What Just Happened?

What actually just happened in the UK General Election, as against the headlines and sensationalism of the media story, and the narrative presented by the Starmer-Rights and Starmtroopers, as well as by the Tories?

Well, its true that Blue Labour has won an historic victory in terms of the number of seats won, and size of its majority, just as its true that the Tories suffered an historic defeat in terms of seats lost. However, as I set out before the election, in terms of votes and vote share, that is certainly not the case, and the basis of the result has little to do with a surge of support for Blue Labour, and everything to do with the corrupt nature of bourgeois-democracy, and the particularly corrupt nature of the British voting system that amounts to systematic and legalised ballot-rigging.

Before the election, I set out that Starmer's Blue Labour was set to underperform that of Corbyn's Labour. At that time, the latest poll data was from an MRP that gave Blue Labour 39% of the vote, as against the 40%, obtained by Corbyn in 2019. As I pointed out, only the actual vote would show what votes Blue Labour obtained, and now we have that data, it is even worse. Labour has won less than 10 million votes (9.7 million), compared to 10.3 million votes for Corbyn's Labour in 2019. Remember that 2019 was supposed to be the worst ever result for Labour in an election, a point that the Starmer-Rights, and the media have repeated ad nauseam, in presenting the narrative that elections can only be won from the centre, and that Corbyn's Labour was unelectable.

Compared to Corbyn's Labour in 2017, the contrast is even greater. Then, Corbyn's Labour won 12.9 million votes, a full 3 million votes more than Starmer's Blue Labour has won in this election (that is 33.3 more votes!). In that election, not only did Corbyn's Labour win a third more votes than Starmer's Blue Labour has won in this election, but that also, can't be explained by simply a much larger turnout of voters, because in 2017, Corbyn's labour secured 40% of the vote, whereas Starmer's Blue Labour has secured only 33.8% of the vote in this election! So Starmer and Blue Labour have not only performed worse than Corbyn's Labour in 2017, but markedly worse than in 2019, too, in terms of votes, and almost the same in terms of vote share (in 2019 Corbyn's Labour got 32% of the vote share). Yet, as the Starmtroopers, and their supporters in the Tory media have kept telling us, 2019 was supposed to be the worst ever result for Labour going all the way back to 1935!

In the election analysis, during the night, Starmer-Right MP's, and spokespeople, such as Harriet Harman could only respond to this, by saying that this was justified, because Blue Labour had not stacked up votes in seats where they already had a majority, but had targeted seats they needed to win, given the nature of the electoral system. In effect, that is the same argument used by Donald Trump, in the US. It validates a corrupt electoral system. More importantly, the argument presented is in any case wrong. The facts of the election show that Blue Labour have not won seats, because they have cleverly targeted seats, and increased their votes, and vote share in them. If anything, their votes and vote share, in each constituency, on average, has declined, not increased.

Blue Labour has won a large number of seats, despite getting a significantly smaller number of votes than it did, even in 2019, simply because the Tory vote was split, with a large amount of it going to Reform. In other words, no love, or even liking of Blue Labour, whose number of votes in each seat failed to increase, and in some case, fell, but an even greater hatred of the Tories. In Leave voting areas, that hatred of the Tories, manifested in increased support for Reform, and in Remain supporting areas, it manifested in increased support for Liberals and Greens, hence the Liberal surge in the Blue Wall, and Greens winning seats from Tories in rural areas, as well as from Labour in Bristol.

Where Blue Labour's vote fell compared to 2019, the Liberal vote remained more or less the same, whilst its vote share rose from 11.6% to 12.2%. The Greens more than doubled their vote from 800,000 to 1.9 million, and their vote share rose from 2.6% to 6.8%. It is worth noting that, although the Greens obtained as many seats as Reform (though Reform won twice as many votes), the practice of the media, which has gone on since long before the Brexit vote, of giving outsized publicity to Fartage and Reform, whilst giving little air time to the Greens, has continued.

In summary, although Blue Labour has won an historic parliamentary victory and majority, in terms of seats, it is entirely due to the corrupt and undemocratic nature of British bourgeois-democracy, and electoral system. Despite the fact that, in 2019, the entire media conducted a vicious campaign against Corbyn, and Labour, assisted by the Right and Centre within Labour, Corbyn's Labour, in 2019, won more votes, and almost the same share of the vote, as Starmer's Blue Labour in 2024! Far from Starmer's Blue Labour having masterfully focused its attention on target seats, to increase its votes its vote and vote share in all constituencies has either been unchanged, or else has even fallen! It has won in those seats, only because the Tory vote was split, with Reform taking a large chunk of it.

