Tuesday 23 January 2018

A western catastrophe in the making

A great inspiration could die.

The British people's unique contribution to the conditions of the western working class in the 20th century is on the edge of collapse. The fragile construction of the National Health Service is only sustained by the efforts, self sacrifice and commitment of its 1.7 million workers. The fifth largest employer in the world, the NHS, has been turned into a honey pot for private capital, reorganised to the edge of extinction, starved of funding by successive British governments and has turned front-line working conditions into a war-zone.

The Prime Minister and Health Minister's 'Winter Plan.'

The farcical commentary by the PM and the Health Minister Hunt, who forced himself back into his job, that the NHS had never been so well prepared for the effects of winter, has created an angry explosion of disbelief as national media exposed the truth to all. This state of affairs has a history. In the last 25 years, the only government measure that changed, even reversed the relentless expansion of work and the tighter and tighter rationing of health services to the public in the winter was the brief period in the early 2000s when the Labour government decided to match NHS funding to the EU average. That stopped before 2008. Since 2010, 15,000 beds have been cut in England alone. Again in England £6 billion has been cut from the Social Care budget and there are now 100,000 NHS Social Care and NHS vacancies.

We know the reasons, don't we?

From 2000 to 2011 the number of people over 85 has increased by 40%.  (It is a matter for concern that gains in life expectancy were concentrated between 2005 and 2010, since then life expectancy has improved little for either sex. See 'Age Concern' Report Feb 2017.)  Many NHS managers tell the population that social care is, nevertheless, the great problem. Old people are in Hospitals and should be in care homes. Fix that and the NHS problem goes away. Increased funding for the NHS, yes, but let's also have greater increases in funding for social care system!

Who is that saviour?

Presenting himself as the hero of the hour, it's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnston, who tells every media hack (before mentioning it to the PM) that the Tories should find an extra £5 billion a year from Brexit for the NHS. This is Boris's 'big idea' to stimulate the anxious and stunned Tory faithful, inside and outside Westminster, as health headlines dice the PM's 'Winter Health Plan' into mincemeat. And as Boris is as interested in the health service as the Pope is about children, it might be guessed that as the PM May's leadership slides into the political gutter, it is Boris who could arise and take on Corbyn's Labour Party in an increasingly inevitable early General Election.

What is the real issue here?

Ed Miliband, Labour's failed Prime Minister in the General Election of 2015, criticised himself in a Radio interview for not projecting 'big enough ideas.' (BBC Radio 4 'Today' 23 Jan.) One that he has now chosen is that the funding of the NHS should be ring-fenced. He has not decided what particular chunk of government income would carry that weight. More progressive 'thinkers' have already made proposals, from the restoration of  'National Insurance' to set proportions of the Gross Domestic Product. But all taxes and the GDP go down as well as up. And (currently soft) right wing voices murmur from behind the wall that increasing health and care expenditure could be endless ... Perhaps it is only the market that might resolve this long term dilemma?

Start from the other end.

The reality is that a combination of steps are required to rebuild the NHS. A proportion of GDP and comparison with other developed countries health and care expenditure would be a popular transitional funding measure. But the fundamentals start from the other end of the argument. The Age Concern report (see above) and the Nuffield Trust report (December 2017) reveals astonishing facts. Starting from the health needs of the population they have discovered that the rich in Britain live a decade longer than the poor. Nevertheless, the poor can expect 20 years' more suffering from chronic diseases than the rich. School-aged children from the poorest areas are two and a half times more likely to be admitted to hospital in an emergency for asthma than those in richer areas. And the gap across a wide range of chronic disease in older age (diabetes, dementia, heart-failure etc) has been expanding in the last ten years. In Britain it is poverty that is the driver of the health and care crisis. Just as it was before the NHS was founded.

Don't do nothing; do something; we can win; we have to win!

