Tony Blair finished PMQs this Wednesday with: "That's it, the end." As soon as he said that people were talking of "Brownism."
"Blairism", "Thatcherism", etc are labels which hide an essential truth: Prime Ministers do not change the basic nature of the capitalist system, nor could they if they wished to, which quite frankly they don't.
"-ism" is being tossed about very freely. Once upon a time you could talk of liberalism, conservatism, fascism, nazism, socialism, communism, marxism and capitalism. Now there are a zillion other "isms". Somebody takes political office, make a new "ism"!
I am not suggesting something so daft as Gordon Brown being the same as Tony Blair. He'll have things he wants to be passed through the usual parliamentary procedures which are different to Blair, some of it probably welcome to the working class. Brown won't differ from Blair or any other PM, though, because his job description is to run British Capitalism PLC. Inevitably, the fundamental contradiction in society, class war, will emerge. The capitalists fleece the workers for profit, rent and interest. Us? We sell our abilities for a wage or salary or else need to beg for welfare.
They own, we don't. Brown will be on the owners' side.
The end Blair spoke of was his leadership of the Labour Party and his time at Downing Street. It isn't the end of an era. Capitalism (that's its name, not Brownism or whatever) is still here.
Gray
3 comments:
I thought you believed that all parties and political groups, with the exception of yourselves, were on the "owner's side".
That's not strictly true.
Certainly, there are groups/parties that stand for a classless society of common ownership. These groups aren't particularly big (either!); we oppose them because they more often than not reject the need for a class conscious, i.e. socialist, working class majority capturing the machinery of the state using means at hand like the ballot box. This is particularly true of anarchists.
Leninist groups/parties stand for the abolition of private property, the conversion of the means of production into state ownership, so they can be said to be against the owners. Only what they stand for is the continuance of capitalism - a state capitalism, nominally under working class control.
In Soviet times, the CPGB supported the new Russian ruling class that developed there; whilst not owners in the conventional sense of share holders which we know from western capitalism, the Nomenklatura, etc was a capitalist class.
Clause 7 of the Socialist Party's Declaration of Principles which every member must support in order to be obeying party rules states, "7.That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the the master class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party."http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/gbodop.html I would of thought that stated that the SP is opposed to all other parties because all other parties are on the owning class`s ( or potentially owning class's) side.
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