Wednesday 29 April 2020

The UK after coronavirus

A friend in the Labour Party talked to me recently (via zoom) about post coronavirus politics. She said that the tremendous efforts by the NHS staff and other carers, including those working in care homes but spreading much further, from dustbin workers to supermarket staff, meant that Boris's Tory government would have to accept at least some sort of mild social democratic - Keynsian approach in the coming years. After the corona experience, my friend thought that the big majority of people would simply not accept another austerity regime. The role of the state, even under the Tories, had dramatically proved its usefulness to British people, which would also restrain the Tories' traditional 'anti-state' mantra.

It sounds inviting. But a great contradiction is already emerging across British politics - and economics. Here, for example, is one small indication that begins to open up what really happens next.

George Osborne, Chancellor under ex-Prime Minister Cameron, and now the editor of the London Evening Standard, enjoys his often stated claim that the current spending programmes, under Chancellor Sunak, are only possible because he, Osborne, imposed austerity and 'fixed the roof while the sun was shining.' The truth is the complete opposite. (See LRB., 16 April.)

Everybody in Britain knows (except Osborne) that the NHS was on its knees before coronavirus. It had had no investment program for staff or for equipment for a decade. The Nuffield Trust (8/5/2019) pointed out 80% of nurse vacancies were covered by temporary staff. 1 in 12 posts were vacant in hospital and community services. There were 40,000 adverts for nurses. The OECD put the UK as 20th for nurses, behind Slovenia, the US, Ireland, Iceland, and of course France and Germany. The UK was 22nd for doctors per patients. As a result, when the coronavirus struck, the government had first to take desperate measures to close the gap created by its own previous policies. The government scrapped the £35 billion debt from its own service and bought 10,000 nurses from private hospitals. That, at least temporarily, covered the Tory hole in Osborne's roof.

And that was just one, result of austerity Britain. Many British companies were already against the wall before corona. Britain's economy remains dominated by the City of London; the main funnel for selling international wealth across the globe - and for sheltering corporate wealth in the mainly British-held tax havens. Many British regions have collapsed. Investment in the UK is the lowest and slowest in comparison with both the EU and the US.

But does the present change the future? Will Boris's Tories' now shift their anti-state orientation? How will the developing contradiction between major state action today and the next 4 years rebuilding the economy, via profit and private ownership, develop?

First we need to look more carefully at the Tories' spending today. By far the largest chunks of Sunak's largesse are formed by the offer of loans - loans to major corporations in the main, but the vast number of small businesses are also offered rent. When it comes to workers, Sunak's famous furlough amounts to about £7 billion. It was late in delivery (end of April) and stops in June. The desperate bridging for the NHS's collapsing structure (roughly £35 billion) like the furlough, could not be a loan. But most of the rest of Sunak's offers are made of loans. We are far away from President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal.

There are the previous Tory promises in the 2019 General Election regarding new Hospitals and new railway development into the North. And they remain essential given the public support for the NHS and the catastrophe of Britain's railways since privatisation. But other than these very late actions, the only other major economic offer to the UK people is a trade deal with Trump.

So can Boris and his playmate Cummings dream up a new Tory austerity?

Austerity 1 has clearly failed, but its title can easily be changed. George Osborne can be stuffed away into history. The real energy that the Tories, under Boris and Cummings, will end up using (and creating Austerity 2 in all but name) has three faces. Boris (and Cummings) are now considering their words carefully.

When Boris says ( No 10 Speech on his return from hospital) that he wants to 'work together with opposition parties' it is because he wants to develop a shared outlook in relation to the economic steps he will need take after coronavirus. He is fully aware of how close Corbyn's economic program came to fruition. Boris rarely fought Corbyn's economic program in 2019, he fought Corbyn the politician (along with every other anti-socialist forces.) Boris's effort to 'bring in' the likes of Keir Starmer is simply the means to extinguish for once and for all the remains of the alternative Corbyn program. Boris will require as much cross-party support for serious tax increases which will be focussed mainly on white collar and blue collar workers. It means agreeing to break the holy grail of locked pensions. And, following all the new right policies across the West, the big reduction of corporate taxes.

