Britain is the weakest link!

Mainstream, self-styled, 'liberal' capitalism (and its social democrat hangers on) are under tremendous, and what seems in the Anglo-Saxon part of the West at least, terminal pressure, from an anti-global political movement - from the right. Trump is making his mark in the US. Britain has gone right-wing Brexit. Now France has become the next critical cockpit of what still remains a struggle for political leadership in continental Europe between two factions of the ruling class: Merkel versus François Fillon, or conceivably LePen. The Dutch elections on March 15 will give a significant (but not a determining) momentum to the north and west European right. We will begin to know then if the nationally based sections of the ruling class in Europe are really intent on destroying the 'unrooted', as the UK PM charmingly calls the managers of the EU, echoing in her chauvinist way Stalin's deadly epithets against Bolshevik leaders he murdered.

After Syriza's terrible retreat in Greece, it is the new right, particularly in the US and northern Europe that have made political progress - and have been the first to mobilise key sections of a previously quiescent working class with a nationalist and racist interpretation of opposition to globalisation.

Yet it would still be a mistaken and harmful exaggeration to see this as a new, social defeat of the working class as a whole. We are not (yet) rerunning the 1930s. First Brexit, then Trump are best characterised as successes for a new right that emerged out of the deepening political crisis created out of the failure of social democracy, the fragility of the old right, where both were underpinned by the increasing burden of globalisation on the western working class - especially following the 2008 crash. But these conditions have not established permanent political allegiances. Indeed, despite Trump's victory and opinion polling success for British PM May, the main characteristic of the coming year will continue to be rapid political change.  Trump's ratings are the worst for any newly elected President. May is unelected - even by her own party. And huge crises are on the horizon for both. 

Inevitably social upheaval is also on the cards in the West and is building up. (The Economist dubs 2017 as the 'year of revolutions.') And the extreme right are using the prolonged political crisis in the West astutely. But the political crisis in the West has not yet worn itself out. Its (rapid) evolution will, in the end, set the terms of the ensuing social crises (do we overthrow governments or defend them?) but we are not there yet. It has a lot of ground to travel before the political crisis arrives at a full stop.

Although the political fracture of the ruling class in the West has created a new right that is a successful (so far) answer to working class hostility to globalisation, its grip on the future is fragile and tenuous. It does not arrive as a result of any significant social upheaval, and with the exception of Greece, any defeat of a radical left position. The new right is scrabbling to get a political grip on the future as it prepares for social upheaval. In Trump's case it is acting as though there had been such an upheaval already. In that sense the new right is not drawing its real policy objectives from the past, (bring back the 1950s; Make America Great Again) but rather from the future social crisis it is sensing. A lot of birds have to fly up, and many dogs have to howl before there is an earthquake; the future is creating the past. The social base of the political right has yet to be built.              

At least up to the March and May events in Holland and France, the main questions that have to be answered in the West are; can a progressive, active mass movement be built in the US that fights, toe to toe, every order Trump signs to destroy the planet; to overturn abortion laws; to criminalise and expel immigrants; to remove safety and security at work; to make the rich richer? And how can the left in Britain make sure that the coming destruction of the Labour Party will lead to two new mainstream parties and not just one.

Of the two, the British situation is most urgent. It is long understood by most Labour MPs that without Scottish votes and with no real answers to UKIP's appeal in the North of England, Labour is finished as a government party on its own. The collapse of traditional Labour might have waited to the scheduled 2020 General Election, but the political crisis in Britain is  speeding up. The bleak reality now is only the creation of a new, class struggle Labour Party can overturn the political victory that the right have won via Brexit. With the Dutch elections in March and the French elections in May and June, with gathering economic storms and an emergency British election in prospect, Corbyn's leadership of the current Labour Party has months to live, not years. 

