The politics of capitalism in our world is now in the hands of US President Biden. Biden has surprised everybody with his $4 trillion plan to invest US structure and improve working class living standards. Together with his tax proposals for the rich, he has projected a state intervention that supersedes FDR's 1933 'New Deal'. Is this a man close to meeting his maker - hoping for a good report at the pearly gates? Who can tell. What is obvious is the potentially huge shift in US, and US capitalism's line of march. Or so it seems.
Here is a fact about the world's money just now, followed by a comment that sums up where we are at politically, as well as symptomatic public actions that shake society - at least in the West. First, the IMF Fiscal Monitor offered this fact; 'In the last 12 months, countries have announced $16 trillion in (their) fiscal actions.' Second an observer of Spanish politics (apologies for the translation) said 'if the novel parties and the renovated traditional parties (in Spain) are more and more unable to define a future that wins any support of any real kind, the next political eruption will produce the final emptiness of all political parties.'
Third, in France, from January 2021 to March, another public wave, without shared common demands but with a collective loathsome of the police, rocked French society.
More generally across the West, the UK's Tory government faces financial insolvency, having nothing like Biden's or even FDR's war chest, and which faces the kingdom's disintegration of its national unity. Germany's decades of their continuous political construction is also failing. In Italy, every version of modern politics has been tried, in every kaleidoscope of combinations, which increases popular despair but without any common perspective.
The next global axis is here. In front of all of us. A new period of History beckons. Covid 19 is certainly not the premise of the next, decisive moment of most of the world's future, despite the decline of big stores and pushing for working at home in the West. It is perhaps more likely that climate change alone might shift the momentum of the world. But the change we are all facing will mean parts of the planet will have to recreate their whole societies. Heat and fuel is critical, but the world, including its climate, depends on two more fundamental facts.
First is the two thirds of the people on Earth live in medium or under-developed nations. This is despite the enormous development, mainly in China, bringing nearly a billion people out of poverty, largely due to the retreat of traditional imperialism after WW2. But China's state capitalism is not powerful enough to develop two thirds of the world - and its growing competitive, capitalist, evolution will soon expand itself into stasis and then decline - as with the US and the West in general.
Second, the engine room of modern society, capitalism, has undoubtedly conquered the world but is no longer able to improve it.
The long-term pillars of capitalism's immense expansion and development over centuries (1) The extraction of surplus labour, (2) The investment of wealth and (3) Imperialism, are faltering or failing. The most semi-successes in todays' capitalism have been the gathering of immense personal wealth and the magnification of money itself. Taking one example of the modern shifts; previous tycoons built ships, trains, planes, cities etc. The modern rich today play largely with communication and adult toys. Another danger in the novel evolution of capitalism - is the development by money - from the sale of potential money - as has been shown in its first set of disasters in 2008.
Capitalism has already absorbed or been defeated by the battles of its traditional imperialism and is unable to make a much further, global, leap. And the extraction of surplus value from the world's labour, from the Apple factories in China to the handful of Filipino workers managing the world's shipping and its ports, shows the exploitation of labour has now become an incongruent and incoherent mess for the management of the capitalist system, except for the multitude of the lowest levels of direct, day-to-day, personal service.
None of this combination of capitalism's retreats are, by itself, going to create a new alternative society. The incredible melee of the world and its peoples will face a combined and uneven future as we all grapple with the decay of the most dominant economic system in history. We can however offer some of a 'where' and a 'when', today.
The two great classes of society in the world, the toilers and the ruling classes, are both in crisis and particularly in the West. In the West we see upheaval against the series of governments and political parties that themselves become hollower and hollower. As a result we see an eruption but undefined action in the working classes and the youth. Again, there are different stages of these processes with more or less coherence in the anger that prevails. Meanwhile, the historic dispersal of the 20th century working classes deepens. The coherence, where it does emerge, becomes more and more a directly political process, tied to explicit demands; support the NHS wage, independence, referendum, personal political figures etc.
The ruling classes have the advantage. For example, Biden has enormous resources to curtail the rightward swing that was building up to a new, US revanchist, social revolution. And even Britain's desperate debts, which have already forced cutting the wages of the NHS, have allowed a fantasy politics where Britain's rich rulers seem more attached to working class people in England that anybody else. But, despite these examples, the Western and parts of East Asia now have no version of their progress. Along with Biden and Boris, there is no sense of the future of this class, and the politicians are defending what they can, in the US by scattering gold; in the UK by re-running a version of history. The political leaders in the main parts of the world, particularly in the West, are opening up chaos.
It will be the front-line of politics in both main classes that will grapple with the alternative to our creaking capitalism. And it will be political battles, in the US's over China as the symbol of its decline - and its failure over social welfare; in the UK, social-service collapsing, together with the disaggregation of the kingdom. It will be smoke and mirrors around these and many other ruling classes, who are desperately smothering their failure through divisions, pretences and, finally, wars. But it will only be the toilers that can solve this double crisis of both of the main classes.
One example of the UK. The UK Prime Minister, Boris, undoubtedly believes that he has settled working class votes across the Midlands and the North of England in this week's elections, via his sharing of a cultural commonality. He used the success of the Covid vaccines to substitute for 'getting it done' with Brexit. But working class people in Hartlepool don't love Boris. They can stand him because he appears to grab the main issue and fix it. Tory ideology does not come into it. The clear aims of the 2017 Labour Party, under Corbyn (before the roaring attack both inside and outside of Labour, which amazingly still won 10 million voters) won better votes than Blair. Corbyn won the youth but most voters were not interested in Corbyn himself. They agreed with his future economic program, out of austerity.
The construction of working class movements is no longer led by industry and mass unions. While remaining critical as examples of unity, unions are inevitably a small minority of those who work now. Temporarily, hesitantly and cautiously, facing the politics of society, the youth and the working class are beginning to build blocs on the basis of common parts of politics. And this is the route for defining the agency of working people in the first instance as the chaos of classes simmers and erupts. Political blocs, including unions, campaigns, mass actions and areas of social unity, will begin the sense of future-being, that so sorely is absent - from our experience of this trap or that fantasy.
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