Second; the Tory duo are beginning to weave an ideological framework through the corona disaster that they have helped made worse They now stand for a new 'unity' that dealing with the illness has aspired. The constant application of the war-like battles - with a virus (!) - that Boris and his ministers spout is a new framework of the UK's potential social and political unity. Brexit is now completed. Britons are standing together supporting 'the front line.' Re-building the victory is the cause now. And in case you need a diverting enemy to keep things together, you have no greater target than China!

Finally Boris will prepare for his answer to the state solutions so essential in 2020. Boris (and Cummings) will claim that the true dynamo of Britain's future economy already is and will be the huge emergence of small businesses. This will be delivered as the model for economic advance for everyone. Stirring this layer in society will start from the call to 'set free' those future entrepreneurs, to get the state (read important regulation) out of their hair, to reinforce the single-mindedness and individual enterprise that they require and provoke. Unravelling the grip of the EU bureaucracy, the Tories will now seek to tear down the deadly range of laws and rules that block enterprise. And start to build the Singapore-on-Thames - courtesy of the US trade deal.

In reality this will all suit the larger corporations. The rising tide has yet to elevate any boat - except the billionaires' yachts. And, at this moment, Labour's new leader shows every sign of signing up for the new austerity trip.  

Monday 6 April 2020

Why does the left fail ?

1. Where now is left social democracy in the West?

The British Labour Party's drastic defeat in the 2019 General Election is the current signature for the radical left across the West. What is it that causes these large failures and retreats - in Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Denmark, Germany, Greece etc.? And a decisive collapse of left social democracy across the West is happening in the near future as the radical Bernie Sanders has been thrown over by the Democratic membership. It certainly defines the defeat of left social democracy across the whole West and its failure to act as the main, progressive answer to globalisation - or to the rising extreme right.

2. Why is left social democracy failing?

Taking the example of Britain, there are the simplistic, hostile answers against socialism that flood across the traditional press media. These idiocies are also regular from Trump's mouth. But the attacks are most gross in the case of the British millionaire tabloids. Most popular British papers go beyond the anti-socialist features on the internet, singing their own old swan songs to the tune of WW2. The coronavirus is used as the latest WW2 parallel. These declining, sad old comics have now decided that they are the mouthpiece of the otherwise marginalised, older sections of the working class as they set out fake visions of the past. They try to provide a version of society which was centred on a great success, but then was thrown away by the youth rebellion of the 1960s, then by the Common Market, then the trade unions, then immigrants, then political correctness (gone mad), and then (post Thatcher) the self-serving detachment of Britain's politicians. But Britain's traditional, decaying, press-media is not the substantial reason for the left's defeat.

In Britain today most people under 50 prefer the internet to find their news - and their versions of history. This increasingly undermines the future of the traditional press and even frightens the liberal BBC (that defines the national debate mainly within the parameters of our 'given' society; note its coverage of Corbyn in 2017 -19). But frankly, the news on the internet offers a greater range of different views in a period where the traditional 'consensus' - a la BBC - in no way reflects real life for most people.

Starting from some basic facts, 10 million voted Corbyn in 2019 - the biggest number looking for an entirely different society since Attlee's post war government. (The Labour leader Michael Foot promoted a very weak program in the 1980s.) The section of the working class that moved over to Boris is not a novel development. (Some US correspondents are claiming that Boris is not a Trump because he is genuinely supporting sections of the working class! See Marshall Auerback 'Nation' March 4, 2020.) Boris's manoeuvres have a long history. Disraeli 'won over' the new knights of trade unionism with the 'benefits' of Empire and its possible concessions in the end of the 19th century. Thatcher sold council houses and offered housing development as an alternative to industry. The older sections of the working class in Britain suffered the Thatcher victories and fell into their gradual decline accordingly. The 'successful' 10% ended up moving to the county of Essex - along with singing 'stars' Lulu and Rod Stewart!

It is not and it has never has been the desertion of the working class as a whole, particularly now, in its modern and young, one hundred and one guises, that has 'broken' from the desperate need to change society. Winning over a chunk of the working class by the right is not the fundamental reason for the left's failure. Indeed in Britain and across other western countries, there are consistent polls that support state ownership across all utilities. More significantly are the constant movements of resistance and struggle for significant societal change - from the huge requirements of climate change to battles with the declining welfare systems, to the movement in Greece, in Germany etc., that are fighting for the right of free movement of refugees. Tomorrow, the failure of the West's role in the requirement to stop Covid-19 and the results of its anti-social economic system that is organised against society as a whole will produce a new revolt.

