Brexit versus Corona virus?

As the 'baked in the oven' Brexit pie appears to have collapsed, it is time to get to grips with the emotional beliefs of those who have accepted Brexit at all costs; if you like as a national necessity. Ex Chancellor and expelled Tory MP Kenneth Clarke said on the 10th of December that he accepted Brexit now, but that a no-deal would be a suicidal decision. He seemed incapable of finding any rational basis for such a step. Of course there are plenty of Brexiteers still cuddling the notion that they are being hood-winked by 'project fear'. They simply do not believe that things will get worse. Others, especially several cynics in the Tory Cabinet, including PM Boris, will use the economic result of the Corona virus to hide the consequences of 'no-deal' or an extended bad deal. They, and the banks and economists, know that a no-deal Brexit would be even worse for British capitalism. But there remains millions of mainly white working class English people, in the Midlands, the North East and across a thousand towns and villages, who have decided that whatever else might be said, Brexit for them has summed up their first success, as opposed to decades of their rejected culture. 

On the other hand, in the last 20 years or so the media, the universities, politics, the theatres and parliament - all of the apparent structures that look like the interests of a ruling and upper middle-class culture - have been playing with their 'culture wars!' How did that come about? What does it mean?

Starting from the working class, the destruction of trade unions and traditional work from the 1980s, thereby the reducing living standards, has led to the deterioration of the working classes' in all parts of life. Stemming first politically from Ronald Reagan's Presidency in the US and Thatcher's Prime Ministership in the UK, the self-confidence and the coherent history of working class people was smashed in the Anglo-Saxon West. The sense of purpose and immense historical achievements of the working class were thereby largely lost. A whole majority class in the US and UK appeared to dissolve. 

What was left? In the UK a core of trade unions has evolved over years and gradually radicalised but they are as yet unable to lead a social class, a class that as a whole is now largely detached from unions. In desperation, many English working class families began to look back to the 2nd World War as the only inspirational motif around which they might understand their own place in society. The actual and long gone millions who fought in WW2 did not see themselves as heroes. But the War period became a prevailing fantasy for the lost sons and daughters and the grandsons and grand daughters that swallowed a dream of a working class success in mid 20th century life, tied to the success of a 'national' Britain. In the US, the social gaps had a different evolution culturally, which was filled with criminality, with immense drug use and with hostile detachment from politics in general. (There are some parallels across Britain, at least in terms of the cultural use of drugs, in the West of Scotland for example.)

Politics does not allow permanent gaps. In both the US and the UK a numb irritation surfaced against sectors of working and middle class society that appeared to have achieved successes - or at least some sort of recognition. In the UK the monetisation of housing courtesy of Thatcher, became one avenue of advance at a cost of millions who have to rent. This was, in reality, the only means by which some of the working class might succeed. And, gradually, this and other sectors of the working class were dissembled and defined by the new, self-employed ways. 

Promoted by upper-middle class liberal sectors that dominated the media and defined poverty and oppression in terms of sectoral groups and minorities of society, led to the working class, the largest collective socio-economic part of society, being broken up, not only politically and socially but also culturally. Parts of the women's movement for equality for example, or particular upsurges by black movements against oppression, appeared to be promoted primarily by liberal authorities, which were often presented as against the working class. Liberal ideas peaked in the Blair era. They were used deliberately to determine significant bits of oppression as a worthy improvement in society so long as they maintained the opposite of any general working class resistance. In this period Thatcher's anti-union laws, the privatisation of health, 'freedom' for banks and the start of widespread casual employment were all supported along with the acceptance of the police's institutional racism.   

Also emerging simultaneously were new political forces that deliberately began to try and mobilise white working class people. These forces used the social, liberal 'causes' negatively. Specific challenges by black people, women, gay and gender movements were poisoned; described as the choices of the middle and upper classes. The government and liberal initiatives had become, for many, the symbol of the weakness and marginality of the working class. In the absence of their own history, the rights that had been won, the causes that had been fought, the white working class instead saw specific individuals, promoted and deliberately coupled with the upper middle class's desires, as liberals who wore their cultural badges of honour. Inevitably raw racism surfaced as the response to these 'liberal successes'. The new politics was gathering a revolt in the remains of the traditional white working class against what should have been a common cause. The definition of the referendum for Brexit was thereby created, against enemies who appeared to be part of the cosmopolitan culture and were supported by the predominant, higher classes' in Britain. 

In the US, the mobilisation by Trump of large parts of the smashed-up, working class, has been used to shift liberal capitalism into a para-nationalism. Huge resources of big capital have, momentarily, stopped that flow. But with Biden's victory, there is not yet the slightest opening of any independent working class America. 

While the Biden 'success' means nothing yet for the American working class, with the US Civil War still be resolved, there has, on the other hand, been a substantial shift in the English working class's view since 2016 that supported Brexit. The shift in the Brexit argument has evolved in a definite class direction. The political views of mainly working class Brexiteers moved away from their initial, racist, response to the Brexit referendum, and has shifted its priorities to the desperately required issue of democratic rights. In the course of this development, 'immigration' has been reduced to the third most important issue in the polls that study support for Brexit. And democratic rights, attached to the severe contempt of the current political leadership, has grown into the first issue. Racism remains - in all classes. But it has stopped being waved as the main flag by the white working class regarding Brexit. In fact an opening for a newly reconstructed English working class is tentatively emerging.   

It is perhaps not surprising that a society-wide crisis, that has to involve the testing of politics, economics and of the culture of social classes, opened up with the pandemic Corona virus. As with great movements in the past, new definitions of society are created against the experience of a fragile status quo. There is a large list with large events that can and will be studied, torn down, supported or recreated. Right at the front in Britain is the NHS (and associated carers.). Most significantly, the NHS is mainly a multi-racist, low paid, overwhelmingly female, proletarian, institution. It came to the fore with Corona virus. Even the Tory government desperately praised the NHS denying their obvious future, in monetising health. 

The real shift of consequence regarding the NHS and the care workers is that it was built by working class decision; it was praised to the hilt by the working class in the main (anti-Brexit) cities and in the towns in the Midland and the North. It belongs to the working class, collectively, more than any Tory Minister or modern Labour would-be. The working class has saved the country. A part of the working class, led by health and care, followed by teachers and transport workers, risked their lives for others. PM Boris Johnson became fitter than a 'butcher's dog' after Corona and Trump 'rose again' following his multiple wealth and care. But the heroes are the workers. And millions know it. 

This is the potential new working class history in the UK. Its new collective culture. And from this new working class history comes the need for the class that built this amazing moment, first to defend the NHS and carers against moneymaking and second, to use this moment, this working class victory, as the momentum for a politics and economy.      

Socialism and human nature

Here's a thing. 'We'd all like Communism...' said a friend from the coast. You could hear the 'but' in the air. But - every effort to apply it has failed hasn't it? (Unless you agree to conditions and regimes that most people in the West would not choose.) Communism doesn't deal with real human nature. There are good and bad in all of us - mostly bad when it comes to power and politics. (Those were additions from my friend.) We (human beings) have always been like that. (Another addition.)

Before getting to 'human nature' and communism, we need to grapple with the West's particular version of its own type of socialism, (not communism) which has had its tussles, via 'peaceful', socialist reform, and which promotes the 'reform of the capitalist system'. It has now become pretty obvious that this kind of western socialism, social democracy, has closed down in the last four decades. Social democracy had always been helpless outside the West. And now, in the West, despite the use of traditional but hollow names, social democracy has virtually disappeared in the shape of major political parties. 

Suddenly, this trend appeared to turn over. Contrary to the decline of European social democracy as a whole, on the wave of a new, youth radicalism, the genuinely social democrat - Labour leader Corbyn (loathed by most Labour MPs) got close to recharging real social democracy in 2018. The split of the British working class over Brexit was enough to show what a ruling class can do with an up-to-date, modern, social democracy these days. Britain's rulers' determined the creation of a temporary fusion from all its corners, despite the divisions over the EU (the EU was deeply desired by the UK's big capital) rather than allowing a genuine social democratic government. They created the organised destruction of Corbyn and forced, wherever they could, the removal of Corbyn from mainstream politics. All sorts of lessons apply. Corbyn's destroyed effort is just one of them. It shows what happens in today's capitalism regarding any serious social democratic project.

