Cameron's Conservative Counter-Coup - Part 1 of 3

History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. Twelve years ago, I predicted, and explained, the coming petty-bourgeois coup, against Cameron, inside the Conservative Party, and its figurehead, Boris Johnson. The coup was achieved by Johnson becoming the head of the Brexit faction inside the party, even though he didn't believe all of the Brexit nonsense, himself. The conservative, social-democratic majority, inside the parliamentary party, still held him at bay for a while, as they installed May, but the contradictions were such that she could only be an interlude. But, at the D-Day celebrations over the weekend, everyone asked how could Sunak have got it so wrong? The question they should ask is who advised him, and look who was standing, in his place, alongside the world leaders – Foreign Secretary David Cameron.

As I have set out before, we have seen this before, in similar conditions, in the 19th Century, in what happened in relation to The Repeal of The Corn Laws, itself, a manifestation of a class struggle. At that time, it destroyed the Tory Party, and led to the creation of The Conservative Party, as well as a more general realignment that created the Liberal Party as a social-democratic party, representing the interests of large-scale industrial capital. The same thing, taking the form of Brexit, has again destroyed the Tories, on the rocks of reality, and created the conditions, for a conservative counter-coup, and another realignment. As Blue Labour has adopted those same petty-bourgeois, nationalist ideas of the Tories, becoming a Brexitory party (a petty-bourgeois, nationalist workers party rather than a social-democratic, bourgeois workers party), as it chases the tail of the most backward section of the electorate, and looks set to form a clear majority government, those same realities, and that same process, looks set to destroy it, in the same way, but in shorter order.

Britain has been a frontrunner for the same political processes now seen in the EU, in which the collapse of the conservative, social-democratic model, based on asset price inflation, has collapsed, but, with progressive social-democracy, let alone the forces of international socialism, unable to offer an effective leadership and alternative, has opened the door to the forces of an ever more radical petty-bourgeois nationalism, and authoritarianism. Last weekend's EU elections were the latest manifestation of it.

Why was the Tory, petty-bourgeois coup inevitable inside the Conservative Party, leading to Brexit? For the simple reason that, as a result of the policies of Thatcher in the 1980's, itself a response to a crisis of capital, of deindustrialisation, and the new international division of labour, the petty-bourgeoisie grew immensely. The number of small businesses grew by 50%, and that reversed a process going back 200 years, identified by Marx, whereby, the concentration and centralisation of capital meant that small capitals get swallowed up by big capitals, and as he, and later Lenin, identified, a good thing that is too, as it is the basis of the transition to Socialism. Alongside it, the continual growth in the number of workers, that had been going on over that 200 years, also came to a halt. It only resumed as the new long wave upswing began in 1999. 

The petty-bourgeoisie (small businesses, the self-employed), are a reactionary class. They look backwards to an age of free competition, when the large monopolies and the state did not dominate everything; they are individualistic, rather than collectivist, in their outlook; they are similarly, parochial, and focused on their immediate environment, on the local market, or at best national market, in which they operate, and look to the state only to protect them from foreign competition, or from monopolies, including monopolies of labour, represented by the trades unions. For one thing, their lack of competitiveness, resulting from their small scale, means they cannot pay the level of wages, or provide the kinds of conditions to workers that large-scale capital can provide. These petty-bourgeois interests form the basis of classical Liberalism of the 18th and early 19th century, of Bentham, taken over, today, by the Libertarians, such as Mises and Hayek, and their disciples such as Rees-Mogg et al. They are the purveyors of the small business myth.

Its no surprise that Blue Labour, scrambling after these petty-bourgeois votes, has not only adopted its jingoism, and reactionary nationalism, but also, now, its economic programme, and commitment to its interests, as against those of the progressive elements of capital, and of the working-class. Starmer has said that he will “Pull up the shutters for small business”. It is reminiscent of the reactionary and utopian schemas put forward, at the end of the 19th century, by the Narodniks, and criticised by Lenin. As with the Narodniks proposals, it will simply fall flat. But, the simultaneous proposals to tax big capital more, and so on, will not only be reactionary and utopian, to the extent they had any effect, it would simply be to reduce UK economic growth and capital accumulation, and to drive capital away to the EU and elsewhere, where it is already moving as a result of Brexit. Its also no surprise that, in the various vox pops undertaken, these various petty-bourgeois, such as cafe owners, self-employed taxi drivers and so on, are described as “workers”, or “working-class”, confusing their low incomes with their class as defined by their relation to the means of production, their ownership of dwarfish capital, and their ideology determined by it.

