Democracy?

An uncertain, not to say a blind future, is becoming the increasing norm for politics in the West. For example, President Biden is organising a world wide symposium to salute democracy and to 'combat international corruption'. Sadly he doesn't reflect on his own 'democracy' while US States are gerrymandering the next elections. Instead Biden talks generalities about tax evasion and money laundering - missing the blazing dishonesty of the US States, the utter corruption of the alternative party, the Republicans, and the corporate-led domination of virtually all of US politics and politicians, let alone the organised, billionaire-led, political machinery, that runs the country. Biden, at the very least, totally misses his own point. 

Consider the last ten to fifteen years. There has been a drastic economic collapse, followed by social decline and austerity measures across most of the world and for the bulk of Europeans and Americans. Despite this failure of the political and economic system, imperialist wars were still led by the West in the same years. That led to at least 801,000 people that have been killed by direct wars. Now; today; the pinnacle of global capitalism has turned into increasing tariffs and the world smells of yet greater wars. 

The semi-fascist Russian regime is now testing the US and NATO for control of the Ukraine. The Covid pandemic remains with us all - despite the West's nationalistic vaccine programs. Deep tensions, in respect of women, children, race and inequality are at yet another huge rising but are stalled and in some contexts, pushed back. Finally, the most immediate potential disaster in the planet's ecology is practically treated as a side window in respect of the bulk of the West's led civilisation. In conclusion, the West appears to be stalled and in some areas reversed, if not collapsing in its decline.   

This blog previously spelled out the first and second stages of socialism. The first, and most extensive wave started with the greatest action in human history; the success of the defeat of Western imperialism in 1917. Early Soviet Russia and its ongoing memory became the famous 'other'; the then coherent, collective, reasoned alternative, as against the World's War madness of imperialist capitalism. 1917 became the alternative to war, to the corruption of life under capitalism and a symbol to the inevitable under-developed existence of the billions, who laboured - or worse - across the world. The impact of 1917, despite the Russian soviets that became mangled and destroyed through the decades, opened up a new world history, leading on through China, Cuba and up to 1974. Despite the increasing doubts of millions in the West regarding Stalin and Mao, the huge breakthroughs, ending in the Vietnam victory and the global young mass movements that covered the globe, still maintained a possible future. At least, the first wave of socialism had overturned Western imperialism across vast parts of the planet. Despite the weaknesses, the mistakes and the failures, the first wave of socialism provided a constant symbol of the possibility of humanity organising a genuine collective in the support of all, for the first time in human history. 

The argument made about the first stage of socialism as it subsided particularly in the West, was that its chequered failure was not only coming from the pressure of the US and European reorganisation of capitalism over the decades, but also from the prominent contradictions within the first socialist wave itself. It is not pertinent to rehearse what happened to this particular history just now. Where all need to go is towards a new, different, second wave of socialism. One which provides a new 'other' in the arguments in society, turning away from the retrograde repetitions of the past that have largely failed. 

The remnants of the first wave of socialism have maintained the independence from imperialism, most effectively in China's continuing development, despite the West's constant efforts to block its progress. But the reality is an increasing pressure both outside and inside of the last of socialism's first wave. The authoritarian regimes and the crushing of any working class democracy, coupled with constant efforts to link economically to the West, is gradually destroying any remaining socialism within. Meanwhile, the world's population has already bypassed the first-wave history. Secondly, the planet now requires at least one fully global political axis that can remove the gathering dangers of capitalist globalisation. The beginning of the second wave of socialism, requiring global technology, deeply collective organisation and new types of democracy is needed to successfully construct our ecological defences and the actual survival of humanity.  

But the second wave of socialism is not even a slight, let alone a main, new 'other' in the minds of those who would seek a new world. In fact, the second wave does not yet apply the understanding, the mood, the argument, the study, the interest in any large section of the world's population. At the moment, and deeply buttressed by the recent pandemic, there is nothing like the decades before and after 1900 to 1975 when it came to battling with and for change with a wide sense that social, economic and political models could be understood for an alternative human society and civilisation. All sorts of arguments have been thrown up, particularly in the West. Indeed, in the West, an enormous collection of thoughts, ideas, speculations, personal implications and mysteries, instead take the place of the thought of advancing society and humanity. There are a billion comments about this substitute 'novelty'. And, in large parts of the West at least, it is a concoction of half baked histories, nationalist puffery, personal aggrandisement and retarded concoctions that offer a would-be new 'other.' It is the decline from the result of the defeat of the first wave of collective human self-organisation. It has grown from a pool of decay soaked by the West's itself's weakness and deterioration.   

The lack of a collective human future in thought and in hope is certainly a consequence of the limits of the first wave of socialism. The absence of alternatives from our daily lives comes from the deliberate, stubborn, backward inaction and the constant insistence of the decline of mass movements and of co-operative undertaking and achievement. The second wave of socialism is yet to be built. It is almost silent now, but it will emerge, not by theory, but by the necessity of an overthrow of a current dangerous and rotten edifice. A daily life of independent and active movement will create a real, new, 'other', as a result of the rising of the vast majority of people who will decide to change their own future. 

Hints are emerging in some western countries. The Irish Citizens’ Assembly was established in 2016 by a parliamentary resolution and tasked with deliberating on a number of issues, including the Eighth Amendment. Abortion was made legal because of ordinary citizens. The Citizens’ Assembly followed the model of its predecessor, the Convention on the Constitution, which ran from 2012 to 2014 and whose recommendations had led to the 2015 marriage equality referendum. Compare this with the USA's democracy that gives 26 States the right to abolish abortion via the new Supreme Court. The States are run by Republican millionaires. The Supreme Court is run by Trumpian millionaires. Of course there will be a ferocious battle - over what is really a democracy and what is actually permanent decisions of the rich and powerful. 

West grabs carnival capitalism

Part of the western fantasies includes the politicians that try to break up the real social memories from the working class's collective history, plus their knowledge and their understanding. One example of the politicians that have created a different history is shown by the new UK Tories. A section of the Tory MPs, including the Prime Minister, are cuddling-up to the small northern towns offering unlikely futures. They are attempting, like their counterparts in other western countries, to thoroughly dissolve the West's genuine social history of the ebbing and flowing of the working classes' seminal battles through the years. This new set of politicians has different faces across Europe - with the resurrection of religious political dominations in Poland and Hungary, to the new defenders of the so called 'culture' in France. But it's all the same. Apparently the bulk of the millions of working class people in the West have to embrace their new political media sovereigns, accept new images of a paternal leadership, enthral a deeper faked-up national identity and to swallow the fear of the drastic 'threat' of immigration, coupled with the dangerous hints of Russia and China shadows' perched on the western borders. This is the new/old history. It answers to nothing but an untruthful past designed to create another illusion.

In fact, as the Glasgow COP shows, a whole world is in peril and the fantasy politics coming out of the West barely touches, or more accurately it reverses, any collective, open and public decisions for the desperately required significant change. Instead the West faces the decline of their traditional imperialism having gradually swallowed the colonial riches over centuries. The West is now dealing with its waning international power. Western capitalism needs to play a new, last card. It is now aiming to retain its world leadership mainly via the manipulation of global finance, controlled by the US and less significantly with the EU. The most ridiculous fantasy of them all. Alas for the political and economic potentates of this world, the latest capitalist design is literally being broken up as soon as it has been set up, via the very same manipulation of the globalisation of the world's finance that led to the collapse of the very same finance - particularly in the West. 2008 was only the first shock. 

What are the forces, movements and battles in the declining capitalist, western-carnival?

The defences of the future West are now swirling around as they seek answers to their troubles. But fake histories simply produce out-of-date palliatives. According to the UK for example, the West needs to have more nuclear submarines with Australia, a beefed up NATO, closer sucking up to the US rather than to the EU and French cops, especially them, to 'do their job in the channel!' Meanwhile finances rise and commodities are fewer than WW2. Other tired out versions are available.

But what could be the West's real chance of avoiding its collapsing decrepitude? First, get rid of the word 'West' and its baleful history. Second, stop the capital carnival. Capitalism is now faltering. Personal ownership has become a monstrous block against the world's needs. Its temporary use to build real development in China (as opposed to the discoveries of the playground in the West) has been the only significant progress across the debilitated capitalist globe for decades. But all of the main problems and disasters in the world today are now global in whole or in part. Nuclear weapons are world wide, increasingly ready and able to offer extinction. The ecology of Earth is entirely in danger and could desolate the planet and its peoples in a few years. Carnival capitalism has no means to focus on the huge requirements of the desperately necessary changes in the world. 

There is progression.

In this period of carnival capitalism, three prolonged human battles are again rising against constant exploitations that go deeper in history than capitalism  itself, despite the industrialisation that capitalism used for those exploitations. Millions are fighting for collective and social answers, to finally defeat the oppressions that have emerged long before capitalism and are still deep in it. Human degradation in our civilisations due to poverty and the lack of real equality, of the children and women being constantly reduced, as with the terrible depredation of racism; these surely are, at last, to be universal parts of the change of a new civilisation. It is breaking out everywhere and is the opening of a new wave of socialism whatever it is called. 

