Permanent austerity or change

The UK needs more austerity. The new Prime Minister (and the market) says so. And, after a decade-plus of austerity and five Tory Prime Ministers, apparently austerity is the proper answer for the future. Except the new Tory Chancellor adds that this time it has to be an eye-watering austerity, more awful than the previous years. Most of the UK's population are naturally worried to bits. And they have had enough. Quite rightly nobody, except the rich, really believes it will all be so much better, waiting for two years for a General Election.

The obvious first step is a General Election now. The Tories will try to carry on their 'eye-watering' for a while. But they are over. The UK's people largely want an election to get rid of the terrible, austerity-and the endless Tory government. A coming election today would also include the needs of the emerging, evolving nations in Scotland and Northern Ireland; the immense danger of the world's ecology; the war in Europe and most worrying at all, the scary future of 21st century capitalism. 

For the best part of the last 20 years capitalism has called itself 'globalisation'. In essence, globalisation was the domination of international capital, where the cheapest international goods, services and labour created immense volumes of wealth, mainly held by the US banks. This was run collectively by the largest nations, with the US holding the debts (Japan, China etc). What's happening now is the contradiction of international capitalism, increasing resistance by even the largest nations against growing international distribution. Now these nations demand their own particular goods - which more and more insist on the most serious goods made in local hands.

The outcomes of the declining areas of globalisation are not only the increasing demands of national goods and services, it is also increasing (or heightening) the beginnings of conflicts and wars. And the national political results, supported by new or changed political parties, are deepening into more and more rightwing nationalist politics. 

Meanwhile the conditions in the West for working class and lower middle class's peoples are dropping week by week. A radical response is emerging against governments. At the moment many people are polarising into two general directions (some combining opposite ideas.) The nationalist temptation for example deliberately promotes resistance to all immigrants, constantly spreading out in society deliberately, by the UK government. Yet again our richer government leaders are loathed by millions of people, who are unable to get their daily requirements. And a new core of the left has risen since 2016 in parts, particularly in Europe. As the increasing austerity evolves, so the left is emerging despite the deliberate contradictions put out by our leaders. 

The failing of globalisation-type capitalism, a capitalism that cannot re-establish as before, is also pressing the changes of the left. The absence of any other choice except socialism or the current declining capitalism is the only direction available now in the West. For more than a century it is only socialism that has offered a genuine society and welfare alternative to capitalism. This has become critical. Today, a green-socialist direction would therefore seem the most obvious step to take. But the failures in the past of both social democratic leaderships, or of most communist dictators, remain deeply in the West's people's history. SD in its century has always turned away from real socialism in order to support capitalism under key critical conditions. Communism crashed, after the dictator Stalin and Stalinism, which completely broke any acceptance of such horror and failure in the vast majority of the West's working classes.

At the moment, from what will become a thunderous period, the unions are battling in the UK and France. The next steps need to be the overthrow of the new anti-union legislation, designed to split workers in general. Already there are common Charters that bring together all the basic radical steps that support the rights of us all. The major political parties, including the leaders of the British Labour Party, are largely stepping aside from any actual action. The focus of the Labour leaders are explicitly working to get a majority in Parliament. And it is at this stage that the active left need to pass the Labour leaders - and begin the genuine next political battle. 

The next step that has to begin is the growth of dual political power in our society. The current, hated, Parliament, that is determined to carry on at all costs, is simply a barrier to any sort of progress for millions of people. The unions are rising, and now we need the people in the cities helping the food parcels, the towns supporting travel to hospitals, the refusal to accept desperate poverty, with thousands and thousands of people to march and to build our own local parliaments, the ones that will vote and act directly alongside. Supporting elected Mayors and even positive local councils can start a web of practical politics that stands against the rotten, failing Parliament. The new politics can have a hundred direct possibilities. In due course it can build up voting for real, basic, issues. Parties of the left can help, but first in practical ways. And finally our Lords, the party PMs, the huge money to get tricky votes at so called elections, the endless centuries of tradition, of domination, will fall. 

Five points and the UK's finished.

1. The Tory leadership (and membership) are unable to define the Tory's future. The recent previous idea, where some superman or women, like the historical Thatcher who, it turns out, won a poisonous war, or a 'ripping' public schoolboy like Boris, who was 'levelling up' despite the lack of any money - have already failed. 

