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A CRITIQUE OF EXISTING THEORIES OF THATCHERISM
AND A CONTRIBUTION TO A MARXIST THEORY OF
CAPITALIST DECAYPETER KENNEDY
Making sense of Thatcherism' has preoccupied the Marxist left in Britain
for the past decade or more. Much has been written on how 'Thatcherism's'
'authoritarian style populism' has swept the 'hegemonic' board in terms of
ideology, politics and culture.1 As Andrew Gamble observes:
The term 'Thatcherism' was widely adopted and used to indicate
the style of Thatcher's political leadership, the new ideology
which she endorsed, and the policies of the Thatcher Government.
All these elements are important, but Thatcherism is best
understood as a specific political project, not just of Thatcher
herself, but of an important current within the Conservative
Party.2
To Andrew Gamble's credit he has at least attempted to provide a
structural explanation for the emergence of so called 'Thatcherism' (see A.
Gamble 1990). As he acknowledges above, however, his concern has been
primarily with a wholly politically based structural analysis. He has placed
Thatcherism within the Right wing tendency which has emphasised the
two-fold need for 'a free economy/strong State' and a rejection of
'collectivism' and 'social Democracy'. At this political level, questions of
what exactly constitutes a 'free economy' or 'collectivism' are never
discussed. In other words a wholly political account generally rests upon
the acceptance of the empirically given and so by-passes, or takes for
granted, the all important social categories of explanation that could be
1 See in particular Marxism Today throughout the 1980s.
2 Social Studies Revue, VoI6 No3 Jan 1991, p 88.
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provided by Marxism. In this sense a Marxist political economy of
'Thatcherism' is still required.
Marxist categories must surely be the basis upon which to construct theories
of ideological and political hegemonies. More importantly, a Marxist
political economy may well lead one to re-examine and place in a new
context the whole concept of a 'Thatcherite hegemony'. Looked at from
this point of view, it will hopefully become clear that present day Marxism
has surely been running before it has learnt to walk. Confirmation that this
is the case comes easily to hand. For example, we know that 'Thatcherism'
emerged out of the ashes of 'Labourism' but Marxists have yet to explain
the full implications of 'Labourism'. How then can they possibly offer an
adequate explanation of 'Thatcherism'? Certainly, no one denies the link
between the two.
There are two main strands to current Marxist theory on the subject of
Labourism. On the one hand, Labourism is reduced to two amorphous
concepts which have preoccupied the minds of the left: 'Fordism' and
'Keynesianism'. As such, Thatcherism then becomes aligned with theemergence of an equally ambiguous concept, 'Post-Fordism'. On the other
hand, Labourism is linked to the failed project of halting capitalist decline.
Thatcherism is then aligned with the emergence of a new capitalist strategy
to halt the process of decline. The latter point of view offers most potential
for both an understanding of Thatcherism and Labourism. However, to
date, Marxists have failed to adequately explain what exactly capitalist
decline means. These criticisms will be taken up further in section 1 below.
There it will be argued that the ambiguities of'Fordism/Post-Fordism'" are
so profound that they cannot be used as the political economic basis of
either Labourism or Thatcherism. Following this, in section 2, a brief
outline of Marx's labour theory of value is provided. Here the emphasis is
placed on the contradiction within labour. It is this contradiction and morespecifically, its negation, that lies at the heart of a Marxist understanding
of Labourism and Thatcherism. This latter claim will be taken up and
expanded on in section 3. In section 3 we are specifically interested with
the emergence of "Labourism" and 'Thatcherism'; the article does not
concern itself with a detailed analysis of the two social categories once
consolidated. To understand why they emerged is the key to understanding
the nature of capitalist decay in Britain, which is really the central concern
of this article. The argument in this section is as follows. Firstly, Marxism
must come to terms with 'Labourism' as a social category which itself
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emerges out of a decaying form of capitalism and which extends
capitalism's life beyond its years. Secondly, the emergence of
'Thatcherism', for all its minor successes, has served only to escalate
capitalism's decay and so bring closer the day when workers must take
democratic power into their own hands, as capital wanes and conscious
regulation of social labour becomes a political necessity. The subjective
factor now becomes the important question.
1.1: THE AMBIGUITIES OF 'FORDISM/POST-FORDISM'
For Stuart Hall, who has written extensively on the topic, "Thatcherism's
project can be understood as operating on the ground of longer, deeper,
more profound movements of change". These longer deeper, more
profound movements turn out to be a loose ensemble of technical changes
all and sundry have termed 'Post-Fordism'. Given 'Post-Fordism's'
apparent importance for understanding 'Thatcherism', it is essential to
define it. Unfortunately 'Post-Fordism' has evaded all attempted
explanation. As such it has remained a catch-all phrase for every passingflight of fancy in society in the past 15 years. Hall and most others who
adhere to this ambiguous concept are at least certain about one thing:
'Post-Fordism' is no "epochal shift, of the order of the famous transition
from feudalism to capitalism"; it is merely another onward and upward
phase in the life of capitalism, or, as Hall puts it: the transition "from one
regime of accumulation to another, within capitalism".
According to Hall anyone expecting a precise definition of such an
important social category is simply misguided. As Hall would have it, "This
stand and deliver way of assessing things may itself be the product of an
earlier type of totalising logic which is beginning to be superseded. In a
permanently transitional age we must expect unevenness, contradictory
outcomes, disjunctures, delays, contingencies, uncompleted projectsoverlapping emergent ones". One response to this might well be to ask
3 S Hall and M Jaques, New Times, p126, 1990, Lawrence and Wishart
4 Ibid. p 127 (emphasis mine).
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why one should give the status of a totalising concept such as Tost-Fordism'
to what Hall admits is an ensemble of accidents. Firstly, as noted, he
informs us that 'Thatcherism' is the product of something 'deeper' and
'more profound', namely Post-Fordism; then we are told 'Post-Fordism' is
part of a set of 'contradictory outcomes' and 'uncompleted projects'. So
which is it to be? Of course, tendentially, they can be both, however Hall
does not explain why or how this could be so. This is not just Hall's problem,
but a problem for a whole epoch of 'Marxisms'.
The lack of clarity is to be expected due to the fact that 'Post-Fordism' itself
is the amorphous offspring of that reified concept 'Fordism': reify 'Fordism'
and one reifies 'Post-Fordism'. The theory of 'Fordism' was, it has to be
said, a gross reification of capitalist social development. Its history is a long
one, however, for Marxists, 'Fordism' came to prominence with the 'french
regulation school' of Marxism. Basically Fordism, as conceived by the
'regulation school', is an 'ideal-type' concept in the best tradition of
Weberian sociology and the worst traditions of Marxism. A technically
determined capitalist historical development is invoked, in which twodistinct capitalist stages follow, one after the other, in chronological time.
The first stage was characterised by absolute surplus value extraction
(extensive accumulation) and an unstructured distribution/consumption
sphere (competitive regulation). The second stage was relative surplus
extraction (intensive accumulation, or 'Fordism') and a
structured/managed distribution/consumption sphere. The reason for the
change from one to the other had little to do with the specifically capitalist
valorisation process and Capital-Labour contradiction. Instead the change
was said to be a product of the mismatch between production Departments
'one' and 'two' which was, in turn, exacerbated by a lack of consumer
demand for final products.
The movement from stage one to stage two of capitalist development soughtthe resolution of, what was effectively claimed to be, a realisation problem.
This was to be accomplished by the management of consumer demand via
Keynesian inspired fiscal policy. However, no sooner had 'Fordism'
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5 Ibid.
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resolved the contradiction than it began to falter under yet another value
realisation problem as consumer demand failed to keep up with
accumulation once again. This gave birth to the next stage in capitalism's
apparent quest to regulate production with consumption - 'Post-Fordism'.