If there is any evidence of voters having any enthusiasm for parties other than the Tories, it is not in favour of Labour, but of Reform, Liberals and Greens, as well as for individuals, such as Jeremy Corbyn, in Islington, and Faisa Shaheen, standing as Independents, largely on the basis of opposition to the reactionary politics of Blue Labour, for example, in its support for genocide in Gaza. Corbyn retained his seat securing nearly 50% of the vote, whilst Faisa Shaheen, who had been similarly blocked by the Starmtroopers, having almost beaten Iain Duncan-Smith in 2019, came within a couple of dozen votes of the Blue Labour candidate, parachuted in by Starmer. The result of this action by Blue Labour, was to split the vote, and let Duncan-Smith retain the seat, which Shaheen was set to have won with a clear majority.

The lack of enthusiasm for Blue Labour is seen in the turnout, as well as in the decline in its total vote. Some Tories, like Nadine Dorries, have tried to claim that the same was true of Tory voters. That is clearly not true. In Leave voting areas, its not that Tory voters sat on their hands. They went out and voted for Reform. Similarly, in Remain supporting areas, Tory voters went out and supported the Liberals and Greens. In, 2019, turnout was 67%, in this election, it is only 60%, reflecting the meagre offering, in fact, of all parties. In Corbyn's seat of Islington North, by comparison, turnout was 68%. Similarly, in Starmer's seat, turnout was only 54%, and Starmer himself saw his share of the vote fall by 17.4%, nearly all of which went to Andrew Feinstein.

The media have spoken about this win by Blue Labour as bucking the trend seen in France, in its Assembly elections, and across the EU, in the recent European parliament elections, of a move to the Right. They have described Blue Labour as “centre-Left”. But, that is completely false. The Labour Party from its inception has always been a bourgeois party, not a socialist party, but, at least it was a social-democratic party. That fact, usually meant that it could be described as centre-Left, although, under Blair and Brown, it was more accurately described as centre-Right, certainly compared to the governments of Attlee and Wilson, let alone the Labour Party of George Lansbury, all of which were more akin to the position of Corbyn.

But, Starmer's Blue Labour is qualitatively different to the centre-Right Labour Party of Blair and Brown. It is clearly a right-wing nationalist and populist party that has gone in search of that vote amongst the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie and lumpen proletariat that backed Brexit, and mourns the loss of the days of the British Empire. In order to hold itself together, given all of the contradictions that entails, it has had to become increasingly authoritarian, with Starmer serving the role as Bonaparte, and is supported with all of the attendant machinery of the party, now backed by former members of the Secret Service. This has all the hallmarks of the kind of transition seen in the past of former socialists such as Pilsudski, Mussolini, and Oswald Mosley, or indeed of national socialist parties such as Paole Zion.

Starmer's Blue Labour is not centre-left, but a reactionary, nationalist and populist party whose trajectory is set further in that direction, as the contradictions within it explode, as the lies it has told for the last four years are exposed, it quickly fails to live up even to the timid and vague promises it has made, and is led into confrontation with the working-class. That starting position, and direction of travel is manifest in Starmer's forthright commitment never to rejoin the EU in his lifetime, or even the single market (though in reality the latter is no longer possible without the former).

A look across the aisles shows that the Conservative ranks are going to be made up of a larger proportion of actual Conservatives, rather than Tories, as the Leave supporting Tories have lost votes to Reform, that has replaced them, or else took enough votes from them to let Labour in, even on a reduced vote share. In those areas, as I have described before, Tory members are likely to merge with Reform. In the middle-class, Remain supporting Conservative seats, they lost votes to the Liberals, but, it was the Remain supporting Conservative MP's that were able to do best in those conditions. As I wrote a while ago, the global ruling class is currently denied a party in Britain that can properly represent its interests, and have the potential of becoming the government. That's why it has had to utilise its permanent state machinery instead.

The Liberals most adequately represent the interests of that global ruling class, now. With 71 seats, as against the 120 odd seats of the Conservatives (some of whom will defect to Reform, as the party splits) the obvious response is for the ruling class to engineer a merger between the Conservatives and Liberals, much as happened in the 19th century, after the Repeal of The Corn Laws, in relation to the Peelites, or as happened, in the 1980's, when Labour was split by the SDP, which, then subsequently merged with the Liberals to form, today's Liberal Democrats. However, that would still only give them around 200 seats, way short of a majority, but providing a more solid base for challenging the reactionary, nationalist and populist trajectory of Starmer's Blue Labour. Moreover, the manoeuvres that occurred under Corbyn's Labour, with Change UK, indicate the likely line of travel, too.

