Saturday Night Northern Soul (5)

 

Anti-Duhring,Part II, Political Economy, IV – The Force Theory (Concluded) - Part 3 of 10

A lot of the environmental destruction, caused by the Industrial Revolution was reversed in the later 20th century, and made possible by the wealth produced by that revolution. The smogs and “pea-soupers” that still existed in the 1950's, disappeared in the 1960's, as Clean Air Acts were introduced. In the 1950's, as a child, every night, the sky above our street turned red, and the air was full of a choking sulphur, as the coke oven doors were opened at the nearby Birchenwood Gas and Coke Works. In other directions, a similar red glow filled the sky from the furnaces at the Goldendale and Shelton Iron and Steel Works, several miles away.

Across towns and cities in the industrial North and Midlands, buildings were a uniform black colour that we all took to be their natural state, until the soot was sand blasted from them, revealing their bright, sandstone features. A similar effect on people's lungs had no doubt taken place over all that previous time, until the Clean Air Acts reflected the fact that, now, much more efficient, and cleaner, North Sea Gas, was able to replace coal and coke.

In the following decades, rivers and canals that had died were cleaned, with fish returning to rivers they had not been seen in for a century, and canals became locations for a range of leisure activities. On the site of the previously mentioned Birchenwood Gas and Coke Works, which was, also, the site of an associated coal mine, iron works, and brickworks, had the distinction of being the most polluted land in Europe. My grandad worked at the pit in the 1920's and 30's, and, as kids, we would roam the area, walking across the fields up to Mow Cop. We would play on the various chunks of slag, dotted across the land that we called “Red Rock”. Another slag heap near the house where my mother grew up, was called “Starvation Banks”, because, during the '26 strike, and 1930's, they would go to pick any bits of coal they could find there.

In the 1960's, I saw the starvation banks reclaimed and trees planted on it. Similar transformations took place at other former colliery slag heaps throughout the city, for example, what is now Hanley Forest Park. Later, Birchenwood, itself, was reclaimed, being turned into a new housing estate, leisure and amenities facilities and so on.

A similar process is seen, now, with the Amazon, as inefficient methods of agriculture lead to extensive rather than capital intensive cultivation, to meet the demand. The result is the reckless cutting down and burning of rainforest, to quickly open up land for such agricultural production.

Duhring's claims about the large landed proprietor subjugating nature by first subjugating slaves, was a fiction.

“The very reverse is the case. Where he makes his appearance in antiquity, as in Italy, he does not bring wasteland into cultivation, but transforms arable land brought under cultivation by peasants into stock pastures, depopulating and ruining whole countries. Only in a more recent period, when the increasing density of population had raised the value of land, and particularly after the development of agricultural science had made even poorer land more cultivable—it is only from this period that large landowners began to participate on an extensive scale in bringing wasteland and grass-land under cultivation—and this mainly through the robbery of common land from the peasants, both in England and in Germany. But there was another side even to this. For every acre of common land which the large landowners brought into cultivation in England, they transformed at least three acres of arable land in Scotland into sheep-runs and eventually even into mere grounds for deer-hunting.” (p 226-7)

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Northern Soul Classics - Its Needless To Say - Bernard Williams & The Original Blue Notes

 

Friday Night Disco - I'm Alright - Little Anthony & The Imperials

 

Responding To The Racists Tactics On Refugee Hotels

The racists of Reform, with their extra-parliamentary auxiliaries from the various neo-fascist organisations have targeted the hotels where the government has located asylum seekers who have escaped various hell-holes across the globe. Many of those hell-holes are the product of past British colonialism, as well as more recent British-US military adventures, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. Indeed, many of them are people who collaborated with British and US invading forces in those countries, and whose position was made impossible when British and US forces scuttled.

The tactic was designed to create a hostile environment, and whip up racist hysteria along the lines of what happened in 2024, and has been facilitated by the same sensationalist media that whipped up those same forces to vote for Brexit in 2016, which has also created such chaos and economic disaster that the racists of Reform try to blame on migrants.

In relation to those “migrants”, the racists always refer to them as “illegal” migrants, but there is nothing illegal about them. Those being housed in these run down hotels, many of which would have simply closed were it not for being put to this use, are refugees and asylum seekers. That is a perfectly legal status. Just look at all the old films from the Cold War era, where people escaped Eastern Europe by various means to sneak into Western Europe, and claim asylum.

