Prediction 3 – Social-Democracy Continues To Disintegrate
At the start of the Ukraine-Russia War, which is simply an element of the overall, inter-imperialist war between US/NATO imperialism and Chinese/Russian imperialism, i.e. WWIII, which is currently, in the phase of “phoney war”, I wrote that it was likely to cause social-democracy itself to disintegrate.
As I have set out, now, for more than 20 years, even before the 2008 global financial crash, which was evidence of it, conservative social-democracy had run out of road. Its model, based upon the interests, not of real capital any longer, but purely of fictitious-capital, the property of the ruling class, consisting of paper wealth in the shape of bonds, shares and property, was based on a delusion that wealth could be conjured from thin air, simply on the basis of speculative capital gains, arising from the continued rise in the prices of these assets (the delusion of the TSSI that capital gains arising from changes in the prices of the elements of constant capital constitute profit is an aspect of it), which also prompted a further delusion, the ever expanding amount of debt collateralised on the back of these inflated, fictitious assets.
In the period after 2008, the attempts to continue with that model have become ever more surreal, requiring ever greater injections of liquidity to buy up those worthless paper assets to prevent their prices crashing once more, and also requiring the capitalist state to simultaneously undermine real capital accumulation, and economic growth, the real basis of wealth creation, in order to try to prevent, or at least slow down, the continued expansion of employment, and rise in wages, and consequent rise in interest rates that spells doom for those inflated asset prices. At each stage, the measures attempted to bring that about – austerity, trade wars, lockdowns – either had limited effectiveness, in conditions of a long wave expansion, or else, ultimately, backfired, when they were ended, as with the ending of lockdowns, and the rapid growth that followed, along with rampant inflation, as the liquidity channelled to households flooded into the real economy.
Even before US/NATO imperialism began to step up its imperialist competition with China/Russia, therefore, social-democracy was on the rocks. Its progressive variant, based upon the interests of large-scale, socialised capital, and its requirement for larger single markets, greater centralised planning and regulation and so on, had reached its zenith in the 1970's, before crashing on the rocks of the crises of overproduction of capital, for which its Keynesian demand management policies were no longer adequate to deal with, as real capital expelled labour in favour of technology, to reduce costs and raise profits, leading to a period of stagnation, excess of money-capital, falling interest rates, and surging asset prices.
In the absence of mass, communist parties such as those created at the start of the 20th century, Marxists have followed the advice of Marx and Engels, and sought to gain the ear of workers by operating alongside the most advanced sections of those workers, inside the social-democratic workers' parties that exist more or less as a political wing of the trades unions. Our attitude to those social-democratic parties, is, therefore, the same as to those trades unions. We recognise them as workers organisations, but workers organisations that are themselves, in terms of their function and ideology, bourgeois. In other words, the function of a trades union is not to “abolish the wages system”, by going beyond it, and establishing Socialism, but is simply to bargain for better wages and conditions within that existing capitalist system. Its premise is the continuation of capitalism, based on the idea that the interests of capital and labour can be reconciled, and that all that is required is a better price for the commodity the workers sell – their labour-power. Social-Democracy is that ideology writ large, and the main political parties have pursued it since WWII, for example, in Britain, both Labour and Conservative, with only marginal variations between them.
In the post-war period, the long wave expansion facilitated that delusion of reconcilable interests, as real capital expanded, and real wages grew, both in money wages, and in terms of a social-wage, provided via an expanding welfare state, itself central to an expansion of state directed planning and regulation of the economy, in terms of labour supply. When that expansion ended in the 1970's, the delusion of reconcilable interests faced the shock of a return of bitter, and prolonged industrial struggles, such as the British Miners strikes of the 1970's, and early 80's. Progressive social-democracy was found wanting, and, as capital resolved the crisis by introducing labour-saving technologies, those bitter disputes, inevitably ended in favour of capital rather than labour. Along with it, social-democracy, itself moved right, in favour of conservative, rather than progressive social-democracy.
All the ideas of progressive social-democracy, of promoting further rational planning and regulation, based upon a curtailment of the power of fictitious-capital, and expansion of industrial democracy, were swept aside. The only elements of that retained were in respect of the need to establish larger single markets, such as that of the EU, but the basis of that was to reduce costs, and other frictions, thereby, raising profits without the need for additional capital accumulation, and so facilitating a rise in dividends/interest payments out of those profits. When the working-class, across the globe had gone down to defeat, the excess of money-capital, from realised profits, facilitated a continuation of the established delusion, by increasing debt to finance consumption.
But, it was, all the same, a delusion, which ultimately was bound to be shattered, as shattered it was in a series of financial crashes, the biggest of which was, so far, that of 2008. The trade war between US/NATO imperialism and Chinese/Russian imperialism, has simply sharpened the contradictions within that social-democracy. On the one hand, progressive social-democracy, as represented by the likes of Syriza, Podemos, Corbyn, Sanders itself continues to possess all of the deficiencies that progressive social-democracy has always had, as a bourgeois ideology. It is a bourgeois-ideology that represents the interests of a social relation – capital – embodied in a thing, real socialised, industrial capital, but whose personification, the workers that are, objectively, its collective owners, neither realise they own it, nor, therefore, have or demand control over it! Hence, the continued ideas presented by both trades unions, and progressive social-democrats based upon negotiating with the non-owners of that capital, the shareholders, as well as ideas about buying out those shareholders, by the capitalist state.