On Saturday 3 February the Peoples Assembly and 'Health Campaigns Together' (see Dr Louise Irvine on 'You Tube' - NHS Emergency Demonstration.) have launched a mass demonstration, starting at 12pm on Gower Street London WC1. People have to show their anger at the destruction of the greatest institution that the British people, the ordinary people, have ever built. And where else will come the support for those on the front line in this battle? How can the million plus workers in a fundamental service keep their morale, their skills and their faith and hope intact if they do not see that the rest stand with them?  

Tuesday 16 January 2018

The real Brexit bombshell

Whoever ever thought PFI would work?

The decrepit British government's latest struggle is with the Carillion smash - another giant outsourcing junket that threatens jobs and pensions and more than a £ billion of taxpayers money. Among the list of Carillion scandals, as ministers poured more tax money into a collapsing, wealth-creation machine, it is easy to see the company as a metaphor for the whole government's course. And still the British people continue to experience the virtually self-confessed eight year disaster of its government's main policy of austerity - for all except the rich. They watch as the Tory/Ulster Democratic Party produces failure after failure. Social and political anger and contempt is regularly registered in polls as growing. But the particular origins of this insane idea, where government money, social infrastructure and key public services were all to be tied to the spinning lottery-wheel of private capital, belongs to Labour's long-serving Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. His Private Finance Initiative, PFI, launched the initial wave of 500 public/private 'arrangements' amounting to a bill for the public of £250 billion.

Carillion is just the latest.

Teresa May's Tory / Democratic Unionist Party government will be seen in the earliest history books as a calamity. From the latest collapse of the UK's ridiculous 'special relationship' with the US, to the Cabinet de-shuffle, to the National Health Service crisis, they appear to get nothing right. Undoubtedly, Britain is the major weakest link in western capitalism today and its traditional politics are in deep crisis. Only the dread and fear of Corbyn holds the hapless, factional, sack of cats that comprises May's government together. Corbyn calls for the reverse of May and of Brown's drastic PFI experiment, mixing social services with private profit. And the polls show that the British public overwhelmingly support him.

Danger looming

The government has generated a storm as a result of its domino failures. Some critical news in the last week has thereby not received the attention that it might. The turmoil of Tory led Brexit has blown up new political weather system on the horizon and not just one but now two ghosts from the past have loomed into view. Blair, Labour's general in the Iraq war, has already called for a new referendum over Brexit. Now ex United Kingdom Independence Party leader, Farage, has reconstituted himself, as the government's muddle over Brexit becomes more and more critical. He too wants another Brexit referendum. At the same time a legal lightening bolt has clarified how the Tory's broken down Brexit will certainly come to a bitter end by March 2019 (if the government has not already collapsed.)

Lawyers talk

The legal opinion of Lord (John) Kerr, the leading UK former diplomat who designed the part of the treaty that allows countries to withdraw from the EU, Article 50, stated that the UK retained its option of withdrawing its notice to leave the EU. He argued that May can rescind her 'Article 50' letter on withdrawing from the European Union at any time before 29 March 2019 – with the consequence that the UK would remain a member of the EU. No other member state would be able to stop the UK’s withdrawal of its Article 50 letter. And now three leading Queen's Councillors (top lawyers) have confirmed Kerr's view and sent their findings to the Prime Minister.

Implications for May

The point here is that there is no doubt Britain's Supreme Court would support the right of the option for a Parliamentary vote on a return to the EU if such an option was proposed by any party in Parliament. But the point is that this vote will inevitably emerge given that the Government has already stated that there will be a vote on the 'deal' before 29 March 2019. Up to now May has said the vote in Parliament will simply be a vote to accept the deal or a vote to leave the EU without a deal. Now it is guaranteed that the vote in Parliament would have a third option - to remain in the EU.

The party-political crisis of all crises

What would happen if Parliament voted on what would become the three options? The Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party would call for the Kerr option to be attached to the Parliamentary vote on the final deal and they would vote, under all conditions, to stay in the EU. Labour would face the choice of an anti-working class deal, no deal or remaining in the EU. In this context the 'retainers' in Parliament would be likely to hold the largest bloc of votes. It is certain therefore that May's government would call an early General Election. How early? As the disasters unfold, from Grenfell to Carillion, the pressure for an early General Election becomes irresistible.

