Starmer and Blue Labour look set to nationalise the “British” Steel plant in Scunthorpe. As with many other things, recently, the issue has been hastened by the actions of Trump's regime in the US, and, in particular, his decision to slap 25% tariffs on UK exports of steel, aluminium, and cars to the US, despite all of the claims that Starmer's Brexit Britain had some mythical advantage of nimbleness to suck up to him, or as Trump put it, “kiss his ass”. In fact, the US tariffs are not the reason that “British” Steel is not globally competitive, and Scunthorpe is closing. The real reason is that it simply cannot mobilise the huge amounts of real capital required to produce on an efficient scale in the era of imperialism, and it can't do that, because, in turn, it does not have a large enough domestic market to sell into that China, or the EU, does. Again, the proximate reason for the failure of “British” Steel, like the “British” fishing industry, is that Brexit caused Britain to deliberately cut itself out of that large domestic, single market of the EU.
The example of “British” Steel at Scunthorpe illustrates a lot of important issues. One of them, obviously, is that alluded to above, which is that, in the era of imperialism/large-scale, socialisedindustrial capital, the scale of production, required for efficiency, becomes so large that it bursts the fetters of the old nation state, and requires equally large single markets to sell into. As Lenin described it, following Marx and Engels' analysis in Capital III/Anti-Duhring/Socialism Utopian and Scientific, this socialised capital takes the form of state monopoly capitalism. Those single markets must, then, be multinational just as the national markets replaced the old regional/provincial markets of the pre-capitalist era. The rationale of that is to have a single, multinational state that creates the required set of rules, laws, regulations and so on, for capital to operate on a level playing field within, but which also acts to protect the capital operating within it, against capital operating within other states. It was on that basis that the EU was established, and one of its forerunners was the European Coal and Steel Community.
The other aspect of this large-scale, industrial capital, analysed by Marx and Engels, is that it could no longer be privately owned capital. Even the largest, wealthiest, private capitalists could no longer provide the required money-capital to operate on such a scale, as became obvious, for example, in the case of the railways, in Britain, even in the early part of the 19th century. To operate on an efficient scale, the capital itself had to become socialised, in the form of joint stock companies (corporations) or cooperatives, in which the company itself, as a legal entity, owns the capital, and simply borrows the money-capital it requires, via one means or another (bank loans, the issue of shares, bonds and so on). This socialised capital is, then, not the property of any individual, or of the people who lend money, equipment or land and property to it, but is the collective property of the associated producers within it, at any given time, much as an orchestra or a company of actors is constituted of the musicians and actors within it.
Formerly, the owners of real, industrial capital, obtained their revenue in the form of profits, but the collective owners of socialised capital, the associated producers, i.e. workers, including those professional, white collar workers who constitute the “functioning capitalists”, who manage and administer it on a daily basis, are, like all workers paid wages. The profit, now becomes, simply the means by which this socialised capital is able to accumulate additional capital, but a large part of it, is now drained from it, as interest, by the private capitalists/ruling class that have now become a parasitic class of money-lenders, and coupon clippers.
Objectively, those that are simply shareholders in a company, do not “own” the company, they only own share certificates/debt instruments, they are only its creditors, just as with the bondholders, a bank that lends it money, or an equipment leasing company that lends it machines and so on. That fact has been established in legal cases on several occasions, and is, also, evidenced by the fact that these creditors, including shareholders, have no liability for any losses that the company itself might suffer from its operations, unlike the case with privately owned capital. And yet, as ruling class, the capitalists who, as a class, removed themselves from the private ownership of real capital, and any social function in production, and became a class of money-lenders, coupon-clippers and speculators, owners not of real capital, but fictitious-capital, in the 19th century, ensured themselves, by company law, the right to still exercise control over this capital they did not own.
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.
“This historical sketch” (of the genesis of the so-called original accumulation of capital in England) “is relatively the best part of Marx's book, and would be even better if it had not supported itself with the dialectical crutch in addition to the scholarly crutch. In default of anything better and clearer, the Hegelian negation of the negation has in fact to serve here as the midwife to deliver the future from the womb of the past. The abolition of ‘individual property’, which has been effected in the way indicated above since the sixteenth century, is the first negation. It will be followed by a second, which bears the character of a negation of the negation and hence of a restoration of ‘individual property’, but in a higher form, based on the common ownership of land and of the instruments of labour”. (p 164)
As set out previously, Duhring presents this as Marx setting out a Hegelian negation of the negation, and, then, fitting material reality to it, whereas Marx's method is entirely the reverse of that. He examines, and sets out the material reality, and the historical process leading to it, and, then, sets that, into, the the context of the dialectic. Moreover, as I have set out, before, in precisely this context, and as Lenin, also, sets out in his polemics against Mikhailovsky and the Narodniks, Marx, in talking about this negation of the negation, of the “expropriation of the expropriators”, was not making a speculative prediction of something to come at some future date, but was describing what had already happened, and was continuing to unfold. Engels also makes that clear in this chapter, and later.
The “expropriation of the expropriators” had already happened, as private capital was expropriated by large-scale, socialised capital, whether in the form of the cooperative or the joint stock company, both of which, Marx describes as the transitional form of property between capitalism and socialism. It is capital that is already the collective property of the “associated producers”, i.e. workers within the company. This change in the form of property, also, did not arise as a result of any conscious will, but simply from the processes and dynamic of capital itself, of the need to produce on an ever larger scale, a scale that could no longer be achieved within the fetters of private capital. As Marx described it, in Capital III, Chapter 27,
“The capital, which in itself rests on a social mode of production and presupposes a social concentration of means of production and labour-power, is here directly endowed with the form of social capital (capital of directly associated individuals) as distinct from private capital, and its undertakings assume the form of social undertakings as distinct from private undertakings. It is the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself.”