Any combination of these events or the arrival of some unforeseen Trump adventure, or even the loss of the Len McLusky's leadership of Britain's biggest union UNITE, will finish British Labour Party 'unity' as it currently exists. The de-facto, already self-organised, centre party of Labour MPs, the mini Liberals and the Tory 'remainers' are aching to regroup in public. They are all aware they need to wait until some shocks and shudders hit the economy to make their move (towards some sort of national coalition government of the great and good.) Most Labour MPs have long lost any serious commitment to the party membership or its nominal leadership. The Corbyn leadership, the Labour Conference, mass movements and key unions need to act first. They need to do nothing less than re-found a new Labour Party based on anti-austerity, repudiation of debt, anti-war and anti-nuke internationalism, free movement of all workers, fair trade not free trade, deep reform of political life and an economy for the people.

The split in the British Labour Party is coming. The question is will it be productive? Will it engender a significant reply to the right's political victories? Will it win the social base and allegiances that, post Brexit, currently stand in the balance?

Note: Next, a look at some global trends for the left

Women in the West and Africa take on Trump

A million women, perhaps millions, marched against misogyny and to maintain key, civil rights, on the day after TV host and three times bankrupt Trump became US President. And so is born both the Trump era - and its antidote.

When half a million women turn out in Washington, tens of thousands in London and thousands in Nairobi - facing down the most powerful man in the world and the vast, international machine that serves him - something very important has happened. The world learns at a stroke the means by which to force Trump into his own defeat. 

All sorts of schemes and plots are bubbling away in Capitol Hill and other capitals to check or reform or threaten or impeach the new President. His strange liking for Putin and his Moscow antics will cause impeachment. His inability to launch a massive government spending plan at the same time as 'massive' tax cuts will be blocked by a republican right in Congress and bring his downfall. And Mrs May will speak firmly to him (especially if he calls her 'my Maggie' as we are told he is given to do!) But none of these optimistic speculations get to the heart of the 45th US President's grip on his power. 

Trump's view is that he has won. To him that means everybody else should follow what he says. In the end the Republican Congress, the media, the establishment, the military, and the US based billionaires who decide things, will make their peace. The official Democratic Party already has (with the exception of John Kerry perhaps). Barring the starting of a war with China - which is now the most dangerous possibility in world politics - see 'The Coming War with China' a John Pilger film on the UK's Channel 4), Trump will be able to enact watered down or spiced up versions of programme. They will undoubtedly produce a succession of mini to large scale crises, but Trump believes and his coterie believe, that he can ride it all.  

His campaign against the public media will continue to pour greater authority into the snake oil news found on the Internet. The billionaires will make more billions from Trump's spending plans, either directly through contracts to build infrastructure or indirectly as the stock market rises. The 'hard men' of the US military are in a state of revengeful, orgasmic bliss as Trump talks of China's 'rape' of America. 

And now comes the women' marches. Women were the first to mobilise in the West against WW1. The suffrage movement in Britain split on the matter, but women's anti-war leadership was a prominent political fact. In the event 1917 and the Russian Revolution brought the US into the war full heartedly and that decided the early outcome. The mobilisation of women in the Glasgow rent strikes prefigured Red Clydeside. Most recently in the UK the anti-nuke / anti war movement, women's mobilisation has been a prominent and leading part of that struggle. Now women have shown the world how to challenge Trump. Only a mass movement of the people, countering Trump's assertion of his own 'mass' following, drains the spurious legitimacy that he claims - regardless of Trump's 20 million Twitter followers. The women who marched have now laid down a challenge to the Western and hopefully the African world. Onto the streets! Onto the streets! We will put an end to the new age of cant! 

What is the real future of Brexit?

UK Prime Minister Teresa May has spelt out the cost of 'controlling' the flow of European migrants into the UK. (It is now surely absurd to continue to imagine that Brexit in the context within which it was spawned had any sort of progressive aspect. Britain's right wing have successfully made the control of immigration the main principle of international relations and that cause is expanding rapidly into the domestic sphere - with loud echoes across the whole of the western world.)

