What modern fascism means in the West.

Any discussion about modern day western Fascism begins with 'Europe's Faultlines' by Liz Fekete (Verso 2018). The book is a study of the growth and characteristics of the far-right in Europe. It places modern Fascism at the centre of the refugee crisis and fascism's growing osmosis with parts of the European state machines, as well as describing the evolution of a group of political leaders, now in the mainstream, that are promoting so-called nationalist 'solutions'.

In the early 20th century, following the devastation of WW1, the Russian Revolution and the economic and political weakness of many European states, the rise of Fascism was primarily supported by big Capital in Germany, Spain and Italy as a necessary means of destroying indigenous 'Bolshevism'. Yet there is no such a general threat imminent in any western country today. It therefore follows that there is a need to analyse the function of the modern far right - not simply to study its new ideology or its emotional structure - but in its relation to the main classes of society and their dynamics.

The root and growth of today's western fascism lies in the decades of increasing globalisation with its particular point of crisis in the international financial collapse of 2008. Globalisation of capitalism is not new. The Dutch East India company of 1637, with an (adjusted) wealth of $7 trillion, had the same wealth as the combined 20 top companies have today. Capitalism has not broken new frontiers in that regard. But it is modern Imperialism that has changed from its 19th and early 20th century economic structure. (Its military interventions still count for most of the world's wars.) Imperialism was previously based economically on the extraction of raw materials, and first the slavery and then the bonded labour needed to export it to the West. But paradoxically, because of traditional Imperialism's weakness and failure following the Russian revolution, the failures of war after war and the effects of WW2, indigenous development of infrastructure and access to labour, primarily in China and also, by echo, in India - has now provided the new giants of capitalism with vast new markets and much cheaper labour than had been available to them in the West. In the 19th and early 20th century traditional imperialism provided several western countries a significant margin of wealth that could be conceded in the case of the most threatening, even revolutionary, demands of their own working classes. Today's globalisation has increasingly destroyed that margin in most western countries.

This provides the context for the new right in Europe and the USA. (It also suggests the origin of the new band of nationalist 'heroes' who now rule in Russia, Indonesia, Turkey and Brazil.)

What is new about today's great corporations is not their size, nor their wealth, nor their new technology but rather that they have managed to fight their way out of the post WW2 stalemate the western states and their working classes reluctantly accepted, post-1945. Indeed some of the most recent companies have made a merit out of their decision not to pay taxes to nation states (so the greatest carriers of the world's wealth are not allowing these states any concession to popular welfare, education or health - even if those states think they face revolt if they don't.) Instead, the great corporations denounce the power of 'states' as the proper means of human governance. Initially such ideas were presented as an almost theological version of human existence by Steve Jobs et al. The brutal reality became the virtual stop of any financial redistribution in society from the most wealthy. What started as a 'super-democratic' ideology for the world has turned into a day-to-day economic war against the majority.

Today western Fascism and racism are not expanding, nor are they backed by any large corporations, as a result of any generally understood anti-capitalist threat.

The collapse of the previous, limited, agreement between corporations and (the larger, western) states in respect of social welfare has created austerity for the millions. Inevitably, especially in the absence of any powerful, mainstream political alternatives, this fact has begun to engineer a struggle between those millions. There we have it. Modern, western fascism's goal is to energise and enhance the battle between modern working class people, especially among the vast layers of small businesses, the self employed etc etc., as they scrabble for diminishing income, health, pensions and homes. The huge units of production out of which the old labour movement was born, are few and far between. They will remain critical given the collective answers they create when it comes to the battle to win basic resources. But a majority of working class people in the modern private sector in the West are more vulnerable than ever, at least initially, to a competitive version of work and life.

Fascists and racists offer their own explanation, not of the means to end capitalist globalisation, but of the potential day to day race to win security. In their 'theory' human beings are sorted into greater and lesser 'persons' whose claims for basic rights are more or less valid accordingly. So the answer to the state reducing services, diminishing income, increasing want is not collective endeavour to overturn it - but rationing. Rationing on the basis of those who 'deserve' and those who don't. Practically, the fascists and racists help open up the cracks, the alarms, the insecurity in society in order to create their version of top class citizens - as opposed to the rest. And the fascists in particular then go on to organise the state's 'police-of-want.' As the state is constantly shorn of its resources, so its direct domination becomes more physical and so begins the Fascist led para-police and their 'citizen' armies.

These are the current ideas and forces building the new Fascism and racism in the West.

But the transformation of the western working class condition is not, as a whole host of western academics and analysts have been shocked to discover, the same as its dissolution. On the contrary, the working class movement in the West is developing rapidly (most particularly at this moment in the UK and the US) where mass political trends are emerging that challenge an alternative to the effects of globalisation, among women workers across nations against Google's management; against UBER - again across nations. Women also lead in the fight for equal pay, supported by men, in Glasgow through to Hollywood. At the same time and in core industries like Rail in France and Britain, bitter battles continue to be fought, not just for income but against the toll of privatisation.

Under these and other assaults, the fragility of the international corporations begins to show. Their apparent 'detachment' from specific nation states (and the cross-globe Nirvana that they have created for their top executives) can't deal with a social class that challenges its behaviour in particular countries or across them. Indeed, the new capitalist giants have reduced in the West the social power of the very states that were built to maintain their dominance. Meanwhile, as the new, class battles begin, it is more and more clear that the current state machines are unable to parley the finance needed from capitalism's new avant-guard, even to prevent the radicalisation caused by wholesale poverty. On the contrary, strong state 'solutions' are required. It follows that the majority will need to clear out these failing states and organise their own state powers to deal directly and fruitfully with the world's great, poisonous, monopolies and their epic wealth.

The fight for control in Britain

The half-a-million plus demonstration (see BBC October 20) for another 'Peoples' Vote' on Britain's Brexit deal was symbolically led by young people. But behind the symbols, and seeking a pivotal position, is the rapidly evolving creation of a new political leadership. This has spread from major capitalist enterprises, via various ex Prime Ministers, via the Labour London Mayor, via the would-be 'new-party' Labour MPs, via the Scottish National Party and is now propped up by various left trends and liberal strands that imagine they can reform the EU.

Another campaign force is also organising. The Peoples' Assembly is mounting an 'End Broken Britain' campaign around the country. It aims to attach their anti-austerity message wherever possible to the growing number of strikes, other industrial actions and the needful anti-racist and anti-fascist activity. The Peoples' Assembly, in alliance with allies in the unions, among youth and with the base of the Labour Party, might also offer a different path, a united means of breaking out of the crisis.

What crisis?

We are witnessing the accelerating crash of the once, historically revered, stable, British Parliament. Steering the sinking ship is a Tory Party and a Tory leader that are carrying forward more cuts and which are factionally incapable of delivering any sort of pro-people Brexit. The only consistent theme in their mess and muddle is the desperate hope of Tory Prime Minister May that she can somehow hang on. But what she cannot do is win a majority vote in Parliament. In other words, it is the forces within British society at large that have to move now to resolve both of these crises. Any solutions to Britain's deepening poverty (except for the rich) and winning a Brexit that defends the majority, are currently unavailable from Britain's benighted Parliament.

Technically Parliamentary governments are now tied to a 4 year cycle. In reality, Britain's Parliament and its Tory Government are vulnerable on all fronts and could be toppled in an hour. Remember the set-in-stone Thatcher premiership was dumped following the main Poll Tax riots. Pressure from Northern Ireland's (utterly reactionary) Democratic Unionist Party, to vote against the coming budget - or any of its key measures, would be enough to stop the right of government to raise taxes or to use them. May's Tory Party is weakened by its detachment from Britain's ruling class support for the EU (with the partial exception of some key elements in the City of London financial district.) It is weakened by its constant battle for party leadership. And it is desperately weakened by the rise of the Corbyn (and the end of what May called her 'shared values' with the old Labour Party.)

The Tory/Parliament paralysis means that the different classes in society are now having to find the means to resolve the crisis. As the British (not to mention the Western) crisis is profound and deep, albeit coming to very important point of change, such changes open new prospects rather than find instant solutions. The overturn of the current government will be just a start. But it is an essential step to a different type of future in Britain.

What to do?

The Poll Tax rebellion of 1988 - 1991 came out of villages and cities. Old political certainties were dumped as Tory voters right down to self-defined Leninists decided to act to stop a Tory government's 'step too far.' The key here is the broadest possible unity in society of all those who need to fight against the government. And that means bringing together all those who hate austerity AND all those who believe that the Tory's approach to Brexit is against the interest of the people. The current government is producing a tragedy on both of these fronts.

The right-wing Labour MPs who want to re-run the EU referendum, will demand the October 20 demonstration as their property, insisting that a new, opposite referendum to 2017, is the critical issue. In reality they seek a 'new' (old) Labour Party, designed to tune into ruling class interests, sharing May's 'values'. But many of the thousands who marched (and the millions who sympathised) are still to be won - still open to a new type of internationalism, not one defined by the corrupt, corporate creatures that run the EU, AND they still also seek a real and abiding end to austerity.

This is the chance for the Peoples' Assembly. Can it bring this decisive moment together? Can it appeal to the youth who want, overwhelmingly, to vote for Corbyn's Labour and who also seek a deep defence of internationalism, poisoned so far by the Tory Brexit? Can it speak to people across Britain whose lives have been poisoned by poverty, a constant reduction of services and politics that have relentlessly failed them?

A start

This new unity will not be a product of propaganda. The start is action to pull down the Tory government. That is what will immediately focuses the collective attention of leavers, remainers, the youth and the pensioners. That is the alliance that has to be created in Britain. An alliance that denies the ex Prime Ministers, the billionaires and the reconditioned Blairites their moment in the setting sun. Instead bringing the forces together in society that have the resolution to build a socially supportive and hopeful country based on an entirely different internationalism.