At least, the progressive social-democrats of the 1970's had reached a level of consciousness to demand a degree of workers control, and industrial democracy, even if it amounted to little more than an incorporation of the trades unions, and the participation of the workers in their own exploitation, by capital. Today's progressive social-democrats are nowhere near having reached such a level of class consciousness, and so its no wonder that the majority of workers are far from it too. With no real class alternative to the ideology of conservative social-democracy, and yet, in conditions where that conservative social-democracy, has itself completely failed, and been driven into ever greater levels of absurdity, as paper, fictitious wealth has expanded to grotesque levels, whilst real wealth creation has stagnated, as real capital accumulation has been held back, its no wonder that large sections of society have turned away from it, to other, reactionary, populist alternatives. The fact that those same processes, since the 1980's, led to a resurgence of the petty-bourgeoisie, which has grown by 50%, with all of its attendant, narrow-minded bigotry, and individualism, its parochialism and nationalism, facilitated that ideological and political shift to the Right as manifest in Brexit, Le Pen, Trumpism and so on.
Social-democracy, within itself, reflects the contradictory and transitional nature of imperialism, as the stage of capitalist development based upon large-scale, socialised industrial capital. Socialised capital is, objectively, the collective property of the “associated producers”, as Marx describes it, in Capital III, Chapter 27, and as he and Engels describe it in Anti-Duhring. As set out above, it is that which progressive social-democracy represents, which is one reason it is also frequently managerialist and corporatist, as well as statist, reflecting the role of the professional middle-class, as part of those associated producers. But, as Marx and Engels describe, those “associated producers”, certainly as far as the workers are concerned, do not exercise control over their collective property. That control is exercised not by the owners of that capital, but by share-owners, who are merely creditors of the company, but whose position as ruling-class, has enabled them to usurp control over property they do not own. It is their interests, the interests of fictitious-capital that conservative social-democracy represents.
For the reasons set out above, they too have failed, and yet inertia, and the failure of progressive social-democracy to reassert itself, let alone a revolutionary socialist movement, has left that conservative social-democracy to vie with the absolutely reactionary alternative of petty-bourgeois nationalism, as the two choices presented to societies. Petty-bourgeois nationalism, whose clearest ideological expression is given by the classical liberalism of Mises and Hayek, and their modern day apostles, also cannot provide any solution, as manifest with Brexit, then with Trump, and with Truss. So, where, in the post-war period, elections led to an alternation of variations of social-democratic governments, each represented only a shade within the spectrum of social-democracy from its conservative to progressive wings, today, we have alternations between two failed choices of conservative social-democracy and petty-bourgeois nationalism.
The petty-bourgeoisie, having grown by around 50%, and representing around 30% of society, is heterogeneous, but its strength, as it always has, comes from its overall size, and capacity to utilise those numbers when it comes to elections. The gravitational force of that is shown by the collapse of the other mainstream parties into an accommodation to it, most glaringly seen in the abandonment even of conservative social-democracy by Blue Labour, under Starmer, and the championing of its own set of reactionary, petty-bourgeois, nationalist ideas. Even more does that leave the working-class with no leadership, and no credible alternative, meaning that demoralised sections of it, fall into apathy, or themselves tag along behind the petty-bourgeoisie.
Hence we see, Macron who was the last hope for that social-democracy isolated, and having once again conned the workers, via a Popular Front, to support his candidates, to keep out Le Pen, then stabs the workers in the back, and leans upon Le Pen, and the right-wing Republicans. In Germany, a similar trajectory for the SPD, exacerbated by the subservience of the EU to US imperialism/NATO, which in its boycotts and so on of Russian energy etc., has seriously damaged the German economy. Now, Scholz too is on his way out, with the forces of the Right gaining in consequence. Starmer, in Britain, did not even manage to obtain the level of support that Corbyn obtained in 2019, let alone, in 2017, and yet, due to the corrupt electoral system, sits on a huge parliamentary majority. But, again, whilst backing US/NATO imperialism to the hilt, his government, began by inflicting further attacks on the working-class, sending its already abysmal level of support to even lower levels, even below the despised Tories.
Only the working-class itself can provide a real, progressive alternative, and that alternative, now, must be built in the day to day struggles in the workplace, where the long wave uptrend continues to favour workers, as labour shortages grow, but the mistake made in the 1950's and 60's, of believing that an adequate solution can come solely from such economistic struggles must be avoided. Political struggles are required, based upon a real class struggle, a political struggle to secure for workers their rightful control over their collective property, and to do that requires the building of a mass communist party.
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