Saturday, 4 July 2026
Wednesday, 1 July 2026
The Hypocrisy of NATO's Illegal War On Iran - Part 20
Unlike the UK, the US is a huge economy. Unlike the UK, the US, also, has long established trade with its neighbours in Canada, Mexico and Central and South America. So, the US can, within its own borders, do what the Brexiters ridiculously claimed that Britain could do. It can set its own rules, and those that wish to operate within the US, or to export to it, have to accept those rules, including the EU and China. Even so, the US was led to create NAFTA, before Trump blew it up, and was then led to replace it with the MCA. Because Trump sees himself as an old style King or colonial Emperor, rather than as a modern imperialist, he is driven in the same general direction, but using the old, abandoned methods of colonialism, land grabs, militarism and annexation. Its what his vulgar approach to Canada, Greenland/Iceland and so on reflects. No wonder his ideology fits seamlessly with the ethnonationalist/racist, settler-colonial ideology of Zionism.
From the perspective of industrial capital, in the abstract, all of these different rules and regulations are irrational, and an impediment to its free expansion. Its why industrial capitalism, in its first flush, had to get rid of all the multiplicity of rules and regulations of feudalism, and create the nation state. The railways provided another example of it, as they quickly required a standardisation of gauge for the tracks, which, also, meant a standardisation of the locomotives and carriages. It also brought about a standardisation of time without which train timetables would have been meaningless. The Bolsheviks, who had appreciated, all of this, and the scientific management methods of the Taylorists, as one of their first revolutionary changes in production, in the USSR, introduced a comprehensive standardisation of sizes and so on, down to the smallest component of production.
Not only did it make production of each component much cheaper, because they were now produced on a much larger scale, but the industries using those components no longer had to waste time in production, ensuring they had the right size of component, taken from the stock room. It also meant that the actual amount of capital held unproductively as stock was reduced. Without such standardisation, none of the advantages of assembly line production, or of time and motion studies could have been realised. When the US sent a delegation to the USSR in the 1920's, that lesson was quickly observed, and the US, in turn, implemented a similar process of standardisation. The example of the social-democratic/corporatist ideas of Herbert Hoover find a pale reflection in the ideas, as far as they can be discerned, of Andy Burnham. But, it also, shows why, if Brexit was a reactionary, delusional adventure, the growing claims about the benefits of breaking up even the nation state, and return to the divisions of regionalism, each ruled over by their own local Bonaparte, are even more reactionary and delusional.
US imperialism has discovered that, although it remains the dominant industrial capital, in many areas of production, having, as I noted earlier, moved away from the old labour intensive, manufacturing and extractive industries, and into new capital intensive spheres, it is China that now dominates global manufacturing industry, and as with the process of combined and uneven development throughout history, it is China and India that are rapidly developing in those areas of high-tech industries into which US industrial capital previously shifted. The rise of China as the global manufacturing superpower, over the last 40 years, had other consequences. It is that manufacturing industry that absorbs huge amounts of raw materials, and China developed global trading relations with many countries in South America, Africa, Australia, and the Middle-East that supply it with those raw materials, and primary products.
At a time when US imperialism was more concerned to have Dollars flowing back to the US to buy up financial assets, so as to keep its asset price bubbles inflating, Chinese imperialism, was paying for its raw materials, energy supplies and other primary products, by exporting not only vast amounts of cheap manufactured commodities, but also by exporting capital. It set up production in DRC etc., to mine the copper that was then exported to China, and those mines used Chinese machines and so on. Like British imperialism in India, in the 19th century, China invested in the creation of additional infrastructure in these countries, tying them ever closer to Beijing. By contrast, the US offered the opportunity to buy already inflated US financial and property assets, the attraction of which was undermined when that bubble burst in 2008, but being, also, another reason that having built its model around it, US imperialism had to reflate it. Alternatively, US imperialism offered to build luxury hotels and facilities for the global elite, in these, economies as with Dubai, which offer little benefit for the masses in those countries, other than the chance to work as a precarious labourer serving the wishes of that elite.
In Afghanistan, US imperialism exported its troops and weapons, to wreak destruction rather than construction. When it ultimately left, the Taliban simply returned, because, unlike with Britain's involvement in India, US involvement in Afghanistan resulted in no export of capital, no industrial development of the economy, no creation of a modern working-class, as the basis of modernising ideas. Once again, as US imperialism and its subordinates withdrew from Afghanistan, it is China that is establishing those kinds of relations, as it develops trade and investment.
Monday, 29 June 2026
The Hypocrisy of NATO's Illegal War On Iran - Part 19
So, as Marx noted, the laws of capital assert themselves in the end, even when these nuances act to delay and obscure them. On the one hand, the other side of the deindustrialisation of the western imperialist economies (which, also, should not be read too literally, as it really means a reduction in the size of the old, labour intensive, productive and extractive industries) was the industrialisation of large parts of Asia, Latin America and Africa, as well as parts of the old Warsaw Pact. The US and Britain, in particular, were content to take advantage of cheap manufactures and primary products, extracting their own portion of surplus-value, as commercial profit. In addition, many companies operating in these newly industrialising economies, were simply parts of global multinationals, based in the US, UK and EU. The shareholders and bondholders of those companies drew their revenues, and saw their share prices rise just the same.
But, 40 years on, China, Taiwan, South Korea, India and others are no longer simply playgrounds for these western multinationals to exploit available labour supplies, and for the shareholders to extract dividends/interest. They have become industrialised, and have their own multinationals. The scale of production for these industries in China and India, in particular, based on their own huge domestic populations, as well as on being used as manufacturing centres for global capital over the last 40 years, means that it is now, very difficult for industries in the old western economies to compete, including in the US, which is why the US was led to try to create its own larger single market with Canada and Mexico, prior to Trump blowing it apart.
The example of EV production in China illustrates the point, as I've set out, elsewhere. China is able to produce EV's cheaper than anywhere else, simply because it has the advantages of economies of scale. Those economies of scale, also, derive from the fact that China is the largest single car market in the world, and, also, the largest EV market. The latter is, also, a consequence of the fact that China has invested hugely in creating the charging infrastructure required if EV's are to be adopted and functional. China, has, thereby, enjoyed the economies of scale in battery production, and charging technologies, as well as in the other areas of renewable energy.
Rather than accept that, the US has dug itself further into a hole, by claiming that China is dumping, i.e. selling its EV's on the world market, at below cost prices. In so doing, they are also delaying the inevitable replacement of internal combustion vehicles by EV's, which will simply lead to a further destruction of US vehicle production, as it will be too small, and too far behind its global competitors, when it faces that reality. Trump's attempts to prop up the US producers with his campaign to “drill baby drill” to keep oil production going, and reduce oil prices, are just another delay and delusion, in that respect.
What it reflects is a belated recognition by US imperialism that the world has moved on, and that, in the end, it is still industrial capital that dominates, however much the delusion is clung to that fictitious capital is the only capital, and that it produces interest/dividends like a plum tree produces plums, or that inflated asset prices are a means of creating wealth out of thin air. The problem for US imperialism is that it now faces the reality that, not only does industrial capital dominate, but the main centre for that industrial capital, and for its accumulation is China. It is Chinese monopoly capitalism (imperialist capital) that is setting the pace, and via its economic (industrial and trade) relations with other industrialising economies, across the globe, is determining the regulatory and standards regimes upon which global production and trade takes place.