3. Has social democracy therefore been tricked out of its potential success by the ruling class's manipulation of modern 'democracy'?

For decades voting in the West was a pretty pointless affair. Millions in the West began to stop voting for parties that seemed to be all the same. Voting appeared to change nothing. And power and wealth were beyond the electoral realm. But now society is polarising and elections are changing. Wealth and power are beginning to be central in day-to-day politics.

As a result there are some momentous tricks brought up by history, which are now being carefully manipulated by the rulers that determine the West's electoral habits. In Britain for example the voting arrangements in 2019 meant that Labour needed 50,835 votes to win a parliamentary seat in the House of Commons. This compared with the 38,264 votes required to seat a Tory. When you add the 14.5 million votes in the 2019 election that did not secure a candidate and the 1 in 3 voters who voted for candidates they did not primarily support (so called tactical voting) it meant that Boris's huge government, with an 87 MPs lead over all other MPs and parties, ended up actually representing barely one-quarter of the British voters!

Trump tactics are being studied in Britain, using the registration of voters as a means of removing hundreds of thousands from the electoral roll - especially the young, the poorest, voters of colour etc. And there is much more to follow.

This, the manipulation of either already planted manoeuvres in the electoral system or those now planned, is getting closer to an answer as to why the left was defeated. But not necessarily so much around the different electoral systems and their tricks as such; more around how the West's politics in general that can never successfully lead to wealth and power being in the hands of the millions.

4. Is the politics of left social democracy adequate to challenge and defeat those who are dominant and who now can exercise wealth and power?

This is the crux of the matter. What is the West's modern democracy? In the end, it is not a question of technical arrangements or even voting systems. It is the question - what is the nature of our 'democracy'? How do really big decisions really get made? Do millions of voters get to decide what they want and need and are they then able to carry out their decisions? Do we have to have 'separate' people who 'do' our democracy and take over the decisions we make - because our daily lives are too difficult for us to carry out our political decisions? Is a continuity viable between voters deciding something, and then the voters themselves making that thing happen?

The western working class, especially the young, have virtually had to start from the beginning, building up their collective strength in the face of climate change, globalisation, the 2008 banking crises, now a pandemic and the further polarisation of society. The remains of the trade union movement in most western countries are today more active in their campaigns but considerably less able to lead a new, vast, disparate working class across society. And right at the centre of this under-developed working class movement and its marginal if popular organisations is the hole that is still empty - where the view of the prospect of a genuinely democratic, socialist society needs to be.

Original Marxists and socialists appeared to be coy about predicting the future. They understood that social context and class action were everything. It was absurd to insist that the future kaleidoscope of history could be settled by the way of a set of architects' drawings. But history since that time has presented the results of the great working class movements and their politics over a century and more. And what young people in the West see today is not only the failures of their own day to day societies but also the collapses, the defeats and the gross mistakes of most, self-styled, socialist countries across the world. By and large the youth support the resistance to the leaderships of those who have led, in name, such societies. Older working class people in the West knew about the collapse of the Soviet Union and they knew that when it did exist, before and after WW2, they praised the Russians for their defeat of Hitler, but, on the whole, their grand-mothers and fathers did not want to live in so-called Soviet Russia. (For one thing it was a country that had no Soviets).

It is always possible to wave theoretical banners and argue that, like the waves in the ocean, the movement of the working class towards a new society is the main, conscious, global question that has yet to be resolved (at least since the French Revolution). Of course working class socialism inevitably takes surges forward, but then it retreats as the system of capitalism first founders and then reorganises. Socialism, over time, appears as though it is unable to defeat the core of capitalism.

At this point in time most Western working class people think (rightly) that their children will be poorer and have a lower standard of living. They want and need drastic change in their society and the corona crisis only increases that feeling. But the political direction of socialism, connected as it is to the defeats of the past, make the political future unclear and practical advances appear fuzzy and utopian. That often leads to the image of progression becoming a personal adventure and success amounts to carving out gains at others expense.