Fartage is right, when he declares that he is coming for Blue Labour. As the nationalist Right splits from the Tories to merge with Reform, his competition for that ground will no longer be the Conservatives, but Starmer and Blue Labour. A merger between the Conservatives and Liberals (presaged in 2010 by the coalition of Cameron and Clegg), as Blue Labour comes increasingly under pressure, as its lies and contradictions explode, in contact with reality, will drive a significant number of Blair-Right MP's into a realignment with the Conservative-Liberals, to form a new, centre-Right party of capital that will be able to form a majority. As they lunacy of Brexit manifests itself even more obviously at that point, the central pillar around which that new party will be formed will be a progressive Europeanism.

Value, Price and Profit, II – Production, Wages, Profits - Part 1 of 5

II – Production, Wages, Profits

On the basis of his assumption of a fixed quantity of national output, Weston argued a variation of the demand-pull theory of inflation.

“All his reasoning amounted to this: If the working class forces the capitalist class to pay five shillings instead of four shillings in the shape of money wages, the capitalist will return in the shape of commodities four shillings' worth instead of five shillings' worth. The working class would have to pay five shillings for what, before the rise of wages, they bought with four shillings.” (p 13-14)

That's basically what the demand-pull theory of inflation says, i.e. if workers have more wages to spend, this increased monetary demand for wage goods will cause the market price of those wage goods to rise, and, by extension, the market price of the inputs for the production of those wage goods will, also, rise. But, that assumes, as with Weston, that the producers of these wage goods will not expand their supply – which the higher resulting profits would suggest they would. At best, it would require that, in raising supply, they faced diminishing returns/rising marginal costs, but all evidence is that higher levels of output bring economies of scale, and falling marginal costs.

For Weston, wages represent a fixed amount of national output, which he also assumes is fixed.

“But why is it fixed at four shillings' worth of commodities? Why not at three, or two, or any other sum? If the limit of the amount of wages is settled by an economical law, independent alike of the will of the capitalist and the will of the working man, the first thing Citizen Weston had to do was to state that law and prove it. He ought then, moreover, to have proved that the amount of wages actually paid at every given moment always corresponds exactly to the necessary amount of wages, and never deviates from it. If, on the other hand, the given limit of the amount of wages is founded on the mere will of the capitalist, or the limits of his avarice, it is an arbitrary limit. There is nothing necessary in it. It may be changed by the will of the capitalist, and may, therefore, be changed against his will.” (p 14)

There is, indeed, an objective basis for the determination of wages. It is the value of labour-power, as a commodity. In other words, to reproduce labour-power, a determinate quantity of wage goods and services are required, and the labour-time required for the production of those commodities is the labour-time required to reproduce labour-power. But, wages are the market price of labour-power, and like every other market price, vary from this determining value, as a consequence of imbalances in demand and supply. Such variations might persist for days, as with variations in ice cream prices on hot and cold days, or for years.

If we take something lie copper, once firms have invested huge sums in exploration, expensive fixed capital, for mines, they must optimise the usage of that fixed capital, and attempt to recover their sunk costs. Even if demand for copper falls, they must continue to produce it, because, otherwise, they have expensive machinery losing value in depreciation. So, excess supply may persist for years, pushing down market prices. But, equally, when the demand for copper rise, firms must first explore for new mines, and then begin the process of developing the mine, which takes around seven years, and more than ten years to reach optimum production. So, for all that time, excess demand pushes up market price. 

“As a result of booming demand, operating profits in the copper industry have grown dramatically – operating margins up from 8% in 2001 to 38% in 2005. So why does copper supply not increase faster, as the industry clearly has plenty of cash to invest? To answer this question, we need to look at the basic economics behind investment decisions in the copper industry. Much of the added value in production of copper arises in the mining stage: only 25% of added value is in smelting / refining but the rest is in extraction and processing of copper ore. Thus the key supply constraint is the limited number of mines. When copper demand was lower, there was a surplus of production capacity and additional supply could be added simply by increasing throughput from existing mines. But supply cannot be increased indefinitely without additional copper production capacity, i.e. new mines. Despite the prevailing very high level of copper prices, copper supply from mines has not risen as fast as might be expected. Copper Industry Investors Look at Long Term Prices The economic theory is that when prices rise due to higher demand, supply will increase as it becomes possible to operate marginally economic mines at a profit due to the higher prices. The problem in practice is that copper is supplied from facilities that require huge investment in the mine and supporting infrastructure, and a major investment decision is required. A short-term rise in copper prices – even when sustained over several months – does not necessarily change industry investors’ perceptions of the long-term copper price. Mining companies will not invest in a project unless their expectations of long-term prices are at a level where the project becomes attractive.”

