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