Nothing to get excited about (2024)

From the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reporting the result of last month’s general election, Reuters said ‘Keir Starmer returned the Labour Party to power’. ‘Power’ is not the right word as it suggests that being the government gives its members more control than they actually have and in fact generally believe they have. It suggests that they have the power to control the economy and make it work as they want. However, the capitalist economic system operates according to economic laws which are beyond the control of governments, however resolute or well-intentioned those who compose them may be.

Of course, governments are not completely powerless. There are some things they can do. They control the armed forces and other means of coercion. On the economic field they can control the issue of the currency, levy taxes, grant subsidies and impose tariffs. But they do not control and cannot control the way the economy works. They can pass laws and draw up plans about economic matters, but this does not mean that these laws and plans can be implemented as envisaged nor, if they are, that they will have the intended effect. Capitalism is an economic system that operates according to its own economic laws which governments ignore at their peril.

These economic laws can be summed up as:

• the capitalist economy is an integrated world economy; there is no ‘British economy’ or ‘German economy’ or even ‘American economy’. What exists is a world capitalist economy which dominates all countries.
• since government activity does not produce any wealth, all the resources consumed by governments, whether for ‘defence’ or social reforms, have to come from the surplus over costs created in the productive sector of the economy, whether private or state.
• the private sector is motivated by the search for profits since these are the source of funds which private enterprises need to continue productive activity; in fact, making a profit is the only reason why this sector produces anything.

Given this, it is more accurate to say that when a party wins an election and gets to form the government what happens is that they come into office. Members of their party replace as ministers members of the outgoing party. It’s a replacement of decision-making personnel, but personnel without the power to make the economy work otherwise than it does.

It would be a rhetorical flourish to describe them as office clerks since they do have more decision-making power than that. A better term would be that are the middle management of the world capitalist economic system. Like middle managers they are given a remit from above with some leeway as to how to implement it. In the case of governments, the remit is to apply the economic laws of capitalism that dictate that priority must be given to profits and conditions for profit-making. Although the economic laws of capitalism are impersonal they are not self-enforcing but require personnel to enforce them, and this is what governments are alongside the executives of business enterprises.

All that happened on 4-5th July was a change of middle management. Nothing to get excited about.

Editorial: Michael Portillo tells the truth (2010)

Editorial from the June 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The time between the close of polls on general election day and before the return to ‘business as usual’ is an interesting one politically. It’s a brief space of freedom from bullshit, and the mainstream media reports it fairly well. Politicians are briefly free from the need to hoodwink voters (the votes are in and being counted) or to dress up business exploitation and war in the language of individual liberty and choice (that’s on tomorrow’s agenda). If you listen carefully during this brief period of freedom, you’ll hear our political masters tell it as it is. We hope all those people who voted for the main political parties were paying close attention.

Take the former Tory MP and cabinet minister Michael Portillo, for example, interviewed by BBC News on 8 May after the general election. An important part of the ‘socialist case’ is to propagate the ‘capitalist case’, stripped of the fine words and verbiage, among ordinary working people, so they can be informed about exactly what it is they are voting for and unconsciously working to support. They will then be in a better position to make informed, democratic choices. Our candidate in the general election was not interviewed by the BBC, but Portillo was kind enough to put the Socialist Party’s case (or at least aspects of it) for us.

Portillo said that, whatever else was going on behind closed doors in the negotiations about who was to form the next government, there was one key issue that that government would have to face – namely, the economy and the deficit. And on this point, said Portillo, it didn’t really matter which party formed the government: Britain’s policy would inevitably be dictated by ‘events’ in the market, and by the actions of international ‘investors’ (the capitalist class). In other words, what was more important than the result of the democratic process was the needs of a small minority of humanity to find profitable investment opportunities, and the democratic process was inevitably subordinated to that fact.

The BBC interviewer, who had perhaps been daft enough to fall for all the pre-election spin and bullshit, expressed surprise at this comment, and reiterated the propaganda point that the parties did differ on this issue, disagreeing about the timing of the Thatcher-style cuts in public services that all parties had promised. Portillo haughtily dismissed this, and said the timing would be dictated to the government by those all-powerful ‘investors’.

On this issue, Portillo was putting the Socialist Party case. We agree with him that democracy under capitalism is all about choosing between different management teams, all of which are committed to serving the interests of ‘investors’, however much they may differ in style and on other comparatively minor points of policy. That means that, whoever you vote for, the government faithfully promises to put first the interests of the rich minority who profit from investment, not the majority who work under their control for a relatively meagre wage. That’s the ‘capitalist case’, and you should bear it in mind next time you head to the polls.