Corbyn's 2019 Manifesto won Labour over 10 million votes - but the Manifesto itself lost credibility. It did not sound possible or likely to be achieved. Simultaneously, the 10 million-plus who also wanted the sort of changes Corbyn described, they went as far as not voting Labour at all! Left Labour leaders, including Corbyn, insisted that all the Manifesto gains were essentially a matter of Britain simply rising to the levels already achieved by German state-welfare etc. But the British waverers believed that the Manifesto would actually be a huge shift in British society. The 10 million-plus did not believe that it was simply a shift to the level of some other European nations. The 10 million-plus did not believe that the Manifesto could be implemented without a great upheaval in Britain. The data about Germany and the Scandinavian countries' social welfare and investments were accurate, in comparison with the UK, but the people beyond the 10 million knew in their hearts that achieving even these very limited advances in the context of the UK would require the deepest struggle since the 1970s. Then they looked again at the ferocious divisions of the Labour Party, led mainly by its MPs, and the results of the history of socialist efforts in the past -  and they turned away. The Attlee example was no longer a valid example for them. They were right. It never was. Attlee rebuilt the war torn Britain by wringing concessions as he simultaneously rebuilt capitalism, using the post-war state. And the 2019 voters were also right that these supposedly relatively small steps in Labour's Manifesto, in the context of Britain in 2019, would not have been accepted by big Capital but rather its application would produce a giant storm.

5. What needs to change?

Social democracy, even the sincere left social democracy of Corbyn, does not cut it anymore. Even if you restricted your desires to the reforms echoed in the Corbyn Manifesto and you want to succeed, you would now need a new revolution in Britain. And that was the missing political centre of Corbyn's proposal. Leave aside the deep split among Labour's MPs and the hostility of virtually every company and corporation, the Labour left - and others  - argued that Corbyn's plans were no more difficult to set up than was Attlee's program. But there was a blind spot in the left's perspective of Attlee during the 2017 and 2019's UK General Elections. Capitalist Britain had been smashed in WW2. The Empire was collapsing. Attlee used the state he had built up during the war to save British capitalism. And that, of necessity, involved major concessions to the working class, but never outside the framework of the new capitalism. For decades Labour and Tories maintained Attlee's fundamental order. The British society was, in effect, a ruling class / working class compact until the 1970s - led  by the union bosses in the case of the working class - in the agreed framework of a capitalist economy and a majority component of the state delivering welfare.

This compact is long gone - whatever Boris tells the workers in the Midlands and the North East of England. In various ways and at different points in history the British-style compact was adopted and now, has systematically broken across the European West. The Attlee gains cannot be repeated in today's economy and society. And working class people in Britain and across the West feel that that. They know that Corbyn and the left covered up or signally denied that there has to be a new and ferocious struggle to gain any serious inroads into today's capitalism.

At the same time 20th century revolutions (with small and partial exceptions) have been seen by the West to have failed outright or to have turned sour. (Left) social democracy could not even hang-on to the concessions they won after WW2. They have become left liberals and died out as mass parties or, as in the minority cases of Corbyn in the UK and Sanders in the US, promoted programs that workers want but do not believe can happen. 

What is to be done? The answer begins with brutal honesty. Millions of the new working classes in the West are damaged by the current capitalist system. They are fully aware of their losses - which are deepening. As has been seen, huge initiatives and epic answers are offered from the new right - and the apparent sizes of these programs are designed to shape up to the huge problems that millions face. This creates a drama and movement in politics for a time. It appears to fill the hole in society where once particularly older working class people could see and identify themselves - now the unions and the old working class parties had gone. But the right's political show inevitably turns out to be empty. Instead, the new right insists more and more on authority, on the control of society and works as a vessel to maintain order and support the power and wealth of the new capitalist global order. Empty of any real direction but enriching capitalist authority against any and all who resist it, the new right attacks minorities and leftish critics to define its own political domination.

