Revolution in the West?

The idea today that the working class across the West would be able to rise up in revolutionary ways; ways that would bring down governments and states in order to set up new societies; building nations that could be led and organised by the basic majority populations, seems fantastical. 

But such a possibility is far from absurd, despite the carefully constructed barriers preventing the hidden realities of life. Starting from obvious facts in the modern West, we find the increasingly negative views in vast populations about current governments and states. These feelings are becoming the norm for large portions of the youth, for women, for people of colour and for those millions who live in the increasing experience of growing poverty.

This immense fact is a constant feature among the huge numbers who fight for key necessities, only to find the absence, indeed the opposite, of the governments and states, with their total failure when they come to supporting the elementary requirements for a decent life. That fact shoots out to all and the standing governments and states fail more and more quickly.

Yet, in the decades of the 21st century so far, the anger that flares up from many corners have not yet become collective. For example, the fights with the Police in the US and now with other countries, especially in France and the UK, does not combine with the actions of women fighting against their social subordination, yet which has also becoming a well-known aspect of the foul role of the police. The totally unfair wages and jobs, which contain huge proportions of the population that are also fighting racism or sexism, is also often separated from the direct battles of the trade unions and collective labour in general. The several campaigns that seek to save the planet are divided, both in their own separate organisations and among the wide range of battles that challenge modern capitalism, which is destroying the planet.

One revolutionary socialist party in the past, the Russian Bolsheviks, played a critical role in constructing collective socialist victories. It was apparent, once the revolution started to bubble up, that Lenin focussed intently on the relatively small section of industrial workers in 1917. Was this the means to win the revolution? Yes and no. The core of the industrial workers were the 'vanguard'. Not because their fire power could bring down the Tzar, the traditional army, the would-be constitutionalists and capitalists. The workers vanguard led the creation of a vast collective across the whole of Russia. 

It was the industrial workers who knew best how to show the coalescing of the whole working class and much of the peasantry, to combine, to bring all that wanted deep change and then how to construct assemblies of all the poor, from the peasants to carpenters to soldiers. This was the concrete assembling of the wide range of the people that became the country wide Soviets. The Soviets were the combination of all who joined the revolution and the industrial workers were the first to show how it could be done, including parts of the belated Bolshevik party. 

Post Lenin, the entrenchment of the role of the party had already dominated. Soviets had been dropped in the starvation of 1919/21, the wars with the counter revolutions and the incessant role of the party focussed everything. The inevitable party became its leadership, then its sole leader and finally was the decisions of all of the main initiatives from 1924. Trotsky's belated call for the return of the Soviets in 1924 became Stalin's version of the Soviets becoming the tool of the party.

The failure of the first wave of socialism was finally the domination of the party over the Soviets. (See 'Polecon' blogs on the 'Second Wave of Socialism'.) The parties first replaced Soviets and then became the normal means of socialism that decided how the new socialist governments and the new states would be organised. The process of this failure has been prolonged. Outside of the richer west, the anti-imperialist battles (China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Vietnam) etc., were often dramatically successful against the main capitalist nations. But the role of the party in these successes have gradually declined, at different rates, without the certainty of any sort of socialist future except via a complete hierarchy of the party. 

In the richer West a different version of socialist parties started, which failed more rapidly. Their attempt, based initially on the German model, organised together with the capitalist states and have flopped almost entirely. Over the years, that part of the first wave of socialism has almost completely collapsed.

The fundamental construction for the second wave of socialism, particularly in the West, is not useful when aiming to create another effort to reconstruct a Bolshevik Party 2. In fact, the most significant discovery among radical forces that have gradually emerged in the West since 2000 is that seeking yet another version of apparent Bolshevism simply fails. However, this understanding  has, without a solid and collective counter approach, tends to cause the new radicalism to become weak and ineffective (that has been discussed in paragraph 4.) The new potential revolution in the West is being scattered.

It would be false to see modern socialism as declining. New socialism, the second wave, has never been more open to see the corrupt, the declining development of the Western governments and states and the breaking down of today's globalisation, particularly in the West. The answer maybe simple but as we practically apply such a simplicity, it is fiendishly hard to do. 

One example could be the moronic world of Boris's UK. When every conceivable lie was thrown at Corbyn, by the state, the government, the media and the Labour Party, nevertheless 10 million voted for him. Of course the attack on Corbyn did its narrow, historical, political job.10 million potential socialists were dissolved, mostly by the anti-Corbyn Labour Party and the standard social democratic response that failed to build up a huge independent movement. But an enormous block, standing against a so called society, could have been started through entirely different movements organising to act and unite for a new future. In reality Corbyn's leadership, from that point trailing the Labour Party in its election, led Corbyn to his own social democratic a catastrophe. The creation of socialism is more than possible but something new needs building.

There are now millions in the UK seeking and partly acting for a new society, economy and state. Part of this answer is to assemble of all those who now see each of the elements in which they fight for justice and change and to cohere the ten million plus in a collective program across the whole of society. The names of this movement are immaterial. Call them assemblies, citizen talks, circles, open parties or conferences. Insist on the combination of all organisations that challenge the governments, states and the economy. Use collectively all of the huge and increasing parts of those who challenge the domination of the status quo.   

The battles that socialists have tried and fought over the decades since the rot of Stalinism are rarely understood but have often offered potentials for the future of the second wave. For example, Yugoslavia, independent of Stalinism over decades, developed worker control in business and development. Cuba astonished all in its spread of health in what was the 'third world'. Cuba played the key role in the defeat of the South African army and opened the door to anti-apartheid. A war ravaged Vietnam, not the US or a hesitant China, overturned the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. And so these incredible marks and others have built a socialist basement for the second wave. 

