What is changing? Covid - or globalisation?

The last couple of blogs have centred on the decay of global capitalism, which increasingly requires a global change - much more significantly than any cure of Covid 19. Now the argument about change, particularly in the West, is shifting. And it will not mainly be about pandemics. Will there be substantial social, economic and political change? Who will make such changes? And, as we cannot stand still, what happens when change is blocked? (At this point it is worth warning that some stats will be required!)

Let us start with the recent General Election in Holland. Historically the Dutch are a sophisticated electorate. This time they came down with a hammer. From the 15th to the 17th of March 2021, they devastated the remains of Holland's Social Democracy. Its vote was the lowest since the Dutch people first won their franchise. Instead the biggest vote went to Mark Rutte. He has led Holland since 2010. He is a right-wing 'liberal'. Yet his speeches were almost entirely about the danger of the pandemic during the election, touched with his apparent call for dumping austerity and the need to elevate social support for the neediest sections of the population. A right-winger, apparently turning away from traditional right-wing economics and supporting state welfare. Heard it before?  

The Dutch working class, like a large part of the UK working class, share a broadly radical perspective, regarding taxation, public health and welfare, as well as demanding equality and the need for government ownership of various utilities. Polls on these views are deeply established. Like the experience of Blair's ten year term as Prime Minister in the UK, the Dutch social democracy shifted right in the case of Holland, carried out austerity and thereby found themselves destroyed. But in Holland (and in the UK) the working classes, regardless of their potential radicalism, then seized the new right wing rather than the traditional left. Many pedagogues explained this political shift in the working class as the organised pressure of racism. It is true for example that the early Brexit in the UK argument was mainly racist. But subsequently, as the Brexit debate developed, racism dropped to fourth or fifth as the main issue. 

This is the heart of the matter, in both the Dutch and the UK working classes. Yes, of course organised racism tried hard to win working class support. It is a significant bloc of 10 to 20% across many European countries. But that has, so far, not been the most decisive or fundamental issue for the working class. 

Racism is alive in all classes, but it is the particular conditions of the new working classes in Holland and in the UK that is creating the Ruttes and Johnsons. It is the work carried out by the new working classes that has drastically changed. And it is most significantly obvious in the growth of the relentless de-construction of large scale work, the break-down of large scale communities and the constant, increasing competition for individual jobs, for the lowest wages, for housing and public services in general. The Dutch working class, like that of the UK, therefore simultaneously saw the failures of the new capitalism and thereby called for some state reforms, but their day-to-day competitiveness for work, and in work, for money, for housing, for health and welfare, inevitably focussed on people, especially on their fellow immigrants and refugees. And these two combined elements among sectors of the working class, in the first place the radicalism required to improve on a declining way-of-life and secondly, the obvious competition against 'the others' - particularly immigrants - became the root of the new right wing's political platform. The conditions of the working class in the West have been diminished and thoroughly reorganised via globalisation. The politics that has emerged is deeply based in the new conditions of labour.

Here are some significant data about the present working class in the UK. 

First, here are the top ten industries in order of size in the UK. 1. Supermarkets 2. Hospitals 3. Charities 4. Agencies 5. Secondary Education 6. Selling and Marketing. 7. Construction contractors. 8. Restaurants 9. Management consultants. 10. Universities. 

Here are the numbers of workers in the top seven groups. 

1. Wholesales and retail - 5 million. 2. Health and welfare - 4.5 million. 3. Professionals - 3.2 million. 4. Admin - 3 million. 5. Education - 2.9 million. 6. Manufacturing - 2.7 million. 7. Accommodation and food - 2.5 million. 8. Construction - 2.2 million. 

Here are some of the effects of small to medium businesses for the working class. 

Such businesses have increased by 72% since 2000. In 2020, there were 6 million such businesses. Three-fifths of all workers in the UK work with 1 to 49 people at their work. 96% have fewer than 10 employees where they work. General service-work employs 79% of all workers. Retail alone accounts for 18% of all workers. (Health and social work and education provides 9%.)  

In one respect, the many small and medium businesses owners (who hate taxes, dodge minimum wages, increase working time and swallow profit and would-be investment) have recreated the petite bourgeoise that was first evolved in Victorian times. Their workers are, in part, in modern shackles, without collective strength and in fear of individual replacement. Their most immediate ambition appears to become an owner themselves.

