Britain is seven years into a prolonged period of fiscal consolidation, in which constraints on public spending have been the central feature and are set to continue for some years to come. According to figures supplied by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, “post 2010 ‘austerity’ is on course to be the longest pause in real-term spending growth on record.” This already demonstrates that the austerity faced by the working class in Britain today is not just a result of instability in the economy caused by Brexit[1]. In fact the ruling class always has a contingent excuse for any worsening in the economy, so that the last decade of austerity has been presented as the ‘recovery’ phase from the credit crunch of 2008. In this article we will show how today’s austerity measures are nothing but the continuation and worsening of a policy that has been carried out by politicians of left and right over five decades in order for the capitalist class respond to the historic crisis in their system. And this has been an international phenomenon.
The reality of the present attacks
The fact that the NHS would face a bed crisis this winter was well known in September, with NHS England noting hospitals planned to open 3,000 and free up a similar number to cope. However a BMA report shows that roughly 150,000 beds have been lost over the last 30 years, roughly half of them the general and acute beds needed for emergency admissions[2]. The Nuffield foundation estimates that spending on the NHS needs to grow by 4.3% a year to cope with an ageing population till 2022/3, but based on figures supplied by the ONS (Office for National Statistics) it will only grow by 0.7%, and in the coming year, 2018/9, it will grow only 0.4%. Of course, a cash-starved NHS also means attacks on the workers in it, who have not only been expected to do more with less, but are also among the 1.3 million public sector workers subject to a pay freeze or 1% cap since 2010 – a severe pay cut in real terms. The chancellor announced last November that this would be ended for nurses only.
The current government was elected on a manifesto that pledged to cut £12 billion from the welfare bill. Freezing working-age benefits until 2020, originally announced in 2015, will save an estimated £4.2 billion or 6%. The IFS (Institute for Fiscal Studies) estimate this will put 470,000 more people into poverty. But the government is also making cuts elsewhere to achieve its target reduction. Bringing support for individuals on ESA (for the sick) into line with the JSA rate (for the unemployed) which applies to all new claimants from April 2017 is expected to save £640 million by 2020–21. These days our rulers like to call this a ‘reform’, which is exactly the opposite from the reforms which the working class could fight for in the 19th Century, measures that improved conditions for the whole working class such as the 10 hour day and then the 8 hour day. The latest such measure is Universal Credit, which is being rolled out to replace working age means-tested benefits, both for those in and out of work, including those on low incomes with families, the sick, unemployed and carers. This comes with a 4 week delay in payment and the possibility of imposing tough sanctions, or cuts in payment, for those deemed not to be trying hard enough. Cuts to the family element, no longer paid beyond the second child, will make more savings. These welfare cuts “contribute to an outlook for income growth over the next four years that sharply increases inequality. The combination of plateauing employment growth, a renewed pay squeeze across the economy and sharp benefit cuts create the prospect of falling incomes in the bottom half of the distribution and the biggest rise in inequality since the final Thatcher term.”[3]
One indication of how the crisis of capitalism is hitting an area is unemployment – capital can only make a profit by exploiting workers, so the unemployed mean lost profit. If you look at the official unemployment figures based on those claiming jobseeker benefits you would be led to think it had fallen to 785,000 or 4.3%, better than at any time since the 1970s. However, if you add in those who are seeking and available for work and those parked on incapacity benefits the number rises to 2.3 million[4], with the young particularly badly hit. Also we know that many jobs today are low paid, precarious and often zero hours contracts, so that those in work can be little or no better of than the unemployed. Unemployment started to rise at the end of the post-war boom in the late 1960s, but really took off at the end of the 70s (when it rose to around a million under a Labour government) rising to more than 3 million in the 80s (under the Thatcher government). At that stage the figures were massaged when millions were pushed onto incapacity benefit, a tactic that continues to be used today.
We see cuts in services, such as the NHS, pay frozen or below inflation rises, benefits frozen or cut, persistent unemployment, and insecure jobs, which overall adds up not just to an increase in inequality but specifically a decrease in the share of wealth going to the working class.