Here it is argued 'Fordism' -characterised by relative surplus value
extraction, monopoly capitalism, the standardised product and worker -
had given way to a Tost-Fordist' world, characterised by the break up of
monopoly, product differentiation and the flexible, privatised worker. This
is not to suggest these tendencies within modern capitalist relations do not
exist. However the nature of such changes are only superficially
understood within a 'Fordist-to-Post Fordist' paradigm.
As Brenner has pointed out the whole foundation of
'Fordism/Post-Fordism' is profoundly ahistoric, depicting as it does a linear
path of ever higher stages of capitalist development. It is also
technologically deterministic, in that each stage is a particular type of
productive technique driven by the mismatch within the mode of
distributing the final product. It is fair to comment that the socialcontradiction between Capital and Labour never gets beyond a cameo part
in the whole proceedings. Because of this, such paradigms cannot explain
why Labourism had to be dissolved. Surely the whole point of the
regulation theory approach to capitalist development is to stress
capitalism's ability to regulate the turnover of commodities in production
with the realisation of their values in the act of exchange? If this follows,
then the regulation of production and consumption must still remain of
paramount importance to capitalism. As such, one would expect the
'Post-Fordist' transition would be towards greater regulation, perhaps an
increased dosage of Labourism? Yet the new 'mode of regulation' -
'Post-Fordism' - has brought deregulation of patterns of consumption, the
removal of Labourism, and a further uncoupling of finance capital vis-a-visproductive capital. This latter dominance of circulatory capital over its
fixed nature in production is intimately linked with the emergence of
Thatcherism. However, 'Post-Fordism' and 'regulation theory* has had
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6 See R. Brenner's article, "The Regulation Approach: Theory and History", in New Left
Review 188, Sept 1991.
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little of real relevance to say on this matter. On the whole it has to be said
that 'Post-Fordism' is more a category of the mind than a real abstraction
from reality. As such it is hardly the sort of stuff on which to base an
understanding of 'Thatcherism'. But what of that other category which has
been used as a basis of explanation for the emergence of 'Thatcherism' -
capitalist decline? The chief problem here is that Marxism has failed to
adequately explain what exactly it is about capitalism that is in decline.
Some of the Marxist offerings in this are critically assessed below.
12: MARXISM AND THEORIES OF CAPITALIST DECLINE INBRITAIN
Given the 'twilight state' of capitalist social relations in Britain, one might
think that Marxists would have developed a clear analysis of what exactly
is in decline. Unfortunately this has not been the case. Of course there has
been no shortage of theory which puts class struggle at centre stage of
enquiry into decline. The problem is most of it is intra capitalist class
struggle and hardly any concerns itself with the Capital-Labour conflict. Inthis respect much Marxist analysis of British capitalism has pumped out a
surplus of theory depicting the intra class rivalry between finance capital
and industrial capital. Some, like Coakley and Harris (1983), are
concerned to reveal the institutional intricacies of the 'City1, and the conflict
of interest which emerges between this financial network and industry over
the allocation of money capital (see also G. Ingham, for the more intricate
analysis of commercial capital). Others (Anderson 1964,1987: Overbeek
1990) have sought to emphasise the political conflict within factions of
capital. Their stress is on the 'hegemonic block' which one faction
(finance) has held over the British economy.
P. Anderson (1964,1987) has argued that the source of decline has nothing
to do "with factors internal to the capitalist social relation". His basicargument is as follows: Despite the fact that 'the present crisis is a malady
of the whole society", it has had nothing to do with the working class or
production relations. This class has "achieved no victories, but its defeats
were astonishing", claims Anderson. Outmanoeuvred in the 1832 reform
movement by industrial capital; its political economy of 'Owenism'
defeated by 1836; its Chartist alliance crushed by 1848; politically
decapitated by Fabianism and patronised by a labourist elite; the working
class had, according to Anderson, become acquiescent and conservative
and remains so to this day. The problem of decline, then, for Anderson,
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has nothing to do with labour. In fact it has nothing essentially to do with
the capitalist class! The problem, we are told, is outside the internal
relations of capitalism, it is in fact pre-capitalist in nature. Apparently a
landed aristocratic elite have never relinquished state power and are thus
able to block the road to capitalist development by stifling the
entrepreneurial spirit with traditional aristocratic values of immediate
gratification and abhorrence of thrift.7
Another important study of British decline has been G. Ingham's
Capitalism Divided(1984). Ingham's stated task was to go beyondAnderson's 'anti-industrial capitalist aristocratic hegemony" thesis, not so
much to reject it, on the basis that Anderson sought to explain capitalism's
decline via social groups outwith the capital-labour relation, but to theorise
it more deeply by breaking down the distinct features and functions of
'money capital' and its dominance over 'productive capital'. Ingham, like
Anderson, rejects the explanatory power of the labour theory of value and
takes the next logical step of rejecting the applicability of Marxist historical
materialism to an analysis of British capitalism. This is because, for himalso, decline is perceived as the product of something external to the
capital-labour production relation. The external factor being the
hegemonic stranglehold that commercial money capital has held since at
least as far back as the restoration of the Monarchy in 1688. In this latter
period commercial capital bailed out the State; constituted the Bank of
England in its own interests; and, through the nexus of City-Treasury links,
systematically sacrificed the interests of capitalism proper (productive
capital) to the more lucrative commercial laundering of money via the
matrix of 'Bills of Exchange' on the world market. As Ingham explains in
a quite sophisticated manner, commercial capital ruled in this way
throughout the 18th and 19th century and continues to do so in the 20th
century, predominantly through the euro-money markets established postworld war two. There cannot be many Marxists that doubt this is the case.
The essential question is why? This is what Ingham fails to explain
adequately.
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7 Quotes and claims are to be found in Anderson's, "Origins of the Present Crisis", New
Left Review, No23 Jan-Feb 1964, pp 49-53.
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The important point here is that Ingham ignores the more substantial
source of decline in the social form of production. In doing so he ignores
the valorisation process. The result of this omission is critical because
production from then on in becomes a material technical arena for the
production of use-values. In turn the essential relation between Capital
and Labour becomes displaced as a class struggle over the finished
product; and the 'money form', so central to Ingham's analysis, loses its
conceptual weight and owes more to Weber and neoclassical economics
than Marx. Given this, it is little wonder Ingham views historical
materialism as being economic determinism and so of little use in
understanding the trajectory of British capitalist social relations. This
leaves him only one recourse: an empirically based historical explanation.
Ingham proceeds to glean, from a historical enquiry of British capitalism,
that financial concerns appear to be consistently at the expense of
productive capitalism; that the state bureaucratic institutions have a
separate rational calculating relation which fosters the practice of 'sound
money" and so inadvertently promotes financial interests; and from this that'Capitalism Divided' is the source of decline and not the Capital-Labour
value relation. As Longstreth (1979) has pointed out, if the sterling lobby
or the Treasury dominated economic policy, it was because there was no
serious opposition to the policies they put forward and not because the
triad of City-Treasury-Bank of England forced their interests upon the
policy makers. Longstreth pointed out in 1979 that the picture of banking
capital forcing through policy measures 'in the teeth of strident opposition
is indeed a false one'. If it was false in 1979 it is certainly false today after
15 years of Thatcherism wherein the CBI has remained muted, offering in
some cases encouragement from the sidelines, whilst the devalorisation of
the British economy deepened. In other words industrial capital has also
had an interest in deciding the trajectory British capitalist social relationshave taken. The essential questions then became: What is the nature of that
interest? Why did it manifest? And, how has it developed?
A number of other studies appear to take a similar route. For example, the
extensive work by H. Overbeek (1990). In Overbeek's case the
'divide-equals-decline' syndrome takes on different aspects. It becomes
one between 'concepts of control', namely: the 'money concept' versus the
'productive concept' and how each in turn strive for control of the state and
the nation's economic course of development. The study offers a useful
empirical and historical overview of the development of British Capital and
decline. Unfortunately in no manner of understanding can it be classed a
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Marxist offering, for it too neglects the Capital-Labour conflict in favour of
the well worn Capital-Capital conflict.