As has happened through history, those that set the rules are those that rule, and the implication of that is that US imperialism will have to become a rule taker, if it wants to trade with these other trading blocs, be it in Eurasia, or the EU. It is, again, why the idea of Brexit was even more absurd.
Saturday, 27 June 2026
Monday, 22 June 2026
Blair-Rights & Soft Left Carry Out Their Counter Coup
The Blair-Right/Soft Left counter coup against the Blue Labour/Zionist faction that took control of the Labour Party in 2019, has now begun. In 2019, the Blair-Rights were not strong enough to displace Corbyn's supporters inside a massively expanded Labour Party. The soft-left were not going to actively support the kind of actions required to bring about the kind of blood-letting to achieve it, though, as in the past, they could be relied on to simply keep their heads down, and wait until it was over, rather than resist it. The Blair-Rights, allied with the petty-bourgeois nationalists and Zionists of Blue Labour, seizing upon the equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism as a convenient weapon to first undermine Corbyn, and then launch the witch hunt in the party. They chose Starmer as a cypher for their coup.
At the time Starmer won the Leadership, I noted that, the Blue Labour/Zionist faction would inevitably drag him further and further into the swamp of the petty-bourgeois nationalist Right, and so it has been, with the inevitable disastrous consequences for Labour, leading to the situation, today, and the equally inevitable counter coup by the Blair-Rights and soft Left, who have now chosen their own cypher, in the form of Burnham. Its ironic that the pro-EU Blair, has himself, now, become an apologist for the petty-bourgeois nationalists, and for his rich associates in the Trumpf gang, whilst the once soft Left and anti-EEC Kinnock, has taken over that vacant slot. On Saturday, Kinnock was even heading up the speakers at the Rejoin EU Rally in London, and its no coincidence that as Starmer gave another empty speech announcing his departure, this morning, in Downing Street, the strains of Ode To Joy, the EU Anthem, wafted through the air, almost drowning him out.
The media pundits have talked about the fact that in the last ten years, Britain has had 7 different Prime Ministers. But, they fail to mention that between 1990, and 2005, the Conservative Party went through 6 different Leaders. The reason is the same. Superficially, that reason is Brexit, or the relation between Britain and the EU, but that is itself simply the manifestation of the real underlying cause, which is the division between the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie and those of the bourgeoisie and working-class. Again, the media pundits, at least the better of them, like to present this division, in electoral terms as that between a Left or “progressive” bloc of Green, Liberal and Labour voters, as against a Right or “reactionary” bloc of Restore, Reform and Tory voters, without considering that these divisions are not simply arbitrary alignments of voters within an amorphous electorate, but are themselves a reflection of aggregated class interests.
The media pundits have tried to claim that Makerfield was a classic seat in which Reform should have won, but they based that simply on the fact, of it being a “Red Wall” seat, and on the fact that in the recent local elections, Reform won every council seat. But, that was a typically lazy, and superficial analysis that was inevitably going to be proven wrong, as I pointed out before the by-election.
I noted,
“Its MP, between 1987-2010 was the Blair-right, Iain McCartney. Given Blair's enthusiastic support for the EU, during all that time, when, by contrast, the Tories were torn apart by their support for Brexit, goaded along by the likes of Farage, there was no indication that the voters in the constituency were put off voting for EU supporting Labour candidates, winning around 60% of the vote in each election. In 2010 and 2015, McCartney's successor in the seat, Helen Fovargue, secured around 50% of the vote, whilst the reactionary nationalists of UKIP/BNP and Tories never got more than a combined 42%. In 2017, under Corbyn's Labour, as it won over large numbers of young voters, opposed to Brexit, Fovargue secured an increased 60% of the vote, whilst the Brexit Party stood aside for the Tories, who still could only secure 31% of the vote.”
The idea that Burnham has, somehow, won over working-class Reform or Tory voters, is as ludicrous as the idea that the Tories or Reform won elections by winning over working-class Labour voters. That is only very marginally the case. Burnham won because he managed to get working-class Labour voters to turn out to vote for him, whereas, in the local elections, many of them simply didn't vote, or else have been voting for other progressive parties such as the Greens, Liberals and so on, as they have rejected the reactionary petty-bourgeois nationalism of Keir Starmer's Blue Labour/Zionist agenda.
As I have pointed out many times over the last ten years, the vote for Brexit, even in those “Red Wall” seats, was based, not on working-class, Labour voters voting Leave, but on a the petty-bourgeoisie voting for it, a petty-bourgeoisie that had grown by 50% since the 1980's, and which was also the basis of the internal strife inside the Conservative Party, of which it comprised the vast number of its members and voters. That the media, and the bourgeois political pundits confuse this petty-bourgeois mass of poorly educated, precarious and impoverished with the working-class is simply a feature of their superficial, sociological definition of class. The fact remains that despite having grown by 50% since the 1980's, as a consequence of deindustrialisation, that petty-bourgeois mass still only constitutes around a third of the population/electorate, and it is that which places a cap on its electoral fortunes.
The reality, however, is clear. Burnham will face the same economic realities that Starmer and Blue Labour faced. Starmer has tried to claim that, in the last two years, he has defied those realities. Its nonsense. His claim about stabilising the economy is only a claim that he has stabilised it in the same way a corpse is stabilised in a graveyard. As Kinnock pointed out, the claims about trade deals are hugely exaggerated, and do not come close to the deals the UK already had as a result of being in the EU. Does anyone who has had to use the NHS really believe the claims about its improvement? Likewise, a look at the continued crumbling of the roads, and other infrastructure give the lie to Starmer's claims in that regard to. In the meantime, inflation remains high, and is likely to rise, whilst government borrowing is rising, and interest rates are following suit.
That reality, drives towards the obvious course of action, of a rapid re-joining of the EU. Burnham should be open about that reality, and get it underway. The Labour landslide in 2024 was a fraud, with Labour getting a third fewer votes than Corbyn's Labour secured in 2017. But, it would be ridiculous for Burnham to ignore the fact that he will take over a huge parliamentary majority. The venality of the Blue Labour/Zionist faction is already being shown in their snarling comments, as they are hoist by their own petard. They may seek to undermine a Burnham government, but his majority will be such that they can be dealt with. Beginning the process of negotiation to re-join the EU is the best basis on which a Burnham government can rebuild the economy, and remove the constraints it faces, and on that basis, rebuild the voter base of Labour for the next election in 2028/9. A General Election fought in 2028, with a commitment to formally re-join, would leave the option for the UK holding EU elections in 2029.
Saturday, 20 June 2026
Thursday, 18 June 2026
The Hypocrisy of NATO's Illegal War On Iran - Part 18
I have set out, elsewhere, why all of the liquidity injections of the 1990's, and QE of the 2010's, whilst depreciating the world's currencies/standards of prices, did not result in large-scale commodity price rises. The reason is that to do so requires that these money tokens and credit went into general circulation, as part of a rise in economic activity. But, in fact, a look at what happened shows that this liquidity was never designed to stimulate economic activity, but was designed only to protect the immediate interests of the ruling-class owners of fictitious-capital, by cutting short the bursting of asset price bubbles.