The first negation is the expropriation of the individual commodity producers by the private capitalists. The second negation, the negation of the negation, or “expropriation of the expropriators”, is not some future event that is, often, equated with the socialist revolution, but had already happened by the late 19th century – and continues to unfold – when the process of concentration and centralisation of capital means that, first, the small private capitals are expropriated by the bigger private capitals, and, then, when even these were not big enough, they were, in turn, expropriated, not by private capitals, but by socialised capital, particularly, after 1855, by the joint stock companies.
“I am familiar with capitalist production as a social form, or an economic phase; capitalist private production being a phenomenon which in one form or another is encountered in that phase. What is capitalist private production? Production by separate entrepreneurs, which is increasingly becoming an exception. Capitalist production by joint-stock companies is no longer private production but production on behalf of many associated people. And when we pass on from joint-stock companies to trusts, which dominate and monopolise whole branches of industry, this puts an end not only to private production but also to planlessness.”
The term that Conrad goes on to use, “a fascist state”, is illiterate from a Marxist perspective. The terms, “fascist”, “authoritarian”, “Bonapartist”, “bourgeois-democratic”, or “soviet” relate not to the nature of the state, but to the nature of the political regime. The nature of the state is determined not by these superficial characteristics of the political regime, but by its class nature, i.e. is it a capitalist state or a workers' state. Trotsky, for example, noted that Nazi Germany was a capitalist state, whilst the USSR was a workers' state, but, in terms of the political regime, of Nazism and of Stalinism they were indistinguishable other than for the greater brutality of the latter.
What determines the class nature of the state is the dominant form of property, and the social relations erected upon it. A state may be in a transitional period of metamorphosis. For example, the bourgeois state in England first took the form of Mercantilism, of a symbiotic relation between the landed aristocracy, financial oligarchy, and the rising commercial bourgeoisie, most evident in the development of colonial empires, based on unequal exchange, protectionism and monopoly, but it was the dynamic of this relation (what Lenin, in another context, described as an algebraic formula), the dependence of that state on bourgeois commodity production and exchange, which defined its nature, and inevitable course of development.. Similarly, the capitalist state which arises on the back of private industrial capital, and free trade, evolves into the imperialist state of the late 19th/early 20th century, through to today. As Engels described it,
“The Reform Bill of 1831 had been the victory of the whole capitalist class over the landed aristocracy. The repeal of the Corn Laws was the victory of the manufacturing capitalist not only over the landed aristocracy, but over those sections of capitalists, too, whose interests were more or less bound up with the landed interest - bankers, stockjobbers, fundholders, etc. Free Trade meant the readjustment of the whole home and foreign, commercial and financial policy of England in accordance with the interests of the manufacturing capitalists — the class which now [These words belong apparently not to Bright but to his adherents. See The Quarterly Review, Vol. 71, No. 141, p. 273.-Ed.] represented the nation.”
To the extent that “fascism” is characteristic of any particular class, it is the petty-bourgeoisie, not the bourgeoisie, which as Lenin describes, in State and Revolution, prefers to use the regime of bourgeoisie democracy. Imperialism specifically prefers social-democracy, which itself reflects the underlying contradiction within the dominant form of property – large scale, socialised industrial capital – which, objectively, is the collective property of the “associated producers”, i.e. workers, but, which continues to be controlled, in the case of joint stock companies, by its, non-owners, i.e. shareholders, the owners of fictitious-capital.
It is the heterogeneous nature of the petty-bourgeoisie/peasantry, which means that it can never, itself, become a class for itself, or, therefore, become the ruling-class. It defines itself not by what it is for, but by what it is against – which means both against large-scale capital, and against organised labour. But, where the bourgeoisie's strength lies in its ownership and control of capital, and control of the state, and the working-class's strength resides in its collective role in production, in the workplace, and its collective strength derived from it, the petty-bourgeoisie has none of those things. Its strength, as with the peasantry, resides only in its numbers, most obviously displayed when it is able to vote, as they did for Brexit, for Trump etc. But, when that proves impotent, its chosen method is that of violence, terrorism, and guerrilla warfare, as with the peasant movements of Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Castro and so on.
The bourgeoisie can engage in a capital strike, but the petty-bourgeoisie cannot, because of the dwarfish nature of its capital, and precarious nature of its existence. The bourgeoisie has built up its state, whose ideological arms reinforce the ideas that represent its interests, as being those that are “common-sense”, or eternal truths. When, that is not enough, it has the mighty power of the monopoly of armed force, represented by its military, and police. The petty-bourgeoisie has no such permanently organised force, which is why it relies on sporadic, disorganised violence, much as the peasantry did, in the past, in various peasant revolts.
Similarly, the workers represent a large social mass, today, larger than that of the peasantry or petty-bourgeoisie, but, unlike the petty-bourgeois, the workers are permanently organised and disciplined simply as a consequence of the fact that production is based upon their collective, co-operative labour. The fact of their role in production, means that they have a far more homogeneous nature, and that is the basis of them forming trades unions, and on the back of it, their own workers parties. The working-class can press its interests by engaging not only in strikes to protect wages and conditions, but in political strikes, i.e. a General Strike. The petty-bourgeoisie cannot do so, effectively, because it is its own employer, in large part. So, again, its method resorts to violence when its numbers are no longer decisive at the ballot box. Trotsky wrote,
"It is stupid to believe that the Nazis would grow uninterruptedly, as they do now, for an unlimited period of time. Sooner or later they will drain their social reservoir. Fascism has introduced into its own ranks such dreadful contradictions, that the moment must come in which the flow will cease to replace the ebb. The moment can arrive long before the Fascists will have united about them even half of the votes. They will not be able to halt, for they will have nothing more to expect here. They will be forced to resort to an overthrow."