The reason the government has had to resort to more of these run down hotels to put asylum seekers in is that the previous Tory government stopped processing the applications for asylum, as well as the fact that a growing austerity, since 2010, means that the state bureaucracy, in general, does not have the resources required to function. Indeed, the same austerity measures, introduced following the bailing out of the financial speculators, who lost paper wealth in the global crash of 2008, that means asylum claims do not get processed effectively is, also, the same reason that schools, hospitals, roads and other vital services have been run down, but which the racists, now, seek to blame on “migrants”.

Of course, the Tories who implemented that austerity over the last 15 years, were also the same ones that inflicted Brexit on the country, which has cost it around £40 billion a year in lost taxes as a result of the 4% reduction in GDP caused by the loss of trade with the EU as Britain's largest trading partner. That £40 billion a year would go a long way to financing many of those services that the racists that backed Brexit, now seek to blame on migrants. With the vast majority of people now seeing that they were lied to over Brexit, and now wanting to re-join the EU, the Tories in their old form have been destroyed, reduced to their central core of racists, which has emerged from its chrysalis form into the shape of Reform. They can only relate to that racist hardcore, and the more Reform grows, on that basis, the more the Tories, left in the old Conservative Party are squeezed out of existence.

Hence the attempts of the Tories to respond by making themselves appear even more hardline racists than Reform. That, of course, simply drives the Conservative element of the Tory party further into the hands of the Liberals, where many of them had found a natural home following Brexit. The Conservative Party can no more compete with Reform on that ground than can the petty-bourgeois nationalists and racists of Starmer's Blue Labour, because the hardcore racists will not believe them, and those who are gulled by the lies of the racists will always vote for the original rather than some pale imitation of it. The only thing that trying to out Reform Reform will bring for Blue Labour and the Tories is a further collapse of their own core vote as it surges towrds the Liberals, Greens, Plaid, SNP, and Your Party.

That is already apparent. At the last local elections, it became obvious that the Tory vote had simply moved en masse to Reform, whilst much of its Conservative voter base switched to the Liberals, or Greens. The claim of Reform, put to Tory voters, that a vote for the Tories was a vote for Starmer was not only vindicated but heeded by Tory voters. In 2024, Starmer's Blue Labour only managed to sustain the meagre vote it managed, by similarly claiming that a vote for more progressive parties, such as the Liberals, Greens or various independents, would be a vote for the Tories. That clearly was not true. Not only did the Liberals win large numbers of additional seats, and would have won more had their been proportional representation, but the Greens also won more seats, and, again would have won many more had their been proportional representation. Even independent candidates, such as Corbyn, won their seats, such is the extent of the distaste for Starmer's reactionary nationalist Blue Labour, and that has intensified since then.

In a number of local by-elections, Labour has lost not to Reform, but to Green candidates standing on platforms, at least on paper, to the left of Blue Labour. 

That, also, gives the lie to the Left nationalists who purvey the myth that Labour has lost support to Reform, and so needs to accommodate that reactionary agenda. If Your Party were to allow itself to be sent down that dead-end, it would quickly destroy itself. Your Party can only provide a real alternative to Blue Labour if it stands on a progressive, internationalist and socialist platform. Having nearly a million people already having signed up to it, gives it an unprecedented advantage in starting out on that basis. It must suck up all of the progressive support for the Greens, Liberals, Plaid and SNP on that basis, again, not by accommodating itself to their liberal, bourgeois agenda, but by offering a clear and principled socialist alternative.

The ideas of calling Your Party “The People's Party”, and such like, are an abysmal, popular frontist betrayal. A true alternative to Blue Labour can never be formed on the basis of such populist nonsense. The “people”, after all, also includes the 30% of the population who are petty-bourgeois, the same social forces that formed the hard core of the Tory Party, and worse, the same kinds of social layers that have always provided the foot soldiers of fascism. They are the same social forces that look to the ideas of Faragism, Trussism and so on, because their inefficient small businesses cannot function without scrapping all of the social protections that have been hard won over the last century. Nothing sustainable can come from trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, and seeking to accommodate and appease the reactionary interests and ideas of that section of society.

One suggestion that follows that same line of thinking was to call it the "New Party", with all of the Mosleyite connotations that has!  Mosley himself of course created the New Party as a supposedly "Left" alternative to Labour after he resigned as a Labour Minister.  All of the claims that it should appeal to reactionary elements by following the example of Blue Labour in brandishing its "Britishness" and patriotism are also disastrous.  I would favour the opposite, proclaiming its internationalism, and specifically the thing that won over tens of thousands to Corbyn's Labour Party, in 2015, its opposition to Brexit and Europeanism.  On that basis, I would favour either the International Labour Party, or the European Workers' Party.