Social democracy in general has been kicked, or been swallowed, to death across its whole, previously more fertile, western history. Our 21st century rulers, even in the West, perhaps particularly in the West, don't and won't make social democratic reforms and concessions anymore. This will be the norm, whether or not the decaying and increasingly baseless 'Labour Party' in Britain is allowed to take its turn for government. So social democracy as well as communism appears to have failed.

Back now to 'human nature'. Good old Marx can help. He might have avoided speculations of a communist nirvana and neither did he try to study individual minds. What he did do, among the many glorious understandings that he opened up, was to insist that it is existence that proceeds to consciousness. This is a basic and fundamental concept. Of course people of all sorts, from epic philosophers to murderers, might think that they (and we) act otherwise, from the spark of our own brain. And it could be argued, correctly, that consciousness, having proceeded from existence, could itself help create a change in existence, as it evolves through peoples' specific thoughts and actions. A thought can also become the reason for an action, and if an understanding of a thought is shared, then most will comply with that thought. Isn't that human nature? Sorry no. That would be the organisation of humans in the consequence of their conditions. And that opens the real problem of 'human nature'. 

Humans, to exist, need to organise with other humans, from childhood to the grave. That's a truism. But the type of organisation that collective humans live in, in their histories so far, have yet to be considered and then decided on by humans themselves. Small numbers of privileged humans have ended up arranging whole societies over the millennia, often without knowing it themselves. (They simply demanded their own dominance via their gods or by using brute strength or both.) More recently, ruling classes do become more self-conscious. They prepare accordingly their places (as rulers) in society. That's the experience of our history as a species up to now. What utterly bursts the continued fallacy that 'human nature' is fixed is the simple observation that human kind, even without control of its history, has, nevertheless, changed constantly. 'Human nature' shifts and turns in the effort by most non-rulers to find what they see is the best possible available existence for themselves, their families, their friends, alliances and most of all, from their work, throughout the different systems of society that they do not control. Most humans have never been allowed to decide what sort of civilisation that they live in. 

Therefore 'human nature' constantly changes as our societies change, as it flows through the changing contexts that place us in our society. History unfolds unevenly. In the last 100 years for example many (but not yet most) human beings face the expansion of technology and the use of literacy. But these developments are still the same, that is to say they still depend on a social society; one that also forces exploitation, drudgery, violence, incapability and horror. These negative features of society cause humans to try to build their defences. But the world, which has always up to now been run by a small elite, turns its society on its head. For those that defend themselves against the difficulties created by society are presented as the reason for the negative effects of society and are blamed for the problems they face. So called 'human nature' is turned into the opposite of the reality of life and living. Each person is different from everybody else who has ever existed. Theoretically everybody has their own nature. OK. But consciousness does not proceed to existence. Although humans are different they are made in the very earliest aspects of their shared lives in common, by a society. Human natures are responses to society and not a person's original choices, uniquely created, which decide our society. It is the other way round.    

Collective experiences of societies come and go. People become more and more curious, angry, bereft about specific items of their society - including other people; and then they become conscious to a degree, when daily-life forces the decisions of human interventions. This finally has led, in the last hundred and fifty years, to the wavering understanding in very large large numbers of the world's population for the need for a society that meets all human's basic needs. Of course individual humans will continue to be savage, to paint great art and love their neighbours. They are still, albeit odd, responding to society. But a human social society, one which is organised consciously by most people, would inevitably tend toward collective support and shared purposes. Life will still require analysis, singers, law, labour and education. But the overwhelming majority would not, if they really got to choose their own society, want or accept what is happening in their lives and the lives of others like themselves, in the frankly unacceptable here and now. 

Take an example. The pandemic, in the current UK society, has just been served with its cost. In the UK the Tory Chancellor has told the British people that the price is £400 Billion this year. He wants to cut public worker wages (already cut for ten years.) And this is nothing compared with what is to come. Meanwhile, the UK newspaper, the Observer, ran an article that pointed out the Swiss Bank UBS calculated that the world's billionaires have surged to a record $10 Trillion by the end of last July. Talking again about Britain, even the International Monetary Fund (a capitalist thinktank) argues that it is 'absolutely crucial to mobilise revenues in an equitable way.' But our Chancellor is married to a millionaire. His government is run by the most personal political corruption since the 18th Century. And we live as the majority in our (capitalist) society, run by a couple of thousand people, which will now fire a giant blow against the welfare, education and their work (or lack of it) of the big majority of the UK population. 

This is the workings of the new type of modern capitalist society. As western capitalism declines (a key reason why we face the end of Europe's social democracy) so the pressure on the big majority is reflected in the political and economic choices that are emerging from capitalist societies. The manipulation of human nature into its opposite is at at the highest degree, at least in the West. Why? Because the old 'truths' are shaking, and manipulation and corruption are essential to make the regimes work.

Boris and Keir dissolve the remnants of British democracy

Only two British newspapers regularly criticise the new British government. But an overwhelming majority of the international media, including the Scottish and Irish papers, share a less starry-eyed view. Most of the British media are still hanging on hard to the Prime Minister's tails. Trying here to blame the PM's top advisor (especially now he and his mate have been sacked) - claiming there that 'world beating' Covid management has inevitably prevented other proper government initiatives, except that the UK has the worst health results in the West, behind only those of the US. So Boris is still presented in most of the English media as a potential knight in shining armour. Nowhere else.

The reality of the British Tory leadership is the inevitable, hopeless extension of the previous 11 years of Tory austerity government. Boris is saying that they are different from the previous Tory governments; 'we are not going for austerity' he bellows. The rest of the world looks at Britain's mess. They pick up the hints from the Government's Treasury; they turn to the history of Britain's post war economy from 1945 to 1960, consider, and then say - oh yes? 

The political alternative to Boris? The second Keir, in his own second-rate way, has already collapsed. 20 Labour MPs have called for Corbyn's re-establishment as a Labour MP. 13 members of the National Executive have walked out. The leadership of Labour is now involved in the narrow business, primarily designed to kill off Corbyn - an expected conclusion of the ruling class's relentless attacks on Corbyn after he nearly won the 2018 General Election. Social Democracy always seeks contracts with the powers that-be. The political death of Corbyn and his supporters was and remains paramount to them. Sadly for Keir mark 2, even if he dumps Corbyn's 20 MPs and his National Exec., supporters, he will have no base outside the Labour Party from which he could push the ruling classes for any sort of contract, because he is trying to dismantle the 10 million who voted for Corbyn. Most of that base do not want and will not support, another, adenoidal version of Blair.   

The two main parties demonstrate the spectacular failure of British politics in the 21st century. Here is what the failing parties will do and what they will not do. Starting with the government; it is the most personally corrupt since the 19th century. (See blog on corruption; 13 November; now covered across many media.) It is going to fail spectacularly in its fight with Scottish national independence. It is going to set up a new austerity of desperate proportions. Mass action will turn to revolt - by students, the unemployed and workers who are going to have their wages cut yet again. All this will redouble the Tory Party factionalism that previously ripped across Brexit, in the government efforts that will be used, by state borrowing, in order to keep Boris's connection with the working class split that he fought for in 2020. 

The government's main opponents in Parliament will also fail - and carry on Blair's destruction of the UK's social democratic party. It will reject the most radical part of the working class action and its demands - despite the context of direct and desperate struggle against the government's program. It will seek a Wilsonian offer, to 'calm things down', that will be unacceptable for most people and which would offer the opposite in the Scottish and Northern Irish radical developments. 'We are not as bad as them' already failed with Miliband in 2012.        

What neither of the two main parties will not do is approach the key crises that are expanding fast in British life. They will trip away; denying the driving significance of poverty and the untouchable wealth of the rich, the British nations requirements and their bubbling future, the direct responses (except via the police) to direct action, the breakdowns and the new, critical decisions of the people. Why? Because the main Parties are rotten. Because British democracy has less and less of a role in Britain's current politics. 

Here's at least one version of what could be done.

First, Corbyn, with his 20 MPs and his 13 National Executive members, should take the step of founding a Socialist faction in Parliament. The new faction would stand for all of the 2019 manifesto; a minimum wage as direct support for all unemployed after Corona; increased wages for all, based genuinely on reversing austerity; opening up and supporting critical referendums required by all sections of the UK and organising social conferences across Britain to deeply reform the basis for a new type of democracy. 

