The Organisation of Capitalist Politics

Capitalist politicians are subjected, like all other jobs, to the market. As such, along with capital, they are put into subjection to the people in general, of any tendency. As in the market, they count each voter the same, and the more people pay the price, the more they get paid. Hence, capitalist society in general is organised democratically, across its length - demands pertaining to democracy by itself will not go beyond reformist hopes. However, this also opens up other strictures or dynamics in the political scene.

Firstly, this leads to a necessary populistic trend in politicians of any country. In a sense, the more open the market in a country, the stronger this populistic tendency. However, this trend is highly eclectic and distracts from each nation's particular role in the world economy - hence, it forms a somewhat necessary exhaust in the form of states like Cuba or Bolivia. The US do take some umbrage at these nations, but because their own politicians are in a sense just as subject to populistic trends, that these trends are given some form of expression among the 'league of nations' is found necessary.

Secondly, there is conflict in the political sphere not only between political tendencies - which, so far as they exist in favour of capital, serve the same masters and hence have only trivial distinctions - but also between the political itself and the position of politics as a job where the politician must be subject to every popular whim. Authors and other such ideological functions of capital will generally tend in favour of the latter - they will attempt to steer politics into the form they are familiar with. However, when political movements occur, politicians are forced to adjust to this new political landscape, and hence to prioritise the political on some perhaps limited level. This will usually be met with resistance, as is noticeable in the case of the Labour Party under Corbyn. Nonetheless, this struggle against market intrusions in politics is in a sense the most important duty for politicians under capital, who are otherwise subject to the same forces and ultimately to the economy.

In general, the political realm tends towards the stricter ideas or the hints of them in politics. American politics is often quite hollow in this - many seemingly 'strict' ideas are merely quibbles over words. In British politics, while Corbyn's supporters have raised several highly strict views, they are expected to not only be pleased with but welcome people who have opposed them for months to years to the helm of the Party, and then aid them in propagandising against themselves. This is a highly absurd situation that could not be reached without many concessions. It nonetheless has many of the characteristics of a farce, primarily on the part of the 'Labour Right,' whose essential purpose is to attack even any mention of socialism. As such, it is not a surprise that, in dealing with them, their opponents are attacked as 'unspeakably extreme,' anti-Semitic (a buzz-word used to avoid discussing politics), and so on - as opposed to the 'Labour Party,' which you could hardly recognise as the Party which has contained highly leftist gestures in its campaigning for quite some time. If socialism itself is treated as a 'bad word,' and a movement organised against this, then over time it becomes a slur, like anti-feminism or anti-Semitism, that can usually be dismissed as exploitation of a word for effect. Ultimately, Jeremy Corbyn's supporters as their aims stand only have impetus reasonably to either stay in the Party and campaign for their views, or to be shouted down and leave rather than campaigning against themselves. Otherwise, the Party increasingly refuses to take a political stand on the state - but this is not a problem to the opponents of Corbyn's movement, who often have no concern for politics and merely view it as a target for incursions of the market.

It is to be noted that politicians are aware of the general concept of vested interests. This is the means by which people whose fundamental concern is the market can get an 'in' in politics, by pretending to lack vested interests such that their comments inhabit some sort of fairy 'political' realm. Hence, for instance, they will pretend that their call for a pro-business agenda isn't a result of their present affiliation with these and present identification of their interests with business - it hence becomes a pseudo-political thing. This is, however, merely a question of demographic manipulation rather than political views as such - in order to off-set their appearance of vested interests, they will claim allegiance to charity or some other impoverished sector of society - albeit only nominal - in order to thus appear 'political,' and hence will be plunged into posturing. In general, if they are forced into personal conflict, they will come off looking bad, as it disarms them, but they might be defended or have their image white-washed due to vested interests in the reporting as well - which inevitably gets in where business was in charge of these things. Hence, in politics, there were many who so to speak took a 'back-door,' who were only 'political' or considered politically for politically illegitimate reasons. While their fundamental agenda was to preserve market incursions on politics and hence the laws of the market, as well as politics' inferiority to the market, this mostly personal agenda was given a seemingly political form by drawing on a different demographic, of whatever kind. Politics was merely a name given to the obscuring of a person, and was hence subordinated to the market. This is important to grasp in referring to how precisely this actual hierarchy functioned, or how political actors could assimilate this superiority of the market into political terms.

In general, capital was organised in such a way that the political was integrated into the economic, and could not escape. In this context, who was to quibble over whether politicians were 'corrupt'? If it's a job, under capital, it's corrupt. In any case, however, resistance to this in the political sphere or the realm of government over society was always present, in the circumstances. The general circumstance was that due to the general reduction of people to voters or to money by abstract labour, conflicting views necessarily appeared or were opposed to each other, and yet had to be treated as somehow uniform at the expense of abstracting from their inherent nature. This force of artificial uniformity of various forms may be called capital, and obviously had a certain bias against ideas which were more concrete in nature, found certain things more evil than others. In any case, the general struggle in the political sphere was one which could not under capitalism be kept within one state, where in general too many demands and atomised political careers existed in one state for it to form any form of political coherence or coherent existence in a nation, and this kept these politicians in place, such that they had to be exported partially to other nations in order to keep some limited sense of national differentiation. Outside that, political forces which could not be fit elsewhere would necessarily take state form, a weakness of this multifarious political form. In general, politics in this situation was for most participants about the atomised economic actor, and traits of theirs which could be abstracted, and hence was ultimately an identity politics centred around the traits which, as an atomised and economic, or physical, entity, they have. For the most part, politics structured around the abstract actor in whichever guise ultimately had to attack any opposed forces as incoherent if it was to be maintained at all, because it could not deal with them concretely without drawing on random, brief phrases which ultimately amounted to the same thing.