There is a lesson for the left in this context. The working class is aware that any serious or sizeable change takes major and specific means; and that serious forces will need to be contended for and substantial progress to be made. Left social democracy denies that. But the response to the new right requires the new left to offer an equally large and decisive alternative - based in their case in serious and practical explanations which denounce the social and economic system and spell out real alternatives. And this takes the argument right back to the future of democracy. Created properly, it will be a new democracy that can break the failings of the left's history.

The way that the left can simultaneously pull away from the apparent failures and defeats of the 20th century revolutions, and successfully adopt a policy for structural change of society, is based on a new focus - for a different, and for the most powerful, democracy.

6. So what can we do about a revolutionary democracy?

Left social democracy in the West has trailed the failing revolutions across the world in their incapacity to break capitalist domination. Indeed the social democrat project was unable to get anything like as far as the Russian or Chinese or Yugoslavian or Cuban or Vietnamese revolutions. And despite the failures of these revolutionaries, their challenge to capitalism and its associated imperialism meant that their revolutions pushed further and faster against the world's dominant social system than anything achieved by social democracy. That is also a part of the revolutionary historical legacy.

People like Blair have long ago dropped any sort of offensive against capitalism. But real social democrats are still attempting to define their alternative to the capitalist system - at least in the West. Despite the history of the social democratic failure, they still believe that social democracy is the only  route to socialism in the western context. And the most significant left social democratic thinkers in the West today are Picketty in France and Monbiot in the UK.

Picketty has produced a new book 'Capital and Ideology' (2019). It is a magnificent tome. As with his previous masterpiece he has drawn out the immoral, anti-human and practical idiocy of the constant expansion of wealth to the world's top 5% and the stasis - and for half to a third of the population - the reduction of wealth, for the rest of us. It has been going on for decades. It crashed the world's economy in 2008 and then soaked more from the 95% and mostly from the bottom 30%, to allow the 5% to continue to rise.  Picketty expands his thorough analysis of similar periods across history and demonstrates their disastrous consequences across the ages.

But we are left with a problem without a solution. Picketty suggests answers that are extensions of his suggestions in his previous book (total inheritance taxes; fair education etc.) Rationally, he is spot on. However, as Corbyn never made clear, the reality of a super class and its determined entitlement of its domination is not an abstraction. And the people who live and exist this way are of course part of a network of others who rule and run the institutions, that allow and promote this condition. In other words, it is a revolt that is required to break up this condition. Extremely rich and powerful people have to lose their wealth and their power. And given their network and their resources, including those that bind the state, they will oppose and fight any substantial change. Social democracy, even left social democracy, does not understand that in today's world, everything needs to change for anything to change.

Mombiot offers a different solution to Picketty - of sorts. YouTube and Face Book show a discussion where Monbiot and a questioner talk about 'the commons.' This has echoes from the English Civil War and the Levellers but there is something attractive and real about how property and resources can be taken out of ownership per se and managed by people who follow the water that flows from the sky, the energy that flows from the sun and the wind and the water. And here is something that is critical for any sort of fairer future. The idea of the 'commons' is deeply democratic in both the sense that property is not owned and that management is collective, which can only be democratic. But again there is no bridge in Mombiot's thinking between what is (treasured and embedded) now and the problem of the change he forments.

Lenin apparently said that socialism - is electricity plus soviets. To get electricity into the hands of the majority you need soviets. To change from modern capitalism to a new society that runs on behalf of the vast majority you need a new democracy. And there is not the slightest sense - even from genuine radicals like Corbyn and Sanders - of the desperate need for a new type of democracy.

7. Ok, generally speaking - what is to be done?

First, it is most urgent that before left social democracy in the West entirely dissolves itself, the left base of these parties need to recreate new political formations. For example, organisations like Momentum in the UK, which are managed by the base and have a clear socialist program, can act independently of most of the remnants of Labour MPs as they tunnel away towards their own end and the Blairite past. Additionally and critically such movements, like Momentum, need to make clear alliances and common fronts with other political movements that act for radical and anti-capitalist change. This can range from organisations like the Peoples Assembly to the left inside and outside of the SNP in Scotland. Without the remaining left in the social democratic shells making a substantive move to build a new socialist bloc, a huge and particularly youthful radicalisation will be lost across the whole of society. And all that will be left is a well-intended far-left stream of confetti.