It appears that if the EU does not agree to May's demand for free trade arrangements, under one title or another, then Britain's economic 'model' will be changed. The UK will become a tax haven for major banks, finance houses and corporations and set itself up as an entrepot on the western margin of the European Continent. Buccaneering globalisation would have triumphed in Britain. (May, who was entirely aware of the symbolic impact of making her speech in the same hall as Thatcher used, to announce and praise the single European Market, is now leaping backwards over Thatcher's head to model herself on Elizabeth 1st and her pirates!) Given the fact that Germany and the EU are not going to tear down the rational for their own existence, May's plans are very likely to be initiated, and while they are certainly a serious threat to the EU, the real tragedy is that they would would also be a drastic blow to labour in Britain and internationally.

The UK's large scale and dubious links to tax havens from Jersey to the Cayman Islands now come into their own.

The EU has just refused to accept the US 's ten year efforts to get a Continent to Continent free trade deal. Britain would be a natural place for European exports to find their way, without tariff or regulation, to the US. The EU refused the American deal because the US demanded the right of decision over whether goods were regulated properly, were safe, were legal under both EU and US jurisdictions. But US officials could be based in the new British Hong Kong without oversight. BMW could send their cars there without EU jurisdiction or even build them, in nominal part, in Britain. Big Pharma, the second biggest big Pharma in the world, would deepen mutual ties to their US friends. A British backdoor into the US market would be opened. And that is just dealing with the EU and the international crooks who want to own the NHS. In reality Britain would become the biggest tax haven in the world.

British labour would enter this deregulated paradise too.

To carry the May plan out would involve the crushing of virtually all rights of the organised labour movement and most of the social wage available to the working class. Labour organisation is an anathema to unregulated international Capital. This is not a theory. The proposition has been tested over and over again across the globe in the last quarter century. Second, health and welfare spending is the first target of a strong state that is managing the freedom of Capital. Today the City of London is responsible for £67 billion per year in tax. They are going to have to be bribed to remain in May's new world. May has nothing to bribe them with except reductions in taxes. Privatisation of all social services, based on the cheapest possible labour, has only just begun.

What are the obstacles in the road that May wants the UK to follow?

There are those forces in the working class, in places like London and in countries like Scotland, who already reject the idea that immigration is the cause of low wages and poor services. A great majority of the young are opposed to the right's agenda for Brexit. More widely and crossing the different directions of the referendum vote, organised labour has started up in the 'Gig economy' and partial victories have been won by food deliverers and Uber drivers. Struggles continue across health and education services as well as in transport. A large, effective movement and non sectarian campaign against austerity continues to build mass actions under the leadership of the Peoples Assembly.

 It is clear that the right's still fragile grip on mainstream political leadership (an unelected May, without any popular mandate, who is yet to face major economic crises and political fractiousness in her own party and wider) is not yet, in any sense, a victory over the whole of society. The examples of resistance mentioned are all positive and essential developments in breaking up the fake choices that the referendum posed in Britain (guess what; both 'leave' and 'remain' gives you ... globalisation) and denying the further success of the right in mainstream politics. But the key to the next stage in this struggle is the Labour Party led by Corbyn.

It is still possible to challenge and defeat the right's political advantage achieved by their grip on Brexit and their successful political mobilisation of those worried by immigration. It is certainly true that the focus on immigration as the reason for rationed housing, low paid jobs and declining services has been successful. But a bold Labour leadership could slice that manufactured coalition into much more favourable proportions with a direct, credible 'New Deal' type plan to boost wages and house building and save services. This would isolate real racism in society.

But such measures depend on a laying a course for a class struggle leadership at the heart of British political life. Broad coalitions around such a centre are possible, in relation to a green economy and across an anti-war, anti-nuke, anti-austerity spectrum of political forces. Such political coalitions are essential for the left's political future. In Scotland for example, the political focus is the demands of the people on a genuinely social democratic SNP government, and the direction of travel is a renewed relevance of the national question as at least a transitional answer to May's aspirations.