Brian Heron

Scary economics for globalisation

There's a new set of internet shows going round. Huge ships crash into other huge ships and boats and various harbours. These towering leviathans slowly break up and sometimes destroy parts of ports, decks, docks, heavy machinery and, as mentioned before, other boats. They do it with graceful momentum, seemingly so slow and yet utterly unstoppable, while hooting and howling from sad pipes and horns that smother the creaks and grinds of the cracking concrete or the scraping bellies of the other boats. There were no deaths or injuries in the pieces seen above. But tiny humans spread along the jetty gradually turned their walks into runs as the enormous pieces of the sea relentlessly ground down their full size and impact. This is not the beauty of the waves. It is the scuttles in the current hangover of globalisation. 

A large container ship engine is similar in size to a six story building. Well over a billion tonnes is carried internationally in containers. Between 2000 and 2017 containerised cargo trade grew three times and about one and a half time faster than the world's GDP. The number of crashes of ships is actually harder to assess. There are a lot of questions and few honest answers in this area. But the issue that is most concerning now is - will these epic behemoths smash up globalisation? 

The ships gathering in Los Angeles, unable to dock their Xmas cargo, has not only saddened the West Coast children but more significantly, created the opportunity of another Trump attack on President Biden.  The mayor of Long beach California says 

'We are facing an unprecedented cargo surge at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles due to major global pandemic productions shifts and decades old supply challenges'. 

The British Prime Minister Boris pretends that the West Coast block is simply part of the same problems that the UK now faces over fuel, food and energy supplies. In fact the LA blockage is mainly the increased demand from the US for Xmas goods and the increasing problem of old fashioned port capacity. Even that minor crisis is pushing critical political issues in the US. In the UK, these hiccups are hugely more serious, and they expose much more rapidly the potential, gradual disintegration of globalisation at its weakest point. Boris talks only lies. The UK's current connection with globalisation, unlike the problems with the LA's port, is becoming the most problematic of all of the main western nations. And now ship containers price their voyages from £2000 to £18000. And gas containers are dropping their agreed previous prices in mid passage and turning their bows to the biggest offers. 

The British Guardian newspaper now faces its Bidenic hero when he insists that the US will go to war against a Chinese intervention in Taiwan. This is a deeply serious initiative against China. Up to now, the Chinese policy is that Taiwan is Chinese. The Chinese leadership has consistently insisted on a peaceful and prolonged return of Taiwan to China. The US policy used to be supporting that approach. But Biden has turned the wheel and put possible war first. (His administration is desperately trying to dissolve Biden's statement into the previous, essential, non-developed Taiwan process.)

This is the sort of sword that slices the ultra modern capitalism's largest development - into pieces. The pillars of globalisation are not the ships (although they are becoming more and more unconstrained) they are the vast connections between the US, the EU and China. Biden has deepened what was Trump's intention to break down global capitalism into nationalistic dominations - with the single leader (and the minor copycats) determinedly on top. 

Boris's pseudo working class politics

Start; 

Beating Boris is no longer a party political issue. Starmer is the most self aggrandising, chest-thumping, soggy-wet, adenoidal-Blairite that Labour has ever swallowed. The previous election, where a minority 10 million voted for Corbyn, despite the immense attacks brought down on them, could have forced the 20 odd Labour left MPs into a new practical challenge against Boris across the country. Those MPs, and the 10 million, could have separated away from Labour's squeaks in Westminster - get locally organised against Boris's right wing directions - call on the huge minority vote and with crystal clear ways — forward for Brexit and for the key nationalisations — which would have shifted and led the UK society and another election ultra-fast. 

Now, this is fighting a cult; a cult which is trying to build up a working class base, just like Trump. Most among Britain's rulers were aware of this and hoped that Tory grandees would pull back Boris - even throw him out. The Times newspaper , etc., are wringing their hands and demanding that the ruling class does something! They don't understand the Boris miracle. But the miracle is simple. Boris has spoken, is speaking and will speak in the future — directly to the working class. It's been a long time since PMs in the UK did that. And the ones that tried, Wilson, Callaghan, partly Thatcher (via sales of council houses) — all of them eventually failed. The last Labour PM, Blair, decided to deny the existence of the working class. And it was Blair that finally dissolved Labour's link with working class people. (That's what Starmer wants to retrieve!)   

Ok. How, now, can the real fight start against Boris and his personal politics?

1. Disclosures; 2. Hard truths; 3. Clear action.

1.While Boris talks to working class voters about higher wages, he lies about the facts and he opposes higher wages where he can. First he says wages will grow because immigrants accepted lower wages. But in the last 35 years wages have been declining. And the only time there was a brief change was the early 2000s — when immigration workers were actually at the peak. Wages dropped again from 2008 to now. Boris uses one or two upticks from private companies to pretend that it is he that wants higher wages. (Most of it is the bump back from 2020.) The 6 million public workers that Boris is directly in charge of are going to get a wage cut.   

2. Wages have dropped for decades. Why? Because unions were broken by anti-union laws that are still going, with the most recent law in 2010 and more yet to come.

3. Workers need to fight together for their unions and higher wages. Boris wants big votes for the smallest wages. 

1. Boris lies about fuel and food, transport and schools. He starts by lying that most countries are worse after the Covid pandemic than his new Britain.  

2. Fuel was under-planned over the last 10 years. Food was underplayed in supermarkets and farms in the last 2 years. Transport was privatised, hugely subsidised (eg., Rail) and it doesn't work. English private school fees are 90% higher than state school spending. The gap between private school fees and state school spending has more than doubled in a decade. 

3. Boris is smashing up all sides of the lives of ordinary people. Get him gone.  

And so it goes on - in virtually all aspects of an increasingly dangerous society. 

Action is needed in the absence of the weak and weary parties in Westminster.  We need local assemblies, including councils, across the UK's nations, to decide what should happen next. We need direct action, following the active Green agenda, to make sure that can show that real changes can and should happen. Workers need to build and lead new unities, pulling down the barbwire laws, crossing the collective boundaries.

AUKUS/PAUCUS

25.36 million Australians have decided, or have been forced, to stand in the front row of the 1.4 billion Chinese in the case of their aggression.  (China supports an active 2.9 million soldiers.) 

But it's all ok, because 'AUKUS' (A...UK...US - get it?) will have Australian based nuclear submarines that could put out China in what? 19 hours or two? The Yanks (closer than the UK by an hour) can fix the nukes in the Australian subs. Voila! Shame that they have to wait for the flight over the Pacific. Maybe the Australians might sneak an early one or two nukes for their submarines from the impoverished Brits? 

Here are some implications. 

The military West, led entirely by the US, has expanded their nuclear weapons in the world in order to prevent the continuous expansion of China. Does anyone believe that the Australians, now with their nuclear subs, won't have the weapons? The whole point is not (of course) safeguarding China's intentions to seize Australia. It is for the US to have a wider ring of Indo/Pacific bases, which are designed to enclose China's economic progress across the world - and which includes China itself. China WILL have Google, or, sadly, it's universal bereavement for us all! Here's the thing. For some time the West has been trying also to monetise their (unused) nukes. Now they can blossom in Australia. 

The US kit that runs nuclear subs are the most secret bits of US war tackle. Only the UK is supposed to share it but everybody who knows this stuff understands that the key secret codes do not belong in London - or in the hands of Boris - thank the gods. Apparently the Australians are going to have empty nuclear subs anyway. But do we, the mugs who pay for and die for our wars, believe that? What will happen with the Aussie subs is that they will be called 'carrying non nuclear based weapons' but they will be non nuclear weapons only to the Australians.  Actually the nukes will be ready inside the Australian subs to shoot - but from Washington. The Chinese will get to know that if they haven't had an Email already. 

Up to now Chinese State Capitalism has proved an enormous benefit to Chinese development and has shifted the largest part of mainly Chinese humanity out of poverty in a way the World has ever seen before. The US's Biden and Trump Presidents have decided that Chinese State Capitalism must be destroyed. It is too successful in China and in its increasingly dominant role in the spread of global capitalism. The real danger of AUKUS is that AUCUS is the long-desired 'one jump ahead' for nuclear success; the cloud that covers the newly termed Indo/Pacific - a term that doesn't mention China but which tells China who rules the East. 

The US fired not one but two nuclear weapons over Japan. Recent documents have arisen from the Cuba drama in the 1960s showing that most of the senior US military were hell-bent on wiping out Cuba - and the USSR if possible. The estimated 15 million US dead in that scenario was denied purely as a political decision by the shaky President. A very close nuclear ring around China is not a Western defence. It is the ultimate step for any wobbling China, that apparently shows its (vague but apparently global) nuclear dangers, which have to be resolved, no doubt with desperate sorrow, by the Pentagon - and another mad or sad US President.   

