Are The Tories and Blue Labour Neoliberals? - Part 7 of 10

The arguments used to justify that position are pathetically weak and superficial, indicating that these are not the real reasons. The obnoxious Wes Streeting, who has been seen as the current epitome of Blairism, for example, has been as dogmatic as Starmer in his recent refusal to countenance any re-joining of the EU.

His argument, as with that put forward by Starmer is that the referendum voted for Brexit, and there have been two elections since the referendum (there have, of course, been three, but Blue Labour like to ignore the 2017 election, as it destroys their criticism of Corbynism). So, what? The referendum was seriously flawed. It disenfranchised not only the 16-18 year-old, section of society who had most to lose, but also tens of thousands of EU citizens who have been living in Britain for years, as well as tens of thousands of British ex-pats, living in the EU. Moreover, it was shown to have suffered from not only interference from Putin's Russia, but also, from election fraud, that, had it been a parliamentary election, would have voided the result! Even with all of that, it secured only a tiny majority of the vote, and only 37% of the electorate.

But, also, the 2016 referendum is no more sacrosanct, or final, than any other such vote, such as the 1975, referendum that resulted in a 2:1 majority to stay in the EEC/EU. Indeed, it was less sacrosanct than a parliamentary election, because the legislation for it, made clear that it was only an advisory referendum, not a binding referendum. Given that, when the Tories, who were the party that had called it, and who were attempting to legislate for Brexit, called an election in 2017, they lost their parliamentary majority, and Corbyn's Labour that had pulled in all of these pro-EU young voters saw the biggest increase in its vote, and seats since 1945, the weak case for supporting Brexit on that basis is manifest. The fact that May's government repeatedly failed to be able to get a parliamentary majority for her Brexit proposals again shows how weak this argument is.

It is rather understandable that the likes of Streeting et al, should want to gloss over all of this, because, had they not put all their efforts, after 2015, and particularly after 2017, into trying to remove Corbyn, and undermine Labour's electoral success – as well as the role of the likes of Umunna and co., and their alliance with the delusional Swinson, in 2019 – the replacement of May by Johnson, could have been avoided. It may even have been avoided in 2017, but could certainly have been avoided in 2019. The actions of Corbyn in trying to appease the Labour Right, during all of that period, and his failure to adopt a principled opposition to Brexit in 2019, certainly facilitated his demise, but the major responsibility for the election of Boris Johnson, and all of the Brexit chaos that ensued, lies primarily with the Labour Right, and their campaign to remove Corbyn, and undermine Labour's electoral hopes. Indeed, when challenged, Margaret Hodge made clear that for the Labour Right, and the funders of Labour Together, in all of those tax havens, even Boris Johnson was preferable to Corbyn.

But, even taking all of that into consideration, the argument that the Labour Right are just being good democrats in accepting the referendum, and subsequent elections is untenable. Starmer and co. led the charge for a second referendum, after 2016, so upholding that 2016 decision does not hold. Moreover, its now, nearly a decade since that vote, a quarter of the time that elapsed between the 1975 referendum, and the 2016 referendum. What is different there is that, support for the EU remained solid after 1975, whereas there was only a slender, and fraudulent majority for Brexit on the day of the Brexit referendum, which has disappeared in every subsequent poll. Current polls show, not only around 80% of Labour voters opposing Brexit, and supporting rejoining the EU, but also, around two-thirds of the electorate, as a whole, holding that same position.

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Anti-Duhring, Introduction, I - General - Part 11 of 17

We think in artificial constructs and categories as part of this common sense, because it fits this superficial experience of reality. For example, returning to the TSSI, we think in terms of, say, a year, when considering a firm's accounts, and its profit and rate of profit. But, as Marx shows, in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 22, in relation to Ramsay, and his use of historic pricing, it necessarily leads to error and confusion.

The problem for Ramsay, and his use of historic prices was this. He took the historic prices paid for, say, cotton, by a yarn producer. Let us say this price is £10 per kilo, and he buys 100 kilos (£1,000). Having produced yarn, with an added value of £1,000 (resolving into £500 wages and £500 profit), he can sell the yarn for £2,000, making a 33.33% rate of profit, over the year. However, if the price of cotton rises, in the intervening period of production, to, say, £1,500, the yarn producer, like all others, could sell their yarn for £2,500 (its current reproduction cost), which, with his own costs based on historic pricing being still only £1,500 (£1,000 cotton, £500 wages) appears to give them a profit of £1,000, and a rate of profit of 66.66% for the year.

If we view this metaphysically, as Ramsay did, and does the TSSI, this produces an obvious problem for Marx's Labour Theory of Value. If, instead of considering the capital itself, we consider the specific owner of that capital, Mr. A, we arrive at the position that, viewed over a discrete one year period, Mr. A laid out £1,500 and gets back £2,500, a profit of £1,000. Yet, we can see that the surplus value produced is only £500. As Ramsay concludes, therefore, labour is not the only source of new value and surplus value. The constant capital (cotton) has produced new, additional value, i.e. surplus value. It has self-expanded from £1,000 to £1,500. In that case, Marx's LTV collapses, which is the conclusion the TSSI should, also, be led to.

As Ramsay notes, if Mr. A liquidates their capital, at the end of the year, they will have £2,500, as against the £1,500 they began with, a profit of £1,000, and rate of profit of 66.66%. But, Marx's point is that this bears no resemblance to the reality of capitalist production, which is continuous and involves simultaneity, and does not break down into these discrete periods of time, useful only to perform certain business calculations. Nor is viewing this reality in terms of the specific personification of the capital (Mr. A) useful, rather than considering the capital itself as property.

For example, Mr. A sells the yarn producing business to Ms. B, who pays £2,500 to Mr. A. Out of the £2,500 of yarn, she then sells on the market, she, now, has to spend £1,500 for cotton, and £500 for wages. Assuming no further change, they again sell the resulting yarn for £2,500, producing a £500 profit, i.e. not £1,000 as appeared to be the case for Mr. A, in the previous year, but only the original £500, equal to the actually produced surplus value. What is more, this £500 of profit, now, represents only a 25% rate of profit, as against the original 33.33%.