All these theories have singularly failed to answer the fundamental
question: what exactly is it about capitalism that is in decline? Instead the
tendency has been to jump immediately to phenomena which lie outside
capitalist production; for example, within the circulation of capital (see G.
Ingham 1984), or, in the so called 'superstructure' (see P. Anderson 1964,
1987). Decline theses soon become engrossed in the measurement of a
phenomena Marxists have singularly failed to get to the heart of. In this
respect analysis, unable to penetrate deeper into the social form of
production, becomes entranced with comparative studies of decline
between Britain and other western capitalist nations. Inadequate theory,
of course, soon leads to reactionary practice as some Marxists, bereft of a
grounding in Marxist categories, align themselves with
'De-industrialisation' theory. They then proceed to support bourgeois
policy designed to curb Britain's 'De-industrialisation' by controlling 'the
city of London' and so place 'Britain' back on the rails of an 'ideal-typicalcapitalism' such as Germany.
This has a highly debilitating effect on Marxism's approach to the political
economy of the Thatcher years. The essential problem here is that Marx's
categories such as 'abstract labour', 'value', 'fixed' and 'circulating' capital
have either been ignored, seen as a 'Hegelian detour', of no relevance to
the 20th century, or else reified into a quantitative 'law of value'; seen as a
useful analytical tool, or else as a backdrop to 'crisis theory". The 'law* of
value then arises intact and phoenix like from the ashes of every capitalist
crisis.
This failure to make use of Marx's central categories in the spirit with which
he himself made use of them, has had one result: the Marxist understanding
of so called 'Thatcherism' has had to make do with that vacuous category'Post-Fordism'. How else is one to speak of a category which is so
ambiguous and devoid of class content that it can be used to 'prove' two
entirely opposite theses? For example, for some 'Post-Fordism' bears
witness' to the rejuvenating ability of capitalism (S. Hall, 1990); for others
'Post-Fordism' is the product of capitalism in decline (H. Overbeek, 1990)!
An explanatory category that cannot distinguish whether an entity such as
capitalism is flourishing or decaying is of little use to Marxists wishing to
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come to terms with the so called 'Thatcher era'. The most fruitful route is
that taken by 'decline' theorists, yet they either leave out, or, just as bad,
reify the central categories of a Marxist explanation - abstract labour, value,
fixed and circulating capital, the formal and real subsumption of labour
etc... In the third section of this article I bring these categories back to
centre stage of enquiry and use them to analyze capitalist decline in Britain.
By doing so I lay the basis for a Marxist understanding of the present epoch
(so called 'Thatcherism'). Before this, section two will briefly outline the
essence of Marx's 'value theory of labour'.
2: THE DIALECTICAL GENESIS OF CAPITALIST DECLINE
THE CONTRADICTION WITHIN LABOUR (OBJECTIVE
COMMODITY FETISHISM)
For Marx an acknowledgement of 'The two-fold character of labour' was
pivotal for a 'clear comprehension' of capitalism. As capitalism is still with
us, albeit in a seriously sclerotic form, then any Marxist notions of capitalist
decay must expose the development and decay of this two-fold character.
Indeed, as will be made clear, the contradiction within labour and its
dialectical process of a development and decay are the roots out of which
firstly Labourism and then Thatcherism grew. It therefore, becomes vital
to the flow of the argument here that we briefly emphasise the essential
aspects of Marx's 'value theory of labour'. As will become clear, it is
primarily an ontological statement about the contradiction between the
forms of labour in capitalism - on the one hand, concrete, useful, need
satisfying labour; on the other hand, abstract, value creating labour. After
detailing this contradiction, we then link its development tendencies to its
highest form of expression - 'money capital' and the accumulation process.
In doing so, the contradictions internal to capitalism, which negates the
contradiction within labour will be all the more clearly exposed (to bedeveloped in section 3). Also in section 3 a tentative 'dialectical history of
capitalist decay in Britain' will be offered concerning the effects that the
negation of the contradiction within labour has had on the formation of the
8 K. Marx, Capital Vol 1, p 49, Lawrence and Wishart, 1983.
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working class and the ruling class in Britain. Firstly, then, a brief outline of
Marx's 'value theory of labour'.
As stressed above, the value theory of labour Marx offers is primarily an
ontological statement concerning the essential social production relations
endured within capitalism. In capitalist society labour is divorced from the
means of production and must sell only its own labour power, which now
stands opposed to it in the form of capital. This simple fact has important
ramifications, for, if one considers that it is through productive activity that
labourers are associated, then it is obvious that divorcing labour from the
means of production atomises every individual labourer, one from another.
Additionally, the owners and controllers of capital also stand atomised
from each other. Therefore, all become commodity owners.The above form is the basis of the contradiction within labour: as individuals
with use value needs and 'bearers of the exchange value producing process'.
For example, labourers own their own capacity to labour, a useful activity
which must become an exchange value creating activity if the capacity is to
be realised. Capitalists, having realised labour's capacity by exchanging itfor a wage and uniting it with the means of production, are also commodity
owners of many potential use-values at the end of the production process.
However, like the worker's labour power, commodities remain only
potential use values until they are exchanged. In this way the capitalist too
is the bearer of a particular part of the universal value relation. Clearly,
the 'ideal' for capitalism is to have no directly social production relation
between individuals (whether intra or inter class). Social relations outwith,
such as feudal, are crushed under the 'juggernaut of expanding capital', to
paraphrase Marx; until individuals are of necessity mediated by exchange atevery turn. It is at this point that one has the ontological basis for the riseof the value form and its dominance over society. Stated simply, capitalist
society ,as an organic whole, expends and distributes social labour, howeverits essential social relations atomise individuals. This ontological fact poses
the real ontological problem of how individual private concrete labour
(whether it is the worker offering his commodity labour power or the
capitalist with a factory full of potential use-values worked up by concrete
labour) is to be socially sanctioned in such a manner as to reveal its
expenditure and distribution as socially necessary.
Clearly it is through market exchange of commodities and so the 'price
mechanism', that this ontological problem is resolved. For Marx,
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commodity exchange, as its hold deepened on society, was, stripped of all
unessential content becomes nothing other than the social process between
individuals which has reduced their holdings of concrete private labour
to abstract social labour. This social valuation of private labour is achieved
through the exchange of commodities. In this manner, as Marx remarked
constantly, our social relations take the form of things because things take
the social form of value relations. As our social exchange relations develop
so too does the expression of value, and as such, abstract labour. Eventually
the social practice of abstracting value creating labour develops out of itself
a universal equivalent: money gold and, at a more concrete level, the world
currencies that at different periods of capitalism's history act 'as good as
gold', namely: Sterling and latterly the Dollar in a more brutalised form.
The point is the universal equivalent is universal because it is an active
reflection of capitalism's growing potential to realise its ideal of totally
atomising individuals as mere commodities and so functions of capital
expansion. This is why the universal equivalent, or, 'money capital' is the
value relations most developed form. As such it is abstract social labour'smost attainable bodily form. In effect, it is the material realisation of the
contradiction within labour; the material embodiment of a social relation.
One side of the contradiction - abstract universal labour in the value or
money capital form - allows the other side of the contradiction - concrete
individual labour - and every other particular commodity, to express their
exchange value and the value relation between people more adequately. It
is a situation wherein the particular expresses its existence as a universal.
Following this, the changes taking place in production, namely, increases
in productivity, leading to less socially necessary labour time; become
transmitted via the exchange of commodities for money, which, as abstract
social labour, is the bodily form of value and as such reveals to the
commodity its new value. It is this social ontology which the more concreteprice mechanism of supply and demand reflect. The whole drive behind
such social relations of course evolves out of the capitalist's need to extract
a surplus from labour. This brief excursion into the basic ontology of Marx's
Labour Theory of Values leaves one with these initial conclusions: the
contradiction within labour is that between concrete useful labour and
abstract labour; abstract labour is the basis of value and value is the basis
of 'money capital'.