The deliberate construction of working class work in the West is the result of globalisation. The destruction of large scale, collective work in the West is also deliberate. The consequences of the new conditions have already emerged in the social and political developments in the 2020s, obvious in the recent Elections in Holland and the UK. And most significantly, despite the 10.1 and possibly 13.1 million workers who are working in whole or in part of larger, collective, working lives, the de facto lead of the working class - as a whole in society - is most dominant by the spiralling impact, especially among the young, of the small and medium businesses. 

What, as somebody once said, is to be done?

That will follow as the concrete reality arises out of the imagination of millions of difficult lives.

Part of it has already begun. Although the pandemic has become a starting point for particularly middle class calls, calling for working at home and worrying about the desperate plight of shops, the most substantial issue that has emerged is the desperate and continuing increase of inequality. Right at the centre is the 1.1 million who directly work in the NHS. In the course of the pandemic the NHS workers proved the critical force and achievement through what was often self-managed, collective efforts. (Despite the state's endless ranking and layering.) For now, that leads across the whole working class and in wider society. 

New unions have broken through (despite the Trade Union Congress, which has by and large defensively tried to freeze their 6.1 million members into its own version of a tight lock-down.) The new unions are widespread, not even limited to particular work in some cases and all of them are led by youth. While the larger society is as yet unaware of these growing organisations they will be front and centre when the obvious classes and people end up paying for the pandemic. (Already a big government mistake with the NHS income cuts.) 

The crucial point here is the creation of a new leadership in society, starting from that part of the working class that cannot (for the time being) be broken up, or pressured by racism, or unable to organise in work, or torn politically away from their views about state support for utilities etc., and instead stay in fear of their own positions. The TUC could have an enormous part. Instead its managers ally with government and Her Majesty's polite opposition. 

The necessary practicalities are new. Just like the massive and fast construction of globalisation, so massive and fast need to be the watchwords for those who want something better than a collapsing world economy, an end to profits in all the utilities, building small-rent housing, who see a much wider democracy and a much deeper equality.  

More to come.  

The world is breaking up. Why?

Globalisation, now the working extension of what was once the traditional western imperialism, has started to reverse capitalism's development. In the last blog (Is the nation state finished?) it was pointed out that Lenin's perception - that the height of western imperialism was not the 'end' of capitalism per se - instead it was the highest stage, and that capitalism would be able to progress no further, has, in turn, been finally confirmed.

The confirmation of Lenin's idea was, inevitably, a combined and uneven process. Shattered by not one but two world wars, western imperialism continued to lead the world after WW2, but more and more western states, led by the US, increased their internationalisation and then accepted the swollen corporations, which promoted global capitalism themselves. That effectively replaced and re-focused the declining role of the failing imperialist wars and the weakening military success of the West. Instead, the concentration of wealth, the utilisation of international debt and the focus on secret high-tech and novel communications, in the hands of western corporations, became the new version of global hegemony - an imperialist type construction that maintained western global domination.

And here is the consequence; Lenin's insight is finally confirmed; modern 'imperialism' or 'globalisation' is now creating the decline of the West and is reversing its previous 'development'. Today's western and particularly the US's capitalism, no longer expands development. Instead in the West it reverses economically and eventually declines both politically and in any social progress. Now it will diminish even the rise of the East and specifically, China. 

Previous POLECON blogs, over many years, have put the argument that capitalist progress in the West has wound down. More generally, the comparison of the internet and its social network, AI (for ever on the horizon) nano-tech that in reality only means 'smaller', space opera, some medical advances etc., compares very little to the first part of the 20th century's progress. Politicians and other public figures try to dazzle today's population with the handful what amounts to modern baubles. A tiny, international-set of $ billionaires grow fast. But more and more millions and billions in the West discover that their lives are no longer better than their parents and will be significantly worse for their children. The United Nations claim that the modern world's population has become less poor is almost entirely the result of China's development of its previously impoverished population.

But what of China and the East? In the East, led by China, rapid, indeed spectacular development has occurred; contradicting the slow-down and reverse of the West. (This development remains the greatest shift of human society out of poverty in human history.) The reason is simple (but often blurred or denied in the West.) In particular China used a different form of capitalism than the inevitable system that the developed West was forced to apply. If the traditional nature of Western imperialism was as powerful as it was in the 19th and early 20th centuries, China (and the rest of the East) would still have remained as satraps to powerful western states. But the West was pushed back by revolution and failed wars after WW2 and the creation of the 'globalisation' of capitalism, operating as the domination of wealth and debt became the extension to the 'old fashion' style of imperialism.  