As Marx sets out in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 22, and in Capital III, Chapter 6, the additional “profit” apparently acquired by Mr. A, is an illusion. It is not profit at all, but only a capital gain, obtained as a result of a fortuitous rise in the price of cotton. It is the same illusion that leads to capital gains from rising asset prices being wrongly described as “profits”. What is more, although this capital gain is fortuitous for Mr. A, the rise in the price of cotton that produces it, is hardly fortuitous as a whole, as seen by the fact that, for Ms. B, it means that more capital has to be advanced (a tie-up of capital), and her rate of profit, is seen to be 25%, as against the original 33.33%. The same thing applies, for example, in relation to rising house prices, share prices and bond prices.

Previously, the £500 profit would have enabled the capital to expand by a third, with a third more workers employed, producing a third more surplus value, and for Marx, this is the real understanding of the rate of profit, as the measure of the self-expansion of capital, but, now, it can only be expanded by a quarter. Mr. A's capital gain, is, essentially, Ms. B's capital loss, because she must, now, advance £500 more capital than did Mr. A (just as he would have done had he continued in business), just to replace the 100 kilos of consumed cotton. That is £500 that could have bought additional cotton and labour-power. Here too is the significance of Marx's Labour Theory of Value, in which it is the value of the commodity, which then, resolves into the funds required to physically renew the consumed capital, as against the cost of production theory of value that Smith collapses into on occasion, in which the value of the commodity is determined by compositing the values of the various factors of production.

As Marx describes in Capital III, Chapter 6, it represents a tie-up of capital. In Capital III, Chapter 49, Marx sets out that it is this physical capital – the commodities that comprise the constant and variable-capital – that must be reproduced "on a like for like basis", and so into which this value of output must be resolved, so as to give the real measure of the rate of profit.

“In so far as reproduction obtains on the same scale, every consumed element of constant capital must be replaced in kind by a new specimen of the same kind, if not in quantity and form, then at least in effectiveness. If the productiveness of labour remains the same, then this replacement in kind implies replacing the same value which the constant capital had in its old form. But should the productiveness of labour increase, so that the same material elements may be reproduced with less labour, then a smaller portion of the value of the product can completely replace the constant part in kind. The excess may then be employed to form new additional capital or a larger portion of the product may be given the form of articles of consumption, or the surplus-labour may be reduced. On the other hand, should the productiveness of labour decrease, then a larger portion of the product must be used for the replacement of the former capital, and the surplus-product decreases.”

(Capital III, Chapter 49)

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Michael Roberts' Fundamental Errors, I - Value, Labour and Labour-power - Part 2 of 4

But, Roberts' position, like that of Proudhon and Duhring is worse than that of the Classical Economists, because he argues in the sentence above – which also misstates the position of the Classical Economists – that it is not labour that creates value, but labour-power! So, in which case, thirdly, therefore, Roberts should tell us, which labour-power this is that creates value. Is it the value of the carpenter's labour-power, of the weaver's labour-power, of the computer programmer's labour-power? All of these different labour-powers have different values, because they each require different amounts of labour-time for their reproduction.

For example, they may require different amounts of food, depending upon the amount of physical or mental exertion undertaken by the labourer, they will require different amounts of labour-time of teachers and instructors required to educate and train the labourers in these very different skills. As Marx sets out, in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 20, this was also a problem for the Ricardian School, in trying to determine some unchanging commodity value, which could act as the equivalent measure of value/money, a fool's errand as Marx describes it, which enabled the subjectivist theorists, such as Samuel Bailey to attack the Labour Theory of Value itself.

Or, perhaps, like Proudhon and Duhring, Roberts thinks that each different type of labour-power is the determinant of the value of the specific commodity it produces. In essence, that is also a cost of production theory of value, which, in the past, I have argued is what the TSSI lapses into. So, the labour-power of the weaver determines the value of the woven cloth, of the carpenter for the value of furniture, and of the computer programmer, the value of computer software and so on. 

It leaves Roberts in the same contradiction faced by the Classical Economists, but in the same form as that faced by Proudhon and Duhring. If the value of cloth – setting aside the value of the materials and wear and tear of fixed capital – is determined by the value of the weaver's labour-power, how then can a surplus value arise? It can't. If the value of the 8 hours of labour performed by the weaver is equal to the value of the weaver's labour-power, then the weaver's wages, i.e. the value of their labour-power, will be equal to the new value created by that labour-power, leaving nothing as surplus value!

What this cost of production theory does is to treat labour-power/variable capital in the same way as constant capital. In other words, it treats the value of labour-power as a cost of production of the commodity, which is transferred into the value of the commodity. That is what happens when you confuse and conflate labour with labour-power. But, it, then, leaves you with the contradiction of explaining where the surplus-value/profit comes from. It can only come from the capitalist imposing a rate of profit on top of their costs of production, to determine the price of the commodity. For Duhring this is a manifestation of his “force theory”, and basically amounts to a “profit on alienation”, resulting from unequal exchange, and monopoly power. Not surprisingly, therefore, we find Roberts also, explaining recent inflation on the basis of monopoly profits too!  It removes the locus of the source of surplus-value from production, to the realm of exchange, which is also, then the foundation of all the vulgar economics, and vulgar socialism of the social-democrats and reformists.

As I've said, before, this can be seen in the way the TSSI, treats variable-capital, and confuses the value of labour-power, and the new value created by that labour. Roberts, in his article, repeats this same error. He says,

“He (Savran) rebuts the neo-Ricardians’ claim that Marx’s theory of value is inconsistent, in that it led to ‘negative values’. As ‘negative values’ are pure nonsense, this was the basis for the neo-Ricardian proposition that Marx’s theory should be consigned to history.”

I will deal with this particular error, later, but, the way that Roberts and the TSSI deal with this claim of inconsistency in Marx's theory, by the neo-Ricardians, is basically, to abandon Marx's theory itself, much as McCulloch and others did, in order to defend Ricardo against his critics, who also charged him with a similar contradiction. The argument of the TSSI, starts by accepting, in essence, the claim about the production of “negative values”, but, then, answers it by replacing Marx's theory of value based on current reproduction costs, with a cost of production theory of value, based upon historic prices. In the process, as Roberts does in his article, it confuses labour that is productive of new value, with productive-labour, i.e. productive of surplus value/capital.