It was also the method of Mussolini's Black Shirts, and Hitler's Brown Shirts, and of the Zionists, as well as of political-Islam. The Zionist state in Israel was established by such terrorism, and the only difference in that with the attempt to do the same by ISIL in Syria and Iraq, is that the former had powerful backers in the corridors of power in Europe, whereas the latter did not. As I have set out before, and as Conrad has, also, to admit, the determining factor is not the existence of these fascist movements, as expressions of the petty-bourgeoisie, but whether the ruling class mobilises the much more powerful forces of its state against them or not.
Usually, when one of the two main classes – bourgeoisie and proletariat – are dominant, this intermediate mass is drawn in behind it. But, for the last 40 years, both of the two main classes have been in relative decline. In part, that is, also, a reflection of the underlying contradiction set out above, of the nature of large-scale, socialised capital. Objectively, it is the collective property of the working-class, but that class has not recognised it, or taken control of it, instead, under the ideological leadership of social-democratic/Stalinist/reformist workers' parties, has settled for simply bargaining within the system over wages. Control of that capital continued in the hands of speculators and coupon-clippers, whose immediate interests are antagonistic to that of industrial capital.
Real large-scale capital in the developed economies, has seen deindustrialisation, and, also, its interests – the accumulation of capital, and creation of surplus value – subordinated to the interests of fictitious-capital, speculation, gambling, rent-seeking and so on. The working-class, decimated in the 1980's, by the new technological revolution, which introduced large quantities of labour-saving machines, as well as by that deindustrialisation, as part of globalisation, and which had no political leadership adequate to the task of responding to it, as it attempted to simply bargain within the system, has been weak ever since.
So, it is no surprise that, during that 40 year period, as the petty-bourgeoisie has grown by 50%, and its social weight has increased, we have seen that reflected within the realm of ideas, and the political regime. The Tories (petty-bourgeois nationalist throwbacks to the period prior to the Repeal of The Corn Laws) increasingly came to dominate the Conservative Party, with Farage's assorted groups acting as outriders. Similar developments occurred with the Republicans in the US, going through various stages of The Tea Party, up to its takeover by Trump. The same process has been seen across Europe, as the post-war, conservative, social-democratic model collapsed. The ruling-class owners of fictitious-capital had asset-stripped real capital to the bone, in order to try to maintain their revenues from interest/dividends and rents, and to hold down interest rates so as to sustain astronomically inflated asset prices, and 2008 showed that was no longer possible, although, they have tried to continue it, via the surreal adventure into negative interest rates/yields, fiscal austerity and other such means.
Indeed, faced with the inevitable crisis following the introduction of his tariffs, much as happened, on a smaller scale with the same policies pursued by Truss, Trump, has, now, tried to openly claim that he has crashed the economy, so as to reduce interest rates! That is nonsense, even though the effect is the same. But, as with many of these instances Trump has just said the quiet bit out loud. As I have set out over the last year or so, for example, we saw conservative social democrats like Larry Summers saying that, US unemployment would need to rise by 50%, to around 5%, in order to reduce inflation, by which, what he really meant was that unemployment would have to rise to discipline workers, and reduce the demand for labour, so as to prevent relative wages rising at the expense of profits.
Meanwhile, the organised labour movement, which provided the material basis, and stimulus for the kinds of progressive social-democracy of the post-war period, which amounted to little more than corporatism, and an extension of planning and regulation for the benefit of real capital, was in hibernation.
Engels, therefore, looks in more detail at the reference given by Marx.
“What is referred to here is the homologous series of carbon compounds, a great many of which are already known and each of which has its own algebraic formula of composition. If, for example, as is done in chemistry, we denote an atom of carbon by C, an atom of hydrogen by H, an atom of oxygen by O, and the number of atoms of carbon contained in each compound by n, the molecular formulas for some of these series can be expressed as follows:
CnH2nO2— the series of the monobasic fatty acids.” (p 161)
Engels' point, here, is that, within these series, the composition of the compounds increases proportionally. First, one carbon atom and 2 hydrogen atoms, then, two carbon atoms with four hydrogen atoms, and so on, i.e. always twice as many hydrogen as carbon atoms. He sets out the series for the monobasic fatty acids.
CH2O2— formic acid: boiling point 100° melting point 1°
“Here therefore we have a whole series of qualitatively different bodies, formed by the simple quantitative addition of elements, and in fact always in the same proportion. This is most clearly evident in cases where the quantity of all the elements of the compound changes in the same proportion. Thus, in the normal paraffins CnH2n+2, the lowest is methane, CH4, a gas; the highest known, hexadecane, C16H34, is a solid body forming colourless crystals which melts at 21° and boils only at 278°. Each new member of both series comes into existence through the addition of CH2, one atom of carbon and two atoms of hydrogen, to the molecular formula of the preceding member, and this quantitative change in the molecular formula produces a qualitatively different body at each step.” (p 162)
Similar examples can be found throughout chemistry. Engels gives another unrelated example, as provided by the science of warfare by Napoleon. According to Napoleon, the best individual cavalrymen were those of the Mamelukes. However, they lacked the discipline of the French cavalry, so that, at a certain point, this discipline of the latter, became a more significant factor than the individual prowess of the horseman.
“Two Mamelukes were undoubtedly more than a match for three Frenchmen; 100 Mamelukes were equal to 100 Frenchmen; 300 Frenchmen could generally beat 300 Mamelukes, and 1,000 Frenchmen invariably defeated 1,500 Mamelukes.” (p 163)
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.