The huge rise in asset prices of the 1980's, was interrupted by the global financial crash that occurred in 1987. It wasn't just a bubble in financial markets that burst, but, also, in property markets. In 1990, house prices in Britain dropped by around 40%, in Japan, some property prices fell by up to 90%. In the US, the Federal Reserve, responded to this fall in asset prices by pumping liquidity into the system. That was quite a reversal for its newly installed Chairman, Alan Greenspan, who as an apostle of Ayn Rand, had previously been a staunch advocate of sound money.
A look at the last 30 years, in particular, has seen the situation described by Marx unfold precisely, but with this difference. When yields fell, as money-capital was devalued, an alternative was found in the speculative capital gains that were the other side of that process. Normally, as Marx notes, the fall in the amount of interest would lead the owners of money-capital to be forced to become industrial capitalists, when the amount of interest no longer covered their needs.. Instead, they, now, cashed in a part of the capital gain, and treated it like revenue. As with every Ponzi Scheme, provided the amount of new liquidity coming into the paper chase, pushing up the asset prices, exceeds the amount being taken out, the illusion continues, and that is what governments and central banks sought to do over the last 40 years. Rachel Reeves is at it again in the UK with the insistence that you can get your tax-free ISA (which acts like the equivalent of an “acca boost”), but only if you plough your savings into a stock market ISA, not if you simply keep your money in a cash savings account.
A number of other factors facilitated the illusion over the last 40 years. The huge rise in productivity, created by the microchip revolution reduced the unit values of commodities, so that even where liquidity did get into general circulation, it only acted to prevent what would have been significant falls in commodity prices. Even when productivity gains began to wain by the end of the last century, other developments such as globalisation, and the creation of large single markets such as the EU, acted as cost free means of expanding trade, reducing costs, and so, increasing the mass of realised profits. So long as the mass of profits continued to grow, the disproportionate growth of interest/dividends and rents was obscured.
But, 2008 showed that had reached its limit. Thatcher's Britain, and Reagan's US were the frontrunners and classic example of the relative decline of industrial capital, and simultaneous rise of fictitious-capital. Both saw deindustrialisation, and both saw a huge rise in asset prices, based on speculation. In the following decades, however, Asia, in particular, saw a corresponding growth of large-scale industrial capital, with similar things happening in Latin America, former Warsaw Pact countries, and later in parts of Africa, and the Middle-East. The US had always had a large petty-bourgeoisie comprised of small traders, as well as its large number of small farmers. It still bears some of the characteristics of its history as a location for European settler colonialism. Its advanced industrial capitalism is concentrated on its East and West Coasts, and large metropolitan areas, whilst its interior remains rural and largely backward. The deindustrialisation of the 1980's exacerbated that, and the same was true in Britain, as its old heavy industries disappeared.
Saturday, 13 June 2026
The Hypocrisy of NATO's Illegal War On Iran - Part 17
The last Innovation Cycle, which brought the microchip revolution, peaked in 1985. It acted to raise productivity, create a relative surplus population, release capital, and massively raise the rate of profit over the next 20 years. As Marx describes in Theories of Surplus Value, such periods are marked by net output rising faster than gross output. But, eventually, as all of the old fixed capital has been replaced by the new machines/technology, that basis of raising productivity dissipates. In the period of intensive accumulation, one new machine replaces two or three older machines, as these older machines wear out. The new machine also requires only one operator, often less skilled, than the two or three operators of the old machines, who are now also replaced. But, now, in the period of extensive accumulation, to increase output, requires not the replacement of existing machines/technology and workers, but the addition of more machines/technology and workers. Productivity growth slows, the relative surplus population stops growing, net output no longer grows faster than gross output. Both net output and gross output rise at a faster pace than in the earlier period, but, now, that is because gross output itself grows faster, capital accumulation expands at a faster pace.
As I have described before, this could be seen clearly, in the late 1990's, and into the early 2000's. The catastrophists, of course, could not accept the idea that capitalism/imperialism could ever be in a condition other than impending crisis, as they anticipated “the next recession”, induced by a continually falling rate of profit. I also, detailed why they were wrong, despite the global financial crisis of 2008, which actually disproved their theories. The 2008 global financial crisis, rather like that of 1847, was a consequence of rising interest rates causing asset prices to drop sharply, and the reason interest rates rise, in such a period, as Marx sets out in Capital III, is because the system has entered a period of more rapid growth, and capital accumulation. It is that, which explains the actions of the global ruling-class, since 2008. It also, explains the real basis of NATO's illegal war on Iran.
The global ruling-class, as owners of fictitious-capital, over the last 40 years, became addicted to speculative capital gains. Those capital gains were simply the other side of the coin to falling interest rates/yields. The revenue produced by the ownership of loanable money-capital is interest, just as the revenue produced by the ownership of land is rent, and the revenue produced by the ownership of industrial capital is profit. Dividends are just the name given to the interest paid on the money-capital loaned in the form of share purchase. As set out earlier, as interest rates fell in a secular downward trend after 1982, the ruling-class saw, on the one-hand, its paper wealth, in the form of financial and property assets, expand astronomically, as huge asset price bubbles were inflated. On the other hand, it saw the yields on those assets drop significantly, as the other side of those higher asset prices.
That did not require the actual revenue to fall, whether it was rent or interest/dividends. If you get £100 of interest/dividends on a bond/share that costs you £1,000 to buy that is a yield of 10%. But, the same £100, if the price of the bond/share rises to £2,000 is a yield of only 5%. The same thing with rent. If you own land/property that produces £10,000 of rent a year, it is a yield of 10% if the property cost £100,000 to buy, but only 5% if the price of the property rises to £200,000. Considering Marx's point referred to earlier, if a disproportionate amount of money goes into the ownership of loanable money-capital (i.e. into the purchase ownership of shares, bonds etc.) then this money-capital is devalued, and manifest in a corresponding rise in the price of those assets, and fall in yields/interest rates.
If you are part of the ruling-class, and your ownership of those financial and property assets runs into billions of Dollars, the fact that yields drop to insignificant levels does not matter. Even a yield of 1% on $100 billion is $1 billion of revenue per year. But, if you are a pensioner from the working or middle-class, a pension pot of $250,000 would, on the same basis, provide you only with an annual revenue of $2,500, and so inadequate to live on. But, the other side of those low yields, was the rise in asset prices. If you could cash in a part of the value of the asset, or borrow against it, that appeared to be as good as getting a yield from it, and, in the case of property, with less effort. It appeared there was no need, even to have the trouble of having tenants in properties, if year after year, the property rose in price by 10%, giving a notional £10,000 on a £100,000 property. Nor did it seem to matter if the money used to buy shares was used by companies to invest in real capital accumulation. Indeed, the latter itself became a hazard to those rising asset prices.
