Andrew Marr was the political Editor of the BBC from 2000 to 2005. He is now running his own Sunday morning show. He is well known in the UK media but most people of course will have never heard of him. But he does have a significant role in the political world of the UK, so when when he hinted about his own views it is worth a look. When he was asked at first Marr restrained himself.
"I cannot tell you now because I will lose my job."
But then he did offer a general, wider perspective of his judgement of future politics. He commented in an interview with Ruth Wishart in the Glasgow Aye Write Book Festival -
"At some point I want to get out." This is not all he said. "What I would say safely is that I think we are going to go through a period of politics - the next 20 years - much more turbulent and much more interesting and testing and challenging that anything we have seen in the last 10 years, which has been big enough." This blog agrees with that view. But Marr's predictions are countered by a big majority of modern prophets, at least in the West, who see the future as 'getting better all the time'. Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, particularly those anchored in the main universities, at the top of corporations etc., claim the future is mainly bright. So we look at some of the biggest potential milestones that suggest Marr's more dubious and turbulent future.
Consider war.
There are great conjunctions that generally criss-cross the world. In no particular order, and accepting the interconnection between and across all of these suggestions, we start with the most dangerous - the place of modern wars.
Right away there is a legion of pundits that promote denials about modern wars. Compared with the 20th century they argue that, so far, wars have been smaller and less deadly. Look, they say, humanity is becoming more sensible and less-accepting of war. The world is getting less violent. Hmm.
Oneearthfuture.org is a public US organisation that exists to oppose war. It has studied the measure of the relative comparisons of wars in recent centuries. It is well known and its particular focus is not aligned in any political direction. Recently, an OEF study was published, 'Is there really evidence for a decline of War?' The significance of this publication was an inclusion of sizes of population that was first taken into account in the number of battle deaths. The limit of the analysis was the definition of wars as interstate wars, not including civil wars. The conclusion is presented as follows; 'the last two decades (up to 2020) have indeed been more peaceful than average...On the other hand, the statistical record provides little, if any, evidence that this recent peaceful period represents a long term decline in interstate war.'
A short term absence of the major state to state war, measured for example by WW2 - and its 70 million war deaths, offers several reasons for hesitation among the rulers of big states. The death roll; the impact of atomic war; the refusal of large scale (mainly) working class people in the front lines; all of these seem insoluble - for the moment - in any sort of major state to state conflicts. As a result, virtually all of the state wars since 1945 that have happened were imperialist adventures, most of which have caused immense destruction, made the victim countries worse and barely achieved the large states' goals.
The idea that is generally led by US scholars, believing in a Pax USA, and that are now still hovering on the rather sickly 'End of History' flag, may like to consider that the US is only just now deploying from its longest ever - and its most failing 14 year, Afghanistan war.
And the dangers of war now? Certainly we can drop any idea that humanity has any current power to decide for (or against) war. Sadly, humanity does not get to decide wars. It is people like Trump, with his denunciation of China's plague, that initiate wars. Indeed, the political rash of wars, that demonstrate, over and over again, that Western imperialism, in particular, constantly loses its imperialist wars (albeit that it often destroys the countries that finally heave the imperialists out) is therefore shifting the new war theories of the generals. Paradoxically, large states against other large states and civil wars are, once more, preparing future agendas. In the Pentagon, the argument is now about winning a first strike in favour of keeping down the enemy, or a good, old, normal war, together with parallel threats about the nukes. (4315 US nukes now available.)
How has this new shift - preparing a full-on, major state to major state war and civil wars - happening? It is the decline of capitalism-imperialism and the subsequent waning economics of the US that is the present answer. Countries, like Britain, accepted their decline - but only after success in the Napoleonic wars and failure after 2 of the greatest wars in the 20th century. That is why the US is preparing for war.
Consider young people.
The World Economic Forum spells out the conditions of youth today, across the globe and from the recent past. 42% of all people in the world, including children, are 25 years old or less. 18% of the world's people are 18 years to 25 years old. Nearly half of the world's young live in sub-Sahara, Africa.