Austerity, the response to the economic crisis by governments of left and right
As we have seen, austerity did not start with Brexit, nor with this Tory government, the previous coalition, or even Margaret Thatcher. It was the response of capital from the very start of the world economic crisis at the end of the 1960s, and included the ‘Social Contract’ brought in by a Labour government in the 1970s to limit wage rises at a time of high inflation. With each new development in the crisis there have been new austerity measures and a great deal of continuity between governments at this level. So the Blair government was elected in 1997 on a promise of keeping to the spending plans of the previous Tory government, and brought in various attacks that were often called “Tory cuts” by those who wanted to pretend that a Labour Party could or should behave differently in office. However the Blair and Brown governments attacked the NHS, causing job losses in the interest of efficiency, and cuts in beds as we have seen, and also brought in benefits cuts described as the ‘New Deal’.
In the run up to the 2010 election, the Conservatives promised more of the same.
“In addition, Labour's flagship ‘New Deal' back to work programme is to be scrapped by the Tories and replaced with more ‘personalised' help, which will include benefit cuts for those unwilling to take part in whatever spurious training they are made to undergo. On the other hand, Labour has said that ‘People out of work for more than six months who have turned down work experience, support or training will be required to take a work placement as a condition of receiving their benefits.’ It's not for nothing that the Work and Pensions Secretary, Yvette Cooper, noted (apparently without any sense of irony) that the Tories ‘are simply rehashing Labour policies...’..”[5]
This continuity is no accident: it is because both parties hold office in a capitalist state, one which works in the ‘interests of the nation’, i.e. the ruling class. This remains true despite democratic elections, and also when governments spout a left wing rhetoric. So we should not be fooled into thinking that the Labour Party led by an old left wing ‘rebel’ would be any different, as we saw last June when it refused to rule out freezing benefits, because it was important to overcome the state debt, but promised to keep defence spending at 2%.[6] “Ooooh Jeremy Corbyn” leading the Labour Party would be no better than the similarly radical-sounding Syriza government in Greece which in 2015 went ahead with the very austerity measures that had been rejected by a referendum it called.
The working class cannot defend its conditions by relying on any elected government, whatever it promises, nor on any union or campaign, but only on its own struggle, its unity, and its solidarity.
M and A, 2.2.18
[1] This doesn’t mean of course that Brexit won’t bring further and deeper problems for the British economy when it finally arrives. See for example https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jan/30/key-questions-latest-leaked-brexit-forecasts [3]. We will return to this question in a future article.
[2] file:///C:/Users/WINDOW~1/AppData/Local/Temp/NHS-bed-occupancy-report-feb2017-England.pdf
[5] ‘2010: workers face sweeping cuts’ in WR 330, https://en.internationalism.org/worldrevolution/200912/3378/2010-workers... [6]
[6] See ‘Hard times bring increased illusions in Labour Party’ in WR 377, https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201706/14333/hard-times-bring-... [7]
We are publishing an article written by the US communist group Workers’ Offensive (www.workersoffensive.org [8]) which offers a welcome critique of the “identity politics” which is gaining strength around the globe, and which, as we examine in another article in this issue, was behind the recent split in the UK Anarchist Federation. Basing itself on a solid class standpoint and the analyses of past revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg, it shows how today’s identity politics serves to channel the real discontent stirred up by exacerbated racial oppression towards bourgeois political goals and institutions, and argues that only the broadening and deepening of the class struggle can overcome the many divisions that class society and capitalist social relations have imposed on the exploited (WR).