(Trends In Copper)

Similarly, with labour-power. If capital creates a relative surplus population, by introducing labour-saving technologies, workers cannot reduce their numbers, so as to remove excess supply, and so wages fall. Indeed, as Engels pointed out, in such conditions, workers cannot effectively reduce their supply by engaging in strike action, because competition between them, for jobs, mitigates against it. It is only as capital accumulates, on an extensive basis, that this excess supply is slowly used up, and so wages rise, but this also takes many years. On average it takes around 12-13 years. For example, the period between 1949-62. Then, in the following period of 12-13 years, wages continue to rise, but still consistent with a rising mass of profit, and so without causing a crisis of overproduction of capital. During such periods, apart from the general, gradual improvements in productivity, its only in those spheres where specific labour shortages arise that capital undertakes the cost of new technological innovation, and retooling.

Back To I, Production and Wages

Starmer Set To Underperform Corbyn

Keir Starmer's Blue Labour is set, according to the latest MRP done by Yougov and Sky News, to underperform Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party in 2017.  In 2017, Corbyn's Labour, despite all the internal sniping by the Right, and attempts to unseat him, not only secured the biggest increase in Labour's vote and vote share since 1945, but also deprived Theresa May of her parliamentary majority, as well as turning the Labour Party into the largest party in Europe, with over 600,000 members.  Corbyn's Labour secured nearly 13 million votes, representing 40% of the votes cast.

By contrast, Starmer's Blue Labour has seen its membership collapse, as it has also prevented any internal dissent, by an authoritarian regime that has systematically expelled opponents.  Faced with a Tory government that has almost universal disapproval and disgust, Starmer's Blue Labour looks set, according to the poll to underperform Corbyn's Labour in 2017, by securing only 39% of the vote.  Only the actual polling will tell us how many votes it actually obtains, but it looks unlikely to beat Corbyn's 2017 performance.

Yet, in 2017, Corbyn's better electoral performance secured only 262 seats, compared to the Tories 317, whereas Starmer's Blue Labour is forecast to win 431 seats, compared to the Tories 102, giving Blue Labour a majority of 212.  What the poll also showed is that both Sunak and Starmer are intensely disliked by voters.  You would have to go to the dislike for both Trump and Biden to get any similar kind of comparison of voters faced with the unsavoury choice between two turds out of the same arse.

What this shows is not that Starmer and Blue Labour are going to win this election, but that Sunak and the Tories have lost it, a process that began with Boris Johnson, as all of the nonsense and contradictions arising from Brexit tore them apart, and which now looks set to tear Blue Labour apart when it takes office.  It illustrates not just the sham nature of bourgeois-democracy in general, but of the particularly corrupt nature of British bourgeois-democracy, and its electoral system that amounts to systematic and legalised ballot-rigging.

Starmer's Blue Labour is set to have the largest majority since 1832, and yet will have secured a smaller vote share than Corbyn's Labour in 2017.  According to the MRP, the Liberals are set to obtain 12% of the votes, but get 72 seats, whereas reform are set to get 15% of the votes, but only 3 seats!  Similarly, Greens are set to secure 7% of the votes, but only 2 seats.

The supporters of Blue Labour will undoubtedly trumpet their victory in securing so many seats, and such a majority, but the reality is that they will have done worse than Corbyn's Labour in 2017, in conditions that were not only far more favourable to them, but almost unique, given the melt down of the Tory Party in the intervening period.  In 2017, the Labour Right did all they could to undermine Corbyn, and that continued over the next two years, as they mounted the campaign to unseat him, and to smear party members with fraudulent charges of anti-Semitism supported by the Tory media.  No one was more shocked and disappointed than the Labour Right, when Corbyn's Labour did so well in 2017, which caused them to redouble their efforts to undermine him.

