An uncertain, not to say a blind future, is becoming the increasing norm for politics in the West. For example, President Biden is organising a world wide symposium to salute democracy and to 'combat international corruption'. Sadly he doesn't reflect on his own 'democracy' while US States are gerrymandering the next elections. Instead Biden talks generalities about tax evasion and money laundering - missing the blazing dishonesty of the US States, the utter corruption of the alternative party, the Republicans, and the corporate-led domination of virtually all of US politics and politicians, let alone the organised, billionaire-led, political machinery, that runs the country. Biden, at the very least, totally misses his own point.
Consider the last ten to fifteen years. There has been a drastic economic collapse, followed by social decline and austerity measures across most of the world and for the bulk of Europeans and Americans. Despite this failure of the political and economic system, imperialist wars were still led by the West in the same years. That led to at least 801,000 people that have been killed by direct wars. Now; today; the pinnacle of global capitalism has turned into increasing tariffs and the world smells of yet greater wars.
The semi-fascist Russian regime is now testing the US and NATO for control of the Ukraine. The Covid pandemic remains with us all - despite the West's nationalistic vaccine programs. Deep tensions, in respect of women, children, race and inequality are at yet another huge rising but are stalled and in some contexts, pushed back. Finally, the most immediate potential disaster in the planet's ecology is practically treated as a side window in respect of the bulk of the West's led civilisation. In conclusion, the West appears to be stalled and in some areas reversed, if not collapsing in its decline.
This blog previously spelled out the first and second stages of socialism. The first, and most extensive wave started with the greatest action in human history; the success of the defeat of Western imperialism in 1917. Early Soviet Russia and its ongoing memory became the famous 'other'; the then coherent, collective, reasoned alternative, as against the World's War madness of imperialist capitalism. 1917 became the alternative to war, to the corruption of life under capitalism and a symbol to the inevitable under-developed existence of the billions, who laboured - or worse - across the world. The impact of 1917, despite the Russian soviets that became mangled and destroyed through the decades, opened up a new world history, leading on through China, Cuba and up to 1974. Despite the increasing doubts of millions in the West regarding Stalin and Mao, the huge breakthroughs, ending in the Vietnam victory and the global young mass movements that covered the globe, still maintained a possible future. At least, the first wave of socialism had overturned Western imperialism across vast parts of the planet. Despite the weaknesses, the mistakes and the failures, the first wave of socialism provided a constant symbol of the possibility of humanity organising a genuine collective in the support of all, for the first time in human history.
The argument made about the first stage of socialism as it subsided particularly in the West, was that its chequered failure was not only coming from the pressure of the US and European reorganisation of capitalism over the decades, but also from the prominent contradictions within the first socialist wave itself. It is not pertinent to rehearse what happened to this particular history just now. Where all need to go is towards a new, different, second wave of socialism. One which provides a new 'other' in the arguments in society, turning away from the retrograde repetitions of the past that have largely failed.
The remnants of the first wave of socialism have maintained the independence from imperialism, most effectively in China's continuing development, despite the West's constant efforts to block its progress. But the reality is an increasing pressure both outside and inside of the last of socialism's first wave. The authoritarian regimes and the crushing of any working class democracy, coupled with constant efforts to link economically to the West, is gradually destroying any remaining socialism within. Meanwhile, the world's population has already bypassed the first-wave history. Secondly, the planet now requires at least one fully global political axis that can remove the gathering dangers of capitalist globalisation. The beginning of the second wave of socialism, requiring global technology, deeply collective organisation and new types of democracy is needed to successfully construct our ecological defences and the actual survival of humanity.
But the second wave of socialism is not even a slight, let alone a main, new 'other' in the minds of those who would seek a new world. In fact, the second wave does not yet apply the understanding, the mood, the argument, the study, the interest in any large section of the world's population. At the moment, and deeply buttressed by the recent pandemic, there is nothing like the decades before and after 1900 to 1975 when it came to battling with and for change with a wide sense that social, economic and political models could be understood for an alternative human society and civilisation. All sorts of arguments have been thrown up, particularly in the West. Indeed, in the West, an enormous collection of thoughts, ideas, speculations, personal implications and mysteries, instead take the place of the thought of advancing society and humanity. There are a billion comments about this substitute 'novelty'. And, in large parts of the West at least, it is a concoction of half baked histories, nationalist puffery, personal aggrandisement and retarded concoctions that offer a would-be new 'other.' It is the decline from the result of the defeat of the first wave of collective human self-organisation. It has grown from a pool of decay soaked by the West's itself's weakness and deterioration.
The lack of a collective human future in thought and in hope is certainly a consequence of the limits of the first wave of socialism. The absence of alternatives from our daily lives comes from the deliberate, stubborn, backward inaction and the constant insistence of the decline of mass movements and of co-operative undertaking and achievement. The second wave of socialism is yet to be built. It is almost silent now, but it will emerge, not by theory, but by the necessity of an overthrow of a current dangerous and rotten edifice. A daily life of independent and active movement will create a real, new, 'other', as a result of the rising of the vast majority of people who will decide to change their own future.
Hints are emerging in some western countries. The Irish Citizens’ Assembly was established in 2016 by a parliamentary resolution and tasked with deliberating on a number of issues, including the Eighth Amendment. Abortion was made legal because of ordinary citizens. The Citizens’ Assembly followed the model of its predecessor, the Convention on the Constitution, which ran from 2012 to 2014 and whose recommendations had led to the 2015 marriage equality referendum. Compare this with the USA's democracy that gives 26 States the right to abolish abortion via the new Supreme Court. The States are run by Republican millionaires. The Supreme Court is run by Trumpian millionaires. Of course there will be a ferocious battle - over what is really a democracy and what is actually permanent decisions of the rich and powerful.