Hope and Fear.

Despite the significance of the UK May 7 General Election, which points up the dangers of the political crisis for the country's establishment (see blog 22 April), it is still a moot point whether the majority of the people of Britain have the means to exploit their foes' weaknesses.

A genuine, democratic and socialist model of society is, of course, not an option for the mainstream  majority in this election. Among other things, the conditions for such a choice include a developed political understanding among the majority. Positive political understanding in the working class of Britain has, as a product of major defeats, including in and by the Labour Party, been rolled back since the 1980s. Yet in the modern age all great progressive change requires heightened political consciousness among the mass of the people. When South African apartheid fell, the black majority understood their oppressors better than they understood themselves. Even in the recent Scottish referendum vote, the result and then the continuing enthusiasm and mobilisation of a large, younger and poorer sector of Scots, mainly in and around the SNP, reflects a year long argument in that country and the experience of decades of a democratic deficit.

Socialism is a qualitatively higher ambition. Tremendous change has and does happen very rapidly. But achieving socialism can only result from the conscious act of the majority. It is not available through simply reading books or by luck or through the will of 'great men and women', much as all that might also be required. It comes through deep understanding of society's contradictory forces and its clashing events, and the organisation of the people embedded in that experience, who, through the collective energy released are therefore able to seize on the practise of their own and others' lives as the basis for revealing society's essence and its meaning and its potential alternatives.

Socialism may not be available but anti austerity politics are on offer in the coming UK election. And here lies the question of hope and fear. Because none of Britain's anti-austerity parties offer a coherent image of a world where austerity - and all of its associated conditions - of growing inequality, of the collapse in useful production, of the dominance of finance capital, of endless savage wars, of the fright and horror released by the collapse of underdeveloped counties, of the apparent fragility of the West, are addressed and a confident alternative offered, then voting 'anti austerity, can seem itself a fearful and short term, not to say utopian act. In this context, driven by fear, those who sound most relentlessly defensive will, in the end, and with their reluctance, attract the most support. While the fight for a separate, small, modern, social democratic nation seems, in the context of Scandinavia, a feasible, coherent and therefore hopeful possibility for a considerable proportion of the Scots, such an image is not projected by the Miliband Labour Party. The Labour leadership has no hopeful, new nation, new image, proposition to offer. You vote Labour because you are more frightened by the Tories, that's all. And that is a very weak vantage point. You wonder; if I vote this way will a weak Labour Government mean the big powers who run the world make things worse for me?

Obama called together a huge mass movement before his first election. How did that happen? Because, despite his empty phraseology and his bedrock commitment to the traditional Democratic Party machine and capitalist America, he seemed to represent the real end of slavery; he seemed to speak for the disenfranchised and for a welfare state and for the end of endless wars. People believed he was going to build a new America. And with that country's immense wealth it seemed feasible. In other words he seemed to offer a realistic alternative future. Anti-austerity alone is not a future.

What is available from this election is the platform of credibility and legitimacy that millions of votes for the SNP, for Plaid, for the Greens, for the handful of well known independent anti-austerity candidates, will create for the ongoing struggle against austerity. An outright defeat for the Tories would also help -  by forcing the issue right into the heart of the new Labour led government's day to day prospects of survival, which is by no mean a small matter! Nevertheless, unless the anti-austerity movement in Britain can bring together those voters who made the first step in the direction of hope and away from fear, and begin to enlarge, together with the parties and organisations who fight austerity, on a model of a country and society that looks credible and could be successful and worth a fight, then the gains possible from this election will dissolve.