And Corbyn's Labour Party?

At the moment Corbyn and the Labour Party have deliberately stepped back from giving priority to Brexit. Up to the end of 2017 it has been ten months since Corbyn posed a question about Brexit in the PM's question time slot. Instead he has laid down some principles, based on working class interests, designed to carry out the referendum. The Labour Party is opposed to another referendum on the EU. As the Tories become embroiled in their struggle for no EU tariffs on British exports but a closed shop on immigration and no legal sharing of conditions for trade, Labour will criticise Tory proposals that harm jobs or risk key benefits for the majority of the population. And it is virtually inevitable that Corbyn's Labour Party will reject the Tory version of Brexit. When the inevitable early General Election comes, Labour will fight the election on the new future needed for Britain and the Tories will fight it on the premise that they are the only Party that stands for any 'real' sort of Brexit.

And the consequences?

The Tories are in a disastrous position. Factional from top to bottom and incoherent throughout, they stagger through a succession of domestic disasters. Paradoxically it is only their association with Brexit that keeps them afloat. As March 2019 gets closer and the second fantasy, this time of an EU 'special relationship' with the UK dissolves in the mist so the Faragian spectre will loom larger for the Tory Trumpeteers as will the unavoidable need for a General Election as opposed to the frightening vote on May's EU deal in Parliament.

If there were a General Election before March 2019, despite the solid domestic ground Corbyn's Labour has made through its 2017 Manifesto, offering as it did real alternatives to the current shambles of British capitalism, it would be a serious mistake by Corbyn's Labour Party to step away from the EU issues. The weakness of the Tory's leverage in the EU becomes more and more apparent, so Labour has to begin to state its own policy on the EU and the major allies that it seeks across the Continent against austerity; the collective need to challenge racism and to resist the right wing upsurge in Europe that echoes the 1930s; how fair trade, with equal wage levels, going global, overturns so called 'free trade'; how common resources and mutual support opens a new chapter in Europe's relations with the Syrian, the North African and Central Asian peoples. Corbyn's new Labour Government can offer a new European Charter offering the alliances that can win equality.

Standing against Macron's vision of a puffed up, re-centralised, 'core' EU, Corbyn's Labour Party in government has to reject a turn backwards and offer European people instead, as with Britain, a new vision of a different society to the benefit of the many.

Wednesday 10 January 2018

Trump in the dump?

Back in the 1970s the first dolls that moved their limbs were made in the US. You pulled a string from the back of the doll and it jerked its arm and legs. If you were lucky it turned its head and jiggled across the carpet on its own. Then you had to rewind the doll if you wanted to repeat the exercise. This led to a joke about President Eisenhower.
'What happened when you wound up the Eisenhower doll?
Nothing!'

Its true that President Eisenhower played a lot of golf. But he was famous in the rest of the world for two big somethings in his long presidency. 1.5 million were killed in the Korean War (36,574 were American.) This is the war that created the US vassal state in South Korea and the drive to nuclearise in North Korea.

Second, he coined a haunting phrase. As Eisenhower became more and more conscious of the limits of the political power of the President and Congress, he looked elsewhere to define where this power had gone. He named it; America's 'military-industrial complex.' This is what he said in his last Presidential address to the nation in 1961.
"We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted."

In 1960, under Eisenhower, the US accounted for 29% of the world's total wealth. By 2011 it was 21%.

Today, President Trump inherits the US's military-industrial complex. Korea is his most important problem and his country continues its slow but relentless decline.  

Trumps's flaky, sexist political psychology has been predominant in the criticisms made by his vast range of enemies both inside and outside the US. The latest US top seller,  'Fire and Fury' by Wolff, accentuates that trend. But Trump is much more than a collection of unappetising behaviours. And while being far from his most recent self-description as a 'calm genius' he is a significant turning point in US, and to some extent, global politics and economics. He has not arrived in the Oval Office by mistake. He is an initial answer, by the most radical sectors of establishment, including the military, to the new American facts of life.