Of course various well meaning but narrow ideologues will shiver at the thought of 'undermining the unity of Labour.' But this particular and ancient notion has run its course - if it ever had one. The single Green MP carries more political weight in society than lorries full of the two main parties of MPs. There is no foreseeable future for any decisive development towards socialism unless a core of millions, already utterly disgusted people, who reject the status quo, can associate themselves with the ideas and policies that they can really fight for. Corbyn and his current supporters can begin to help building that movement: Inside and outside the current but decrepit British Parliament. 

questions from socialists about the 'new wave of socialism' (29 October)

A Few Questions

1. Why is a new social democracy ‘an ancient proposition’. I agree instinctively but not sure of why. Is it because the capitalist class don’t need to make concessions of that order because they are so strong, or can’t afford to be so weak/ needing to centralise? Or not able to because capital reorganised multi nationally ?

2. Do you mean previous efforts to create socialism couldn’t succeed because to beat the imperialists and develop economically / industrially they needed a capitalist state?

And that what they succeeded in was independent national development and shouldn’t be thought of as ‘workers states’ ( ‘deformed’ or otherwise)?

3. So that means that on their own (in one country) movements couldn’t achieve socialism or go beyond national liberation, whoever was leading the movement eg Latin America in the 80s, would always have been limited even if it hadn’t been led by liberal nationalists ?

5. But Scottish and Irish nationalists need to break up the British state, hence are inherently progressive even if not socialist. So if these movements became overtly socialist, could they develop socialist states? 

6. Agree about nature of capitalist state - role to defend class interest even if some of the apparatus - nhs, schools etc - result from concessions, from society pushing back

7. So - and this is my main Q - what are you saying about a socialist state? Do you mean movements need to be seeking to take over the state as it seeks to take over politics? Ie as was starting in Greece with a parallel system then supported by the new Syriza gov? What does it mean for how movements organise now? 

Responses

1. The essence of social democracy (SD) is its contract with the capitalist system. The UK, the second most powerful capitalist country in the world in 1945, created such a contract. All the SD contracts were with developed capitalist countries. There were  no SDs in underdeveloped countries. Today, SD cannot make contracts with developed capitalist countries – regardless  of the working class causing extreme pressure for change -  because, with the exception of the US, capitalist organisation is centralised in three main blocks with global corporations and a banking system concentrating most profit and wealth. Most capitalist nations borrow globally. For some time, SD has been unable to increase significant resources for working class people in virtually all the individual capitalist countries and has therefore declined as a political force. Capitalism now uses splits of the working class or will use police or military force to stop any serious widespread anti-capitalist action – rather than offer any SD concessions. 

2. The first would-be socialist revolutionaries did not create capitalist revolutions. They wanted socialism and they called it so. But their revolutions (with the evolving motors of state bureaucracy) created societies that were completely run by the new state. It was the new state that used everything it could, including state capitalism, to achieve modern development. They were therefore not creating socialist states and neither deformed or degenerated socialist states. They were, and are, brutal, successful, national revolutions that pushed back imperialism but often used state capitalism (of different types) to develop. They were the second wave of the national revolutions that started in 1645. And they broke down some of the most important 20th century imperialism’s barriers to do so     

3. Socialist-named revolutions spread across what was ‘the third world.’ In reality they were fighting western imperialism to win their own development. Spreading several countries might have created possible bases to start building socialism, if they were powerful enough not just to push imperialism back but also the capitalist system of society. The capitalist / imperialist blocks today, the EU and the US, would also be powerful enough to challenge the capitalist system of society – should a wider international revolution develop. Cuba and Vietnam have pushed furthest towards opening socialism, but they are still dominated by the US – and China - preventing any genuine socialist step.

4. If they succeeded, the radicalism of Irish and Scottish nationalism would break up the UK log jam and force a reassessment of a second ‘Scandinavia.’ This would open more possibilities for the working classes, which already have access to modern development, and could understand socialism via new demands for a different sort of society. A general coalition / federation across these small nations could be a first step.

5.-7. In 1917 Russia, dual power (which should have been fully understood as two states) clashed for the leadership of society. The soviets represented exclusively the workers, peasants and most of the army. While the Bolsheviks, eventually, argued ‘all power’ to the soviets in 1917, in practice they did not see the soviets as the exclusive representation of the working class and peasantry. On the contrary, they replaced the possibility of a new leadership based in new soviets with their own party and then with the inevitable bureaucracy of their own party, which in turn pushed exclusively for national economic development.  The creation, as full as possible, of the self-organisation or organisations, created by workers and their allies, as the day-to-day alternative to the capitalist state, must be the engine room of a future socialist society. The socialist parties cannot replace this new state. And in the already developed countries, the goals of the new state must include the earliest possible subordination to a new society – via the peoples’ decisive democracy

 

Boris Johnson makes deep trouble

From the beginning of Johnson's huge victory in the 2019 UK General Election, he has functioned abysmally. Virtually every day he makes public mistakes. He spins his 'U Turns' like a Whirling Dervish. His laddish cohorts infuriate the Tory women MPs. His 'inner team' annoys his 'do as you are told' Cabinet. His advisers, who obviously set up the government's strategy, are in a melee. And now that the US is not going to give the UK a big, fat, trade deal, the EU can make mincemeat of Brexit. The only two advantages that Boris has established are the results from his illness (ahhh) and the (non) effect of the excruciating caution of the Labour leader's opposition (which has been far more devastating in its attack made on his own party's left wing.) 

All these fun and games cover up an extraordinary and historic shift in British politics.

You could cover this shift from a number of angles. There is the deep drama of Scottish independence and Northern Irish radical nationalism. More alive in Scotland since the 18th century and in Ireland since the 1970s and 80s. There is the utterly impossibility now of an Eastern Asian / British deal or deals, which was the main lever in the economic argument for Brexit. As the US are trying to shut down China, which Biden will maintain, UK business in SE Asia will be 1, American and 2, in direct contest with the much praised digital capacity of Britain, (read Cambridge and Shoreditch, a patch in London). Moving on, the UK, and especially Boris's bit of England, have among the worst results dealing with the Corona virus. The UK is projected as having the worst economic results from the end of the virus, in comparison of all main European countries. 

But the 'heave' now moving UK politics is not always obvious. And there is another angle that needs to be surfaced. British government's leading personnel are creating a monumental mountain of corruption. For example 'Public First' is a small, new PR firm, run by Rachel Wolf, who co-wrote the 2019 Conservative Manifesto and James Frayne who is a long standing ally of Cummings (the PM's first advisor.) It was given contracts worth a £ million for running focus groups to 'urgently' manage communications around the government disaster of the school's exams failure. There had been no competitive tendering. It has been dropped in favour of using 'emergency provisions'.

Competitive tendering has been suspended by the Tory leaders. In late March the accountants Deloitte were called in to run a crisis unit to sort PPE. (The result, of course, was utter chaos.) The Cabinet office has not published the contract. The Cabinet office minister, Chloe Smith was a Deloitte consultant before she became a Tory MP. Deloitte (again - an accountant firm) went on to screw-up contact tracing, and their thousand consultants to work on Test and Trace included 'imports from Boston' that were paid £6250 a day. 

£12 billion went on Test and Trace according to Rishi Sunak. (SERCO got £410 million of it.) And, so far, the government have tossed out non-competitive contracts worth £100 million. (Mate rates.) SERCO provided a batch of 500,000 test tubes including leaking vials and contamination with hair and blood. It's ok. The Department of Health did not include any penalty clauses. SERCO profits are still mounting. And the chief executive, Rupert Soames, told staff (in a leaky Email) that the pandemic is 'going a long way in cementing the position of the private sector companies in the public sector supply chain'. Soames should know - as a grandson of Churchill and a brother of the Tory grandee, Nicolas Soames. And so it goes; on and on. (See many more details, LRB, 5 November.)

Corruption, in the sense of MPs and Ministers pocketing irregular money from Parliamentary benefits as was seen in the early 2000's appalled the British public. But Boris's crew are doing something else. They are using 'emergency provisions' to provide businesses that want large public funds - on an industrial scale. And this is the most poisonous aspect of the new politics. 

What is the impact of this cesspit? 

Spraying public money from the government to your private company friends, without the tiniest indication of any questioning from the opposition parties, shows how desperately sheltered the democratic centre of British politics is today. This is a democracy which does not challenge some of the greatest self-seeking so called 'political' decisions that are now in full display. If anybody wishes to answer the question; 'why does the British government fall so far behind similar European (and not to mention East Asian) when it comes to the Pandemic? Why do the British government have failures in PPE, in Track and Trace, in Care Homes and in the numbers of deaths from Covid-19? Why? Because the structure of British politics today is incapable to manage, let alone lead any serious crisis. It is organised to prevent any real democracy. 

