Brexit Britain's Bridge To Nowhere - Part 12 of 27

So, it is no wonder that, in Britain, Brexit, as with the EEC Referendum of the 1970's, or, as with the Mosley Memorandum of the 1930's, brought together forces on both the Right and Left, around what was a reactionary, petty-bourgeois, nationalist agenda. The conditions that enabled this delusional set of ideas to flourish, essentially, come down to the inevitable failure of social-democracy, and the failure of socialists to provide a programme around which the working-class could move forward, Instead, socialists were dragged down by the centripetal force exerted by the petty-bourgeoisie, and by the weight of social-democracy and Stalinism in the labour movement.

They settled into a routinism of reformism and economism, falsely equating purely industrial, distributional struggles for class struggle, ignoring the property question, and this process was further encouraged, as they became diffused into a multitude of competing sects, each trying to “build the party” on the basis of a more or less one to one recruitment of militants, based upon their ever more frantic involvement in these day to day activities, and also, reflecting their petty-bourgeois/studentist nature, also seeking quick recruitment by orienting towards those other sectional struggles, and petty-bourgeois nationalist struggles that mobilised large numbers of students and the middle-class, largely on a moralistic rather than class basis. In itself that encouraged the development of popular-frontism.

The progressive social-democracy of the 1960's and 70's, reflected the interests of large-scale socialised capital, and its transitional nature as capital, but, now, capital collectively owned by the “associated producers”, but which was controlled by shareholders. So long as capital expanded, and profits grew, making possible a corresponding increase in dividends/interest/rent/taxes, the ruling class of coupon-clippers were content to simply let those revenues roll in. Its ideological reflection was the increasing planning and regulation of the economy – including, increasingly, the global economy – via state planning bodies such as NEDO, and, at an international level, via para state bodies such as the IMF, WTO, World Bank etc. It was also reflected in the parallel development of corporatism, of the idea of industrial democracy, as already existed in the vanguard of such social-democracy in Germany, and proposed in the EU's Draft Fifth Company Law Directive, and in the 1975 Bullock Commission Report, in Britain.

As Marx and Engels described it in Anti-Duhring,

"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."

That reached its limits in the 1970's, as the long wave cycle reached the stage at which labour shortages became so acute that rising relative wages squeezed profits, to the point that a crisis of overproduction of capital occurred. Socialists, still enmeshed in the ideas of the previous 20 years of industrial struggle, bargaining within the system, had no adequate programme, to respond to the changed material conditions. They recognised that the programme of that social-democracy offered no real solution, but other than their own continued engagement in distributional struggles, their only other alternative was an ultimatistic call for revolution, along the lines of 1917. Large sections of that Left combined with the Left-nationalist social-democrats, such as Benn, to oppose even the rational extension of that process, i.e. the EEC/EU.

Having pinned their colours to that mast, they inevitably dissipated their influence when the workers proved to be in advance of them, voting 2:1 in favour of remaining in the EEC. But, the consequent victory of conservative social-democracy over them, was also severely limited in the solutions it could offer. The expansion of the EEC/EU certainly facilitated those solutions, however. It meant that large-scale, socialised capital could operate on a more rational basis, provided by the size of the EU single market, saving British capital from its particular set of restrictions. The further resolution of the global crisis of overproduction of capital of the 1970's, and early 80's, has been described earlier, as also set out in my book, on Marx and Engels Theories of Crisis, which also sets out the inevitability of the current financial and political crisis facing the ruling class owners of fictitious capital, and their state. Capital engaged in a technological revolution to solve the problems faced by a shortage of labour. The microchip revolution, created a relative surplus population, pushed wages and the value of labour-power down, raising the rate of surplus value, and rate of profit. The supply of money-capital from profits exceeded the demand for it for capital accumulation, pushing interest rates down, and setting in train a huge rise in asset prices.

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