Trump has capitulated on his trade war, again, and now in the most humiliating manner. It is the same kind of capitulation as that of the Brexiters in Britain, which occurred as a series of such collapses, which they sought to deny, but which everyone could see.
Trump, of course, was one of the prime backers of Brexit, along with his friend Putin. Theresa May claimed that “Brexit Meant Brexit”, before having to accept that her threats that Britain would commit suicide, via a “No Deal”, if the EU didn't give it what it wanted, were empty. She couldn't even get a majority in parliament for her Brexit proposals, and when she sought to get more Tory MP's to do that, by calling an election in 2017, the result was that she lost a load more seats, and her majority, with Corbyn's Labour Party securing the biggest increase in the Labour vote, and number of seats since 1945. As the Brexiters tried to claim that it was all down to May not really believing in Brexit, she was replaced by the arch-Brexiter Boris Johnson, who also couldn't get a majority for his Brexit plan, and who ended up also, capitulating to the EU, having to recognise that if Britain wanted to continue to export goods to the EU, which is its largest trading partner, it would have to comply with EU standards, laws and regulations. In fact, on that basis, Johnson had to accept a worse deal in relation to Northern Ireland, than that negotiated by May, which he had rejected.
As, the reality of Brexit began to role out a growing chaos, it was temporarily masked by the pandemic, or more precisely by the lockdowns that the government, and other governments introduced which shut down a large part of economic activity. The lockdowns were, as Professor Woolhouse has set out, stupid an act of madness, driven by the lie that the COVID virus was an equal threat to everyone, whereas the reality was that it was only a serious threat to around 20% of the population, i.e. mostly those over the age of 70. The data on COVID deaths, shows that, indeed, 90% of them are of people over 65. The ridiculous laws and regulations that Johnson introduced, under pressure from a sensationalist media, became his own downfall, as politics descended to the level of pantomime, in the subsequent furore over who had attended a party during that time, and what constituted a party or just a work meeting!!!
But, the reality was, also, that Johnson had also not been able to “Get Brexit Done”, as he claimed, because Britain continued to have to comply with EU laws and regulations – the thing that Trump also now complains about, when he talks about the EU refusing to accept US GM foods, chlorinated chicken, and so on – and was being attacked by Farage, and so on, which led to the split in the pro-Brexit vote in 2024, between the three petty-bourgeois nationalist parties – Reform, Tories and Blue Labour – which allowed the latter to win, despite seeing the worst drop in its vote ever, down 30% from Corbyn's vote in 2017, and the lowest share of the vote, for any winning party ever. But, of course, before that, the Farage narrative, which insisted that Johnson had betrayed Brexit, was itself exposed as a lie.
They lined up behind Truss, who proceeded to pursue the course of a true Brexit, and all of the petty-bourgeois, nationalist agenda that goes with it. Within days, the financial markets had punished the Pound, and UK bonds, pushing the government's borrowing costs ever higher. Not surprisingly, Truss was quickly removed.
Trump, who had told Theresa May that she should “sue the EU” - on exactly what grounds, remains a mystery, as it was to May when he suggested it, and was probably a mystery to Trump as well – over Brexit, attempted to pursue a similar petty-bourgeois, nationalist agenda in the US, in his first term, but had little more success, as the ruling-class, and its state frustrated his efforts in the same way as had happened in the UK with Brexit. Trump's trade war, which was ramped up more after 2018, when global growth had been rising causing, interest rates across the globe to rise, which, in turn saw a 20% drop in US share prices, had the effect of slowing that growth, and giving justification for the US Federal Reserve, and other central banks to stop their removal of QE, which enabled money to flow back into financial speculation. The imposition of lockdowns saw that policy of QE, and destruction of the value of currencies intensify further, which led to the global spike in inflation that began in 2021, and has continued since, in a series of waves.
As I wrote at the time, although Trump's trade war – and to a much lesser extent Brexit – caused a slow down in global trade and growth, it was only temporary, because the consequence was, already, to lead to that trade to simply flow into alternative channels, and for growth to then resume. Again, lockdowns disguised that, but, once lockdowns ended, the explosion of trade through these new channels, also reflected in what has been termed, a break down of existing supply chains, saw global growth rocket, and all of those devalued currencies, now led to the inflation that followed. There is, of course,an element of truth, in Trump's argument, here, because that re-routing of trade, also meant that China, shifted some of its production to Vietnam and elsewhere, much as Britain and the US, shifted their production of mature products, requiring only cheap unskilled labour, to developing economies in the 1980's.
In fact, the consequence of Trump's trade war, at that time, was to create conditions in which China, and others in Asia, began to develop alternatives to the US, and its dominance of the world trading systems and mechanisms. It has put China in a stronger position, now that Trump has resumed what he left off in 2020. It also, created the conditions, after 2020, in which the sanctions applied by US imperialism, and its subordinates in Europe, and elsewhere, to Russia, were not only ineffective, but largely counterproductive. They failed to tank the Russian economy, which in fact, has continued to grow faster than economies in the EU, on the back of its exports of energy and primary products to China, India and elsewhere, whilst the rising costs of those things to the EU, primarily Germany, as a result of the US inspired boycotts, has tanked the German, and, thereby, the EU economy, and reduced its rate of profit. The beneficiary was China, as its position in dominating a Eurasian economic bloc was strengthened.
When Trump lost the 2020 Presidential election to Biden, the underlying interests of US imperialism did not change, but could now find a more open expression than the deformed expression that resulted from Trump's petty-bourgeois, nationalist agenda, much as had happened, in Britain, as a result of Brexit. Biden continued, in large part, with Trump's trade war against China, but sought to restore the position of US imperialism in the Pacific that Trump had undermined. Australia, which had been drawing closer to China, on which it depends, as a market for its primary products, was drawn back towards US imperialism, via AUKUS. But, ultimately, the gravitational pull of China, was bound to reassert itself, and that has been accelerated, as Trump imposed his tariffs on Australia, too, driving it back into the arms of China.