The above describes capital's 'ideal', it is also clear that a Marxist
understanding of capitalism in decay must encapsulate that process
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whereby the dual nature of labour begins to disintegrate along with the
contradiction between use and exchange value. In as much as this is the
case, decay is a positive progressive category to use, because it explains how,
with the demise of abstract social labour, concrete social labour, orientated
toward useful needs, eventually dominates productive intercourse between
people. Below we develop our understanding of the process of decay by
considering 'money capital' the general form of capital and as such the
highest manifestation of capital as circulation capital. Specifically, we
develop an understanding of the contradictions which build up as capital,
in order to expand value, has to assume particular forms which become
increasingly alien to it. The alien forms spoken of are fixed capital and
eventually even its life blood - variable capital. The latter is the real source
of capitalist decay.
2.1 CAPITAL'S INTERNAL CONTRADICTIONS: THE PROCESS OF
DECAY
Below the word 'decay* refers to the decay of the contradiction within
labour mentioned above and expresses two meanings, the one negative the
other positive. On the one hand it refers to a negative decomposition of
labour's dual nature: negative in the sense that, without communism the
concrete, use value, need fulfilling character of labour becomes
decomposed, or, bureaucratised (the example of health care provision
these past decades being a case in point). On the other hand, it refers to
the more positive Latin meaning 'decadere', or, literally, 'falling away*; in
this case it is positive decay and signifies the 'falling away" of the alienating
character of labour - its value creating abstract side. This, then, is the dual
meaning of decay emphasised here. To provide a detailed account of this
process is beyond the scope of this article. At this point I wish no more
than to intimate how capitalist decay is generated by the contradictioninternal to the capitalist accumulation process.
A theory of capitalist decay must start from the recognition that capital
must of necessity accumulate surplus value in order to survive. We know
from the above that value's substance is abstract labour and that abstract
labour, the product of the value relation between Capital and Labour, takes
as its highest material form money capital. Money capital is the highest
material form because it best reflects capital's essence as being above all
circulating capital. Hence here we refer to circulation in its widest sense
covering production, exchange and distribution of value. Capital, in order
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competition to increase the rate of exploitation. This compulsion saw the
movement toward the creation of a labour process more in keeping with
capital's value expanding essence. That is, it saw the movement towards a
labour process occupied by increasingly abstract homogeneous labour; a
'labour' more adequate to capital because more adaptable to a speedy
circulation through the labour process.
The attempt to reduce labour craft fixity and control over the flow of
production (the latent abstraction of labour in production) leads to the
simultaneous growth of capital's fixity in the production process, in the
material form of concentrated machinery (fixed capital). So, the drive to
accumulate, compels the capitalist system to increase the abstraction of
labour, but in the process this requires a greater level of fixity on capital's
part; a fixity which hinders capital's ability to circulate and accumulate!
This process may increase the mass and rate of profit, but it also heralds a
vicious spiral of decline for capitalism. Capitalism begins to 'dig its own
grave' due to the fact that the same process foists upon capital another, all
consuming, contradiction - an increasingly socialised labour whichthreatens to negate its value form of existence as abstract labour.
It is this contradiction which is embedded within the heart of capitalism.
On the one hand, in order to expand, capital has of necessity to reduce the
fixity of craft type labour and expand the proportions of its form as fixed
capital. As such capital is compelled to expand in a form which can only
circulate value in slow seepages over many turnovers. Exactly how many
turnovers will depend on the size of fixed capital, a particular capital's
position in the commodity market and capital's ability to control an
increasingly socialised workforce. On the other hand capital has to reduce
all the fixity building up within the production process to socially necessary
abstract labour, by dissolving itself once more into its general money capital
form. It must do this if value is to circulate and realise the expansionoccurring in the production process. The contradiction is an acute one for
the capitalist class. As Marx noted:
13 See appendix concerning the category of socialised labour.
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As long as it is tied up in the process of production, it is incapable
of circulation, and hence is virtually devalued. As long as it is
tied up in circulation, it is incapable of production, posits no
surplus value, is not capital in process.
As Marx implies in the above quote, and building on what has been
suggested above, any 'bottle necks' in the production sphere must act as a
drag on capitalist circulation and, as such, act as an effective devaluation
of capital.
This contradiction becomes more critical when one bears in mind two
interrelated facts which interweave with the above problems for capitalism.
Firstly, fixed capital is prone to increasing rates ofmoral depreciation of
the value imparted to commodities due to the intensity of competitive
accumulation between capitals. Because of this, productive time becomes
of the essence. This fact intensifies the imperative for production, as
valorisation process, to occur as smoothly and as quickly as possible.
Secondly, we have the major obstacle to this endeavour because higher
levels of fixed capital bring on to the historical stage a higher concentrationof directly socially combined living labour, which, increasingly, through
emerging economic and political organisation, act as a barrier to capital's
exploitation of labour and so a barrier to the smooth efficient use of fixed
capital.
As the degree of fixed forms of capital develop, both moral depreciation of
capital and increased socialisation of labour develop the contradictions
within the capital value relation. Eventually, for the larger dominant
capitals which emerge in each industry, the atmosphere in the production
process becomes unconducive to the risking of large amounts of money
capital in large scale investments of fixed capital. This becomes the case
whether the investment is by private capitalist or joint stock companies.
To briefly recapitulate, I have argued that, due to the competitivecompulsion to expand value, capital must increasingly forgo its essential
14 MECW No 29, op.cit., p 9.
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production can recommence, relatively safe in the knowledge that the
socialised labour which emerges to negate capitalism, becomes
transformed and re-atomised via a bureaucratic regulation of labour in both
an economic and political sense. However even if this solution works, it
does so only initially, for it is at great cost to capital in general. It allows
workers institutional links with the state, through which rank and file
struggle can be channelled to great effect. It also means the beginning of
a bureaucratic regulation of abstract labour formation which seriously
restricts the valorisation process. Looking ahead slightly we can say this
potential negative effect for capital did actualise itself in Britain throughout
the 1960s and 1970s, when profit rates declined and worker militancy
became a major problem for the ruling class.
The potential bureaucratic solution has of course realised itself in the
historical process. It is what has often been referred to as 'Labourism'.
Traditionally, one only refers to 'Labourism' as a political phenomenon
with contradictory 'Left' and 'Right' political manifestations. The
argument here, however, is that it must be given further recognition as asocio-economic production category which bureaucratically regulates and
atomises the labour process and in so doing allows the further latent
abstraction of labour. In section 3 below a preliminary outline is given of
the historical dialectic of this process in Britain. After which a preliminary
contribution to a political economy of so called 'Thatcherism' will be given.
3: THE HISTORY AND DIALECTICS OF CAPITALIST DECAY IN
BRITAIN
We become historically dialectic and so more concrete specific by taking
the above genetical treatment of capitalism and its emergent decaying
forms and relating them to a specific capitalist entity, in our case Britain.
With regard to Britain, the further expansion of capital from the late 19thcentury onward served to develop the contradiction within labour to the
point where it began to decay. That is, capitalist expansion served to
develop the socialisation of labour in its drive to create every commodity
on the basis of abstract socially necessary labour. This emergence of
socialised labour heralded the point of dissolution of commodity fetishism,
ie, that contradiction within labour between its useful form and its value
form of existence. Empirically this revealed itself in the labour movement's
growing clamour for the social regulation of their own labour and
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productive forces. Some of the dominant ideologies workers became
drawn to, as their capacity to socialise grew, were 'Ricardian Socialism',
'Municipal Socialism' and 'Syndicalism'. It was through these versions of
'socialism' that workers began to organise and advance their political
demands for socialism.