Second, as the recession and slump - following coronavirus - is preparing austerity part 2, it becomes a pivotal moment to attack and denounce the West's decaying democracy.

There are so many negative experiences that millions upon millions in the West have in relation to their political systems. This is not a theoretical supposition. At heart it is a class matter. The majority get very little, indeed mostly they lose, from their political systems. To an extent the new right, Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, etc, etc, understand that. They do not sell democratic institutions, which they know are failing, instead they sell themselves and their own domination. Initially, they rest on the anger and dissolution of all sections of the population who see the failure of the political class. In time they become the iron fist that smashes any real attempt to change class politics.

In the UK, leaving aside the biggest section of Britain's 'democracy,' the ridiculous and mouldering House of Lords appointed without a single vote, and even if there are genuine elections and choices, as with 2017 and 2019, which had real class issues are at stake (a very rare situation), the British people as a whole have only once, in 1931, won a majority. Since then every government has won with a minority vote. And when getting a 'proper' government really matters, in the UK system you can even get your government without getting the highest number of votes, let alone the unobtainable majority of voters. In 1951 Labour scored 48.8% of the popular vote - the highest Labour ever achieved. The Tories scored less votes, but won more MPs and took the government.

This sort of shenanigans is normal in the West's democracy. The world knows how Trump got to be President 2 million votes less than Clinton. In most European countries the shenanigans happens after the vote as the real power is shuffled in the most appropriate way for the continuation of the prevailing system. So, to get anywhere, the socialists have to break up the West's traditional politics and its underpinning state - if they really wish to build up a new economy and society. This is how to move from a social democracy, which is blocked from any socialism by its acceptance and defence of the current 'democracy', into a democratic socialism.    

But this could not be a new 'party policy.' Building a new democracy would be an action. If the new party, alliance, movement focussed on decisive, concrete requirements, coming from the people in democratic meetings across their self-decided areas, then views like 'No Second Austerity', 'Build New Green Industries', 'Good Homes and Wages for All', 'Votes now for our future (countries, cities and towns)' begin to be heard.  The movement should be prepared to set up local and national votes to test what people need most. Then it would help mobilise the voters and help organise how to effect their vote. If this sounds like a utopian dream - in part it has already been experienced - by millions.

In the case of Britain there has been a recent referendum about EU membership. After the referendum two other 'big' votes have surfaced, one of them for the second time. The Northern Irish are beginning to change their nationhood away from Britain. And the Scots are preparing again for a separate nation.

The Brexit referendum was set up by a section of the Tory party and coming from that source it initially created a great confusion as to whether the Brexit vote was a far right, anti immigrant campaign, as a means of winning traditional working class votes, or, as the years rolled by following the vote, whether it had empowered the working class against the British establishment. The significance of the referendum was, however, immense. The Brexit confusion cut through society, energised millions of people who ignored traditional politics, mobilised millions in action and radicalised the Tories - to the right - and Labour to the left. Although the starting point was a Tory Grandee that needed to reshuffle his backward MPs and although that confused the issue, deliberately opening the door to the new right, nevertheless, the energy, commitment and passion of millions of ordinary people, over several years, created a majority and changed their society. Imagine if millions of ordinary people were not only able to vote in referendums but were also able to set the serious questions. That is the new democracy.      

Any MPs or councillors could collaborate or cut themselves off from the new democracy in action. Real democracy, carried out by the majority of voters. Democracy in action would be the bedrock of the new democracy for the whole of society. It would stand up against the degeneration of a rotten system.

The fight to set serious questions by the population would be defended by the democratic meetings and actions. The actions would be mass actions, and the events would be voted for, the voting would be direct and cover all main issues.

The goal would be the gathering of the new, active democracy, opening to all the big questions, as the alternative to the current undemocratic politics that is founded on a biased state and a rotten society.

8. But, what is to be done - right now?

Right now, the new Labour leader Keir Stamer is telling us all that he will support everybody in anything they do - including the government over the coronavirus. But the real socialists should prepare to stand loud and firm against the storm that Boris and his government are brewing when the coronavirus dies away.
'The Low Pay Commission says cost of fighting coronavirus pandemic endangers flagship pledge to raise national living wage to £10.50 an hour.' This little note comes from the Guardian but has been generally ignored elsewhere.

