This is, again, magnified in the accelerated nature of the process seen in Russia, as detailed by Lenin. The growth of the bourgeoisie also sees the spread of bourgeois ideas. A look at England shows, for example, the way that the bourgeoisie begins to send its children to university. Those children, having done so, go on to take up positions in the state, as well as in the schools and universities themselves, so that they infuse those institutions with their own ideology. This goes on all the while that the political regime, itself, remains dominated by the landed aristocracy.
Even by the time of the 1832 Reform Act, only 2% of the population, in Britain, had the right to vote, which excluded, also, most of the bourgeoisie, more or less all of the petty-bourgeoisie, and of course, the whole of the emerging working-class. Even where the bourgeoisie did have votes, they were concentrated in the large towns and cities, which did not constitute parliamentary constituencies, as against the rotten boroughs, and concentration of seats in rural areas, dominated by the landed aristocracy. Even by the end of that century, parliament continued to be dominated by them, until such time that workers got the vote, and were pulled in, largely, behind the Liberal Party, as the representative of the newly developed, social-democratic alliance of large-scale industrial capital, and the industrial proletariat.
As Lenin described, in Russia, by the 1890's, its state was also dominated by the representatives of the bourgeoisie, and it was the interests of capital that dictated the actions of the state. Yet, it was still the old feudal-Asiatic class that dominated the Tsarist political regime.
“Trade on a large scale, that is to say, particularly international and, even more so, world trade, requires free owners of commodities who are unrestricted in their movements and as such enjoy equal rights; who may exchange their commodities on the basis of laws that are equal for them all, at least in each particular place. The transition from handicraft to manufacture presupposes the existence of a number of free workers — free on the one hand from the fetters of the guild and on the other from the means whereby they could themselves utilise their labour-power — workers who can contract with the manufacturer for the hire of their labour-power, and who hence, as parties to the contract, have rights equal to his.” (p 132)
And, so these requirements of capital and bourgeois society invariably come to dominate the actions of the state, i.e. of its permanent bureaucracy. Incidentally, talk of “the deep state” is just petty-bourgeois, conspiracist nonsense. What they really mean is just “the capitalist state”, i.e. the state of the bourgeois ruling-class, which, as a class state acts on behalf of that class, which is now a global ruling class, whichever party wins elections. It is the reality that Trump and Truss discovered, as they tried to pursue the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie to turn back the clock to the days prior to the dominance of imperialist capital, and the social-democratic state, and that Trump and Blue Labour are finding once more, as the global ruling class, again, uses its power via the global financial markets, to send interest rates higher, and their currencies lower, in response to their reactionary nationalist, petty-bourgeois agendas.
That is necessarily so, not just because the real human beings that make up that state bureaucracy are themselves bourgeois, but because the state must ensure its own survival, taken in its wider context. As Marx and Engels pointed out to Zasulich and Danielson, after Russia's defeat in the Crimean War, it recognised that it had to modernise, in order to compete with other capitalist states. It had to abandon its existing feudal-Asiatic production, and develop capitalist production.
“And finally the equality and equal status of all human labour, because and in so far as it is human labour, found its unconscious but clearest expression in the law of value of modern bourgeois political economy, according to which the value of a commodity is measured by the socially necessary labour embodied in it.” (p 132-3)
No comments:
Post a Comment