, represents the objective interests of large-scale socialised capital, and, thereby, of its collective owners, the working-class. Those interests not only involve a continuation of the process of creating larger single markets, and globalisation, but of all the measures of increased planning, regulation and standardisation that goes with it, as described by Trotsky in the quote above. That is most certainly in the interests of the workers, and of the global ruling class, and hostile to the interests of the reactionary nationalist petty-bourgeoisie, as represented by the likes of the Tories, and now Blue Labour in Britain, as well as by both Trump and Biden in the US and so on.
So, why do these mainstream politicians pursue these positions, hostile to the workers and the ruling class? Precisely, because the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie has grown since the 1980's, to form such a sizeable electoral bloc, which, with the attendant layers of lumpen elements, and backward sections of workers, cannot be ignored by those parties, if they want to get elected, and careerist politicians do want to get elected, no matter what they have to say to achieve it. In Britain, the petty-bourgeoisie, alone, accounts for around 15 million votes, and made up the votes for Brexit, and for Boris Johnson.
But, as the experience of Brexit in general, and of the Truss fiasco, in particular, showed, this reactionary petty-bourgeois nationalism can offer no way forward. Those that actually believe in it, inevitably fail, whilst those that don't, but who feel compelled to clothe themselves in it, not only also fail, but, in office, must betray those they tried to mislead, and must resort to bureaucratic and authoritarian means to implement the policies that reality, and the needs of that large-scale capital, imposes on them. It requires those authoritarian, Bonapartist methods, not only to sustain itself against that reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, but also against a rising working-class, for which it has no solutions, and upon which it has imposed the costs of its own failures, and requirement to bail out the ruling class's gambling losses.
Progressive social-democracy, going back to the latter part of the 19th century, as described by Engels, brought a significant increase in the concentration and centralisation of capital, but also a significant increase in the accumulation of capital, in a period of extensive accumulation. The same thing was seen after WWII. But, the 1920's and 30's highlighted the problem for the ruling class. This process of extensive accumulation, strengthens the social weight of the working-class, and all of the attendant measures of state intervention, of greater standardisation, regulation and planning, required by the large-scale capital, represent, as Marx and Engels describe, the encroachment of the coming socialist society on the existing bourgeois society.
The fact that the capitalists exist only as a bunch of money-lending parasites, whilst the day to day management of businesses has passed to an expanding, middle-class of professional managers and administrators, themselves largely drawn from the ranks of the working-class, shows to workers, in practice, that they do not need the ruling-class, and that rationally, they should simply exercise their own democratic control over their collective capital, as, indeed, they do in the worker cooperatives. The logic of that was set out in Anti-Duhring, that the ruling class, should simply wither away, having become just a class of “coupon-clippers”, living off the interest/dividends on their bonds and shares, an amount that should decline over time, as the workers simply allocate the additional money-capital required for investment out of their retained profits, rather than any need to borrow from the ruling-class.
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