Here are the latest facts from The Institute of Fiscal Studies (26 March.) It offers this tentative 'result' of government costs:
The British economy will shrink by 6% in 20/21 costing the government        £70 bn
An estimated expenditure given the small and under funded public services .£266 bn
Estimate furlough costs                                                                                  £10 bn
£330 bn to company loan guarantees with estimated costs to government of   £50 bn
Definite suspension of VAT costs                                                                       £30 bn
Total, estimated                                                                                            £426 bn
Additionally in 20/21 government borrowing will rise from £55 bn to £120 bn. They originally promised very long debt recovery ...

This is one year, the first year of Boris's Tory government. Because the government is new, because they believe that 3 or 4 years of austerity mark 2 can be blown away by 2025, this damage is going to be handed over to the working class in direct ways (see above) and in great slashing cuts into social services. Like the bankers in 2008, the big companies will be 'saved' now and remain untouched in the years to come. The costs of the coronavirus for Britain will be immensely more than most of the larger European states (and probably doubled over 2 years) because Britain has severely cut back its health service and welfare generally over 10 years. It has had o make a great leap financially just to get to the resources needed to run an adequate service let alone deal with the coronavirus.

Socialists will desperately need a plan for the people. And, at last, WW2 surfaces - as more than just flyers in the press. In WW2 the top earners paid 98 and 99% income tax. Even through the 1950s, 60s and the early 1970s it was roughly 90%. By 1999 it was less than 40%. So;  first, the utilities, transport and pharma have already been showered with government money and therefore need to be taken over to protect the huge loan offers turning into the hands of the CEOs and private share holders. (As with the 'quantitive easing' after 2008 which created hundreds of new billionaires.) If there is doubt on this point then call a referendum and let mass action decide. Second, the terrible weaknesses of the British Health Service and welfare particularly with the aged, has been shown (see Germany) as a government promoted mass killer. Health, welfare and education need to be ramped up and as wars are now unaffordable and tax havens unacceptable, we need another referendum on paying for the priorities of the people.

In a nutshell, Boris's government should not be allowed the slightest credibility, legitimacy or acceptance following the Coronavirus disaster. The socialists will not, in such circumstances, spend their time and efforts crying for a general election. They will build the democracy and the decisions that count from the base; new demands for new referendums. The general election will come only as a desperate effort to dissolve the new democracy. The new democratic politics, through its actions, in defence of the ordinary people, must become the centre across UK society.

9. An End of the Beginning

The breakthroughs so far achieved by socialists have all been driven in large part by the need to overthrow great imperialist powers and their wars. None of the larger capitalist countries in the world, that are part of the imperialist domination themselves, have yet seen the success of a revolution at home. The immense victories against imperialism, won by Soviet Russia, by China, by Yugoslavia, Cuba and Viet Nam and others went through desperate periods after they won their wars and revolutions but had no resources to win a socialist peace. Eventually, as western imperialism weakened by the end of the 20th century, China managed to 'steal' economic progress via cheap labour and then by winning great Capital. But all of the countries mentioned and many others created new classes and forms of society that withstood western imperialism to some extent, but degenerated their previous socialist goals. Some, like Cuba, still remain obvious beacons. Others, like Yugoslavia were simply destroyed. Meanwhile, no fully developed country came close to even starting genuine socialism.

Trotsky, who saw first hand the degeneration of Soviet Russia, wrote pieces for many papers. In 1934 he wrote for Liberty how American could be communist. The essence of his cheerful article was that the resources and technology of the US would prevent the underlying forces that spelt monstrous bureaucracy in Russia. American socialism would truly lead humanity. The essence of his argument was that while the rich capitalist countries were incredibly difficult to break with their immense systems and powers, subsequent to the revolution none of the major conditions of violent bureaucracy and a society run by the police of want, would apply.  In other words, the West would find the revolution incredibly difficult but the subsequent growth of socialism so much more easy to develop. (He added, 'One final prophecy: in the 3rd year of the Soviet rule in America you will no longer chew gum!') That's already happened!