And it is inevitable that the left's appeal to the working class will also have to drive through the Labour Party itself, particularly its MPs. Many of them will sheer away, either to pursue their ambitions in other spheres or prepare a wretched posse available to the highest bidder should the need for a new 'National Government' emerge out of the coming crises. Nevertheless, a minority force in Parliament, coupled to a mass movement both inside and outside the base of the party would signal the breath of fresh air that the mass of Britain's working class population are desperate to breath. Under such circumstances the initially small political presence in Parliament would be the tip of a social iceberg, with immense weight for the future of the country.

President Trump is crazy. Like a fox?

Jonathan Freedland, a British journalist writing in the Guardian newspaper (14 January) had his article on Trump titled 'Do not treat Donald Trump as if he's a normal president. He's not.' His piece is fairly typical of a lot of liberal, rational, political commentators, and their puzzled hinterland, as he explains to (a no doubt grateful) UK Prime Minister Teresa May that Trump IS a self-absorbed nutcase. May is advised not to try the normal UK slavering subservience to new presidents. Trump is too self serving, too unpredictable to soak up the UK establishment's normal, urgent, peons of praise and adulation offered so generously to every new president. There is no 'instead' offered' by Freedland. He simply seems to suggest Trump is best left seriously alone.

No doubt however Britain's mandarins and Her Majesty will do their usual thing, convinced that the deep traditions of what remains of the British ruling class can overcome the mistakes of foreign electorates and their champions. They are used to looking the other way in the palaces of bling that decorate many London addresses - courtesy of the Russian mafia. The offer of complete, uncritical support with all the baubles looks like an irresistible prize, from the British end of things. 

Which begs the question; who or what is Trump, the politician?

When political systems start to fail huge 'personalities' begin to flourish. They are marked by the conditions of their age of course. Rasputin emerged out of the grotesque mysticism and privilege that had underpinned the Orthodox church for centuries. He adorned the Czar's family as a means of communication with the ocean of peasants who had begun to fall out of their medieval swoon for the landed aristocracy. Father Gapon (a Czarist agent) had already played his role in the 1905 revolt, taking the insurrection to the gates of the 'little father', the Czar, over the heads of the bloated aristocracy (and into the arms of the secret police.)

Mussolini, who made his office into a Parthenon and who turned his lights on through the night, was another showboater who emerged out of WW1 to deal with the fragile, impoverished and novel Italian government on the one hand and the popular revolution on the other. He defined himself (and his movement) as the new Romans, a version of Italy's greatness which implied radical change at the same time as a dictatorial means to rebuild the floundering state while stamping out any genuine working class political alternative. He placed himself between the people and the ruling class and then reorganised the state around himself.

Although both cast a long shadow down the 20th century,  Stalin and Hitler were of a qualitatively different character from each other, and from the examples already described. Stalin was the centre of a counter revolution in the heart of a revolution, the offspring of gathering bureaucracy using murder, state crime and famine as its means of survival. Hitler first constructed and then spearheaded imperialism's most savage military offensive against 20th century revolution as a whole. But both men were more symbols of great historical movements in full flood rather than marking out their own original political territory. Accordingly their political personalities emerge more as poisonous bureaucrats, sitting impervious at the centre of great machines, full of secrets and without charisma.  They have a connection to political crises, one to the collapse of Soviet democracy in the face of war, the other to the collapse of Wiemar and the defeat, both externally and internally, of the German Communist party. But both of them are the prodigy of complete social collapse and political defeat and not simply of a political crisis of the status quo.

Churchill was an outsider as far as the British ruling class was concerned. A poor record in WW1, an unhealthy obsession with the US, a bellicose view of Germany, he was catapulted into office by the collapse of Chamberlain's peace with Hitler. A similar ruling class outsider, General De Gaul, was not so lucky. But both stood against the mainstream as the political leaderships of their respective countries rotted into fear and insignificance. Both saw themselves as saviours of their nations. And both were brought down to their real stature by popular movements that changed the political reference points for decades; (the post war Labour Government in the case of the UK and the impact of 'Les Eventements' in '68 in France.)

