Re: [OPE] Britain--parasitic and decaying capitalism: A comment

On 2010-01-15 23:23, Paul Bullock wrote:
>
>> [Paul C]
>> Also the ultimate beneficiaries of the purchase of say Mexican bonds
>> by a bank based in London will themselves be an international spread
>> of depositors with the bank - an international rentier class a large
>> proportion of whom are not resident in the UK, indeed, given that the
>> UK has for decades had a negative balance of payments on current
>> account, the preponderance of the ultimate beneficiaries for new net
>> loans by UK banks will be overseas.
>
> I suppose you realise that all this leads to the reactionary political
> conclusion that we face an abstract international ruling class (
> located no doubt on the other side of the world), which I suspect
> leads to the idea that we don't have to fight our own ruling class
> (?), since 'we' don't have an identifiable one
I think your conclusion is mistaken here. The point was that the rentier
class is no longer partitioned into distinct national boundaries.
Rentiers extracting surplus value from workers in, say, Germany can be
based in Frankfurt, New York, Dubai and Mumbai. This is possible because
the laws of capitalism can now operate on a global scale. In principle
it is no different from the fact that rentiers extracting surplus value
from workers in Scotland were once based more or less exclusively in London.

Therefore the notion of fighting our 'own' rentier class cannot lead to
any practical political program. What must be fought is an international
system of finance and this can no longer be done on a purely national
basis. Political unification will become necessary to advance over
globally integrated capitalism.

//Dave Z
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Received on Fri Jan 15 18:53:55 2010