We will have to see how many votes Blue Labour secures even compared to that 2019 performance, which the Labour Right, and Tory media wasted no time in proclaiming to be the worst since 1935, which, in terms of votes, and vote share, as against seats, it was not.  But, even compared to that performance, Blue Labour's performance, in terms of votes, in this election is likely not to be anything to write home about.  basing yourself on ephemera such as the number of seats won, as against the underlying trends of votes, as an index of social movements is a delusion.

Boris Johnson, in 2019, won an 80 seat majority based on the idea of "Getting Brexit Done", and taking back control.  He built a shaky electoral coalition of traditional middle class Conservatives, and petty-bourgeois Tories, dragging behind them declassed elements in the decayed urban areas of the North and Midlands.  That coalition contained an inevitable contradiction between the middle-class Conservatives that backed Remain, and the petty-bourgeois Tories, and declassed elements that backed Leave, on the basis of a lie.

Even in 2019, the consequence of that was manifest, as in the Spring EU, and local elections, those middle-class conservatives, swung increasingly behind the Liberals.  Every since, the Liberals have been gaining ground in those areas at the Conservatives expense.  But, Brexit was built on a lie, and increasingly the lie was exposed.  The lives of the immiserated petty-bourgeois, and particularly of the declassed elements got markedly worse, not better, after Brexit, despite all the talk about "levelling-up".  Instead, most of those decayed urban areas simply looked like they had just been levelled, or needed to be levelled by bulldozers, are they fell into even greater decay.

The chaos inside the Tory Party was just the external manifestation of these contradictions, and the inability of the government to make good on its unachievable promises.  The electoral coalition fell apart, as the middle-class Conservatives, in the "Blue Wall", have deserted them as they flock to a Liberal Party that more closely represents their bourgeois values and interests, as epitomised in the opposition to Brexit.  But, as the Brexit lies were exposed, so too the Tories lost that flaky support of the petty-bourgeois and declassed elements in the North and Midlands too.  Some of the latter has gone to Reform, where it will be disappointed again, leading some of it to move even further Right to the BNP etc., whilst others will have returned to their usual apathy, and others will have voted for a Brexit supporting Blue Labour, where they will again have their reactionary dreams of "Making Britain Great Again", dashed.

Blue Labour's electoral coalition is so full of contradictions, and based on the same reactionary nationalist lies as those of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage that is must inevitably blow apart in short order, and in a similar manner.  Blue Labour has already enraged and antagonised a large part of its core, progressive working-class vote, many of whom will only turn out to vote Labour, out of an even greater hatred of the Tories, and knowledge that given the corrupt nature of Britain's electoral system, other parties such as the Liberals and Green, let alone the smaller socialist parties and sects have no chance of winning enough seats, even if they win a large number of votes.  But, that does not change the fact that a large groundswell of dislike for Starmer and Blue Labour exists, in conditions where the working-class is rising from its knees for the first time in nearly 20 years, and starting to organise itself once more.

Brexit Is Central - Part 4 of 6

So, just as we have no illusions in bourgeois-democracy or the bourgeois national revolution, being only moments in the transition to Socialism, via permanent revolution, yet go along with the workers in such struggles, on that basis of permanent revolution, so, too, we adopt that approach to the EU. We sow no illusions in its capacity to solve workers' problems, but we go along with workers who do have such illusions, on the basis that, in the course of this struggle, we build workers' unity across Europe, we posit workers' interests to the interests of capital, across Europe, and we posit independent workers' parties and organisations across Europe as the means to achieve it. In doing so, we draw out the logic that workers across the EU can only resolve their problems by creating a Workers Europe, on the road to a Socialist United States of Europe.

Of course, none of the main parties seek to get anywhere near such a condition, in which they would provoke the ire of the global ruling class. That is why they have already committed to such modest proposals, and why they have stated so vociferously that they will not raise taxes or borrowing. But, that does not change the fact that their current plans simply do not add up, as the IFS has set out. They must implement spending cuts, or raise taxes, or increase borrowing.

The ability to raise taxes has been discussed, but the position in relation to borrowing is very similar. Lloyds Bank has already warned them not to try to raise borrowing to meet the gap. Blue Labour, and to an extent the Liberals, have sought to blame the constraints on them on the Truss government. But, as I have set out previously, the rise in interest rates was underway long before that government. It is a global process, driven by the dynamics of the long wave cycle. A long, secular decline in global interest rates began in the mid 1980's, as the annual average rate of profit rose sharply, and the supply of money-capital from realised profits exceeded the demand for it, for capital accumulation. It is what created the initial surge in asset prices.