Conclusion

A very serious and a very dangerous step has been taken by the West to deal with its sinking economic (and political) domination across the globe. Its action will unravel previous 'solid' blocks in the Western world as well as its perimeter. The EU supported and French led commitment to Australia - with conventional subs - has been broken up by the US - directly in favour of more aggressive steps. That measure defines the real relation of the new US President regarding the EU. It is worse than Trump's EU fun and games. 

The Australian proxy for the US, Indo/Pacific, war front is a serious and hostile act aimed at China and will necessarily increase an alternative combination of China, India (after Trump backed the Taliban and therefore Pakistan), Russia and even in some quarters, Turkey, as a new military front 'responding' to nuclear advances increasing in the East. 

India/Pakistan's intolerable non-relations - which were already threatening both their weaponised nukes - have now ramped up since Modi annexed the independent Kashmir. Pakistan is responding by quietly supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan and offering China's role in the region. The Indian/Chinese border battles are now evolving from Modi's intentions to break up the proxy Pakistan core in this increasingly dangerous and growing momentum. He will not stop at Kashmir or the Muslims. And he has to break China's intended hegemony. 

The constant assumption presented by the politicians and their military - that the presence of nuclear weapons is actually a positive situation against dominant nations carrying out vast wars that destroy many nations and kill millions of people as with the two World Wars, is now dissolving fast. Nuclear threats, like all of the shuddering and dangerous aspects of today's capitalist system, are now more likely to erupt than at any stage since WW2. Why? Because the international domination of capitalism, centred in the West, is breaking up. Nuclear war is not in any way a separate part of the global economic and political systems. Destruction is a seminal part of the system of society that we all live (and die) under.

Afghanistan defeated imperialism?

Let's get something clear about the success of the Taliban - as though it is achieving some kind of heroic anti-imperialism in Afghanistan. Sadly, some left currents in the UK are lining up with Trump/Biden (for different reasons) on the withdrawal of the retreat of the US (and UK and German forces.) These left groups are offering a (very doubtful) 'hurrah' about the end of imperialism in Afghanistan. Meanwhile the US Presidents were both determined to stop another $2.26 trillion (Brown University Cost of War). They both added the costs in injury and death involved. (There were 2312 US deaths, compared with 69,000 Afghan security and 51,000 Afghan civilians from 2002 to now - again analysed by Brown University.) The US figures provided the front cover at least for the US's more sentimental losses for the American voters. Biden now does not think so much of his would be Afghan comrades and avoids their 98% losses. 

More facts have arisen regarding the Taliban, now mooching round the streets of Kabul and the other 33 provinces, often carrying out exactly what is denied on the media by their leader Abdul Ghani Barada. The nine day 'battle' to win the 34 provinces overwhelmingly amounted to a huge, well trained and long expected kleptocracy. The provincial 'leaders' of the provinces were either living off the $2.26 trillion, spread out from the ex President's Ashraf Ghani's largess, or from the financial bypasses provided by Trump's 'deal' in Doha, who wanted the US money to go over the heads of the money-grabbing government in favour of the money-grubbing war lords. 

Despite the $2.26 trillion since 2002, Afghanistan's poverty line is below 54.5% of the population. Afghanistan is one of the least developed countries in the world. On the 2018 Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, Afghanistan ranked 172 out of 180 countries. Al Jazeera put it this way. ' Some are that poor management of the countries wealth, coupled with armed groups and local strongmen (to) illegally extract resources and sell them on the black market to neighbouring countries and beyond.' 'The Taliban earn between $2.5m and $10m a year from mining talc alone, which has become, next to opium, their main source of revenue.' Mining is the future of Afghanistan's development according to local experts. But the effective pact between the local war lords/Taliban and US funds, the country has been bought. In that sense the Taliban have simply pushed its power of what was the board of Afghanistan/USA. There was, and now is, no revolution for a real Afghanistan's development. The Taliban, from that perspective, is yet but another bandit that has stolen the country. It is a form of domination that acts as an imperialism. And in a more violent, and more backward way than before except that they live in the same country - sometimes. 

US imperialism has set up both its own failure in Afghanistan and the creation of another regime that is worse. Fundamentally, it is a further decline of US imperialism, but it is completely false to imagine that some advance has occurred for the Afghanistan people. What they have is more difficult and more dangerous. 

Today (18 August) at least two people have been killed after gunmen fired into into a crowd who had taken down a Taliban flag in the city of Jalalabad. There are now further eruptions. ' Reporting from Kabul, Al Jazeera said that the protests have expanded beyond Jalalabad to several other provinces.  

Afghanistan and the West

Trump floated 'a deal' with the Taliban, over the heads of his US installed government, to agree that there would be no more attacks on the West and then the Taliban would be able to share the government. Biden did not believe in the Taliban's offers (despite, for example, that they have said on the 10th of August that the West would not become a base for terrorists) but Biden did believe that the US trained Afghan army would hold the line against the Taliban - which would be enough to keep the West safe, (despite a likely endless fight in Afghanistan itself.)

These two military talents are only topped in history by the Brits, who lost three wars in Afghanistan, the latter providing a day of celebration in Afghanistan on the 19th of August. Any guesses about the date of the 'fall' of Kabul?

Afghanistan's current government is finished. But serious results will erupt as the factional lines, in and around the Taliban, break out across the country. One major probability is the renovation of al-Qaeda across the Pakistani/Afghanistan border, coupled with the prevailing pressure by China on both parts and on the Pakistan military. 

The result of the US forces' retreat (coupled by the exit of the mini UK) and the apparent 'success' of the Taliban, is a disaster for the Afghanistan people, particularly for women and children. This is a barbarism as awful as described by Rosa Luxemburg in WW1 and her judgement of the counter revolution arising in Germany. 'Socialism or barbarism' was her perception. 

Many in the US couple this moment with the 'terrible failure' of the exit of US forces out of Vietnam. But they reversed their judgement then and now. Vietnam was an historic success in South East Asia - and fired the optimism of millions across the world for a different life. Afghanistan today is the opposite. The turn to the dark-ages is certainly a modern aspect of a spreading shaky international capitalist system and an increasing decline of the Western imperialist adventures, but it is a turn to barbarism. The US (and the UK) as a result of their own weaknesses, have just turned forty million into a deeper hell. 

Does that mean that the West's invasion, (following the USA build up of the Taliban, organised and funded to defeat the Soviet Union's invasion) was, or is, right? Of course not. But it would be absurd to follow a 'what's if' trail to simply apply Afghanistan independence. That would need to be going back at least to the Victorian 'heroes' and their gatling guns. 

It has to start with an Afghanistan (nominally created as a nation by the UK) that was and remains an area of enormous value and importance. As China has advanced, so Afghanistan even now demonstrates its centrality in the movements between East and West that constantly created huge distributions between the rising settlements and populations, from the Mediterranean to the China seas. Imperialism; the British imperialists, blocked that flow in the 19th century. They wanted a frozen India/Pakistan and the isolation of Russia and China. A blocked Asia laid out north and south and run by London. So, history does turn, but only starting in the present.

What, as somebody once said, should be done? 

There is more than a core of Afghan people that will not give away their expectations into the violent hands of the dark ages. The imperialists have failed them. But there are others that are now able to at least support a new battle for a proper, independent life. China, because it has to function on globalisation and it  is scared of religious cults, will tentatively and at some distance support (but not imperialise) a serious movement, starting with Kabul (alien to the Taliban and entirely based on force) which can build an organisation that will win back the cities. In due course non-military international brigades can provide aid delivered by Afghanistan people that was so deeply unwilling in the hands of the UK, the USSR and the US. The Taliban undoubtedly lead a significant portion of Afghanistan, but less, much less than 2000. History, even for the Taliban, does not stop.   

Capitalism dying?

Lots of correspondents, mainly from the left, are writing about the post-Covid type of capitalism. US President Biden's apparent renovation of his own version of the 'New-Deal' is propelling the argument for a type of Keynesianism in most of the western world. The prior, von-Hayek model, which reduced State expenditure, sought low taxes, free trade and trickle down benefits, appears to have failed - even among the cautious EU. We know that Reagan and Thatcher set up the political shape required to energise Hayek's economic ideas. But now economists, including Eliot, the newspaper Guardian economic correspondent, are praising the return of Keynes, despite the continuing traditional political shape of Reagan and Thatcher, which has been maintained. State money is distributed, sure. But the Reagan/Thatcher attack-laws on labour rights, remains a vengeance. 

