The Boss Needs You, You Don't Need Him!

Nick Clegg has Only Himself to Blame.

Some of you may have tuned in to the LBC debate between Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage on the European union. This spectacle was hosted by reactionary lard-arse Nick Ferrari. It was everything one would expect. Nothing outside of the oscillation between mainstream liberalism and nationalism came up and this debate can largely be understood as a sign of the rightward trend of British politics over the last four decades. Liberal internationalism and conservative nationalism feed into one another, their relationship is dialectical, both oppositional and complimentary, and ultimately, they spiral into the same downward trajectory. It's no coincidence that the Liberal Democrats signed up for the Coalition with a party torn over Europe and he now finds himself poised against UKIP. For the Conservatives, Nick Clegg is the canary in the mineshaft and little more.

It must have been a disparaging experience for Liberal Nick. No longer a sponge sucking up all those disenchanted votes Nick Clegg stood as the establishment figure with his old place usurped by Nigel Farage of all people. Of course, the underdog status of UKIP is a falsehood. Nigel Farage railed against the bankrupt establishment, which Clegg now embodies so thoroughly, all the while UKIP stands in necessary relation to the status quo. He was probably expecting reason to triumph over reaction. He littered his phraseology with references to 'dogma' and appealed to common-sense. Bad moves by definition in this kind of debate. I don't know how he could have expected it to have gone his way. Without any grounding to maneouvre on economic and domestic policy (where he is wedded to Conservative policy-makers) the only issue of contention was going to immigration. That is hardly a threat to the Conservative Party. And of course UKIP has no interest in combating neoliberalism.

Outside of conventional politics the demagogue sets himself and poses as raising the real questions, the dangerous questions, to which the Establishment then reacts to preserve itself. As with Romania we find that the UKIP lot are playing this game again. The real issue that the people in countries like Romania and Bulgaria are fleeing from social conditions produced by neoliberal globalisation cannot be raised. Should we repair the damage? Now that's a dangerous question! It would only mean that the level of immigration would be based on the free movement of people, rather than on economic desperation. The Lib Dems can't make such a point because they've accepted the neoliberal model prescribed by Brussels, Whitehall, and Washington; while the only criticism UKIP may wage is that this hasn't gone far enough in tearing through all forms of state-ownership. This is why a key issue was never mentioned, namely the EU-US free trade deal currently being implemented by stealth.

The Liberal Democrats emerged from the consolidation of gains for a third party after the founding of the Social Democratic Party from the right-wing MPs who abandoned Labour. The loss of 10% of their MPs helped to secure Labour's defeat and a victory for Thatcher in 1983. So you can see how far the Party has come since helping to divide up the voters for Thatcherism thirty years ago. They have now graduated to joining those forces they helped deliver Britain to in the 1980s. This is the stinking filth of the body of liberalism: inaction, hot-air, and endless compromise. It's clear the trilateral consensus are not only complacent in the face of the nationalist reaction to the rapid internationalising trend of capitalism. We see this quite well demonstrated in Ukraine where a coalition of neoliberals, conservatives, ultra-nationalists, and oligarchs, have seized power only to wrench the country into the orbit of the European Union and open it up to the IMF prescription for an economic miracle.

Meanwhile here in Britain we find UKIP is looking to force the Conservatives further and further to the right as it condemns the EU. Clegg doesn't deserve our pity for his pathetic belief that if he just said the right words the audience would dutifully nod their heads for him. He was asking for the kicking he got.

Self-Service is Disservice.

The predominance of so-called 'self-service' machines in supermarkets should worry those concerned by the depredations of the market. The 'self-service' machines turn us into unpaid employees for a Tesco, or a Morrison's, or a Sainsbury's, and even a wholesome Waitrose. The fact of the matter is that it is a service to Tesco, not ourselves, for the most part, to man the till in the place of a paid worker. It is another way in which the rinsing of people, as workers and consumers, to amass huge profits - and it means worse and worse working conditions and job prospects for vast numbers of people. With all that said, it is unavoidable given the pace at which we have to live, that we are going to avoid queuing for longer (unless we have a tobacco habit), and we can't find an exit point in waiting longer. Notice that the fetish of 'free-choice' actually offers little in the way of quality, and even less in the way of consultation.

Before we go any further I ought to do some throat-clearing: the kind of jobs available to people in supermarkets should be romanticised, they are not examples of fulfilling work by and large. Nevertheless, it has to be said that once such an area of job opportunities is closed off it will leave behind a section of people who had little other immediate option to working in a supermarket. The innovation of 'self-service' machines really allow businesses to discard labour in the endless attempt to pull in enough labour to squeeze dry, but not too much as it encumber the maximalisation of profits. Important aside: profits are by definition what is leftover after the cost of labour is taken into account, before that point its just revenue. The contradiction faced by businesses is in the need to scrap labour to save money, while at the same time drag in even more of it to keep up productivity. The workers are a burden, but at the same time they are invaluable to the economy, they are a cost to be cut, and the source of mountainous revenue.