The problem also involves a confusion of profit/loss with capital gain/loss, as Marx describes in Capital III, Chapter 6, and in dealing with the same error of the TSSI, made by Ramsay, set out in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 22, i.e. the question of the tie-up and release of capital.

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Are The Tories and Blue Labour Neoliberals? - Part 6 of 10

A look at the experience of what happened to Allende's government in Chile, when it tried to do that, shows the recklessness of such demands, without first having ensured, as the Bolsheviks did in 1917, that real power in society, already rested with the working-class, outside parliament, in the form of a network of organs of workers power, in workers councils/soviets, factory committees, workers militia, and so on.

As Trotsky described, in relation to the Chinese Revolution, it was the failure, indeed refusal, of the Stalinists to do that, for fear of frightening their bourgeois allies in the KMT/Popular Front, that resulted in the subsequent coup, and slaughter of the communists, and period of counter-revolution. On an entirely different scale, and in a different context, as I have set out before, the failure of Corbyn and his Stalinist advisors to break with the bourgeois forces inside the Labour Party, and to build the structures to defeat them, instead, simply creating superficial propaganda bodies and events, led to a similar result, and the counter-revolution that has put the reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalists of Blue Labour at the helm. The fact of Starmer's current dogmatic adherence to Brexit, however, seems, ironically, to be a lasting achievement, both of Corbyn's Stalinist advisors, and of Putin, and their endeavours to bring about Brexit!!!

The dogmatic adherence to Brexit by Blue Labour, at first sight, seems impossible to fathom. The Conservative Party, had always been a party, whose membership and core vote was based on the petty-bourgeoisie, even though, until the 1990's, they were always subordinated to the interests of the ruling-class, and had to suck it up, as, until the arrival of UKIP, they had no other viable home for their votes. In reality, UKIP was not even that, then, as it got nowhere in parliamentary elections, and only did well, as with the BNP, in conditions of a low poll, such as in local elections, and the European Parliament elections, where it was, also, aided by the operation of PR. But Labour has never faced that contradiction. It came into existence as a social-democratic party geared to promote the interests of large-scale industrial capital, and the ruling-class, and to limit the horizon of workers to a simply bourgeois-trades union consciousness of bargaining within the system, on the basis of “jam tomorrow”.

That working-class base of the Labour Party has never had any reason to support the reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalism that is the basis of Brexit, and, time and again, it has not done so. Despite the attempts of the likes of the Communist Party and its fellow travellers, in the 1975 Referendum, the vast majority of Labour voters voted to stay in the EEC. The Labour Party itself, had to drop the calls for leaving the EU, after 1987, as the working-class continued to oppose such a reactionary policy. Labour's core vote, and membership has been overwhelmingly opposed to Brexit ever since. In 2016, despite Labour's campaign for a Remain vote, led by Alan Johnson, who disappeared without sight after having been appointed by Corbyn, being almost as lacklustre as that of Cameron, around 60% of those that had voted Labour in 2015, voted Remain.

Following the referendum, and as Corbyn's Labour grew massively in size, attracting in large numbers of young workers, including many enthused for the first time, as well as those that had previously been drawn to the Liberals and Greens, it appeared to offer the only chance of opposing the actual implementation of Brexit. That is shown by the fact that, of those that voted Labour in 2017, an even larger proportion than those that voted Labour in 2015, voted Remain, around 70%. The support for Remain, and for re-joining the EU, is even greater amongst Labour's members, even after the right-wing Blue Labour coup has decimated its membership. Moreover, in 2019, that was even clearer still. As Corbyn, again, slid back towards the old reactionary agenda, in the form of the delusional idea of a “Labour Brexit”, or making Brexit work, all of those young workers that had been drawn to Labour, abandoned it again, in favour of more overtly pro-EU parties, such as the Greens, Liberals, Plaid and SNP.

Even 60% of Labour members, in the local elections and and EU elections, in Spring 2019, voted for these other clearly anti-Brexit parties, creating the conditions for Labour's disaster in the General Election. Of course, the fact that the Labour Right had tried, with all means, to undermine Corbyn, from 2015 on, and used their continued control of the party machine, access to the right-wing media, as well as to large amounts of funding, from various tax havens, and use of the fake, Anti-Semitism panic, which Corbyn capitulated to, once again, played a significant role, in 2019, to that disaster, in a way it did not in 2017. So, the dogged, irrational support for Brexit, now exhibited by Starmer, the main advocate of a second referendum, under Corbyn, seems unfathomable, at first sight.

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Anti-Duhring, Introduction, I - General - Part 10 of 17

The start of the natural sciences begins, then, Engels says, with the Greeks in the Alexandrian period, being developed by the Arabs in The Middle Ages. We now know, also, the role of India and China in the process of development, for example, with the development of zero, as a concept, indispensable in mathematics.

“Genuine natural science dates from the second half of the fifteenth century, and from then on it has advanced with ever increasing rapidity. The analysis of nature into its individual parts, the division of the different natural processes and objects into definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organic bodies in their manifold forms — these were the fundamental conditions for the gigantic strides in our knowledge of nature that have been made during the last four hundred years. But this has bequeathed us the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, detached from the general context; of observing them not in motion, but in their state of rest; not as essentially variable elements, but as constant ones; not in their life but in their death,. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last centuries.” (p 25)

As I have set out, elsewhere, this is also the difference of the TSSI, which operates on the basis of this metaphysical rather than dialectical method of thought. It divides capitalist production into separate discrete periods, rather than as being continuous, and consequently simultaneous. It finds the concept of simultaneity, inherent to understanding continuity, anathema. Yet, as Marx sets out, you cannot understand capitalist production without understanding that simultaneity, which, as he shows, occurs repeatedly throughout it.

