Cameron’s Conservative Counter-Coup

History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. Twelve years ago, I predicted, and explained, the coming petty-bourgeois coup, against Cameron, inside the Conservative Party, and its figurehead, Boris Johnson. The coup was achieved by Johnson becoming the head of the Brexit faction inside the party, even though he didn’t believe all of the Brexit nonsense, himself. The conservative, social-democratic majority, inside the parliamentary party, still held him at bay for a while, as they installed May, but the contradictions were such that she could only be an interlude. But, at the D-Day celebrations, everyone asked how could Sunak have got it so wrong? The question they should ask is who advised him, and look who was standing, in his place, alongside the world leaders — Foreign Secretary David Cameron.

As I have set out before, we have seen this before, in similar conditions, in the 19th Century, in what happened in relation to The Repeal of The Corn Laws, itself, a manifestation of a class struggle. At that time, it destroyed the Tory Party, and led to the creation of The Conservative Party, as well as a more general realignment that created the Liberal Party as a social-democratic party, representing the interests of large-scale industrial capital. The same thing, taking the form of Brexit, has again destroyed the Tories, on the rocks of reality, and created the conditions, for a conservative counter-coup, and another realignment. As Blue Labour has adopted those same petty-bourgeois, nationalist ideas of the Tories, becoming a Brexitory party (a petty-bourgeois, nationalist workers party rather than a social-democratic, bourgeois workers party), as it chases the tail of the most backward section of the electorate, and looks set to form a clear majority government, those same realities, and that same process, looks set to destroy it, in the same way, but in shorter order.

Britain has been a frontrunner for the same political processes now seen in the EU, in which the collapse of the conservative, social-democratic model, based on asset price inflation, has collapsed, but, with progressive social-democracy, let alone the forces of international socialism, unable to offer an effective leadership and alternative, has opened the door to the forces of an ever more radical petty-bourgeois nationalism, and authoritarianism. Last weekend’s EU elections were the latest manifestation of it.

Why was the Tory, petty-bourgeois coup inevitable inside the Conservative Party, leading to Brexit? For the simple reason that, as a result of the policies of Thatcher in the 1980’s, itself a response to a crisis of capital, of deindustrialisation, and the new international division of labour, the petty-bourgeoisie grew immensely. The number of small businesses grew by 50%, and that reversed a process going back 200 years, identified by Marx, whereby, the concentration and centralisation of capital meant that small capitals get swallowed up by big capitals, and as he, and later Lenin, identified, a good thing that is too, as it is the basis of the transition to Socialism. Alongside it, the continual growth in the number of workers, that had been going on over that 200 years, also came to a halt. It only resumed as the new long wave upswing began in 1999.

The petty-bourgeoisie (small businesses, the self-employed), are a reactionary class. They look backwards to an age of free competition, when the large monopolies and the state did not dominate everything; they are individualistic, rather than collectivist, in their outlook; they are similarly, parochial, and focused on their immediate environment, on the local market, or at best national market, in which they operate, and look to the state only to protect them from foreign competition, or from monopolies, including monopolies of labour, represented by the trades unions. For one thing, their lack of competitiveness, resulting from their small scale, means they cannot pay the level of wages, or provide the kinds of conditions to workers that large-scale capital can provide. These petty-bourgeois interests form the basis of classical Liberalism of the 18th and early 19th century, of Bentham, taken over, today, by the Libertarians, such as Mises and Hayek, and their disciples such as Rees-Mogg et al. They are the purveyors of the small business myth.

