1. When the western leaders go anywhere or do anything, it is the US Presidents that are most wrapped up in the significant defences available across the planet. Endless care and consideration are applied to prevent presidential vulnerability. The process starts when the presidential elections begin and it increases to an epic height as the victor wins. Yet out of the forty-five US Presidents, four have been murdered and ten have nearly been murdered. US politics is a very dangerous game and remains so.
What Trump and his weasel Mark Meadows did was simply a step over the brouhaha of Presidents' infallibilities. They realised that murders of Presidents do not work so well. As the offices of state have developed, a particular President being bumped off does not clear the way for the would-be victor. So instead Trump used a big part of the US government itself. He very nearly slipped into a made-up Presidential office - without any real problems. Trump intended to use the Vice President and the Republican Party to stop the vote and change its result. Mike Pence was the pivot. Alas he wanted to be President himself - so he shut up. But it was very, very, close. And now over 30 States so far are preparing to fiddle the vote to make sure of just that same goal, together with the Republicans and the Supreme Court - ready for a successful round next time.
In reality, this is the stuff of war. The tricks and fiddles run by Trump covers rooted millions across the States, a mass population still infuriated by the failure of their 'American dream' and poised to win the politics of the hard right. This movement will not accept an apparent Washington slip again. It has a party. It has many States and it has the Supreme Court. It still has the anger that it will not accept a constitutional defeat again.
It is too early to define exactly what a coming US civil war will be like. At the moment the shape of the battle seems to be based on State decisions manipulating their votes. There are of course vast organisations that are supposed to defend the US government, besides the two main parties. But civil wars open conditions that can break up even the government forces. The US society and its structures are lining up in new splits. One potential example; there are a million active soldiers in the US. But a civil war is internal and fractional. The US military army has 57% white soldiers, 32% black and hispanic and the remaining 12% are also non-white. And then there is the armies' leadership. The top four star generals are 11 white and 1 black. And it is worth noting in times of apparent chaos and post war conditions, 4 star generals have regularly offered themselves as interim Presidents. But in a crisis, a lot of the base of the army would most likely join the local militias, dividing on a State by State basis.
The great US corporations appear to despise Trump and certainly would not want any civil war. But the pandemic doubled the wealth of the ten most rich in the world since March 2020 and nearly all of them were US citizens. They are doing OK. In a concrete decision, they mainly believe a deep loathing for any Washington government that supports any sort of company taxes. Our billionaires are almost all of the view in favour of a very, very, small government.
2. The prospects of a coming US war is not a lonely phenomena. Putin is currently bombarding the US (and the new NATO countries) with significant and drastic threats. He has recently published his own document - an Article by Vladimir Putin "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" July 12, 2021, which affects all of Eastern Europe. Putin has decided to reconquer what was the old Soviet Union, and the proposal is that the Ukraine etc, would become part of the extension of the nation of Russia and not, as was previously, different national Soviet Unions, with the right, in Lenin's days, for succession. (If nothing else Putin thinks, 'Russification would be an answer to the current and deep decline in Russia's economic life.) If/when Putin starts his armies into eastern Ukraine, the battle will have at least two fronts; Putin's discovery that even the eastern side of the Ukraine will fight back, unlike his previous grab of the Crimea, and second economic warfare that will play a dominant part form the West, particularly the US, as Russia will instantly lose 40% of its wealth.
Meanwhile Northern Africa and the Middle East are laced with constant internal revolts against right-wing, corrupt dominations. Simultaneously, millions suffering from these now constant conditions are seeking what is already becoming the militarisation against the movement of African and Asian exoduses. These people face more and more barriers as they try to enter the declining West. With rare exceptions, immigrants struggling to enter into Europe and the US are now being trapped in military prisons.
Even where there have been failures of the recent western imperialist adventures, which denote the growing weakness of the West, the West have also burned out most of the possible social futures available in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. This leaves the prospect of local civil wars, major migrations and the blockage of any development, except through dependence on larger nations. These new 'independent countries' are attached almost entirely to larger powers that often, ultimately, depend on the West. Permanent, fluctuating battles constantly emerge, which reduces many of these ex imperialist societies into desperate tribe-based criminality. In other words, since the success of the Vietnam war and its decisive alternative against US capitalism, the weakness of western traditional imperialism still stalls and crushes nations. Their lack of an alternative to capitalism despite their overthrow of the Western military conquests, are now smothered by a new world wide capitalism, through globalisation.
3. The partial pattern described above is only one part of the 21st Century. But it is enough to describe a deep malaise in the world. To summarise, there has been a previous historical moment that also exposed a deep break-down across major countries and their empires. This earlier conflation, besides its layers of death, had a particular character, which does not appear so obviously in the 21st century. WW1 hugely promoted the first major waves of socialism - in both of its directions. It simultaneously destroyed the largest socialist party in the world by its collaboration with the German military State, and it also ended up propelling a successful socialist revolution in Russia that changed the world for the decades to come. 1914 to 18 were wars that were fought for domination over other capitalist countries as well as the imperialist empires. It was followed by new capitalist wars organised to fight to destroy socialist nations.