A critical moment for Britain

The British Prime Minister, Teresa May, shuffles towards her Brexit deal with the EU (see Blog 28 September. 'The British Prime Minister May will probably agree some half-baked plan from Brussels that supposedly will continue to be discussed after next March.')

Among a series of concessions, May will accept the EU Customs Union - which allows the EU control of all of Britain's trade matters - on a 'temporary basis.' Tory cabinet members are turning themselves in knots trying to define 'temporary' without suggesting a definite ending. But, in the end, everything is temporary. A predictable upheaval in the Tory Party both inside and outside Parliament is now underway (again.) We have apparently reached 44 letters against May, handed over to the ridiculous Tory 1922 Committee, and only 4 more are required for her to have to face election for the leadership of the Party. But May's future is not the key question.

The critical issue for British politics, now, is what is going to happen to the Labour Party.

The British newspaper 'The Independent' published a story on the internet (Sunday 14 October) that, if true, will begin the real destruction of the Labour Party. Here is a selection of quotes from its news.
'Multiple Labour MPs have told the Independent they are prepared to support the Brexit agreement Teresa May hopes to bring back from Brussels, boosting the PM's chances of forcing it through parliament.' ... 'even if, as expected, Jeremy Corbyn orders his party to oppose it.' ... 'at least 15 could rebel against Mr Corbyn ... enough to tip the balance on the Commons in favour of the deal.'

Gareth Snell, MP for Stoke Central, Ruth Smeeth MP, from Stoke North and Carolyn Flint, MP for Don Valley are all mentioned in the article as holding these views.  Other Labour MPs, the Independent continues, are considering abstention.

The Labour Party as a whole, together with its membership, its union affiliates and its MPs, has taken a position at its September conference. Conference voted to reject any Brexit deal without the 6 conditions the Party sees as essential for the well being and rights of the majority of people in Britain. In the (up to now likely) event of the defeat of May's dismal plan in Parliament, Labour would force a General Election against austerity.  If the Tories decided to hang on to prevent a General Election, Labour would then call for a new Peoples' vote, with 'all options on the table'.

If a group of Labour MPs vote for May's EU deal they are breaking from their Party's decision, they are supporting an anti-working class 'deal' with the EU and they are ensuring the continuation of a vicious, pro-austerity government. Why? Because they put their continued presence in Parliament before the desperate need to put an end to the destruction of millions of peoples lives and future. But that goes without saying. More accurately, they will be definitively attacking the working class base of the Labour Party at the precise moment when its potential in society is opening out.

The Labour leadership across Parliament and the unions have systematically sought to bring any working class rebellion back into the system's fold, across the entire history of the Labour Party. What is different today is that the new, working-class base of Labour have broken into Labour's traditional leadership and begun a new movement that potentially challenges capitalism. This is a major political advance in British society. If/when Labour MPs vote for the May's poisonous mess with the EU, they will reverse that process, maintain an austerity government, further dividing the working class on Brexit, sewing nationalist seeds of disorientation as a result - and likely usher in a new radical right wing under Boris Johnston.

The fundamental class division between the the historical base of Labour support and its traditional leadership will then explode. The upheaval will take the form of the Parliamentary disassociation of Labour MPs from the Party's leadership and its new base - create the inherent inability of establishing a Labour government in that context - and thereby dissolve Labour's current formation.

What, as some socialists in the past have asked, is to be done?

The current base and the current leadership of the Labour Party must not be sucked back into the Parliamentary melee that will boil and bluster away in Parliament following the May deal and its Labour defenders. On the contrary; the new and critical Labour forces must sharpen their political edge by rallying the working class - in and across society. Whatever happens, the austerity government must fall. And that means it must be torn down by any and by all means necessary. Leavers and remainers, trade unionists and 'casual' workers, north and south have to be brought together, to regroup, bring down the government and stop the right wing chaos created by the new Tories. Success (or otherwise) will now have to come from society, not from Parliament.  

Force Parliament to call a General Election

This brief blog is not part of the series on modern revolution.

The political crisis in Britain is about to hit its first wall. There are many to come but the six months ahead - ending with Britain's removal from the EU on March 29, 2019 - will begin Britain's political avalanche with a vengeance.

Here is the logic, but not of the Sir Kier Starmer's legalistic variety offered in Liverpool at the Labour Conference.

The British Prime Minister May will probably agree some half-baked plan from Brussels that supposedly will continue to be discussed after next March. (She has ruled out any extension of the EU leave date.) The Labour Party and a couple of dozen Tories cannot do anything but vote against or abstain. That ends May. The gung-ho Tory Brexiteers see this as a positive step to 'no deal' (read no restrictions) and will begin to set up more of their off-shore wealth funds etc.

At this stage Labour will ask for a General Election. But none of the Tories (they are after all in a faction fight and not a class-war with their colleagues) will vote for a new election. And neither will the pumped up DUP who have literally never had it so good. But (sooner rather than later) the Tories WILL seek another sort of election; an election for a new leader. Boris is the only possible candidate to navigate the Tories through the No Deal by March scenario. A couple of Tories will leave. There will be pools of Tory 'remainer' tears. The overwhelming majority of Tory MPs will support Boris (Not to mention the ancient Tory Party members.) A vicious right-wing government will be in the saddle.

Without any Election, this leads Britain to a No Deal war with the EU and the only way to conduct such a war, with the slightest possibility of any success, is the Trump way. Slash business taxes. Open the door to US 'investment'; first in Agriculture then the NHS. Sell anything that can be priced. Tear down any legal limits that restrain the market. Etc.

Consequently, the next political step by the Labour Party cannot centre on an appeal to the British to have a new referendum over Brexit. To appeal to the majority of the British people, and it has to be the majority, led by the working class, it is the fire sale of Britain that has to be stopped. We need a General Election not because we want set up another 48% v 52% vote in reverse over Brexit. A move that can only be supported by half the voting population. No. The Tory led Parliament has to be brought down because they are about to destroy the living standards and conditions of millions - and accelerate the yawning gap between the rich and poor.

Labour MP Laura Smith called for a General Strike to bring the Tories down. She has been ticked off by senior Labour leaders for her well received remarks at the Momentum conference. Laura Smith has the right of it. There IS a big majority in Britain opposed to Johnson and his British version of the Alt Right. But it has to be mobilised. New millions are needed on the streets. Last year's leavers and remainers across the working class and the youth must link arms to break the extreme right domination of what was a hung Parliament. The government must be broken and fall. They are not legitimate. The have to stand down.

This, radical and extensive mass action including mass strike action where possible, is surely the coming test for the Labour Party. They have to break through to a new Election by all means necessary. And they will find that they will have to break through Labour MPs who would rather support the Tories than fight them.  

Is a Corbyn government possible?

(This blog is exclusive. It is not a section of the on-going series on Revolution. The fourth part is shortly to be published.)

The significance of the intensity and length of the 'anti-semitic' charge against Labour in general and its leader Corbyn in particular suggests the obvious point that should Corbyn's Labour win a General election and come into government it would face the greatest and most venomous hostility of any previous British government in the modern age.

This fact alone gives pause for thought regarding suggestions from some of the left that a Corbyn led government, perhaps parallel to Syriza, is actually seeking a new settlement with the country's ruling classes via a meek Brexit and some economic reform! Indeed Corbyn's 2017 Manifesto is a a temperate document. It is not as radical as Attlee's 1945 program. But, despite the nod in a reformist direction offered by Britain's Church of England's Arch Bishop, an ex oil executive, Britain's (remaining) ruling class do not sense that the relation of social forces in society requires even the most gentle reform. On the contrary. They are opposed to Corbyn's Labour Party in order to prevent the current shift to the left in the working class becoming, in anyway, dominant. Indeed, rather than accept a Corbyn government they are doing their best to destroy the Labour Party - at least as a Parliamentary and thereby as a governmental, force. They are much more frightened that a Corbyn government would, whether officially recommended or not, build up a new social tidal-wave, and that is of greater concern than the prospect of big British Capital missing out on a half-baked Labour Brexit. For now.

The attacks on Corbyn's Labour confirm two other realities.

First is the direct appeal to Jewish and now to Black voters not to vote for Corbyn's Labour Party. The 'anti-semitic' row is not an internal battle. The self-styled leaders of the campaign are speaking as far as possible to millions of voters who are a large part of Labour's political base in the country. Their message could not be clearer. Don't vote for the Labour Party led by Corbyn. The (Labour) MP Chuka Umunna has tried to extend the anti-semitic insult to a Labour Party that in his words has become 'institutionally racist.' Umunna hoped this was an abuse designed to move another, much larger, section of the traditional Labour constituency among people of colour.  (Consequently his clever little move has bounced back at him and Umunna has had to scrabble around with letters to his constituents claiming that he has no intention whatsoever of supporting an alternative party to Labour. Apparently he is entirely dedicated to stay with an institutionally racist party.)

Second is the difference between the arguments in the two main parties as we go to an impeding General Election.

The gung-ho Tory Brexiteers held a recent meeting to explain their approach to the Irish conundrum. They were at pains to avoid ex Foreign Secretary Boris Johnston's assault on Prime Minister Teresa May. They insisted that they were not (yet) for a change of Tory leadership. Of course the battle will come over leadership if/when Parliament fails to vote for any Brexit 'solution' - or a General Election is called because that has already become clear. But despite the historic implications of removing Britain from the EU (or fudging it) the fight in the Tory Party is not a class struggle. It is a faction fight within a class about the general interests of that class: whether to turn the UK into the biggest (capitalist) tax haven in the world or join the EU bloc in the (capitalist) fight with the US and Asia.