Its no surprise that Blue Labour, scrambling after these petty-bourgeois votes, has not only adopted its jingoism, and reactionary nationalism, but also, now, its economic programme, and commitment to its interests, as against those of the progressive elements of capital, and of the working-class. Starmer has said that he will “Pull up the shutters for small business”. It is reminiscent of the reactionary and utopian schemas put forward, at the end of the 19th century, by the Narodniks, and criticised by Lenin. As with the Narodniks proposals, it will simply fall flat. But, the simultaneous proposals to tax big capital more, and so on, will not only be reactionary and utopian, to the extent they had any effect, it would simply be to reduce UK economic growth and capital accumulation, and to drive capital away to the EU and elsewhere, where it is already moving as a result of Brexit. Its also no surprise that, in the various vox pops undertaken, these various petty-bourgeois, such as cafe owners, self-employed taxi drivers and so on, are described as “workers”, or “working-class”, confusing their low incomes with their class as defined by their relation to the means of production, their ownership of dwarfish capital, and their ideology determined by it.

The power of the petty-bourgeoisie, as Lenin and Trotsky describe, arises from its numbers, as with the peasantry. In Britain, those numbers amount to around 15 million people, and formed the electoral basis of Brexit. The Conservative Party has, also, relied upon these elements for its foot soldiers, and for its electoral support, just as the Labour Party has relied on the working-class. However, just as the fact that the Labour Party’s reliance on workers does not mean that Labour governments act in workers interests, so too with the Conservative Party and the petty-bourgeoisie. The state is the state of the ruling class, a global ruing class of speculators and coupon-clippers that, ultimately, is dependent upon large-scale industrial capital. Both Conservative and Labour governments are constrained by the nature of that state, and the reality of needing to defend the interests of that ruling class, and of large-scale industrial capital. In that context, the agenda of the petty-bourgeoisie, epitomised by Brexit, was always not only reactionary, but impossible to achieve, utopian.

The petty-bourgeois footsoldiers of the Conservatives, always formed a majority, but Conservative governments always ignored them, and pursued the interests of the ruling class, which also constituted its higher echelons, just as it constitutes and controls the higher echelons of the arms of the state. But, the model of conservative social-democracy, pursued by both Labour and Conservative governments, began to come to grief as the new long wave upswing began in the late 1990’s. It meant that the number of workers grew, capital began to accumulate more rapidly, and interest rates rose, causing asset prices to crash, and so making a model based on debt fuelled by borrowing against ever inflating asset prices unsustainable.

That centre-ground of conservative social-democracy that we continue to be told is the only ground upon which elections can be won, could no longer be sustained, so that even when parties won elections on the basis of an appeal to that centre-ground, once in government, the reality manifest itself, most notably with the global financial crisis of 2008, followed quickly by the introduction of widespread austerity measures, combined with the most surreal measures of liquidity injections so as to inflate asset prices once more.

In the US, Hillary Clinton lost to Trump, who although, so he claims, is a billionaire, is the epitome of that ideology of the reactionary petty-bourgeois nationalist — individualistic, moronic, bigoted and idiosyncratic. Trump, of course, as with Brexit, and Truss, could provide no solution either, the basis of Macron’s election gamble, now, in France. Now, that is set to be repeated as Biden loses to Trump. In Britain, Brown lost to Cameron, as the gloss came off the Blair-Brown governments, particularly after 2008, but Cameron was modelled, until 2010, in that same conservative, social-democratic mould (just as Bush followed on from Clinton), which inevitably failed, dragging the overtly conservative social-democratic Liberals down with him, as the coalition government paid for the bail-out of the gambling losses of the ruling class with austerity, designed, also, to slow the economy (to restrain wages and interest rates), combined with yet more liquidity injections to inflate asset prices, putting, for example, houses out of the reach of millions of workers, whose real wages fell year after year.