In the coming months, it will become apparent that Starmer's refuge in 2024, will, now, turn against him. Everywhere, Blue Labour is losing, and it is losing because progressive voters are abandoning it to vote for other parties such as the Liberals, Greens and so on. That is even before Your Party is actually formed, and begins fighting elections. As with Blair's New Labour, which was an empty vessel, and lost all of its activists on the ground, Blue Labour, also, has no large activist base, working in local communities, campaigns, and workplaces. Your Party, especially if the trades unions give up on Starmer and affiliate to it, will have that implantation in the working-class, much as happened when the trades unions created the Labour Party itself, as they split from the Liberals. It will quickly become apparent that a vote for Blue Labour, as against a vote for Your Party, or in some seats, the Greens or Liberals, or Plaid or SNP, will be a vote for Reform. To avoid splitting the anti-Reform vote, it will be necessary for the remaining Labour voters to switch to these other progressive alternatives.

The latest polls show that Your Party is already set to overtake and replace Blue Labour as the main workers' party.

Blue Labour has been sucked down the rabbit hole of reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalism. It may still be possible to save it, but only if the trades unions act, in the next few weeks, to oust Starmer, and set it on a different track. As a start, they should be demanding that instead of Blue Labour responding to the racist attacks on refugees and migrants, by adopting an even more reactionary and racist stance itself, that it begins to stand up to the racists. Part of the problem was the fact that the Tories stopped processing asylum claims, and its now been revealed that Jenrick had himself signed up a load of these run down hotels to house them, before the Tories lost the election in 2024. The simple answer to the tactic of taking legal action by racist councils is for the government to simply give a blanket approval of asylum to everyone currently seeking it. That would mean that all of those asylum seekers would be able to take up employment, and find their own accommodation, as well as contributing to the production of goods and services, and paying taxes etc. It would immediately remove all of the objections put forward by the racists.

Anti-Duhring,Part II, Political Economy, IV – The Force Theory (Concluded) - Part 2 of 10

The English jurists, following the colonisation of India, tried in vain to answer the question “Who is the owner of the land?”. These conditions of collective ownership persisted for millennia, and, as Marx noted, in his writings on the British in India, those relations were so stagnant and stable that they remained like that until some external intervention disturbed and disrupted them, creating the possibility of change.

“The Turks were the first to introduce a sort of feudal ownership of land in the countries conquered by them in the Orient. As far back as the heroic epoch, Greece made its entry into history with a system of social estates which was itself evidently the product of a long but unknown prehistory; even there, however, the land was mainly cultivated by independent peasants; the larger domains of the nobles and tribal chiefs were the exception, and they disappeared soon after. Italy was brought under cultivation chiefly by peasants; when, in the final period of the Roman Republic, the great complexes of estates, the latifundia, displaced the small peasants and replaced them by slaves, they also replaced tillage by stockraising, and, as Pliny already realized, brought Italy to ruin (latifundia Italiam perdidere). During the Middle Ages, peasant farming was predominant throughout Europe (especially in bringing virgin soil into cultivation)”. (p 225-6)

Whether these peasants paid feudal or other rents to landlords, Engels notes, is not relevant, because unlike a slave or serf, they did so as free peasants.

“The colonists from Friesland, Lower Saxony, Flanders and the Lower Rhine, who brought under cultivation the land east of the Elbe which had been wrested from the Slavs, did this as free peasants under very favourable rentals, and not at all under “some form of corvée”.” (p 226)

In North America, the large tracts of land were, generally, not cultivated by the Native American tribes, who remained as hunter-gatherers, because of the facility of doing so. Cultivation on a large-scale, arises only with European settlement, but, here, again, there is no support for Duhring's thesis.

“In North America, by far the largest portion of the land was opened for cultivation by the labour of free farmers, while the big landed proprietors of the South, with their slaves and their rapacious tilling of the land, exhausted the soil until it could grow only firs, so that the cultivation of cotton was forced further and further west.” (p 226)

Again, as Marx had set out in Capital III, it is only with the subsequent application of capitalistic methods, and its use of science and technology, that these “rapacious” methods that destroy the soil and natural environment, were ended and reversed. The two sources of real wealth, as Marx sets out in The Critique of The Gotha Programme, and A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy, are Nature and Labour. Capitalism relies on both, and, in its contradictory process of development, is led both to destroy and to conserve them. At times, it overworks and destroys both the environment and labour-power, when they are in excess supply, but, then, is also forced to introduce its own regulation, to prevent such destruction, as bringing, also, a destruction of its own capacity to produce and realise profits. As Marx had put it in his Preface to Capital I, the Factory Acts were as much the product of industrial capitalism as the spinning machine. And Engels, in his later Prefaces to The Condition of the Working Class, makes the same point.