“To the metaphysician, things and their mental images, ideas, are isolated, to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, fixed, rigid objects of investigation, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely unmediated antitheses. "His communication is 'yea, yea; nay, nay'; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." For him a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another, cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis one to the other.” (p 26)

The metaphysical mode of thought is easily adopted, because it seems eminently reasonable, conforming with our everyday observation and experience of the world. It seems to be common sense. Everything has its place, and can be placed in a discrete box, whether it be time (a minute, day, month or year), or space (an inch, foot, yard or mile), a dog or a cat, mammals or reptiles, or, indeed, social classes.

Except that Einstein showed that there is no separation between space and time (space-time), and nor are they absolutes. Darwin had shown that no such fixed categories existed in biology either, and so it was no surprise that no such absolutes and fixed categories exist in social organisms either.

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Michael Roberts' Fundamental Errors, I - Value, Labour and Labour-power - Part 1 of 4

Michael Roberts' Fundamental Errors

In an article in The Weekly Worker, Michael Roberts makes a series of fundamental errors, which go a long way to explaining the other errors he has made, over the years, in relation to his understanding of Marx's theory, and his application of it to the analysis of capitalism, today. 

Unfortunately, my letter to the WW, in response to Roberts was severely butchered, out of all recognition, but that gives me the opportunity to significantly expand on it, here, which I will do in a series of posts over the next few weeks.

Roberts' article is a review of a book by Ahmet Tonak and Sungar Savran. I must begin, by saying, therefore, that I have not read their book, and this critique is not in relation to their book, but only of Roberts' errors elaborated in his review of it.

I - Value, Labour and Labour-power

Roberts' first error, for a Marxist, is a school boy howler, and if you can't get this right, then you cannot get anything else right that flows from it. He says,

“... the classical economists recognised that value in an economy was created by human labour-power”.

I have set this out in my book.

This is wrong on numerous levels. First of all, the classical economists did not recognise that value is created by human labour-power. Indeed, they had no category of “labour-power”, only of “labour”, which is why, as Marx demonstrates, they ended in an irreconcilable contradiction. They recognised that value was created by human labour. The Classical economists did not distinguish between labour and labour-power, and this failure to do so led to the fundamental contradiction in their theory, which led them in to a dead-end, which resulted in Smith abandoning the Labour Theory of Value, and adopting a cost of production theory of value. Ricardo did not follow him, but failed to address the fundamental contradiction in which that left him. It also led to further contradictions in his theory, which, in turn, led to the dissolution of his School, as his followers such as McCulloch, attempted to resolve those contradictions, by essentially ditching his teachings, to do so, as Marx sets out in Theories of Surplus Value.

Marx's great advance in economic theory was, precisely, in making this distinction between labour, and labour-power, which resolves the fundamental contradiction faced by Classical theory, which meant that it could not properly explain the existence of surplus value, or, more correctly, of profit. So, secondly, Roberts' in claiming that value is created by “labour-power”, rather than by “labour”, makes the same error as Smith, Ricardo and the Classical economists, but in mirror image, because they correctly claimed that it was created by “labour”, whilst failing to distinguish it from “labour-power”. If anything, Roberts' version, is, therefore, worse than theirs. It is, basically, the same position that was put forward by Proudhon, and addressed by Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy, and by Duhring, and tackled by Marx and Engels in Anti-Duhring.

The Classical economists, at least, understood that value is created by human labour, i.e. the act of labour, itself. As Marx and Engels note, they had the ingredients required to, also, explain the existence of surplus value, had they put them together, and made the distinction between that act of labour, which creates value, as against the labour-power of the labourer, which is, itself, a use-value/product/commodity, and, consequently has its own value, quite separate from the value created by the act of labour. Had they just followed through on their argument, Marx and Engels note, and realised that the specific labour-power of each labourer is a use-value/product/commodity, and so has its own value, determined by the labour-time required for its reproduction, the contradiction in their theory would have disappeared.

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Northern Soul Classics - In Love - Tony Galla

 

Friday Night Disco - Another Night - Dionne Warwick

 

Are The Tories and Blue Labour Neoliberals? - Part 5 of 10

Statists always see things in terms of the amount of actual state involvement in production that exists. Its why they were so obsessed with Clause IV of the Labour Party Constitution, and its removal, by the epitome of neoliberalism (conservative-social democracy), Tony Blair. But, the role of the state, for capital, and so for social-democracy does not reside in how much the state itself engages in production of goods and services. (Marx and Engels noted that an indication of the growth of large-scale socialised capital, was actually that former state run enterprises were taken over by it).

The role of the state resides in protecting and advancing the interests of capital, by whatever are the most effective means at the time. Sometimes that requires the state to nationalise industries, sometimes to privatise them, sometimes to directly provide services such as healthcare, social care and so on, and at others to simply provide a National Social Insurance Scheme, whilst facilitating non-state companies to provide the actual services. The statist Left, and others have always fetishised the NHS, but, across Europe, social-democracy developed much better, more efficient social health care systems, that do not rely upon the state running hospitals, and so on, with that being undertaken by a range of providers from cooperatives, mutuals, and private companies.

In the post-war period, Fordist production was still the most efficient means of production, based upon large-scale, assembly lines. State provision of healthcare and public education, followed the same format. But, as Aglietta described, many years ago, changes in technology made possible different, more efficient methods of production, and what came to be called Post-Fordism. It creates new conditions of regulation for capital accumulation. The role of the social-democratic state, is to simply provide the best framework, via the planning and regulation of the economy for capital accumulation. It is also, why, at times, that role involves not reducing the size of the state, and provision of welfare, education, healthcare provision and so on, or as with Blair's proposals for 50% of the population to go to university, to increase it. In either case, its done not for the benefit of “society”, but for the interests of capital, given the specific conditions of the time.

However, as stated earlier, it is necessary to distinguish between the state, and the government, but also to distinguish between the immediate interests of real, socialised capital, and fictitious capital. Socialised, industrial capital is, objectively, the collective property of the “associated producers” (workers and managers in the given company), as Marx calls them.. As it is, also, this capital that produces the surplus-value/profits out of which capital accumulation/economic growth arises, as well as out of which is deducted the revenues of the ruling class (rent, interest/dividends, and taxes) so, ultimately, it is the interests of this capital, that must determine the actions of the state.