In France, the Socialist Party, as so often in the past, talked Left and acted Right, under Hollande, and collapsed, with similar things happening in Greece, Italy and Spain. Reminiscent of the 1930’s French Popular Front, to prevent the election of fascists, the collapse of the Socialists led to a rotten, opportunist bloc under Macron, which, as with Starmer, today, never had any positive support, and was itself, largely hated, but based itself on an even greater fear and hatred of the alternative, Le Pen in France, a rapidly Right moving, and disgraced Tory Party in Britain. Macron, immediately set about demonstrating that the model of conservative social-democracy has collapsed, by attacking French workers from Day One. The same can be expected from Starmer and Blue Labour, just as similar things have been seen with Biden in the US, Scholz in Germany and so on. The argument that elections can only be won from the centre, a bit of wishful thinking by those politicians, rather than anything based on fact or logic, was not only disproved by Hitler in 1933, Attlee in 1945, Allende in 1970, Thatcher in the 1980’s, and Trump in 2016, Johnson in 2019, but has also been seen in the trouncing of Macron by the NR in France, in these EU elections. He looks set to also lose in the proposed parliamentary elections on the back of it.

The rising social weight of the petty-bourgeoisie, as a class, from the 1980’s onwards, and corresponding decline in the social weight of the working-class, during that period, combined, now, with the collapse of the model of conservative social-democracy that had predominated during that period, made the petty-bourgeois coup in the Conservative Party inevitable, just as the same processes made a similar coup inside the US Republican Party inevitable. In Britain, it took the form of, first, a growth of an overtly petty-bourgeois nationalist party — UKIP, itself supplemented to its Right by, for a time, the BNP. Yet, the forces of the petty-bourgeoisie were divided, the majority of them remaining inside the Conservative Party, but dragging it ever closer to the agenda of UKIP. The parallel with The Repeal of The Corn Laws is notable.

The managerialists of conservative social-democracy always believe they can use bureaucratic and parliamentary manoeuvres to tack and trim to defeat such parties, electorally. Often they can, but as Germany, in the 1930’s showed, when the Socialists and Communists, attempted to steal the ground upon which the Nazis had gained support, of nationalism, the result was only to legitimise that reactionary nationalist ideology. Cameron, when he became Prime Minister, in 2010, but finding himself facing this growing reactionary petty-bourgeois movement inside his party, rather than mobilising against it, tacked towards it. He adopted the nationalistic criticisms of the EU, took the Conservatives out of the EPP, and joined the cranks and petty-bourgeois, nationalist fanatics in the European Parliament. Having done so, and continued in similar vein for six years, it was no surprise that he could not fatten his pig on market day, and lost the referendum.

Concerned only to build a rotten, opportunistic, electoral bloc to win the election, Starmer and Blue Labour have followed this same disastrous course. No doubt, for them, it is of little concern. They will get their cushy parliamentary and ministerial jobs for at least the next five years, with the prospect of that leading to some similarly cushy job in some large corporation, international agency, or simply the usual progression to a cushy life sitting in the unelected House of Lords. For the rest of us, the effects are more serious.

At the end of the 19th century, The Liberal Party represented conservative social-democracy, and the interests of large-scale industrial capital. The Conservative Party had split, the Conservative Peelites joining the Liberals, as the rest returned to being a Tory Party, representing the old landed aristocracy, concentrated in the shires, as well as their equivalents, the financial aristocracy. The landed aristocracy obtained its revenues from its form of wealth — landed property — as rent, whilst the financial aristocracy had its wealth in the form of fictitious-capital, and loanable money-capital, and obtained its revenues in the form of interest/dividends. The Tory Party, as before the Repeal of the Corn Laws, defended the ideas of monopoly and protectionism, most clearly expressed in its support for the British Colonial Empire, and its protected markets. As with rent and interest, it depends upon the appropriation of surplus value on the basis of unequal exchange. They represented the era and ideas of Mercantilism. Mercantilism, and colonialism, itself, was limited to the era of the rise of the nation state.

The Liberals as the champions of large-scale industrial capital, were opponents of protectionism and those old types of monopoly and protected markets. Industrial capital is based upon the production and appropriation of surplus value, by labour in the productive process, resting upon equal exchange of values. In so far as they championed free trade, however, it was a free trade that inevitably benefited the large-scale industrial capital whose interests they represented, as its large-scale production inevitably undercut and outproduced the smaller scale capitals, that, ultimately, were swallowed up by it, or subordinated to it. It represents the transition to the imperialist stage of capital, the need, for this industrial capital to expand beyond the fetter represented by the nation state. The Liberal Party, however, depended on the votes of the working-class, which also made up a large part of its membership through the Liberal Clubs, and support given to it from the trades unions, who, in return, obtained a number of Lib-Lab MP’s. The relation was similar to that of the workers and trades unions to the Democrats in the US.

