There is, currently, no crisis of overproduction of capital, as Conrad claims. There is no shortage of profitable avenues in which money-capital could be profitably invested. There is, currently, no serious threat to profits from wages – rather, the threat comes from excessive payments of interest/dividends and other transfers to shareholders, and from rents and taxes, including the excessive rents arising from sky-high property prices, resulting from the same process of asset price inflation, and speculation. Part of the drain of surplus value, into rents, also takes the form of taxes levied by the state to cover the payment of housing benefits and so on. It is precisely because there is no crisis of overproduction of capital, no threat to profits from rising relative wages, no threat to capitalist property from a revolutionary proletariat that the ruling-class does not need to resort to the methods of fascism of the 1920's, and 30's. Conrad, acknowledges that it does not need those methods, which, consequently, sits at odds with his claims about the existence of a crisis of overproduction of capital, about there being no profitable avenues for productive investment.
Labour markets have certainly tightened compared to the 1980's/90's, just as they did in the 1950's/60's, compared to the 1930's, but not yet to the degree that labour supplies are unavailable, or unavailable at wages that produce surplus value, i.e. there is no crisis of overproduction of capital relative to labour supply. In the 1960's, unemployment fell to around 1-2%, whereas, measured on the same basis, today, it is still around 6%. Even on the current basis of measurement it is still around 4%. As Marx noted,
“Given the necessary means of production, i.e., a sufficient accumulation of capital, the creation of surplus-value is only limited by the labouring population if the rate of surplus-value, i.e., the intensity of exploitation, is given; and no other limit but the intensity of exploitation if the labouring population is given.”
In fact, considering the real nature of Trumpism/Starmerism/Brexitism, as an attempt to represent the interests of petty-bourgeois nationalism, rather than the interests of capital itself, the issue of adequate labour supply could be even more facilitated by increased immigration, and a free movement of labour. Indeed, that is what Blair's government did, in the early 2000's, just as Atlee's government did after 1945, and as did many other social-democratic regimes. The fact that Trump/Starmer/Brexit does, or tries to do, the opposite is a clear indication of the fact that it is not operating on the basis of that social-democratic ideology, i.e. not operating on the basis of the interests of large-scale, monopoly capital/imperialism, but signifies a reactionary step-back, into the ideology of 18th/early 19th century liberalism, and petty-bourgeois nationalism, which inevitably butts up against the reality of 21st century monopoly capitalism/imperialism.
But, because Conrad – and he's not alone – equates Trump with the US ruling class, and its interests, he, then, concludes that its not only the ruling-class that does not need fascism, but also Trump. That is a non sequitur, as soon as you recognise that Trump does not represent the interests of the US ruling-class (owners of fictitious-capital), nor the interests of US industrial capital itself, i.e. real, large-scale, socialised capital. He says,
“Trump, stating the obvious, has nowadays absolutely no need for non-state fighting formations - a defining marker of fascism qua fascism. The totally botched January 6 2021 attempted self-coup with its Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and other boogaloos was another matter.”
This is self-contradictory, confused, and theoretically false. It assumes that Trump, like Mussolini, or Hitler, or Franco, required “non-state fighting formations” to break apart workers organisations on behalf of capital, or the ruling-class. But, Trump, as representative of a petty-bourgeoisie that has grown in size by 50% since the 1980's, and has grown in social weight even more, as both real capital has been relatively diminished by “deindustrialisation”, and, in the developed economies, by the process of “globalisation”, the new international division of labour I described back in the 1980's, does not have as his target a flaccid labour movement, but the capitalist state itself. For that, he and those like him, most certainly do require, obviously, “non-state fighting formations”, such as those Conrad describes in his own description, as well as an attempt, as suggested by Bannon and others, to hobble the existing state apparatus and to put in place their own functionaries. A clearer example was the prolonged battles that the Tories had, after 2016, in trying to push through Brexit, in the face of opposition from the state apparatus, courts, and so on. Le Pen has just found the same reality in France.
This is what petty-bourgeois, nationalist regimes such as those of Trump and Johnson/Truss/Starmer have in common, and why Blue Labour thinks it can continue to play the role of ideological representative of America in Europe, whilst trying to retain its vital economic ties to the EU, as its largest trading partner. It sets both Britain and the US apart from the EU as a whole, which continues to try to adhere to the ideas of social-democracy, primarily of conservative social-democracy (neoliberalism), but, which, as Germany is now finding, is increasingly being pushed back towards the forms of social-democracy of the post-war period. Even those petty-bourgeois nationalist regimes inside the EU, such as that of Orban, in Hungary, have been forced to accept the reality, manifest in Brexit, that they have no future outside the EU. The petty-bourgeois populists, such as Le Pen, and Meloni, have also had to abandon their own commitments to leaving the EU, meaning that it is only the petty-bourgeois reactionaries of Reform, the Tories and Blue Labour that, now, continue to peddle that particular snake oil.
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