The grip of an emerging finance capital over and above domestic
productive capital in Britain also revealed itself in this late 19th century
early 20th century period. It can be said to mirror the polar grip that
militancy and socialism was having on dominant sections of the labour
movement. History shows that finance capital in Britain emerges from the
fragmented country banking system and quite rapidly (approximately
between 1870 to 1920) centralises and concentrates its holding of money
capital in the 'City of London'. Finance capital does this to escape the
parochial and restrictive connection with industry. At first finance capital's
predominant form is imperialism, or, corporate finance capital. That is to
say, finance capital, through the 'City* orients itself as world capital along
the lines of the fusion of banking and industry outlined by Hilferding, andlater, Lenin. Its other, higher, development - parasitical capital - is held in
check in this period, by the imperialist mode. More specifically, the
clearing banks were increasingly drawn into the web of commercial money
laundering and the short-termist philosophy of merchant banking. Drawn
in, it should be noted, by the Bank of England and Treasury. Below is an
attempt to flesh out the process a little more, by, very briefly, itemising,
firstly, some occurrences which suggest labour's growing strength and
secondly, some occurrences which suggest capital's waning powers.
3.1: ASPECTS OF AN EMERGENT COLLECTIVE LABOUR
MOVEMENT
In the first two decades of the 20th century independent working classcollectivity reached new heights which have never been attained since.
Syndicalist ideas of socialism had gripped the most politically advanced
sections of labour. The main thrust of its practical politics was that trade
unions were to become the vehicle for achieving socialism and the General
Strike was to be the main weapon in the trade union arsenal. The militant
sections of collective labour were concentrated in Coalmining, Docks and
Railway industries. Throughout this period, especially 1910-14, strike
waves deepened and often brought whole cities to a standstill. The state
had increasingly to resort to sending in police and troops in an attempt to
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regain control; this was the case in, for example, Hull, Manchester, Salford,
Liverpool and Glasgow.
The period 1910 to 1921 saw the development of worker 'trades councils'
and 'cooperatives', alongside the development of 'councils of action'
throughout the country, which were responsible, among other things, for
the 'Hands Off Soviet Workers' campaign. Also in this period, the
increasing tendency of trade unions from different sectors of the labour
process to act together, irrespective of craft division, began to reveal itself.
As the Minister of Labour lamented in 1920.
What is called 'class consciousness' is obliterating the distinction
between those who follow different occupations. 7
In this period the rank and file workers' movement was still, in large
measure, autonomous from the rigid policing role of trade union
bureaucrat, who, particularly during the first world war, was seen as an
accomplice to state inspired working class oppression. According to the
British labour historian J. E. Cronin, it was this period when 'technical,
social and economic processes' were at work combining to internallyhomogenise the working class and cause it to be 'less sharply divided within
itself. Increases in the numbers of unskilled and semi-skilled workers
was the objective basis upon which political collectivity began to be formed.
Within the cities a distinct working class culture was emerging, which
allowed the point of production struggles to spill over into political struggle.
Cronin again notes how
16 For a concise empirical history of the conflict between capital and labour in Britain see
J. Sheldrake, Industrial Relations and Politics in Britain 1880-1989, Pinter
Publishers, 1991.
17 The Minister of Labour 1920 was cited by J. Cronin in his, Labour and Society in
Britain 1918-1979, p 22, Batsford, 1984.
18 Ibid., p 27.
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The militancy of 1917-20 transcended the issues of wages, prices
and dillusion and even war itself. It was, more than any previous
or subsequent unrest, a mobilisation of the working class as a
class and of their institutions and neighbourhoods.
There is a tendency to scoff at such optimism that the working class in
Britain were acting as a class, on the grounds that this optimism is born ofan 'economistic' outlook. To some degree this may be justified, however,
this attitude overstates the scepticism. It does so because the holder by and
large looks at this period of British worker struggle through the distorting
prism of Stalinism and Labourism and, as such, the hold these categories
have exerted on worker politics. What we must not forget is that Stalinism
had not yet developed and Labourism had still to gain a central place in the
re-atomisation of the growing worker collectivities and had yet to stratify
them into bourgeois collective bargaining groups.
Labour history is of course, full of such anecdotal evidence as that supplied
above. What it has singularly failed to do is place the growing worker's
movements within a theory of capitalism's decaying forms. The groundwork for the surge in labour collectivity alluded to above had been laid in
the last quarter of the 19th century. From 1873 to 1896, in the face of
declining prices, real wage increases were successfully rested from capital.
In the same period profits went into a spiral of decline.20 Workers began
to assert their political economy over and above that of capital: increasing
use value acquisition and needs were to take precedence over surplus value
creation. In effect the situation was one where workers increased their
standard of living, whilst capital, unable to cope with an increasingly
socialised workforce, had to accept the profit losses and begin its flight into
finance capital.
Of course there was counter offensives by capital, from the turn of the
century until 1914 real wages declined, but, one must stress, only at the cost
19 Ibid., p 31.20 See any number of economic history textbooks for this evidence. For example, A. E.
Musson, The Growth of British Industry, pp 149-166, Batsford Academic, 1978.
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of inflationary price rises. The latter being no less than the outcome of the
pitched battle between labour and capital in this period. Objectively the
battle was being won by labour, empirically this can be gauged by the
massive decline in fixed capital formation, as capital reverted to its essential
circulatory form. Feinstein 1points out that in the period 1873-1913
productivity growth in Britain slowed to an average of 1% per year, whilst
the USA, Germany and other developed capitalist economies exhibited
averages of up to 2%. Fixed capital installation was older and less
advanced, new industries were slower to develop and managerial strategies
to control labour were lacking. The essential but simple fact was, capital
was losing control over an increasingly collective labour. Throughout this
period and until the late 1920s, the ruling class were in disarray, especially
so when the influence of the Bolshevik revolution made its impact on the
working class. Bentley captures the atmosphere in the ruling class camp in
this period when he remarks how
The socialism which Lloyd George confronted after 1918
seemed to him something harder and colder...In thecountry hespoke not of socialism but of bolshevism (and) he wrote of 'the
great struggle which is to come'.22
Until the Fabian/Labour Party and the TUC could effectively join forces
with Conservative social chauvinists such as Chamberlain, to ensure a
bureaucratic atomisation of the emerging socialised working class, it was
the likes of Syndicalists, such as Tom Mann, who inspired the worker's
movement politically. As a ruling class counter-weight it was the
'Anti-Socialist Movement', the 'Economic League' ideologues who
inspired the capitalist counter-offensives. Up until that watershed in
British working class formation, the 1926 general strike, the Labour Party
and TUC, despite the state's careful nurturing, were essentially still on the
21 See C. H. Feinstein's, "Slowing down and Falling Behind - Industrial Retardation in
Britain After 1870", in New Directions in Economic and Social History, Vol 2, Anne
Digby et al (eds), 1992.
22 M. Bentley, "The Liberal Response To Socialism", in, K. D. Brown, Essays in
Anti-Labour History, p 49, MacMillan, 1974.
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side lines with respect to any hegemonic control over the working class.
Therefore, in this period, on the one hand, we had Syndicalism striving to
breakdown the political divisions between workers. On the other hand, we
had a Labourism attempting to consolidate its reason for existence by
working flat out to deepen sectional divisions in the working class and
deepen the divisions between the British working class and international
labour via patriotism.
32: THE RISE OF FINANCE CAPITAL IN BRITAIN
In this section a brief consideration will be given to the developmental
tendencies towards a particular variant of finance capital in Britain. The
1870s to late 1920s was essentially a period of limbo for capitalism in Britain.
The objective conditions for a transition to socialism were effectively being
constructed, regardless of any subjective conclusions otherwise reached by
the actors involved. Finance capital is predicated upon this . That is,
finance capital emerges when the capitalist mode of production is in the
netherworld of decay. There are a number of aspects to the way in whichfinance capital in Britain reacted to this transition period, where the
contradiction within labour was being positively negated by an emerging
social and collectively conscious labour movement. We note here only
some of the essential ones.
As the contradiction developed between, on the one hand greater levels of
fixed capital formation and intensified moral depreciation of its value
holding capacity, and on the other hand the negation of commodity
fetishism, or, the contradiction within labour; the ruling elements within
capital ensured the easy passage for capital to revert to type, ie, circulation.