The essence of the Trump 'answer' is to massively strengthen the military-industrial complex, technically and financially, to 'resolve' Korea as either a permanent sore in the Chinese body-politic or, by military action, creating an extension of South Korea. And by these means Trump intends to reverse the decline of the US.

This will means cutting away from any US decisive role in the rest of the West (a policy already already started under President Obama.) It means a new haven for minimally taxed international Capital and investment in the US, (foreclosing the attraction of any European/Chinese ventures.) It means consolidating military and economic hegemony over East Asia.

When Trump says 'America first' he means that America dominating the West is no longer a viable basis for global leadership. 'America first', American domination over the world, now means 'America over East Asia.'

The missing part (in the popular media) of the demographic studies of US voting in the last Presidential Election is the proportional vote by the US military for Trump, estimated as 3 to 1 for Trump over Clinton. And now the most significant journal published in the US regarding world politics from a US point of view, the magazine 'Foreign Affairs', has published on the 8 January, 'It’s Time to Bomb North Korea' by Edward Luttack. The article recommends 'surgical' bombing (as with the Afghanistan raid on the I.S caves) and the use of nukes. It has been immediately countered with other arguments, but the issue is now a legitimate part of the national debate in the US.  

Trump's bloc of support in the country remains solid enough (given the deep political crises of both mainstream parties) to provide the platform he needs to take the initiatives that put 'America first.' Trump undoubtedly crawled out of a US billionaire sewer and he is surrounded by enemies, some of whom are gathering the goods to get him (eg special counsel Robert Mueller assembling the Whitehouse's Russian connections.) But as Watergate demonstrated, President Nixon was only exposed at the beginning of his second term and when he was surrounded by the growing defeat in Vietnam. Trump can yet change the world, for the worse.

Sunday 7 January 2018

Macron, Europe's new globaliser!

Traditional media have a new boy.

Current British-based political and economic Annuals (see 'The world in 2018' - Economist, and 'the Future issue' - Prospect) are unconventionally enthused by the French President, M. Macron. The British chief of the Intelligence Service 1999 - 2004, Mr Dearlove, is positively enraptured by his potential. Things have got so bad - with Brexit and the Tories - that the patrician, old gents of the establishment clubs, long for the reincarnation of another unblemished Blair!

Blair and globalism

Blair's latest campaign is to get the Brits to have another referendum. If necessary that can be achieved through two stages. First the UK adopts all of the EU rules to ensure access to a European 'free' market and then discovers it has even less power to decide the rules and accordingly reverses its EU exit.  Blair wants the UK to return to the EU because he sincerely believes that globalisation is unstoppable and only Europe as a whole has the heft to at least regulate some of its more negative aspects. And that is necessary both to maintain the super rich and also to defend them against what would become inevitable social and political upheaval in the West from the right and the left. Look at Corbyn and Trump - he moans.

Blair to Macron

Blair is at the rear end of the arc of 'new' politicians across the West that emerged in the 21st century having a common outlook on the inevitability of globalisation and who reconstruct or by-pass the traditional parties to create the new political order that will support and defend it. Blair's original continental twin was Berlusconi despite their very different styles and origins. This is what Blair said to the 'New Labour' Party in 2005.
"I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer." He added "our changing world (is) replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt ... and slow to complain." Social groups and communities were not to "resist the force of globalisation". The labour Party's job was "to prepare communities for it."

Macron and the old magic

Macron has exactly the same global view as Blair had. Notwithstanding the 2008 financial crash, when the world's biggest bank became the now minuscule Royal Bank of Scotland, courtesy of Labour's leaders Blair and Brown opening the City of London's door to 'globalised finance'. And despite a decade of reduction in the western working classes' standards of living. And accepting the years of diminishing taxes from the richer and richer international corporations, Macron has a new plan to make sure that 'autumn follows summer.'