Racial identity politics within the United States have historically assumed one of two forms: integrationism and black nationalism. The integrationist view was most eloquently espoused by Frederick Douglass. It sought to eliminate racial barriers to upward social mobility by reforming the dominant social, political, and economic institutions within capitalism to be inclusive of black business and professional elites, as opposed to just their white counterparts. The black nationalist perspective, whose best-known exponent was Marcus Garvey, was much more skeptical concerning America’s ability to accommodate racial diversity within the ruling class. Its proponents argued that blacks should build their own independent political and economic enclaves within American cities, with many in the movement calling for blacks to return to Africa.[1] Both integrationist and nationalist ideologies were predicated on notions of elite spokesmanship that made black workers into the wards of ‘their’ capitalist class. This principle is encapsulated in the politics of “symbolic representation”, in its various iterations, according to which parity between social groups can be determined by measuring the degree of elite representation within the halls of power.[2] Alternatively, it has been referred to as an “elite-brokerage” style of politics. Within this framework, the diverse and often conflicting interests of blacks, which are primarily dependent upon their class positioning, are subsumed under the heading of homogeneous racial interests, with black capitalists, predictably enough, speaking on behalf of an empirically non-existent black community.[3] In short, in spite of their superficial differences, both integrationist and racial separatist (i.e., nationalist) perspectives share many assumptions that are apologetic to the existing capitalist social order. It shall be the aim of the present essay to prove the inadequacy of identity politics for liberating blacks within the United States from racialized oppression and to provide, in broad outline, a roadmap for their emancipation and that of all oppressed peoples.
The idea of the right of nations to self-determination entered public discourse in earnest when then-US president Woodrow Wilson issued his Fourteen Points towards the end of the First World War. Long before that, though, the ‘national question’ had been a subject of fervent discussion, not only among the most ardent defenders of capitalism, but also the international socialist movement. Rooted partly in the experience of the American and French revolutions, but also the major social upheavals that took place between the mid-19th to early 20th centuries, this theory holds that a nation, or group of people sharing a cultural identity, has the right to detach itself from an alien political body and decide for itself the manner in which it is to be governed. Naturally, this postulate appealed to the weak among the capitalists. Subordinated economically with respect to the dominant factions and effectively excluded from political power, they saw in it the opportunity to advance their position within capitalism by capturing the state apparatus. However, it also found a great deal of support among socialists, who feared that their mass movements would collapse from under them and workers would flock to the capitalist parties if they did not prostrate themselves before the delusions of the masses. Only a few within the Socialist International took a principled stance against the shameless opportunism of its leadership concerning the question of nationalities. The left-wing of the socialist movement, whose foremost representative was Rosa Luxemburg, rejected the right of nations to self-determination as a bourgeois myth and reasserted the validity of the core Marxian concept of class struggle.
Nations, according to Luxemburg, are abstractions whose existence cannot be asserted through factual means. They do not exist as internally homogeneous political entities because of the contradictory interests and antagonistic relations between the social classes that comprise them. Hence, as Luxemburg explains, “there is literally not one social area, from the coarsest material relationships to the subtle moral ones, in which the possessing class and the class-conscious proletariat hold the same attitude, and in which they appear as a consolidated ‘national’ entity.”[4] But nationalism is not simply an artificial thought-system propagated by the ruling class to keep the exploited masses subjugated under their rule. Rather, like all other ideologies and political theories, it is rooted in socioeconomic realities and historical processes. To be more specific, nationalism was the ideological implement through which the ascendant European bourgeoisie rallied the poor peasantry and the proletariat in its struggle to overthrow (and replace!) the feudal nobility. It was likewise with race, a category with no scientific basis whatsoever, since the current extent of our species’ biological diversity is far too superficial to merit differentiation into distinct racial categories, but which served nevertheless as an ad hoc justification for the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism, both of which were vital to capitalist primitive accumulation.[5] Therefore, the function of race in the American context is rather comparable to nationalism in 18th century Europe. As Adolph Reed explains, these ideologies, “help to stabilize a social order by legitimizing its hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, including its social division of labor, as the natural order of things.”[6]