One notes in this respect the general trend away from capital's 'country
banking' base to the 'City of London* from the 1870s, which quickened to
a gallop as the century drew to a close. This was achieved primarily througha spate of mergers. By the early 1920s British finance capital had
consolidated a remote central banking system operating out of the 'City*
and had taken up full residence in the world of fictitious capital creation
(secondary share exchanging and short term money market discounting
etc). 'Over night' almost, the old 'country banking' network which 'lent
long* and encouraged a 'healthy* fusion with productive capital, had been
sublated by the growth of parasitic bank branches - the tentacles of finance
capital and main arteries through which circulatory capital could assert its
parasitic dominance of productive capital.
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Of course in the 'City* there had always been a number of avenues for capital
to realise a return. The two basic distinctions of parasitic activity were
between money market activity, which lent short to domestic productive
capital and long to foreign Governments and/or high labour intensive, low
wage, foreign, private industries. Within this configuration however,
commercial trading in currencies, bonds, secondary share issues and bill
discounting became ever more dominant. It is this latter faction of capital
which eventually became the central focal point for a capital reacting to the
loss of control over its productive base in the UK. The more the
contradiction within labour became negated and so the collective strength
of labour grew, the more deeply did this form of capital feel at home in its
abstract, fictitious world of M-Ml.
In its imperialist form, finance capital acted as world banker to all
developing countries. By exporting capital it was able to replenish itself on
the surplus value of other nation's labour. The problem was that the first
world war, caused by this imperialist expansion, served, firstly, to bankrupt
British finance capital (the celebrated foreign earnings of 4 billion by 1914dissolved to nothing); secondly, served to block the flow of capital abroad,
due to the restrictions imposed on foreign securities during and after the
war. Such potential for international restrictions on the flow of capital and
the growing class tensions within Britain, convinced the British ruling class
that they must attempt to create favourable internal conditions for the
return of inward capital investment. In other words finance capital had to
exert short term discipline upon itself by allowing the state to act in its long
run interests. The state as repository of finance capital's long term interests
then sought, firstly to contain, then to incorporate and control the labour
movement. The only lasting way to accomplish this was to firstly, crush the
syndicalist influence and secondly, foster the growth of reformist elements
within the Labour movement. From this point on the strategy of Britishfinance capital was to encourage and foster the growth of Labourism within
the ranks of the Labour movement. No one should doubt that finance
capital had the necessary institutional links to carry through this policy.
Apart from the 'Economic League' and organisations like it, one also has
the multitude of 'Employer Associations', the systematic interlocking of
directorships which knits the circuit of capital together and sublates it
under the influences of finance capital. On top of this one also has the
persona of finance capitalist influence within the state directing planning
committees, conciliatory procedures and controlling the Treasury Office
and Bank of England. As John Scott has pointed out, finance capitalists in
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Britain for the past century have been in effect the controlling power elite
out of a power bloc consisting of large scale industrial capitalists,
commercial and landed interests.
No doubt some historians may dispute the historical chronology or other
particulars of the above. Arguments have raged amongst economic
historians for years as to how one should characterise this period in British
economic history. For some it was a period of 'retardation', for others, a
period of 'restructuring' before the onset of the 'second industrial
revolution';others still, deny it as a period altogether, claiming it as simply
part of the natural evolutionary process that all mature 'industrial societies'
pass through. In this case Britain merely revealed to other nations a glimpse
of their own de-industrialising future. It would appear that no matter how
much one pours over the empirical data, there will always be those who will
dispute your findings. It seems to me that what has been most needed is a
theoretical basis upon which to investigate/understand the surplus of
empirical data collected on the economic history of Britain in the period
1870-1930.In applying Marxist categories this much has become clear: the emergence
of finance capital occurred in Britain around the 1870s onward; predicated
upon a temporarily defeated productive capital that could no longer secure
control over workers to guarantee an efficient rate of accumulation. As the
decades of the late 19th century gave way to the early 20th century,
commodity fetishism, based on the contradiction within labour, began to
break down. Objectively, then, the special interest given this period by
historians is warranted, for it is the period which heralds the beginnings of
the negation of capitalism.
In essence the period can be characterised as that period in British
capitalism when the two poles of the commodity mode of production were
becoming wrenched apart. On the one hand, an increasingly organised
23 See his book, Who Rules Britain?, Polity Press, 1991. M. Useem, The Inner Circle,
OUP, 1984, also describes how an "inner circle" (finance capitalists) have dictated the
political agenda.
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labour movement was advancing to assert the preeminence of useful
production and need; on the other hand, a retreating finance capital was
holding on to its fetishised value creating world via a parasitic
'money-go-round' called the 'City of London'. The intensification of this
contradiction threatened the existence of commodity production. In this
respect the emergence of Labourism was no accident.
33: THE EMERGENCE OF LABOURISM
Labourism can be said to be the development, within a decaying capitalist
formation, of a new political economic category. Politically it sought to heal
the rift between finance capital (the value form) with Labour (use value and
need) via 'corporate compromise' at the level of the State. Specifically,
Labour was to be given bureaucratically regulated use value provision
through the construction of the welfare state. This was at great cost to
capital, but was the only way of establishing the rule of the policemen of the
labour movement - the TUC and Labour Party Bureaucracy. Alan Fox,
like the majority of 'industrial relations' experts, views this period as theconsolidation and integration of 'collective bargaining'. Whatever one
chooses to call it he is surely correct when commenting thus about its
substantive purpose
...when British ruling groups admitted to a recognised foothold
in decision making such organisations as demonstrated their
readiness to pursue their ends within established constitutional
structures, they thereby creatednew allies in the defence of those
structures.
The 'new allies' were the Labour Party and the TUC, and 'those structures'
refer to the growing society wide network of collective bargaining controls
over labour. Taken as a whole it constitutes Labourism. Industrial
relations theory never does get to the bottom of 'collective bargaining', aMarxist approach can.
24 Alan Fox, History and Heritage, George Allen and Unwin, 1985
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Even more important was Labourism's economic/social dimension,
because this was the basis for collective bargaining. Labourism can be said
to be a social category which develops out of the decaying forms of
capitalism. Its fundamental task being to act as a surrogate form of
abstracting labour in production. As such, it bolstered the ailing value
form's role in abstracting labour. By this it should be clear that it does not
make value formation any more efficient, in fact quite the opposite; its chief
purpose is to prolong the life of an ailing social relation. If we remember,
the capitalist value form of labour abstraction brings with it an emerging
socialised labour, this is one reason why Marx could say that capitalism 'digs
its own grave'. The task of Labourism was to reverse this socialisation of
labour via bureaucratic rules and procedures both in the labour process
and wider society and state. In this way capital found the means for a
reinvestment strategy in Britain from the late 1920s onward. Unlike the
'Fordist regulation' theory however this process is not evidence of
capitalism's health, but rather, in line with the argument here, evidence of
its decay.One can point to many examples of the growth of this social category. One
notes, as already mentioned above, the growing theory and practice of
'Industrial Relations'. This fetishistic preoccupation with a 'scientific'
enquiry into 'employee/employer' relations has an inverse relation with the
fortunes of capital, ie, as capitalism decays the academic industrial relations
'industry1 thrives! From as early as 1868 and the Royal Commission on
Trade Unions, there developed a labourist clique of reformers, full time
trades union officials, employer associations. The gruesome combination
of Fabian bureaucracy and right wing social chauvinism, became the
bedrock upon which a philosophy of consensus industrial relations could
emerge. The Whitley Committee created in 1916 was the first national
vehicle for the institutionalisation of Labourism within the labour process.From another angle, one can observe the importance of the merging
conscious application of labour process strategies in the face of a declining
commodity fetishism. This was particularly so in areas of industry where
the reserve army of labour had 'dried up' and an internal bureaucratic
regulation of the flow of labour to the needs of capital, had become the
norm. Direct forms of labour control which shadowed the abstraction of
labour achieved by capitalism, such as 'Taylorism' were introduced (and
increasingly so after 1931). Along with 'Taylorism' other labour process
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controls became dominant such as 'human relations theory*. This offered
a more 'responsive autonomy* method of control, according to Friedman.