That secular fall in global interest rates ended around 2012, and was presaged by the global financial crisis in 2008. It is only the extraordinary measures introduced by states and central banks, since 2010, as they sought to slow economic growth via austerity, and to boost asset prices by QE, that has subdued that dynamic, bringing its own contradictions and idiocies, such as negative yields on bonds, with it.

The lunacy of Truss's government gave the opportunity for the ruling class to slap down the petty-bourgeoisie that has been ascendant since the 1980's. It used its power in global financial markets to hammer the Pound, and drive down UK bonds, sending UK interest rates higher. It was a soft coup against the government, showing just what a radical Left government would face. But, having carried out that coup, the Pound rose, and UK interest rates fell back. That those rates are again higher is not a consequence of Truss's government, but of those underlying longer-term dynamics that are driving global rates higher as part of a long-term secular rise in interest rates establishes itself. Just as the secular decline in rates lasted for around 30 years, so too the secular rise will last for around 30 years, and these minor fluctuations are merely bumps on that upward slope.

Conservative social-democrats, and petty-bourgeois nationalists, such as those of Blue Labour, do not want to acknowledge that reality, because it undermines the whole of their strategy of the previous forty years, based on low interest rates, rising asset prices, and the illusion of wealth created from thin air, out of the rise of these asset prices, as the basis of debt collateralised on them. Rising global interest rates, induced by a rising demand for money-capital to fund capital accumulation, at the same time as the supply of money-capital grows more slowly, as rising relative wages squeeze profits, of itself, puts a further huge hole in the budgets of governments, simply to cover the rising cost of servicing their existing debt. So, any addition to that debt, by further borrowing, will result in government's facing sharply rising interest rates. The right-wing, petty-bourgeois, populist government, in Italy, has already found that, clipping its claws, and, now, France is seeing the same thing, as the yield on its bonds rises sharply compared to that on German Bunds, even before Macron's party loses control of the Assembly.

The idea that Britain could just borrow its way out of the problem is, then, simply not tenable. Ten years or more ago, Britain could have taken advantage of historically low interest rates, so as to thoroughly renovate its national infrastructure, and so on. That would have repaid itself, as it brought improvements in productivity, and so on. But, instead, the government imposed austerity, to slow the economy and slow wage growth, to enable asset prices to be inflated.

The idea that this problem could be avoided by simply monetising the debt, i.e. by printing money tokens to pay the debt, or to finance the additional spending shows a lack of understanding of what money is. It is to invite a repetition of the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic, and elsewhere, when such measures are undertaken, and of what happened in the 1970's and early 80's. It is what happened on a smaller scale when liquidity was injected to cover the furlough payments and other costs inflicted due to lockdowns. The inflation that results simply increases money costs, rather than reducing interest rates, and acts like wear and tear of fixed capital, in respect of the money advanced by lenders. It means that they seek to compensate for that depreciation (Net Present Value) of their capital, by demanding higher nominal rates of interest.

Moreover, as already seen, lenders are more likely to lend to EU countries, backed by the ECB, than they are Britain, as its economic problems intensify, as a result of Brexit. Its true that Britain can always print additional currency to pay back its creditors, but, in doing so, it devalues that currency, paying them back in “funny money”, just as when states used to reduce the gold content of the currency. Lenders simply respond to such measures by demanding even higher nominal rates of interest.

So, any incoming government will find that it has a hole in even the existing budgets that cannot easily be filled by either taxes or borrowing. That is why they use the magical thinking of “growth” to resolve this dilemma. But, as I set out earlier, and as the IFS also state, to rely on growth requires that you set out where this growth is suddenly to come from. The obvious quick answer would be to re-join the EU, but none of the parties dare speak its name, despite the fact that a clear majority of voters are in favour of it!

The only response they can give as to that is that the 2016 referendum voted for it, and for some unknown reason that decision binds us for all time!! That's like deciding to drink from a bottle that you did not know contains poison, and then, discovering your mistake, assert that you must still drink from it, because that was the decision you had made, and so must stick with it!!!!

Back To Part 3

Stalin and The Chinese Revolution, 4. The Strategy of Lenin and The Strategy of Stalin - Part 2 of 3

I have referred, on several occasions to the repeat of the errors of China, in Chile, in 1973. In the WW, Mike McNair, in his analysis of its lessons, makes this same error of confusing the nature of the Popular Front, with the United Front. He writes,

“Trotskyist authors place great emphasis on the fact that UP was (as its name tells us) a popular front. But the question posed is: would a united front government, of the SP and CP alone, have been any better? The answer is quite plainly not.”