The corruption of modern political life in Britain is seeping into the whole of society. Parliament, with its hundreds of giddy Lords and its criminals in the Commons is promoting a real revolt where millions directly challenge their leaders. In Germany in the 1930s the Nazis smashed up a similar, bent democracy. In the USA, in France and Italy, in Poland, in Belarus, Hong Kong, the left (just about) have the momentum and the chance, not to re-vamp a dubious history, but to start now and build a real democracy of the people.       

The second wave of socialism

Second Wave of Socialism. October 28, 2020 

 

 

Socialism is great? If you do not think like that, don’t worry, it’s ok -  so long as you believe that it could be fine - if all the blocks that have kept stopping it from happening were removed. If you don't want socialism anyway, even if it worked, and stayed working, well, you've had it, at least from bothering to read this. If you find that you really desire personal wealth and power? Bad luck and fuck off. For the rest of humanity, it's pretty obvious that conscious and thoughtful efforts, carried out by the big majority of human beings, should be a way to create a better society; better than the one that we have been living in (under various nations, conditions and relations) for what, four hundred years? A better society that is, which finds a successful way to make socialism work, over the long-term. Which of course would mean an entirely different civilisation. You choose. Or at least have a look at this. 

 

 

Before tucking into my explanation 'why we don't get to a rosy, socialist future - and how we might', it is worth registering a fascinating note about socialist ideas up to now. Despite their endless failures, semi-successes and outright defeats, it still remains the' big other.' Top politicians across the globe either deny that socialism can exist anymore -  a la Blair, or that they need to destroy it - a la Trump, or that they are actually claiming to be carrying out socialism for billions of us - a la Xi Jinping. It turns out that socialism is the constant political loadstone for what is happening in the planet; how it is being defeated, how it has died in History, what is the imminent danger that it suggests. It's like something that our leaders and would-be leaders cannot get out of their minds - and their throats. It's a permanent pain for them. Somehow our actual, real society, our current civilisation, can't get past the bloody socialism idea, despite its many so-called funerals. Why is that? 

 

 

An example. Historically, what were actually political philosophers from the Enlightenment onwards (although the likes of Machiavelli and Hobbes didn’t know it) started by discovering the individual God-like figure using reason for need of ‘the master’. Then the philosophers coupled the ordinary individual's life with goals that had been assumed were decided by the creator. Then, latterly, they understood ‘the being’, ‘the self-alone’, which made an abstract logic of the ‘self’. This vision was then absorbed in nature that apparently resolved truth and satisfaction. But misery and individual crises broke out from literature, art and a tempest of revolts, which studied the new life of millions, thereby exposing the creations of new classes. Breaking out from this connection, the actual activity of life threw itself open to the practical evidence of society. The novelty of machinery, production and wealth – related to others – changed philosophy and the individual now witnessed the new ‘life’ - as defined and then practically delivered by the multitude of books on society and then the community and then, scarily, the value of labour. 

 

 

At that point, following two World Wars and many revolutions, modern western philosophy simply collapsed. With the earlier exception of Gramsci and then Sartre, western philosophy finally struggled itself into a set of grotesque abstractions, to break away from any real life at all. And of those efforts have now drastically failed. What the post modernists and their ferociously abstract pals were unable to do was to explain human life let alone their intention to dissolve socialism's fundamental arguments about the possibilities of humanity's existence. 

 

 

These are all particular fancy-pants assertions, but bear with me. It is surely inevitable that organised thought in any sphere, including philosophy, has to set its questions in terms of the circumstances that are defined by real life, albeit those conditions may be muddled and need to be reorganised. Indeed, a fundamental idea defined by Marx remains utterly critical regarding all social thought. Existence proceeds consciousness. The human mind evolves out of the perception of what is. The 84% of Americans who believe in God don't get their fantasies from spectral beings, no matter what their pastors tell them. God is necessary for religious humans to define their own order of the world, including their own personal conditions. They create God for all sorts of necessary and worldly purposes. 'Pie in the sky when you die' is the most elementary. And it still works for old, US billionaires, as they spray their holy winnings across the sad world, hoping for repentance for their early days and more pie available post death.

 

 

Why did (does) philosophy stall? (Which sadly includes much of the Frankfurt school and their self-styled Critical Theory. Exception made of Adorno – who at least criticised German and Western ‘civilisation’ to the bone, unlike his friends, who vaguely criticized the world but hovered over Stalin.) My view is that, just like modern capitalism, there are no solutions available in today’s western civilisation that can seriously develop the declining and more and more calcifying system of capitalism’s society. If today’s thinkers offer futures (available in huge numbers) they tend to provide us with amusing banalities regarding shopping, or speculations about robots. (There’ll be more about these bloody robots.)       

 

 

Just in case you hung around during '68, beyond formal religion, there are many versions of thought that describe themselves as imagination, detached from day to day (that is real) reality. But imagination comes with the mud on the ground, the clouds in the sky, the life that is lived. It is inescapable. Which is what gives its weight to this pesky, shot-down, poisoned and mangled - socialism - and why it refuses to go away. Socialism is a human proposition about a more equal, shared and successful society. All sorts of conditions have to apply to get there, from the requirement to re-build the green in the world, to politics that is governed by the people. These are not the blocks and fences against socialism’s possible success. Many people in the world want such things. The blocks to successful socialism obviously start from the reality of social classes in our current, dominated society, those that already rule the world - or who damn well want to.

 

 

Let’s follow the diversion about robots. FANG and their corporate friends started with robots as young ‘freshmen’ (all men.) It led to Facebook, Apple, Netflicks and Google -  machines that suck up wealth through controlling billions of peoples’ purchases on the internet. But our futuristic proprietors still pretend that a new world of a utopian capitalism is at hand through AI, if they could just let the internet alone. These titans have now got the same wealth as France. But they have got nowhere on AI and robots, and some are already preparing for the giant catastrophe that humanity is about to face. So far, the robots and algorithms allow what you get out of them is what you have had put into them. Alas, the big deal – is that AI has to get more than what you put into them. AI has to bridge its own, previously unavailable gap, between what they get into them and what they get out. But other than being quicker, no big deal is on sight. Philosophy AND robots have stalled. Why? The capitalist system of society has stalled. Of course, the new tech has created new ways of working. They have helped to reorganise the world’s working class. But the new (actually quite limited tech) of the last six decades goes, historically speaking, goes much slower and much less significant than the six decades before. And our new titans are partly recognising their failure and largely becoming the internet’s bank.               

 

 

This growing fact of capitalism has helped finish off another line of politics, Social Democracy,  in the West. There are no ways round this particular point. Sadly, good old Corbyn, (a British Labour Party leader who lost) even if he had turned his 10 million votes in 2019 into 15 or 20 million, he would still have needed a big majority of the people to fight to the end to get anywhere. The followers of Labour in 2019 often insisted that 1945 and Labour's Clement Attlee achieved great reforms without revolution. But Labour had a big majority of voters and, more significantly, 4 million soldiers and sailors and their families behind them that, together with Russia, had just had their victory over fascism. But even with that strength every hour following Attlee's victory was moulded, by the state, by the rich, and by most of Labour's MPs, towards the re-alignment of the previous social system and away from definitive socialist reform. And this became the start of the real life of social democracy when the European west staved off the chance of revolution via a welfare state – and it worked. Western social democracy offered the framework and it was accepted. Today, with the partial exception of (highly pressed) Scandinavia, capital is systematically rolling back ‘welfare’, most obviously shown by the relentless decline of European states’ expenditure. The framework is dismissed. Another new social democracy is an ancient proposition – for modern Capital. Today you’ve got to fight for all of it.     

 

 

The British example - of a stalled revolution in 1948, resulting with a slow socialist-crash - was a long-term event in history but hardly major in relation of the world-wide experiences and the world's most general blocks to socialism's progress and success. After all, two World Wars had smashed society. Huge new anti-capitalist states had erupted, some (except Yugoslavia) as immediate vassals to the USSR and others, from China, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, all results of genuine nationally based, self-styled socialist revolutions. In other words, so far at least, it is not the power of the capitalist system alone that has prevented the success of socialism in the world. That is if, like me you agree that, with some partial exceptions in the case of Cuba and Vietnam, the vast majority of supposed socialist countries became failures. (If you disagree with that bit - stay. ‘Down with sectarianism, I say!’)  