Of course at the concrete level of British class struggle the Labourist
incorporation of the working class was to be a protracted affair. In
particular, its 'left' face had to be hammered out on the anvil of class
struggle over many decades. Indeed it was not until the massive waves of
labour unrest, which swept through Britain from the late 19th century to
the 1920s, were finally defeated, culminating in the General Strike of 1926,
that Labourism could take its place with any real success at the head of a
depoliticised labour movement. In this respect two important
phenomenon occur; firstly, it was only after 1926 that the Labour Party and
TUC took firmer root in the social fabric of capitalism. Secondly, the
successful depoliticisation of the working class heralded the break from the
gold standard in 1931. As such it heralded a new era of capital and state
investment on the basis of cheap money. More importantly it heralded the
decay of a 'universal equivalent form' for capital, this itself the reflection of
the deeper chasm developing within the form of labour.This strategic retreat of parasitic finance capital was made more palatable
by the opening of the 'sterling area'; a corridor which insulated sterling from
the dollar's world hegemonic position as a surrogate universal equivalent
abstract labour representative. Throughout the 'corridor', parasitic capital
could repatriate surplus value, generated in the colonies Britain controlled,
back to the 'City of London' for speculatory purposes. Meanwhile, with
Labourism in place, the conditions for the 'corporate' side of British finance
capital to reinvest in the domestic economy had been created. However
the tension within capitalism to revert to its parasitic form and the ability
of labour to counteract the bureaucratic mechanisms of Labourism such as
collective bargaining, has meant that from 1929 to 1979 any moves towards
the 'corporate' containment of either finance capital and labour couldnever develop. It is this schizophrenia of British finance capital which has
characterised what in hindsight came to be seen as the consensus years and
25 A. L. Friedman, Industry and Labour - Class Struggles At Work and Monopoly
Capitalism, p 69, MacMillan Press, 1977.
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what I have referred to as the labourist bureaucratic control of the labour
process. The period was to stretch from 1931 to approximately 1973. There
are those on the left who have described this area as a peculiar kind of half
hearted attempt at 'Fordist production regimes'. I have argued here that
this 'Fordism' can be best understood as a social category which emerged
to contain workers - Labourism. The reason as to why it was such a
contradictory affair, or, 'half hearted', is wholly to do with the peculiar
schizophrenic nature of British finance capital. On the one hand it has
exhibited spasmodically its 'Hilferding type' form (note the corporate
financial structure of Germany); whilst on the other hand it has been
systematically pulled awry by its highest parasitic form via speculative
activity in world money markets. A full appraisal of this must be the subject
of another work. The point to be stressed here is that Labourism emerged
to dominance in the late 1920s and became consolidated by the events of
the post 1945 world order. It eventually began to wane, firstly, under its
own internal contradictions. The chief contradiction was that working class
rank and file organisations, bolstered by the promise of full employment,threatened the existence of Labourism. A second contradiction was the
world capitalist slump, which began to assert itself in the late 1960s - early
1970s and brought an end to a rate of profit which could afford such a
compromised value relation. It was out of the ashes of Labourism that so
called 'Thatcherism' emerged.
3.4: 'THATCHERISM'
The waves of growing working class militancy throughout the late 1960s and
most of the 1970s are evidence of, by this time, an increasingly socialised
production process facing a capitalist class increasingly bereft of its
labourist support. Faced with a world slump, the costly bureaucratic
compromise between labour and capital simply had to be removed. Nomatter the degree of apparent pragmatism at work in this period, the logic
was clear: Labourism hindered valorisation; could no longer control the
working class, therefore Labourism had to be removed! However, removed
under conditions as favourable as was possible to a decaying capitalism.
The Thatcherite ruling class faction's onslaught post 1979 was no
'hegemonic victory. In its essence it was a set of pragmatic policies
designed to carve out a breathing space for capitalism in the hope that, with
the demise of Stalinism in the East, fortunes may change. In the short term
the so called Thatcher 'strategy* was simply to break up the bureaucratic
restrictions on valorisation, whilst also breaking up any socialising
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as 50%. In the capitalist sector gross domestic capital formation fell by
33% between 1979-83.27 The money form has been used to dissolve the
bureaucratic association that had ossified into the social fabric in the
decades of Labourist dominance around the production of needs. This was
done by imposing 'cash limits' on the public sector; and imposing 'merit
pay' wage rises, awarded to workers on an individual basis. These
particular strategies served to break the material basis of Labourism. In
effect it left the mechanism of control such as collective bargaining in tact,
but without any context. Basically, collective bargaining has been 'hollowed
out' - only the framework survives, buttressed by so called 'Human
Resource Management' goals (we return to this briefly below).
Secondly, the breaking up of large production units in the name of 'Post
Fordism' and its derivative 'just-in-time production' occurred. In 1973-4
there were some 1018 workplaces employing a labour force of over one
thousand; by 1982-3 this figure had almost halved to 5S9.28 This particular
strategy, as well as facilitating the break up of socialised labour and allowing
abetter environment for the intensification of abstracting labour, (tendencytowards the flexible worker, just-in-time production, labour
surveillance..etc); also served another important purpose. It served to shift
the burden that unproductive labour was exerting on profitability from the
stronger capitalist to the weak. Thirdly, a collection of so-called
'supply-side' policies designed to recommodify the labour process. The
chief policy being to whip the labour movement back into line by creating
a large scale reserve army of unemployed. By the early 1980s that arch
representative of capitalist interests, Nicholas Ridley, could assure his pay
masters that "the high level of unemployment is evidence of the progress
we are making". One Employment Act after another has sought to
27 Ibid.
28 Business Monitor 1974 and 1985, cited in, A. Callinicos and C. Harman, The Changing
Working Class,p 57, 1987.
29 Quote taken from J. Eldridge et al, Industrial Sociology and Economic Crisis,p 32,1991.
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nature. Of course, as Clarke observes, the Utopias of Post-Fordism and
'flexible specialisation' have no vision and 'serve to rationalise the
complacent self-satisfaction of a small stratum trying to invent for itself an
historical role'.31Nevertheless, it is incumbent on Marxists to extract from
this mishmash the 'rational kernel' within.
The Thatcherite project to re-commodify workers has had very limited
success. The main purpose was an impossible one to achieve the
re-establishment of capitalism in its prime. For all the attempts to control
labour via the re-imposition of the commodity form in workplace relations,
there has been little capitalist regeneration of the economy. Capital has
refused to invest on the scale required and so most of any increase in
valorisation rates have come solely from the intensification of work. As the
scale of de-industrialisation suggests, the relations of production stand
opposed to the forces of production. Without the re-invigoration of the
value form 'marketisation' of the public sector has been a bureaucratic
sham. State regulation of such hybrids as British Gas, and the different
'Water Companies'...etc and 'contracting out' of Health and Educationprovision, has simply lead, contrary to ideology, to greater state regulation
than ever before. The deregulation of finance capital has further retarded
any attempts to re-commodify production relations in Britain. In the past
15 years the pace of the flight of capital away from Britain surprised many.
With its favoured long term options in Eastern Europe turning sour, its
parasitic presence can only increase and increase the de-industrialisation
trend in Britain. As for the changes that have confronted workers in the
workplace, these too are fraught with long term difficulties for the ruling
class of Britain. As Gough has explained, the high degree of interrelation
of abstract workers implied by the fetishised forms of flexible functionalism
and just-in-time-producing..etc, create the ground upon which the future
strength of the working class can be built. In the sense that the processintegrates workers across skill boundaries, whilst creating inflexibility for
capital, especially with the commitment to 'core' worker status. A future
article will deal with the contradictions of Thatcherism in some detail. The
task here was to put in place the foundations of an understanding that
31 Simon Clarke, ibid., p 28
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stretches beyond the particular time period of Thatcherism' and situate it
within a general theory of the decay of capitalist social relations of
production in Britain.