Thursday, 11 June 2026
The Hypocrisy of NATO's Illegal War On Iran - Part 16
Marx noted, in Capital III, Chapter 23,
“It would be still more absurd to presume that capital would yield interest on the basis of capitalist production without performing any productive function, i.e., without creating surplus-value, of which interest is just a part; that the capitalist mode of production would run its course without capitalist production. If an untowardly large section of capitalists were to convert their capital into money-capital, the result would be a frightful depreciation of money-capital and a frightful fall in the rate of interest; many would at once face the impossibility of living on their interest, and would hence be compelled to reconvert into industrial capitalists.” (p 378)
It is precisely that problem that the ruling-class of rentiers has faced. On the one hand, the microchip revolution of the 1980's, brought a huge rise in productivity, and the rate of profit. It brought a huge moral depreciation of the fixed capital stock, and with it a huge, global release of capital. All of these realised money profits fed into money markets, causing global interest rates to enter a secular decline from 1982 onwards, and a consequent rise in global asset prices.
In the US, stock markets rose by around 1300% between 1980 and 2000, more than 4 times the rise in GDP. Stock and property markets across the globe followed suit.
In Britain, house prices quadrupled in the 1980's. No wonder, in this “loadsamoney” culture, this inflation of asset prices, seemed to amount to the creation of wealth out of thin air.
Of course, ownership of speculative assets is neither the same as ownership of productive-capital, nor the same as ownership of a durable commodity. If you own bonds or shares, for example, if the market price of those assets rise sharply, you can sell them, and simply pocket the capital gain. You don't have to buy other bonds or shares to replace them. If you own property as a speculative asset, or as a landlord, you can similarly, sell those properties, if property prices rise sharply, without needing to replace them. In both cases, you can simply bank the realised capital gains, and wait until asset prices fall again. But, that is not the case if you own a property as a durable commodity/fixed capital.
If house prices rise, as a homeowner, that is of little benefit to you, for the simple reason that if you come to sell your home, you still need somewhere to live, and so must replace it with an equally more expensive house. If you are a commercial business that owns the commercial property in which you operate, the same applies, the building constitutes a piece of fixed capital. In fact, a rise in property prices, generally operates to your disadvantage, rather than advantage. If house prices across the board double, but wages remain the same, then, the house you paid £50,000 for, when you sell it for £100,000, appears to have provided you with £50,000 for free. But, to move to a better house, means that, this better house, which previously cost £75,000, will now cost you £150,000. In reality, you will have lost £25,000, compared to had house prices not risen.
Of course, had you not been a homeowner to start with, you would have lost out even more, which is why so many people, now, cannot afford to buy a home. Yet, the bourgeois media portray any fall in asset prices as being catastrophic, despite the fact that, for the great mass of society, they would be hugely beneficial. Indeed, for industrial capital, they would be hugely beneficial too, as I have set out, elsewhere. Its not just those who cannot afford to buy a home that are adversely affected by high house prices. One solution to the inability to pay the high prices, would be, for example, for wages to rise. But, a rise in wages, means a fall in industrial profits. Many unable to buy, are led to rent, but, that leads to higher rents, which again, means either higher wages, or else higher levels of housing benefits. Those higher benefits require higher taxes, which again, reduces industrial profits.
As I've set out, elsewhere, the same is true with inflated bond and share prices, which form the basis of workers' pension funds. The delusion referred to earlier, in which money-capital is seen as the only real capital, and the interest on which is seen, not as a deduction from industrial profit, but as some kind of natural fruit of that capital, leads to the assumption that if asset prices rise, the fruit of those assets increases along with it, like a bigger plum tree, producing more plums. But, as Marx set out, interest/dividends are simply a deduction from profit, and if the mass of profit does not rise, there is no sustainable basis for interest/dividends to rise. If interest/dividends do rise, without the mass of profit rising, then, rent, tax or profit of enterprise must fall, as Marx set out in Capital III, Chapter 15.
But, unless capital is accumulated – more labour employed – the only way to increase the mass of surplus-value/industrial profit, is to raise the rate of surplus-value. In the conditions of the 1980's, and 90's, as the huge rise in productivity created large relative surplus populations, which pushed down relative wages, and also reduced the value of labour-power, and so raised the rate of surplus value that was possible. Indeed, by raising the rate of turnover of capital, it also raised the annual rate of surplus-value, and average annual rate of profit. It, also, as set out earlier, created a release of capital that appeared as a mass of realised money profit. But, that was then, and this is now. Those conditions began to change when the new long wave upswing began in 1999, just as they have done in previous long wave cycles.
Saturday, 6 June 2026
Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, I – Historical - Part 6
The failure to address that property question, indeed even to understand it, has left the working-class effectively leaderless. On the one hand, social-democracy and social-democratic parties, in the 20th century, emphasised the common interest of labour and capital. Indeed, as Marx sets out in Wage-Labour and Capital, so long as you assume the continued existence of capital, that is true. The workers interest is that of capital too, for a continued accumulation of capital, so that more labour is employed, which creates the best conditions for their wages to rise, not only from the fact of being fully employed, but also because of rising social productivity and an expansion of the range of goods and services they can consume, as Marx describes in The Civilising Mission of Capital. It also means that, as their employment expands towards full employment, their bargaining position is strengthened, so that not only do nominal and real wages rise, but also relative wages.
However, as Marx describes, in Wage-Labour and Capital, and in Capital III, Chapter 15, it is, then, precisely this rise in relative wages, whose concomitant is a fall in relative profits, i.e. a profits squeeze, as seen in the 1960's/70's, which creates a crisis of overproduction of capital. The first consequence is that the smaller, least efficient capitals, the plethora of petty bourgeois producers – whose profit margins were already below the average – go bust. To the extent they employ workers, they are laid off. The consequence is, the, also, an overproduction of commodities, even where none existed previously, because the firms that have gone bust no longer buy from their suppliers (as Marx puts it, capital itself is physically composed of commodities), and their workers no longer have wages to finance their own consumption.
So, the affluence of the workers, in these best of all conditions, turns, for many of them, into the cause of their own misery. Moreover, the underlying cause of the crisis of overproduction of capital was the shortage of labour, causing relative wages to rise, and so relative profits to fall. To respond to it, capital is led to engage in a technological revolution, to raise productivity, and to replace labour with machines. Again, that was seen in the 1970's, with the microchip revolution. Consequently, as long as capitalism continues, and so long as the working-class does not have control over its own collective property – the large-scale socialised capital – it is doomed to repeat the cycle of prosperity, full employment/boom, crisis, and unemployment.
Social-democracy, and reformist socialism/Menshevism, cannot offer any solution, therefore, but, at the other pole there are the “revolutionary” sects, who can only offer the illusion of some repeat of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, or worse a version of the Peasant Wars, such as that in China in 1949, of Vietnam, Cuba, and so on. All of which are based on the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie and not the industrial proletariat. But, that petty-bourgeoisie and peasantry can never form the ruling-class, because of its atomised and heterogeneous nature. It always results in chaos, crisis and Bonapartism. It can be see as a result of Brexit and Trump, today. But, the victory of Trump, Brexit and other petty-bourgeois nationalist movements is, itself, a consequence of the failure of Marxists to offer a real analysis and solution to the property question, turning themselves, simply, into more militant wings of social-democracy, and proponents of bourgeois, trades union consciousness.
