The rising social weight of the petty-bourgeoisie, as a class, from the 1980's onwards, and corresponding decline in the social weight of the working-class, during that period, combined, now, with the collapse of the model of conservative social-democracy that had predominated during that period, made the petty-bourgeois coup in the Conservative Party inevitable, just as the same processes made a similar coup inside the US Republican Party inevitable. In Britain, it took the form of, first, a growth of an overtly petty-bourgeois nationalist party – UKIP, itself supplemented to its Right by, for a time, the BNP. Yet, the forces of the petty-bourgeoisie were divided, the majority of them remaining inside the Conservative Party, but dragging it ever closer to the agenda of UKIP. The parallel with The Repeal of The Corn Laws is notable.
The managerialists of conservative social-democracy always believe they can use bureaucratic and parliamentary manoeuvres to tack and trim to defeat such parties, electorally. Often they can, but as Germany, in the 1930's, showed, when the Socialists and Communists, attempted to steal the ground upon which the Nazis had gained support, of nationalism, the result was only to legitimise that reactionary nationalist ideology. Cameron, when he became Prime Minister, in 2010, but finding himself facing this growing reactionary petty-bourgeois movement inside his party, rather than mobilising against it, tacked towards it. He adopted the nationalistic criticisms of the EU, took the Conservatives out of the EPP, and joined the cranks and petty-bourgeois, nationalist fanatics in the European Parliament. Having done so, and continued in similar vein for six years, it was no surprise that he could not fatten his pig on market day, and lost the referendum.
Now, we see that following a progression over the last 20 years that ran through the nod towards such nationalism, by Bair's New Labour, in the anti-immigrant policies of its Home Secretaries such as Reid, Straw and Clarke, culminating in the, now, jingoistic petty-bourgeois nationalism of Blue Labour, the result is to have legitimised such ideas as more adequately represented by Fartage and Reform that have now overtaken the Tories, as the chosen vehicle for the petty-bourgeoisie, and its utopian reactionary agenda.
Concerned only to build a rotten, opportunistic, electoral bloc to win the election, Starmer and Blue Labour have followed this same disastrous course. No doubt, for them, it is of little concern. They will get their cushy parliamentary and ministerial jobs for, at least, the next five years, with the prospect of that leading to some similarly cushy job in some large corporation, international agency, or simply the usual progression to a cushy life sitting in the unelected House of Lords. For the rest of us, the effects are more serious.
At the end of the 19th century, The Liberal Party represented conservative social-democracy, and the interests of large-scale industrial capital. The Conservative Party had split, the Conservative Peelites joining the Liberals, as the rest returned to being a Tory Party, representing the old landed aristocracy, concentrated in the shires, as well as their equivalents, the financial aristocracy. The landed aristocracy obtained its revenues from its form of wealth – landed property – as rent, whilst the financial aristocracy had its wealth in the form of fictitious-capital, and loanable money-capital, and obtained its revenues in the form of interest/dividends. The Tory Party, as before the Repeal of the Corn Laws, defended the ideas of monopoly and protectionism, most clearly expressed in its support for the British Colonial Empire, and its protected markets. As with rent and interest, it depends upon the appropriation of surplus value on the basis of unequal exchange. They represented the era and ideas of Mercantilism. Mercantilism, and colonialism, itself, was limited to the era of the rise of the nation state.
The Liberals as the champions of large-scale industrial capital, were opponents of protectionism and those old types of monopoly and protected markets. Industrial capital is based upon the production and appropriation of surplus value, by labour in the productive process, resting upon free and equal exchange of values. In so far as they championed free trade, however, it was a free trade that inevitably benefited the large-scale industrial capital whose interests they represented, as its large-scale production inevitably undercut and outproduced the smaller scale capitals, that, ultimately, were swallowed up by it, or subordinated to it. It represents the transition to the imperialist stage of capital, the need, for this industrial capital to expand beyond the fetter represented by the nation state. The Liberal Party, however, depended on the votes of the working-class, which also made up a large part of its membership through the Liberal Clubs, and support given to it from the trades unions, who, in return, obtained a number of Lib-Lab
MP's. The relation was similar to that of the workers and trades unions to the Democrats in the US.
However, this arrangement was clearly untenable for long. The Liberal Party was a bourgeois-workers party, whose constitution and aims was most clearly designed to further the interests of capital, rather than labour. Only to the extent that social-democracy, as it emerged in the writings of John Stuart Mill, for example, claims that the interests of labour and capital are the same, could that continue. It was inevitable, therefore, that, as the workers formed the majority of this party, and, as the idea that the interests of labour and capital were the same had been disproved by Marx, and, consequently, overtly socialist workers parties/communist parties were arising, the workers, and, more importantly, the trades union leaders, needed to free themselves from the Liberals, and create their own Labour Party. But, as Lenin described, it was a change of name rather than of substance.
The Labour Party, from the start, specifically omitted any reference to Socialism in its aims, remaining firmly on that old bourgeois, social-democratic ground of bargaining within the system, merely for a “Fair day's wage”, rather than “abolition of the wages system”, and so on. The Liberal Party, virtually disappeared, in the same proportion that the Labour Party, took its place. But, in its entire history, the Labour Party, as with the social-democratic parties elsewhere, has acted, not, directly, in the interests of the working-class, but in the interests of large-scale industrial capital. Blue Labour is a qualitative break from that history, a change not in a progressive direction, but in a thoroughly reactionary direction, and one that will inevitably come to grief.
Brexit represented the triumph of the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie inside the Conservative Party. But, the contradiction unleashed was manifest in the fact that, even inside the Conservative Parliamentary Party, only a minority supported it. The reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, could not even get a majority in what was, overtly, their party, or get one of their own, as its Leader. Instead, May was elected, and a long period followed in which, she attempted to tack and manoeuvre, as the capitalist state also tried to limit and frustrate Brexit, so as to neuter it. For years, despite the fact that the petty-bourgeoisie had moaned about the EU, and immigration, and the BBC had feted clowns like Fartage that were their public face, the petty-bourgeois, nationalist parties, be it the BNP or UKIP, had failed to mobilise any substantial electoral coalition, let alone win any parliamentary seats. Fartage, himself, has stood seven times, and lost badly on each occasion. It was never a decisive issue for voters, until the referendum.
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