Where does Trump stand in all this?

'Drain the swamp', Trump said. In the absence of a mass political movement able to take on the US's political crisis, the crisis that Obama was completely unable to resolve to the left, so enter entrepreneur, TV star, multi-billionaire and showman, the aptly named Trump. He carries all the decorations (including his little bad boy, misogynist antics) of a modern celebrity. But what is sure is that he will not 'drain the swamp.' He will not take big money out of US politics. He will make US politics dance more to the tune of big money.

The Republican extreme right have coalesced around Trump to fill in the huge spaces that he has left on his agenda. They imagine that they will be able to lead him into their particular version of utopia. But it is Trump that has 20 million followers on Twitter in the US. He can speak over the heads of the swamp directly to the people. While he has no intention of draining the swamp, it is completely impossible that Trump will give up his main leverage or the technique he has settled on to apply his influence. The establishment, including the Republican establishment, hate him. He could fail very quickly. But the immediate sword of Damoclese that hangs over history's latest charismatic clown is whether he can release a new, multi-billion dollar investment into the US's domestic future or not. Can he drown everything else out with the sound of cash pouring from the two armed bandit? That would be enough to keep Trump afloat for a couple of years. But something else entirely will need to be built to 'drain the swamp', including the finishing off of the swamp creature, Trump. 

2017 and the future of the left.

The arrival of the New Year 2017 provoked the biggest spate of dramatic projections of possible futures from academics and commentators across the western media, since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was no doubt a result of Brexit and then Trump’s victory in the US. There was the odd gem among the buckets full of clinker. But most of the pundits extended characteristics of recent politics and amplified them. In their minds the future was simply a bigger version of now.

There were a few braver efforts published that attempted to provide a coherent explanation why the western world was evolving in the direction it is. The most imaginative of these was Editor of the Economist, Daniel Franklyn’s theory that the globe has entered into a new stage of capitalism, a second (or third?) ‘Industrial Revolution’, that was drastically reorganising both Capital and Labour. Digital communication, automation and, soon to emerge, artificial intelligence, were all products of this new revolution. As with the previous major shifts in technology, the new capitalism was producing social frictions and political fractures. Millions of traditional workers, especially in the west, were inevitably insecure and uncertain. But like previous periods where new techniques became dominant, it would all get sorted out with a new type of social contract, albeit quite different from the crumbling, traditional version that was now collapsing (and thereby causing all the populist angst so apparent in the west.)

Franklyn’s idea is an attempt to couple up the social and political world with the latest technology, spinning out of globalisation. But his idea is fatally flawed. Leaving aside his presumption that there is obviously a new technology coming out of what he sees as a new stage of capitalism, which is a proof of the endless fruitfulness of this apparently permanent system of society, his assertion that a new social contract between Labour and Capital will gradually evolve out of the new conditions demonstrates the lack of any sense of history. (Or any vision of the fundamental contradictions between the interests of Labour and those of Capital.)

In this year of all years it is surely blindingly obvious that millions of working class people had the most immense battles against Capital across history, from strikes to national liberation struggles, from revolutions to World Wars. Their huge efforts and monumental sacrifices across the globe have forced Capital to offer ‘social contracts’ to defend themselves and their system against Labour’s 100 year tsunami. It is not new technology that attacks the gains that Labour has made in the last century. (And before we are distracted by Twitter and robots that can talk – sort of – technological change between 1900 and 1960 was infinitely faster than the modern period of 1970 to today.) Capital attacks Labour, ceaselessly. The current economic mechanism for that attack is not I phones but the fact that Capital’s largest returns (profits) come from the sale of money and not from production. This is a gigantic machine literally designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.  

At the beginning of 2017 lots of observers rightly commented that a new right is winning political power in the west. In the US and in Britain a recomposed right wing has already taken mainstream political leadership and elections in France and the Netherlands are likely to show an increase in their strength in Europe as a whole.