Half-baked Keynesianism actually started not with Covid but with the 2008 collapse of the banks. The banks fell and their rescuing was a very particular State-like shift away from Hayek (but not at all towards Keynesianism).  It started with the huge quantitative easing from States to banks and then from banks to the stock exchanges and then from stock exchanges to shares of companies and then from shares to the super wealthy. Hayek's trickle down benefits and the increase of profits then became no sorts of benefits at all, trickle or otherwise, just simply austerity. This was literally capitalism-as-social-theft. In previous blogs we have noted the decline and indeed the destruction of social democracy in the West - the political sign of capitalism-as-social-theft in the West. 

Has Biden (or for that matter UK's Prime Minister Johnson) pushed history back? Is the old Keynesianism really emerging ? Sorry, no. It is true that social and political turmoil is rising, including in the West. It is true that Biden has distributed large, individual, increases of wages and some parts of welfare. (Boris peels off here.) It is also true that he wants to increase taxes, particularly corporation taxes, to renovate the USA's infrastructure and to broaden the development of green jobs and industry. But the conditions for Keynes no longer apply. How is this? It is the fact that the waves of capitalism are not constant. They do not repeat their patterns or combinations, anymore than the evolution of humanity repeats its lives. Are there discernible patterns and cycles in capitalism? Yes; patterns and cycles are understandable, similar and pliable, but because they are always moving they are never exactly the same.  

The content of Biden's plan has little to do with the terms and conditions of Roosevelt's New Deal. Roosevelt saw the rise of fascism as little worse than his views about the danger of the UK's empire. (At one point in WW2 at a separate meeting with Stalin, he suggested that India should be like the Soviet Union and break away from the British Empire to allow modern development.) Roosevelt's State wealth distribution could dominate the great US corporations, their taxes handed over, as the price to control risings and to prevent the grip of communism in the US. 

Biden has no such context. (And Johnson is another joke entirely when he denies the continuation of austerity to his UK electorate.) The great corporations, nominally in the US, that Biden requires for the use of his State taxes, are not of the like of the 1930s of Ford or Bessemer Steel. They are located in the global sphere. Equally, there is no 'communist threat' forcing US corporations to accept their tax payments in order to defend capitalism against the workforce of the US. The workforce of the US are barely beginning to organise. Instead it is 'communist China' that is the threat for the new corporations that are based globally. In reality the 'threat' that Biden is trying to use on the corporations in the US is the 'threat' of Trump-based fascism. A step that would rapidly place China as the leading economic country in the world. Alas, as history suggests, big capital has had a rather respectful response when it came to associating with fascism.   

More broadly, among the studies of modern capitalism (see for example the New Left Review piece by Cedric Durand - 'Forces of Change') the impending contradictions of both the Hayek and Keynes capitalisms suggests the need for an entirely new cycle. A cycle that requires a particular, new character, one of building drastic social and political interventions. Why? In order to continue the sovereignty of the economics of capitalism, so far dominated by us and by our five-hundred year capitalist system. Because ... capitalism's recent dynamics are breaking down. 

It is necessary to avoid any foolish assumptions that capitalism will destroy itself, a view that many times has been shouted out from childish versions of Marx or Lenin etc. So far the capitalist drive has recovered and reorganised all its crises. But it is equally blind to imagine that previous capitalisms will simply repeat themselves. More; the contradictions and social stresses of capitalism become more heinous in ever mounting stages. In such situations, catastrophes make the capitalist system less and less bearable for the overwhelming majority of the people of the world. It is arguable that we are at just such a terrifying moment today. And the consequences become more and more barbarous.

To pick up the new context of capitalism's next circle (or circles) a set of observations should be offered.

1. Note the sets of analyses regarding the mechanisms of capitalism, largely independent of social and political interaction, on the assumption that the economy of capitalism is the core of society. The greatest such model was the amazing books and essays of Ernest Mandel. 

2. The 'self destruction of capitalism' idea is simply empty in all of its history.

3. But today we note that the crisis of capitalism becomes both intensely more problematic - AND  - intensely more tangled, with the rising social crises so common in modern times. It would be absurd not to coalesce, not to see the combinations, of what is often only described as an economic engine. The modern economic engine, now itself reorganised by effects of the world wars, is partly reordering new societies and vice versa. The analyses of modern capitalism does not proceed from a capital A then to a small b and then to c.    

4. And the wider and wider mystification applied to modern capitalism has never been a more developed complexity. (This of course is part of the means designed to deny the implications of a system that exploits the overwhelming majority in the world.)

5. While capitalism in itself becomes more and more difficult, crises ridden and dangerous - the combination of the increasing social crises together with capitalism creates the more and more likelihood of human extinction. (As WW1 and WW2 hint.)

6. Capitalism has to move onwards to sustain its role in society, through competition, mergers, acquisitions, monopolies, technology and most of all labour, to create its object of wealth. 

7. Logically, globalisation can only be the ultimate end for any further extension of capitalism.

8. But as globalisation is reaching its peak across the planet, it becomes weaker and weaker as a force, first because of the failures of imperialism across the globe and second because it has stalled away from the key mechanisms spelled out above. 

9. This capitalism failing at its own height is most obviously apparent in the herding of wealth for personal purposes among more and more millionaires (who rarely trickle down.) Virile Capital, albeit viciously and violently, built social and technical revolutions in the past. This aspect of modern capitalism has become less and less.  

10. Less apparent but more decisive is the failure of capitalism, more and more, in relation to the world's danger. 

The capitalist system accepted and partly swallowed two world wars. The system and its corporations  were used to defend the results including a nuclear bomb. Today capitalism is unable to solve or resolve any of the planet's main dangers; heat, nuclear battles or any sense of billions of people that they have a chance of sure progress. Today, vast resources in slowly moving ships and concentrated internet deals about wealth at light speed, are constantly bought and sold, borrowed and paid. The novelty of this endless, world above the world, is its gradual, but relentless, detachment from the world. The US holds Japan and China's debts. Both countries hold wealth equivalently more than their debts. Both countries use their US debts to pressurise sales from their countries to the US. Now Biden, and Trump before, were and are closing down China's sales. They have to. China is getting richer than the US. US capitalism, already based on money and not production, now needs to make its own products. The aim is to force decline in China. And so it rolls on. 

Consider. The state capitalism of China alone is now overwhelmingly the single social advance in the last two decades. The main motor of the world's general world capitalism, capitalism led by the US, is declining at a pace. Capitalism in the West is now necessarily required to halter and diminish social welfare, political democracy and any substantial reform of the working class. Living standards are also declining. The planet is in ecological danger. Wealth is more and more concentrated and unavailable for reform within the system. Technology offers a narrow development and reflects the smallest achievements in centuries. The remains of democracy are reducing and nukes are expanding. The capitalist system no longer advances. Worse; it prepares for degeneration and social destruction.

Posted by Brian Heron at 16:48 

West politics and revolution

Western politics is in a dangerous mess. A wild set of half-way indications are breaking out from the previous post WW2 settlements. It has created political melees. As yet nothing is permanently settled. But forceful trends are competing and are at loose. 

Biden has not managed to blow Trump away. Trump remains supported in a solid third of the electorate. And the overwhelming structure of the Republican Party is still attached to Trump. They calculate that there is nowhere else to go. Trump has established his place as an oligarchic in the US and the Republican Party as his personal popular movement. 

Germany is about to lose Merkel, which is facing the widest uncertainty for the coming elections since the fusion with East Germany. France's mini-Bonaparte, Macron, has failed regarding his plans with the EU and with the technical, de-classe future that he offered to France's 'new' population. He launched his attack and produced a revolt as a result of his Thatcherite labour policy. His party is expiring as quickly as it was born. Sweden's navigation is diminishing - even the shared history of what is now its empty social-democracy is melting away. Denmark and the Netherlands are soaked in the immigration farrago — apparently without any alternative future to offer. Spain has recently developed a new political 'national defence' which is reducing the impact of the left's model for the future across the country. Italy may still have the worst political chaos of all the West, competing with proto-fascism and mounting corruption, but now it is threatening to rock the most coherent European society. Italy has generally managed its social coherence by broadly by-passing its politics. That is becoming the past. 

UK politics exposes the deepest change in the new type of potentially dangerous politics, second only to the US. 

There is much debate in the West about social media causing the rumpus in politics. Many, indeed almost all correspondents that study politics offer the idea that it is the social media that has changed the nature of Western politics. Certainly huge proportions of the population, especially of the young, believe that. The whole argument appears to have become a stereotype. 1. Everybody can now say what they really thought; 2. Everybody can make up their own mind by deciding that others are liars or 'on their side'. 3. Politics is an instant right and is based on perks.

We can all agree that Western politics is in trouble. What follows is a revolutionary perspective of one country, the UK.

The increasing decline of most people's lives in the UK has been obvious for decades. The main political parties in Britain have hung on to their supposed principles while they are unable to change life circumstances for most people in the British nations. The changing character of Capitalism after the 1970s did not allow social reform. The capacity to distribute gains in society became almost entirely channeled into successful wealthy global corporations and their owners. In the case of the British, especially the English and the Scottish, traditional politics had less and less purpose.  