The power of the petty-bourgeoisie, as Lenin and Trotsky describe, arises from its numbers, as with the peasantry. In Britain, those numbers amount to around 15 million people, and formed the electoral basis of Brexit. The Conservative Party has, also, relied upon these elements for its foot soldiers, and for its electoral support, just as the Labour Party has relied on the working-class. However, just as the fact that the Labour Party's reliance on workers does not mean that Labour governments act in workers interests, so too with the Conservative Party and the petty-bourgeoisie. The state is the state of the ruling class, a global ruing class of speculators and coupon-clippers that, ultimately, is dependent upon large-scale industrial capital. Both Conservative and Labour governments are constrained by the nature of that state, and the reality of needing to defend the interests of that ruling class, and of large-scale industrial capital. In that context, the agenda of the petty-bourgeoisie, epitomised by Brexit, was always not only reactionary, but impossible to achieve, utopian.

The petty-bourgeois footsoldiers of the Conservatives, always formed a majority, but Conservative governments always ignored them, and pursued the interests of the ruling class, which also constituted its higher echelons, just as it constitutes and controls the higher echelons of the arms of the state. But, the model of conservative social-democracy, pursued by both Labour and Conservative governments, began to come to grief as the new long wave upswing began in the late 1990's. It meant that the number of workers grew, capital began to accumulate more rapidly, and interest rates rose, causing asset prices to crash, and so making a model based on debt fuelled by borrowing against ever inflating asset prices unsustainable.

That centre-ground of conservative social-democracy that we continue to be told is the only ground upon which elections can be won, could no longer be sustained, so that even when parties won elections on the basis of an appeal to that centre-ground, once in government, the reality manifest itself, most notably with the global financial crisis of 2008, followed quickly by the introduction of widespread austerity measures, combined with the most surreal measures of liquidity injections so as to inflate asset prices once more.

In the US, Hillary Clinton lost to Trump, who although, so he claims, is a billionaire, is the epitome of that ideology of the reactionary petty-bourgeois nationalist - individualistic, moronic, bigoted and idiosyncratic. Trump, of course, as with Brexit, and Truss, could provide no solution either, the basis of Macron's election gamble, now, in France. Now, that is set to be repeated as Biden loses to Trump. In Britain, Brown lost to Cameron, as the gloss came off the Blair-Brown governments, particularly after 2008, but Cameron was modelled, until 2010, in that same conservative, social-democratic mould (just as Bush followed on from Clinton), which inevitably failed, dragging the overtly conservative social-democratic Liberals down with him, as the coalition government paid for the bail-out of the gambling losses of the ruling class with austerity, designed, also, to slow the economy (to restrain wages and interest rates), combined with yet more liquidity injections to inflate asset prices, putting, for example, houses out of the reach of millions of workers, whose real wages fell year after year.

In France, the Socialist Party, as so often in the past, talked Left and acted Right, under Hollande, and collapsed, with similar things happening in Greece, Italy and Spain. Reminiscent of the 1930's French Popular Front, to prevent the election of fascists, the collapse of the Socialists led to a rotten, opportunist bloc under Macron, which, as with Starmer, today, never had any positive support, and was itself, largely hated, but based itself on an even greater fear and hatred of the alternative, Le Pen in France, a rapidly Right moving, and disgraced Tory Party in Britain. Macron, immediately set about demonstrating that the model of conservative social-democracy has collapsed, by attacking French workers from Day One. The same can be expected from Starmer and Blue Labour, just as similar things have been seen with Biden in the US, Scholz in Germany and so on. The argument that elections can only be won from the centre, a bit of wishful thinking by those politicians, rather than anything based on fact or logic, was not only disproved by Hitler in 1933, Attlee in 1945, Allende in 1970, Thatcher in the 1980's, and Trump in 2016, Johnson in 2019, but has also been seen in the trouncing of Macron by the NR in France, in these EU elections. He looks set to also lose in the proposed parliamentary elections on the back of it.

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