While this fact throws the working class movement onto the defensive in the west it is not the same as the social defeat of the working class. Trump scored less of the popular vote than Clinton. In Britain the working class vote split, but nearly half the population of the UK, including some of the most progressive centres of the labour and trade union movement (in Scotland, in London etc) voted against the rightwing campaign of the Brexiteers. It is not true, even in the US and in Britain, let alone in Spain, Italy, Germany and even France, that the new right has won the leadership of society.  Key battles are still breaking out based on the social weakness of the new right’s agenda. For example in the UK there is a competition between PM May and the unions as to who is more likely to improve the lot of the ‘Just About Managing’. May makes speeches about raising the standard of life of ordinary people while making no concessions whatsoever. Meanwhile key unions battle for working class conditions, against the ‘gig’ economy, keeping employment, public safety and raising income as government ministers anxiously check to see if they can whip up a public mood for the strangulation of all strikes. The right in Britain does not (yet) lead society.

While social struggles continue, including the right to life movement in defense of black youth in the US, the new right’s grip on mainstream political leadership in insecure. The union action in Britain and the anti racist movement against the police in the US will be the first targets. Racism will be stoked up to divide the working class layers of society in order to isolate the right’s targets. The issue for the political left is first to renew its connections with the working class people in the western societies that are challenging globalisation, in many cases up to now by using political vehicles designed by the new right. But the right’s political leadership is still fragile. In the UK UKIP’s 4 million votes are still open to fluctuation. The left can still win the argument in society by openly recognising the reality of rationed services, housing and the use, by employers, of immigration to reduce wages – and denouncing it all; lock, stock and barrel. Second the left should openly fight any division among working class people in their social struggles as a gift to the rich and the road to a more and more wretched life for all of us. That will isolate the real racists. Thirdly the left should shout out the need for a new political system and the need for an economy that serves the people. Radical change and only radical change will get the attention of an alienated but politically mobilised working class.

In the US, despite his mistake in linking up to the Clinton Foundation, which still has to be worked through, Bernie Sanders offers a lead and others, like the occupy movement seem ready to follow. The situation in the UK is a dramatic paradox.

Britain’s traditional political system is collapsing and the first victim of that collapse is the traditional Labour Party. Even the Fabians now recognise that traditional Labour cannot win a UK general election. The Fabians, naturally, in line with their long history, make the most cautious and feeble recommendations to deal with the problem. The contradiction at the centre of Labour’s future is that as a mass party it is the largest in Europe. But two, entirely distinct class interests are at war in the envelope with the Labour Party address. Only one of those interests can speak to Britain’s working class in the context of the current terms of politics. Only one part of that party is capable of the presenting the bold vision of a totally new democratic politics and an economy for the people. But as the Tristan Hunts (Labour MP) drift off to other establishment sinecures, despairing that Labour will ever be able to provide a solid platform of ministerial advancement to one who is entitled, the left leadership of the party is as quiet at the Fabians and as cautious!

Above all, the left leadership of the Labour Party must lead. But they often lose sight of what it is that they should lead. They imagine that they should lead the Parliamentary Labour Party, if only the MPs would cooperate and settle down and stop lighting fires under Corbyn. The truth is that they have their moment and only their moment. Most Labour MPs will disappear like brother Tristan or fight with fury against their leadership. The left’s moment and its role is to use their opportunity to lead the working class, to use the massive, healthy and renewed base of the party to bring the message of the need to change society to the millions who reject globalisation, the rule of the super rich, the destruction of services and poverty of every day life.

Will the right MPs split the party? In some form or another, probably. But the left’s direct actions, over the heads of the MPs, rallying the conference and the most active unions behind it, could, in the here and now, create a solid political nucleus, with a sizeable caucus of older and newer MPs, at the centre of the biggest mass movement for social, political and economic justice in Britain since the Chartists.