Where are we now?

Where (from the point of view of engaged and radical leftists) are we now? Many other commentators also ask this question but are careful to avoid mention of their own starting point - which does not mean that their subsequent answers contain a god like neutrality. For they surely have a starting point, and a consequent purpose, but they assume they have universal credentials that are not necessary to identify to the rest of us. They are starting from the defence of the status quo which translates as far as the commentators are concerned into 'basic common sense.'

In fact the period we are now in was opened by three historic shifts. First was the imperialist disaster of the Iraq war and the recognition of the failure of the Afghan war, finally symbolised by the 2010 withdrawal of US forces from combat in Iraq. Second was the international finance crisis of 2008/9 that now deepens into a classic crisis of production, of over-production, and the hyper inflation of stock market values. Third was the so called Arab Spring, which hit the world's headlines first in December 2010, with the revolt in Tunisia, and which has now turned into a new proxy world war. The main aspects of the political and economic world, particularly in the West, are still turning around these events and their aftermath.

In Europe whole populations were polarised by the US led adventure in the Middle East. But unlike the European reaction to the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 70s, the political leadership of Europe and all of the major European parties, most significantly including most of Europe's Social Democrat remnants, supported the US 'War on Terror'. This was most destructive, from a social democratic point of view, for the Labour Party under Blair in the UK. A similar position was also taken by the political leadership and all the mainstream European parties in the case of the responses to the world's financial crisis in 2008 - to this day. And the social bases of the Arab Spring (albeit a different mixture of lower middle class youth and the urban unemployed) coalesced with the middle class and utterly politically-alienated youth in the West that first rose against austerity (alongside the remaining organised bastions of the traditional working class in the case of western Europe.)

The Arab Spring has become its opposite, transformed into the worst of the barbaric wars since 1939/48. The Arab Spring was not able to get to the foundations of inequality, of corruption of military rule, of the state of Israel, of a united, future Arab nation, nor create the social alliances needed to address these issues. Despite the young people's heroism and hope (and the decisive turning point in  Middle East history that their brave actions have opened up) their place has now been taken by mainly reactionary forces, who are now in fierce battle. The Arab East in 2000 was an arrangement made by a century of western imperialism, in the first instance by the UK, then the US. The first phase of the Arab rebellion has been defeated - but the system has been cracked and cannot be put together in the old way (as the recent US treaty with Iran, and the increase in Turkish intervention both demonstrate.) The destabilisation of Pax Americana in the Middle East is permanent. And at least some new and progressive forces, with powerful social and historical roots and a pan Arab perspective, have emerged from the Kurdish diaspora as the direct imperialist grip of the region convulsively and violently unwinds.

The contest in Europe over austerity and now over some of the effects of the West's domination over the Middle east - including the floods of refugees westward, is full on. At the moment, despite the setback in Greece, the main political feature is the continued weakening of the traditional mainstream political and economic institutions in the face of these conflicts and problems. And while the independent working class organisations of Europe continue, after decades of defeat and erosion, to remain structurally weakened, new initiatives and leaderships have brought their remaining nuclei into the battle, to varying degrees and in unique ways in different countries. But the overall qualitative judgement is that a new political trend has emerged across Europe that is at odds with its traditional political institutions, including the party establishment and which is a potentially decisive new turn across the political complexion of the continent; a radicalisation of a new sector of society not seen since the 1960s and 70s.

Are there new strategic implications in the new period?

Yes. It was the great mass of the working class in industrial production seen as the majority of any potentially revolutionary class that was deemed to be the keystone to the success or otherwise of the new revolutions of the 20th century - at least for many socialists across Western Europe and the US. (In Latin America no such shibboleths applied or apply today.) But it is true that in Western Europe over the last thirty years the liquidation of much large scale industrial production had certainly helped to shift qualitatively the balance of power between the main classes.

What is often forgotten is that the greatest and most successful revolutions of the 20th century took place in countries where the industrial working class was in a tiny minority.  And that industrial production did not just fade away in western Europe. Strategic sectors were often attacked in an act of class struggle which was then lost by the working class and their unions. Historically speaking, the Chartists came from a hundred different occupations in villages and cities. The Communards that fought for the 1870 Paris Commune were leather workers and bakers and servants and clerks.