The institutionalization of the racialized division of labor in the United States, which was quite profound historically and has assumed the form of slavery, racial segregation, and ‘post-racial’ structural racism successively, makes the American context unique in a few significant ways. For instance, whereas in other countries, racially and ethnically delineated labor pools have historically been incorporated into capitalism as a particularly vulnerable segment of the working class that can be subjected to intensified forms of exploitation, i.e., surplus-value extraction, black workers in the United States are disproportionately impacted by the structural unemployment that capitalism naturally produces. Their status as a surplus or excess population – ‘excess’ only in the sense that they cannot be profitably employed by capital – can be attributed in large part to their historical exclusion from the formal economy, and particularly those sectors experiencing the highest growth, which some have identified as the source of their relative underdevelopment.[7] Instead, the majority of black workers live in a chronic state of unemployment or under-employment and have been affected more than any other subsection of the US working class by the tendency towards the casualization of employment that has flourished under neoliberalism. It is precisely this dismal state of affairs which racism seeks to rationalize. Hence, racialist thought plays a dual function in modern-day capitalism: 1) it helps channel groups of people into certain occupations and allows for the maintenance of a reserve army of labor that can be deployed during periods of heightened capital-expansion; and 2) it sows divisions within the ranks of the workers and ideologically binds them to ‘their’ exploiting class.[8]
Since racism is grounded on the economic substructure of society, it logically follows that its abolition will not be brought about by the exploiting class or political movements led by it. The self-anointed leaders of the so-called ‘black community’, who purport to be mediators between this idealized collectivity and the majority-white political establishment, are deeply embedded in capitalist production relations and therefore complicit in the reproduction of racism. These ‘black brahmins’, as Manning Marable famously referred to the professional-managerial stratum (a layer of society that includes clergy, politicians, and middle-class professionals), are little more than professional poverty pimps, opportunistically riding the wave of black proletarian discontent to achieve political prominence and riches for themselves.[9] The most recent manifestation of this phenomenon is an activist network in the United States that calls itself ‘Black Lives Matter’, which has become synonymous with the movement against racialized police violence, a clear-cut example of capitalists and their lackeys co-opting the authentic resistance of black workers. This organization, whose ties to the Democratic Party-NGO complex are fairly well-established at this point, attempts to harness the explosive spontaneity of the proletarian element within these social movements, which often takes the form of riots and looting, into forms of engagement with the capitalist system that do not interfere in any way with profit-making.[10] It is unsurprising, therefore, that their manifesto reads like the DNC platform, but with demands for reparations and investment into black-owned businesses, which effectively amounts to income redistribution for black capitalists, thrown in for good measure. Black Lives Matter are modern-day Garveyites, only they have traded in the overt homophobia and misogyny of the latter for hollow social justice rhetoric that throws a veneer of radicalism over their essentially capitalist politics.
For reasons that we have already explored here, the capitalist class and its allied strata, all of whom are materially invested in the preservation of the existing social order, are incapable of putting forward a suitable response to anti-black racism in the United States, much less to the generalized barbarism of this society. Therefore, a solution to the profound social, economic, and moral crisis that capitalism presents at this juncture rests with the large segment of humanity dependent on the sale of its labor-power. In the American context, the creation of a multi- gendered, national, racial, etc., working-class front uniting all those who, while not equally disempowered, share a fundamental relationship to the economy, will be instrumental to abolishing capitalism and its attendant hierarchies. To this end, all forms of identity politics, which espouse collaboration between exploited and exploiting classes, and thereby compromise the success of workers’ struggle for emancipation, must be firmly opposed. It is not, however, enough to oppose identity politics; socialists must actively address non-class forms of oppression, detailing their foundations in capitalism and explaining how a socialist society will do away with them.