New politics began to emerge as answers to the failures of the traditional parties. The first came out of the decaying Labour Party, with the exciting proposal of a rise of a new economy. A second, non-traditional party arose, initially around immigration and then tied itself to Brexit. And it was this step outside Parliament that reorganised the nature of the Tory Party. The Tories broke off their traditional ruling class domination and instead created a right-wing populist party mainly constructed around Brexit. 

Brexit was presented as the means to restore or rebuild money and resources from the EU to be returned and delivered to the working class in the UK - especially in the north of England and the NHS. The Tories maintained racist policies, but the importance of a democratic vote over Brexit became the more significant means to get Brexit for sure. Radical Labour's policy seemed less obvious and unsure of the Brexit offer. The ruling class also organised a huge attack on Corbyn, which reduced his credibility further. 

The Tory Party have subsequently kept a populist front, but the Tory leadership are now stressed by the lack of their promised perks in the north of England, plus the turn taken in Scotland (and increasingly Wales) to build different countries - as their answers to the decline continue to face most of their people. Additionally, a ruling class layer based in Britain is now forced to move more than ever, connecting up to a wavering US. The new Tory Party is as fragile as their empty schemes that they claim to make better for the working lives in the UK. Consequently, their enormous majority of Tory MPs and their constant nonsense about the future of the UK will blow away with any one of their major crises. The question is not how the Tories can possibly keep 'winning' (or indeed if Labour can ever win again). This is also not a social media resolution. The new politics will break through by decisions that most people across the UK believe are the most potent to raise their living standards. 

A new country designed already as a single radical Ireland, is moving close. Scottish independence has two exceptional bases for its future, away from the declining England, which is only just beginning to realise that they have won nothing and are going nowhere. Renewables met 97% of Scotland's electricity demand in 2020. This is the second, and now ecological, North Sea abundance that Scotland will demand. Additionally, the Scandinavian block, although under the pressure of the general capitalist decline, is still supporting much higher social conditions, managing close to 50% corporate taxes and having high level welfare more than anyone else in Europe, including Germany. As far as Scotland is concerned, Scandinavia is a much more promising future than an attachment to England, which is in rapid decline. 

Such developments in Ireland and Scotland will not be determined  by nationalist arguments in supreme courts and the decisions of the divine Westminster; they will be bitter fights and struggles. This is the beginning of the revolution. The will to fight will need to be led by the young, not lawyers, in fights with the state, mainly in direct action against the police; those who want the nukes out and those who don't; those who want an end to the UK's history of imperial wars and tax havens, and those who don't;  those see a future of small nations bent mainly on social objectives and those who don't. In other words the new revolution has to show its positive future to the people in its majority.

Brexit was a fake in terms of building a positive future for ordinary people. But the Brexit millions made what was a huge decision. New parties sprung up. Movements forced their views against the media. Traditional parties either melted or were changed utterly from their historic foundations. Immense politics like these will inevitably get larger. Already Manchester and London are fighting the Tory Parliament without care of the large number of Tory MPs. And the cities, particularly Manchester and Liverpool, are designing their own conditions. The political shocks will come fast. The new revolution will show the action of the Brexit and Grenfell type - and more. To win, beyond the Brexit story, the revolution must act again - on the basis of a clear, new future, which all can see and understand. To succeed it must be direct. Westminster is secondary.  

The £2 Trillion debts that are owned by the Tories in Westminster will drastically demonstrate the collapse of wages, of labour rights, of free education, of health and welfare. The decline for most of the British population described earlier will drop like a stone. Movements and parties, in the recent memories, can split up to defend rights, re-establish the local utilities, take over banks and deny the debt until the wealth of the country and those who own it, distribute it for all. The UK, led by an Etonian mini Trump, will not hold. A different future has to be formed and acted upon. A revolutionary perspective has begun to emerge in the wavering UK.  

Building the new futures in Northern Ireland, in Scotland and in England and Wales; for the new Ireland, overthrowing Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, starting from the radical Sinn Fein; in Scotland winning the Scots to a future that throws out Westminster's domination in politics and in action; in England, learning the lesson that new politics can win in action and a new economy must be built to survive on all fronts. This is the start of the new revolutions. It is the future.

When a slave master had his statue thrown in the river, that was the future. It was connected to 'Black Lives Matter' which British politicians insist is not political. Why? Because it is political. It is the political necessity of bringing down the police and its total reorganisation. It was the direct action of millions to drastically change something that has always been vile. Together, with the developments of new futures, the new revolution begins. 

There are (at least) two versions of hegemony. Coming out of western politics in the 1920s and 1930s, the analysis of the Italian Communist Party, made by studying Antonio Gramsci in his prison writings, saw the West as developed states and societies that meant it was possible to 'win' these elements, socially and practically and overcome capitalism. This crude analysis required endless arguments over Gramsci's works. Now a second variant has 'naturally' born.

When the Grenfell fire (14 June 2017) created a movement about how wretched their condition was; the deep inequalities; the total failure and fear of the parliament and the government over Grenfell for weeks; the main features of the cities and the emerging momentum of 'the ordinary people' Grenfell became the leadership of society. Grenfell was a few hundred people. But they led the country and inspired the feelings of millions. In the context of flash-bang social media, of endless political humbug, of unconnected politics, the 'big ordinary' became dominant. This is the hegemony of the new revolution. 

Brexit had elements of it, even to the extent of the final decision on Brexit, which became the right of democracy rather than immigration or the UK's glorious past.  The NHS are about to enter a battle that will, if the rank and file take the lead, do the same. From these concrete, risen moments comes the new revolution. The next step of the revolution is the combining of the new hegemony

New revolutions.

Many political and social organisations are raising their banners for 'revolution'. Even Britain has a part of the picture; from small left organisations and groups, to the BBC that runs a program about post Covid revolutionary change. Nearer the core, from Hong Kong, through to Myanmar, Afghanistan, Sudan, Belarus, Poland, Hungary, Columbia, Senegal, Thailand (against the army and monarchy), Peru, anti-Modi movements in India, actual revolts are emerging. From the West's point of view, there are also numerous direct-actions against governments and states. For example, the Gilet Juanes remain active across local France (while regional voting is very low, including the fascists vote.) Most significantly of all in the West is the conflict against US racist police, the occupation of the US Capitol and the reduction of the franchise across many US states, further reducing non-white suffrage. The US is building up into a genuine insurgency. 

 

By mid-June 2021, 17 US States had provided 28 laws designed to stop black voters. 14 States installed 19 such laws in 2020. The Supreme Court is largely accepting the rights of these laws so far. The Brennan Centre for Justice, based at New York University School of Law, has stated the new laws are 'an unprecedented assault on voting rights' and 'voter suppression effort we have not seen since the likes of Jim Crow.'  

 

The multi-versions of calls for revolutions are not mainly the products of any pandemic. Revolutionary speculation and tentative action are not surprising in current conditions. Particularly in the previously world-dominant West, momentous shifts in both politics and economics have broken-down the post WW2 consensus and thereby the Western domination of the globe. 

 

The West created their supremacy over large parts of the world during centuries - initially via the 'discovery' (read extermination) of the Americas, together with Britain's industrialisation of slavery. The peak of the West's domination was the period from the French Revolution to the British Empire, followed finally by US hegemony across the globe. This was 250 years of the  capitalist-type of politics and economies which defined the West - as the basis of all significant human progress on the planet.

 

But the peak of the West's authority is now over. The West is in relative decline in virtually all aspects of modern civilisation. Progress in all levels of the West are slowing or reversing - most obviously in comparison with the development of the 20th century and the advance of the previously under-developed Far East. 

 

As a result, the politics of the West has become more and more tangled and mangled. Created from the wealth of imperialism, western politicians were often able to absorb the pressure from their own working classes, accepting parties that both bridged demands for reform but which also supported the capitalist status quo. Nations in the West began over decades (albeit reluctantly) to widen their franchises under the force of the working classes and women's demands. (They obviously denied any votes that dealt with the key organisations of wealth - whenever they could.) 

 

Now, the shift of the West's politics is based on its growing global weakness and the bulk of western nations allow no serious reforms whatsoever. The traditional parties for reform have largely disappeared or been broken up. Biden's desperate attempt to re-enact the 'New Deal' is the one, last, shot by the world's largest capitalist country. Biden is trying to make major, if one-off, concessions for the working class, as a means of invigorating the immediate current in the US economic decline (and thereby blocking the emerging prospects of a US proto-fascism.)  

 

Today, the West's main supposedly democratic politics has become a ridiculous show and it is largely treated as such by most of the electorate. Even if voting is high, cynical responses are continually prevalent. Meanwhile the century long extension of the expansion of the franchise is now retracting - in Europe via the economic leadership of the banks led EU - in the US via the recalcitrant States that exclude non-white voters, and in the UK, via new rules that are being legislated against voter-checks as well as curbing protest movements. 