The fight in the Labour Party is a class struggle. (Albeit by proxy.)  A hundred serious Labour MPs want to break, even from Corbyn's relatively timid Manifesto. Further; if elected they will form their own party in Parliament against Corbyn's Labour and join together with others that seek to defend their version of liberal capitalism and its associated restraints on the working class and their services.

Is a Corbyn government possible? Yes. But the crisis of government is only just beginning. If it wins (as the polls still show it should) Labour (unlike the Tories) will split in Parliament - albeit with the split keeping away from a definite alternative party in the country - for the moment.  A Corbyn Labour government will then depend on two factors. The movement of the working class and its allies across the country mobilising around the the critical requirements that society needs. Unlike President Obama, the mobilisation of the people comes first, not just before, but most importantly after, a formal government takes office. If Corbyn's Labour wins then it is the people who will achieve and force their democratic victory on Parliament. Parliament will have to follow the action of the people in its stalemate.

There will of course be more elections, more crises as Britain's ruling class deepens their already long term investment strike and begins to fiddle around with the new Alt Right as a political 'solution' for 'stability'. And then second aspect emerges in its full and urgent course. It will be nothing less than the building of a new (Labour?) Party  - and a new political system. A system that is willing and able to decide and act on whether decaying and failing capitalism is to be our future rather than a system that takes the economics of the country for granted.

Anti-semitism and Corbyn's Labour Party

Dame Margaret Hodge (Labour MP for the Barking constituency in East London) has just gone beyond her insult, widely reported, that Corbyn was a 'fucking anti-semite' and a racist. She has now decided that the disciplinary procedure of the Labour Party, which was invoked following her public statement about Labour's leader, is comparable to Nazi Germany. Being investigated by the party after her confrontation with Corbyn she said to SKY news that it had made her feel 'like a Jew in Germany in the 1930s.' In fact the Labour Party investigation had been dropped before Dame Margaret made her latest comments.

What is this?

Even if you agree with Corbyn's view that the Labour Party has a small but serious anti-semitic problem, Dame Margaret's view of her world has become more and more bizarre. Whatever might be thought of the various bodies of the Labour Party the idea that they echo Nazi Germany is truly fantastical. Dame Margaret has not only described (part?) of the Labour Party as fascist, she is placing herself as a Jewish victim of fascism. Perhaps her own remarks regarding her own 'victimhood' shed light on how she is thinking;
'On the day that I heard they were going to discipline me and possibly suspend me, I kept thinking: what did it feel to be a Jew in Germany in the 1930s. It felt almost as if they were coming for me.'

Dame Margaret's self-identification with Jews in Nazi Germany maybe touching but it is a dangerous error. The comparison she makes does not show how monstrous and murderous the Labour Party Committees are, rather it belittles the violence and terror created by the Nazis.

More

Now Labour MP Chuka Umunna has decided that the Labour Party is 'institutionally racist.' (14 August.) He said
'The Macpherson Report defined institutional racism as 'the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin.'

'It said this 'can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.'

'Based on its actions (or failure to act), it is beyond doubt that Labour, as an institution, meets these criteria insofar as the Jewish community is concerned – something which should shame every member of our party.'

Macpherson and his Enquiry spent years studying huge amounts of evidence about why the Police, as an organisation, had failed to carry out their duties when faced with the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence.

Umunna does not in any way describe, define, detail or explain the 'collective failure of an organisation', in this case the whole Labour Party, in its 'service to people because' they are Jewish. He undoubtedly wants to scare the Jewish community in Britain away from Corbyn becoming the next Prime Minister. And we could be quite sure that should Umunna take the leadership of the Labour Party the 'institutional anti-semitism of the Labour Party' would apparently dissolve like snow in the summer sun. Again Umunna does not describe the reality of the Labour Party relationship with the UK's Jewish population as a whole, despite his scare tactics, but he does end up diminuishing the weight and significance of Macpherson judgement.

What next?

These wilder and wilder assertions need to be dealt with as they turn the Party into a public laughing/weeping stock. In fact they have to be a turning point for Corbyn's Labour. If nothing else they prevent attention being focused on the most serious racist development in society, in the block being built by the remnants of UKIP, the Alt Right, all headed up by the Tory Party's future candidate for Prime Minister. Enough is enough. It is clearer and clearer that some Labour MPs prefer a continuing Tory government to a Labour Party led by Corbyn. But Labour needs to reorganise away from these MPs and re-centre itself in the battle to get the Tories out.

The leadership of the Party now need to act politically, starting with a statement that the Party is dealing successfully with the small number of members and supporters who expressed anti-semitic views, that the focus of the Party will now be turned on to the deeply serious racist developments in the fringes of the Tory Party, that any future internal tirades by Labour MPs, claiming that the Party and its leadership is anti-semitic, will be rejected without response or argument but will be raised in the MP's constituencies, and that the coming Labour Conference will put a resolution to the vote on these steps.  

Russia and China's' revolutions in the 21st century.

This is part three of an examination the role of revolution in modern and future history.

Introduction

1. The previous two parts of this set of essays (see 15 June and 27 June) were summaries of the character of the May 1968 revolt and its associations - and of the meaning and purpose of socialist revolution in general, in respect of the current disasters breaking out of the Middle East and the Syrian war.

This, the third part, looks at the mighty Russian and Chinese revolutions, not in order to rehash the content of these events, but to start from the point of view of the historical impact of these two revolutions on global politics, economics and the future of our society.

2. Looking from the standpoint of the first two decades of the 21st century it is obvious that the Russian and Chinese revolutions, together with the First and the Second World Wars, were the most significant events in the 20th century. In population terms the two great revolutions of the 20th century directly involved 7% of the globe's population in 1917 and 22% in 1948, without taking into account their international reverberations. World War 1 directly killed and injured 2% of the world's population and WW2, including the Holocaust, directly killed 3% - again without taking into account their world wide impacts. But these mechanical facts alone barely touch the real significance of these events or their intricate and dramatic entanglements with each other.

The essence of the matter, which is the subject of all the pieces in the examination of revolution, is summarised by two scholars who, in the course of their own analysis and, some might say, their apologetics, nevertheless attempted to make a summation of the 20th Century.  One was an American citizen and the other Chinese. Our famous American told us that the end of the 'Cold War' was the 'end of History.' ‎Francis Fukuyama now rejects his own thoughts from 1992 in light of the trauma that History has thrown up since he had them. The truth was, as he studied American international success in 1992, that his nation was already in serious decline and the series of brutal consequences of that fact has subsequently changed his mind. Sadly, in the process of his repudiation, he has lost the little kernel of truth that he had stumbled upon.

3. In the mid 1990s 'Gaobie Geming' (Farewell to Revolution) was published by Li Zehou, a well know Chinese philosopher. He wrote of a deliberate turn from the revolutionary 20th century by China, and the benefits of such a course. (Wang Hui's famous book of 2009 responded. 'The End of the Revolution' argued that the end of 20th century revolution, in the broadest sense, has now created a 'depoliticised political ideology after the revolutionary era' in the thoughts, discussions and the 'common sense' of Chinese political life. Wang Hui challenged that mode of thought, with its substitution of 'development' for politics, as the sole project for society. And, while refusing to 'reopen the 20th century door', began the search for a new, 21st century politics and economics.) Nevertheless, a sense that the international, socialist revolution was a thing of the past - a failed thing in ‎Francis Fukuyama's view - no longer required in Li Zehou's thoughts, was and remains almost a definition of the 20th century past itself. Not wanted, nor successful, nor required for the future.

4. The question posed by these (and many other thinkers) amounts to - has the global revolutionary socialist struggle, a 20th century phenomena, ended? And if it has what, if anything, replaces it? A concerted examination of what the great revolutions of the 20th century have achieved, despite their failures, both in Russia and in China in their own terms, begins to provide an answer to these questions.

1. Russia's revolution.

The great movement of the Russian peasants, soldiers and workers in February and November 1917 undoubtedly changed the whole world, but it was not immediately obvious why. It is true that Russia's population in 1917 amounted to 15% of the entire world's population. But the proportions and demographics of Russia's population were very different from the social developments in western Europe and the USA - where global power lay and from where influence across the globe spread in every direction. Despite an intense drive towards industrialisation, mastered by the Tzar's minister Stolypin, Russia's urban population in 1917 was barely 17 million in number.

The Russian revolution itself was savagely attacked and crippled from the start. The '10 Days That Shook the World' announced by US journalist John Reed, presaged civil war, 17 invader armies and one (British) enemy navy, famine, economic collapse and, within a decade and a half, the emergence of a virtually seemingly unassailable, privileged bureaucracy, that under its Stalinist leader, would go on to jail, torture and murder millions - including the flower of its own party.

Nevertheless the (failed) Russian revolution changed everything; across the whole world and over half a century and mainly for the better.

2. Industrial plans and Stalinism

Following a period when Stalin decided to support Bucharin's 'Socialism at a Snail's pace' in his response to the Communist Party opposition's proposal for planned industrialisation and a new soviet system, he reversed his position. First, the opposition in the Soviet Communist Party was smashed up. Then industrialisation became the great Stalinist drive. (Poor Bucharin was dropped and then killed.) And the drive became an hysterical, utterly ruthless and savage enterprise under the whips of the police and secret service. Millions of peasants died or were killed. The centralised, incoherent and fantasy 5 year plans for economic and industrial progress became a travesty, covered over by a monstrous propaganda machine. The one overriding merit of Stalin's utterly bureaucratic centralisation was to be its role in major infrastructural projects and then - in the creation of one, great, single, direction of the all-out war economy.