It is true, for example, that within the United States blacks are murdered by police at a rate that is more than twice their percentage within the general population, while whites and Latinos are killed at a rate that is roughly proportional to their share of the population. However, it is important to note that more than half of all those killed by police are white. Moreover, in states with very small black populations, the percentage of blacks killed by police is many times smaller than the national average, which suggests that although anti-black racism is an important factor in police killings, it is clearly not the principal one. In fact, empirically speaking, the most reliable predictor of whether a person is likely to be murdered by police is not their race, but their class. More than 95% of all police killings are concentrated within neighborhoods where the median annual household income is just under $100,000, while the median annual household income in most neighborhoods where police killings occur in general is just over $52,000.[11] Police killings are not, then, a mechanism for establishing and reproducing white supremacy, but rather white supremacy is a system for maintaining the domination of capitalists over workers, regardless of the race of either one. Or as Adolph Reed succinctly explains, “the pattern in those states with high rates of police killings suggests […] that it is the product of an approach to policing that emerges from an imperative to contain and suppress the pockets of economically marginal and sub-employed working-class populations produced by revanchist capitalism.”[12]
Recent developments in the class struggle within the United States are cause for careful optimism, since they reveal a willingness on the part of some workers to organize themselves in order to press their demands collectively against the bosses, independently of institutional (Democratic Party) and institutionalized (labor unions) organizations that actively discourage such behavior and openly stifle these attempts. The recent wave of illegal and non-union (i.e., wildcat) strikes by workers in the logistical and service industries, many of which have been multiracial due to the displacement of a large segment of the general working population into low-waged and low-skill labor over the last few decades, is a sign that something is potentially brewing beneath the surface.[13] With each successive struggle, workers in the United States learn for themselves that they have more in common with one another than not. Sadly, this emergent wave of militancy has been confined to a handful of industries and it has not yet spread to the whole class. Although still in its infancy, these experiences have greater transformative potential than all the consciousness-raising and leftist proselytizing in the world. The material imperatives of the class struggle impose themselves on the consciousness of social actors as an objective barrier impeding any further progress. Thus, for example, if white and male workers believe that they are inherently superior to black workers or to women, then they will make no attempt to organize with them, and their resistance will be crushed by the bosses all the same. For it is the class struggle itself that challenges people’s most deeply-held beliefs about the world and each other, and which draws the lines of battle within the workplace between workers and capitalists. In other words, the very process of putting together a solidaristic movement – that is, a social movement that unites all those who are exploited under capitalism – also works to actively undermine the various ideologies employed by the system to fortify and stabilize itself. E.S., October 13, 2017
[1]. John Henryk Clarke, Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2011), 207.
[2]. Manning Marable, Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics (Brooklyn: Verso, 2009), 188.
[3]. Adolph Reed, “Why Is There No Black Political Movement?”, in Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene, (New York City: The New Press, 2000), 4-5.
[4]. Rosa Luxemburg, “The National Question and Autonomy,” in The National Question: Selected Writings (New York City: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 135-136.
[5]. Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1 (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 915.
[6]. Adolph Reed. “Marx, Race, Neoliberalism,” New Labor Forum 22 (2013): 49.
[7]. Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Boston: South End Press, 1983), 48-49.
[8]. Marx, op. cit., 781-782.
[9]. Marable, op. cit., 170-171.
[10]. Janell Ross, “DeRay Mckesson is Running for Mayor. What Does That Mean for Black Lives Matter?”, Washington Post, February 4, 2016.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/04/black-lives-matter-runs-for-mayor/?utm_term=.a86f31b8178f [9]
[11]. While it is not a great indicator of class positioning, understood by Marxists as a person’s relationship to the economy, we can make useful generalizations from data that looks at income.
[12]. Adolph Reed, “How Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of Patterns of Police Violence”, Nonsite, September 16, 2016.
https://nonsite.org/editorial/how-racial-disparity-does-not-help-make-sense-of-patterns-of-police-violence [10]
[13]. See, for example, the walkout by 4,000 dockworkers in Newark, New Jersey [11] (https://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2016/01/surprise_walkout_by_ila_shuts_down_the_nj_and_ny_p.html [11]), which the International Longshoremen’s Association did not approve of, the latter issuing a call later that very day for its members to return to work. Or the truck drivers’ protest in Hialeah, Florida [12], (https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/ [13]) which blocked traffic on Okeechobee Road, one of the main arteries through which goods and people move in and out of the city, until they were forced to disperse violently by police.