However, this arrangement was clearly untenable for long. The Liberal Party was a bourgeois-workers party, whose constitution and aims was most clearly designed to further the interests of capital, rather than labour. Only to the extent that social-democracy, as it emerged in the writings of John Stuart Mill, for example, claims that the interests of labour and capital are the same, could that continue. It was inevitable, therefore, that, as the workers formed the majority of this party, and, as the idea that the interests of labour and capital were the same had been disproved by Marx, and, consequently, overtly socialist workers parties/communist parties were arising, the workers, and, more importantly, the trades union leaders, needed to free themselves from the Liberals, and create their own Labour Party. But, as Lenin described, it was a change of name rather than of substance.

The Labour Party, from the start, specifically omitted any reference to Socialism in its aims, remaining firmly on that old bourgeois, social-democratic ground of bargaining within the system, merely for a “Fair day’s wage”, rather than “abolition of the wages system”, and so on. The Liberal Party, virtually disappeared, in the same proportion that the Labour Party, took its place. But, in its entire history, the Labour Party, as with the social-democratic parties elsewhere, has acted, not, directly, in the interests of the working-class, but in the interests of large-scale industrial capital. Blue Labour is a qualitative break from that history, a change not in a progressive direction, but in a thoroughly reactionary direction, and one that will inevitably come to grief.

Brexit represented the triumph of the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie inside the Conservative Party. But, the contradiction unleashed was manifest in the fact that, even inside the Conservative Parliamentary Party, only a minority supported it. The reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, could not even get a majority in what was, overtly, their party, or get one of their own, as its Leader. Instead, May was elected, and a long period followed in which, she attempted to tack and manoeuvre, as the capitalist state also tried to limit and frustrate Brexit, so as to neuter it. For years, despite the fact that the petty-bourgeoisie had moaned about the EU, and immigration, and the BBC had feted clowns like Fartage that were their public face, the petty-bourgeois, nationalist parties, be it the BNP or UKIP, had failed to mobilise any substantial electoral coalition, let alone win any parliamentary seats. Fartage, himself, has stood seven times, and lost badly on each occasion. It was never a decisive issue for voters, until the referendum.

Inevitably, therefore, with no parliamentary party backing Brexit, unlike with, say, the SNP, and its advocacy of Scottish independence, Brexit was always going to be frustrated and lead to contradictions, as parliament was led into legislating for something it overwhelmingly opposed, and which it recognised would be severely damaging to the interests of the ruling class. The contradiction led to the failure of May, and her replacement by Johnson. Again illustrating the point made earlier, in relation to the rise of the Nazis, in the 1930’s, it was the unprincipled collapse of Corbyn’s Labour Party — largely driven by his own economic nationalism, and that of his Stalinist advisors — into an acceptance of the Brexit vote, rather than a commitment to reject it, that saw the huge rise in support for Corbyn’s Labour of 2017, reversed, and which allowed Johnson to score a dramatic victory, in 2019.

The Starmer-Right narrative that it was Corbyn’s radical policies, let alone anti-Semitism, that was the cause is a nonsense easily dismissed by looking at the massive rise in electoral support, and party membership, between 2015, and 2017.

It is as much a nonsense as the Stalinoid claim that Labour lost that support, due to not clearly backing Brexit. In 2017, its surge of support came from young people who overwhelmingly opposed Brexit. Around 80% of Labour’s 2017 membership backed Remain, and around 70% of its voters. Even in the Leave voting areas, a majority of Labour voters, backed Remain.