 

Behind the scenes, it was and is the western economic engine, rather than manic politics as such, that is creating the decay. To get to the heart of the matter; from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Century, two enormous, economic forces effectively ran the economic world. The greatest part was the role of Western imperialism. Imperialism decided the economic motion of most of humanity, from world wars, to banks, from the rape of Africa, to the glory of the City of London and the final domination of New York. 

 

The second, and the other more minor economic emergent across the world, was the 1917 and 1947 revolutions. This created a different and independent economic development. This, new and conscious revolutionary step fought against imperialism from 1917 onwards. The toilers' successful struggles in Russia, then later in China, were both independent of imperialism, but rapidly, in turn, the toilers faced a privileged bureaucracy that degenerated, through ‘the Party’ in the USSR and the Army in China. Via the grasp of the ruling bureaucracies, taking away the control of any democratic power of the working classes, a new, self-constructed class of bureaucrats delivered their political domination against their worker's democracy. They further centralised themselves in the immense efforts required in the great wars that came after the revolutions. Nevertheless, the 1917 and 1948 initial breakthroughs, despite their political failures, maintained their resistance from Western Imperialism.   

 

Following the World Wars, the dominant bureaucratic layers in the USSR and China defended themselves by blocking any further control of Western international imperialism in their own countries. But, increasingly, the bureaucracies tried to gain concessions from Western imperialism around their parts of the world - given that in their own countries' their control would be able to continue. The result of this so called 'peaceful co-existence' ultimately led to the contradiction and the crash of the Soviet Union - a collapse without any direct western intervention as such - and which now once more shakes the paradox of China's state capitalism, whose contradictions and power are rapidly facing the break-up of globalisation. 

 

The US ruling class, led by both Trump and Biden, demand the reduction of Chinese development. Unlike the decay of the UK vis a vis the USA, the US ‘will not gently go into that night’ when it comes to the Chinese leadership's further development. Why? Because ultimately Chinese state capitalism, despite its immense 'success', is not led by capitalism! It is led by the politics of the Chinese bureaucracy and its formidable Chinese Army.    

 

The West maintains a continuing difficulty with its declining global domination, both economically and politically. Imperialism is weaker now since any time of its history. The defeat of the 20-year war in Afghanistan is yet another proof. In China in particular, the second greatest capitalist economic system in the world, is still controlled by a bureaucratic, state-capitalist state, designed to increase development, but outside of the West's so-called world-wide free-market and competition. The overall global acceptance of this clearly incoherent economic and political process, which promoted the world into globalisation, is already a ten-year capitalist project that is failing - mired by the mass of its own contradictions.

 

This increasingly dramatic background produces speculative arguments about change rising across the globe. (One evidence is the list of unsettled countries mentioned at the beginning of this essay.) In the West there is clearly a disequilibrium in respect of institutions that were previously accepted for decades as solid and successful. Meanwhile, again across the world, there is very little positive sense among the majority that the future will improve, especially among youth. Social polls and surveys constantly tell us tell us that large parts of developed countries see the old order as corrupted and failing in their goals. But this itself is not revolution. These are only the beginnings of conditions for revolution.

 

The difficulties that the working class and youth face in most of the world's countries are the growing pressures that increasingly limit the possibility of achieving reasonable lives. Revolution only begins when these social layers and their allies identify the politics and economics that are creating the barriers to the lives they need and seek. Work, including the absence of work, pinpoints social exploitation. But this is still only one of the new conditions necessary for the next wave of revolutions. 

 

Taking one example; the UK’s working class, particularly the youth, is almost entirely organised in service industries and mainly paid by the minimum wage. The public sector comes second, but is highly ranked and ‘professionalised.’ Both sectors have little or no trade union support. A large number of older workers, especially in house-building (and a significant sector of youth working particularly on internet arrangements) have been broken down into a more traditional petit bourgeoise condition – where ‘single’ labour is personalised, without legal conditions, and personal ownership, not collective bargaining, is seen as more beneficial. The current political implications in the UK include significant parts of the re-creation of the traditional political parties – where immediate responses as with immigration, Brexit or Grenfell or pork-barrel local offers, become the superior questions. And state politics reflects or sets up rapidly developed leaderships, based on immediate, dominant issues, often repeated by fascists today.   

 

More widely, social exploitation is also identified by the millennia of women's lives and of racism, now deepened by the enormity of current capitalism, but which were planted in all the stages of human existence, right from the start of thousands of years in all class-based social control. These long-lived horrors of the past (and the present) are now connecting with more immanent crises of the climate. The climate is now an immediate context of destruction and exploitation. And, as with the long-term failures of all the class-based stages of history, climate has now added its own immediate critical decay in what will be seen in the future as the capitalist period, second only to its economic crises. 

 

The first socialist wave must therefore be improved on a much wider base than 1917 or 47. Socialism must be expanded by its second wave; moving beyond mass industrial labour and basic development that remains particularly in China and South East Asia.  

 

What was the first revolution and what is now the new, second revolution? 1917 and 1947 won their development. (And 'development' still remains the most important feature for two thirds of humanity - albeit not necessarily via traditional industry.)  Winning traditional 'development' today, in the conditions of the final and decaying global capitalism, will not work. Copies of Soviet Russia even in the positive period of 1917 - 24, or indeed even now, with the Chinese state capitalism, are frankly far too limited and futile in their scope. 

 

Of course, the tremendous rise of millions out of poverty was led by a unique 'development' in China. And, paradoxically, it would not have taken place without the first stage of revolution, which cornered its own capitalism and used the defeats and weaknesses of Western imperialism. But globalisation is now breaking down. And the Chinese bureaucracy are desperately holding on to their capitalism at the moment of its most contradictions. The Chinese leadership simultaneously ache for western style 'development' in terms of the most modern technology, and at the same time the leading capitalist nation, the US, is determined to reverse China's state-led capitalism. The Chinese leadership has arrived to the climax of its own state development. The question now is war or the next revolution? 

 

The next revolution cannot be about maintaining development alone. It is no longer enough. The fight to come is the fight for a different civilisation. The first revolution turned out to be the battle for development. A halfway battle. The second socialist wave of revolutions needs to challenge and overwhelm our increasingly dangerous decline of capitalism.   

 

What then is the keynote to both accept development for all and to sweep away the rulers and their capitalist systems in the west and the bureaucracies that fought for their own dominations? Sorry. This will not be managed by requiring a new Lenin, with a longer life, or a Trotsky, this time who managed to overthrow a Stalin, or a more painted-up Bolshevik Party, however attractive such answers might feel. The second wave of socialist revolution will need to be much wider. It will need to make a plan that will have to apply the collective watchword, in all the aspects of civilisation, as 'equality.' Equality has to apply from every child's rights to the largest organisations on the planet. The second wave will aim for an end to exploitation, to class rule, to second-rate gender, racism, undistributed wealth, privileged politics, all becoming unacceptable, as equality becomes the condition of all parts of humanity. The second socialist revolutionary wave is the struggle for deep equality, based initially and frontally on the working class and its allies. But the removal of the quivering and increasingly dangerous capitalist system is, obviously, only the first step that will need organised collective development wherever it is necessary and full equality whenever it is possible.

 

In a nutshell a new revolution is not and cannot be a repeat of the revolutionary past and neither can it be described as a set of would-be social democratic demands from an already brutalising state and a more and more hazardous economy. The second wave of revolutions should aim for a different civilisation, where development, as such, is won via equality and where the undoubtedly necessary new states becomes subordinate to equal democracy in all matters.

 

The new state powers in the new revolution (following the unfortunate but almost inevitable clash of war with the core of the old capitalist states’ systems) will be subordinate to the new politics. The new politics will be held by the premier right of all those who agree to support the decisions of collective democracy and who reject the old rules. That could include all 16 plus youth, all toilers that rely on work to live, but also political parties, commissions, and movements. The new democracy will decide all major actions that will be delivered by the state. 

 

The committees of the revolution – open to all who promote the revolution – will defend the new democracy, test the delivery and the implementation the democratic decisions. The order described above, as we begin the new civilisation, will be crucial.

 

But what are these speculations, yet to be created and managed by the second wave of socialism? Are they just a set of fantastical propositions, down even to specific organisations, that amount to unsold and unknown pie-in-the-sky? Perhaps. However, the historical development of the human race has taken definite stages, stages with definable conditions across the millenniums. Great Empires have risen and then have fallen – as technology or climate or limits of growth have changed. In all of these steps involving human development, or its decline, no conscious human understanding has applied itself to the shifts and breaks that have pushed and pulled the sections of the human race as each of the civilisations were gradually built up and then broken down. Humans sought Gods and demons to understand the nature of their world. Even the early dominant capitalist system, that spread across the world from the 16^th onward, was barely understood as such. Indeed, understanding  of general systems of society, made with specific and definite engines that were dominated by ruling classes, economics, politics and wars, were beyond material analysis until the second half of the 19^thcentury. 