Faced with the growing dissension within the ruling class, and the Tory party in particular, in response to negotiations around Brexit, it is useful to take a step or two back and examine the historical roots of some of these divisions. The two articles published on this page both aim to show that the divisions are not merely the result of Brexit, but derive from the decline of British imperialism over a far longer period. The article ‘Britain: the ruling class divided’ is part of a longer piece published online (https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201712/14546/united-states-heart-growing-world-disorder [14]) which also emphasises that sharpening divisions within the capitalist class are a product of the present phase of the historic and world-wide decline of capitalism – the phase of decomposition in which the watchword of the ruling class has increasingly become “every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost”. The other piece, written by a close sympathiser, looks at the symbolic use of the figure of Winston Churchill in order to understand the increasingly delusional world view of parts of the British ruling class.
In Britain, Prime Minister Theresa May had called early elections for June 2017, with the goal of winning a larger majority for her Conservative Party before entering negotiations about the conditions under which the country would leave the European Union. Instead, she lost the majority she had, making herself dependent on the support of the Ulster (North of Ireland) protestant Unionists from the DUP. The only success of the Prime Minister at these elections was that the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP, the hard liner Brexiteers to the right of the Conservative Party) are no longer represented in the House of Commons. Despite this, , the latest electoral debacle for the Conservatives made it clear that the fundamental problem remains unresolved –the problem which, a year ago, made it possible that the referendum about British membership of the European Union produced a result –the “Brexit”- which a majority of the political elites had not wanted. This problem is the deep division within the Conservatives –one of the two main state parties in Britain. Already when Britain joined what was then the “European Community” in the early 1970s, the Tories were divided over this issue. A strong resentment against “Europe” was never overcome within the Tory ranks. In recent years, these inner party tensions developed into open power struggles, which have increasingly hampered the capacity of the party to govern. In 2014, the Tory Prime Minister David Cameron managed to checkmate the Scottish Nationalists by calling a referendum about Scottish independence, and winning a majority for Scotland to remain part of the United Kingdom. Emboldened by this success, Cameron attempted to silence the opponents of British membership of the European Union in a similar manner. But this time, he had seriously miscalculated the risks. The referendum resulted in a narrow majority to leave, whereas Cameron had campaigned to stay in. A year later, the Tories are as divided on this question as ever. Only that today, the conflict is no longer about membership or not in the EU, but about whether the government should adopt a “hard” or a “soft” attitude in negotiating the conditions under which Britain will leave. Of course, these divisions within the political parties are emanations of deeper lying tendencies within capitalist society, the weakening of its national unity and cohesion in the phase of its decomposition. |
To understand why the ruling class in Britain is so divided on such issues, it is important to recall that, not so long ago, London was the proud ruler of the largest and most far flung Empire in human history. It is thanks to this golden past that the British high society is still today the richest ruling class in western Europe[1]. And whereas an average German bourgeois engages himself or herself traditionally in an industrial company, an average British counterpart is likely to own a mine in Africa, a farm in New Zealand, a ranch in Australia, and/or a forest in Canada (not to mention real estate and shareholding in the United States) as part of a family inheritance. Although the British Empire, and even the British Commonwealth, are things of the past, they enjoy a very tangible “life after death”. The “White Dominions” (no longer so-called) Canada, Australia and New Zealand, still share with Britain the same monarch as formal head of state. They also share, for instance (along with the former crown colony: the USA) a privileged cooperation of their secret services. Many among the ruling class of these countries feel as if they still belong, if not to the same nation, then to the same family. Indeed, they are often interconnected by marriage, by shares in the same property and by business interests. When Britain, in 1973, under the Tory Prime Minister Heath, joined what was then the European “Common Market”, it was a shock and even a humiliation for parts of the British ruling class that their country was obliged to reduce or even sever its privileged relations with its former “crown colonies”. All the resentment accumulated over decades about the loss of the British Empire began, from this time on, to vent itself against “Brussels”. A resentment which was soon to be augmented by the neo-liberal current (very important in Britain from the Thatcher days onwards) to whom the monstrous “Brussels bureaucracy” was anathema. A resentment shared by the ruling classes in the former dominions such as Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media billionaire, today one of the most fanatical Brexiteers. But quite apart from the weight of these old links, it was humiliating enough that a Britain which once “ruled the waves” had the same voting rights in Europe as Luxemburg, or that the tradition of Roman law held sway in the continental European institutions rather than the old Saxon one.