By contrast, as Corbyn returned to an emphasis on his economic nationalist position, and calls for a mystical “Labour Brexit”, in Spring 2019, even 60% of Labour members, voted for alternative Remain supporting parties!

But, it was a pyrrhic victory. Johnson never believed the nonsense behind Brexit, but, having put himself at the head of the petty-bourgeoisie, on the basis of that narrative, he was captured by it. At every step, he was led to say one thing, and do another. At every step, whilst claiming to be getting Brexit done, he was actually capitulating, inevitably, to the demands of the EU, as seen with the Northern Ireland Protocol, for example, which was a worse deal than he had voted against, as negotiated by May! The whole fiasco was illustrated by it, as he was led to claim in public that the agreement said the opposite of what it actually said. This was just the start of the manifestation of the fact that, not only Brexit, but the agenda of the petty-bourgeois nationalists, as a whole, based on a return to the kind of idealised free market competition of the early 19th Century, supplemented by a colonialist and protectionist British state, was a fantasy that had died in the 19th century, and was simply a reactionary, delusion. The ruling class came for Johnson, who made the job easier for them, by introducing the ludicrous lockdowns and restrictions, and then being seen to flagrantly breach those same ludicrous restrictions!

But, the ruling class had not finished with the petty-bourgeois leaders of the Tory Party, which they first drove mad, before destroying them. Johnson was removed from office for having eaten cake, and drunk wine at an office party, and, was then, replaced by the even more eccentric Truss. If the ruling class had wanted a more perfect stooge to represent the idiocies of the reactionary petty-bourgeois agenda, they could not have had anything better than Truss. All of the delusions of Brexit, and of how it was going to enable a resurgence of Rule Britannia, trading pork fearlessly across the globe, supported by a domestic economy at home in which all protections for workers, consumers and the environment had been abolished, in a return to the good old days of the 19th century, as graphically depicted in the works of Dickens, was contained in the empty vessel that was Truss. Its almost immediate failure, and collapse of her government, as the ruling class, via its control of global financial markets, sent the £ tumbling, and UK Gilt Yields soaring, effectively spelled the end of that experiment. Yet, it seems that Fartage and Starmer are still equally committed to trying it again!

Fartage, of course, made no secret of the fact that, even under Johnson, Brexit really wasn’t getting done. He did not, say, however, that it could not be done, only that it required a government that was really committed to it. Truss’s government actually was, but failed even more spectacularly, a fact that Fartage, as with Truss’s supporters, still in the Tory Party, skirt around. But, it was not just Fartage that adopted this stance. Starmer and Blue Labour, also collapsed into petty-bourgeois nationalism, and Brexitoryism. They pointed to the fact that Johnson was not really getting Brexit done, and like Fartage claimed that it was all a question of the inadequate nature of the government, in negotiating with Brussels, rather than recognising that the entire project was not just reactionary, but itself unachievable. In typical technocratic style they claimed they were just better reactionaries, better Brexiters.

Typical of the duplicitous and opportunist nature of Starmer and Blue Labour, they claim that the reason they cannot offer any worthwhile improvements in the economy, or for workers, when they are in government is down to the damage done by Truss’s government at the end of 2022, when interest rates rose sharply, and so on. But, that is nonsense. Yes, the financial markets struck against Truss’s government at that time, effectively a soft coup, that removed her from office, but the reality is that UK interest rates were rising long before Truss’s government, for reasons I have set out elsewhere, and earlier. Moreover, once Truss had gone, that spike in rates, and the fall in the £ was quickly reversed. No significant, lasting damage can really be attributed to it. The fact that UK interest rates are back to the levels, then, cannot be attributed to Truss, but is an indication of those longer term processes that are driving interest rates higher, globally, processes that Blue Labour seeks to close its eyes to.