In the short-term, however, the state is the state of the ruling-class, and the ruling-class is not a class of owners of real industrial capital, but of speculators, owners of fictitious capital. It merely, continues to exercise control over the real industrial capital, via its monopoly ownership of fictitious-capital. Similarly, the highly fungible nature of fictitious-capital, and footloose nature of the ruling-class, today, as a global class, with no necessary tie to any given nation state, means that it can utilise its monopoly ownership of fictitious capital, to control global financial markets, and so the cost of borrowing for states, value of currencies and so on. It is a fact that Syriza discovered in Greece, on the Left, and Truss found, in Britain, on the Right.

Indeed, the examples of Syriza, and of Truss indicate this difference between the government and the state, which also indicates the idiocy of those calls, in the past, by some on the Left, such as “Labour Take The Power”, a version of which, today, is the even more ludicrous calls for a “Workers Government”, by which is only meant for a social-democratic government, to act in the interests of the working-class, as though real power in society ever resides in the government, rather than in the hands of the permanent state, its officials, bodies of armed men, judiciary and other institutions of control, as well as in the power of the ruling-class, in the financial markets.

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Anti-Duhring, Introduction, I - General - Part 9 of 17

The Enlightenment, and its rationality, whose vanguard was the natural sciences, became focused on metaphysics, and the Aristotelian syllogism. But, it is necessarily limiting, and unable to deal with reality, and its nature as one of perpetual change, which involves contradiction. For analysing semantics, and the internal consistency of arguments, the syllogism is fine, up to a point; for analysing fixed states, one with another (comparative statics) it is fine, but, as quantum theory has shown, the nature of reality does not conform to these requirements that A cannot simultaneously be -A.

Aristotle himself, like all the Greek philosophers, investigated and developed dialectical methods of thought. And, even within the philosophy developed during The Enlightenment, when confronted with the need to think concretely, rather than abstractly, its exponents were led to use dialectical methods of thought. As Lenin was fond of saying, “the truth is always concrete”. In Hegel, German philosophy reached its peak in restoring the dialectic.

Engels then sets out a summary of these two different modes of thought – metaphysics and dialectics – and their role and development in history. In Theories of Surplus Value, Marx looked at the development of economic theory in a similar way, showing that the development of its ideas were by no means arbitrary or accidental, but driven by the development of bourgeois production, and the new social relations it brought with it.

“When we reflect on nature at large or the history of mankind or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless maze of connections and interactions in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. [At first therefore, we see the picture as a whole, with its individual parts still more or less kept in the background; we observe the movements, transitions, connections, rather than the things that move, change and are connected.]This primitive, naïve but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and also is not, for everything is in flux, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away.” (p 24)

This, however, only gives us a superficial description of the world. If we think of a car, we see it move from A to B, but, without investigating further, we do not know why it moves from A to B. Besides the fact that it may be out of gear, and with the brakes off, and is simply moved by gravity, we would need to examine all of its components, the engine and transmission, and the role of the driver, but that would then lead us to investigate the various components of the engine, the fuel and ignition system, and of the transmission, and so on. Only when we have identified all of these separate parts, and their relation to each other can we truly understand what we see when we observe the superficial image of the car moving from A to B.

Anyone who has studied Yoga, and its sutras, in relation to thinking, will also recognise these methods. First, there is concentration, a focus on the object itself, and its components, second is meditation, an examination of these parts and their relation to each other, and to other objects, thirdly contemplation in which all these parts, their interactions etc. are seen and understood simultaneously, as in an epiphany. As Ernest Wood describes it,

“If you were looking at a picture, and saying 'How nice it is. See this group of trees here, and this little stream there, and that light on the hillside...' you would be experiencing the delight of meditative examination, which would gradually build the picture into one unit, as you grasped these various interesting items clearly and then combined them into one, and discovered the unity of the whole. But if you 'took in' the whole picture at once, missing nothing, not flitting among the parts one to another, you would undergo ecstatic discovery and experience of the unity.”

(Yoga, p 59)

This is also the method of thought used by Marx and Engels, which differs from that of Hegel and the Greeks, because it begins with an analysis of the real world, of breaking down its actual material components, understanding their inter-relation, and laws of motion, just as does natural science.

“In order to understand these details we must detach them from their natural or historical connection and examine each one separately, according its nature, special causes and effects, etc. This is, primarily, the task of natural science and historical research: branches of science which for the Greeks of classical times occupied only a subordinate position on very good grounds, because they had first of all to collect the materials [for these sciences to work upon] [Only after a certain amount of natural and historical material has been collected can critical analysis, comparison, and arrangement of classes, orders and species be undertaken].” (p 25)

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Are The Tories and Blue Labour Neoliberals? - Part 4 of 10

Its notable that, in all of this debate, about membership of the Common Market those in favour were, again, the majority of the Conservative Party, as well as of the Labour Party, and Liberals. Those opposed were, again, the representatives of the petty-bourgeoisie be they the National Front, or the Powellites in the Conservative Party; the Communist Party, which had made its Popular Front policy of tailing the petty-bourgeoisie the cornerstone of its politics, and consistent with its reactionary nationalist concept of “Socialism In One Country”, and the Bennites, in the Labour Party, that pursued a similar course, consistent with their own statist and nationalist politics. The revolutionary socialist Left, at that time, rejected that reactionary, nationalist opposition to the EEC, and argued an abstentionist position based on the fact that the problem was capitalism, whether British or European. Only later, in the 1970's, during the 1975 Referendum campaign, did sections of that Left capitulate, as they feared being marginalised amongst the industrial militants, and Labour Left.

Its notable that, in the referendum, their was a 2:1 majority to remain in the EEC, and, today, having seen the idiocy and failure of Brexit, there, is, again, a 2:1 majority in favour of rejoining, reflecting the fact that, although the petty-bourgeoisie has grown by 50%, since the 1980's, and they were able to utilise that inside the Tory Party, and in the 2016 Referendum, they still only account for around 30% of the electorate, and, typical of that class, they are themselves heterogeneous, and riven with contradictions. Its why they never had an electoral majority, in any parliamentary election for Brexit.