But all of this does not mean that the “Brexiteers” have or ever had a coherent programme for leaving the European Union. The resurrection of the Empire, or even of the Commonwealth in its original form, is clearly impossible. The motive of many of the leading Brexiteers, apart from resentment and even a certain loss of reality, is careerism. Boris Johnson, for instance, the leader of the “Leave” fraction of the Tories last year, seemed even more amazed and dismayed than his opponent, the party leader Cameron, when he heard the result of the referendum. His goal did not seem to be Brexit, in fact, but replacing Cameron at the head of the party.
The fact that it is the Conservatives, more than the Labour Party, which are so divided over this issue is equally a product of history. Capitalism in Britain triumphed, not through the elimination, but through the bourgeoisification of the aristocracy: the big land owners themselves became capitalists. But their traditions directed their interest in capitalism more towards the ownership of land, real estate and raw materials than towards industry. Since they already owned more or less the whole of their own country, their appetite for capitalist profits became one of the main motors of British overseas expansion. The larger the Empire became, the more this land- and real estate owning- layer could get the upper hand over the industrial bourgeoisie (that part which had originally pioneered the first capitalist “industrial revolution” in history). And whereas the Labour Party, through its intimate links to the trade unions, is traditionally closer to industrial capital, the big land and real estate owners tend to assemble within the ranks of the Tories. Of course, under modern capitalism, the old distinctions between industrial, land owning, merchant and finance capital tend to become dissipated by the concentration of capital and the domination of the state over the economy. Nonetheless, the different traditions, as well as the different interests they partly still express, still lead a life of their own.
Today there is a risk of a partial paralysis of the government. Both wings of the Conservative Party (who at the moment present themselves as the proponents of a “hard” versus a “soft” Brexit), are more or less poised to topple Prime Minister May. But at least at present, neither side seems to dare to strike the first blow, so great is the fear of widening the rift within the party. Should the party prove unable to resolve this problem soon, important fractions of the British bourgeoisie may start to think about the alternative of a Labour government. Immediately after the Brexit referendum, Labour presented itself, if anything, in an even worse state than the Conservatives. The “moderate” parliamentary fraction was disgruntled about the left rhetoric of its party leader Jeremy Corbyn, which they felt was putting off voters, and about his refusal to engage himself in favour of Britain remaining in the EU. They also seemed poised to topple their leader. In the meantime, Corbyn has impressed them with his capacity to mobilise young voters at the recent elections. Indeed, if the tragic Grenfell Tower fire (for which the population holds the Conservative government responsible) had taken place before instead of just after the elections, it is not unthinkable that Corbyn would now be Prime Minister instead of May. As it is, Corbyn has already begun to prepare himself for government by ditching some of his more “extreme” demands such as the abolition of the Trident nuclear armed submarines presently being modernised. Steinklopfer, August 2017
[1]. Magazines such as Fortune publish annual figures about the world’s wealthiest banks, companies, families and individuals.
In his long political career Winston Churchill epitomised the implacable defence of British imperialism’s best interests, and for this reason he is still an icon for all factions of the British bourgeoisie, who have now recruited him in support of their arguments over Brexit.[1]
In 1953 Churchill apparently told the House of Commons: “If Britain must choose between Europe and the open sea, she must always choose the open sea.” For the Brexiteers this is clear proof that Churchill was a convinced Eurosceptic. Except, as supporters of remaining in the EU have pointed out, he didn’t say this to Parliament at all; the quote is concocted. For the Remainers, on the contrary, Churchill was a passionate believer in a ‘United States of Europe’.
In fact what Churchill said on the question of Britain and Europe is revealing not only of the delusions of British imperialist policy after World War 2, but also of the extent to which Brexit is a mistake for the British bourgeoisie.
In Churchill’s vision of the post-WW2 world, Britain as a global imperialist power held a unique position at the centre of the Empire and Commonwealth, the ‘English-speaking world’ (ie. the USA) and a future United Europe; the interests of British imperialism were best served by maintaining close relationships with all three. For Churchill, Britain was therefore “with” Europe, but not “of” it.
