Conservative, or Bourgeois, Socialism

Continuing my commentary on The Communist Manifesto

"To this section belongs economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of the SPCA, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind... 

The Socialistic bourgeois want the living conditions of modern society without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie natural conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and Bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into a more or less complete system. 

... A second and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to deprecate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class, by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economic relations, could be of any advantage to them... 

.... Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Solitary confinement: for the benefit of the working class." 

- The Communist Manifesto, 1848, Chp 3.

Anyone in Britain reading this recognises, or should recognise, the present government as the most recent in a long line of governments who dismiss revolution and argue that they are the party of the workers, the only ones who can make the workers better of materially. As if offering workers back some minuscule fraction of the products of their own labour in order to be a better consumer has anything but the enrichment of the 1% in mind.

At the same time they knobble labour unions, export jobs to other countries, and most importantly they *remain in power*.

The bourgeois remain in control and dole out rewards to the faithful workers in the form of "benefits" when their jobs are annihilated or the system crushes them so much that they can no longer work. And we see the 1% getting exponentially richer while workers become redundant or keep their jobs only at the cost of less wages and poorer conditions.

We are even treated to the slogan "taking our country back from the bureaucrats of Europe". What a bitter irony that is.

But as (right-wing) comedian Simon Evans has remarked, there was never in history, a country less likely to revolt than Britain is today. Workers have bought the line about the desirability of material goods, are eager to be consumers, and have their minds anaesthetised by reality TV and the internet. The constant pressure to relocate away from family and community to seek work is slowly atomising society. Schools churn out conformist drones for the call-centres, who live for the binge drinking weekend. And best of all, he points out, "a stroke of genius", the poor are *fat*. At least in the past the poor were thin and hungry and that made them eager for change.

The collapse of totalitarian forms of state socialism seems to have been used to discredit the left generally. As though there is no value in helping each other, supporting each other. Our politicians are completely insulated from the problems they cause. The supposed party of the workers is so busy with its internal power struggles that it has lost the ability to perform any function in the power structures of the nation. But it long ago become bourgeois.

The ruling classes have hoodwinked the population into believing that there is no alternative to Neoliberalism - a combination of discredited economic and social policies that lead to the breakdown of economies and societies, but which succeed in enriching the rich. And we're not even really angry about this. Bombarded with TV news in which our capacity for empathy is swamped by vicarious suffering and hyperstimulation, we struggle to respond to the people around us.

Some of us think we can create a protective bubble around us. Walk around the homeless, ignore the political corruption, cling to what we have, and keep our fingers crossed that the people in charge will not take our jobs, homes, and savings again as they did in 2008. But we are not protected by this.

The weird thing is that be definition we out number the 1% 100 to 1. We could simply repossess all that wealth. There are not enough police to stop us if we all acted together. But Capitalism per se has atomised society to the extent that concerted action is probably no longer possible. Effective resistance to the bourgeoisie is all but over. Most of us are not even thinking in terms of resistance, let alone revolution. Revolution, as Marx and Engels predicted has been discredited, and participation in free market Capitalism is now the only way for workers to improve their lives. Free market Capitalism has replaced the Christian Church as the arbiter of values and consumerism as the opium of the masses.

To be fair, Capitalism has dragged everyone with it to some extent. The average worker does have a materially better standard of living. But that raising of the workers is steadily reversing now that opposition has been neutralised. Wages are falling. Jobs are disappearing to places where people labour in worse conditions for less for less pay. Atomisation continues apace.

Capital as a Social Power

"Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion". The Communist Manifesto. 1848.

This comes from the justification for the abolition of private property in the Manifesto. I found I was shocked by the bald statement: "the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property".

What Marx & Engels are getting at, it seems, is that without the concerted effort of workers, capital would never increase. One person working alone can seldom produce much in the way of surplus and so their capital grows slowly if at all. Capitalists exploit the labour of many workers to make their own capital grow, while the capital of the workers themselves does not grow. In many cases it shrinks. This is especially so in the developed world post-2008 financial crisis. We've seen wages falling, conditions of employment being undermined, at the same time as corporate profits rise, shareholder dividends rise, and CEO salaries rise. And yet those same people whose capital continues to grow while the capital of the workers shrink, refuse to pay their taxes. And workers are further enticed into debt slavery to the banks  - UK household debt is 150% of income and rising.

Personally I don't think the abolition of private property is a viable solution. Where it has been tried it is simply replaced by other forms of tyranny and exploitation that are at least as bad as, and have frequently been worse than, capitalism.

One potential model is the John Lewis Group one of giving employees shares in the company. This allows workers a greater share in the profits, when there are profits. Of course this assumes that profits are declared rather than hidden. It would not work in the multinationals who routinely hide profits in order to avoid paying taxes (e.g. Apple. Amazon, Starbucks, Google, etc.)

At the very least we need to acknowledge that if someone has got rich, it is by taking more than their fair share of the profits or by inheriting land (and all that land implies in the production of wealth). No one person working alone can become a billionaire. For every billionaire there are thousands of hard-working people, who just get by. The products of their labour are taken and mostly  redistributed to the rich, who then hoard it or indulge in conspicuous consumption. This is exploitation. In a better world everyone would benefit from their labour. If employers paid their employees the full value of their labour, there would be no billionaires.

No one who works full-time should struggle to pay their rent, food, and utility bills. At present many such people in the UK require "in work benefits" to get by. And this is insane, because it means that tax payers are subsidising supposedly free-market capitalists to keep prices above what is affordable. Landlords, who are largely the same as property developers, can partly do this by deliberately ensuring that the demand for housing outstrips the supply and claiming that high rents are simply a matter "supply and demand" as though it is nothing to do with them, but is just the market operating freely. Meanwhile the world's kleptocrats and drug-lords are laundering money by buying up property in Mayfair and Parklane and forcing property prices to rise at ten times the inflation rate, while wages continue to fall. And the Southern Rail company provides an appalling service, but still receives £25 million in government subsidies and declares a profit of £100 million which goes to private sector shareholders who probably don't pay tax in the UK! Why are we subsidising foreign shareholders with UK taxes while getting lousy service? Why are we not investing in the local economy?

Capitalists say that they deserve the lion's share of the profit that labour generates because they are risking their capital. There is something to this. Risking one's capital ought to bring rewards, if only because investment creates jobs for workers. The relationship is in fact symbiotic. The capitalist who takes all the profits and leaves nothing for workers destroys their own capital because the workers are soon unable to work. The only way for capital to produce profit, is through the application of labour by many workers. Or as the Manifesto says, through the whole community acting together in a concerted way. If there is profit then, necessarily,  the community should benefit.

Unfortunately it has been the policy of the merchantilist thinkers, who have shaped the industrialised world's economic policies for six centuries, to try to ensure that wages did not rise above subsistence level. This was supposed to ensure that workers did not succumb to the laziness and moral turpitude that was assumed to be their natural condition. That it happened to make capitalists phenomenally wealthy was just taken as further proof of their moral superiority. That workers are poor is not seen as a result of centuries of deliberately pursued policies, but instead of the moral inferiority of the workers. The double standard is hardly even remarked on in the mainstream. Instead of arguing over whether workers deserve to be adequately compensated by employers, the debate is over whether poorly paid workers deserve government handouts.

The whole system is fucked up.