A historically unparalleled contradiction will ‘hit the fan’ for the English ruling political caste
- being now threatened for the first time with the loss of its own centuries-old capitalist ‘constituency’ of City workers and bankers, European and global manufacturing and service corporations who fear trade tariffs and rely on skilled migrant workers, its use of unskilled immigrant labour to exploit in agriculture (though at least not with the ‘bonus’ of sex-slavery as in Sicily), its loss of the migrant workers on which the whole housing industry, the NHS etc. depend (although naturally there is no need for the ruling caste to concern themselves with social housing or health). Prognosis - the possibility of ever greater civil discontent as, behind all the distracting Brexit blather, a barrage of ever more vicious austerity cuts, made worse by rising inflation, travel and housing costs goes unnoticed - and bite harder, but with no funding to pick up the pieces for the homeless, unemployed, the working poor and all those literally disabled or made dependent on food banks by this continuing barrage of cuts. Then there is the threat of falling inward investment, and the potential voluntary exit from the UK, not just of corporations but of a key economic demographic of young people, and of skilled workers and employees.
Any answers for the ruling caste?
Not many - except throwing Britain’s doors wide open and making it a most welcoming island tax haven for the ruling global caste, a most welcoming property playground for billionaire Saudi head-choppers, Bahraini and Qatari investors, a most welcoming ecological playground for eager American ‘healthcare’, fracking and GM agro- and food corporations - all whilst cutting corporation tax to an all-time low! Oh yes, and hopefully salvaging our thriving arms export business and selling to all and sundry - no questions asked. In a word, the answer for the ruling caste reads: to export our sovereignty to a motley band of pirateering, privatising and asset-stripping corporations - and their nations. At least that way the ruling caste will remain in clover, but now transformed into a mere money-grubbing plutocracy. Alternatively, keep the one link with Europe that could serve the ruling caste with a diversionary agenda. You’ve guessed it - war - but now against rather than with Russia. Meanwhile proceed with ever-intensified neo-liberal austerity and the immiseration of the British people to a Dickensian level of poverty, the reduction of the U.K. - and the destruction of all sense of community except through Empire-nostalgic identitarian jingoism and racism - which defines the rich history and identity of the white people of the U.K. purely in terms of other peoples and their identities, in this way dialectically negating rather than affirming ‘white identity’ itself.
From Capitalist Contradictions to Capitalist Irrationalism
Recently we have also seen the rise, not just of aggressive capitalist nationalism but also of a new phenomenon: overt capitalist irrationalism . The inherent contradictions of capitalism - and their consequences having long reached a point at which they cannot anymore be rationalised away, the previously disguised irrationalism of capitalist politics now finds expression in the irrationally and internally contradictory fantasies that dominate the new and aggressive form of national capitalism displayed by both British and American political leaders - which amounts to nothing more than government by and for billionaires. On the other hand, the now outright irrationalism of U.S. and British governments offers social nationalists the opportunity to shift the focus of their discourse from questions of Brexit, immigration and Islam to the real issue: the degeneracy of the English ruling caste and its overgrown and world-straddling foster-child - U.S.-Zionist hegemony and warmongering. As philosopher, I furthermore suggest that the claim of capitalism and its so-called democracies to have inherited from the Enlightenment a universal principle of reason and rationality was a false one right from the start - unless of course, one first reduces ‘reason’ itself to a mere capacity for utilitarian technical, monetary and political calculation - often of the most cynical sort and for purely utilitarian and capitalist purposes. This degeneration did not go unnoticed by the English poets, by the watertight anti-materialist logic of the Irish philosopher George Berkeley - or by many politically-minded writers, thinkers and philosophers in Germany prior to WW1 and following WW2. One need only think of the immense and ground-breaking challenge to capitalist ‘rationality’ from the dialectical reasoning of both Hegel and Marx - and the poetic or “meditative thinking” of perhaps the greatest thinker since Aristotle and Plato - the now much-maligned Martin Heidegger.
A Historic Question
Will the post-Brexit contradictions faced by the English ruling caste now become so acute that we can effectively say that - in that very same land which led the world in pioneering capitalist development, colonialism and imperialism - (which is why Marx came here to study it!) capitalism may now be looking into the face of imminent and irredeemable collapse. If the answer to this historic question is yes, then socialists in England and the British isles have perhaps the biggest and most difficult historic challenge to face in the entire history of capitalism, for England is already beginning to show all signs of a ‘failed state’.
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