The Australian Prime Minister, not surprisingly, claims that he will not rush into the arms of China, but the laws of capital and of history are not listening. Those same laws, as I set out at the start of the year, inevitably drive, not only those economies in the Pacific towards China, but, also, drive Europe in that direction, as well as Central Asia. Trade and economic ties always develop first, and most with those in your own geographical location. That is why nation states developed, and it is why the EU, makes sense as a politico-economic bloc, whereas the British Commonwealth, comprising nations spread across the globe, does not. The reality is that the US is a long way from Europe, across 3,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean, as well as a long way from many of the Pacific economies. With the developments in transport, in terms of the shipping of freight, and with the developments in telecommunications and the Internet, in relation to many services, that may have become less important than it was a century ago, but it is still significant, when looking at the trade and economic relations on the single land mass of Europe and Asia.
In practice, the US is just a big version of Britain, and of Brexit. Whatever, the ideologically driven delusions of the petty-bourgeois nationalists that back Brexit, or that back Trump, the reality is that the world is now a global economy, dependent upon global supply chains. That global economy is divided, not into the nation states of the 18th./19th century, but into large multinational, politico-economic blocs, each setting their own rules, regulations and laws – partly driven by the political dynamics in those blocs, and partly, also to protect and advance the interests of the capital based in those blocs. It is these blocs, which then, negotiate with each other, on that same basis, to regulate the trade between them, and in the post-war period, it was the development of global, para state bodies such as GATT/WTO, IMF, and World Bank that were the institutions through which these regulations, typical of social-democracy/imperialism, were formulated. Brexit was an attempt to reverse that, and failed, causing considerable damage to Britain in the process, and Trump's agenda is equally doomed, despite the fact of the huge size of the US economy.
The rationale of the economic nationalism of Brexit, and of Trump is autarky, and it seems that that is what Trump was really being driven to, having listened to the ravings of Peter Navarro, who even Elon Musk has correctly described as “dumber than a sack of bricks.” Navarro developed a set of ideas that influenced Trump, which rather like the ideas of the Brexiters, basically claimed that there is an advantage in such autarky, and from the imposition of high tariff walls, and other measures of protection. Asked where the evidence for this came from, Navarro referred to a paper from one Ron Vara, in fact, as is fairly easily discerned, Ron Vara is just an anagram of Navarro!
As I have set out, previously, there is history and logic on the side of Canada, Greenland and Mexico being a part of the United States. Marxists, in those countries would argue for them to voluntarily become a part of a North American state, just as we argue for a European state, and so on. Such developments are historically inevitable, and progressive. That, of course, as Lenin and Trotsky pointed out, does not mean that we advocate or support the imperialist manifestation of that progressive, historical trend, in imperialist wars, and forcible annexations, such as Putin's war against Ukraine, or Trump's threats against Canada and Greenland, or Netanyahu's genocide in Palestine.
Trump's trade war waged against Canada and Mexico, along with his trade war against the rest of the world was stupid, even from that perspective. US imperialism's main imperialist competitors are China and the EU. China is the dynamic, rising imperialist power, with a population, and so internal market of more than 1 billion people, but the EU, whilst it has a population of less than half that, is comprised of established and developed, advanced economies. In terms of value, the EU is the world's largest single market. But, US imperialism has recognised China as its main imperialist threat, despite the fact that large amounts of US capital has been invested in China, and China provides a large part of the manufactured goods that the US economy now consumes, and which could not be efficiently produced in the US, despite Trump/Navarro's claims, as well as China, like Japan before it, lending huge amounts of money to the US, in the purchase of US debt, to enable it to continue to consume on that scale.
As financial markets have crashed, within the last week, not only stock markets crashing, but also being joined by bond markets, and the prospect of Trump facing his own Truss moment, yesterday, and the prospect of an actual failure of a US bond auction, he capitulated, and announced a 90 day pause in his “reciprocal” tariffs, other than on China. Like Boris and Brexit, Trump tried to hide the fact of the capitulation, by claiming he'd got what he wanted from dozens of countries begging him to do a deal, with only China refusing to do so. It was nonsense of the most moronic kind, and delivered with Trump's own brand of childish language. Rather than dozens of countries pleading with him to do a deal, and “kissing his ass”, the opposite was true.
Canada had just imposed its own retaliatory tariffs on the US, so had the EU. Vietnam and others had agreed to trade talks, just as had Brexit Britain, reduced to that kind of third order of economic power, but, even in these cases, the agreement to talks on trade does not in any way signify a willingness to simply accept Trump's terms. Far from it. In fact, the consequence of Trump having isolated the US, and set itself against not just China, but also, the EU, Japan, Australia, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and even its closest and biggest trading partners in Canada and Mexico, and even penguins on isolated islands, was to unite all of these other economies against it! Canada was looking to replace its relations with the US by a closer relation to the EU, for example. The big winner, in fact, was China, as its position in Eurasia, and most immediately in the Pacific, has been greatly enhanced.
Trump's capitulation, much as with the capitulation of Truss, in 2022, was to immediately cause the crashing stock markets to do a sharp about turn, rising by as much as 13%, although still not returning them to anywhere near the levels they were at, prior to the carnage created by Trump's tariffs. And, notably, even as stock markets rose, bond markets continued to sell-off, as the prospect of economic slow down, and demand for capital, was reduced. In addition, given the dependence of the US bond market, on money flowing in from China, and Japan, the recent events highlight the potential for money to increasingly move out of an unstable US economy, under the Trump regime, causing US assets to sell off, and interest rates to rise. If China sells off some of its US bonds, perhaps to finance a fiscal expansion in China, and development of its own domestic market, that would cause US bond yields to rise, and would probably prompt the Federal Reserve, under pressure from Trump, to engage in a new round of QE, which would devalue the $, and bring with it a new wave of inflation, as happened after 2020.