The man with a plan

Like Blair he wants the power of French labour shackled; a precondition for any Macronic EU reform according to Germany's Merkel. Blair carefully maintained Thatcher's anti-union 'reforms' in Britain. Macron has to introduce them. Why did Blair and why does Macron want to destroy organised labour? To open up the 'opportunities' provided by endless working weeks, by zero-hour contracts and to dissolve assumptions about job security or state-based living pensions. Following his first battle, like Blair, Macron imagines himself as the first (elected) President of Europe, courtesy of a new European Finance Department, covering taxes and government expenditure across the EU, attached to the European bank. The economic federation of Europe then becomes the powerful lever to curtail the 'bad' effects of globalisation in a way that is unreachable for any single countries - with the partial exception of the USA. It is the same beat that Blair introduced in the UK in 2005, on the same drum, but after 12 years of failure.

Financial globalisation - bankers fail ...

The biggest of the globalista's catastrophes was the fantasy that financial globalisation - the 'free' flow of Capital across the world - would benefit humanity (see - make a lot of Bankers extremely rich). Even after the 1997 East Asia banking crisis the US and the UK led the charge into an epic disaster. The Lehman Brothers' $639 billion collapse collapse pulled most of the world's attention but it was the British RBS that was the biggest melt down. Ross McEwan, one of the bank's two chief executives after the crash, said
"It has taken nearly 10 years to undo the consequences of the global ambitions pursued by RBS in the run up to the crisis", and they are not there yet. Besides the mountain of bad US mortgages bought by the bank, it has had to drop a hospital in Australia and get rid of the largest cosmetic surgery business in Asia. The RBS balance sheet is now £751 billion - down from £2.4 trillion in 2008. It has withdrawn from 34 of the 50 countries it bought into, and dumped 150,000 staff. It only survived at all because UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown nationalised it.

And rule!

While globalisation and the free movement of Capital still continues to dominate most of the capitalist world, freedom of labour has never applied and even in those sectors of the world which espoused freedom of movement, the heady phrases in the treaties died the death (as between Mexico and the US or as in the EU faced with the refugee crisis) given any sort of real test. The Financial Times (1 December 2017) attacked Labour Party leader Corbyn for his criticism of big bank "gamblers and speculators." When the US's Morgan Stanley Bank issued a report stating that a 'Corbyn government would mark the most significant political shift in the UK since Thatcher's election and might represent a bigger risk than Brexit' Corbyn replied "bankers like MS should not run our country, but they think they do" because, commented the FT, 'of their ties to Teresa May's Conservative party.'

Has the EU helped to curtail globalism?

As Capital (and mostly Capital) becomes more mobile, it is more difficult to tax. Trump is currently slashing taxes of big corporations, but as Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard points out that corporate taxes have been falling in all advanced economies since the late 1980s, often by more than half. The tax burden on wages have remained constant, rising with inflation while rates of consumer taxes, like VAT, have been rising to the detriment of society's poorest sectors. In the EU, financial globalisation, expressed through the Euro, has caused sustained recessions and slumps in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland.

... and once as farce.

Macron thinks Paris can take over London's role in global finances. Presumably he would then build the European financial centre he covets around the new Paris. Tidy up the French working class. Build a new economic centre (and EU leadership) which Germany has to accept, especially while Merkel is shaken. Cest ca! Meanwhile the reality of the grinding disaster of globalisation, unmitigated by the EU's institutions, continues.

What are the conditions for the use (fulness) of Capital, for free movement and for international trade?

Broadly to be used for the benefit of societies and not privilege, Capital needs mostly to be held by the state. Without that condition serious, longterm and fruitful investment cannot withstand the world's flows of private wealth - and Capital - as a means of production, becomes instead almost entirely parasitic. Corbyn's remarks about the banks and the investment policy of the Labour Party are simply the most practical response to the decade and a half of failure of the current 'uses' of Capital in the West.

