All That Is Solid ...: Finance Capital and the Conservative Party

 What is the
Conservative Party? 

Why, for the majority of the left it is the
traditional party of Britain's ruling class. And while it has proven to
be its preferred vehicle, having dominated the 20th century and holding
the title of the most successful party in electoral politics anywhere, it is not and has never been the party of all
the ruling class. When Marx wrote about the state as the general
committee for the common affairs of the bourgeoisie, it did not
necessarily follow that the Tories as a collective political entity were
similarly stamped by these "common affairs". 



As the Conservative Party
suffered its first week from hell
under Boris Johnson's dubious leadership, we are reminded of the
sectional character of the Tories by last week's series of not-hostile
articles in the Financial Times on Corbynomics. This involved the not insignificant news of Citibank and Deutsche Bank coming out in favour of a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour government over a no deal Brexit under Johnson's stewardship. Welcome, comrades!



Something
strange has happened in British politics to bring about this -
previously unthinkable - eventuality. Weird, yes. Unsettling? Certainly,
particularly to those looking on in horror on the right. But not entirely unexpected if you grasp the long-term development of the Tories, the recomposition of Labour in response to the rising class politics of the 21st century, and
the simple realisation that capital, as a collective, is foremost
concerned with preserving the class relations and power dynamics
underpinning private ownership - relations that are more nakedly obvious
now than at any time since the 1930s.



Following John Ross's excellent small book, Thatcher and Friends,
the emergence of the modern Conservative Party following the 1832
Reform Act and the splits and controversies of the Corn Laws in the
1840s has seen it be the fractional vehicle of certain sections
of British capital. These are finance itself - chiefly the City, banks,
owners of large property portfolios, overseas speculators and the like;
landed capital, including the old aristocracy, large farmers and food
producers, and mercantile capital, the myriad of middlemen firms who
fixed up trade routes and brokered deals while creaming off a share of
the commerce they affected. You'll note the absence of extractive
industry and manufacturing capital. True, there have always been Tory
manufacturers and capitalists in the Fat Controller mode who identified
with and give money and support to the Tories, people like JCB's Bamford
family, but as a whole their support for the Tories was more
conditional and episodic. In the post-war period, for example, while the
Tories quickly adapted to the Keynesian settlement and were
promulgators of a capitalism that appeared more gentlemanly and
patrician, at least from our vantage point, manufacturing capital was
more oriented toward Labour. In the early 1980s the SDP-Liberal Alliance
was also able to win over industrialists.



This, again, shouldn't shock when you examine the dynamics within the ruling class. As Alexander Gallas points out in his The Thatcherite Offensive,
as the ruling nexus of Keynesian capitalism entered into crisis during
the 1970s, under Thatcher the Tories pivoted away from it. What enabled
this was the movement into the parliamentary party of so-called
self-made business men (they were all men), party hacks, and
professionals (above all, lawyers). The old guard of one nationists who
looked back aghast at the 1930s, not least because the laissez faire
response to the depression ably assisted the emergence of mass fascist
and communist movements across Europe, were retiring and getting
replaced. The newcomers were the cadres of politicians who had little or
no memory of the war, and did not appreciate how the institutional
consensus built by successive Labour and Tory governments allowed labour
to have a seat at the table and buy a measure of class peace. Until the
1970s, anyway. Not only did this layer hold the post-war compromise in
contempt, unlike their predecessors they were not tied to it in the same
way. 



For instance, if your capital was tied up in producing for the
supply chains supporting the nationalised industries, it was more
immediately obvious how government spending and the commitment to full
employment impacted your business than if you worked in or ran a law
firm, or worked in brokerage in the City. Because these ties were
weaker, because the Tories were traditionally the party of the
finance-land/food-mercantile power bloc of bourgeois interests, and the
Thatcherites doubly so, they were relatively structurally insulated from
taking on the rising power of organised labour. And when they did and
unleashed their thugs against the miners the blowback had few political
ramifications. Indeed, they went on to win the following two general
elections. Pace Tony Crosland, his view a party causing or
presiding over mass unemployment would pay a prohibitive political price
turned out not to be the case.



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