Part of the western fantasies includes the politicians that try to break up the real social memories from the working class's collective history, plus their knowledge and their understanding. One example of the politicians that have created a different history is shown by the new UK Tories. A section of the Tory MPs, including the Prime Minister, are cuddling-up to the small northern towns offering unlikely futures. They are attempting, like their counterparts in other western countries, to thoroughly dissolve the West's genuine social history of the ebbing and flowing of the working classes' seminal battles through the years. This new set of politicians has different faces across Europe - with the resurrection of religious political dominations in Poland and Hungary, to the new defenders of the so called 'culture' in France. But it's all the same. Apparently the bulk of the millions of working class people in the West have to embrace their new political media sovereigns, accept new images of a paternal leadership, enthral a deeper faked-up national identity and to swallow the fear of the drastic 'threat' of immigration, coupled with the dangerous hints of Russia and China shadows' perched on the western borders. This is the new/old history. It answers to nothing but an untruthful past designed to create another illusion.
In fact, as the Glasgow COP shows, a whole world is in peril and the fantasy politics coming out of the West barely touches, or more accurately it reverses, any collective, open and public decisions for the desperately required significant change. Instead the West faces the decline of their traditional imperialism having gradually swallowed the colonial riches over centuries. The West is now dealing with its waning international power. Western capitalism needs to play a new, last card. It is now aiming to retain its world leadership mainly via the manipulation of global finance, controlled by the US and less significantly with the EU. The most ridiculous fantasy of them all. Alas for the political and economic potentates of this world, the latest capitalist design is literally being broken up as soon as it has been set up, via the very same manipulation of the globalisation of the world's finance that led to the collapse of the very same finance - particularly in the West. 2008 was only the first shock.
What are the forces, movements and battles in the declining capitalist, western-carnival?
The defences of the future West are now swirling around as they seek answers to their troubles. But fake histories simply produce out-of-date palliatives. According to the UK for example, the West needs to have more nuclear submarines with Australia, a beefed up NATO, closer sucking up to the US rather than to the EU and French cops, especially them, to 'do their job in the channel!' Meanwhile finances rise and commodities are fewer than WW2. Other tired out versions are available.
But what could be the West's real chance of avoiding its collapsing decrepitude? First, get rid of the word 'West' and its baleful history. Second, stop the capital carnival. Capitalism is now faltering. Personal ownership has become a monstrous block against the world's needs. Its temporary use to build real development in China (as opposed to the discoveries of the playground in the West) has been the only significant progress across the debilitated capitalist globe for decades. But all of the main problems and disasters in the world today are now global in whole or in part. Nuclear weapons are world wide, increasingly ready and able to offer extinction. The ecology of Earth is entirely in danger and could desolate the planet and its peoples in a few years. Carnival capitalism has no means to focus on the huge requirements of the desperately necessary changes in the world.
There is progression.
In this period of carnival capitalism, three prolonged human battles are again rising against constant exploitations that go deeper in history than capitalism itself, despite the industrialisation that capitalism used for those exploitations. Millions are fighting for collective and social answers, to finally defeat the oppressions that have emerged long before capitalism and are still deep in it. Human degradation in our civilisations due to poverty and the lack of real equality, of the children and women being constantly reduced, as with the terrible depredation of racism; these surely are, at last, to be universal parts of the change of a new civilisation. It is breaking out everywhere and is the opening of a new wave of socialism whatever it is called.
Brian Heron