Free trade deals (besides blowing up all over the globe just now, courtesy of Trump) have never even begun to be 'free'. Instead trade deals are actually tied to all sorts of preconditions which protect various interests important to ruling classes in different countries. The most distinct feature of 'free trade' at the moment is the colossal terms and conditions that are written up into law for their exercise. These terms and conditions are universally a response to the special interests of ruling classes, in the relevant participant nations and in respect to owners of the multinational companies.

To really win free trade requires fair trade. Let the conditions for trade be based on the populations that are effected by it. The most obvious basis for fair, free trade is that the price of labour is levelled up to the highest amount among the participating countries. These conditions, applied to genuine fair trade, are much simpler that those that now pertain to 'free trade' (and which are collapsing.)

Free movement is simply an unconditional human right. Again all sorts of obstacles, like the West's wars used as an instrument of foreign policy need to end. Marshal plans are required to repeat and secure the advances made most recently, for example in China, which if nothing else, proves that millions and millions can organise to lift themselves from want. Similarly the determined defence and extension of the social gains made by the working classes of the West in general and Europe in particular, can offer a bench mark to raise conditions for all - thus ceasing the fractious results of increasingly rationed services.

Tuesday 2 January 2018

Corbyn's experiment.

EU worries about Britain x 2

When, before Xmas, British Prime Minister Teresa May was clapped by the leaders of the remaining European Union countries, their relief came from two worries. First the EU rulers were applauding themselves for forcing the UK government to accept all of the main conditions that they had started the negotiations with, 17 months before. Second, they were backing May's role in herding her Tory cats and thereby preventing a new UK election and a possible Corbyn led Labour government.

After Xmas, Lord Adonis, one of Tony Blair's most scrupulous minions, left his government advisory post to sing the praises of Clement Attlee, the UK's Labour PM after WW2 who initiated the NHS and set up wide scale nationalisation of key industries. As Bob Dylan sang;
'For the times ... (and possible future posts) ... they are a'changing!'

Leading British journals (eg The Guardian Dec 30, Prospect Jan 2018 ) and websites are stacked with analyses of Corbyn's projected 'new nationalisations' and how to confront globalisation, especially how to grab tax from those big, Internet-based rascals! Meanwhile even Rupert Murdoch's 'Times' denounced the Tories for not dumping austerity and for refusing to open up a new investment boom.

Has Social Democracy, that had seemed to have withered on the vine across most of Europe, been revived in Britain? And if it has, can British Social Democracy seriously challenge and overcome the global monsters of our age?

Balance sheet

Tens of thousands of what used to be called the 'hard' or the 'far' left in the UK have joined Corbyn's Labour Party and the associated Momentum movement. No doubt they start with all sorts of different perspectives but most share the collective intention of achieving a Labour government that will at least carry out its 2017, Corbyn led, Manifesto.

Encouragingly, nobody (except Blair), least of all Corbyn, denies that British Social Democracy has a checkered past. Labour PMs, from Wilson to Blair, all saw the reduction of organised working class strength as critical to Labour's governmental success! It is not an accident that Corbyn turns instead to Attlee's role as his inspiration for the future of his would-be Labour Party. Attlee's government made tremendous advances in the interests of working class people, despite its war debts and pressure from the USA. 

At a more general level the great scholar Thomas Pikkety (see 'Capital in the 21st Century') established a thorough, evidence-based case that the periods of achievements and advances by the western working classes, in terms of their standards of living, approximately coincided with historically narrow gaps between rich and poor and the advance and return to office of Social Democratic governments. The implications of Pikkety's research appears clear. It implies that in the case of the western working class's benefits, Social Democracy has sometimes proved to be a successful instrument in the 20th Century.

But not the whole story.

Narrowing the focus to the UK once more, it was the Tory grandee Boothby who made a comment in 1946 that suggests the Pikkety thesis may not be the complete picture.  Referring to the British working class Boothby warned the post-war British Parliament that 'if we do not give them reform; they will give us revolution!'