 

 

Ok, here we are getting to it. What then were the main blocks, up to now, that have prevented socialist success? Oh no! It's not what has just popped in your head? Human nature is the source of capitalism’s eventual success?! Look. Societies evolved and human beings still progressed (and the reverse) without understanding anything at all about the core processes of those experiences in the last, what, 15,000 years. They thought it was the God’s will or brazen luck. Why would they not, once they are able to see those processes and how they actually work, set about consciously improving their lot? The block here is not some version of human nature. The blocks were the nature of survival and the main activities of work that preventedany wider understanding and that simply stalled all independent thought and imagination - beyond the daily effort of living to exist. 

 

But I digress. The blocks stopping socialism do not mainly result from successful counter-revolutions. And neither do they fail as a result of a permanent, rock-solid versions of 'human nature' (available in all good history books. If ‘a permanent human nature’ ran things – there would be no change in history.) I also want to argue (sadly) that the first socialist revolution wouldn't have been ok, even if Trotsky had replaced Stalin. (Sadly, because Trotsky failed to carry out his own view, that the USSR should be overthrown in a political revolution. And if he had tried it, the structures that were created by the USSR’s state and party would still have remained the decisive barrier.) Many on the far left of western politics thought and continue to believe that removing Stalin (and now Jinping) would have cracked it. But even the brilliant, analytical and practical Trotsky was too little and too late. It is Socialism itself, I beg to argue, both the self-styled social democratic model and the great revolutionary movements, which so far have an internal flaw – or flaws. 

 

I know…; what then is this damn flaw!? Sorry, we first have to look at some important questions. Start with the big issues. Did the USSR and China 'win' against the dominant, imperialist West? It is hard to say 'no, they didn’t'. From 1917 to 1989 the USSR fought off huge attacks both militarily and economically. The USSR was victorious against the 1918-22 invasions and 1940-45 invasion. It was successful in the basic, industrial economic development of Russia from the 1920s until the 1970s - at least in the technical sense. And just in case you think I’m getting all gooey about Stalin and his henchmen, both the military and economic efforts carried out by the USSR's citizens were horrific, and their dreadful actions go down in history as one of the centuries' holocausts. 

 

 

A policy, directed by Mao, tried to shape the organisation and collectivisation of the countryside in China, which also led to the death of millions - following desperate measures - similar to the effect of the USSR's collectivisation. But this failure led to an internal reform in China that was possible as a result of the gradual weakness of Western, especially US, imperialism. The half defeat of the US and the UK in Korea, the wholesale defeats in Cuba and Vietnam, the partial breakdown of the hegemony of the US coupled with the UK and France in the Middle East in the 1970s, forced western capitalism to accept, and gradually to participate, as a subservient force, in the huge industrialisation of China, via a state-controlled capitalist development. Totally unseen in history, China's progress and exceptional development is by far the most significant event in the 21st century so far. We cannot therefore say that the revolutionary national independence movement of China failed, nor did the USSR, at least up to 1989. But, despite these advances they are not socialism; at least in terms of the leadership and management of society by the working classes. 

 

 

The question is; was it, like the earlier version of the USSR, impossible to make such advances (including the social 'use' of capitalism) in order to create a domination of society, of politics and of collective freedom, in order to get to there? Were the de facto Emperors, the secret polices and the vile extinctions of millions, essential to establish the 'socialist' effort? We have finally reached a key point. (At last!)

 

 

It is my view that socialist revolutions were never reached, either in the USSR or in China. (And no more was socialism achieved in any of the developed capitalist countries, courtesy of social democracy’s constitutional efforts.) There was, in fact, no achievement of the first wave of socialism at all. What objectively took place in the USSR and what is still taking place in China is the revolutions - for national independence. There, you have it! 

 

 

This struggle for national independence has gone through two phases. The English, then British civil war opened the national revolutions, which were tied inexorably to the emergence of capitalism. And right through the centuries, up to and beyond the vast European wars and then the US wars that followed, national independence was won - nation by nation – based more and more distinctly on the further development created by capitalism. By the 20^th century however, the rapid expansion of capitalism on a world scale, had started to crush possible development in a vast range of countries. In the British case in particular, the UK created subordinate and dominated sections of the globe that were specifically designed to reverse any further development, in order to prevent competition. The became the high phase of imperialism. And any country, empire, continent or would-be nation, was subordinated to the already established developed nations in defence of their continued capitalist evolution.  

 

National revolutions that blew up in the imperialist age could not throw down their monarchs and their divine rights and thereby to achieve nationhood, nor through their military power push away the armies of the imperialist nations. Why? Because by the beginning of the 20^th century, a genuinely ‘independent nation’ could only be constructed by removing the rights of capitalist property ‘owned’ by the imperialists, which already dominated the local economy and society - from the outside. Inevitably, this fact became tangled with the inflexions of ‘Permanent Revolution’. (Wait for it.)

 

 

Invented by Parvus, promoted by Trotsky and adopted by Lenin, PR is not some heady toxin. It is the simple understanding that underdeveloped countries, dominated by the world’s imperialist regimes, cannot go through their own, paralleled capitalist phase that would create a majority of  workers, that could stir up its own banks and technology and then, once modern capitalism was achieved in their society, go for the next socialist revolution. PR centred on the requirement of the minority of workers in alliance with the much greater peasantry, to overthrow the old regime and to lead society. But PR did not ensure the success of socialism. 

 

 

What happened? The Russian revolutionaries in 1917 successfully overcame capitalist leadership without much difficulty, because Russian capitalism was entirely attached to international capital and they offered only their most tentative and feeble reaction to the huge changes needed in Russia. The mistake of versions of PR was not that development could now mean overleaping the social and economic conditions of countries otherwise choked by imperialism. That worked. The mistake was calling that socialism. Russia, as it became the USSR, managed an incredible surge of development, albeit all on the economic side and not at all socially. It was a terrible joke that the workers and the peasants led society. And in no way could the Russian revolution be described as socialist, despite the great leap it created and the initial mass movements that ran far beyond its previous history. 

 

 

Both Lenin and Trotsky hinted as much (that the USSR was not socialist) when the fully developed Germany failed to win its socialist revolution, which could have opened the possibility of a giant federation, and which could have led to real socialism. Instead, the response to that defeat went in two mistaken routes. The least error, from Trotsky, was his view that the overthrow of the bureaucracy would allow a return to socialism in Russia. But socialism was not available in Russia and the problems of development and national independence remained, with or without the bureaucracy. The second was the grotesque view of Stalin, who called for ‘socialism in one country.’ (Much more acceptable and even comfortable in the self-styled communist world.) Completely abandoning reality up to WW2. And while millions of working-class people in the West were delighted that the USSR had led the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, daily life in Russia did not charm the western working class at all. Socialism seemed promising, but not of the so-called soviet type.    

 

 

The national revolutions in Russia and China stood and stand for independence and therefore had to stand against imperialism to win their independence. In China, since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping in 1979, capitalism has been re-created because imperialism had been thrown back. The ‘new way with capitalist elements’ is still subordinate and restrained in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party after 40 years. But China is not a socialist country; and its successful revolution with its added capitalism, is successful as a nationally, independent country.

 

 

Oh yes. The tragedy of all this. The tragedy is what happened in Russia in 1989. It was inevitable – but only if you realise what the real revolution in Russia was. Everybody appeared to be amazed when the Soviet Union collapsed. The US in particular fought a cold war from 1946. But that had not stopped Russia’s nukes, their Sputnik, more doctors by head of population than the UK, etc., etc. What crashed was the rule of Russia – its bureaucracy. Why? Because that bureaucracy had (it believed) achieved its full role. By the 1980s they knew that what they were doing had nothing to do with socialism. They had ‘modernised’ Russia and now they wanted to grab the real goodies on offer. Sadly, that is also the future of China. The capitalist servant will become the master – via the increasingly corrupt bureaucracy. The national revolution has been won. And, like the USSR, it too will, in due course, be festooned with the phrases and mottos of socialism – which have never been real. 

 

 

On to the second wave.