The rising of wars today, both technologically and politically, are also bedded in capitalist competition. Today we face the increasing violent contradictions of the new, global capitalism. Direct battles led by socialist alternatives do not (yet) apply. But the domination of global capitalism in the West is faltering and declining and war is becoming more and more required to develop a new world order. In this stage of the new war, revolutionary socialism is simultaneously hidden behind the decline of the USSR and the state-capitalist regime of China, as well as the absence of any socialist advance globally since 1974. The new socialist wave can therefore only emerge as a new phenomena; as a means of refusing and declaiming the capitalist wars and then, and only then, by seizing, totally, the possibility of a new society and a new civilisation, thereby entirely changing the context of the capitalist wars.
This hypothetical socialist emergence is more obvious than it might be imagined. The huge mass actions, aimed against ruling classes and their controls are constant across the globe today. From the Arab spring, to the fight for ecological survival, world wide battles today and emerging new politics are being defined through the actions of a potential revolution. And not as the ferocious demands of witless goals that the status quo must prevail; a feature of history that has never succeeded.
4. Four key structures are beginning to coalesce towards a second, new wave of practical socialism across parts of the world. These tentative structures, emerging as a result of the absence of any realistic alternatives, are trying to deal with the rash of unsatisfactory societies.
First there is the escalating contradiction of the intense drive for so called free profit on the one hand and cartel conduct through globalisation on the other. For example, the US government sets up a huge rain of market duties that prevent Chinese goods selling at their own prices and promoting their own. Second, the West's peoples' are more and more disgusted by their own sham democracies. Third is the failures of leaderships and the social systems in regard to the world's ecological dangers. And finally there is the grotesque distribution of wealth and class across most of the world.
The response of mass actions in East Europe and in South Asia are already huge, aimed at failing leaderships and the lack of popular needs, politically as well as socially. Now that parts of the Covid pandemic are potentially reducing in the Western Europe, so large clashes will be rising, in order to demand much greater responses to the people's huge, prior efforts and the damage they see of a future which appears to be an appalling distribution of resources. Some European governments are frankly blind to the furious momentum that is coming.
The present question is who will act in these struggles that can define a collective movement for action - that can organise change? And how will such a movement be able to develop the deep and coherent ideas that will need to come from such actions; that will be able to create a system of policy that can overturn the current and increasing failure of our civilisation? What now is the second wave of socialism?
5. As the battles for positive change break through the crises and wars, new experiences and common possibilities will emerge. The youth have led the upsurges across the world that have broken many times in the last 12 years. The working classes, from New York to Angola, are now deeply ground-down with the power of labour law, of the police and of the razor of living standards and the increasing ruthlessness of trenchant capitalism. Nevertheless, the upsurges that have emerged, over ecology, over women and racism, over public authorities and over corrupt leaderships go directly to the rotten source of power, often overrunning partial gains and minor steps.
As the pandemic ceases and globalisation continues to shake and shudder, which will again expose states and their leaders, so the mass actions will grow. Organisations will rise, conducting and defining their opposition to society, in the name of the common people and with their own arguments and propositions. It is inevitable. However, the crucial point is not this Party or that particular issue, it is the amalgamation of key actions that will aid the break up the current social system. And there are some critical steps in this direction - to bring down the modern wretched states and their economies - that are already evolving.
6. The entire rock of the Southern Irish political and social law and culture was overturned by 4 consecutive randomly selected citizens assemblies, creating, in turn, three successful referendums at the end of the 2020s. The victory over state and religion has still ricocheted through the century-long backward, hostile Parties that are now hanging on to each other, declining in their clutches of globalisation. This is a new type of democracy which is utterly opposite to the rank 'democracies' now serving through both the EU and the US. And the Irish assemblies and referendums have become the start of a revolution across the whole of Ireland and beyond. A paradigm shift for genuine, revolutionary democracy.
The understanding of the youth and the effect of the huge layers of extreme exploitation of the working classes are aware of the real hypocrisy of the internationalisation of globalisation. The youth in particular see the virtual necessity of international science, of health and of education. They are stunned by world wide developments which are deliberately tied to these human gains to wealth and to competition, a competition defined as globalisation.
Millions, especially the young, now see the world seeking both common parts of all the nations as well as local and national countries that are able to maintain and thrive humanity. These millions seek for the overthrow of current capitalism in defence of human society. As days go by, so the struggle will become more and more acute. The focus on capitalism's greatest surge, a globalisation that reduces common human endeavour, increases the destruction of the planet and is motorised by the worse competition, the seeking of money and power of the ruling classes, becomes more and more obvious as the greatest barrier to human success. And millions are moving to bring it down. A socialist revolution.
Some areas on the planet utterly demand the need for common agreements, currently denied by the single competitions for wealth. Davos in Switzerland the last time it came together it had 119 billionaires, 309 private jets and 53 Heads of States. Oxfam states that lower incomes of the world's poorest have contributed to the extra death of 21,000 people each day during the pandemic. The world's richest men more than doubled their collective fortunes since March 2020 ($700 billion to $1.5 trillion, March 20 to November 21.) The authors of the Oxfam stated that the 10 richest represented 'a record breaking increase something like of which we have never seen before.' The rich in Davos? They wanted and prayed to for all to remain the same - subject to more $ trillions. The same for them to control the world's wealth.
A socialist revolution needs desperately to be set up in a new Davos. What should it do? It should decide a universal wage for all labour worked through by the assemblies across the globe. The distribution of wealth and the destruction of the vast mechanical politics and economics that block human success needs to be smashed. The billionaires and millionaires and the 53 plus heads of Governments will be an absurd and poisonous blimp of history.