China used the failure of the West's multi-imperialist domination and their settlements to open up its own style of capitalism. State capitalism was a method that allowed private enterprise but is controlled by the state. (Early communist Russia desperately argued for the implementation of this stage as its post-WW1 industry collapsed!) The Chinese market was controlled by the state. And for nearly 30 years it has become a tremendous success. The Chinese CP leaders suggest that their political system, managed by the leaders of the Chinese CP, is the reason for this immense development. But the leaders are still there with a vengeance and China's state capitalism, despite (or because?) of its leaders is now starting to fail. 

State capitalism is itself a paradox - and the early Russian communists were aware of that too. Its momentum can create extraordinary development - as has been seen - but it cannot remain capitalist without competition and private ownership - and these two features cannot be controlled by the state. Accordingly, this state-capitalist momentum, the fast rise of unfettered development, becomes stuck. Other capitalist forces, particularly in the global era, begin to press against the 'unfair' production of state capitalism and begin to block the previous balance where the machinery of development is sold for mass, basic, cheap products in return. The critical engine of globalisation 'provides' the wealth and loans but with China, they are dealing outside of the institutions and banks which mobilise these machines. They, more and more, exert pressure on China's independence of wealth. 

Secondly, the key aspects of further development become contradictory as state-capitalism, as it once churned out basic goods, so now requires the purchase of the most developed imports to go further - and therefore presses further for dangerous reforms in relation to the Chinese model. Here is the parts of a speech recently given to the 'Great Hall of the People', China's assembly that gives key messages to the many hundreds of Communist Party leaders. 

'We are at least thirty years from becoming a manufacturing nation of great power. Industries heavy dependence on US high tech products such as semi-conductors (is) a strategic weakness. Core technologies are in the hands of others (and threaten) being hit in the throat.' The pivot to service-based model in China 'now means that in 2020 manufacturing is one quarter of the gross domestic product. 'The ratio of manufacturing has reduced too quickly. There is too much of the big but not strong.' Miao Wei made these statements to his vast audience. He was the industrial and information technology minister and a member of the equivalent of the polit-bureau for ten years. He has recently retired. There can be no doubt that his words were deliberately said, so dramatically, with the backing of Xi Jinping. 

Miao Wei offered his solutions. He identified the weakness of 'insufficient market-orientated reforms.' The reforms mean reduction of tax burdens, the need for investments and a much greater of innovated high tech.' 

These messages are partly aimed at reducing US tariffs but more significantly the warning from Miao is the need to break out from at least some of state-capitalism and to allow capitalist 'freedom' and personal ownership to take the next step of capitalism in Chinese society. It seems that state capitalism has reached its ability in China to continue the immense development it created. China is speculating on a turn towards full globalisation. It is taking hesitant steps into capitalism's increasing failure.  

The East, or at least China, is appearing to tentatively join the declining West. 

The world's economic future is already shaping its politics. Leading scholars and public figures try to grasp the meaning of the unsettled democracies in the West. Identity politics? The terror that labour will be run by robots? Fear of the East? Nukes are now proliferating as means to keep the door closed from the bandit states that they 'trade' with. It's junk. Capitalism is breaking down - even in the future of China. And this is why billions fear for the future - their lives are going to get worse. Trying to rev-up capitalism or growing more nukes are just parts of the problem. There will be revolution(s). And from them, no matter how long, we need a new civilisation.      

Is the the Nation State finished?

A global shift is underway. And it contains waves of change that are practical, moral and psychological. The most obvious transformation (but far from the only one) is the reorganisation of the capitalist state. 

Such claims can appear fantastical. But starting with nations, national politics is 'on the move' - most obviously since the 2008 crash. The major national changes started from the 1980s (the collapse of the USSR, the emergence of state capitalism in China, the creation of the western European block etc) but are now explicitly rapid, especially in what used to be the dominant West. What is the machine of national changes, particularly in the West? It is the consequence of the failure of capitalism. A big idea to swallow? Perhaps. But if we start with Lenin it might help our digestion!