 

 

 

There are 4 great ideas (based on reason) still at work in the world, and they can be usefully aimed at some glimpses of a socialist future. Human organisation across the globe is not a product of ideas as such. It is the opposite. It is the concrete action of billions who live in layers of social classes and that exist in permanent contradiction and conflict. (Yes. That had to be mentioned!) However, the 4 ideas indicated are now mostly used by the ruling classes to categorise their own meanings of their rights to the leadership of society. The 4 ideas are Economics, Politics, Society and the State. Perhaps surprisingly, having described the critical flaw in the first wave of socialism, now turning to the erasing of the flaw in socialism, can be discovered via the possible, new, active hierarchy in daily life! In other words, Economics, politics, Society and the State, can have a new hierarchy that has yet to be analysed and arranged, but which can be helpful in the full understanding of a successful socialist world. 

 

 

Starting with ‘Economy’, modern Western capitalism had (and has) every interest in preventing collective economic development (and political change) especially in the many under-developed countries on the planet. In fact, the struggle for revolutionary socialism has, so far, been mainly a prime battle against western capitalism’s control of economic life in the under-developed countries. Social democracy on the other hand has campaigned for its variety of controlled capitalism in the already developed countries in the West. (This variety of socialism has failed as well.) Revolutionary socialism so far has centred its aim on the economy, on capitalism. Social democracy, generally based in the heartlands of capitalism, focused on democratic institutions to win reform. The leaderships of pre-dominant capitalism essentially deny its existence at all! The ‘economy’ as described by the overwhelming majority of the West’s political leaders, over 60 years, was nothing but capitalism – until the 2008 banking collapse pulled the curtains open to the world. 

 

 

The politics (of capitalism) are relatively matter-of-fact, and are directly attached to the capitalist economic system. But the rulers of the world, who are still mostly dominating the world from the West, despite the US’s gradual decline, deliberately still do not call themselves capitalists and deliberately do call themselves democrats and ‘free.’ The countries that these people rule are described as ‘free countries.’ But western democracy has largely become a fatuous farce; in that its various establishments have systematically shrunk ‘democratic’ choices to next to nil. The small points that parliaments and senates argue about are largely third-rate issues and mostly cover self-enhancement. (In Britain, the first real politics for decades has burst out of the regulated and detailed, organised regime that runs parliament, albeit in a muddled way, through two referendums on Scotland’s fate and on Brexit.) The paradox of western democracy and its politics in the last half century is that it prevents any real freedom at all. The example of Trump, who claimed he would launch a deliberate and open attack on the political elites that provide an empty shell in US’s established ‘democracy’, has ended up with the proposal to have no democracy at all. Trump was right about who runs the US but his proposal is to set up a dictator! Why? Because he will not reveal the real engine of US society that has always been the starting point of any important decisions – which is – how to best safeguard US capitalism. Because the US’s politics are more and more exposed as rotten, Trump wants to turn that truth (of which he is the putrid opposite) into a TV based, semi-fascist, regime. Trump has learned from the 1930s fascists. It is impossible to drive down the working class and its allies when capitalism is ruthlessly centralising its wealth – unless you put neo-Nazis on the streets . 

 

 

So, the world’s politics is largely created by the world’s economics. Yet the two systems try to deny their interdependence, and thereby often turn politics into a smokescreen. 

 

 

‘Society’ is a contradictory concept under the capitalist system. It is a dilemma because it is based on what is, the most fundamental aspect of human activity, collective labour. To that degree ‘society’ is a concession that capitalist economics and politics find tricky. And as a result, ‘society’ in the West has often become middle class charities and the fiction of the close lives (in moments of peril or patriotism) that all of the social classes apparently share. Yet ‘society’ is a deep experience of human life once the snake oil is poured away. Moments when ‘society’ among the millions who depend on work or welfare, turn towards a general connection, often result in the push-back of the ruling class economics and politics that normally manage most citizens’ lives. The social welfare, hugely enlarged by the most capitalist states because of the Corona Virus, is a case of such a push from society against the main role of the capitalist state. The organised construction and definition of ‘society’ and its rights, will become a keystone of the second wave of socialism.      

 

 

And the state. This is the greatest conundrum for socialism’s second wave. The difficulties do not lie in any doubts about the need to completely destroy the current capitalist state machines. The long-term failure of social democracy in a more and more hazardous capitalism that is curtailing the remains of the democracies, stands for itself. The states, even in the richest countries, are in dangerous moods as their previous structures in economics and politics fray. But where politics in the time of capitalism creates smoke-screens, provides laws to limit the needs of subaltern classes, focuses away from the apparently impervious rules of capitalist economics, etc., states themselves organise action against a class or selected classes that seek serious change. As revolts get closer in the West and as capitalism falters, the core role of the state is exposed.  

 

 

The dilemma is their replacement. Local military and the imperialist forces attacked the Russian revolution after the revolution.  A vast, military state, led by a single party, was installed by the Russian Communist Party. The defeat of imperialism and their local armies won the revolution in China. The successful military/party were installed as the new state. When both Russia and China were held by the revolutionaries they turned to new economics first. While the new economics was organised, where it could, and to the benefit of the working class and the peasantry, despite mistakes, a new type of state was not organised. Where a gradual, more complex economic system was able to be administered, the New Economic Policy which instituted ownership in the land in Russia and a more unsuccessful collectivism in China, there was no new state created, despite the opening being possible. In reality, the two states of the USSR and of China petrified until the extinction of the Russian revolution in the 1980s and the CCP today. The second wave of socialism has to solve this deadly error.   

 

 

Looking at the need to change the hierarchy and relationships of Economics, Politics, the role of society and the state, we are talking about a new civilisation. Just a note… Good fun.

 

 

Let’s spell out some critical requirements of the ‘second wave.’ (You know you want to!) Starting with the quality of socialism; it is in the conscious capacity of the big majority of people across the world to decide on, and to organise, the way they want and need to live. This is a first. No human activity of that sort has ever been fully seen. There have been glimpses in the West in moments in WW2 and much wider. Much more in the many revolutions across the world. Today there is the swelling movement of millions, perhaps billions, trying to save ourselves, together, from the ravages of capitalism across the planet; demanding a different, more considered, more collective and more aware sort of society, in the struggle to save planetary health. But are these only moments, consciously changing history? And is this vast green revolt enough to secure the necessary, equal, standards for changing daily life – let alone extinction? Not yet.   

 

 

What does that mean? It means starting by resolving two matters. The first pops up as a word that left-intellectuals play with (very seriously!) ‘Agency.’ I think that means, who is it now that will carry out the socialistrevolution – now that the working class has disappeared, or been middle-classed, or cut away from the history of the industrial working class, or having to live with the weakness of trade unions, or large parts of the state covering health, welfare and education in the West - meaning the whole state can be reformed based on that? Poor intellectuals. There is no theoretical answer or rather no theoretical solution about the new socialist revolution, at least not yet.  An entirely new working class has happened - across the globe - but the new revolution has not yet happened. 

 

 

What is happening are momentous movements, like the world-wide greens, like the new surge for women’s rights, from Hollywood to Warsaw to Calcutta, like the new anti-slavery, black-rights’, battles with the state in the US, the UK and in Continental Africa from Cape Town to Nairobi. In the UK there is a majority of Scots who demand partition; ten million British voters who voted for the devil Corbyn; immense pressure on a reluctant state, which is desperately shoring up capitalism during the Corona Virus pandemic and that will spill out in mass action the moment that there is a vaccine. 

 

 

(Sticking for a moment with the dissolving UK after the 2019 General Election, various efforts, including from me and some other friends, tried to start a political bloc, seeking a joint movement between Labour’s left in Momentum and the Peoples’ Assembly, outside Labour. Our dismal failure pointed out that linking together the modern fantasy of Attlee’s Labour and the outside Labour campaigners, seen as from the Bolshevik tradition, was probably the last place to start!) Nevertheless, the new working classes in the West – and across world have been re-organised by Capital or in the battle for nation building, and their gathering action, now seen and known across the globe, seems a good enough potential ‘agency’ for me. 

 

The principle of bloc building, mentioned rather weakly above, connects to the second ‘matter’. (Look above and pay attention!) What is the political vessel that can turn the world’s level of disturbance and revolt into a plan and programme to change the economy, politics, society and the state? That was another failure of previous would-be socialist revolutions, if you remember. Well; we have learned that it is certainly not achieved by a repetition of the various would-be Bolshevik parties which, by theory, manage a state and a society until capitalism is pushed back (ok, good?) but then the new workers and their alliances have to fall in line regardless of the sole party and its state (definitely bad.) You will remember that repetition does not achieve better change, it produces the same results as before. This time without the developed nation that at least pushed imperialism back.  