 

The first wave of socialism, started by the Paris Commune, which rolled, finally, upto the Vietnam war, was the first effort by human society to define and create a new society. There had been idealistic notions before; from the French Revolution onwards. But the critical shift of the first wave of socialism was to understand class and the material movement that had to be used to overthrow ruling classes. The pivot of capitalism had to be replaced by the rule of the enormous majority of toilers as the democratic leadership of a different society. 

 

The first wave of socialism, as we have seen, became partial and is itself reaching a potentially declining stage. The demand, at all costs, to place first ‘development’ was a partial success – including the retreat of imperialist powers. But using capitalism, led by a state-capitalist bureaucratic class, has now reached the contradiction summed up by China and the US as well as the marginalisation of the big majority of society. As we have seen, ‘peaceful co-existence’ is over. The first wave of socialism was unable to provide for the majority of humanity. It could not move into a new civilisation and the dangers of the decline of capitalism, the breakdown of politics and war, means that the second wave is essential. 

 

To begin the shape of the new revolution we seek blocs - which will bring together all of the parts of work, organisations, active unions, society and politics who demand the end of current danger and decay and who favour equality. Second, we seek circles based in the population that decide what the exploited need action for change and the measures to get it. Third we need referenda on all major state and political decisions, organised equally across society with a state that primarily carries out those decisions.  

 

In summary, that is how the new revolution defines itself. Of course, it is crucial to understand what became of the half-revolutions in 1917 and 1947. They succeeded in fighting back imperialism and they achieved the economic development of their people for a time. But those were revolutions of the most internally violent and oppressive cost. To 'win' development in the face of the violence of imperialism was a great measure for all humanity. But the paradox was that it was the internal, counter revolutionary processes in the evolution of the revolutions, and not just the attacks of the capitalist nations, that destroyed one success in the Soviet Union and now that threatens China. 

 

 

(Note; The conditions and history of both Cuba and Vietnam both have stepped beyond simple development as their focus. The political developments of both those societies need to be studied independently of the Soviet Union and today's China.) 

 

Biden building a new democracy?

President Biden has been defending US democracy. He has to. Trump is about to go to his Summer rallies. QAnon conference speakers, assembling mass audiences, suggest the overthrow of the Biden government on the basis that Trump really won the Presidential Election. States, led by Texas, are cutting the franchise for potentially poor and non-white voters. During 2021 States will be partially voting for the Senate (currently held by the Democrats by one vote) and the House of Representatives. 

The US has a well known history of Democrats and Republicans mounting filibusters and meddling with  votes. The particular significance in today's case is that Biden's Democrats have no intention of fiddling the vote - as an organised purpose - but the Republicans, including nearly all of its leadership, are designing exactly that. The GOP proposes to drop democratic measures and instead has decided to create a new(ish) political formation - mainly independent of the norms of US democratic consent. 

If the GOP break into a Senate majority this year it will freeze Biden and extend the polarisation that has been building since the huge failures of Clinton, Bush and Obama. In reality the US right-wing, bolstered by key states, are moving towards the subordination of the US's shaky democracy in favour of a virtual dictatorship and, if resisted, to a version of another civil war. 

The reduction of the franchise is now a regular feature of Western's dwindling democracies. Frankly it is a response to what was becoming dangerous possibilities, where key structures that managed big economics (and therefore politics) were breaking down. The EU and its response to the 2008 crash began to dissolve its domination, which is still happening. Britain cracked via a democratic referendum. It is still now wobbling from its previous core foundations - the EU dependancy, the City of London and the unity of the UK are all in trouble. 

The crisis of globalisation and its effects began initially to move movements in the West in order to demand blocking immigration. This has polarised too. Over three or four years, most particularly in Germany, France, the UK and even now the US, the fear of immigration has declined, becoming instead a hard-line minority social base in the population, but considerably lower than the main, majority demands. The top requirements now are seeking good jobs, health, homes and schools, all below immigration. 

The requirement to use democratic means has never been more essential, as the post-war West collapses under pressure of the East and of the fragility of globalisation. But what has happened is the leaderships in the West are becoming less and less willing to use what was always limited, democratic responses to the crisis.  Several western countries are now are reducing their franchises - which from the 1930s onward had always been expanding. Police measures are being prepared to block public mass-action. The end of Covid 19 will test the real relation of forces in the West as the people come onto their streets for reform. This, in turn, will test the Trumpet cult in the US, the fascists across France, Italy and the UK. Sadly, but essentially to understand, the battle will become more and more combined with direct parts of the state - that is, if popular change appears to break through. 

A new democracy? A new democracy will not emerge from any aspect of the current conditions available in the West - as the western countries continue to reduce democratic means to deal with their crises. Corbyn was blocked, to pieces; now Biden faces the US right. The situation remains open. Two certainties will apply. There will be conflict across the West. Some will want it to be a confrontation with China, others, part two of the US civil war. The battle in the UK will be initially the future of Ireland and Scotland. Europe is disaggregating in various directions. A second certainty will be facing an economy that doesn't work any more. It will be the most dangerous and most international moment in the history of modern capitalism.  

 

Friday, 28 May 2021

The decline of Western democracy. 

Recently in Britain a self-centred, would-be political genius, Dominic Cummings, denounced the Health Secretary for his lies and for both Secretary Hancock and the Prime Minister, Johnson, for their mistakes that meant 'tens of thousands' had died unnecessarily in the Covid 19 pandemic. Cummings had run the Brexit campaign, which brought Johnson and the Tories roaring into government and placed himself, for a month or two, as the guru of British politics. The guru rapidly discovered his plummeting fate. Johnson had fitted up his own holy man - himself. The 'political genius' therefore finally decided to become a rich(er) nobody - for now. Funny, if it was not so dangerous.

Here is another advisor. This one, Paul Krugman, is, unlike Cummins, the genuine article. He won the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics. He is a sustained 'New Keynesian' economist and supports Biden so far. A few days ago he published 'The banality of democratic collapse' in the New York Times. 

Cummings attacked Hancock as a complete disaster and Johnson as an 'unfit Prime Minister'. That was the main issue for the media. More interesting was Cummings's version of the three failures of the state and government that he also proscribed in his 7 hour prattle to a Parliamentary Committee. The failures were -  not accepting outside genii to run things; basing a government in peril because of its chopped up parts that ran separately under the civil servants; - and allowing the single horror of the PM to have the power to decide everything. (Both Johnson and Corbyn were called 'donkeys controlling lions'.)

Cummings sees the weakness and errors of Britain's state and government from the platform of his own brilliance (now swept away) and the dominating bureaucracy (which also stood in his way.) His main reform in answer to Britain's crisis was to set up combined leadership groups, led by a scintillated leader like himself (not elected) to 'get it done', managing the organisation over everybody's head!  

Krugman's essay offered a quite different study of western politics in the US. The incipient role of the Good Old Party, the (new) Republicans in particular, were dismantled and explained as a warning in respect of the US democracy. 

Essentially, Krugman exposed the new Republican Party as a turning point in the US. The example of this turn was the continued maintenance of Trump's central role, not just among a public layer but in the continuing leadership of the Republican Party. That leadership now overwhelmingly supports Trump's political direction, and, most significantly, the obviously hysterical notion of the so-called theft of Trump's presidential vote. It is patently obvious that the vote was not 'faked'. Yet all of the major leaders of the GOP maintain the fake. This amounts to a clear shift in the US's party structures.

The Democratic Party remains a coalition of various parts of the US (no doubt mostly directed by New York and the West Coast wealth). The GOP also retains parts of the US's capital and wealth but is doing something new. It is continuing to build a cult. And the cult subordinates the (albeit dubious) public democracy up to now in order to fuse together a permanent social block, based on racism and patriotism. The block will undoubtedly be manipulated. Today it is the fantasy horror of the Democrat's socialism. Yesterday over 40 states already reduced the franchise under the screen of 'sly immigrants' and criminal, read African-Americans. Tomorrow something else. Texas has just destroyed abortion tights. These initiatives flow into the cultist construction, setting up the 'Good Old' America that will be run by the GOP. 

What is this? It is the systemic narrowing of what previously stood for western democracy. Of course the developed West has never actually used democracy to manage and run the place. Most of the important decisions rarely found their way via the franchise from the 1920s onwards. Capital determined the flow of decisive politics. Since WW2 certain shibboleths were set up to 'manage' what certainly could not and would not be managed by any western type democracy. In the UK, first Empire, then the City of London coupled with 'there is no alternative' ran the show. In the US, world capitalist domination was promoted with anything other than a vote. In Europe, the EU and the German Banks decided europeans' fates. 

But here is today's paradox. Even Cumming senses something shifting about what Covid 19 and the new type of PM that now, apparently, stands for britishness. Krugman spells out that the republican leadership, half of republican America, are openly deciding to dump even their dubious democracy in the US, in favour of changing their main political machine. 