It is not just a theoretical error but a huge mistake in practise to believe that because there was a revolutionary opposition to Stalin and to Stalinism in Russia until 1928, and because Stalinism had reversed the politics of the revolution, that the people of the world would be able to see that Russia's revolution was being assaulted from the inside, by its rulers and their apparatus and not any longer from the outside, by foreign armies. Even much later, Stalin's crimes (exposed by Kruschev) were described by communist leaders (particularly in the unharmed West) as the breaking of eggs necessary to create a socialist omelets, and as an essential response to the constant attack of the big capitalist powers. But the reality of the late 1920s and 30s was that it was the Stalinists who were actually breaking up the essence of Russia's 1917 revolution - while not under foreign fire and at the very point where millions across the globe were turning for strength and hope from the memory of the revolution.

The 1929 world economic slump destroyed work and living standards in the West. And the short term memory of the Russian revolution across the West and in societies crushed by imperial power across the globe, was strong enough to prevent another war against the Soviet Union. On the contrary. Many colonial and semi-colonial countries saw Stalin's grab for 'Socialism in one country' as a dramatic answer to the big capitalist nations' barriers to their own development. And even in the West, the popularity of government planning and social investment to deal with the crisis became widespread in the working class.

And then, by the end of the 1930s, the Soviet Union did find itself under foreign attack - from the West. Hitler's Germany launched its legions and the central life and death struggle of WW2, began.

3. The impact of war - and the new life.

When the war in Europe finished lots of allied soldiers from the US, Britain and France sat around camps talking to each other, even going to radical officer's lectures, discussing the new world in the bombsites of Europe. Despite their own troubles and experiences, they were completely aware that the land war in Europe had ultimately been won because of the Russians' (25 million dead) sacrifice. Churchill's antagonism to the USSR and General Patton's war plans against Russia were always pipe dreams. The US and British soldiers would have refused to fight the Russians - and not just from weariness and fear. The dying US President Roosevelt had gone much further. Before the end of the war, and convinced that Britain's imperial avarice had been a key reason for the rise of Hitler, (and seeking US domination) he held a private meeting with Stalin (to Churchill's unspeakable fury). He told Stalin that Britain held back India; that Russia should lead India and the Indian people should 'use the soviet system' that had seemed to work so well getting development going in the USSR!

The existence of the Soviet Union, its triumph against Fascism and its huge, new sovereignty over Eastern Europe amounted to the fundamental global leverage that, together with the organised and determined working class in western European countries, forced the social democratic transformation of a collection of major countries (as opposed to the USA.) And, over two generations, billions have benefited. Indeed it was the collapse of the remnants of the USSR in 1989, despite its long, hollow reality and absence of anything close to socialist practice, that fired the starting gun for the assault still underway today, to roll all those gains in Europe back to the 19th century.

Equally, early revolutionary China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia would not have existed in their relative independence (and in the case of China, Cuba and Vietnam their inroads against capitalism) in the absence of the Soviet Union, despite its hunger for and intensive international activity in, defence of its own 30 year policy of 'Peaceful Co-existence' with capitalism.

4. A brief note - what if?

If the Russian Communist Party opposition had won the fight against the rise of Stalin and the bureaucracy; if the call for the democratic rebirth of the soviet system of government and state; the careful organisation of industrialisation; the honest acceptance that while socialism in one country was impossible, nevertheless serious inroads into the capitalist system were possible and could be won (as with the New Economic Policy in the early 20s); if, if, if. Then the crisis of 1930's capitalism might have ended with a different future. Certainly the battle in Germany could have been won. Certainly Stalin's insane politics over the rise of Fascism, where the social democrats were just another version of the same; where 'after Hitler comes us' was a favourite slogan of the German communists; then the Fascists in Germany could have been defeated in their homeland. And WW2 avoided? The point is not that a better future was possible. Of course it was. The point is that despite all the internal destruction of Russia's revolutionary cause, the revolution still rose powerfully enough through history and among millions to enable the defeat of one of humanity's darkest moments and to lever huge, new, social advances across a Continent - despite its early demise in Russia itself.

1. China's revolution

The greatest political movement in world history so far, the Chinese revolution, has changed the second half, particularly the last quarter, of the 20th century. And however scholars, socialists, activists and analysts care to characterise the Chinese regime and system of society today, the consequences of Chinese revolution are still transforming the globe.

2. The question that Perry Anderson (from New Left Review) asked Wang Hui in 1997.

'How can we explain China's growth?' Anderson asked Wang Hui. Why? Because, according to Wang Hui 'only by simultaneously presenting an analysis of growth that differs from the neo-liberal one can the critiques' (of modern capitalism) 'be true persuasive.' Why is this question and its answer so important? Because millions and millions of peasants and workers have had their lives transformed in the largest and fastest movement of people out of poverty in human history. It starts with some undeniable facts.

3. Some facts - and their implications.

According to the World Bank, more than 500 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty as China's poverty rate fell from 88 % in 1981 to 6.5 % in 2012. This is measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011, using purchasing price showing equivalent items etc. Today, the World Bank estimates, by the same criteria, that China's poverty level is now 2% and 800 million have now been lifted from poverty. China, with 1.415 billion people, has 18.54% of the world's population. China has lifted 57% of its population out of poverty in 37 years thereby reducing the whole world's basic poverty by nearly 10% in that time.

This alone accounts for virtually all of the claims from the UN, international banks, assorted governments and corporations that humanity has been steadily moving out of poverty since the 1980s! It is this fact of China's progress, virtually alone, that is being used to demonstrate the apparent progressive power of the late, global, capitalist system!

4. Unheard arguments in China about progress and development.

Wang Hui analyses the weaknesses of some Chinese thinkers regarding their understanding of China's progress and development. For one he argues, they utterly avoid the historical context of China's apparent 'miracle.' Dismissing the Chinese revolution and all its stages by omission as any sort of engine in China's history, they instead identify the 'development' itself as the critical factor in the tremendous advances that China has made. The unique but combined elements of government development policy and the approach of 'crossing the river by feeling for stones' amount to a combination of reasons that are supposed to explain this unique, world-historic event.

Wang Hui, and others, are at pains to re-assemble and reintegrate China's 20th century history into the more recent story of the dramatic progress that modern China has achieved - but their views are not part of any debate in the constitutional or political agencies and institutions that deal with social and political life in the country. This is, perhaps surprisingly in western political circles, a qualitative shift from the past - in comparison with the real debates previously held inside top echelons (and wider) of the 1970s and 80s Chinese Communist Party. And while Wang Hui spells out significant links between the revolutionary politics of the early parts of China's break from domination by imperialist powers, even he is at pains, at least in the works he has so far published, to insist that the deeds band practice of the revolutionary 20th century cannot answer the problems arising and facing China in its new, 21st century position.

5. But the revolution creates its own reality and it breaks through obstacles

Wang Hui and others make critical arguments against the evolution of the Chinese revolution over its seven decades but also rage against its major enemy; that of western and increasingly US, imperialism. They note the decline and the hollowing out of western democracy. In a sense they see this also as the 'de-politisisation' of the late 20th century and they speculate that 'the debacle of America's military expansionism since 2001 may unite an increasing number of global forces in "de-Americanisation."' (Wang Lui, 'De-politicised politics; from East to West.') And here is the kernel that Fukuyama missed. The failure of the US in its military ventures; its decline in general in relation to the EU and China, with its biggest single downward swing descending in almost exact proportion to China's growth, are not a casual selection of independent world events. They are in reality products of the same process, the same (albeit uneven) shifts in the same social, political and economic forces - and their contradictions - across the world.

China's revolutionary goals were blocked by decades of war, foreign intervention and mass terror from the mid 1900s until 1948. By 1945 the country had been virtually destroyed in order to prevent both a national, anti-imperialist and then a socialist revolution. But unlike the Soviet Union (and China broke from the USSR - at least in respect of its foreign policy in 1954) the Chinese revolution, when it finally struck its decisive blow, was not subsequently directly bombarded from the capitalist world. Despite the Korean war, the end of WW2, nuclear stand off and the desperate poverty and internal problems of China focussed the West's immediate interests elsewhere. Nevertheless, various initiatives like the 'Great Leap Forward', a proto Stalinist industrialisation program, were launched without internal success. The 'Cultural Revolution', designed to break the sterile, unmoving, self- seeking Chinese Communist Party bureaucracy, turned into a bureaucratic elite faction-fight, reconciled only by the imposition of a violent and dictatorial cult. And no dramatic social and economic progress was therefore made internally in China until the 1980s despite the absence of serious western pressure after Korea.

So what changed after Mao's death was not any ideological overthrow of the base-line of China's revolution, but rather a growing, rational, comprehension in the leadership of the vast CCP that the weaknesses of the world's most powerful imperialism, the USA, allowed a new space for a new social and economic mobilisation. The US's failure over Cuba, then over Vietnam allowed an uninhibited experiment to grow in revolutionary China that was started in December 1978 by reformists within the Party, led by Deng Xiaoping.

Economic reforms introducing market principles began in 1978 and were carried out in two stages. The first stage, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, involved the decollectivisation of agriculture, the opening up of the country to some foreign investment, and permission for some entrepreneurs to start businesses. All of this 'New Economic Policy', early Soviet type creation, was displayed under the banner of the Chinese revolution. Most industry remained state-owned. It was this period, and particularly the changes in agriculture and the land which produced the most rapid and the largest reductions of poverty in the story of China's change, without US or western negative intervention of any kind.

