Is Business Becoming Corbyn-Friendly?
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Title : Is Business Becoming Corbyn-Friendly?
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Title : Is Business Becoming Corbyn-Friendly?
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Hegemony is coming, hegemony is coming. Or is it? Among the responses to Jeremy Corbyn's Brexit speech was a cautious but nevertheless welcoming statement from the CBI. Meanwhile, The Times led with the disgraced Liam Fox's attack *on business* for applauding the Labour leader's speech, going on to brand any attempt to stay in the (or a) customs union a "sell-out". It's a funny old world. This begs a couple of questions about the bizarre situation in which the anti-austerity socialist leader of the Labour Party is more in tune with business interests than the trade secretary of the natural party of capital. That is whether business warming to Labour is a pragmatic orientation to a possible government in waiting, a contamination of their thinking by the modernisation programme outlined in the celebrated 2017 manifesto, or something else? And is the customs union divergence between the government and the bosses' union episodic or symptomatic of a deeper alienation?
Capital-in-general is an ensemble of competing businesses with common but divergent interests, and so there has always been some fracturing of political loyalties. Labour, the Liberal Democrats and their predecessors, and the SNP historically have and continue to attract rich backers. But more often than not, capital's chosen clearing house, the party traditionally best suited to serve their class interests is the Conservative Party. Not only has it enjoyed their backing, the Tories have and do adjudicate competition among fractions of capital through the rough and tumble of inner party (parliamentary) battles and the balance struck by the Tory leader in their top team. The party is a continually evolving project, a movement of the minuscule minority in the interests of the minuscule minority (and now, almost with the membership to match), but the party is arguably the most electorally successful political party in the West - even if it is based on a dishonest conceit. Its success lies in being reactive, when not reactionary, and adapting itself to new politics welling up from below. In the 1950s it was carrying on the Keynesian restructure of British capital started by Labour, and preserving and extending its achievements, such as the NHS, nationalisations, council house building and full employment. And again, one cannot understand the basis for Thatcher's long 1980s without accepting her simultaneous adaptation of the Tories to proletarian consumerism all the while smashing proletarian collectivism.
It was this decade that saw a problem inserted into the Tories' relationship with capital. In the first place, the destruction of the post-war settlement didn't just smash union power and sink working class communities, large sections of capital went to the wall as well. The capital tied up in the supply chains of the nationalised industries saw huge losses. The myriad small capitals supplying services to the manufacturing working class - dispersed and destroyed. New avenues of investment were opened up by Thatcher's privatisation programme and the undermining of social housing via right to buy, but nevertheless a wedge was driven into the alliances the Conservative Party expressed. The second problem is not entirely unrelated to the first. With the collapse in confidence in the Major government after the ERM fiasco, and following the untimely death of John Smith, the New Labour project firmly and consciously established itself as a safe-for-business and capital-friendly party that would do nothing whatsoever to imperil those interests. While a Smith Labour Party was never going to do the full communism thing, and business would have made their own unenthusiastic overtures in time, Tony Blair beamed with the zealotry of the convert. Labour would have won in 1997 come what may, but the courting and getting into bed with business ensured New Labour was the new party of capital-in-general. Modelled consciously on Clinton's Democrats, the Blair/Brown alliance was about transforming the B team of British capitalism into the preferred party of business. And it worked, after a fashion. Redistribution came via booming tax receipts and not restructuring capital a la 1945 vintage Labour. Light touch regulation and credit balloons kept finance and property happy, and it made Tory private finance initiatives very much its own, along with myriad other ways in which public services and the state were opened up to profiteering. New Labour was responsible for the creation of new markets that, in theory, would secure business loyalty to it in the same way Thatcher hoped the transformation of council tenants into owner occupiers would turn them Tory.