The paradox in the so-called democratic West is that the West has discovered that it is now that it has to find a real role in the new decade for their parliaments and senates. Global capitalism is faltering. And if the parliament and senates cannot be seriously controlled, a la Trump or the EU, then they will need to be replaced. We see the fringes of that across Eastern Europe, in Macron's mini Napoleonic domination, the shift of the British Tory Party, plus the new set of curbs on voters and the increased police powers against real democratic, public, action. One way or another states in the West will have to recoup in the fading light of international capitalism and the global successes of the past. And accept their previously carefully managed democracies, which are under greater strain than anytime since the revolutions in the early 20th Century. 

The direction is clear for the West's apparent democracy. As globalisation subsides so state measures will be needed to maintain economics via politics. If the politics do not work, what democracy remains will be shaved, dictator by dictator, to the bone. The alternative is a deep and real democracy, starting with the economy we need and want.   

The greatest political crisis

Andrew Marr was the political Editor of the BBC from 2000 to 2005. He is now running his own Sunday morning show. He is well known in the UK media but most people of course will have never heard of him. But he does have a significant role in the political world of the UK, so when when he hinted about his own views it is worth a look. When he was asked at first Marr restrained himself. 

"I cannot tell you now because I will lose my job." 

But then he did offer a general, wider perspective of his judgement of future politics. He commented in an interview with Ruth Wishart in the Glasgow Aye Write Book Festival -  

"At some point I want to get out." This is not all he said. "What I would say safely is that I think we are going to go through a period of politics - the next 20 years - much more turbulent and much more interesting and testing and challenging that anything we have seen in the last 10 years, which has been big enough." This blog agrees with that view. But Marr's predictions are countered by a big majority of modern prophets, at least in the West, who see the future as 'getting better all the time'. Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, particularly those anchored in the main universities, at the top of corporations etc., claim the future is mainly bright. So we look at some of the biggest potential milestones that suggest Marr's more dubious and turbulent future. 

Consider war.

There are great conjunctions that generally criss-cross the world. In no particular order, and accepting the interconnection between and across all of these suggestions, we start with the most dangerous - the place of modern wars.

Right away there is a legion of pundits that promote denials about modern wars. Compared with the 20th century they argue that, so far, wars have been smaller and less deadly. Look, they say, humanity is becoming more sensible and less-accepting of war. The world is getting less violent. Hmm.

Oneearthfuture.org is a public US organisation that exists to oppose war. It has studied the measure of the relative comparisons of wars in recent centuries. It is well known and its particular focus is not aligned in any political direction. Recently, an OEF study was published, 'Is there really evidence for a decline of War?' The significance of this publication was an inclusion of sizes of population that was first taken into account in the number of battle deaths. The limit of the analysis was the definition of wars as interstate wars, not including civil wars. The conclusion is presented as follows; 'the last two decades (up to 2020) have indeed been more peaceful than average...On the other hand, the statistical record provides little, if any, evidence that this recent peaceful period represents a long term decline in interstate war.'

A short term absence of the major state to state war, measured for example by WW2 - and its 70 million war deaths, offers several reasons for hesitation among the rulers of big states. The death roll; the impact of atomic war; the refusal of large scale (mainly) working class people in the front lines; all of these seem insoluble - for the moment - in any sort of major state to state conflicts. As a result, virtually all of the state wars since 1945 that have happened were imperialist adventures, most of which have caused immense destruction, made the victim countries worse and barely achieved the large states' goals.

The idea that is generally led by US scholars, believing in a Pax USA, and that are now still hovering on the rather sickly 'End of History' flag, may like to consider that the US is only just now deploying from its longest ever - and its most failing 14 year, Afghanistan war.

And the dangers of war now? Certainly we can drop any idea that humanity has any current power to decide for (or against) war. Sadly, humanity does not get to decide wars. It is people like Trump, with his denunciation of China's plague, that initiate wars.  Indeed, the political rash of wars, that demonstrate, over and over again, that Western imperialism, in particular, constantly loses its imperialist wars (albeit that it often destroys the countries that finally heave the imperialists out) is therefore shifting the new war theories of the generals.  Paradoxically, large states against other large states and civil wars are, once more, preparing future agendas. In the Pentagon, the argument is now about winning a first strike in favour of keeping down the enemy, or a good, old, normal war, together with parallel threats about the nukes. (4315 US nukes now available.)

How has this new shift - preparing a full-on, major state to major state war and civil wars - happening? It is the decline of capitalism-imperialism and the subsequent waning economics of the US that is the present answer. Countries, like Britain, accepted their decline - but only after success in the Napoleonic wars and failure after 2 of the greatest wars in the 20th century. That is why the US is preparing for war.

Consider young people. 

The World Economic Forum spells out the conditions of youth today, across the globe and from the recent past. 42% of all people in the world, including children, are 25 years old or less. 18% of the world's people are 18 years to 25 years old. Nearly half of the world's young live in sub-Sahara, Africa.

In 1995 there were 200 million children in conflict areas, in 66 wars. By 2016, 357 million children were in 52 wars and conflict areas. 

In 2000 there were 377.5 million children in schools. In 2016, 263.0 were in schools.

Between 1997 and 2017 the overall youth population (above 16) grew by 139 million, while the youth labour force shrank by 35 million. 70.9 million were unemployed in 2017 and that is rising.

Despite the decreasing condition for young people, 49% saw Climate Change 39% saw Conflicts and Wars and 31% saw Inequality as their overwhelming problems. 56% disagreed that their countries considered young people's views.

There is little to add, except the growing political anger of the newest generation that, including advanced western countries, are perfectly aware of the reduction of the conditions of life that they are experiencing compared with their parents and carers.  

Consider the planet.

There is now a vast and global effort, led in action by the young, forcing the most meagre steps from the corporations and their politicians, to transform society. Such a global perspective invariably contains a number of perspectives but the increasing argument owns up the real purpose of capitalist economy and its defenders. A new version of how people could and should live is genuinely in front of daily life. It is effecting all aspects of our civilisation.

The obvious failing of the old days of roaring capitalism makes the norms of our politics and economics - our structures - more and more absurd and dangerous. There is (at the moment shielded) a fight for just who will dominate the planet. The sooner the real conditions are fully exposed, the failure and decline of capitalism, the real world wide existence of the 2 thirds who live in medium and low income nations, the danger of war will force direct action. And the realisation that the Earth and its people are the sole life that we will ever see in the universe,  demonstrates the necessity for fateful, structural change will surely break open. 

Consider wealth.

There are dozens of estimates about wealth, with all sorts of caveats. Starting (and finishing) with the Wikipedia, in 2008 1% of adults were estimated to hold 40% of world wealth. But by 2013, 1% of adults were estimated to hold 46% of the world's wealth (and around $18.5 trillion was estimated to be stored in world wide - read mainly UK - tax havens. )

This imbecilic aspect of the 'management' of a declining civilisation shrieks for itself. And the figures are getting worse. 

Consider nations.

The fundamental organisation of human activity is largely determined by classes. But two critical aspects often emerge to cloud out these facts. This is a period, which Andrew Marr has hinted, when exploited classes begin to grip and tear the false aspects offered by the ownership of the rich. The tumult he suspects 'in the next 20 years' is the inkling that the next 20 years is not just going to be quicker, noisier, with a lot of changes but also and in-fact essentially, a bitter struggle between classes. 

The aspects mentioned above include the role of the nation. Nations were truly formed in early capitalism to unify society in a common conception, with shared types of work, with types of income and expenditure, with a new and defining emergence of a specific type of personal wealth. The nation has always evoked itself to battle when lower classes demanded rights.   

But, as we see in the case in the case of Scotland and Northern Ireland, 'nation' can now be appropriated as capitalism's power reduces. In the case of the UK, the US and in some European countries, 'nations' will be part of the rolling struggle between classes - a process of many dimensions - and Mr Marr may yet be right with his 20 year prediction. 

The other vail in the struggle between the classes is that 'there is no alternative!' A nation/ruling class makes that particular syllogism or dialectic sound like a common and collective action and decision made where we are all involved in a shared requirement. In the UK, in France, strangely in the US, in Italy, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands political vails are already partly torn away. The working class have moved to bargains with their politicians. Choices are selected on the basis of key political decisions, not a sense of political commitment with the state. Of course this has both a right and left aspect. But there is little doubt that class choices now feature on the basis that they will not decide simply on prior history. Paradoxically, this begins to reduce the grip of 'nation.' 

Last comment.

Neither of the main social classes are prepared for the destruction of capitalism. But both are prepared for struggle - across a swathe of western countries, in parts of the Middle East, countries in South America, particularly Brazil, in south west Asia and both north and south Africa. 

The milestones mentioned simply give the sense of the new politics but yet its deeply under-developed  background. 

Nevertheless, capitalism, while never having been so wealthy, so apparently universal and claiming the future - it has never been so weak.