Conservative social-democracy (neoliberalism) reflects the interests not of the real socialised industrial capital, or, therefore, its collective owners – the working-class – but the interests of the non-owners, the shareholders, i.e. the ruling class of coupon clippers and speculators. As Marx showed in Capital III, this fictitious-capital stands in opposition not to the workers as workers, but to industrial capital itself, which, in the era of imperialism, of socialised, monopoly capital, is, objectively, the collective property of the workers. It is why Marx and Engels, themselves felt happy about engaging in gambling on stock markets, because, as they saw it, it was only, if they were successful, taking money away from the ruling-class parasites, not from workers.
Marx wrote to his uncle Lion Philips, on 25th June, 1864, for example,
“I have, which will surprise you not a little, been speculating—partly in American FUNDS, but more especially in English stocks, which are springing up like mushrooms this year (in furtherance of every imaginable and unimaginable joint stock enterprise), are forced up to a quite unreasonable level and then, for the most part, collapse. In this way, I have made over £400 and, now that the complexity of the political situation affords greater scope, I shall begin all over again. It's a type of operation that makes small demands on one's time, and it's worth while running some risk in order to relieve the enemy of his money.”
Engels had shares in the London and Northern Railway Co., South Metropolitan Gas Co., Channel Tunnel Corp. and Foreign and Colonial Government Trust Co. As with Marx's comment above, he noted, that trading stocks “simply adjusts the distribution of the surplus value.”. It doesn’t expropriate it from the workers.
It was the idea of conservative social-democracy (neoliberalism) that wealth could be created out of thin air, from asset price rises, which formed the new global order of the 1980's and 90's, including in the proposed constitution of the EU, as set out in The Lisbon Treaty.. All those elements that facilitated the free movement of capital and labour, as well as creating a level playing field for capital, within the EU, which provided the kind of macroeconomic planning and regulation, required by large-scale capital to invest, over the long-term, were retained, because that facilitated a growth of profits, and, thereby, the payment of interest/dividends/rents/taxes out of those profits, but all of those elements of progressive-social democracy, of greater industrial democracy, and so on, were ditched.
No wonder that Thatcher was, initially, such an enthusiast for the creation of the EU, and its single market. But, those solutions, created their own contradictions, and sowed the seeds of the destruction of that conservative social-democratic (neoliberal) model. The technological revolution, by raising productivity, created a relative surplus population, the basis of a reduced value of labour-power/wages, and rise in the rate of profit. But, it, also, by the same token, meant that any given level of output was produced with less labour, or that any given increase in output, required less labour than previously. This is the nature of intensive accumulation, which, also, corresponds to the stagnation period of the long wave cycle, producing lower than average growth of output. It is characteristic of such periods, described by Marx, in Theories of Surplus Value, in which net output expands relative to gross output. That was exacerbated by the process of deindustrialisation in developed economies, as the production of mature products, requiring only cheap unskilled labour moved to China, and other parts of Asia, etc.
Large numbers of workers, in developed economies, particularly in Britain and the US, where this model was championed by Thatcher and Reagan, found themselves unemployed – it was, also, during this period, that Thatcher introduced 20 changes to the calculation of the number of unemployed, including encouraging the over 60's to declare they had no intention of getting another job, in return for not having to regularly sign on, and encouraging the unemployed to register as sick, rather than unemployed! It was, also, during this period, that large numbers of the unemployed were encouraged to become self-employed, petty-bourgeois, with schemes such as the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, as a Thatcherite application of the reactionary ideas of a Universal Basic Income.
It went together with other such policies to encourage the growth of the petty-bourgeoisie, such as the introduction of Enterprise Zones, in which such small firms were encouraged to take advantage of workers, to a greater extent, by the removal of even the most basic rights. The result was an inevitable growth of this impoverished petty-bourgeoisie, and, where they employed small numbers of workers, an increase in their exploitation, whilst doing so in conditions of low levels of productivity. The same thing had been seen in the 19th century, in the form of the sweat shops. It was a more cultured, western version of the same attempt to revert back to some society based upon the rampant free competition of a society of individual peasant producers attempted by Pol Pot, and inevitably, also, collapsing in short order, but having created large scale social destruction.
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