Now the 1980s and 90s and the 2000s are shaken off. The working class in Western Europe is reassembling. It takes on different faces in the different nations - partly dependent on the direction taken by the remaining centres of trade union organisation and their leading role - or lack of it. It is coming blinking, uncertain, trying everything, accepting nothing, even playful, into the light. Where the old rubrics of shared housing, workplaces, communities marked your working class status; where the day to day shared 'social and economic' experience rooted every identity, the new working class, coming from a thousand different occupations and from none, from different communities and ethnic histories, assembles itself primarily politically. It is appalled by its enemy, a political class, which has some power to change things and steadfastly, corruptly, refuses to do anything for the people.  This latest incarnation of the working class sees its day to day life not so much blighted by the factory or the mill (although often by its housing or lack of it) but rather by the grotesque and growing inequality in an (un)shared society, which progressively blights its health, welfare, security and independence.

But the new political current that has emerged from the new working class is not born with all of its required accouterments. While not entirely starting from year zero, and having built significant movements in a series of countries, it has to start again. It has no national political platform of its own. Union organisation (however essential) is a minority condition. It requires new alliances and new ways to present itself to win the leadership first of all the most oppressed and then of the whole of society. The social democratic perspective has collapsed across Europe (and while its divisions and break up can offer some building blocks, trying to reorganise the whole show back into existence would be fruitless.) A radical green perspective and the need for root and branch political and institutional reform are already part of the DNA of this new left. As are new types of activism and communication. But these, by themselves, do not constitute a broad and overarching enough appeal to conquer the mainstream.

The first new strategic idea is the recognition of the emerging working class, with a radical political current, seeking novel ways to present itself in society.

The second is the understanding that over the last 30 years, and excepting the collapse of the USSR, it is only partly European Russia and some of its ex satellites where the rulers have succeeded to establish a 'strong state' in the West's orbit of influence. And the absence of stronger states in key European countries is becoming a difficult matter and creating new and dangerous vulnerabilities for them.

The US based magazine 'Foriegn Policy' has carried a debate for nearly a decade which argues back and forth about the the relative of strength of Western versus Chinese capitalism. Many Western thinkers believe that China's strong state (and not Bush's milksop 'democracy') was the natural co-determinant of a vibrant capitalist economy. In the 1970s and 1980s many (including on the left) in Europe believed that the French, Spanish and Portuguese political revolutions, and the partial political revolution in Italy, proved that the remnants of democratic freedoms would have to be curtailed in modern European countries, in order to marginalise the frightening role of the powerful labour movements, and to reduce the price of labour in face of growing, mainly US, international corporate competition. But the drive towards strong states in the West did not happen.

Instead Europe, with the partial exception of Thatcherism and the UK, decided to create a new multi-state apparatus, thereby bringing the political protection of the planned, competitive, European international corporations outside of the interference of particular nation states, progressively preventing these 'local' states, with their awkward electorates, from influencing the key economic objective of the then European rulers. In practise the distinct European nations including the UK (in Britain's case more because of the role of the City of London) became less and less able to influence the economic trends that their people had to live with. Today, big capital has certainly outlived the nation state, even in the largest countries. But the nation state remains the first manager of the overwhelming majority of peoples' lives. The contradiction between multi-national capital and national governance is now a critical crisis. Where it has always been at breaking point, in the colonial countries, local strong states have always been essential, buttressed if necessary by international war machines. Today in European nations, the economic / political contradiction has reached a crisis but the local states are both unable to interfere with economics (except where it ransacks the nations' people to pay for its mistakes) but nor are they equipped to be able to crush the potential opposition.

The opposition in the West and especially in Europe has emerged. The experience of the nation state on its knees to pay for international Capital's 2008 indigestion created a howl of protest. Already facing large scale alienation from populations that had seen the collapse of any radical choice between the main parties, the realisation emerged among the majority that the national political systems were bankrupt and false and packed with self-seekers. Now the humanitarian crisis at the gates of Europe implies the necessity of national governments driving an international solution - having to start with a complete break from the US's war machine.

Strategically new definitions of political institutions are required that are simultaneously credible as representative of and accountable to the majority of people and which have the power to radically intervene and alter the direction and organisation of big, multi-national capital. On the one hand the relatively weak European states remain vulnerable to big changes in the peoples' political mood being reflected in their elected governments. On the other, these governments have no independent power over economic life. This is the contradiction that has paid such havoc with the initially anti-austerity Syriza government in Greece. Believing that the Greek example is unique, or is not relevant to the larger countries in Europe, is to miss the fundamental point. Relatively weak states in Europe, with open government make formal 'democratic' advances credible and likely. On the other hand such governments will immediately be confronted with their lack of decisive power. And it will be for the new radical movement, in its battles and in its discoveries, to grapple with and to solve that dilemma, both on the national and the international level if it is to win the leadership of society and make its mark on the world.

Next: European federation and the political dichotomies of Pablo Iglesias