Joining the EEC, in 1973, did not mean that the problems of British capitalism were ended, and certainly not that the problems of British workers were ended. But, it did mean that the specific problems of British capital, as a relatively declining economy, outside the EEC, were ameliorated. And, as part of the EEC, it meant that the potential of the British labour movement, to unite with the labour movement across the EEC, to wage a struggle that would address the problems of the working-class, was opened up. Unfortunately, large sections of the British labour movement, remained trapped in that old, Little Englander, nationalist mindset for another ten years or so, and, indeed, many, like Corbyn, the Communist Party and so on, never escaped it. Also, unfortunately, the entry of Britain into the EEC, came at the time when that post-war period of prosperity and boom, that made possible the growth of social-democracy, itself came to an end.

The rational development of social-democracy, in the 1970's, was a continued planning and regulation of the economy, on a larger scale, including the incorporation of the labour movement in that process. The national planning bodies already did that, by having representatives of both the TUC and CBI etc. The reflection of that in the realm of ideas, came in the form of the development of Eurocommunism, as Stalinist parties were transformed into simple social-democratic parties. Usually, the Eurcommunists were aligned with Liberals, and many made a natural progression into the camp of Blairism. The rationale of Eurocommunism, as it sank into this social-democratic corporatism, was the acceptance that, if the capitalist state was to plan economic activity, that included bureaucratic planning of prices and wages, as with the Social Contract, but also of immigration. It fitted the Stalinist, Popular Front idea of tailing the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie, and, consequently of nationalism.

At the level of large companies, the ideas of “profit sharing” were popularised, which, of course, ties workers and their unions into a continued acceptance in managing their own exploitation. The systematisation of those ideas came in the form of the Alternative Economic Strategy, and, as the Labour Government set up the National Enterprise Board, included ideas of “Planning Agreements” with firms seeking government support and so on.

Its notable that Thatcher did not abolish the NEB, when she became Prime Minister, but combined it with the NRDC, to form the British Technology Group. Also, Thatcher did not smash the unions, but created a new tier of full-time lay bureaucrats (convenors and so on) that separated the shop stewards from the members, which had been the strength of workplace organisation since the 1950's. They facilitated the creation of single union agreements, with the large businesses.

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Anti-Duhring, Introduction, I - General - Part 8 of 17

The development of technology, itself, leads to different productive relations. At the most basic, class society could not arise until productivity rose to a level where a surplus product could be produced, i.e. the labourer could produce more, in a day, than required to reproduce their own labour-power for the day. Engels sets this out against Duhring's idealist and subjectivist “force theory”. And, as Marx set out, in The Poverty of Philosophy, it is these different productive relations that arise out of the development of technology that results in the evolution of different forms of property, and new, and different social classes resting upon them, and acting as the personification of that property. Such was the development of slave society, feudalism, and capitalism, as well as the Asiatic Mode of Production.

“M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen, or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood is that these definite social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc. Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations.”

(The Poverty of Philosophy, p 102)

And, the same development of technology, and its requirement for ever larger scales of production, ever larger single markets – rationally a single, global market and state – which develops via socialised capital, as the collective property of the associated producers, is, similarly, the basis of the new social relations, the new socialist society.

On the basis of their idealist and subjectivist ideology, the Utopians and moral socialists dealt in absolute truths, but, as with the multiplicity of the same moral-socialist, petty-bourgeois Left sects, today, each had their own set of absolute truths.

“At the same time, absolute truth, reason, and justice are different for the founder of each different school; and as each one's special brand of absolute truth, reason, and justice is in turn conditioned by his subjective understanding, his conditions of existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they grind each other down. Hence, from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average socialism, such as in fact, has dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England up to the present time; a mish-mash permitting of the most manifold shades of opinion; a mish-mash of the less striking critical statements, economic theories and pictures of future society of the founders of different sects, a mish-mash which is the more easily produced the more the sharp edges of precision of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook.” ( p 22-3)

The achievement of Marx and Engels was to discard this petty-bourgeois moralism, and to place socialism on the same scientific basis as other sciences such as physics or biology, restricting themselves to explaining social evolution on the same basis of material conditions and natural laws. On this basis, human action, guided by ideas and principles is, indeed, required to bring about social and political revolutions, but these ideas and principles are no longer simply arbitrary or deriving from absolute truths, and moral principles existing outside society, or reality, but are themselves the product of the given set of material conditions, the productive and social relations existing in society, and which arise, not on the basis of some conscious act of will, but arise spontaneously behind Men's backs, as a result of The Law of Value, and its continual drive to raise social productivity.

As Marx puts it in Capital I, these human actors on the stage of history are merely the personification of the different forms of property, and, as he put it in The Poverty of Philosophy, emphasising this role of The Law of Value,

“Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcase.”

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Are The Tories and Blue Labour Neo-Liberals - Part 3 of 10

As real wages rose – especially as married women entered the workforce, and some of those workers' children also started work (at a time when it was usual for children to live with their parents until well into their twenties, when they got married) – so that, instead of a cost to the household, they became additional incomes, workers saw less reason to work long hours of overtime, in evenings and weekends. To get them to do so, in conditions of labour shortages much more noticeable than those of today (the unemployment rate fell to around 1-2%, whereas today, measured in the same way, its around 6%), employers had to offer much greater incentives, and premium rates of overtime pay. That enabled capital and surplus value to continue to expand, but at the cost of a reduced rate of surplus value, and squeeze on relative profits, as indicated by Glyn and Sutcliffe in “Workers and the Profits Squeeze”.