I'm not New Labour's biggest fan, but it does have one lasting achievement to its name: driving another wedge into the assemblage of capital sustaining the Tory party. The Blair/Brown partnership may have eviscerated its own base which, ultimately, rebounded on the Labour right, but they did draw more political support from capital than any prior Labour government. Yes, that didn't save them when the stock markets came crashing down, nor did they show due recognition to Gordon Brown for sparing them the trauma of a depression, but their backing of Dave's Tories and endorsement of austerity was more hedged, more hesitant, more mercenary than previously. Despite the socially liberal makeover, Dave was determined to capitalise on the crisis and push Britain even further in the direction of deregulation, market fundamentalism, and a race to the bottom in wages. In a number of ways this was warmed over Thatcherism, and the interests such a project served were those parts of capital invested in the city - the most superficially dynamic but socially useless sections - and the largely uncompetitive and labour intensive forms. Who benefited most from austerity, an increasing labour supply, and the scandal of precarious working? These people, these capitals did. Dave's coalition government was therefore very far from being a general committee for the common affairs of the bourgeoisie and more a sectional administration. With Dave's gamble on EU membership failing to pay off and all of us lumped with the losses, it at first appeared the new administration of Theresa May had ditched this blatant sectionalism, stitched together the fraying alliances underpinning the Tories and set about renewing the class settlement established by Thatcher. Her utter incompetence and shambles of an election has fractured all this. Some of capital clings to the Tories out of fear for Labour, but others are thoroughly alienated by the capturing of a decaying party by leading lights who prefer delusion to a clear sighted take on Britain after Brexit from capital's point of view. The crisis of the Tories then was long in making, but the effect is spectacular - a party not just dropping to bits, but becoming increasingly unmoored from the interests that made it and are (were) articulated through it. It is starting to resemble a husk empty of all but the personal ambition of certain dramatis personae, and a compulsion to meet the approval of the editorials of collapsing newspapers. Attacking business for looking out for business interests, dismissing the Irish border issue as if it were flim-flam, pretending Britain's going to get a sweet deal with the EU because Britain, every day the ravings of a fast declining party are heard and broadcast to millions.
Just as some leftists used to argue New Labour meant the working class was without a party, we are getting into a situation where capital itself is caught politically homeless. With the Tories absorbed by existential crisis, and Theresa May's likely successors to be just as short-termist and ruinous for business prospects as she, the Labour Party is the only game in town. But it is a big risk. Labour is under new management and is composing, assembling, and pushing the rising interests of the rising worker and, fundamentally, cooperation with Corbynism means subordinating capital's interests to it. The price of that cooperation is reform and a tilt in the balance of power away from business to labour, but the reward is continued profits, access to Britain's biggest export market and, ultimately, stability inside a new framework. The Tories offer more of the same, which is a status quo that threatens business, and exacerbates the polarisation of politics to such a degree that Corbynism's anger at the Tories might harden into an antipathy against business per se. It's not a case Labour is becoming hegemonic and its views are the new commonsense, at least yet. But it is true that as far as the boss class are concerned, Jeremy Corbyn (Jeremy Corbyn!) is to be preferred over the decadent and dying mess the Tories have become.
Capital-in-general is an ensemble of competing businesses with common but divergent interests, and so there has always been some fracturing of political loyalties. Labour, the Liberal Democrats and their predecessors, and the SNP historically have and continue to attract rich backers. But more often than not, capital's chosen clearing house, the party traditionally best suited to serve their class interests is the Conservative Party. Not only has it enjoyed their backing, the Tories have and do adjudicate competition among fractions of capital through the rough and tumble of inner party (parliamentary) battles and the balance struck by the Tory leader in their top team. The party is a continually evolving project, a movement of the minuscule minority in the interests of the minuscule minority (and now, almost with the membership to match), but the party is arguably the most electorally successful political party in the West - even if it is based on a dishonest conceit. Its success lies in being reactive, when not reactionary, and adapting itself to new politics welling up from below. In the 1950s it was carrying on the Keynesian restructure of British capital started by Labour, and preserving and extending its achievements, such as the NHS, nationalisations, council house building and full employment. And again, one cannot understand the basis for Thatcher's long 1980s without accepting her simultaneous adaptation of the Tories to proletarian consumerism all the while smashing proletarian collectivism.