The petty-bourgeoisie had its head and reached the zenith of its lunacy with Truss, and inevitably failed. It has no solution, and Brexit is dead. Its only a question of when and how Britain is reabsorbed into the EU, and how much of the damage done by it, can be minimised. Obviously, the quicker Britain re-joins the EU, the less damage Brexit will do. But, the problem for the ruling-class, which depends on large-scale industrial capital for its revenues, and controls that capital, via its ownership of fictitious-capital, and for the working-class, which is the collective owner of that large-scale industrial capital, is that the main parties have been captured by the petty-bourgeoisie, and are imprisoned by it, and its commitment to that failed Brexit. Even the Liberals, that previously made the EU their unique selling point, have inexplicably relegated it to the back of their Manifesto, and subject to a lengthy process. Only The Greens, Plaid and the SNP of the more significant parties continue to promote it, and they have little chance of forming a government.

The consequence of this is that the Conservative Party, has collapsed. Unable to actually implement Brexit, and the wild fantasies of petty-bourgeois nationalism, its Tory wing has repeatedly split away to those promising to themselves achieve the impossible. Its latest manifestation is Reform, which is on the cusp of overtaking the Conservatives in the polls, and in actual votes in the election, if not in seats due to the undemocratic nature of the electoral system. It indicates the extent to which Brexit has destroyed them, and, now, it looks like they will not even form the official opposition, being overtaken by the Liberals. But, hence Cameron’s Conservative Counter-Coup.

The vote of the petty-bourgeoisie will, now be split three ways, between Reform, the Tories and Blue Labour. Blue Labour’s majority will flow from this rotten electoral bloc, in which it has gone in search of that reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, and its periphery, in the decayed urban centres, whilst seeking to maintain the votes of its core working-class base, who are presented with a fait accompli of vote Labour or get the Tories, much as Macron sought to do against Le Pen and Biden against Trump. As seen in the case of these last two, it has limited shelf-life. Indeed, for Starmer its worse. Macron offers a poor alternative for French workers, but there is a clear difference between him and Le Pen. No such difference exists between the reactionary nationalist politics of Starmer, and those of Sunak, epitomised by Brexit. Why would voters choose one rather than the other, simply on the basis that one comes in a blue wrapping and the other in a red one. In fact, both, now, wrap themselves in the same red, white and blue flag, both sing the National Anthem at their conferences and so on.

Starmer may think he can negotiate the kind of cakeist Brexit promised by Johnson, but he can’t. It will fail, as Britain is presented with the choice of continuing to be a rule taker, as it is now, or taking even more rules, such as acceptance of free movement, and so on, to get any closer relation, in which case the obvious question is, why accept that rather than join the EU, and become also a rule maker?! Having built this rotten bloc on the basis of Brexit, Starmer cannot simply do what he’s done before, and simply abandon his Brexit narrative, because to do so, would result in the reactionary petty-bourgeois element of that bloc flocking towards Fartage and Reform, which Blue Labour, as an electoralist party, would not countenance. So Blue Labour is trapped by its reactionary nationalist agenda, for the foreseeable future. Within that agenda the lunacies of Brexit, make it even harder to try to retain the support of its working-class base, or of the trades unions, as the economy suffers from it.

The obvious beneficiaries are the Liberals, especially as they have the potential to be the official opposition to the incoming Blue Labour government. As the Conservative party splits, with the Tories flocking to Reform, the obvious conclusion for the ruling class, is to engineer a merger of the remaining Conservatives with the Liberals, much as happened with the Peelites in the 19th century. The Conservatives with their much greater machinery, resources and connections to the ruing-class would, in effect implement a reverse takeover in parliament, and across the country, outside parliament. It was no accident that Sunak was given the advice to leave the D-Day celebrations early, and that, in his place stood, the Conservative, pro-EU, social-democratic Cameron. Starmer’s problem, then, becomes the fact that he may have got rid of a useless parliamentary Left Opposition, but will have a large chunk of discontented Blair-Right, conservative, pro-EU MP’s, threatening to split and join that new, conservative, social-democratic, pro-EU party, as the adequate representative of ruling class interests.