Two small moments (there are millions more) in the web of modern history that seem to focus the future of our system of society; in 1996 the British Economist magazine carried the news that 17% of capitalist enterprise across the globe was illegal. On the 16th of February 2018 the Chiefs of the German, the French and the British Secret Services made a public, joint statement at a European Security Conference (gently) demanding a European secret state.
First, where is (international) capitalism going?
Well, you might start with the fact that 'illegal' capitalism accounts for far more than 17% of global capitalism today. Indeed, the major technical advances since 1996, the ones that have created the biggest corporations in the world, the ones that have defined social advance in the world (if you believe the adverts) have turned their business into a megalith of economic illegality.
In 1996 the Economist was counting up the amounts involved in drug sales, prostitution and slavery, in the secret arms trade. A generally hidden part of the economic system. The new wave of 'human progress' or the 'fourth industrial revolution' shouts its criminal outlook from the rooftops. They are against social taxation. Most of the world have laws regarding tax and most of those laws are broken by the biggest corporations in the world. Publicly. From their own created moral high ground.
The total myth (false news?) that modern capitalism has reduced world poverty (whatever it has done to the working class in the advanced countries) is spun by the breathtaking hypocrisy of the capitalist apologists in the West grabbing Chinese development (the main contributor to poverty reduction in the world) as their own! This has been discussed many times in this blog (and no doubt thousands of others blogs and the media in general). China's development is directly related to the global decline of the West in general and of the US in particular - which has allowed the leadership in China to use capitalism to its own and to its peoples' dramatic advantage. The great corporations and leading capitalist nations intended no such thing. They just could not stop it. (We will see how the latest King Canute, Trump the merciless, manages.)
Global capitalism, since 2000, is essentially an illegal enterprise. It will not pay for social welfare. States with social infrastructures are, at best, cash cows. Modern capitalism is not mainly turning some dramatic technological corner (a world full of sex-bots and cars in space?) It is withdrawing from the social compact it was forced into after WW2. More criminal; less social. That is its biggest characteristic. That is what stimulates and then lays down the layers and layers of corruption from senior mandarins in the EU to Spanish policemen. (And, most recently, underpins the moves to political 'consolidation' of the Communist Party in China.)
And western politics?
The political elements that are now all thrown up upon the air by big Capital (amid the eddies of 'new' mini parties, the shrinking of national parliamentary power, the gathering corruption of the political classes etc.,) resolve into two. First the traditional parties, the lost children of the old social contract, redefine themselves around the concessions that they will now make to Capital - or they die. Social Democracy mostly dies as its mediating role between the working class and Capital has no role. But even classical ruling class parties look for large umbrellas in the storm of competition. Either America or the EU are the only routes in the West affording access to big Capital. That's the nexus of the current Tory civil war in the UK. Macron appears (outside most of France) as potentially successful because he claims he can influence Germany and thereby construct an EU centre.
And the western states?
In a brilliant essay by Mark Greif ('Against Everything;' Verso) he draws out the distinction in the role of the police between law and order. From the most basic look at their organisation and behaviour he completely exposes that the police are barely ever used for the purposes of upholding or defending or indeed carrying out, law. They are essentially an instrument of order. Reporters were very surprised at the public emergence of the Secret Services' triumvirate at the EU's Security Conference. And as traditional party-politics dwindles and Parliaments become 'swamps' so the more jagged and less friendly edges of the state emerge and, as with our Secret Service Chiefs, construct their own role in the perturbing times to come. As law fades, so order takes its place. As the Social pact forced on western Capital is torn up so state control - of immigration - of personal information - of acceptable and unacceptable 'values' - of the streets - needs to dominate.
Alliances are being built across the West today between those who can 'supplement' the state's new forward role and the relevant 'services' of the state. In Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Russia and possibly Italy in the next months, photo fascist movements are developing and in many cases conjoining with state forces to help 'manage' order (in the absence of any law.) The future image of these countries leaders are to be found, today, in Russia, Turkey and Egypt. They are the public faces of the new 'order.'
On the other hand in France and Spain and Portugal and Ireland and most of all in Britain, political formations on a mass scale are emerging out of, or separating from (or both) traditional Social Democracy. And new leaderships intend to enact new laws in favour of the working class. The support in these societies (and others) for laws that serve the working class is already mainstream. And there is a growing sense, in Spain regarding the political class but particularly in the UK, that this will involve a major challenge to the powers of big Capital. But the movement for change needs to be aware that big Capital will not seek its traditional, now fading parties, to 'hold the line' against the new laws in Parliament. The left MPs and most of all the movement of the people will need to be solid as the super rich try to cause economic and social chaos and then seek state organisations, with their allies, to restore order, to remove any new laws and lock down a new type of leadership in society.
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