 

 

The ‘new’, means gathering the stirring actions that are troubling the status quo from various directions and building a bloc of them - and their supporters. Let all of the major, radical movements share their demands for each and all of the radical changes needed. We can be sure that at the heart of such a bloc will always be the youth, those who provide welfare, health and education, those who face the worst wage slavery and those who struggle to survive. This combination would inevitably and practically examine capitalism’s economic system, its politics and the society that is really needed to achieve their demands, and, I do not doubt, will therefore come up against a more and more hostile state. Naturally a plethora of parties will spring up in this process and add their weight. So be it - so long as the bloc takes precedence through decisive votes as the battle for change develops its politics. Is that enough ‘agency?’  

 

 

After the ‘agency’ matters comes the decisions about how to defeat the capitalist system and how to develop a genuine democracy that is able to build its own, entirely subservient, state. In history we have the two, or three-year examples of soviets. Momentary experiences of a soviet type developments also ran through revolts and revolutionary actions in Germany, Spain and France etc., over the decades. In modern times, perhaps surprisingly, another type of democracy has arisen. We have the partial collapse of the deteriorating British parliament and its associated parties that resulted in two referendums, most importantly, on critical issues. The renewed Scottish National Party also led a serious, largely temperate and long – very considered - public debate. In the end the vote went for the status quo due to fear of weakening the economy (or UK capitalism.) The second referendum, designed to keep the Tory party in the EU, turned into a concafany, but was nevertheless more democratic than any General Election since 1945. But these two scary experiences (which seriously damaged Britain’s ruling classes) and now the next Scottish fight for another referendum, which has a large majority for independence and no longer fears UK capitalism, are, albeit, crooked models of what real democracy could be. In Scotland the majority of working class people will now try to detach from the UK. Why? Because the first referendum showed that great issues could be decided by ordinary people. The voters for Brexit have already reversed the state’s purposes. The main political parties were utterly changed and more people in the working class were more mobilised by more politics – demanding and achieving their decisions over all other negative aspects of the state, of its economy’s wishes and of the initial views of the political parties. Not soviets, but a lesson in democracy for the next socialist wave.        

 

 

 

The next socialist wave? At first it means the overthrow of the dominance of capitalism. The economy that runs politics. (Capitalism can still be useful in a wider context and under collective control.) That achieved, it means the conscious decision to break up class rule, replaced by the rule of the wide majority who work in all fields collectively, and which implies the agreed need for the equal distribution of society’s wealth. The first action of the new economy – which is to be led by politics. The ever-more concentrating rich of the first part of the 21^stcentury will be utterly dissolved. Instead the deep unfairness, so essential to all class-based societies, can be replaced with more and more societies attaching themselves to the new, second-wave of socialism. 

 

 

This established, with a regular democracy, that has the systematic power (hinted by the best moments of the referendums in the UK, the early Soviets, etc., and an elected and diminishing state) the great horrors of human history across all History’s’ stages can at last be destroyed. Since civilisation was first ordered by its fledging ruling classes – and at least as early as the agricultural revolution – the evils of racism, of the vile definitions of women’s subordinate lives and all the attending aspects of lives created to be unspeakable, will, at last, finish.   

 

 

The second wave of socialism tries, at every possible step, to subordinate the state in favour of a collective society and its new democracy. Economics becomes subordinate to politics, that is itself the engine room of society, replacing that state.  Enough. 

 

 

 

Trump echoes Mussolini.

Trump's performance in the now Corona-spread White House reminds the world of Mussolini. Mussolini was the arch political actor before WW2. Beside him Hitler looked thin and frail. Hitler was a vegetarian. He wanted war but had to learn his most pompous struts in the cities from his architect, Albert Speer.  From Mussolini's imperious marches to his vast office, to his insistence on keeping his palace alight into the night to prove his long hours of work, the grandiose Mussolini presented himself nothing less than a lesser God. Bar a vicious attack to create a miniature empire in Ethiopia, war was to fall on him. 

Trump set up a slow motion, carefully lit and staged film, ending with the throw-away of his mask, to tell his 'fellow Americans' that, like a Superman, he felt 20 years better than before. Trump had thrown away the world's pandemic

How the hell did America get here?

The world has Trump (and his followers and imitators) because of the politics and economics that preceded him. Trump, (like Mussolini) emerged from the continual disasters that evolved out of crises and crashes in capitalism and the political leadership that emerged out of these disasters. 

The relentless slow crash of industry in the US and the seemingly endless decline of the wages, of the jobs, of the housing, of social conditions over 30 and more years, were headed by political leaders that accepted, indeed promoted, the consistent rise of the super rich and the consistent failure to establish any significant reform. From Reagan to Obama, the steps were built for Trump. 

At this moment millions of Americans are hoping that their majority vote, by post as well as in the ballot boxes on November 3, will be enough to stop Trump from being able to squeeze his creeps and creatures in the offices among the key States, pretending a 'victory' on the night, then confirmed by the Supreme Court's acceptance of that 'no postal votes will be allowed' after the 3rd. The US Constitution could be about to be imploded. And the truth is Biden - if he managed to get over the gate at all - will simply rehearse the tragedy that is swelling. 

Millions are certainly needed. But not for Biden. They are needed, as in Belarus, on the streets, in a battle for a different society.

The end of globalisation. A new conjuncture?

Among the words offered by the Thesaurus that fit with 'conjuncture' is the word 'apex.' In a political sense 'conjuncture' suggests a gathering of important political events and attitudes that summarise a moment (in time and/or place) and that creates a definition, or meaning, of the main engine of events. 'Apex' is better though, because it also suggests a pinnacle which, in turn, suggests a new slope ahead.

This short argument is going to try to identify the pinnacle and offer some comments about the slope.

In fact all over the left (and the more scary right) in Europe and the US, politicians, writers, reporters and speculators are focussing on the conjuncture. Why? Because it is obvious that globalisation is bursting. Despite Tony Blair's think-tank, etc, etc, globalisation has been bubbling up higher and higher for some years and now it is popping across the world. Blair (and many others) sincerely believed that globalisation was the ultimate story of capitalism and that it has decades, perhaps millennia, to go. This blog has often argued about the inherent weakness of globalisation. Many others thought so too. So we can leave that item aside for the moment. Whether you think that globalisation was a consequence of the weakness of western imperialism or you think it was all down to Corona, globalisation, as it stood, is over.

The main forces that are bursting the global bubble are the US and, latterly, the EU. China is still (desperately) trying to make tariffs go away. (Chinese economists are publicly hinting at the removal of their funds from the US if they do not pull back from current economic attacks.) But the massive U.S. financial system has assets of about $100 trillion as of the end of 2019, according to the International Monetary Fund. There is no doubt that the US still runs the world.

It’s not clear how large China’s financial system overall is. Chinese banking institutions had assets of 285 trillion yuan ($40.7 trillion) at the end of September 2019, according to state reports. Total Chinese investment in the U.S. economy has reached over $145 billion. And China owns about $1.1 trillion in U.S. debts. (This sounds big - and the Chinese are beginning to use it as a lever - but it is still less than Japanese loans in the US.)

The US, followed by Australia and now the UK and Germany, are pushing back against Chinese exports and their general, global, investment. This will deepen, regardless even if Trump is dumped or Boris is really back-stabbed by Gove or the EU mandarins start moaning at Merkel.

These terrifyingly facts (a massive economic war has always led to the real thing) are covered over in most of the West's population by (governments who are dealing with) Corona. It is apparently the Corona that is changing the world, shutting up the big shops in the City centres, stopping the lips-tasting Langdoc this year in the garden, destroying all those charming young peoples' cheery jobs. There are acres and acres of books, pods, blogs, programmes and conversations about how the western world will now change because of the Pandemic. Bollocks. What is happening is that the West is using their state powers to deal with the Pandemic but also (see Boris's denial of any more austerity) to create a new type of capitalist investment. Does anyone think that after Corona we will be just the same as 2019? That thought is enough to show that Corona is not the issue.