Of course, again as with Brexit, that rise in inflation and cost of living for US consumers, the diminution of the power of the US in the world, the fall in US profits that will arise from its higher costs of production, and rise in US wages to compensate for the higher cost of reproducing US labour-power, and yet still failing to return the US to the days prior to the 1980's, let alone a golden age of free market capitalism, is far from what Trump promised the huge number of petty-bourgeois reactionaries, and demoralised sections of the population that voted for him. That indicates the degree of bankruptcy, not just of Trump and that ideology of petty-bourgeois nationalism, but of the social-democracy of the preceding 80 years, since WWII, and particularly, over the preceding 40 years, since the 1980's, that created the conditions in which Trump and Brexit became possible.
And, as I have described above, and Marx sets out in Theories of Surplus Value, to produce on even this scale requires a large enough market for what is produced, so as to make it worthwhile employing those workers. That is why it is only with the growth of the towns, in the fifteenth century, and after, that those markets grow, so as to make this large-scale industrial production viable, and means that the failed independent producers become wage-labourers rather than, as before, debt slaves, servants or paupers.
“It is only after this, and in the course of further explanations elucidating and substantiating the fact that not every petty sum of values is enough to be transformable at pleasure into capital, but that in this respect each period of development and each branch of industry have their definite minimum sum, that Marx observes: “Here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel (in his Logic), that merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes.”.” (p 158-9)
As Engels notes, therefore, Marx does not say that, because of the Hegelian law, when money reaches a certain size it becomes capital. He says that, only when a sum of value reaches a certain size can it be transformed into capital, and that this is a proof of the Hegelian law. Exactly what this size is will vary according to a range of other factors. In some conditions, a relatively small amount of value may be required, if, for example, production in general occurs only on a small scale, and where the value of the necessary means of production is low, and they can be turned over quickly. In other conditions, only a huge amount of value can be converted into capital, where, to produce on an efficient scale requires large factories, filled with expensive machinery and so on.
“Not to mention the fact that Herr Dühring makes Marx speak of any kind of “advance”, whereas Marx refers only to an advance made in the form of raw materials, instruments of labour, and wages; and that Herr Dühring thus succeeds in making Marx talk pure nonsense. He then has the cheek to describe as comic the nonsense which he himself has fabricated.” (p 159)
This method of quoting incorrectly, used by Duhring, is also one I have noted in relation to, for example, the AWL, who, as adherents of the petty-bourgeois Third Camp, are also advocates of the “practical politics” of one of its initiators, Max Shachtman. Engels notes, in similar vein,
“It becomes more and more evident that this habit is an internal necessity of the philosophy of reality, and it is certainly a very “summary procedure”.” (p 159)
Duhring had, himself, lapsed into the Hegelian law, in his previous discussion of the quantitative changes in the temperature of water, resulting in the qualitative change into steam or ice. Engels notes that hundreds of other examples could be cited as proof of the law. For example, Marx, in Capital, sets out the way cooperation, division of labour and so on results in a qualitative change, beyond a certain point.
“As for example the fact that the co-operation of a number of people, the fusion of many forces into one single force, creates, to use Marx's phrase, a “new power”, which is essentially different from the sum of its separate forces.” (p 160)
In the passage from Capital, cited by Duhring, Marx had, also, added a footnote, in which he wrote,
“The molecular theory of modern chemistry first scientifically worked out by Laurent and Gerhardt rests on no other law.” (p 161)
Yet, Duhring disparaged Marx's scientific knowledge, much as he disparaged the knowledge of everyone else.
Conrad fails to distinguish between the owners of fictitious-capital (the ruling-class), and the owners of real industrial capital. But, in the age of imperialism, i.e. the era of large-scale socialised capital, as Marx sets out, in Capital III, Chapter 27, the real owners of that socialised capital are the associated producers, i.e. the workers, including the professional managers/functioning capitalists, who are, now, drawn from the ranks of the working-class. That, other than in the worker cooperatives, those associated producers do not exercise control of their own property, does not change that social relation, it only emphasises the contradiction that exists, and which must result in a crisis that resolves it. Fictitious-capital does not stand in opposition to the workers/associated producers, as workers, i.e. owners of labour-power, but does so in opposition to them as the collective owners of socialised capital.
The rentiers, the owners of fictitious-capital, i.e. the ruling class, seek to maximise their revenues in the form of interest/dividends or else, today, have sought to obtain huge capital gains from rises in asset prices. But, the more the ruling class denude profits, by increasing their share in the form of interest/dividends, the less is available for profit of enterprise, i.e. for real capital accumulation. The more real capital is accumulated, the more the demand for loanable money-capital, and so the higher the rate of interest, but, then, the consequence is to cause asset prices to fall.
So, the ruling-class, which has come to rely on those capital gains, has a direct, material interest in holding back economic growth, and the demand for capital, so as to hold down interest rates, and so prevent a crash in asset prices such as that of 2008. As conservative social-democratic governments, in the last 30 years, have also seen inflating asset prices as some kind of magical source of wealth, of “free money” that could just be tapped by periodically, realising capital gains, further encouraged such behaviour.
The fact that by holding back capital accumulation, they, also, hold back the expansion of surplus-value, upon which both interest/dividends and profit of enterprise depend, and so must, ultimately, result in a financial crisis (i.e. not an overproduction of capital, but the opposite an under-production/accumulation of capital), and collapse of those asset prices, as happened in 2008, does not change the fact that this is what the ruling-class and its state is driven to do, in the short-term.