The 'talmudic' research of Lenin's writings has led mainly to a mess down the ages. However, one of his most poorly translated comments has resulted in a muddle that does merit some study. Lenin is often quoted that imperialism is the last or the final stage of capitalism. Not so. Lenin wrote that imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism. That's it. No more quotes. But we can see a point of significance. Lenin in the early 20th century, and the rest of us in 2021, are not experiencing the end of capitalism as such. No. However, Lenin does suggest that capitalism's capacity to continue on an imperialist basis in a global scale will generally become unsuccessful for the capitalist system. Lenin saw the end of WW1 and the post war collapse of European society. He did not see WW2 or the 'recovery' of capitalist development as a result of second world war and then the final surge of imperialism, led by the most mighty US, which drastically failed (compared with the tremendous 'success' of the far less dominant UK in previous centuries.)

The relative decline of imperialism is now obvious and largely unchangeable across the globe.  And, as Lenin suggested, this fact creates a new, deep and dangerous, unstable, character to the capitalist system.

To turn to the implications of another historical shift, which his now emerging in the new context, Yuval Noah Harari's famous book 'Sapiens, a brief history of human kind' demonstrated the superiority of Empires when dealing with social progress. The book reminds us that the 'nation-state' is not at all any sort of natural development. Nations arose for a purpose. A nation can more easily organise economic competition, define several different ownerships, establish vast impersonal labour and draw up a nationally defined influence. The apparent meaning of a nation to its people is given as the pinnacle of its sovereignty. But the real foundations of a nation is its socio/economic requirements of capitalism. 

Imperialism, as led by the West, called their nations empires in the 19th and early 20th century but were never more than nations that controlled other, often genuine, pre-capitalist empires, through slavery, then hard labour and the theft of resources throughout. Imperialist nations did not create empires despite their nomenclature and ideological fantasy. What that did in the newly modern world was that they bloated and internationalised capitalism to the benefit of specific, capitalist, nations. 

This is where Lenin's insight comes once more to life. The highest stage of capitalism means that nothing 'higher' or more successful, or an unforeseen capitalism that will lift; lift what? Will lift further development. And this is the crux of post pandemic, western, modern capitalism. Today's capitalism is starting to reverse. Its domination of nations that ruled global imperialism is waning and, in desperation, the main, western and south east asian capitalist nations are insisting more and more that they need to become real empires - in the absence of the declining traditional imperialism. 

In today's Europe, we have an utter confusion. There is now a real, European empire being created, particularly in relation to finance, while a great popular heat is rising to get back to traditional nations. And a significant minority layer is trying to create new mini-states in respect of real control of democracy. There is a typical maelstrom in the UK reflecting this cauldron. But we are only just beginning. What is certainly on its way is a major reconstruction of nations and their functions, whether that means getting rid of the UK's poisonous monarchy and their Lordships - along with its smell of the history of Britain's empire - or other particular civil battles. While specific markets (eg in China and India) are catching up their local social advances, this is ultimately the result of an international capitalism which is no-longer able to push forward any genuinely new development across our world.  

Breaking up is so hard to do

The potential break-up, or breakdown, of the nation state called 'The United Kingdom', is not separate from, but instead getting tied up with, both Covid 19 and Brexit. These two new UK landmarks will be presented by the Tory government and also by the opposition Labour Party, as the immediate reasons why the cohesion of Britain's various countries cannot and should not detach themselves from the UK. In Scotland, Northern Ireland and increasingly in Wales however, Covid and its government-led errors; plus the fatuous balls-up of Brexit 'deals' in Northern Ireland; plus decades of the collapse of both UK's major parties in Scotland itself; plus a big anti-Brexit vote in Scotland; - all of it stands entirely opposite to both of the different claims of the main Parties in Westminster. The parties that run the British Isles are virtually exclusively and absurdly English. A joke? The impact of Covid and Brexit suggest that Westminster cannot any longer hack it. That this is a final insult. 

A mess, surely. And the Westminster leadership from both the Tory government and the Labour opposition are tearing their hair out. The Tories, prepared to demonstrate their benefits of an apparently cross-country UK style budget, are starting to move the heavy guns forward. 

The demands from the Tory leadership in Westminster that British sovereignty in Scotland was essential for the success of their part of the pandemic is weak to say the least. Every politician in the West knows that Nicola Sturgeon out-managed the first three quarters of the Tories' failures over Covid; a failure with deadly consequences. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has finally applied Surgeon's approach over Covid's vaccines. It was the Scottish political leadership that forced the UK. And now the Tory budget might offer £ millions to Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales but the real £ billions go mainly to the English centred corporations.  