The second stage of reform, in the late 1980s and 1990s, involved the privatisation and contracting out of much state-owned industry and the lifting of price controls, protectionist policies, and regulations, although state monopolies in sectors such as banking and petroleum remained. In other words capitalist measures could be taken but still under control by the state and still managed by key state enterprises including banks, energy and communication. It was at this point that the CCP leadership began to resile from China's revolutionary roots, beginning to see the early revolutionary stage as a redundant type of politics, to be replaced by the techniques of 'development.' State capitalism ruled. The revolution had become synonymous with 'politics' which had been replaced by 'development.'

The new lords of the CCP had a deep fear that democratic freedoms might accompany economic 'reform' (a disaster, they thought, in Russia and in Tiananmen Square.) The de-politisisation of China in favour of the watchword of 'development' was, in part, a response to what might have been a new stage in the Chinese revolution. Instead the possibility of such a new democratic stage was snuffed out. Nevertheless and despite the CCP's leadership's ideological rulings it is inconceivable that such a combined economic and social triumph, over decades, in what had been a deeply underdeveloped country, would have been 'allowed' to continue its advance, at liberty, in a capitalist dominated, imperialist world, unless the mastery of the big capitalist powers had not been diminished, among other things, by the initial force and potent memory of the Chinese revolution!

6. China's development transcended Lenin's view of imperialism - but not forever.

Lenin argued that imperialism was the highest stage of the capitalist system. Yet the largest and and one of the most deeply underdeveloped countries in the world has broken capitalism's imperialist stage and developed its own country to compete with the greatest power on earth. Russia achieved that same breakthrough via revolution; as did China itself, but capitalism's highest stage of imperialism has now had its power broken, at least partially, in India, in Brazil and to some extent in other large and medium countries.

The weakness of imperialism, compared with Lenin's experience at the beginning of the 20th century, is a major factor of the 21st century world. And even though the Russian and the Chinese revolutions failed in their own terms - that is to say that these revolutions were unable to win socialist societies, resulting in at immense costs for millions - they nevertheless positively changed the world of the working and peasant classes over the 20th century to a dramatic, albeit as yet unfulfilled, degree. (And now millions of new Chinese workers are already mobilising to challenge the government on wages, conditions, on housing and pensions. China's social unrest today is, and has been since the 1980s, among the highest levels of social unrest, proportionately speaking, of all countries in the world. The revolution - or at least the view that society should be managed for the benefit of all - remains intact in the thinking of the new generation despite the CCP's break from their own origins.)

The broken revolutions of Russia and China still managed to 'break' Lenin's 'highest stage' and maim the social system that runs the planet. And now the capitalist system retrenches. New attacks are being launched in trade wars and military threats, to rectify the limits of imperialist domination. Russia's 1917 revolution has died already. It plays no role in the constant battles between and with the imperialist powers. Now the Chinese people will need to find a new politics for the 21st century right enough. 'Development' will not resolve Trump (and American capital's) trade attack of a $500 million tariff wall. The Chinese people will need to mobilise and will need to recognise again its revolution and bring it back to life in the battle for survival to come. Everything will need to change in Chinese politics, including who holds power. And 'development' will fail to hold the line. De - politicisation will require its opposite; the politicisation of the mass of the people, the return of the revolution.

7. The great (failed) revolutions of the 20th century (which now must contrast with the Cuban success) were bitter battles that might have been won for the benefit of the whole of humanity. But despite their distortions, their corruptions, their vast sacrifices and their defeats, the great revolutions of the 20th century created immense opportunities for the majority classes, initially in western Europe and latterly in what used to be called the 'Third World.' Naturally under capitalism all gains remain insecure, threatened and now menaced. The unfinished business of the 20th century's failed revolutions will become, for the mass of the world's people, the essence of the politics of the 21st.

8. A final word

Politics, the politics of real life, for workers and for all of the toilers of the world, is revolution. Revolution is direct, mass and majority action or actions aimed at removing those who hold power - and replacing them by the sovereignty of the huge majority who do not. By and large the first part of the problem has been addressed pretty well in the 20th century. It is in the latter aspect that it has failed; but, as has been demonstrated, never immediately and not definitively over many years. But in 1968 to '74 the European radicals did not even get to the first stage, a determination to overthrow the existing power, because it was never the focus in the predominant political arguments among workers and the youth in France or in Italy, close in Portugal perhaps, due to the colonial experiences of the Portuguese military, but not in Spain either. Even in the wild days of '68 most of western Europe, especially those aligned to Moscow and even Peking (as was) saw the revolution in the 'democratic West' as a fantasy. Today we might measure how much the vote and Parliaments have taken forward the working class causes in Western Europe since '68 versus the effects of the international corporations, the cartels, the stupendous corruption and the unbelievable distribution of wealth.

Part one of the examination of revolution focused on the critical question of who holds power and why radical movements and actions must keep that question to the fore.

Part two looked at the greatest conundrum in current world politics with the highest prices for people to pay, in the Middle East. In this case (as, sadly, the Arab Spring showed) only a majoritarian revolution can sever the Gordian knot of peoples, races, cultural and religious reaction, special interests all churned and compounded by their imperialist foundations and the constant outside interventions. Again there are organisations and movements that stretch in that direction but without a settled core to their ambitions in the resolution at the heart of a Federated Middle East - a shared state for Israelis and Palestinians. Revolutions of the poor, the peasantry, the semi-employed and the millions in the camps, the soldiers seeking home, the young half-paid faction fighters, women who daily fight for their family and community - from all quarters - need a common starting point for the changes that they separately seek.

Part three made a quick review of the impact of the great Russian and Chinese socialist revolutions of the 20th Century. (Major and successful shifts in the political geology of the century, for example in the Mexican revolution and Ataturk's overthrow of the Ottoman legacy in Turkey, also made huge if partial advances for the peoples and nations involved.) The local failure of these socialist revolutions, however, with all their dire consequences, did not prevent historic shifts in the longer term experience of the subaltern classes in the generations of the class struggle across the globe. Even the failure of these gargantuan efforts and sacrifices helped advance the condition of millions.

Trump's logic breaking down US foreign policy.

In the world of US foreign policy it is a profound mistake to reduce Trump's initiatives to his ego, to his pathological hatred of Obama, to his casual, 'make it up as you go along' speeches, to putting the EU in the same basket as Russia and China in his apparent inability to define friends from foes. The current US president does inflate his own role and his personal success. But that is inevitable when you have a second term to win and yet your foreign policy has to be a definitive, historic retreat.

US foreign policy, like all capitalist led foreign policy, reduces itself to money (read trade) and war. Since 2000 (and some argue the 1980s) the US economy has been declining relative to key competitors across the globe. Taking 2016 figures as the most defined up to now, the largest global export of goods and services came from the EU (14.6€ trillion.) This compared with imports of 2.5€ trillion. The EU exported 16% of the world's goods and services and imported 15%; China exported 17% of the world's goods and services and imported 12%; the US exported 14% of the world's goods and services and imported 18%. In 2016 the US trade deficit of 796.74$ billion was the fifth successive year where the US had to accept the greatest proportionate debt in world trade.

By their calculation, the United States spends more than the next seven countries combined when it comes to military expenditure. That means it spends more than Russia, China, India, France the UK, South Korea and Japan put together. In 2014, the most recent year available, the United States led the world in military spending at $610 billion, marking 34 percent of the world total. Yet it failed and is continuing to fail in two major Middle East and Asian wars - and was unable to shift the course of a third - in Syria. The failure of its conventional fire-power has put nuclear firmly on the military board in the US. Any future US war-mongering will be both decisive and deadly.

The point of these defining facts for US capitalism is that an entirely new foreign policy was called for - actually long before Trump. Obama, with his 'turn to the Pacific' - (read, the construction of the world's greatest military 'cordon sanitaire' in human history around China) - was a significant sign of the times. Now Trump wants to break up the European block, compete 'nation to nation', break up the Chinese/East-Asian block,  make a new alliance, especially with Russia, as the world's second military power and as a vast, backward, militaristic and relatively new-market resource. A US/ Russia pact would be both a leverage against the German-led EU and, Trump hopes, China.

The slide and collapse of the remains of the post-war 'Pax America', in the G7, NATO, the United Nations (and long before, the Bretton Woods agreement, the World Bank and the IMF) is now actively promoted by the US sharks. The militant wing of US capitalism is not getting at the traditional elites in order to benefit the working class, as claimed, it is using them as a political weapon to re-order their social system and re-launch the primacy of the US in much more disordered and chaotic world.

Paradoxically, Trump's initiative has already reinforced two new political and social trends. In the first place Trump has undoubtedly provided a base for the new European and US right that uses racism to build dangerous, nationalist responses which will begin shortly to take on a military edge. But second, the divisions that the new US leadership have made inside the dominant capitalist forces have largely isolated the now old globalising neo-liberal leadership in society. When Hilary Clinton said;
'You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables' she summed up the Liberal elite's view of the working class. And any sense of their possible progressive, internationalist, humane approach collapsed in the bucket. (Blair did something similar in the UK.) The new ruling class divisions are opening up new spaces and opportunities for a working class voice - whose allegiance is now being claimed from all directions but whose sense of independent power and of independent right is growing.

Britain's political crisis deepens.

Britain's traditional political stability is falling apart. Ex Foreign Secretary Captain Boris, is not stepping out of the Tory Cabinet to become a sage in his dotage, commenting only from the edges of Parliament. Once he had checked that his own particular Brutus was in no position to stab him the back for the second time (poor Gove has stayed with Prime Minister May's sinking ship) he made his move. There is not the slightest question but that Mr Johnston will be looking at the first opportunity to destroy Prime Minister May and take the leadership of the Tory Party.

