Farage and the corruption exposé: more pointless than doing Al Capone on tax evasion

Nigel Farage and Al Capone bonding over a kipper - AI generated (obviously)

It seems that Channel 4 News has stitched up Nigel Farage and Reform UK’s administrative arm like a kipper. By all accounts this was a classic sting operation accompanied by grainy video and tinny sound in order to imbue its exposé with journalistic credibility. The sting ignores that Faragism represents a fiercely anti-working class, sexist, homophobic and racist ideology. Instead, it relies on the technicalities within bourgeois law to temper the extreme right-wing of capital. Ultimately it is like doing Al Capone on tax evasion, only more pointless.

The mainstream metanarrative emerging around this scandal encourages us to view it as a victory for the fourth estate against corrupt elements within the state. It is a balancing act, it is argued; the system correcting itself and returning political discourse to its previous rosy-cheeked verve and vigour. The populist fever is subsiding, and parliamentary capitalism will emerge out of this crisis somewhat renewed and reinvigorated. It is a comforting fairy tale.

The counternarrative must make a few banalities abundantly clear:

First, corruption is not an anomaly of capitalism; it is not even a temporary aberration; and it is certainly not an outlier. Corruption is an integral and essential mechanism of accumulation. Corruption was there at the birth pangs of capitalism to initiate the ‘enclosure movement’ and it has lent a helping hand ever since in times of war and peace in order to maintain the profit margin.

Second, it is worth remembering that old political economists used to talk about corruption in terms of different shades of the economy. There is the ‘white’ part of the economy where everything is aboveboard and legal. In fact, if you did not enter negotiations without an expensive team of lawyers, your rivals would rejoice. The ‘black’ economy is the exact opposite, representing illegality, danger and at times immorality (think of illegal boos, gun running and human trafficking). The ‘grey’ economy is the most precarious of all, one day being tolerated as legal, the next relegated to being semi-legal, and without warning being designated illegal.

Third, the intelligent section of the ruling class understood these shades and knew how to use one to boost the other two (a classic example is the way the US-Italian ruling class utilised the mafia towards the end of WWII to reestablish commodity production and distribution through integrating the black market into the grey and white markets). The visionary elements within the ruling class also understood that the continued health of capitalism is dependent on the constant recalibration of the ratio of white to grey and grey to black. Farage, through his cavalier disregard of the white economy, was reminding the rest of the British ruling class that cryptocurrency shenanigans and party donations from questionable foreign billionaires can enhance wealth and power accumulation.

Finally, there is another political tendency that has increased corruption in recent decades. As the executive branch of the state becomes more powerful everywhere, vis-à-vis not only the citizenry but also the judiciary and legislative, the state becomes more secretive and corrupt. There is a historical inevitability about it under capitalism. Trump whoring himself at $100,000 a pop by selling to Wall Street firms and hedge funds vital information a fraction of a second earlier through his posts on Truth Social is the natural culmination of bourgeois corruption. It says the rich will become richer and the poor are screwed.

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We do not know what the future holds for Farage’s political ambitions. It is said that Al Capone tried and partially succeeded in running his empire from the joint. What defeated him was not Elliot Ness and his Untouchables but the state abolishing prohibition and whitewashing the black business of liquor production. Farage will try to manage his empire of hatred from either his seat in the House of Commons or from a suitably fortified position commensurate with his ‘anti-establishment’ pose. It makes little difference to us. Our task in this regard is to show the common threads running through the white-grey-and-black parts of capitalism.

These common threads are trans-cultural and trans-geographical. Corruption and the ability to utilise it for the benefit of the entire ruling class is not limited to Farage, Trump, Netanyahu and western neopopulism. It has its able counterparts in Chinese capitalism as well as in Iran. In both countries rulers learned the tricks of realising surplus value and moving capital around during many years of sanctions and boycotts. Being a corrupt capitalist is not an aberration; rather, corruption is an essential skillset for the aspiring ruler. I think I am safe in saying that ultimately it is the class struggle that exposes Faragism, not ‘bourgeois investigative journalism’.