CONCLUSION
This article has claimed that Marxists up to date have singularly failed toprovide a political economy of what has, for convenience, been called
Thatcherism'. It was pointed out that 'Post-Fordism' and 'Capitalist
Decline' theses were inadequate to the task. The former because it was
merely a Weberian 'ideal-type' concept held together by an eclectic series
of empirical observations of conjunctural economic and social trends. The
latter because it was ill-conceived, dealing only with intra capitalist
struggle as a reason for decline. Nevertheless, as pointed out earlier, the
concept of capitalist decline held out most promise in our quest to
understand both 'Labourism' and 'Thatcherism'. As it stood however the
category of decline had to be strengthened if it was to bear the weight of
explanation assigned to it. This article has attempted to do this bytransforming it into a category of capitalist decay. The decay, it was argued,
resided in the contradiction within labour. Specifically, it was pointed out
that decay referred to the falling away of labour's value form (abstract
labour), or, rather, its negation into social collective labour. The drive for
this transition rested with capital's insatiable desire to expand itself. In the
process of expansion we described how contradictions emerge for capital;
chiefly, increasing levels of fixed capital in a climate of increasing moral
depreciation of capital and an increasingly collective and organised labour
movement. As argued it is at this juncture that capital reverts to type, ie,
circulation, and finance capital emerges. Labourism, it was argued,
develops as a social category in capitalist decline, its functions being to
rescue the labour process for a recalcitrant finance capital by re-atomisingthe socialised worker thus allowing capital to continue the valorisation of
labour power. It was then argued that this Labourist solution for capitalism
lasted in Britain from approximately 1931-73. After which time, and due
mainly to the world slump, it declined rapidly. 'Thatcherism' emerged out
of the ashes of 'Labourism'. As argued, with 'Labourism' gone any further
abstraction of labour would lead only to the re-socialisation of labour, this
was certainly occurring in the militant 1970s. In this respect it was claimed
that 'Thatcherism' had two suicide missions; on the one hand the break up
of socialised labour formation, hence of capitalism itself
(de-industrialisation for the bourgeois mind). On the other hand the
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freeing of parasitic capital from production, to the promise land of the
promissory bank note - the 'City1 - where it could find short term security
in speculative money dealing, in the long term hope of a move to the
ex-Soviet block countries.
Of course the above strategy has failed and so called 'Thatcherism' lies in
tatters. The bourgeois class have no all embracing strategies because they
have no future. Everything achieved by 'Thatcherism' was negative;
breaking up the forces of production, atomising workers with anti-trade
union laws and unemployment and bolstering capitalists with the force of
the state's coercive institutions; and then allowing both classes to fight it
out, whilst freeing finance capital to hover over the bones. The future can
only lie with the working class, the problem is they have to seize it by
redefining once more, for themselves, a common politics.
APPENDIX
SOCIALISED LABOUR AND THE VALUE FORM.
The category socialised labour has a number of attributes which can bedivided, for analytical purposes, into two levels of abstraction from the
complexities of the capital relation. At a deeper level of abstraction one
has socialised labours' genetic attributes, which are properties of the inner
laws of capitals decay, whilst at a more concrete level of abstraction one
has socialised labours' historical attributes, which are empirically verified
trends within production and the labour market. Taking the historical
attributes first, these manifested around the creation of internal labour
markets and the increasingly relatively autonomous spheres of control in
production, which the emerging socialised labourer forced capitalists to
concede. The fact that in later decades, after the consolidation of
Labourism, these became transformed as mechanisms of control over
labour is beside the point. Initially they were capitalist concessions whichcost capitalists dearly; raising labour costs, hindering technical change and
deflating profit rates. The nuts and bolts of the matter are that the dominant
capitalist enterprises internalise the employment relation: wages, work
conditions and division of labour are fixed by internal administration,
influenced by works councils and less by market forces.
Much has been written about the historical attributes, however little if
anything has been written in the way of an explanation of the most crucial
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aspect of the emergent socialised labourer - its genetic attributes as a
category of capitalist decay. This is a little surprising because the process
is simple enough to understand. One reason why it has been ignored has
much to do with methodology. When Marxism refrains from treating the
law of value as if it were some timeless Kantian concept, the genetic
attributes of socialised labour become central parts of our understanding
of capitalism.
In an earlier section of the article it was explained that at the heart of the
commodity form of production which defines capitalism, there is a
dialectical contradiction - the contradiction between use value and
exchange value. The dialectical contradiction revolves around the fact that
they are opposing substances united in the one body. To add to this we also
know that, for Marx, the most important commodity form was labour
power. With this in mind, let us consider the commodity form more closely.
The commodity form is a unity of opposites: on one side of the contradiction
there is concrete private labour, on the other side there is abstract social
labour. As Marx was at pains to stress in Capital, for concrete privatelabour to be socially useful labour requires it take the form of abstract social
labour. That is, labour must be valorised and exchanged with money
capital in order that its social usefulness can be validated. The emergence
of the socialised labourer effectively short circuits this contradiction and in
so doing offers the potential ground through which the opposing forces of
the commodity form of production can be abolished and communist social
relations established. In what sense does the emergent socialised labourer
short circuit the commodity form of production? Reverting back to the
contradiction, the following process of negation occurs. From the
concrete private labour side of the contradiction the socialised labourer
develops the powers and complexities of concrete labour. From the
abstract social labour side of the contradiction, the emergent socialisedlabour develops the inherently social attributes of labour. Combined, the
social labourer extends and develops its productive activity on the basis of
directly concrete social labour. In so doing the emergent socialised
labourer's conscious inclination is to exert political pressure which ensures
the use value need fulfilling aspect of production as a natural right over and
above valorisation, which is increasingly perceived as a subordinate
consideration. The vast empirical evidence of strikes, general labour
unrest, intensifying community struggles and the growing appeal of socialist
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agitation, which occurred on an ever deepening trend from 1870s to
approximately 1926, provide ample proof of the above.
In the Gnindrisse Marx was quite specific about how and why the sociallabourer substantiates itself in production on the basis of concrete social
labour; and how and why the value form becomes increasingly
subordinated. Marx argued that under capitalism labour time is the
ultimate source of wealth in the form of value. However capitalism faces
an unescapable contradiction which eventually brings about its decay. For,
as capitalism develops, so too does the social productive power of labour.
So much so that the product of labour bears less and less relation to labour
time and so value creation. In other words commodities produced are
substantiated more and more as use values and less and less as aliquots of
value (Gnindrissep704-706). As labour power is a commodity, then this ishappening to living labour activity itself; the two-fold contradiction within
labour (Marx's most important discovery) is dissolving.
Marx is quite clear as to the cause of this tendency toward the negation of
the commodity form of production - it is the emergence of the socialisedlabourer and its productive potential which outgrows its value form. As
Marx argues with respect to the role of the emergent socialised labourer,
in the above mentioned transformation -
It is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor
the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of
his own general productive power, his understanding of nature
and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body
- it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which
appears as the great foundation stone of production and of
wealth. The theft of alien labour time, on which the present
wealth is based, appears as a miserable foundation in face of this
new one As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to bethe great wellspring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease
to be its measure, and hence exchange value (must cease to be
the measure) of use value With that, production based on
exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production
process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis ' (ibidp705-706, my emphasis in bold).
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Again the heart of the irreconcilable contradictions of capital when faced
by the emerging socialised labour is never made more clearer by Marx than
in the following statement -
On the one side, then, it (capital) calls to life all the powers of
science and of nature, as of social combination and of social
intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent(relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side,
it wants to use labour time as a measuring rod for the giant social
forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits
required to maintain the already created value as value. Forces
of production and social relations - two different sides of the
development of the social individual - appear to capital as mere
means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited
foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions
to blow this foundation sky-h