Given the bourgeois reformist nature of both the Chilean Socialist Party and Communist Party, such a government would not be a United Front, but simply a Popular Front. At best, it would be like the kind of Workers Government that Lenin and the Bolsheviks envisaged, in Russia, in 1917, when they raised the demand “Down With The Capitalist Ministers”. It assumes that standing outside any such government, is an actual revolutionary party, (as was the case with the Bolsheviks in 1917) engaged in a real United Front, in action, at a rank and file level, exposing the contradictions and inadequacies of such a reformist/centrist government, and, thereby, ripping the workers away from it. As Trotsky puts it, in discussing the Workers' Government, in The Transitional Programme,

“When the Comintern of the epigones tried to revive the formula buried by history of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry,” it gave to the formula of the “workers’ and peasants’ government” a completely different, purely “democratic,” i.e., bourgeois content, counterposing it to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Bolshevik-Leninists resolutely rejected the slogan of the “workers’ and peasants’ government” in the bourgeois-democratic version. They affirmed then and affirm now that. when the party of the proletariat refuses to step beyond bourgeois democratic limits, its alliance with the peasantry is simply turned into a support for capital, as was the case with the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries in 1917, with the Chinese Communist Party in 1925-27, and as is now the case with the “People’s Front” in Spain, France and other countries...

From April to September 1917, the Bolsheviks demanded that the SRs and Mensheviks break with the liberal bourgeoisie and take power into their own hands. Under this provision the Bolshevik Party promised the Mensheviks and the SRs, as the petty bourgeois representatives of the worker and peasants, its revolutionary aid against the bourgeoisie categorically refusing, however, either to enter into the government of the Mensheviks and SRs or to carry political responsibility for it.”

Mike McNair, basically adopts the Stalinist interpretation of the United Front, on the basis of form rather than content. On that basis, the Popular Front is an alliance of bourgeois and workers parties (“bloc of four classes”), whereas a United Front is an alliance of reformist workers parties (Socialists) and revolutionaries (Communist Parties). The trouble with that, when looking at Chile in 1973 (and the same applies generally) is that these party labels were themselves meaningless. The Mensheviks, in 1917, were still, nominally a Marxist party whose goal was Socialism. By the 1920's, even, all of these “Socialist” parties had become simply social-democratic parties, or “bourgeois-workers' parties”, as Lenin defined the British Labour Party, whose goal was not Socialism, but simply a more efficiently managed monopoly capitalism. Any formal alliance with such a party, was already, therefore, simply a Popular Front, in content.

And, the same was true of the Communist Parties. They too became simply social-democratic parties. But, more significantly, what presenting a formal alliance of such parties, as a United Front, fails to understand is that the United Front is an alliance, in action, at a grass roots level between revolutionaries and reformist/social-democratic workers. It is an alliance proposed to those workers, by revolutionaries, over the heads of the leaders of the parties representing those other workers.

“Lenin, it is understood, recognized the necessity of a temporary alliance with the bourgeois-democratic movement, but he understood by this, of course, not an alliance with the bourgeois parties, duping and betraying the petty-bourgeois revolutionary democracy (the peasants and the small city folk), but an alliance with the organizations and groupings of the masses themselves – against the national bourgeoisie.” (p 267)

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Brexit Is Central - Part 3 of 6

Of course, as I have set out previously, the idea of increasing taxes on large-scale capital is not only utopian, but itself reactionary, a reflection of a petty-bourgeois mindset. The progressive social-democratic approach would, instead, be to remove the right of shareholders to control capital they do not own, and to give that right to the collective owners of that capital, the workers in the respective corporations. Those workers would have no reason to export that capital. It would also make possible the taxation, not of the profits, but of any unearned income by share and bond holders.

However, again, to do so would mean to declare open class war on the ruling class. The idea that any national government, be it in Britain, France or anywhere else could do that without the global ruling class responding in kind is utopian. That global ruling class would throw all it had into removing such a government, and would inevitably succeed unless workers in other countries came to its rescue, and pursued the same course. Again, for Britain that is inseparable from re-joining the EU, and a struggle with other EU workers for a Workers' Europe. Commencing that struggle only after the ruling class has mobilised its forces is to invite disaster, as most recently, also, Greece discovered.