In 1995 there were 200 million children in conflict areas, in 66 wars. By 2016, 357 million children were in 52 wars and conflict areas.
In 2000 there were 377.5 million children in schools. In 2016, 263.0 were in schools.
Between 1997 and 2017 the overall youth population (above 16) grew by 139 million, while the youth labour force shrank by 35 million. 70.9 million were unemployed in 2017 and that is rising.
Despite the decreasing condition for young people, 49% saw Climate Change 39% saw Conflicts and Wars and 31% saw Inequality as their overwhelming problems. 56% disagreed that their countries considered young people's views.
There is little to add, except the growing political anger of the newest generation that, including advanced western countries, are perfectly aware of the reduction of the conditions of life that they are experiencing compared with their parents and carers.
Consider the planet.
There is now a vast and global effort, led in action by the young, forcing the most meagre steps from the corporations and their politicians, to transform society. Such a global perspective invariably contains a number of perspectives but the increasing argument owns up the real purpose of capitalist economy and its defenders. A new version of how people could and should live is genuinely in front of daily life. It is effecting all aspects of our civilisation.
The obvious failing of the old days of roaring capitalism makes the norms of our politics and economics - our structures - more and more absurd and dangerous. There is (at the moment shielded) a fight for just who will dominate the planet. The sooner the real conditions are fully exposed, the failure and decline of capitalism, the real world wide existence of the 2 thirds who live in medium and low income nations, the danger of war will force direct action. And the realisation that the Earth and its people are the sole life that we will ever see in the universe, demonstrates the necessity for fateful, structural change will surely break open.
Consider wealth.
There are dozens of estimates about wealth, with all sorts of caveats. Starting (and finishing) with the Wikipedia, in 2008 1% of adults were estimated to hold 40% of world wealth. But by 2013, 1% of adults were estimated to hold 46% of the world's wealth (and around $18.5 trillion was estimated to be stored in world wide - read mainly UK - tax havens. )
This imbecilic aspect of the 'management' of a declining civilisation shrieks for itself. And the figures are getting worse.
Consider nations.
The fundamental organisation of human activity is largely determined by classes. But two critical aspects often emerge to cloud out these facts. This is a period, which Andrew Marr has hinted, when exploited classes begin to grip and tear the false aspects offered by the ownership of the rich. The tumult he suspects 'in the next 20 years' is the inkling that the next 20 years is not just going to be quicker, noisier, with a lot of changes but also and in-fact essentially, a bitter struggle between classes.
The aspects mentioned above include the role of the nation. Nations were truly formed in early capitalism to unify society in a common conception, with shared types of work, with types of income and expenditure, with a new and defining emergence of a specific type of personal wealth. The nation has always evoked itself to battle when lower classes demanded rights.
But, as we see in the case in the case of Scotland and Northern Ireland, 'nation' can now be appropriated as capitalism's power reduces. In the case of the UK, the US and in some European countries, 'nations' will be part of the rolling struggle between classes - a process of many dimensions - and Mr Marr may yet be right with his 20 year prediction.
The other vail in the struggle between the classes is that 'there is no alternative!' A nation/ruling class makes that particular syllogism or dialectic sound like a common and collective action and decision made where we are all involved in a shared requirement. In the UK, in France, strangely in the US, in Italy, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands political vails are already partly torn away. The working class have moved to bargains with their politicians. Choices are selected on the basis of key political decisions, not a sense of political commitment with the state. Of course this has both a right and left aspect. But there is little doubt that class choices now feature on the basis that they will not decide simply on prior history. Paradoxically, this begins to reduce the grip of 'nation.'
Last comment.
Neither of the main social classes are prepared for the destruction of capitalism. But both are prepared for struggle - across a swathe of western countries, in parts of the Middle East, countries in South America, particularly Brazil, in south west Asia and both north and south Africa.
The milestones mentioned simply give the sense of the new politics but yet its deeply under-developed background.
Nevertheless, capitalism, while never having been so wealthy, so apparently universal and claiming the future - it has never been so weak.
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