It was this decade that saw a problem inserted into the Tories' relationship with capital. In the first place, the destruction of the post-war settlement didn't just smash union power and sink working class communities, large sections of capital went to the wall as well. The capital tied up in the supply chains of the nationalised industries saw huge losses. The myriad small capitals supplying services to the manufacturing working class - dispersed and destroyed. New avenues of investment were opened up by Thatcher's privatisation programme and the undermining of social housing via right to buy, but nevertheless a wedge was driven into the alliances the Conservative Party expressed. The second problem is not entirely unrelated to the first. With the collapse in confidence in the Major government after the ERM fiasco, and following the untimely death of John Smith, the New Labour project firmly and consciously established itself as a safe-for-business and capital-friendly party that would do nothing whatsoever to imperil those interests. While a Smith Labour Party was never going to do the full communism thing, and business would have made their own unenthusiastic overtures in time, Tony Blair beamed with the zealotry of the convert. Labour would have won in 1997 come what may, but the courting and getting into bed with business ensured New Labour was the new party of capital-in-general. Modelled consciously on Clinton's Democrats, the Blair/Brown alliance was about transforming the B team of British capitalism into the preferred party of business. And it worked, after a fashion. Redistribution came via booming tax receipts and not restructuring capital a la 1945 vintage Labour. Light touch regulation and credit balloons kept finance and property happy, and it made Tory private finance initiatives very much its own, along with myriad other ways in which public services and the state were opened up to profiteering. New Labour was responsible for the creation of new markets that, in theory, would secure business loyalty to it in the same way Thatcher hoped the transformation of council tenants into owner occupiers would turn them Tory.
I'm not New Labour's biggest fan, but it does have one lasting achievement to its name: driving another wedge into the assemblage of capital sustaining the Tory party. The Blair/Brown partnership may have eviscerated its own base which, ultimately, rebounded on the Labour right, but they did draw more political support from capital than any prior Labour government. Yes, that didn't save them when the stock markets came crashing down, nor did they show due recognition to Gordon Brown for sparing them the trauma of a depression, but their backing of Dave's Tories and endorsement of austerity was more hedged, more hesitant, more mercenary than previously. Despite the socially liberal makeover, Dave was determined to capitalise on the crisis and push Britain even further in the direction of deregulation, market fundamentalism, and a race to the bottom in wages. In a number of ways this was warmed over Thatcherism, and the interests such a project served were those parts of capital invested in the city - the most superficially dynamic but socially useless sections - and the largely uncompetitive and labour intensive forms. Who benefited most from austerity, an increasing labour supply, and the scandal of precarious working? These people, these capitals did. Dave's coalition government was therefore very far from being a general committee for the common affairs of the bourgeoisie and more a sectional administration. With Dave's gamble on EU membership failing to pay off and all of us lumped with the losses, it at first appeared the new administration of Theresa May had ditched this blatant sectionalism, stitched together the fraying alliances underpinning the Tories and set about renewing the class settlement established by Thatcher. Her utter incompetence and shambles of an election has fractured all this. Some of capital clings to the Tories out of fear for Labour, but others are thoroughly alienated by the capturing of a decaying party by leading lights who prefer delusion to a clear sighted take on Britain after Brexit from capital's point of view. The crisis of the Tories then was long in making, but the effect is spectacular - a party not just dropping to bits, but becoming increasingly unmoored from the interests that made it and are (were) articulated through it. It is starting to resemble a husk empty of all but the personal ambition of certain dramatis personae, and a compulsion to meet the approval of the editorials of collapsing newspapers. Attacking business for looking out for business interests, dismissing the Irish border issue as if it were flim-flam, pretending Britain's going to get a sweet deal with the EU because Britain, every day the ravings of a fast declining party are heard and broadcast to millions.
Just as some leftists used to argue New Labour meant the working class was without a party, we are getting into a situation where capital itself is caught politically homeless. With the Tories absorbed by existential crisis, and Theresa May's likely successors to be just as short-termist and ruinous for business prospects as she, the Labour Party is the only game in town. But it is a big risk. Labour is under new management and is composing, assembling, and pushing the rising interests of the rising worker and, fundamentally, cooperation with Corbynism means subordinating capital's interests to it. The price of that cooperation is reform and a tilt in the balance of power away from business to labour, but the reward is continued profits, access to Britain's biggest export market and, ultimately, stability inside a new framework. The Tories offer more of the same, which is a status quo that threatens business, and exacerbates the polarisation of politics to such a degree that Corbynism's anger at the Tories might harden into an antipathy against business per se. It's not a case Labour is becoming hegemonic and its views are the new commonsense, at least yet. But it is true that as far as the boss class are concerned, Jeremy Corbyn (Jeremy Corbyn!) is to be preferred over the decadent and dying mess the Tories have become.
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You are now reading the article Is Business Becoming Corbyn-Friendly? With link address https://newstoday-ok.blogspot.com/2018/02/is-business-becoming-corbyn-friendly.html