“The competition of manufacturer against manufacturer by means of petty thefts upon the workpeople did no longer pay. Trade had outgrown such low means of making money; they were not worth while practising for the manufacturing millionaire, and served merely to keep alive the competition of smaller traders, thankful to pick up a penny wherever they could. Thus the truck system was suppressed, the Ten Hours’ Bill was enacted, and a number of other secondary reforms introduced — much against the spirit of Free Trade and unbridled competition, but quite as much in favour of the giant-capitalist in his competition with his less favoured brother. Moreover, the larger the concern, and with it the number of hands, the greater the loss and inconvenience caused by every conflict between master and men; and thus a new spirit came over the masters, especially the large ones, which taught them to avoid unnecessary squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and power of Trades’ Unions, and finally even to discover in strikes — at opportune times — a powerful means to serve their own ends. The largest manufacturers, formerly the leaders of the war against the working-class, were now the foremost to preach peace and harmony. And for a very good reason. The fact is that all these concessions to justice and philanthropy were nothing else but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the few, for whom the niggardly extra extortions of former years had lost all importance and had become actual nuisances; and to crush all the quicker and all the safer their smaller competitors, who could not make both ends meet without such perquisites. Thus the development of production on the basis of the capitalistic system has of itself sufficed — at least in the leading industries, for in the more unimportant branches this is far from being the case — to do away with all those minor grievances which aggravated the workman’s fate during its earlier stages...

Again, the repeated visitations of cholera, typhus, small-pox, and other epidemics have shown the British bourgeois the urgent necessity of sanitation in his towns and cities, if he wishes to save himself and family from falling victims to such diseases. Accordingly, the most crying abuses described in this book have either disappeared or have been made less conspicuous.”

(Preface To The 1892 English Edition of The Condition Of The Working Class)

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UK Inflation Continues To Rise

Following the surge in US Producer Prices, the UK is the latest developed economy to show that inflation persists, as central banks have continued to provide liquidity to enable firms to raise prices, to avoid cuts in their profits. UK consumer prices, as measured by the CPI, rose by 3.8%, in July, compared to the previous year. That compared to 3.6% in the previous month, and expectations of a rise of only 3.7%. The Bank of England, has never brought inflation back to its 2% target level, since the spike in inflation following the tsunami of liquidity pumped into circulation during lockdowns, and this figure stands at nearly twice that target level. Yet, in the UK, as in the US, as the speculators clamour for cuts in interest rates to boost asset prices, the central banks are complying with those demands.

Its worth summarising what prices are. They are the exchange-value of commodities as measured against the general commodity/money commodity, or, as Marx describes, in countries with fiat currencies, against the standard of prices/unit of currency. Like any other exchange-value, therefore, it depends on the value of the thing being measured, but also on the value of the unit of measurement. Just as with length, where a field may remain the same length, but can be expressed as, say, 100 or 1,000, dependent on whether its measured in metres or centimetres, so too with prices. The value of commodities, in aggregate, may be unchanged, or even be reduced, which is what happens as a result of continually rising social productivity, and yet prices, in aggregate, may rise, if the unit of measurement, for example, the Pound, is itself reduced in value. For a unit of currency, this reduction in its value is the result of an excess of it being thrown into circulation - inflation.

That is what happened with the surge in inflation following lockdowns, but the same thing was seen in the 1970's, and early 1980's, it was seen in the Weimar Republic in the 1920's, as well as in the USSR at that time, and in numerous other economies, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, where the state has simply printed money tokens in excess, and caused the value of those tokens to be shredded. But, its also worth examining why states do that. One basic reason, from the time they began issuing currency, they have debased it is that they thought they could pass off bad coin to pay for their debts. As with MMT, they confuse money with these money tokens/currency, which is like confusing a cow with the picture of a cow. They thought that they could simply “create” money, by simply printing more of the tokens, which are, in fact, only a facsimile of it. Its like thinking you can produce more cows, by simply photocopying a picture of a cow used as its representation.

