Globalisation has been a powerful and progressive development that reduced circulation costs and so raised profits, without the need for a corresponding investment of capital. The creation of large single markets, like the EU, is integral to that process. But, the large growth of the petty-bourgeoisie in the same period, as part of that process, engendered all of those old reactionary, individualist ideas of the past. It not only fuelled the reactionary notions of trying to turn the clock back to the days of the nation state, but, inevitably, was forced to go beyond that to a return to the old provincialism and regionalism.
However, each time petty-bourgeois populism attempts to implement these utopian and reactionary schemas, as with Brexit, Trump etc., they quickly fail, and are forced to confront the reality, just as much as the ruling-class owners of fictitious-capital have been forced to recognise the reality that their dividends/interest are a deduction from profits, and, in the end, profits only grow by an expansion of capital, an expansion of the quantity of labour exploited.
“... the ultimate causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in their growing insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. The growing recognition that existing social institutions are irrational and unjust, that reason has become unreason, and kindness a scourge, is only a sign that changes in the mode of production and exchange have silently been taking place with which the social order adapted to earlier economic conditions is no longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the means of eliminating the abuses that have been brought to light must also be present, in a more or less developed condition, within the changed relations of production themselves. These means are not to be invented out of one's brain, but discovered by the brain, in the existing material facts of production.” (p 343-4)
Marx and Engels set out, already, in Capital III, and, here, in Anti-Duhring, what these changed conditions were, and that had become dominant by the end of the 19th century. I have set them out again, in summary. But, I have also set out, here, how the most recent development of those, now, over-ripe conditions means that the irrationality has reached a crescendo.
The ruling capitalist class is, now, the immediate, mortal enemy of capital.
Engels sets out the state of play at that time.
“It is now pretty generally conceded that the existing social order is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the bourgeoisie. The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie, which since Marx has been called the capitalist mode of production, was incompatible with the local privileges and the privileges of estate as well as with the reciprocal personal ties of the feudal system. The bourgeoisie shattered the feudal system and on its ruins built the bourgeois social order, the realm of free competition, of freedom of movement, of equal rights for commodity owners and all the glories of capitalism.” (p 344)
For petty-bourgeois socialism, it is as though Marx and Engels analysis ends there. This bourgeois development created all those bourgeois rights and freedoms and created the bourgeois nation state. They want to leap from there to Socialism, treating the modern economy and bourgeois society as though it is essentially no different to this era of private industrial capitalism. It justifies their hostility to imperialism both in the form of state-monopoly capital, and its concomitant the destruction of the old bourgeois nation states.
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