In a recent article (27 June) in the British political magazine 'New Statesman', left journalist Paul Mason laid out a sombre future. His article, 'Ukip’s turn to the alt-right is a warning sign - we need to fight back', spells out the extra-parliamentary, proto-fascist movement that is trying to associate its racist package with working class discontent and the more flamboyant versions of Brexit, now coming under Boris's command.  In his argument Mason lines up Tories, extreme Brexiteers, the large, discontented sections of the working class that voted to leave the EU and the new fascists. But that is simply an unhelpful muddle. Nevertheless, the rise of (new) British fascism, re-equipped by the US far-right weaponry, is definitely one, expanding, response to the general political crisis in Britain - albeit not yet substantially rooted in any of the major social classes in UK society.

The key issue in the here and now is Corbyn's Labour Party.

It has been patently obvious for some years that Britain's political crisis - the inadequacy of the countrys' main political institutions, including the traditional parties, the national divisions in the UK and the overgrown and underpowered Westminster Parliament - will go through as series of stages. And although the Tory Party looks most vulnerable just now, it is the Labour Party that is first going to bear the brunt from Britain's EU dilemma. While a right wing faction of the Tory Party, encouraged by Trump, are facing down most of the big Corporations based in Britain when it comes to Brexit, they are exactly that; a political faction of the ruling class. They want to reorganise capitalism in Britain in new ways. However, when it comes to the Labour Party, we have two distinct and contradictory class contests in its (mainly Parliamentary) ranks. We have a large group of Labour MPs and their apparatus who share exactly the same views as the pro-EU Tories. At the same time we have a smaller group (in Parliament) - larger outside Parliament - who want an across-the-board push against Britain's capitalist system, that want to make inroads against capitalism.

A political faction fight within the ruling class party is very dangerous for the City of London, the big corporations etc. It is already going at least to lead to an early and rancorous General Election. But a class to class battle, potentially led by a Labour Party Prime Minister, is far more dangerous. Of course, were Corbyn to win a General election for Labour, initially big Capital would seek to put all its pressure behind Labour's right-wing, or more accurately its pro-capitalist wing - with some possible left decorations to soothe some of the Corbyn left, under the cosy charm of 'Labour Party unity.' But not only Corbyn, but a huge section of his party will push in the other direction. In office, Labour will not face a factional war, but rather an irreconcilable class war.

Today, the marches and strikes and campaigns are brewing. But it is the crisis of the Labour Party, of a potential Labour government, that will begin to provide the focus and coherence for the battles, great and small, that working class people are waging. And it is then that the relationship between mass action, demonstrations, strikes, mass organisations, ad hoc meetings and conferences, protests, movements and the burgeoning of new hope and a new way of life, will have a platform and will have a sense of its way forward.

This goes way beyond Brexit. None of the versions of Brexit offered thus far, 'soft' or 'hard', deal at all with the critical problems facing millions of working class people. While leaving the EU, because it is one of the barriers to socialist economics and politics makes sense, at the moment the Brexit issue is, like all of the fundamentals of Britain's present society, an issue of this sort of capitalism or that sort of capitalism. The crisis of any new sort of Labour government will require a left leadership that dumps the current Brexit argument, root and branch. For or against the current Brexit as presented in Britain's politics cannot possibly be the axis for any radical change - at least for the millions who work to live. Defending new state industry and building new services, controlling banks and deciding the major new state investments Britain needs will inevitably break through the EU's rules and demands. Brexit is not the answer to anything. Indeed, in the hands of the right it becomes a dangerous, racist, reactionary tool. Brexit must take its place as simply one of the many steps that have to be taken in order to get somewhere else entirely.  

Nothing in history was ever proved to be automatic. For example it is vital not to confuse Brexit as an abstract measure that is somehow good for its own sake. It exists in a context. That context will decide its value or its danger. However, it seems to be common sense that a social class will move most against its conditions if there is a focal point, a binding prospect for change, an opportunity to make progress. In the process the struggle itself creates new visions and turning points - that are not obvious at first. Corbyn's Labour left are not at the end of the process that they might inspire, but the very beginning. The more profound the connection between mass movement and actions in society and Corbyn's Labour left in a government under siege, the more the old Labour Party will break up and dissolve - as traditional politics convulse.

A new stage of Britain's political crisis is underway; a stage which potentially wakes with the thunder of the direct intervention of the working class - first in defence of Corbyn - then in defence of a new type of future.

Syria and the Middle East revolution

This is Part 2 of a longer series on the modern role of revolution.

1. The international destruction and re-creation of Syria

The Syrian war seems to be shuddering to some sort of end, with the Assad regime still in place. Among the West's traditional liberals and among some of the remains of the Syrian 'democratic' forces, the dismal result of the seven years of brutal fighting has happened because the West did not support their natural allies from the outset. This version of history correctly implies a continuing (albeit slow) decline in Western power in the world, but it is blinkered by the reality of the West's (read the USA's) shift in policy, since their slow-motion defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan combined with their savagely corporate version of democracy in those countries.

But the US has not ignored Syria. Right now the US controls and defends most of Syria's oil wealth - as a result of its occupation of Raqqa and it shows its immediate intention to 'monitor' and 'keep the peace' in most of the other north-eastern towns and cities. It is one of the four military powers that now actually run Syria. The US have taken their slice of Syria as a matter of their direct interest - which does not include in any way 'mending' the Syrian nation. That is the great lesson that a cautious Obama and then an 'America First Trump' have learnt from the Iraqi (and the Afghan) farragoes.

The US also intend to limit Turkey, the second military force dividing up Syria. They do not care about the Kurds' future but are happy to use them as cannon fodder if necessary. This is required while Erdogan's Ottoman madness inflates the external threat of a new Kurdistan as a means of holding back his own country's internal decay. Theoretically Turkey now controls an area of over 900 square miles of Syria, including parts of Aleppo and Idlib - where the anti-Assad forces are sent.

Both Hezbollah (funded and armed by Iran) and Putin, the other two foreign powers, are already sending their bills to Assad. Assad is calling the next period of Syria, the policy of reconstruction. One of Assad's new 'reconstruction' laws, law 10, sent out in May, states that Syrians that wish to reclaim their homes and buildings have to show themselves in weeks, with papers proving ownership etc. It is an 'ownership' that frequently means holes in the ground - courtesy of Putin's generals and their military tactics borrowed from the 'Battle' of Grozny in their 10 year war in Chechnya. Otherwise these buildings/spaces and places (covering whole cities and part cities, like Eastern Aleppo) become state property and are to be sold and 'developed' by Russian and Iranian money and companies. Assad has to pay his bills.

The contradiction at the heart of a future Syria is that Assad's state cannot rule without the deadly weakness of direct foreign domination. Osama Kadi, founder and president of the Syrian Economic Task Force states;

'Syria as a centrally managed state no longer exists.'

2. Nation states and the Middle East

The three 'great' nations of Egypt, Turkey and Iran (who between them account for half of the population of the Middle East) have now switched 2 to 3 against US and general western leadership. The intermediate nations (Saudi-Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, just over a collective quarter of the Middle East's population) are either fighting surrogate wars for regional hegemony (see Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as the new paradigm) or, as in the case of Iraq, crawling out of a western military disaster. Finally the smaller group of nations, led by Syria with a nominal population of 18.4 million people, are being progressively sucked into the vacuum created by the impact of western imperialism's 'withdrawal' from its previous whole scale interventions.

This leaves the horrific effects of the crazy, early 20th Century and the 1948 national boundaries, now literally shaking into pieces. It expands the stateless millions who now only have borders, and are without nations, and who are still at war for survival.  (Of the 4.3 million refugees registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, 33% live in UNRWA's 59 refugee camps throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. In 2016, from an estimated pre-war population of 22 million, the UN identified 13.5 million Syrians requiring humanitarian assistance, of which more than 6 million are internally displaced within Syria, and around 5 million are refugees outside of Syria.) It also draws the Israeli nuclear threat to Iran into the frame.

Today Trump and his State Department provide Israel (the 10th in population terms of the 11 ME countries) with $3.1billion per year. Iraq gets $5.3 billion. Egypt gets $1.3 billion-straight to its vast, property-owning military. (Iran has gone into the same game with its military - without the US subsidies.) There are secret bonuses to both Israel's security forces and to Egypt's government. But this is not enough. It is certainly not anything like the West's previous weight. The Middle East rulers have learnt that Syria, a medium sized nation, with an internationally loathed dictator, even one that hates Israel, cannot be toppled (as Iran's leadership was toppled, as Libya's leadership was toppled, as even Iraq's leadership was toppled) by US power. This changes everything.

3. How can the Middle East's people win substantial change?

The key to understanding the dreadful and apparently unresolvable Syrian war is the structural character of the struggle of millions of people in the Middle East. Imperialism from the West has created a jumble of political entities defined by their historical western masters which destroyed any coherence and unity between the Middle East people themselves. Cockpits have periodically emerged and become focused by their artificial sets of country boundaries, recently over-laid by religious definitions, that rarely actually apply to the whole populations in the invented nations. Naturally, under these conditions, it is impossible to establish anything other than savage, dictatorial regimes and repression and impoverishment for the many. The basic needs of the population cannot be resolved in these contexts.

The closest to a 'solution' most recently, was the ISIS claim to establish a Middle East (and then a world) Caliphate. Taking one of the more obnoxious religious strands available, ISIS demanded that everybody adopt its unifying principle. At the same time it proposed a definitive end to Western domination. Its success among Arab youth in the region (and beyond) speaks for itself. ISIS gained their purchase because they were both 'universal' in the Arab cause - a desperate necessity in the crazy jigsaw of the Middle East - and because the West was the 'Great Satan'.