In a booming economy, like that of the 1960's, firms have to invest and accumulate capital, so as to grab their share of this expanding market. But, a growing squeeze on relative profits/profit share, means that, to finance this capital accumulation, they must either borrow more from capital markets, or else use more of their profits to finance that accumulation, rather than throwing that money into the capital markets. Either way, the demand for money-capital rises relative to the supply, and consequently interest rates rise. Rising interest rates, as Marx describes, cause asset prices to fall, via the process of capitalisation. Higher rates of interest cause land prices to fall, and, consequently, other property prices. They cause existing bond prices to fall, and as companies borrow by issuing additional bonds and shares, so this increased supply of them causes their price to fall.

Yet, a look at asset prices during the 1960's, and into the 1970's, does not seem to show that. The reason is that, during this process, central banks increased the supply of money tokens/currency, creating inflation. That inflation, on the one hand, meant that, although real wages rose, they did not rise by as much as the rise in nominal wages rose during that period. That was one means by which capital was able to ameliorate the rise in relative wages, and fall in relative profits. But, also, the inflation meant that, whilst asset prices fell in real terms, during that period, in nominal terms, they rose. As I have set out before, a look at the Maudling inflationary boom in 1963, that pushed up property prices, and the Barber Boom, of 1970, were early instances of what became the strategy over the next 50 years. In the US, its position of having the Dollar as global reserve currency, meant that it could finance its welfare state's creation, and its military spending for the Vietnam War etc., by simply printing more Dollar bills, and claiming they still had the same value, i.e. financing it at the expense of other countries, mainly in Europe. That continued until 1971, when Europe, led by France exposed the fallacy of the value of the Dollar, by demanding payment in gold, at the official rate of $35 an ounce.

In other words, during all of this period, the interests of real, large-scale, socialised capital prevailed and it continued to expand, with all of the implications and requirements for increased planning and regulation by the state, quite compatible with the large-scale concentration and centralisation of capital into huge conglomerates that took place during that time, as well as the growth of multinationals, and of the creation of multinational single markets, politico-economic blocs, and proto-states such as the EU. The ruling class of speculators and owners of fictitious-capital had to be content with a rise in their revenues (interest/dividends) made possible by this expansion, even whilst their wealth in the form of those paper assets, fell in real terms. But, that had a limit, and it was reached in the 1970's.

By the late 1960's, the signs of that limit were starting to be seen. Across the globe the subterranean currents and processes repeatedly broke out on to the surface, in numerous social protests. Britain, as the former world hegemon, but which had been deteriorating rapidly for more than 50 years as its position was challenged by the rise of Germany and the US, and then Japan, was simply too small, now, compared, also, to its main trading partners in Europe that had come together in the EEC, and were on their way to creating the EU. The attempts to join the EEC/Common Market, during the 1960's, which finally succeeded in 1973, were a recognition of that reality, as British capital sought to save itself.

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Anti-Duhring, Introduction, I - General - Part 7 of 17

The revolutionary ideas of the 18th century were, in fact, the revolutionary ideas of the rising bourgeoisie.

“... that this realm of reason was nothing more than the idealised realm of the bourgeoisie; that eternal justice found its realisation in bourgeois justice; that equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the most essential rights of man; and that the government of reason, Rousseau's Social Contract, came into being, and could only come into being, as a bourgeois democratic republic. The great thinkers of the eighteenth century were no more able than their predecessors to go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.” (p 20)

But, from its inception, this bourgeoisie is, also, confronted by its own nemesis, the industrial proletariat that grows alongside the growth of industrial capital.

“... in every great bourgeois movement there were independent outbursts of that class which was the more or less developed forerunner, of the modern proletariat. For example, at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasant War, Thomas Münzer's tend; in the great English Revolution, the Levellers; in the great French Revolution, Babeuf.” (p 21)

The schemas of future societies no longer rested upon demands for political rights and political equality, but presented images of equality of social conditions, often religious in origin, or else harking back to some supposed golden age, such as that of Sparta. The latter is, of course, relevant, because, even today, the moral socialists often frame their views in terms of some kind of requirement for an end to consumer driven society, usually linked to petty-bourgeois enviromentalism, and Malthusianism.

The epitome of these schemas of the future society was Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen.

“One thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development had, in the meantime, produced. Like the philosophers of the Enlightenment, they want to emancipate not a particular class [to begin with], but all humanity [at once]. Like them, they wish to bring in the realm of reason and eternal justice, but this realm, is as far as heaven from earth, from that of the philosophers of the Enlightenment.” (p 21-2)

This reflects the continued dominance of idealism, when it came to social science, as against natural science. The Utopians could only conceive that the only thing holding back the implementation of what they saw as the rational organisation of society was the failure of philosophers to actually theorise that rationality. They could not understand that there was, indeed, a separate rationality for different classes, based on their own material conditions and interests, contrary to Kant's concept of an overarching, universalisable moral rationality, represented by The Categorical Imperative.

“What was wanting was only the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who has recognised the truth. That fact that he has now arisen, that the truth has been recognised precisely at this moment, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chain of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering.” (p 22)

But, of course, as Marx and Engels set out, this moralistic, idealist view could never have been realised. Not only could the ideas not have been developed 500 years earlier, but even had some “genius”, 500 years ahead of their time, had them spring into their mind, they could not have gained traction, because they were unrealisable, just as much as a primitive human could not have had the idea of a computer or capacity to build one. Social evolution is driven by, and, also, constrained by natural laws as much as biological evolution. Its fundamental law is The Law of Value.

Humans need to live and to procreate. To do so, beyond the smallest numbers, and most limited needs for food, shelter and clothing etc., as they separate from the animal kingdom, Nature alone is incapable of meeting those needs, which then requires production. The limits of that production are not only the existing material conditions presented by Nature, but the amount of social labour-time available for production. From the start, humans are driven by The Law of Value, to allocate that available labour-time to maximise the use values that can be produced, i.e. to raise productivity, which, itself, leads to particular forms of production, such as division of labour, as well as the development of technology.