The second wave of socialism is gathering. Frankly there is no other humane proposal, any alternative, meaningful, rational, intelligent, future, for the majority of human kind. The current conditions of capitalist decline are breaking up in a howling mess.           

Boris pops the bubble

 

It's no surprise that Boris is on his way out. It will take some time as he hollers through his sub-Oxbridge speeches. His Party is riven with poisonous factions. No one has been able yet to pick up Johnston's (fading) charisma. But the reality is that Johnston is getting weaker and weaker, shackled with party-gate and massive public debt, Northern Ireland and Scotland. His giant domination of Parliament has become the apologies offered by the new Tory MPs as they spend their time listening to unhappy criticisms in their constituencies. Boris is over. The timescale may stretch, but the new Tory party will convulse and the current Tory government is unavoidably in trouble. Yet this was supposed to be the novel 'new' type of politics and politicians in the UK since WW2. And now it's going to hit the wall. The Tories' only hope for a future is their awful, incoherent alternative. 

The Tory Party, now running over 12 years in government, has evolved rapidly but in a new way. The Boris Tory Party shows little continuity with Cameron and May, who ran the governments from 2010 to 2019. Boris's crashing 'success' over the traditional Labour strongholds elevated the 'man who got Brexit done' and a new future that would improve the lowest conditions outside London. It was a genuine Tory political novelty. And, as Boris continues, the Tory Party is still, reluctantly unhappy in many places, as it is shifting its new character. 

One of the many mistakes of Labour leaders is their constant squawking about the so-called 'same old Tories.' True Boris and company continue to adore the wealthy. But so did the Blairite Labour Party leadership, quite openly. Both main parties, excepting the partial moment when Corbyn turned in a different direction, have always supported the wealthy. That's not new. What's new is that Boris has shifted away from what used to be the historical and 'normal' British democracy. 

Boris has not done this himself. Certainly he has been swallowing what has been emerging in the US and the EU. But his approach is not scientific. He is grabbing what has happened to the West's new model as it dropped the death of the social democracies - with their pretences of the taming of capitalism by the state. Boris doesn't have a clue of the social and economic manoeuvres that have been erupting in society, in either the UK or anywhere else. He is not interested in the deep moves of late, western capitalism. He is interested primarily in his own rich, much loved and praised existence. But he is the first leading British politician that sussed what Blair, the EU and Trump has become in the new politics. 

Picking up one version of the new political development in the West, an essay of Wolfgang Streek in the London Review of Books (27 January 2022) suggested a way of looking at the new politics and its relationship to the West's social and economic classes. The critical points in his argument were one; the breaking down of the traditional working class (added with the reorganisation of work and housing), two; the removal of ideology in politics and the use of the state to 'fix' problems, locally and distinctly one by one, three; the new democracy should have no theory of class conflict but instead manufactured consent is the incentive, four; the absence of the past, its avoidance of real history (instead of slogans) and no futures for the aim of society in general, is the focus. There is no sense of the moment in which we are to live.

WS calls this as 'technopopulism'; the deliberate type of a version of involvement in politics organised by the government. It is an anathema to the existence of alternatives created by the public. The historic core that traditionally created a genuine society, particularly under capitalism, was the organisation first of trade unions. The new politics reveals that a worker can be offered single advantages where necessary. A trade union or collective bargaining or workers on the boards of companies must be destroyed. 

WS catches a real concept and program for this new politics. Going forward he is reflecting that the tiniest collective demand that emerges outside of the state is unacceptable. Moving on from WS, the West's new politics is based on the destruction of the remnants of social democracy in relation to three new modern essentials. First, independent organisations with the demand of their own stakes in society are out, replaced by either destruction, as with the UK miners strikes, or re-construction, as with unions re-composed into 'professionalism' ie., seeking to accept harmony with the government. Second, the movements against racism and the fight for women have to be both insistently separate, swallowed by state via their offers and decisions, and reduced of independent activity through state law and order. Third, the silent and unseen motor of capitalism, when mentioned at all in any alternative individual presence, is beyond the argument by the state and silent in respect of society's problems. 

Boris's political bubble is already shrinking after party-gate and popping while the UK opens up the opposition to Boris's new politics. His shaky new politics is interestingly represented in the hands of 2 billionaires - one from the US and the other from the UK. The latter, John Armitage, gave the Tories more than half a million since Boris became the PM. Now Armitage wants to get rid of Boris, and the current political situation he has found is 'tremendously upsetting.' Bad show. Boris lies and pretends and turns solid straight forward Tory standards into mob slogans. 

In the US the West's picture is sharper. Peter Thiel, who has a wealth of about $2.6 billion, is focusing on 2022 Trump type candidates in the State elections, says he 'no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible'. He deplores 'the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women' (after 1920.) 

Our traditional Tory is shamed at one side of Boris's politics. The direction of the new Western politics is suggested from a new Trumpet on the other. 

What is this politics? The politics emerging from the West is not creating the next millennium, or even a decade. From the EU banks dominating countries that are causing public eruption and destruction, nationalist racism, to the worst labour laws in the UK whose leaders claim the greatest freedom across Europe, to a US on the edge of State wars, the present politics is a serious disaster. We are inevitably at the start of a new revolutionary period in the West. And it will require an organised revolution to prepare, to be ready to throw down the current, swelling dangers and create public governments and states with the full energy of a collective society

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