The trouble was, Britain’s status as a global imperialist power was already in irreversible decline.
Before WW2 the British ruling class had tried hard to appease Hitler’s imperialist appetites, precisely because it knew that in a major war it risked losing its global empire and becoming a dependency of Germany – or America. But in the end of course it went to war to defeat its continental rival with American help, and despite all of Churchill’s best efforts and the famed ruthlessness of the British bourgeoisie that Hitler so admired, it came out of the war bankrupted by its supposed ally, and having lost its empire to the new global superpower.
Churchill’s post-war vision of Britain’s role was therefore a last ditch attempt to hold onto Britain’s status as an independent imperialist power. But the humiliation of British and French imperialism at Suez in 1956[2] demonstrated US supremacy and forced Britain to accept its subordinate role within the US bloc. This eventually led the main factions of the British bourgeoisie to conclude that Britain’s interests were best served by being part of Europe. There were clear advantages to the British economy in greater integration, with the removal of internal tariffs, etc., but there was also a strategic reason. Churchill had supported the idea of a ‘United States of Europe’ not, as the ‘Remainers’ would like, in the interests of ‘peace and prosperity’, but as a way of neutralising the threat from Britain’s continental rivals, as well as providing a much-needed counterweight to overweening American power.
Britain’s real objective in joining the EEC in 1973 is nicely summarised in the clip from the “Yes Minister” comedy series on the ICC homepage: to divide and rule. It did not give up the pretensions that lay behind Churchill’s vision – the pretensions of a former global maritime imperialist power resentful of the subordination of its interests to the “Brussels bureaucracy” – and continued to consider itself to be “with” Europe, but not “of” it.
But outside of the EU and unable to directly influence its decision-making, Britain will find it more difficult to pursue this strategy, while for the same reason it risks being of even less use to the US as an ally – even without the added volatility of the Trump regime and its ‘America First’ policy. This is why Brexit is fundamentally a mistake for the interests of British imperialism, the result not of a re-orientation of imperialist policy but of the rise of populism and growing political instability.
The rosy vision of the Brexiteers – of Britain as a great island trading nation in the swashbuckling spirit of the 19th century when it ruled the waves – is even less based on the realities of British economic and political power than in Churchill’s era. The limitations on British imperialism’s pretensions to ‘punch above its weight’ are best illustrated by the ongoing fiasco of its new aircraft carrier, which is not only leaking water but more importantly will have to wait until 2023 for all its much-delayed US-built fighter jets; two years after it is supposed to be operational, making it reliant on the US Marine Corps to provide its air power. Continuing defence cuts mean that the second carrier may never be completed while operating the new warships could exceed Britain’s total future defence spending. Meanwhile, as the right-wing Telegraph spluttered, the same cuts could leave the army the smallest it’s been since Britain lost its American colonies... More than that, in a major operation British imperialism would have to deploy its remaining ground forces as part of larger US-led units.
How’s that for symbolism?
MH January 2018
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/wr_379.pdf
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/not_just_the_tories.jpg
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jan/30/key-questions-latest-leaked-brexit-forecasts
[4] https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/app/uploads/2017/07/Austerity-v2.pdf
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/oct/29/sparkling-jobless-figures-mask-real-picture-uk-economy-unemployed
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/worldrevolution/200912/3378/2010-workers-face-sweeping-cuts
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201706/14333/hard-times-bring-increased-illusions-labour-party
[8] http://www.workersoffensive.org
[9] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/04/black-lives-matter-runs-for-mayor/?utm_term=.a86f31b8178f
[10] https://nonsite.org/how-racial-disparity-does-not-help-make-sense-of-patterns-of-police-violence/
[11] https://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2016/01/surprise_walkout_by_ila_shuts_down_the_nj_and_ny_p.html
[12] https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/truck-drivers-protest-pay-rates-by-blocking-okeechobee-road/
[13] https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201712/14546/united-states-heart-growing-world-disorder
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/mono-def_johnson_churchill2.jpg