It is not the case that the prices of food have fallen since this innovation of the marketplace. Yet the liberal accounts of technological progress would have us believe that the betterment of life overall will come out of the liberating capacities of technology. Its a convenient viewpoint, for a liberal or even a Fabian, there is no need for radical change as the evolution of technology will gradually perfect us and perfect our society. If the 'self-service' machines are to be installed then the goods should be cheaper, and if not, then the employees of the supermarket should have a higher wage. Neither is the case. Not only do they take our money for over-priced products they make extra money by not hiring the staff to man the tills. It's yet another instance of the rationality of the market really amounting to irrationality. The business can depend on human beings to act against their own interests, to work for free, to buy over-priced garbage, and ultimately to contribute to the further enrichment of those layabouts convinced of their own brilliance - the crust of wealth hoarders.

Only under particular conditions would self-service actually be conducive to social betterment. The companies could probably be cooperatised, we could each be hired and have a slice of the profits if we are to be engaged in any meaningful kind of self-service. The right to work has to be enforced if there is to be full employment and equitable standards of living enabling each person to lead fulfilling lives instead of living to fulfill the lives of a tiny few. Under conditions of universality and mutuality these machines would be of better social use. It might actually free people from a mind dulling role standing by counters, leaving them to more authentic pursuits, and not just tossing them on the wayside to rot. Otherwise the machine is a bloody con, for consumers, and for workers. In the meantime one can hope that the managers will be replaced by machine innovation sooner rather than later. Now that would be progress of a kind.

The Bourgeois Politics of Frugality.

The bourgeois politics of frugality are alive and well with us in the most form of austerity. You know the line: we've all got to tighten our belts in order to pay-off the deficit left over by New Labour. Conveniently it's only the masses that have to tighten their belts. All the while David Cameron promises a new road of progress that we will find once the deficit has been chopped down. But there is no sign of financial discipline for the banks. Yet the Right does not hold a monopoly over the politics of frugality. Take the fears of over-population on the Green Left which has its origins in Malthusian thought. Malthus railed against the Enlightenment view of history as progressive in its insistence that humanity could not indefinitely improve its conditions. There are limits to human development given the state of the environment, we shouldn't downplay these limits but it is the Malthusians who overplay them. It is capitalism that takes production as infinite whereas socialism is not about the expansion of productive forces.

Rather it is established after the build-up of material abundance. This abundance is not an endless flow of goods for us to consume, but it is a sufficiency produced with the minimum of unpleasant exertion. The Malthusian message is essentially that any attempt to improve the living standards of the mass of the population is doomed to failure by the natural limits of the environment. The view that the growth of population comes at a rate faster than the production of food goes on to hold that the productivity of labour in agriculture would inevitably fall over time. Malthus was looking to defend the interests of the landed aristocracy in England. To this end he argued that it is inevitable that society will outstrip its resources, so the living standards of most people are unsustainable. The wage level has to be kept at subsistence in order to deter the poor from having more children. It was David Ricardo who followed this claim further to the position that the subsistence wages necessary to keep workers alive would rise so profits would fall until society reached a stationary rate.

At this the mode of production would cease to grow any further. The logic being that the imbalance between population and food production would be brought down to an equilibrium (as the surplus mouths are eliminated in the system). If this equilibrium were to be disturbed it could wobble out of balance and then there could be a famine. For Malthus the attempts to build a society based on liberty, equality and fraternity are doomed to degenerate into a society constructed upon a plan no different from that which prevails in every known state today. Only a class society of proprietors and labourers was imaginable to Malthus. It was the case that Malthus saw capitalism as natural, it then followed that any attempt to abolish the system was utterly crazy. It is consistent with the structural need in capitalism to raise the productivity of labour higher and higher while it holds down wages across the workforce. We shouldn't be surprised then that Malthusianism was routinely invoked to justify low wages in the 19th Century.

It's clear whose side Malthus was on, as he made the case to crush the living standards of the poor it was only the wealthy who would benefit from this. The push to limit the birth-rate of the poor would only eventually have to be reversed once the system requires an influx of fresh labour. It was completely outside the outer-limits of Malthusian thinking to see that the relative overpopulation was a "problem" of economic relations. The composition of capital means that a smaller number of workers can produce a given amount of commodities. The capitalist may well react by sacking the surplus workers, this may indeed have been his aim in introducing the new technique in the first place. The result is that the accumulation of capital involves the constant expulsion of workers from production. There are not more people than there is food to keep them alive. Instead it is that there are more people than capitalism needs. The superfluous population is deprived the wages on which workers depend to survive.

It is important to keep in mind that the capitalist economy generates an industrial reserve army of unemployed workers in this way, as part of its management of the accumulation process. The unemployed and newly arrived workers provide a pool of workers desperate enough to be vacuumed up into new branches of production at the lowest of wages. This helps to keep the employed on their feet and force them to accept a wage that can be held down easily. The expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army regulates the wages of the employed. The existence of an industrial reserve army strengthens the position of the capitalist and makes it easier for him to increase the rate of surplus value. If the total amount of capital remains the same, then the rate of profit will rise. So a greater intensity of exploitation is one counteracting influence on the falling rate of profit. From all of this it should be clear that the suggestion of "overpopulation" is something to beware for anyone concerned with a future for all on this decaying planet.