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Are The Tories and Blue Labour Neoliberals? - Part 2 of 10

Blue Labour is something different. Labourism, like most social-democracy and reformist socialism, has always been tinged with a reactionary, “anti-capitalism”, carried forward from the ideas of the petty-bourgeois moral socialism of people like Sismondi, which does, indeed, have the same kind of material basis within the condition of the small business class. The “anti-capitalist” rhetoric of social-democracy has always been simply that, however, and was presented in the form, not of actual attacks on that large-scale capital – upon which they recognised the economy and the state's future depended – but in the form of presenting the small business myth, and claims about how it was the small business sector that was the bulwark of the economy, and how much they sought to support it. All the while, however, the laws of capital, of concentration and centralisation, rolled on, and those small businesses continued to disappear.

Occasionally, social-democratic governments would increase Corporation Tax, or even levy the odd, one-off windfall tax on some sector of big capital, but never would they systematically undermine that big capital, which is the goose that lays the golden eggs, and besides which is the source of the wealth, power and revenues of the ruling class, which controls the state. On the contrary, in the post-war period, social-democratic governments, pretty much everywhere – whether they went under the label Labour, Conservative, Democrat, Republican and so on – nurtured that big capital, and ensured its development. In Britain, Conservative governments as much as Labour governments presided over a growing state, and public sector of the economy, including the nationalisation of bankrupt industries, important for the rest of big capital. They could do no other, because, as Marx and Engels described, even 150 years ago, that is precisely what capitalism, dominated by large-scale, socialised capital requires.

Almost everywhere, such governments established national economic planning bodies, such as NEDO, as they extended economic planning and regulation, entirely in the interests of that large-scale industrial capital, and, thereby, of its shareholders, and the ruling class. The extension of those ideas into the creation of the EEC, and then, EU, as well as the attempts to create even global bodies to undertake such planning and regulation, such as GATT/WTO, World Bank, and IMF were all elements of that social-democratic agenda. The development of welfare states, everywhere in the developed capitalist economies, including the US, was a major part of such planning and regulation, of the supply of labour-power, on behalf of that big capital.

But, during that post-war period, all of this expansion and accumulation of real industrial capital was, also, quite in keeping with the interests of that global ruling class of speculators, and owners of fictitious capital. As capital expanded, and more and more labour was employed, producing more and more surplus-value, including in ever new regions of the globe, so more and more of that surplus value enabled increased dividends, interest and rents to be paid. A turning point in that process only arose in the early 1960's, around 1962, indicated by the flash crash in stock markets in that year.

By the early 1960's, the economic expansion that followed WWII, had led to capital expanding at a faster pace than the available labour supply, even with the large-scale immigration that developed economies used during that period, alongside the bringing of large numbers of married women into the workforce. Even, the addition of a large number of young workers – baby boomers – born in the immediate aftermath of 1945, who began to enter the workforce in 1959, was not enough to satisfy the demand. As Marx describes in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 21, in these conditions, to grow surplus value, capital must increase the social working day, and that means not just these additions to the workforce itself, but a lengthening of the individual working day. However, by the early 1960's, the previous means of doing that, of simply offering workers the chance of overtime, was itself not sufficient.

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Anti-Duhring, Introduction, I - General - Part 6 of 17

The capitalist state, acting as the state of the ruling class, embodies this contradiction. It is comprised, in its day to day functioning, of the same professional middle-class that comprises the ranks of the functioning-capitalists – the same middle-class strata that also comprise the trades union bureaucracy - the superficial appearance of which gives rise to the idealist and subjectivist theories of a new class, put forward by Rizzi, Burnham, Hayek, Djilas, Dahrendorf and so on, whether characterised as a bureaucratic-collectivist, state-capitalist, or other managerialist class. It must promote the interests of its own national, socialised capital, which has, itself, now, burst the fetters of the nation state, and become multinational in nature, but must also defend the interests of the ruling-class of speculators and money lenders, themselves, now, also a global ruling class.

When asset prices crash, as in 1987 and subsequent crashes, this state, therefore, responded to the needs of this ruling class, concerned with its total returns, by creating additional liquidity that was pumped into financial and property markets to inflate these asset prices once more, causing price-earnings, and other such measures to rise to levels only previously seen just prior to earlier stock market crashes, such as 1929. But, the more this concern for total returns becomes dominated by the capital gain component of it, rather than the revenue component, the more this becomes a self-destructive, vicious circle.

Revenues, not only the interest/dividends paid to the owners of fictitious-capital, but also the profits, rents and wages are driven in search of these capital gains, for fear of missing out, and so drive asset prices higher still, draining revenues away from the real economy, and undermining the real capital accumulation needed to increase profits. It is the equivalent of the farmer that consumes their own seed-corn. It is the stripping of real assets in order to boost the prices of fictitious assets, on a huge scale, that must result in an enormous crash of those asset price, which 2008 gave notice of.

But, Marx and Engels could only see, and analyse the start of this process. Only after the passing of the Limited Liability Act, in 1855, did the huge growth of this fictitious-capital occur, some of which is detailed by Engels in his Supplement to Capital III. Here, in Anti-Duhring, they set out the other component of it, the expansion of the socialised capital, itself, and of the professional middle-class, and the consequent encroachment of the socialist society upon it, in the form of the need for extensive planning, regulation and standardisation, in place of the anarchy of production, seen in the early stages of capitalism. As Engels put it in his Critique of The Erfurt Programme,

“... when we pass on from joint-stock companies to trusts, which dominate and monopolise whole branches of industry, this puts an end not only to private production but also to planlessness.”

And, here, he and Marx note that all of these features of the socialist society are still utilised by the capitalists themselves, rather than for the benefit of workers.

“In the trusts, free competition changes into monopoly and the planless production of capitalist society capitulates before the planned production of the invading socialist society. Of course, this is initially still to the benefit of the Capitalists.

But, the exploitation becomes so palpable here that it must break down. No nation would put up with production directed by trusts, with such a barefaced exploitation of the community by a small band of coupon-clippers.” (p 358)

They could not have foreseen that society would tolerate for so long the blatant theft of property by the ruling class, nor that the labour movement, including those that call themselves Marxists, would have reverted to those same Sismondist, petty-bourgeois, moralist ideas of the earlier period in their “anti-capitalist” attacks on large-scale, socialised capital. It represents an abandonment of the Marxist, scientific method, set out by Marx and Engels in this work, against a similar trend at that time.

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