Thursday, 4 June 2026
Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, I – Historical - Part 5
The 1832 Reform Act was a victory for the bourgeoisie as a whole, but the workers were left to pursue their own interests and demands for political rights and freedoms via the Chartist Movement. The large-scale, industrial capitalists, again, required the support of the workers to consolidate their victory, in 1848, against the other sections of the bourgeoisie – the commercial bourgeoisie and financial oligarchy – and its political reflection was the creation of the Liberal Party, in which the big industrial capitalists sat side by side with the trades union representatives of the workers.
The same was true in France, but its political revolution was far more thoroughgoing than its British equivalent. The Monarchy, and large sections of the aristocracy faced the criticism of the guillotine.
“To be sure, the bourgeoisie had already developed rapidly during the Revolution, partly by speculation in the lands of the nobility and of the Church which had been confiscated and then sold, and partly by frauds on the nation by means of army contracts. It was precisely the domination of these swindlers that brought France and the Revolution to the verge of ruin under the Directorate, and thus gave Napoleon the pretext for his coup d'etat.” (p 331)
For Saint-Simon, rather like with the Physiocrats, the “workers” were not just the labourers, but also the capitalists, be they industrial capitalists or the merchants and bankers. The Revolution set this mass of “the people” against the idlers of the old aristocracy, but the idlers were not confined to them, but, also, all those that simply lived off their incomes without taking any part in production. At a time when capitalist production was still relatively undeveloped, compared to the later large-scale production, it is easy to see why this distinction was made.
For Saint-Simon, The Reign of Terror showed that the actual workers, the great mass of labourers and petty-bourgeois, did not have the capacity to lead the country.
“Who then was to lead and command? According to Saint-Simon, science and industry, both united by a new religious bond destined to restore that unity of religious ideas which had been broken since the Reformation – a necessarily mystical and rigidly hierarchical “new Christianity”. But science was the scholars; and industry was, in the first place, the active bourgeois, manufacturers, merchants and bankers. Of course, these bourgeois were to transform themselves into public officials, into trustees of society, of a sort; but they were still to hold a commanding and even economically privileged position vis-a-vis the workers. The bankers especially were to be called upon to direct the whole of social production by the regulation of credit. This conception was in exact keeping with a time when large-scale industry and with it the chasm between bourgeoisie and proletariat were only just coming into existence in France.” (p 331-2)
Here can clearly be seen, even before the development of large-scale, socialised capital/imperialism, the basic outlines of social-democracy. A shared interest between capital and labour, but with the professional middle-class representatives of capital “functioning capitalists”, managing national production on behalf of “society”. Along with it goes the required planning and regulation of production and credit. All of this is contained in the statist ideas of Lassaleanism and Fabianism.
“But what Saint-Simon especially lays stress on is this: what interests him first and above all other things is the lot of “the largest and poorest class” (la classe la plus nombreuse et las plus pauvre).” (p 332)
Unfortunately, that same kind of moralism pervades much of today's Left. It confuses “the poorest” with the working-class, just as it confuses “the rich”, by which if often means the affluent, with the bourgeoisie, and worse, the owners of capital. As Marx set out in relation to the hand-loom weavers, and Lenin set out in relation to the poorest peasants, the poorest (actually the least affluent, i.e. least net income) are not the workers but, setting aside the paupers and chronically unemployed, the great mass of the petty-bourgeoisie. These layers, the breeding ground of reaction and fascism, and which, today, is the foundation of Trumpism, Faragism, Starmerism, Bolsonarism, and all the other reactionary nationalist movements, can never be the prime concern of Marxists.
Our concern, today, can only be with the organised working-class, which is, itself, now, the collective owner of all the socialised capital that dominates production, and, via its pension funds, also, the collective owners of a large part of the fictitious capital, which draws its revenues from that socialised capital's profit. But, in neither case is the working-class allowed, by law, to exercise control over its own property. That, today, is the property question that Marxists must address in their programmes.
Tuesday, 2 June 2026
Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, I – Historical - Part 4
Marx makes the same point in Value, Price and Profit.
“They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!"” (p 93)
The contradictions arising from capitalist production were only taking shape, in 1800, when the utopians were setting forth their observations. The first, generalised crisis of overproduction of commodities did not occur until 1825. It was another quarter of a century before large-scale industrial capital asserts its dominance, and another quarter century before that large-scale industrial capital, predominantly, takes the form of socialised capital, in the shape of the co-operatives and limited liability companies that flourished after the passing of the Limited Liability Act of 1855. So, the Utopians could not see such development, and the means of achieving their goals. Rather, they relied still on the pervasive power of reason and belief that, if only society could have its eyes opened to such reason, a harmonious development could be undertaken.
“During the Reign of Terror, the propertyless masses of Paris were able to gain the mastery for a moment [and thus to lead the bourgeois revolution to victory against the bourgeoisie itself]. But, in doing so they only proved how impossible [it] was [for] their domination [to last] under the conditions then obtaining. The proletariat, which was only just separating itself from these propertyless masses as the nucleus of a new class, and was as yet quite incapable of independent political action, appeared as an oppressed, suffering estate, to which, in its incapacity to help itself, help could, at best, be brought in from without from above down.” (p 329-30)
The Utopias dreamed up were incapable of becoming real, not because the productive forces were not developed sufficiently, but because there was no reason that the capitalists were going to voluntarily abandon their own advantages and position as ruling-class. In 1800, it was still the case that many of the private industrial capitalists were former skilled labourers themselves. The majority of production was undertaken, still, by petty-bourgeois, independent commodity producers, like the hand-loom weavers But, as the fate of the latter showed, described by Marx in Capital I, those conditions were rapidly changing, as machine industry drove them out of production, and concentrated the means of production in the hands of private capitalist families, whose lifestyles were transformed along with it.
Marxist theory is not a theory that starts from the individual seeking to turn each one into a clone of another. So, of course, some of these individuals caught a glimpse of the future, but Marxist theory, historical materialism, is a theory based on the interests of given forms of property, and so the behaviour, in aggregate, of the social classes based on it. That some of these individuals did obtain a glimpse of the future, albeit expressed in their various fantastical forms, is still a mark of their own genius.
“Saint-Simon was a son of the great French Revolution, at the outbreak of which he was not yet thirty.” (p 330)
That revolution was carried out against the old aristocratic ruling class, a class of parasites and idlers that leached off the great mass of society engaged in the production of the nation's wealth – the Third Estate. But, this Third Estate was soon revealed to, in fact, be a contradictory whole, comprising, at one pole, the rising bourgeoisie, and, at the other, the emerging proletariat. Much as with the political revolution in Britain, in which the bourgeoisie conducted its struggle for political rights and freedoms, whilst drawing behind it a large mass of petty-bourgeois producers, and the emerging proletariat, as symbolised by the gathering in St. Peter's Fields in Manchester, it soon became apparent that this political revolution was one that the bourgeoisie sought to contain within strict limits.