As Marx describes, when economies had currencies which were redeemable in gold or silver, which acted as the money commodity, this was limited, because, if the value of the coins/tokens fell below their nominal or face value, i.e. the amount of precious metal they were supposed to represent, holders of the coins/tokens would simply redeem them for the precious metal. The excess was taken out of circulation. In practice, this is what happened in 1971, when France demanded to be able to redeem its Dollars for gold. When the US printed excess Dollars, from around 1962, to pay for its military spending on wars in Vietnam and so on, and to finance its domestic welfare programme, so causing a devaluation of the Dollar, its creditors/trading partners, eventually, decided enough was enough, and demanded to redeem their Dollars for gold at the official exchange rate of $35 an ounce. That official exchange rate was over stated the value of the Dollar, by a factor of ten at that time. Of course, the US, at that point, simply refused to honour its obligations, and ended convertibility of the Dollar for gold.

During the 1960's, the US in printing these excess money tokens, that became increasingly worthless, but which continued to pass them off, across the globe, at their nominal value, simply extracted tribute from the rest of the world, and, in the process, as these excess Dollars circulated in the world economy, created a growing inflation in global prices. It was that which became manifest in the inflation/stagflation of the 1970's and early 1980's. By 1980, the price of gold had risen from the official price of $35 in 1971, to $800 an ounce!  The same happened with lockdowns, as governments printed money tokens to cover the payments they made to households and businesses to replace the revenues they lost as a result of being locked out of their workplaces.

But, of course, there is another side, as set out above. The price of a commodity may rise if its own value rises. But, that requires that productivity must fall, whereas, generally, productivity rises by an average of around 2% p.a. Having the value of commodities rise, therefore, is not something easily accomplished. The most obvious cause of a rise in value is, for example, if there is some kind of crop failure, or equivalent that causes raw material values to rise. But, even then, these raw material prices only constitute a fraction of the value of the commodities they are transformed into. If some reduction in the cotton crop causes the value of cotton to rise, it would pass through into the value of cotton thread, and, thereby, into the value of cotton cloth, and so on, into the value of all those things that cotton cloth is used to produce from shirts to sails. But, cotton may comprise only 10% of the cost of producing cotton yarn, so that, generally rising productivity will reduce the value of other inputs, as well as reducing the value of yarn itself. There may be no rise in the value of yarn, therefore, and even if there is, yarn will comprise only a fraction of the cost of cloth, which in turn comprises only a fraction of the cost of shirts, sails, etc.

To cause a general fall in social productivity, leading to a rise in the value of all or most commodities, therefore, requires some big social change affecting all production. Globalisation, and the reduction in trade restrictions, created such a large change, in the opposite direction. It hugely reduced the value of all commodities, but the ending of that process, and its reversal in the form of Brexit, of Trump's trade wars, and so on has caused some values to rise. The rise in UK consumer prices is partly a consequence of a devaluation of the currency, i.e. inflation, and partly a consequence of a fall in social productivity resulting from Brexit, and all of the frictions it has brought.

In the case of the US, and its tariffs the situation is different. Tariffs, of themselves, like any other tax, do not increase values. If the government puts a 10% tax on cars, that does not increase the value of cars. It simply reallocates the revenues into which the value of the car resolves. As I described recently, exactly how that plays out depends, but, ultimately, that 10% tax is paid out of surplus value, i.e. out of profits. But, that brings us to the other reason that states devalue their currencies, and why central banks were created at the start of the 20th century, and why economies moved to fiat currencies. That is that if currency values are maintained, the consequence of the overall rise in social productivity is that commodity prices should fall. One of those commodities is, itself, labour-power, and workers resist falling money wages, even if their real wages are rising. Its easier for states to devalue the currency each year, so as to cause some inflation, with prices rising, despite falling values, so that nominal wages rise. Whether those rising nominal wages go along with rising real wages depends on the extent of the growth of productivity.

In the case of Trump's tariffs, the tariffs themselves do not result in a rise in the value of commodities. The value of commodities, in the US, may rise, indirectly, for the simple reason that if imports to the US fall, and are replaced by US produced commodities, the value of those commodities may itself be higher. In other words, it has the effect of an import quota. But, when US workers, then, have to buy these higher value US produced commodities, that raises the value of their own labour-power, resulting in higher wages, which, in turn, means lower US profits. Its to avoid that that central banks increase liquidity to enable companies to raise prices to protect their profits in the short-term, leading to inflationary spirals.