The Arab Spring was another attempt to 'go beyond' the crushing burden of underdevelopment and the seemingly irrepressible logic of dictatorship. It had its greatest advance in Egypt, the most historically coherent and settled 'nation' in the Middle East. But, in part as a result of its westernised social base, it was unable to face the two 'hidden' roadblocks to revolution. ISIS did not analyse the deep anger of the most impoverished and disrespected population of the Arab East, but they mobilised it among the youth. And its lances thrown at the West were publicly popular. What ISIS touched was the need to overthrow the domination of the West, not only in the here and now, in this city or in the Parliament in that country, but in the history, the borders, the use of resources, that the imperialists had set up. The Arab Spring was unable to grasp that reality and could not therefore link itself to the layers in society that felt its historical burden.

Equally the Arab Spring did not address itself to the borders in the Middle East world, of which the 'border' between Israel and a non-existing Palestine is the core.

4. Revolution in the Middle East?



This summary essay, which began with reflections on the French May '68 events (see 15 June), started with the revolution for change being centred around the question of power. The Syrian war and the Arab Spring throw up another key to revolutionary success. And that is the need to define the essential purposes of revolution. To change society by taking power away from the classes that rule to empower the classes that are exploited is essential but abstract. Russian revolutionaries resolved their vision to 'Land, Peace and Bread' - to be gained by 'All Power to the Soviets.'  In the case of the modern Middle East three great fissures in society need to be bridged for any revolution to be successful from whatever geographical point in the region that it first arises.

The modern relationship to imperialism has to be defined at once and all, and it is at the heart of any revolutionary attempt. Revolution will be led in the Middle East by those who seek to unify all the oppressed social layers that have born the burden of relentless poverty, their endless labour for survival - seen as at the margins of society and that is able to throw down the shame created for them by distant centres of power and wealth - as they will need to rise to the future and organise to create the great new changes.

There are already mass organisations across the Middle East that fight imperialist power beyond national boundaries, albeit be it most with deeply reactionary purposes, as in the case of ISIS. This too is a critical matter in the development of the Middle east revolution. There has to be an understanding and a meaningful approach to the fractured and incoherent national structures of the Middle East that are the presiding legacy of imperialism - but the new structure has to welcome all who identify with the need for change - regardless of place, or religion.

From that point of view Hezbollah has gone through some significant developments as its internal contradictions grow. Starting as an international defence force for Shi-ite Iran, Hezbollah, in public statements, has widened its view, making allies beyond the Iranian sectarian approach to the different wings of Islam. It has also reversed the Iranian model in respect to women's rights and even to Marxism! Its signal success against the Israeli intervention in Southern Lebanon makes it the only Middle East force since 1948 to defeat Israeli fire power. At the same time its centre of power remains with the Iranian regime, and Hezbollah is increasing its self-corrupting hooks into ruling circles in Lebanon and now Syria.

The Kurdish battle for a homeland, denied by the imperialist settlement at the beginning of the 20th Century and, latterly, by its 1948 extension in the seizure of Palestine, has remained a radical movement. Its inevitably cross-region perspective and its implementation of highly developed self-organised communities, with consistent efforts to promote women's place at the centre of leadership, remains a guiding star. But the Kurd's struggle for nationhood, in Iraq, in northern Syria and in Turkey cannot, solely, lead the region. It is nevertheless part of the jigsaw that has to be put together to make the Middle East revolution.

At the core of the understanding of 'national liberation' in the Middle East, lies the issue of Israel and Palestine. It will be the key resolution of the first of the many fractures of Middle East life. Indeed millions of Arabs, and others, will not believe in real change without it. The latest (and last) 'solution' proposed and promoted by the West has been 'The Two State Solution.' It is a rank and increasingly desperate failure. Even the US has currently abandoned it. While hundreds of Palestinians are dying for it.

At the heart then of the revolution in the Middle East has to be the recognition of one, combined, Jewish and Palestinian state - recognising both sets of peoples as citizens of a secular nation. New settlements in Palestine, for Arab and Jew. End the old imperial borders; build the new peoples' nations.

These are some of the key elements of the Middle East revolution.

You say you want a revolution ...

Introduction

What follows is the first part of a longer publication. The whole is entitled - 'You say you want a revolution ...' (A line from an old and famous Beatles song). This larger piece is not a polemic against the present social order. Our capitalist dominated, anti-human society is taken as a given. The goal is to analyse the modern potential for successful revolutions.

Many revolutions in modern history (since 1776) have taken decades to reveal their full nature. But all of them are dramatic engines of change. Change and upheaval is at the heart of the matter and it is not technology, nor ideology nor 'great men' who form the centre of these historical whirlwinds, it is the social collisions (including sometimes military collisions) created by mass politics - where politics is understood as the pursuit of power. Political power and who holds it, who seizes it and who controls it becomes the essence of all genuinely revolutionary moments - even given the quick, huge, deep and wide overturn of all aspects of daily life and virtually all the previous 'common sense', in the lives of millions of people who experience these events.

Political leaders who seek change and progress have, over earlier modern times, speculated about and sometimes developed plans for revolutions - but latterly they have mostly tried to guard against them as the results of revolutions rarely ended with their triumph. The 'Founding Fathers' of the United States led a successful revolutionary war against the super-power of the day because the change they wanted could not be achieved without it. Those same 'Fathers' were revolted by the revolution's outcome. The revolution effectively destroyed their would-be 'enlightened aristocracy' and filled the vacuum with a virtually universal race, mainly by white men, to use commerce to build capitalist enterprise across the new continent. In the 30 years after 1776 the domestic US was yanked into a populist, commercial, direction as its continental market exploded and its population expanded exponentially through the decades. (See 'The Radicalism of the American Revolution' Gordon S. Wood., 1991, Vintage Books.)

In China since 1948, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party has, at different times, taken both 'revolutionary' and conservative and roads to 'progress'. Mao acted to achieve drastic social advance twice - by revolutionary means - with the Great Leap Forward and then with his last initiative, the Cultural Revolution, in a China, as he saw it, otherwise hogtied by an imperialist world order. Both failed to reach his goals and latterly narrowed to factional war inside the Chinese Communist Party's bureaucracy. His antecedents reversed Mao's 'revolutionary' policy, seeing dangers for themselves in Mao's approach they therefore organised an opposite, mass (and brutal, as in the suppression of Tienanmen Square) de-politicisation of the Chinese population. It is now presented to the country as a key to the foundation of further progress. (See 'The End of the Revolution', Wang Hui, 2009, Verso.)

While the endless social and political violence of the US and the desperation of vast parts of the semi and under-developed world would imply the relevance and requirement for revolution, Western and Northern Europe are surely in some senses beyond any revolutionary future?  Even Marx in 1871 after the Paris Commune said -
'In England, for instance the way to show political power lies open to the working class. Insurrection would be madness where peaceful agitation would more softly and surely do the work.'
However, in his interview with a New York reporter for 'World' he went on -
'The English middle class has always shown itself willing enough to accept the verdict of the majority so long as it enjoyed the monopoly of the voting power. But mark me, as soon as it finds itself outvoted on what it considers vital questions we shall see here a new slave-owners war'. (This was a reference to the US civil war.)

Despite their immense complexity and uneven character, there is still no sign that modern history has given up on revolutions even, as we shall see - including in the northern and western corners of Europe! Revolution still becomes the key question when mass politics takes to the field. It remains the only mechanism that can really work - when mass politics, politics deciding the big questions of power, politics that, most decisively of all, break the power of the previous order, is needed. It is the foundational argument of this pamphlet - that revolution is at the kernel of all major social progress in modern times, and will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.        

Part one

May '68, what was all that about?

May 68's 50th birthday is now long over! But the French 'eventements' of half a century ago still stir speculation among the left, especially in Western Europe, about what a modern revolution should look like, at least in the fully developed countries. In today's mainstream-media discussions about 1968, the prevailing view seemed to be that as 1968 dwindled away, those who participated - even at a distance (and who are now near enough 68-plus years old themselves) - did not really end up changing much.

Yet, unlike WW1 or 2, or the 1917 Russian Revolution, or the Chinese, the Cuban and the Vietnamese revolutions, there yet seems to be no settled sense of the meaning of '68. Arguments still clash as to whether it was a social and political pinprick in history, whether it opened out a new global wave of women's liberation, whether it marked a new stage in the development of modern youth; created a new culture; initiated a new stage of morality and politics in the West? All these ideas and many others have been thrown into the '68 pot. All this tells us, if it tells us anything at all, is that whatever else '68 was, it was unfinished.

Before laying out yet another overall characterisation of '68 it is worth remembering some of the concrete results of '68 that remain indisputable.

What moved; what changed?

1. De Gaulle fell, albeit in slow motion, but never to return. He had survived and defeated the violent, military-led coup that was aimed at maintaining the French Algerian (and Vietnamese) Empire in the early 1960s, to the point where the Parachutist's Regiment landed at Orly airport and the ministry of War was handing out machine guns to members of the French Communist Party. May '68 was powerful enough to send De Gaulle scuttling away to the French conscript Army stationed on the Rhine. There he read the signals. Big and fast reform was going to be necessary and he would have to leave the stage (hopefully still with the appropriate pomp and ceremony.) France was re-opened, politically.