Because Conrad fails to understand or analyse this contradiction between these two forms of property – fictitious-capital and industrial capital – and sees only “capital” and capitalists, he fails to understand the real world of, today. He continues to operate on the basis of a model of “private” capitalism, that both Marx and Engels showed ceased to exist a century and a half ago. He fails to understand the contradictions between fictitious-capital and real industrial capital, and the laws of motion of each, and so equates a surplus of loanable money-capital with a surplus of real industrial capital, despite the fact that Marx, in Capital III, Chapter 30 et al, showed that there is no relation between the two. Indeed, Marx noted,
“Talk about centralisation! The credit system, which has its focus in the so-called national banks and the big money-lenders and usurers surrounding them, constitutes enormous centralisation, and gives to this class of parasites the fabulous power, not only to periodically despoil industrial capitalists, but also to interfere in actual production in a most dangerous manner — and this gang knows nothing about production and has nothing to do with it. The Acts of 1844 and 1845 are proof of the growing power of these bandits, who are augmented by financiers and stock-jobbers.”
What Trump, as with Truss and the Brexiters, has shown is that not only are they the enemy of real industrial capital, but, by promoting the interests of the reactionary, nationalist petty-bourgeoisie, they are also the enemy of the ruling class owners of fictitious-capital, as seen in the collapse of asset prices under Truss and, now Trump. As Chris Bryant writes for Bloomberg Opinion,"Wall Street Thought That Trump Was Their Guy. They Were Wrong"
If the objective owners of all that real capital, the workers who are the collective owners of socialised capital, and represent its interests, actually had control of it, they would have no problem finding profitable industries into which to invest their profits and money-capital. The problem is that they do not have such control. Instead, control rests in the hands of non-owners, in the hands of shareholders, and their representatives. It is an indication of just how much, as with the old landed aristocracy, the ruling-class, today, not only has no useful social function, but is actually an impediment to the further development of capital itself.
More than a century before the existence of internet trolls, Engels writes of Duhring's approach,
“The method has the further advantage that it offers no real foothold to an opponent, who is consequently left with almost no other possibility of reply than to make similar summary assertions in the grand manner, to resort to general phrases and finally thunder back denunciations at Herr Dühring — in a word, as they say, to engage in a slanging match, which is not to everyone's taste.” (p 157)
Duhring, however, did lapse from this method and provided “two examples of the detestable Marxist doctrine of the Logos.” (p 157)
As with Burnham, in Science and Style, Duhring attacks the “nebulous Hegelian notion that quantity changes into quality.” (p 157) In fact, science has itself, most forcefully, demonstrated the validity of that proposition, before our eyes, as liquids go from clear to coloured and back again, solely as a result of quantum level changes in their atomic structure, explained by chaos theory, and also set out in the Butterfly Effect. Long before that, the theory of evolution is based on the accumulation of small, quantitative changes in the genetic structure of species, which, at a certain point, results in a qualitative break, and creation of a new species.
Duhring presents this representation, in Marx's Capital, as “an advance, when it reaches a certain limit, becomes capital merely by this quantitative increase!”, (p 158).
Of course, Marx says no such thing. The closest to it is Marx's account of the quantitative increase of commodity production and exchange, as the serfs and former feudal retainers move to the towns, in the 15th century, and become independent, small scale producers of industrial commodities. It is this development of the market, which makes larger-scale industrial production possible, whilst competition between these producers leads to the ruin of some of them, who, then, become wage-labourers in the employ of their successful competitors. It is that fact, and that they no longer have their own means of production, depending upon that of their employers, which means that those means of production become capital.
Engels summarises Marx's actual position, set out in Capital.
“On the basis of his previous examination of constant and variable capital and surplus-value, Marx, draws the conclusion that “not every sum of money, or of value, is at pleasure transformable into capital. To effect this transformation, in fact, a certain minimum of money or of exchange-value must be presupposed in the hands of the individual possessor of money or commodities.””. (p 158)
He goes on to explain that, if the rate of surplus value is 50%, it would require two workers to produce enough surplus-value, as the equivalent of a day's wages/value of labour-power. If someone employed these two workers, they would need enough money to pay their wages, but also to buy the instruments of labour, and materials for them to process. Even then, it would only enable the employer to obtain the same standard of living as if they were, themselves, a labourer.
“As the aim of capitalist production is not mere subsistence but the increase of wealth, our man with his two workers would still not be a capitalist. Now in order to live twice as well as an ordinary worker, and turn half the surplus-value produced back into capital, he would have to be able to employ eight workers, that is, he would have to possess four times the sum of value assumed above.” (p 158)
It is not, as Jack Conrad claims, that "the world is awash with surplus capital - capital that cannot be profitably invested in the production of surplus value”. The working-class, as in the post-war period, is in an upward trend, but it is near the start of that trend, as in the 1960's, not at the end of it, as in the 1920's or the 1970's/80's. Conrad's analysis is wrong, because he confuses Trump's regime with the US ruling class, and, also, confuses the interests of the US ruling-class - a class of rentiers and speculators – with the interests of US capital itself. Trump himself, is certainly a rentier, but his political regime rests upon, not the ruling-class, nor upon real capital, but on the petty-bourgeoisie, and its associated layers. As with all such regimes, it explains its Bonapartist nature, as described by Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire.