More serious - for its self-affliction alone - is the attack by Alex Salmond on Nicola Sturgeon. The first wobbles (see the ferocious campaign for UK unity, led by 'The Times' newspaper) across the majority for Scottish independence have started. Salmond's role now could effectively destroy the current platform for the independence referendum and inevitably open up the space for a new Scottish Tory Party leadership in the country. Salmond with his £ half a million is politically dead anyway. But if he carries on his vendetta he threatens one of the historically most significant opportunities to develop a new radicalism in Scotland and, finally, to help remove the dead-end imperial history which sustains the whole of Britain's rotting politics. 

In Northern Ireland events may be slower and covered in the desperation of the Democratic Unionist Party's leadership's hysterics about the Brexit deal they accepted. But the course of NI's future as part of Irish unity is much more solid than the Scottish movement. In NI the DUP can only find its unionist way to victory after they experienced another raw 'sell-out' of the Tories. ( A regular feature according to hard unionist historians.) The DUP are straining to re-vitalise the battle call of 'the Union!' But life has changed in both NI and also in the results of the failure of Southern Ireland's economic globalism. 

NI young people are now a majority that would accept Irish statehood. As with many young people across the West the idea of western unity has a strong appeal (despite necessarily its current EU construction.) An organised, radical and historically based party, Sinn Fein, who gained more support in Southern Ireland and came very close over the last unionist election in NI, are sophisticated, managing their historical view of the framework of Ireland as an oppressed nation. It has now turned towards a more modern radicalism. Frankly, the unionists are less and less able to manage a society they cannot lead. The danger of course is their possible turn to attempts of social violence. But the unionist base no longer sustains the weight to make that more than a marginal and rapidly abhorred, local, terrorism. Frankly, NI dissolving into Ireland will be most fought against by the two main Southern Irish parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail who will most likely link with the unionists - in order to try and stem Sinn Fein.   

Behind these particular and detailed developments, in Scotland and in NI (Welsh independent national development is growing but is not yet politically defined or supported by a truly mass base) is a potential and enormous development across the West. 

A new type of disorganised Western capitalism is emerging. And one of the oldest and most developed keystone in the capitalist system is beginning to dissolve.                    

Trump and Boris and Macron and...and...are not 'exceptional'. Trump et al are reviving national politics because of the political and economic failure of Western globalisation. This has many aspects; the dissolution of social democracy; the increasing role of state violence; dividing the working class by the need for 'national defence'; the rise of armaments etc. But, of course, these more obvious trends hide deeper shifts and movements. These are the changes and initiatives within general politics and economics as new ruling class defences in Western societies are being recreated.   

A deep example is emerging in the growing dissolution of the UK. The US can still pretend that it will remain the leading country in the world. But, without a major war in the next decade, it won't. The EU is staggering on, trying to organise the politics of different nations in Europe based on the strength of its economic domination. This contradiction is only going to get brutally worse. 

Not surprisingly the first main country (except the Netherlands) that became a capitalist nation was England in the 1640s and then Britain by the18th century. In due course its capitalist and imperialist economics resolved the parts of emergent nations and their global superiority in the West. The capitalist economics of the modern day is beginning to dissolve western nations. Fighting for globalisation via the strength of the US and the concentration of the EU has, first, used globalisation, but not at all for most individual capitalist nations (and not provided any success for the previously successful traditional western imperialism either.) 

As the first capitalist nation, the UK, detached from the EU and without a coherent future except to become a fantasy Asia and California, under pressure from its different national parts, is beginning to break down. The call to split from the EU and its countries is a UK-based desperate response to 'reclaim' a national sovereignty. That is in effect unavailable to to the UK, in the globalisation system of the West. The UK's proposed sovereignty is contradicted by its actual, real own economic system. The exact reverse of its origins as a nation. 

It is no surprise that the UK will disintegrate as imperialism weakens further. More generally, sections of societies in the West will begin to move (in a battle) to local political decision making, dragging down the apparatus of capitalist globalism. A new economics will therefore inevitably have to flow against the current offer of the capitalist system. A type of new (international) socialism could then emerge out of the local, radical political initiatives. The alternative is truly barbarism.