Social democracy, even the genuine Corbyn type sees a transfer to socialism in the West from entirely the wrong angle. Social Democracy believes that the easy business is the transfer of the current system to socialism - if you put the right arguments and inhabit the main political institutions.  And that is why they have mainly ended up as supporters of that system. Breaking through the West's wealth and power is the route to a socialist society. And such a society would start from the real possibilities of an advanced condition for its people.

The world has changed dramatically since 1917. The revolutions (and many other great developments) have at least succeeded in showing how it is possible to make immense changes, contrary to all apparent possibilities. But that understanding can be stopped dead by those who start from the endless 'now' as the only map for the future. Western imperialism is weakening right across the globe. The dissolution of capitalism through its tenuous, global-wide, financial structure is fragile and dependent on national handouts each time it subsides. The old 'third world' is now part of what was called the 'first world' as millions slave for pittances in the metropolises of the West. Anger, dislocation and rejection are the common culture in the traditional 'rich' countries. Time to take action and reverse the future.

Wednesday 1 April 2020

Is a new society coming?

BBC Radio 4 'Start the Week' - March 30th - was one of a number of podcasts, articles, speeches and essays that are trying to work out what will life be like after the Corona virus is vaccinated away. Amol Rajan, an astute BBC commentator, led the discussion between Danny Darling, a political geographer who was promoting his book called 'Slow Down' and Nick Timothy, Chief of Staff for ex PM Teresa May, who has had plenty of time since 2017 to write his book called 'Conservatives in an Age of Crisis.'

Timothy is obviously having a hard life as his tome was a heartfelt plea for the Tory Party to stop basing itself on the banner of 'individual freedom' alone.  Instead the Party should look more like Disraeli and Harold MacMillan's approaches. Timothy believes that the Conservatives should use a medium size state to promote other good stuff besides freedom, like better wages and the proper support for the health services. He is scared by the California led hyper liberalisation and the end of corporate tax. Sadly (for Timothy) he has pushed his book exactly at the time when (a) Tory PM Boris won a large majority on a right wing program and then (b) went on to tell us that there was a society after all (dumping Thatcher) and has then spent £billions defending health and working class wages. Timothy, just as in 2017, has in 2020 fallen off his horse before the race started.

It was therefore not surprising that Timothy's contributions to the Start the Week discussion proved to be defensive and even a little desperate.

The ideas offered by Darling were, however, highly significant. Rajan had to pull the the points made by Darling into the program's shape, just as he had with Timothy, but, unlike Timothy, he was able to create a better background for what Darling was saying.

'History's great acceleration' was the mantra that Rajan used to define the popular view that the last 20 or 30 years was a tremendous advance, first technologically and then socially and then globally. However, Darling said that in the last decade virtually all the indices, polls, empirical studies and scientific evidence showed a great slowing down and even an even more, a substantial stopping, of global history. Rather breathlessly (as the program was closing) he added that even IQs had stopped!

'Slowing down' as a theme is also becoming common among various thinkers as they try to work out how the world, and particularly the west, will be - post corona. (See blog 27.03.20.) But Darling's studies pre-date the corona virus. And some of the 'post corona' thinking has suggested that the effect of the virus will only accelerate a big shift in society that was already emerging.

The paradox of 'slowing down' is that it will happen, if it happens, very fast.

For example, one part of any 'new society', at least in the UK, will be the fate of the Boris led Tory government, apparently deeply secure with a huge majority and facing a scattered Labour Party opposition. Already social media and the traditional press are beginning to attack the failings of the Tory plan to defeat corona. (See The Daily Mail, 1 April, '20.) But what is most significant is the fundamental fate of the Tory government in the next four and a half years. The British economy will not 'bounce back' as Boris and his Chancellor constantly repeat. Its decline and its decay will be the key factor for the Tory government for years.  Boris's government will be marked by a deep recession and probably a slump. Austerity, even rationing, are now on the medium term horizon.

This is the reality that governments, like the Hungarian dictatorship, are beginning to prepare for. Because social upheaval is inevitable.

Gathering a new political force across the West in general and in Britain is the key to what sort of change we get. And the change we want to kick start society again needs to be the conscious actions of millions who organise resources, technology and genuine democratic decisions for the sake of humanity. Twitter and the selfie, the billionaires and millionaires, poisoning the climate and violent competing does not do it anymore.