With profits, the rate of profit, and the rate of surplus value at high levels, the idea that capital cannot be invested profitably, so as to produce surplus value, which would signify a crisis of overproduction of capital, is risible. Just look at what happens, for example, when one of those owners of astronomical amounts of money-capital – be it, Musk, Bezos or whoever – does precisely what Marx describes in the passage quoted earlier, and uses that money-capital productively, i.e. turns themselves, once more, into an industrial capitalist. Has Musk found any problem making profits, producing surplus value by investing huge amounts of capital in the space industry? Absolutely, not, and that is just one industry.
The realm of biotechnology, genetic technology, medical science, robotics, cybernetics and so on are wide open for profitable investment on a massive scale. The problem is not the lack of potential for such profitable investment, but that the immediate and guaranteed returns from simply using money for speculation, to obtain capital gains has far outweighed it. The ruling-class, after all, is a parasitic class of rentiers and speculators that removed itself from any functional role in production more than a century ago, and is at home in this world of coupon-clipping and speculation, as against the more tedious business of actually accumulating real capital, and all of the risks that go with it.
Marx noted,
“In order to quickly settle this question, let us point out that one could also mean by the accumulation of money-capital the accumulation of wealth in the hands of bankers (money-lenders by profession), acting as middlemen between private money-capitalists on the one hand, and the state, communities, and reproducing borrowers on the other. For the entire vast extension of the credit system, and all credit in general, is exploited by them as their private capital. These fellows always possess capital and incomes in money-form or in direct claims on money. The accumulation of the wealth of this class may take place completely differently than actual accumulation, but it proves at any rate that this class pockets a good deal of the real accumulation.”
Marx, also, sets out, in that chapter, indeed, that at times of more rapid economic growth, with rising masses of profits, a surplus of loanable, money-capital can arise, precisely because an increasing proportion of the transactions between firms are conducted, not on the basis of bank credit, or resort to capital markets, but simply on the basis of commercial credit between them.
Indeed, more than that. As Marx described, these two forms of property, fictitious-capital and industrial capital, and the revenues derived from them, are imminently antagonistic to each other.
“These two forms, interest and profit of enterprise, exist only as opposites. Hence, they are not related to surplus-value, of which they are but parts placed under different categories, heads or names, but rather to one another...
The lending capitalist as such faces the capitalist performing his actual function in the process of reproduction, not the wage-worker, who, precisely under capitalist production, is expropriated of the means of production. Interest-bearing capital is capital as property as distinct from capital as a function. But so long as capital does not perform its function, it does not exploit labourers and does not come into opposition to labour.
On the other hand, profit of enterprise is not related as an opposite to wage-labour, but only to interest.”
But, how is that at all reducible to Duhring's conclusion from it that, for Marx, “everything is all the same in the end.”?
Engels notes,
“Thus this insight of his into the well-known philosophical prejudice also enables Herr Dühring to prophesy with assurance what will be the “end” of Marx's economic philosophising, that is, what the following volumes of Capital will contain, and this he does exactly seven lines after he has declared that
“speaking in plain human language it is really impossible to divine what is still to come in the two” (final) “volumes””. (p 155)
Engels quotes Duhring's further rant against Marx and dialectics, which he calls “these deformities of thought and style” (p 156). A similar phrase, “Science and Style”, was used by the ideologist of the petty-bourgeois, Third Camp, James Burnham, as he launched his attack on Marxism and dialectics, and set himself, and that ideological trend, on its right-wing course into the camp of imperialism, as described by Trotsky, whose manifestation, today, is seen in the role of these social-imperialists.
“For the moment, we are concerned in no way with the correctness or incorrectness of the economic results of Marx's researches, but only with the dialectical method applied by Marx. But this much is certain: most readers of Capital will have learnt for the first time from Herr Dühring what it is that they have really read.” (p 156)
Engels notes that, in 1867, Duhring had written what was a relatively rational review of Capital I, and did so without translating it into the Duhringian language he now claimed was “indispensable”.
“Though he even then committed the blunder of identifying Marxist with Hegelian dialectics, he had not quite lost the capacity to distinguish between the method and the results obtained by using it, and to understand that the latter are not refuted in particular by vilifying the former in general.” (p 156)
What, then, of Duhring's conclusion that from the Marxist standpoint “everything is all the same in the end.”? Duhring objects to Marx's method of starting from the whole, and breaking it down into its component parts, in “micrological detail” as Marx does at the start of Capital, by examining the commodity as the basic cell from which the entire structure of capital is erected. Instead, Duhring proceeds “in the grand manner”, in other words, to base himself on a sweeping description of the superficial appearance of things. As Trotsky sets out, this was the same approach taken by Burnham and Shachtman, in relation to their own methodology, when characterising the USSR, so as to relieve themselves of the requirement to defend it as a workers' state, albeit a deformed version.
“Indeed historical treatment in the grand manner and the summary settlement with genus and type are very convenient for Herr Dühring, since he can neglect all known facts as micrological and equate them to zero by this means, so that instead of proving anything he need only use general phrases, make assertions and thunder his denunciations.” (p 157)
That same approach was used by Burnham and Shachtman, in relation to the USSR, and involved moralistic condemnations of the, undeniably, vile nature of Stalin's regime, which, for Burnham and Shachtman, and the petty-bourgeois Third Camp, became beyond the pale with the Hitler-Stalin Pact. This same superficial, subjectivist and moralistic approach, which focuses on the political regime/superstructure, rather than the underlying class nature of the state, has characterised the methodology and practice of that Third Camp of the petty-bourgeoisie every since. On the one side, it bowdlerises the arguments of Trotsky against Stalinism, in the Third Period, to justify support for bourgeois-democracy and “democratic imperialism”, against fascism/authoritarianism; on the other side, it bowdlerises the arguments of Lenin on imperialism, to justify its support for assorted anti-working class movements and regimes, solely on the basis of their “anti-imperialism”.
