Lenin, in “Left-Wing Childishness”, pointed out that the threat, in Russia, after the revolution, came not from state-monopoly capitalism, but from the vast numbers of small private capitalists, the petty-bourgeois producers and traders, which continued to exist. The ultra-Lefts, who railed against state-capitalism,
“reveal their petty-bourgeois mentality precisely by not recognising the petty-bourgeois element as the principal enemy of socialism in our country.”
It is state-monopoly capitalism, Lenin, following Marx and Engels, notes, which is the material basis for Socialism. In Russia, after the revolution, its economy was still overwhelmingly dominated by small private producers, petty-bourgeois, and peasants. State-capitalism, Lenin notes, was a great step forward for its economy, and the threat to it was the former, which continually pierced it via their attempts at profiteering, and the kinds of methods that Engels described, as having died out in Western Europe, as large-scale industrial capital had come to dominate. And, that is, indeed, the difference that, for more than a century, the developed economies have been dominated by that large-scale, monopoly capitalism/imperialism.
The way forward resides in recognising that monopoly capitalism as the material basis of Socialism, and the need for workers to assert their rightful democratic control over it, as their collective property. The struggle for such industrial-democracy, should have characterised the 20th century, in the same way that the struggle for political democracy characterised the 19th century, but, instead, workers were misled into the belief that nothing had changed since the era of private-capitalism of the early 19th century, and were limited to a merely economistic struggle for higher wages, and better conditions. All that social-democracy and Menshevist/Stalinist reformism did was to extend that economistic view into the political sphere, on the basis of statist, Lassallean/Fabian bourgeois-democratic illusions in the class neutrality of the state.
The ideologists of the petty-bourgeoisie on both Right and Left, continue to portray the enemy as being that state monopoly capitalism, which is the basis of Socialism, rather than being the vast, reactionary mass of the petty-bourgeoisie, which seeks to hold back that development, to return to some golden age of the small producer, and so on. The fact that large sections of what passes for the Left, since World War II, has subordinated itself to fighting for the interests of petty-bourgeois nationalism, in the name of “anti-imperialism”, has facilitated a similar opposition to monopoly capital, in alliance with the petty-bourgeoisie. So, it is no wonder that confusion reigns, currently, in their attempt to reconcile the petty-bourgeois nationalist ideology of the likes of Trump or Starmer, with it being all part and parcel of representing the interests of that monopoly-capitalism, or as they have termed it “oligarchic capital”, to fit in with the role of the likes of Musk et al.
That Trump, as much as Starmer, or Boris Johnson/Truss before, has to accept the reality that much as they and their political regime rests upon the support of the petty-bourgeoisie (in the case of Blue Labour not even that, which is why its electoral base is crumbling) the reality is that the world economy, and consequently, the national economy rests upon large-scale, socialised, industrial capital, i.e. upon state monopoly capitalism. This is no different to the analysis that Lenin provided, at the end of the 19th century, in relation to the similar petty-bourgeois ideas of the Narodniks, except that, given the development of imperialism since then, it is even more reactionary, even more delusional to think that some reversion to that path is possible today. It is the significance of the point made earlier that the characterisation of the state stems from its class nature, not from the superficiality of its political regime.
Bismark represented the interests of the old Prussian Junkers, and yet, as with Louis Bonaparte, whose coup rested upon the mobilisation of the petty-bourgeoisie, and dangerous classes, had to recognise that the future of Prussia resided in its capitalist development, a development that was facilitated by the Prussian state, itself. The same applied to Russia, after its defeat in the Crimean War, as described by Marx and Engels, and later by Lenin.
Mao Zedong led a peasant army in a guerilla war to seize power, and establish his political regime. But, having done so, he was faced with the question of what kind of class state it was going to be. The idea of some kind of non-class state, or peasant state was impossible, and the experience of Pol Pot, in Cambodia, later, in trying to establish such a peasant state, illustrated that point. The conditions in which the Chinese Revolution, in 1949, took place, and its reliance on the USSR, dictated that, irrespective of the peasant and petty-bourgeois nature of the regime and forces that brought it about, it had to base itself on the development of a workers' state, albeit one deformed in a similar manner to those in the USSR and Eastern Europe. In other words, it was going to be a state based upon socialised means of production, in which the material foundations, the property forms upon which the landlord and bourgeois classes rest, had been ripped up.
When that failed, as in Eastern Europe, there was no “alternative path”, based on neither a bourgeois nor a workers' state. As with the Junker Prussian state, the French state under Louis Bonaparte, or Russia under the Tsar, after 1851, the alternative was only a rapid development of bourgeois property, of industrial-capital, now, under the tutelage of the state itself, which is what arose under Deng Xiaoping.
The Trumpists might think they have a right to their own facts, but reality, inevitably, disabuses them of that, just as it has done with the Brexiters, most dramatically manifest in the form of the collapse of the Truss government. The Brexiters, like Farage, saw the reality of the inevitable chaos of Brexit, and claimed that it was all down to the fact that Johnson had not implemented a true Brexit. So, they backed Truss, who represented the apogee of that movement in Britain. But, that simply exposed it even more, as the attempt to pursue it, led even more quickly to a disaster that drove them out of office.
The astronomically wealthy individuals, of the type of Musk, might, also, think that their enormous wealth enables them to defy the laws of capital, and of history, which fuels their individualist, petty-bourgeois ideology, but, ultimately, they are subject to those laws like everyone else. Having enormous wealth, to temporarily escape Earth's gravity, does not change the fact of its continued existence, nor the fact that, eventually, you are brought back to Earth by it. The ideology of some of those individuals is simply a reflection of the growth of the petty-bourgeoisie over the last 40 years, reversing the trend of the last 200 years, and of the growth of Libertarianism/anarcho-capitalism based upon it. It also, reflects the point made by Marx, that the ideas of these owners of fictitious-capital that seems to produce a revenue (interest/dividends) magically and automatically, separated from any relation to the need of real industrial capital to produce surplus-value/profits, is not to be confused with the ideas and interests that flow, objectively from the needs of that real industrial capital.
As I have written before, a look at the ideas behind Star Wars, in the 1980's, and other steam punk fiction, is also a reflection of it. Steam punk is based upon an absurd contradiction in which we have tremendously advanced, technological societies, and yet, with the people in those societies living in social formations like those that existed under feudalism or before. A working-class is absent in all of these portrayals, the majority being peasants or petty commodity producers and traders, criminals, or else slaves, ruled either by some form of aristocratic or bureaucratic ruling class or caste. In Star Wars, the heroes, are, in fact, reactionaries seeking to overturn the “Empire”, in favour of a bunch of feudal aristocrats and mystics, and doing so by essentially those same terroristic/militaristic means typical of the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie, rather than proletarian class struggle.
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