Sunday, 31 May 2026
Saturday, 23 May 2026
Wednesday, 20 May 2026
Burnham's Brexit Baloney
Its like deja vu all over again! The liberal Left and soft Left, having chosen their next potential saviour, and reduced themselves, again, to essentially passive onlookers of the historical process (class struggle), cheerleaders of whoever (or whatever) might be the current lesser-evil, had great expectations in the King of the North, Prince Across the Water – choose your appropriate aristocratic metaphor – Andy Burnham. But, 7 years ago, they had similar hopes for Starmer, who stood on an almost identical platform to that, now, put forward by Burnham. At least, Starmer had stayed in Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet, when Burnham ran off to Manchester.
Of course, even before that, the same passive, hapless role of what passes for “the Left” - an increasingly less than meaningless term – had, at least, formed up to cheer on Corbyn, into the same role. Its epitome was the less than useless, Momentum. But, as far as “the Left” is concerned, we could go back further than that. In the 1960's, Tony Benn, as a government Minister, had no great Left-wing credentials. If Burnham wants a precedent to answer the questions of those like Owen Jones who have noted Burnham's journey back and forth from Blair-right, to soft-Left, he could point to Benn, who, in the 1970's and 80's, became a champion of that “Left”.
Benn, like Foot before him, became a figurehead for “the Left”, but he could be so, much as with Corbyn, only because of the deeply inadequate nature of “the Left” itself. “The Left”, has become simply code for those that favour greater roles for the capitalist state, both in the economy, and society in general, as well as those that favour, and attach themselves to whatever the latest “progressive”, social movement is thought to be. In other words, “the Left”, is a vague, middle-class, liberal mush, the result of a long-term search for the broadest “progressive” coalition of forces.
It is a manifestation not of Marxism, but of Hegelian Idealism. By defining “the Left”, in terms of state ownership and intervention, its no wonder that it opens up the line of argument of the bourgeois centre that the Left and Right, meet up at their extreme points. How much more state interventionist could you get than Nazi Germany, for example. If that is the definition of “Left”, then, Marx and Engels, but, also, the likes of Lenin and Trotsky, would not have considered themselves to be “Left”. It completely leaves out of consideration, any question of the class character of that state.
As Marx and Engels put it.
“The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.”
(Anti-Duhring)
It is, on that basis, a “progressive” development of capitalism, in the Marxist, scientific sense of the term “progressive”, as against the middle-class, liberal, idealist and moralistic sense, of being the latest social movement crusade. It is progressive, only, as an inevitable development of capital, into larger, more concentrated blocs, as with the previous development of monopolies/oligopolies. In fact, large sections of “the Left”, driven by a sense of petty-bourgeois moralism, show their confusion, by seeing those monopolies/oligopolies, not as, also, being progressive, but, as being akin to the devil incarnate. Not surprisingly, they see the appropriate response to that being, not, as Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin and Trotsky argued, the need for the workers to exercise their rightful control over them, but, instead, either to argue for the state to break them up/limit them, in favour of the smaller capitals, or else, for the capitalist state (the national capitalist) to assert its control over them! Socialists, argue that to expect this current state, the capitalist state, the national capitalist, to act in workers interests, is to mislead the workers, with bourgeois idealism. As, Marx put it,
“The German Workers' party — at least if it adopts the program — shows that its socialist ideas are not even skin-deep; in that, instead of treating existing society (and this holds good for any future one) as the basis of the existing state (or of the future state in the case of future society), it treats the state rather as an independent entity that possesses its own intellectual, ethical, and libertarian bases ...
the whole program, for all its democratic clang, is tainted through and through by the Lassallean sect's servile belief in the state, or, what is no better, by a democratic belief in miracles; or rather it is a compromise between these two kinds of belief in miracles, both equally remote from socialism.”
In the modern parlance, such demands might be described as “Left”, but they are certainly not socialist. But, that confusion that misrepresentation is what has characterised “the Left”, including those that call themselves “Marxists”, for around 80 years. So, in the 1970's, “the Left” made itself into cheerleaders for the likes of Benn, and his statist ideas. But if that “servile belief in the state”, and “democratic belief in miracles” is to be pursued, then, it is clear that this state, can only be the current capitalist, nation state, and the democratic miracle can only be performed by the existing, bourgeois-democratic national parliament. Its no wonder, therefore, that, in the 1970's, when the question of the EEC/EU again dominated the political debate, the opposition to the EEC/EU saw “the Left”, and the Far-Right, indeed, meet up to defend the fiction of this nation state. Ironically, I watched, yesterday, a 2025 TV programme on how, in 1940, Churchill made a “bid to abolish Britain”, and merge France and Britain.
This servile belief in the state, and democratic belief in miracles that characterises “the Left”, is simply an extension of its petty-bourgeois, nationalist mindset that has also dominated it in the post-war period, which has seen it prioritise struggles for national self-determination, which means the national self-determination of bourgeois states, over the self-determination of the working-class across those states, and for whom, those bourgeois states are their main enemy. So, the opposition to the EEC/EU, becomes a utopian, idealist, and so reactionary quest, to insist on national self-determination for the “British” capitalist state, so that a “British”, reformist, Labour government can implement “Left” policies.
As in the 1970's, foreigners, i.e. the EEC/EU are used as the scapegoat, the excuse for why the British capitalist state, even when it was far more powerful, and with far greater room for manoeuvre, despite several Labour governments over the last century, most of them markedly to the “Left” of the current Labour government, failed to bring about any radical, meaningful change in the interests of the working-class, at the expense of capital. Over and over, the logical, reactionary dynamic of that is witnessed. If its Europe that limits a Westminster government from acting in workers' interests, then, in Scotland and Wales, it must be an English parliament in Westminster that is stopping the possibility of the Scottish and Welsh nations from acting in the interests of Scottish and Welsh workers. But, similarly, the problem in the Regions, in Manchester, Birmingham and so on, must be the need to “take back control” into local hands. The very logic of nationalism, every time it necessarily fails to deliver, leads to the argument to take back control to a smaller, less rational unit, which, also, inevitably fails. Nationalism destroys the basis of the nation state.
What is more, who is to say that having freed itself from the supposed constraints of some larger, more rational political entity, the nation state would act in the interests of workers, or be more “progressive”? That is not why the likes of the National Front, Enoch Powell, or the likes of Farage, Truss, the BNP and so on argue for national self-determination for Britain. On the contrary, they see such national independence as the necessary condition to pursue the interests of the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, whose political representatives they are. They want to opt out of all those rules and regulations that go along with the EU. They want to be able to give all of those small traders and employers every opportunity to go back to the days of cheating and swindling that characterised the early days of capitalism, to be able to utilise sweated labour, unlimited rights to hire and fire at will, to ignore any consumer or environmental standards, because its only in that way that their dwarf capitals can make a profit. And, the concomitant of that was seen under Thatcher in the 1980's and 90's, with the introduction of Enterprise Zones, and so on, and the pitting of one region, local authority area against another, competing tooth and nail for resources for its area, at the expense of others.