Turning round Boothby's remarks, we can see something of the limits to Pikkerty's argument. Pikkerty's study of the history of the progress or otherwise of the western working class is not fully situated in its proper global context. For example the evolution of the British and the French working class advances have a deep relation to the Empires of both countries. Many of the struggles and upheavals and most significantly the battles for basic working class rights were 'exported' into the savage oppression of the colonies and the super exploitation of the colonial populations. Some central working class leaderships, particularly in the UK, saw the Empire as the source of their own 'privileges' and they were not wrong.

Continuing the inversion of Boothby's declaration, globally speaking it was the enormous 30 year wave of anti-colonial and socialist revolution, from Russia to China, from Czechoslovakia to Greece, expressed deeply in the most developed countries in the West as the victory over fascism in the European continent, that really set the context for the requirement of the rulers in the West to 'reform.' Revolution had forced the Boothby's of their time to accept Social Democratic reform.

Reform .. and revolution?

This is not to say that European and US working class people did not struggle and make sacrifices for their own advances in the 20th century. (Often against their own leaderships!) It is not to say either that without a global movement for revolutionary change no national or local shift, or substantial reform is possible. That would simply be a leftist version of the poisonous mantra that 'there is no alternative'. There are no eternal truths carved in stone. But it is to say that if the aim is a root and branch change in favour of the working class, essentially against the interests of the dominant class, then the ruling class will need to be dispossessed of their power as a class and certainly overwhelmed as the leading force in society. For the 'Social Democratic' reforms of there 20th century - whatever their real source and however compromised - are now now being purposefully dissolved across the western world.

And revolution? Clearly the experience of the western working class in developed countries is deeply different to the Russian or the Chinese experience. Many left academics and would-be theorists have tried to twist versions of Russian and Chinese revolutionary history into sets of universal norms that have inevitably ended up at the margins of mainstream, working class political life in the West. Much less has been made of the tremendous global impact of those great revolutionary struggles across the globe in setting the basis for those advances in the West. Equally, there is little point in abstract arguments counterposing the supposed merits of western 'reform' versus eastern 'revolution'. The history of the oppressed and their battles for change are at first a totality and should be studied in that sense in order to see what the upheavals against capitalist society have produced so far across all the continents.

Back to Corbyn

As described above, Corbyn's Labour Party leadership has established one benchmark in the sense that Labour's latest Manifesto has mainstream political significance. Large parts of the media are all over it. The Tory's contemptuous comments about the return to the 1980s has been largely ignored in both the electorate and the mainstream media debate.

The Manifesto is not the same as a worked through battle plan. There are also critical absences and unnecessary concessions in the document. Nevertheless the flag has been unfurled. The forces in society and, more difficult, the forces in and around the Labour Party, now need to be marshaled - in action.

This is the terrain in Britain, today, on which the working class and its allies could first win and then lead politics in a modern, developed western society. The day to day friction between the poor and the systems that command their lives are now surfacing above ground and into the light - in a clash of interests and alternative visions of society. We learn again who it is that is most concerned to 'offer' reforms and why - and then what is held in the other hand at the sign of any hesitation.

In this context we see that the world works in the opposite way to abstract theory. People en-mass open the fight for change. The content of society's political instruments rapidly changes around that battle; for or against. Reform can start as a demand of demonstrators and then can become a tool designed to stop their forward march. The movement for (serious) reform in reality can be revolutionary. If 'reform' is seized by society's rulers it can be its reverse. The argument about Corbyn's Labour Party cannot be conducted in such terms. In real life it will solve nothing and move no-one.

However, it would be equally absurd to imagine that convulsive movements for change in society will not break up and remodel the antiquated political instruments currently available, from rotting Parliaments and Parties to the urgent requirement by the people of a severe, practical examination of wealth and power. Change in society will inevitably and utterly change even Corbyn's Labour Party and, hopefully, the design and direction of his his Labour Government. And a tentative rebirth of British (and of Western) Social Democracy needs careful preparation, for if it happens it will mark the death of its traditional role in capitalism and the end of its traditional leadership. To survive it will need to become its opposite.