Everybody is in to it. Cummings, Boris's advisor-stroke-brain, wants the UK to build its own £2trillion version of FANG - (Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google.) There are similar dreams across the Western nations as politicians starry eyes get-going by rooting up more and more breathless names of future tech that will provide a new centre of the globe (and another decade or two of stupendous wealth.) The UK's version is to be a signal part of the 'famous five' - of the US (big daddy), UK (first son), Australia, Canada, New Zealand - that will hopefully wrap up the wealth of Asia and Africa's demand for the new, Anglo-Saxon FANG.

Sadly, this momentum has been also picked up by parts of the left (Varoufakis, Paul Mason et al) who have begun to imagine that the new state-based initiatives will create some openings for state action that could be used to distribute wealth and reduce private ownership. But we have already seen how the 'new' state action works. Test and Trace, which is a mess particularly in England, gets called by Boris 'the NHS Test and Trace' when he is denying all of his mistakes. But Test and Trace in England was sold to SERCO, one of those most useless companies that has regularly failed in all their other 'public services. The Apex has provided state action mainly to hold up companies and to re-finance some of the NHS. But we have now reached the slope; a slope that will bring the fantasy FANG mark 2, and any other new version of capitalism, smashing to the ground as the state desperately delivers...to private enterprise. (Has everyone forgotten the first dot.com economic collapse in 2000?)

Nevertheless, the new champions of the would-be 'famous five', with their scruffy West Coast clothes and their false hatred of the 'deep state' and their pretences that they are the underdog, (eg.,Cummings, Boris et al) sincerely imagine that this vast new FANG is just there, an inch away from the treasure chest. Sadly, the tech revolution, tied as it is to future of capitalism, has already run out of substantial new tech! All the main super-future tech goals are already failing. And the idea that something elementally new is just around the corner but unseen by the current FANG lot, is simply ludicrous. Yet they are ready to dole out £billions to private firms that sound good. In reality, the only thing that can and will be extended and promoted is more and more surveillance, which is a definite 'yes' as far as the use of dominant state powers are concerned. Surveillance is particularly required in the West as the upsurges after Corona begin.

(And breaking treaties? The French described the truth of the 'perfidious Albion' centuries ago. The British state is known across the whole world for its history of lies and twists. Take the Middle East in only one example. The secret agreement between Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot in May 1916 divided the Ottoman lands into British and French spheres – and came to light only when it was published by the Bolsheviks.

Boris is breaking the EU Withdrawal Agreement because, if there is no Canada style agreement over Brexit, and his power to use whatever state money to build new tech is diminished, he knows that the EU would be left alone, building new Customs at the edge of Southern Ireland. The Brits are not going to do it. Neither will the Unionists. Boris is of course hostile anyway to the Nationalists in Northern Ireland.)

How Scotland can win its independence.

There is a discussion in Scotland about setting up a new party. It is barely months away from the next Scottish General Election. Despite coronavirus continuing to dominate the agenda, more and more, party politics is coming out of lockdown. The idea of the new Party is that it would be organised so that the SNP (and their coalition Greens) could win all of their constituency votes, but the new party, coming from outside the constituencies and represented the list votes only, would be able to bring the single independence issue to a bigger, combined majority vote in the Holyrood Parliament. With its increased pressure (both on the SNP and Boris's Westminster government) the new party and the SNP vote would more likely force the second referendum for Scottish independence. This argument is the backdrop to the increasing hints and implications regularly surfacing against the SNP leadership and Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland's first minister. 

1. For some months now the polls in Scotland have supported Scottish independence. The figures roughly show the same numbers delivered by the referendum in 2014 -  except it is now in reverse! The figures give a growing majority for independence. It is becoming Scottish society's new norm.

Since 2007 the Scottish Nationalist Party has been, and remains, the largest party in Scotland. The SNP is overwhelmingly dominant in Scottish government elections - despite the failed 2014 referendum result.

More dramatically, the SNP leadership are now, overwhelmingly, the most serious challenge to the UK's government. Not only has the SNP leadership out-managed and out-delivered the responses to Covid-19, it has also restored the issue of Scottish independence - front and centre - in the UK, despite PM Boris Johnson's denial of any new independence referendum.

The problem facing the SNP - and all who now support a new referendum for Scottish independence - is that Boris Johnson is the leader of a large majority of MPs in Westminster and he and they all oppose any new referendum in Scotland. The British Parliament and its government has a legal right to control Scotland's ultimate destiny.

2. Recently in Spain, the Catalonia province and its elected Catalonian leaders, decided to hold their own referendum for independence against Spanish rule. The referendum was not accepted by the Spanish government. It was declared unconstitutional on 7 September 2017 and the referendum was suspended by the Constitutional Court of Spain after the request from the Spanish government, who then declared it a breach of the Spanish Constitution. The Catalonian referendum was denied and its leadership crushed.

3. This is the crisis of the next referendum for Scottish independence. And this is what the SNP leadership said about a new referendum in September 2020.

'That’s why we’re moving forward with giving Scotland the choice over our future – and before the end of this Parliament, we will publish a draft Bill setting out the proposed terms and timing of an independence referendum, as well as the proposed question that people will be asked in that referendum.'
'The 2021 Holyrood election will then be crucial – we will make the case for Scotland to become an independent country, and seek a clear endorsement of Scotland’s right to choose our own future.'

But nothing is published by the SNP that offers a way through the Westminster government's dominant majority legal-lock.

4. Virtually all of the radical left in Scotland also demand a new referendum. At the moment the left (which does not include the decaying and dying remnants of Scottish Labour) is driving in two directions.

First is the AUOB (All Under One Banner) marches across Scotland in 2019. On  07/10/2019, the Edinburgh march - in the rain -  attracted over 200,000 people - the largest demonstration in Scotland ever. The SNP leadership were effectively forced onto the platform - and their constitutional nervousness was noted. Today this unresolved question remains open under the general significance of the Corona-virus, but the SNP September 2020 statement is still moot in respect of the inevitable challenge with Westminster. The desire of the left (and some of the SNP deep-nationalists) to make independence the main, defining issue in the coming election in 2022, stems from the power of the AUOB movement.

Second, a smaller left group in Scotland insists that the referendum has to be effected only on socialist terms. The SNP and its leadership are defined as Scotland's Tories and building a socialist leadership of the referendum is the keystone to (and the only way) that Scottish independence can be won.

While the abstract and sectarian perspective of this second approach speaks loudly for itself, nevertheless the broad, mass-movement, now in suspension, cannot project Scotland's marches and its polls for a referendum as the answer to overcoming the UK government. Additionally, the problem that would ensue is that such a Scottish referendum, repudiated by the UK government, would become a different issue again across all British politics. The British state would define the left's Scottish referendum as an illegal initiative, and that would be seen as an attack on the democracy of the UK as a whole.

5. Here is an answer that opens the politics beyond Scottish 'political parties coming out of lockdown' and the dubious weight of Scottish marches and opinion polls across the UK, albeit their value in Scotland. The approach derives from the understanding that Scotland's 'right' for independence is its constant and unacceptable restraint created by the English based Parliament and governments. Scotland's Westminster laws and governments simply do not represent the laws and governments that the majority of Scot's agree with. That has been the case since the 1970s. For 50 years Scotland has not been able to implement the full requirements of its own society. This, fundamental fact, means that Scotland cannot implement its own democracy.

These are examples of what a lack of democracy means and what should happen about it - as soon as possible - to begin the fight for democracy in Scotland. First, the SNP and the majority of Scots think that Britain's Trident nuclear submarines are unacceptable. Trident is a British policy to 'defend' a nation that feels the need to prepare for devastating war across the world. Most Scots however want to be a small nation who look after their own people. This is what should happen. The SNP should remove Trident, close it down. Let Westminster move it to a nation that supports it. Mass action will certainly be needed to stop nuclear Scotland. If the SNP do not fight this issue, actively, in a mass movement, then they do not fight for Scottish democracy.

The implementation of a humane immigration policy, immediate alliances with surrounding nations, major conferences nationally and internationally to re-model the new democracy, including with other ex-UK citizens that are supportive. These are vital measures now to prove a new, progressive nation is being born. And they can be started in the face of Westminster's failing democracy - as  an alternative society.

From practical steps like these (changing Westminster taxes, re-organising a new Bank of Scotland and the building of a sovereign wealth fund, etc) the argument about Westminster's rights in Scotland will become immediately defensive and then apply for a new treaty and the battle for independence has truly begun. It is the alternative to endless court battles and declining marches.