The other logical conclusion of that is not greater democracy, but the handing over of political control to local Bonapartes, to act to attract those resources to that area, at the expense of others. That is the role that the Metropolitan Mayors played. At least in the 1960's, when development was pushed ahead, in places like Tyneside by powerful local figures, such as T. Dan Smith, and all the corruption that went with it, it was at a time when British capital was far less decayed than it is today.
So, it is no wonder that, today, we have Burnham continuing to argue that, although Brexit has been extremely damaging – and not even the hard line Brexiters, now, try to deny that – he will not do the obvious thing, and reverse it. Instead, just as with Starmer, he wants to continue to peddle the same old snake oil that somehow, Brexit can be made to work, that Britain can have a “closer relationship” to Europe, and that “Britain's” problems can be resolved, outside the EU. That is the same cakeist agenda that was put forward by Corbyn in 2019, and led to the dissolution of the coalition of support that had made him Leader, and came close to winning the election in 2017. It led to the disaster of 2019.
Starmer, of course, became Leader only by playing on his role in Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet, and by adopting, as part of the strategy put forward by Labour Together, his ten point pledge to pursue the Corbynite, social-democratic agenda. That is the same Labour Together that used Starmer as their cypher, and ditched that agenda as soon as he became Leader. It is the same Labour Together of which Josh Simons was a Director. That is the same Josh Simons who has just stood down in Makerfield for Burnham, and who Burnham has said, he would find a place for.
But, the reality is that Brexit cannot be made to work, and the longer it continues, the greater the damage it will do. Its like saying I realise drinking this poison is really bad for me, but I decided to open the bottle, and so have to keep drinking. The difference with Brexit is that its a bottle that never runs dry. As I wrote in 2019, and after, the idea that you can pursue any kind of even radical social-democratic agenda, without reversing Brexit, and re-joining the EU, is utopian and reactionary. Its a form of Stalinoid, theory of Socialism In One Country. For one thing, Britain is losing around £40 billion a year in tax revenues, as a result of the reduction in GDP growth that has resulted from Brexit. As I pointed out, in relation to the fantasy agenda of Blue Labour in 2024, if the key to your programme is growth, how on Earth are you going to get that growth without a) having the fiscal space to spend on infrastructure, and b) without renewing the free movement that comes from being a part of the EU?
As I've noted before, its not that joining, or now re-joining the EU is the answer to workers problems, but it is that re-joining is the basis of being able to create the conditions for doing so. Blair-rights such as Streeting, for all of their conservative, social-democratic agenda, at least have the advantage over the likes of Burnham that they recognise that the future for Britain, and in the immediate future at that, must reside in the EU. Without that perspective, the decay will continue, a Burnham government, even were he to be serious about carrying out some kind of progressive social-democratic agenda, would quickly have to face the reality that, outside the EU, the prospects for growth are dire, and without that growth, there is no prospect of carrying out even the agenda of Starmer, let alone anything more progressive. It is a recipe for further political chaos, opening the door even wider for the likes of Farage.
Burnham says he does not want to campaign for re-joining the EU, because to do so is divisive, but its equally divisive, and even more destructive not to do so. What is more, God forbid that even bourgeois-democracy should involve the electorate in a heated debate! Far better to keep the voters quiet for 5 years, and only ask them to passively place a cross every so often. So speaks the voice of the entitled, bureaucratic politician who just wants to be left alone to do their job. If that is the case, moreover, then there is a simple answer to that objection. As I noted prior to 2019, rather than a second referendum, Labour could simply put it in their next Manifesto that they intend to re-join the EU. In the meantime, a Burnham Labour government could be getting on with the job of negotiating with Brussels for such re-entry after the next British general Election. That is the best way they can “form closer ties to the EU”.
Burnham's supporters, of course, argue that Streeting, by raising the issue of re-joining the EU is seeking to sabotage Burnham's by-election chances. That assumes that arguing for re-joining the EU is damaging to Labour, and to Burnham. All the evidence shows that not to be true. The vast majority of the electorate, as a whole, know that Brexit has been a disaster, and the even vaster majority of Labour, Green and Liberal voters know that to be the case. In 2017 it was that coalition that gave Corbyn's Labour a 40% share of the vote, and saw the Labour vote, in every constituency, including those that voted “Leave”, rise dramatically, as against 2015. It took away the Tories parliamentary majority.
In 2024, when Starmer had committed to sticking with Brexit, he was able to get only 34% of the vote, and the lowest number of votes ever for any party winning a general election. In local and regional elections, Blue Labour has been haemorrhaging votes not to the reactionaries of Reform, but to the Greens, Liberals, Plaid and SNP. Continuing the Brexit lie that to win in the “Red Wall” seats requires pandering to the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie and its attendant layers of backward workers will be disastrous. In the main those Reform/Brexit voters were never part of the core Labour vote, and so they could never be “won back”. The describing of the reactionary poor as working-class, is a bourgeois sociological terminology that confuses income and social status with class, and relation to the means of production. The petty-bourgeois traders and self-employed are frequently poorer and more precarious than the majority of wage workers, but that does not make them working-class. It is the basis of their desperate individualism, and often hatred of the organised working-class and its progressivism. They are reactionaries.
Its true that one result of Thatcherism and de-indstrialisation since the 1980's, has been a 50% growth of that reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, and Burnham has pointed to some of the symptoms and consequences of that in the decayed urban centres, and the growth of asset inequality, based on the serial asset price bubbles in property, and financial assets. But, it is a crude opportunism and electoral politics that simply responds to that by chasing after the votes of that petty-bourgeoisie. If its true that, in Makerfield, the composition of the electorate is such that this reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, and its associated layers of urban poor is so large that it outweighs the votes of the working-class and progressive middle-class, then, rather than blaming Streeting, Burnham should blame himself and his advisors for choosing such a seat in which to make their stand. But, there is no evidence that is the case. Makerfield, has lower levels of deprivation than the surrounding towns, and higher levels of home ownership with a mostly skilled working-class population.
Its MP, between 1987-2010 was the Blair-right, Iain McCartney. Given Blair's enthusiastic support for the EU, during all that time, when, by contrast, the Tories were torn apart by their support for Brexit, goaded along by the likes of Farage, there was no indication that the voters in the constituency were put off voting for EU supporting Labour candidates, winning around 60% of the vote in each election. In 2010 and 2015, McCartneys successor in the seat Helen Fovargue, secured around 50% of the vote, whilst the reactionary nationalists of UKIP/BNP and Tories never got more than a combined 42%. In 2017, under Corbyn's Labour, as it won over large numbers of young voters, opposed to Brexit, Fovargue secured an increased 60% of the vote, whilst the Brexit Party stood aside for the Tories, who still could only secure 31% of the vote.
Only in 2019, when Corbyn retraced his steps towards backing Brexit did Labour's vote in the seat decline, from that 60% to just 45%. Another factor, here, was that the Corbyn wave, saw turnout in 2017 rise by 3.6%, whereas, Corbyn's return to Brexitism, in 2019, saw turnout drop by 4.1%, as Labour voters sat on their hands. In 2024, Simons won the same share of the vote as Fovargue in 2019, but the turnout was down a further, 6.2%, as Labour voters reacted to Starmer's support for Brexit, and his abandonment of even social-democratic positions. So, despite the same vote share, Simons got 2,000 fewer votes than Fovargue. The reason was not Labour voters going to the Brexit Party/Reform, but Labour voters staying home, or moving to other progressive parties such as the Greens or Liberals.