As I wrote at the time of the EU Referendum, the Marxist argument for voting Remain could not be that presented by Cameron, the Liberals or Blair, which was a bourgeois, social-democratic argument, based on national self-interest, i.e. the interest of British capital, and therefore, free free trade and the rule of market forces. The Marxist argument, rather, was, and is, that to defend workers' interests, be they British, French, German etc. workers, requires those workers to unite across the EU, as a European working-class to confront European capital. Removing outdated national borders is as important for that, in the age of imperialism, as was the removal of the old provincial barriers in the 19th century, so as to create the nation states.

As Lenin and Trotsky described, where Marxists joined with workers and peasants in those national revolutions, in the 19th century, and early 20th century, it was not because they supported, or had any illusions in that bourgeois-democratic, national revolution, but that they recognised that a large proportion of the masses did, and that the way too divest the masses of those illusions was to go through that struggle with them, to show that the only means of achieving even the limited aims of those bourgeois revolutions was by the masses creating their own independent organisations – parties, trades unions, factory committees and workers' councils/soviets.

This is the basis and lesson of permanent revolution. It is the same principle as that set out by Lenin in Left-Wing Communism. We have no illusions in bourgeois-democracy or parliamentary elections, but a large proportion of workers still do, and so we relate to those workers in those elections, and in those parliaments. We stand our own candidates in elections on revolutionary platforms, exposing the bourgeois nature of the social-democratic and reformist workers' parties. Where we are not strong enough to do that, we engage with those workers inside these parties, to do the same thing, and, where possible, to stand candidates under the banner of those parties, but on the basis of a socialist programme, for example, as with the Socialist Campaign For A Labour Victory, in 1979.

Where we get our own representatives elected to parliaments, we use that tribune again to expose the sham nature of bourgeois-democracy, and of the bourgeois workers parties. We refuse to engage in all of the parliamentary routinism and chicanery, and, instead, at every opportunity, use those positions to support workers engaged in struggle. Even when we have large numbers of such representatives, we refuse to join the government, or form a government, or government coalitions, instead adopting the position of extreme opposition. That is true even when we call on the reformist and centrist workers' parties, the Stalinists and Anarchists, to form a Workers' Government, and demand that it break with the bourgeoisie, and represent workers' interests, as the Bolsheviks did in 1917, when they demand of Kerensky's government “Down With The Capitalist Ministers”.

In relation to the EU, we also know that a majority of workers do not, yet, understand the sham nature of bourgeois-democracy. Indeed, it is that fact that enabled the Brexiters to seize upon the democratic deficiencies of the EU, and, opportunistically, sell the lie that British bourgeois-democracy was an alternative to it. Some backward workers, and more or less the whole petty-bourgeoisie bought that lie, even though many of them quickly learned that they had been lied to, by Fartage and Johnson, as Brexit not only failed to deliver what had been promised, but led to one ill-effect after another on their lives. But, even for the majority of workers who were not taken in by that lie, and who voted Remain, they did so on the basis of another lie, the lie sold by Cameron, Clegg and Blair that the EU, as it stood, as a bourgeois-democratic, capitalist Europe, was itself the answer to their problems.

It clearly wasn't, but what the EU, even in its capitalist form, does is to clear away a lot of the barriers that stand in the way of workers creating the solution to their problems. As Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky described, even the creation of freer, more rational conditions for the development of capital is, itself, progressive, and facilitates the transition to Socialism. We are not petty-bourgeois, moral socialists, or “anti-capitalists”, seeking to hold back or reverse capitalist development. We do not see less mature forms of capital as preferable to its mature forms in the shape of monopolies and multinational corporations. Quite the contrary. These mature forms, as socialised capital, Marx explains, in Capital III, Chapter 27, are the collective property of the workers in those companies. They are the transitional form of property between capitalism and socialism. But, also, because of their size, and need to plan and regulate their production, they must also draw on all of those aspects of the encroaching socialist future that requires a close relation to the state, which must also incorporate this contradiction within itself.

The fact that these mammoth capitals must, themselves, burst out of the reactionary constraints of the nation state, becoming multinational and transnational companies, itself acts to unite the workers of these corporations across national borders. But, this same requirement drives the requirement to establish ever larger single markets, such as the EU, within the framework of a multinational state, which becomes the minimum adequate political form in the era of imperialism, just as the nation state was in the era of privately owned, competitive, free market capitalism. All of these features of imperialism, and of the multinational state are, also, features required by socialism.

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