2. The French rebellion in '68 also shifted the course of the Vietnamese war against the American military machine. The huge western youth movement, in Europe, most aroused in France, opposing the Vietnamese war, started its campaign with two faces. In the US the youth and the black movement called for the American troops to be 'bought home.' And that remained the main slogan of the fight in America - and it was hugely successful. In Europe, headed initially by the large Communist Parties of France and Italy, the slogan was 'Peace in Vietnam.' The Vietnamese leadership were careful in their relations with the European CPs and with the Soviet Union - as Russia provided their weapons, albeit through an eye dropper. But they had no intention of accepting a Korean type peace deal, 'along the 59th parallel', as their military initiatives in the country showed, most determinedly, in a big military move against the US in the South (the Tet offensive) in 1968.

Following the (more political than military) success of the North Vietnamese offensive, after May '68 and the 'hot June' that followed in Italy, the slogan in Europe became 'Victory to - the NLF!' The mass Communist Parties of Europe were no longer able to sustain the peace slogan in Europe (or their leadership of the movement.) The impact of the West's mobilisation now found its most effective combination. In the US the anti-war movement put direct pressure on to the US government - the main protagonist. In Europe the pressure was on the Soviet Union now forced to increase military support, which was decisive through to the end (as was proved in the clear statements made at the time by the Vietnamese leadership themselves).

(In the US, the anti-war sentiment began to coalesce with black resistance and even class identification expressed more and more by leaders like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The US state prepared its counter-revolution to the new radicalism with huge state violence and a tsunami of drugs aimed at the 'Projects' - the US's version of public housing - which is still being fought out today.)

3. In January 1968 Alexander Dubcek was made the First Secretary of the Czech Communist Party. In August the same year Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia and destroyed 'the Prague Spring.' The 1956 Soviet occupation of Hungary, years of 'cold war' and successful social democratic social reforms had already shattered the remains of the post '45 popular sympathy across the Western European working class with the 'Soviet model.' But Dubcek's attempted reform and democratisation of the Communist regime and its destruction in August helped to create an entirely new political current in the rest of Europe based on the rise of the youth rebellion in '68. The young radicals in France who fought the police in the Left Bank, the Vietnam protesters, the student rebellions across Europe - reoriented the socialist left, identifying it closely with Trotsky, anarchism, Luxembourg and other critics of the Soviet and particularly the Stalinist legacy. This current remained a small but significant factor in the shape of Western European politics, particularly with regard to anti-racism, women's liberation and social movements, to this day.  

4. Both before (and even after) the upsurge in France, including the critical factory occupations and the great strike waves in Italy, leading 'thinkers' on both the left and the right, most especially in the Anglo West, had to re-define their previous versions of the working class and labour movement. The most famous of these was the US radical Marcuse, who explained how the traditional worker, even in trade unions, was no longer the radical agent of change under modern conditions. This fell to the alienated and excluded layers in society. A wave of sociologists (see John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood 1963) had 'studied' the 'new' worker and discovered, through 'social scientific' means, that workers were now on a spectrum of an 'instrumental' approach to unions, to political change and to industrial action. Their deeper class attitudes and principles were lost. They aspired to be middle class.

In 1968/9 workers en mass in Northern France and Italy changed all that. 68' turned out to be the beginning of a massive rebellion involving millions of European workers that lasted into the mid 1980s.

But Western Europe's ruling class response to '68 ultimately defined '68.

1. Momentous changes across Western Europe closely followed 'Les Eventements' in '68. And in order to prevent '68 setting the scene for the acute crises in Spain and Portugal and ongoing disorder in Italy, a through and rapid reorganisation of European wide ruling class forces took place. In 1973 the UK, Ireland and Denmark were allowed to join the European Economic Community. The first collective tariff arrangements had already been established; as had the Common Agricultural Policy subsidies for small farmers (deliberately designed to encourage a social counterweight to working class, city based revolt.)

Although both Portugal and Spain applied successfully for EEC membership only in 1977, the nascent European Union developed its first (and perhaps for now its most significant) political/economic interventions in response to the overthrow of the fascist dictator Salasar in Portugal and the collapse of the Franco regime Spain in 1975. In both countries the EEC virtually created the leadership and provided the resources required for mass Social Democratic Parties, designed to dissipate revolutionary fervour in the Hispanic peninsular, with a clear and attractive aim of providing fully developed standards of living in a rapid process of integration into the northern European economy. Huge numbers of small farmers were meanwhile encouraged and then consolidated into the EU project, behind CAP, in Italy, Portugal and Spain.

The initial European revolutionary rectangle in 1974, between Paris, Milan, Barcelona and Oporto gradually imploded in the context created by a new vision of European leadership and better living conditions. (And the epic piles of cash judiciously allocated - creating the beginnings of the monstrous layers of corruption that are now the 'normality of all EU to EU members' operations.)

2. Many of the first socialist revolutionaries in the Russia of the 1920s - 30s, especially those who had been most active in the defence of the Soviet CP in the Leninist period, tried to analyse the class and political character of the Stalinist regime with a view to its overthrow. By the late '30s Trotsky and his followers called for a 'Political Revolution' against the bureaucracy. This 'caste' had to be destroyed and replaced - but this was not in essence to be a social revolution. Much of the Stalinist led society, politics and economy had to be thoroughly reformed, but the fundamental domination by the state over property and capital should remain.

The characterisation of the 1968/9 uprisings, their extensions and consequences throughout Western Europe are also best understood as a political revolution. That is to say revolutionary actions and organisations were built by workers and students but they were not able to overthrow the social system that they sought to defeat. Nevertheless, those revolutionary actions and the classes that led them were used by a new part of the ruling, capitalist class, the first internationalist and globalist elements of that class, to break the prevailing political system. The would-be revolutionaries were not able to substitute the ruling class as a whole by a government and a state which represented the revolutionary classes. As the struggles evolved, so new political forces, still attached to the old ruling class, were able to use the popular revolt as leverage to create new state systems, economic models and 'reform' - even including the creation of whole new mass political parties in some cases. And this was only sporadically and spottily contended by the practical alternative political and social vehicles that were created by the revolt itself.

The political revolutions in 1968 in France, to an extent in 1969 in Northern Italy, profoundly in 1974/5 in Portugal and 1975/7 in Spain are, in that sense, unfinished. Not because the working class and its allies did not rise up, but because they was not able to create their own alternative to the state and economy recreated by the new 'European' ruling class. The capitalist class had not run out of steam. They were able to take hold of the ferment and rebuild their social bases in a different direction.

The next sections of 'You say you want a revolution' will examine:
Syria and the Arab Spring,
Russia in the past and China today and tomorrow,
The US now,
Europe's radical right fringes,
France (again) and Britain, now and soon.

Trump trips over Korea

Trump's claims of triumph over North Korea's 'Rocket Man,' a term much more appropriate to the Commander-in-Chief Trump himself as he accelerates the US's nuclear hardware are, thank goodness, completely the opposite. Trump has fouled up. And the rest of the planet, including Korea, can breath a sigh of relief.

Trump and his coterie believe that he has forced and frightened North Korea's 'Supreme Leader' and his regime into de-nuclearisation. Republican under Bush and ex secretary of state (in charge of US foreign affairs) Condoleezza Rice warns America and Trump that North Korea has previously offered disarmament under the pressure of sanctions. She harbours doubts about the regime, but she still 'salutes' Trump's 'success.'

In reality the US's ultra-bellicose foreign policy has been trumped - by China. Most of the West's politicians have been so mesmorised by Trump's rhetorical and military manoeuvres and their own media's juvenile japes and hysterical fears that they entirely lost sight, if they ever had a serious view, of Korean and East Asian fundamentals.

Kim Jong-un has never ventured out of North Korea since his rise to power in 2011; except for two recent and relatively lengthy, initially secret, trips to China, followed by a short show in South Korea. North Korea depends on China for 80% of its trade. More importantly, during the early 1950's Korean war, an exhausted Red Army lost nearly 200,000 soldiers, nearly 400,000 if the wounded are included. The US broadcaster CNN estimates China's death toll as 600,000.  (Official figures have only recently been issued by China.) They cannot step away.

On April 27 the South Korean President, Moon Jae-in, and Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, made a pledge to formally end the Korean war. Kim has further stated that he meets Trump on June 12 'to denuclearise.' Kim can still mess up in the negotiations to come but Trump has already been ambushed.

The Supreme Leader had to go to China. His breach with the Chinese leadership has to be resolved - for China's sake. Trump threatened nothing less than the re-start of the Korean war, beginning with whatever it took to destroy North Korea's nukes. This was a potential disaster. But once the Supreme Leader was reigned in by the Chinese government, China could take the initiative to organise a big step forward in respect of its own aims for the Korean peninsular.

For its own safety, and to deepen its leadership in South East Asia, China needs the de-nuclearisation of the whole of Korea and the potential removal of the US military from the South. To get anywhere near this China needs to turn the 1953 Korean armistice, which has supplanted any long term peace treaty up to now, into a formal treaty between the two Koreas and their watchful body guards. Such a treaty has to accept the two Koreas as sovereign and independent states (which, in reality, would be the only long term route to any sort of unification in the future.) This would in turn be associated with mutual and binding peace treaties, where besides local disarmament, foreign military intervention would also be (nominally) ruled out.

China, so long as the Supreme Leader keeps to his script, has realigned the cards. Certainly China, North and South Korea and Japan would accept the new position over Korea, a position that US foreign policy has been trying to prevent for 65 years.

And what has Kim got in return from the unwiring and dismantling of his bombs and missiles? He has made a secret treaty with China that he will receive defence, including nuclear defence from China - should North Korea come under military attack (a policy that China would have to have used in any case.)

Trump's bombast (so long as the Supreme Leader can keep his mouth shut) has potentially destroyed a key US bridgehead in its efforts to extend its domination over the Pacific and most importantly, over China.