The Greens saw their vote rise by 50%, in Makerfield, in 2024 compared to 2019. The Liberals saw their vote rise by a third. Reform more than doubled the vote for the Brexit Party, but the reason for that, as elsewhere, was simply that Reform has replaced the Tories. In 2024, the Tory vote collapsed by 75%, in the constituency, compared to 2019. Taking that into consideration, the combined reactionary nationalist vote going to Reform/Brexit Party/Tories fell from 21,000 in 2019, to just 17,000 in 2024, which is hardly a ringing endorsement of the argument that the Labour voters of the constituency are abandoning Labour in favour of Reform.
It is far more likely that, this latest weak-kneed, cowardly approach from Burnham, typical of his vacillations over the years, will simply lead to even more Labour voters staying home, or continuing to move to the Greens.
Tuesday, 19 May 2026
The Hypocrisy of NATO's Illegal War On Iran - Part 15
This is the backdrop to the conditions we have, today. The ruling-class of rentiers/coupon-clippers have become, over the last 40 years, not only parasitic on the very capitalist system that brought them into existence, but have become a fetter on its further development, just as previously, the monopoly ownership of private industrial capital, became a fetter on the expansion of industrial capital, and was burst asunder, in the latter half of the 19th century, as the monopoly owners of that private industrial capital were expropriated by, large-scale, socialised industrial capital (the expropriation of the expropriators, as Marx and Engels described it).
That ruling-class of rentiers, now, represents a fetter for two reasons. Firstly, as Marx describes, in Capital III, the interests of interest-bearings capital, are antagonistic to those of industrial capital. The former seeks to maximise the amount of interest/dividends it can extract from profits, whilst the latter seeks to minimise that interest/dividends, and to maximise the profit of enterprise/retained profit so as to maximise capital accumulation. That was, always the case, but, as Marx describes, it is objectively limited, because, the rate of interest is determined by the interaction of the supply of money capital, as against the demand for it. The owners of loanable money-capital, will not lend it for nothing, whereas the demand for it, is limited by the average rate of profit, which sets a ceiling on how much industrial capitalists will pay to borrow it.
As Marx puts it, capital itself – i.e. the social relation, as opposed to the physical elements of capital – becomes a commodity sold on the market, and its "value" is determined by this social relation, by the average rate of profit. The functioning capitalist, does not own capital themselves, and so must “buy” it, i.e. borrow it from those that do. If, the average rate of profit is 30% p.a., then the “value” of £1,000 of capital is £1,300. In other words, £1,000, used as capital, to buy machines, material and labour-power, at the end of the year, turns into £1,300. The use-value of “capital”, as Marx sets out, is this capacity to produce the average rate of profit. There is no reason, therefore, why industrial capitalists, which, in the era of imperialist capital, means socialised capital, would pay a 30% rate of interest to borrow money-capital, in the above example, because it would consume all of their profit.
In Capital III, Part V, Marx and Engels explore these relations between what were then the two antagonistic classes of capitalist, the owners of interesting-bearing capital, and the owners of industrial capital, and how this antagonistic and contradictory relation determines, firstly the coming into existence of the category of interest, and how it determines the rate of interest in different phases of the economic cycle. This analysis by Marx and Engels sets out the true relation, and can be contrasted with the arguments put by bourgeois economists, who view the world and the relation through the lens of the owners of interest-bearing capital. Indeed, as Marx and Engels describe, they see “only” this loanable-money-capital as capital, and interest as being some kind of natural fruit produced by it.
Profit, by contrast, is seen as not deriving from capital, but from entrepreneurship, by the cunning and skill of the entrepreneur, in buying low and selling high, in bringing the factors of production together efficiently, and so on. In other words, the entrepreneur or “functioning capitalist”, is characterised not by their ownership of “capital”, but by their functional role in production, and profit is, then, reduced to being just a special kind of “wages” for their labour-power. The only real capital, is, then, portrayed as interest-bearing capital, and the only real capitalists are the owners of this interest-bearing capital, whose epitome, and agent becomes the bankers, and large financial institutions, stock markets and so on, that provide this capital that makes production possible.
In the 18th and early 19th century, in the era of the monopoly of private industrial capital, Marx and Engels' analysis shows that it is the laws of capital, of competition and capital accumulation, played out over the long-wave cycle that determines the demand for and supply of loanable money-capital, and so the rate of interest. A key factor, both in the supply of loanable money-capital, and the demand for it, as they set out, in Capital III, Part V, is the rate of profit. The supply of loanable money-capital is comprised of two main sources. Firstly, realised money profits, and secondly accumulated savings. In respect, of the latter, it is why they note that older bourgeois societies, tend to have lower rates of interest, because they have greater levels of accumulated savings.
Those savings can also take the form of various money reserves, i.e. money destined to be used to buy commodities, but which has not, yet, been so used, for example firms amortisation funds, or the money received by workers, and capitalists they will use to buy the necessities required for their personal consumption, but which they have not yet spent. Marx notes that the development of banking, so that small amounts of savings by workers and the middle-class can be aggregated into large sums, facilitates that. Today, we have huge amounts of workers pension savings both in their private pensions, and those accumulated by the state directly in taxes.
But, the largest source of additional loanable money-capital is from realised money profits. Profit is the money form of the surplus product. If the amount of the surplus product/profit going to unproductive personal consumption remains the same, then the amount available as loanable money-capital rises, when the mass of profit rises. If the demand for that money-capital does not rise, then, interest rates must fall. But, the demand for that loanable money-capital is also a function of the amount and rate of profit, as Marx and Engels set out.
“On the whole, then, the movement of loan capital, as expressed in the rate of interest, is in the opposite direction to that of industrial capital. The phase wherein a low rate of interest, but above the minimum, coincides with the "improvement" and growing confidence after a crisis, and particularly the phase wherein the rate of interest reaches its average level, exactly midway between its minimum and maximum, are the only two periods during which an abundance of loan capital is available simultaneously with a great expansion of industrial capital. But at the beginning of the industrial cycle, a low rate of interest coincides with a contraction, and at the end of the industrial cycle, a high rate of interest coincides with a superabundance of industrial capital. The low rate of interest that accompanies the "improvement" shows that the commercial credit requires bank credit only to a slight extent because it is still self-supporting.”
It is, industrial capital, and its cycle that determines the supply and demand for loanable money-capital, and so the rate of interest. But, for orthodox, bourgeois economics, it is only interest-bearing capital that constitutes capital, and it is its supply, which somehow manifests out of the ether, into the hands of money lenders, which determines the state of the economy. So, orthodox bourgeois theory sees the rate of interest as being the regulator, along with its concept of a natural, or neutral rate of interest, with rates below it causing economic expansion and the potential for overheating and inflation, and above it, contraction and the potential for recession and deflation. I have set out, elsewhere, why this is nonsense.
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