The Tory MP Steve Baker is the only chance, with his block of super EU-leavers in Parliament who still wants Truss, as part of his new idea. Baker has been studying the 1900s when, among other horrors, there was little or no public health and welfare (unless you were rich). Perhaps surprisingly he does not mention the role of the UK's imperialism at that time, and all the countries that poured in the goods and money into the corporations and the UK's bank during that period. Perhaps Baker believes he can get modern equivalents from Singapore and the rest of the cheap labour nations. Baker is for the 19th century future. He's studying it and sees that there will be no money in 2045 to pay the old and ill. People have got to pay for themselves. The main money from the new tiny State has to be the army needed, we assume, to squash the starving. (Baker also doesn't mention the ecology of 2045.) 

2. and 3. The growing futures of both Northern Ireland and Scotland both hang on two major shifts in today's UK's politics. First there are, or will be, imminent numbers of the population of both sectors who are favouring separate countries other than the UK. Second, both have political organisations enabled to organise the shift to change into new potential nations. The weakness in the case of NI would undoubtedly be the minority block of Ulster. That is sharpening for sure but it is also dwindling. The bigger obstacle is more likely to be the resistance of the main Southern Irish parties (again minorities) in the South. But a different future (unlike the UK) is crystal clear and getting stronger in both populations.

In Scotland, because of the long-term and the better organisations in Scotland, and the dismal past and future apparent in the UK, the next two years are likely to finally (if reluctantly) decide Scottish nationhood. The failure of ecological and radical possibilities in Scotland, rather than the UK as a whole, is constantly increasing. The alternative political support in Scotland, against the UK, has become deeper and deeper. Moreover, the SNP party has placed its decision to present its Scottish referendum in the likely fast act of a new UK Election. 

4. Labour is very likely to win the next Election. This is as obvious - given the Tories. But that is the point. The Election will happen because of the Tories. The Labour leadership, who are undoubtedly able to pass by the Tories' crash, is, up close, not much different to the ideas, as such, that the majority of the Tory Party offer. Except for their dissolution. The Labour leadership has one, particular critical idea. They are utterly determined not to have anything to do with socialism. The current capitalist crisis, with its different aspects, has created a totally normal, would-be, Tory type answer, if they have not collapsed. No wonder that the main Labour Party Momentum leader, Michael Chessum, is now calling for a new left Party. 

Two vital questions about the crisis will blow up, upon the coming Election. Millions of workers are acting to win their wages, in order to keep themselves properly alive. The Labour leaders are hiding what Labour will say just now. In office they will act like the Tories - perhaps without some of the new Tory laws, although the last Labour governments maintained the anti-union laws by Thatcher.  Second, the large and well supported public utilities are a straightforward, necessary step against the current capitalist crises. Labour leaders frankly dump that direction. 

What is decisive in this particular turn is the understanding that a new period, certainly across the West, has begun. The evolution of capitalism has been more and more slicing through the capacity of social democracy to reconstruct social support as the requirement of privacy and wealth. It is not a matter of different questions. It is a system that is essential and deliberately and partly destructive. Even the state capitalist development of the Chinese nation, which is dominated by bureaucratic social, military state, is now facing a serious reduction of development, where figures of development are not being provided from the current 2022 Communist Conference because of the serious reductions. The politics of the Labour leaders are preparing for the decline of social state support.

5. The new period of history, politics and economics, is already calling its alarms in the European war in Ukraine and the decline of the West. As this is written the next UK Prime Minister has just been dumped. And it is not some personal or even political reason of the constant, catastrophic political failures. It is the fundamental shifts of a new time for capitalism and the different places that it requires; a system that is not working.  

Deep crises; false directions.

Since nearly a century gone by, the West has fought two world wars and accepted the rise of the USA, but has never seen the political and the economic convulsion that is being experienced today. The West is facing the possibility of losing its dominance, including the wider US world-wide leadership. Recessions and inflations are now regularly widespread across the West. Well before Putin's upheaval, there has been deep political shifts in the West. As a result, there are eruptions among the previous, traditional western political parties. They are dwindling or changing themselves, moving in favour for surface novelties, battling as dominant leaders, rather than connecting to large-scale, party memberships. Traditional politics is only playing with what it used to be - with the normal, albeit minimal, 'democracy'. And to top it all, the West is now fiddling with a war with Russia. 

Leaders, like the almost certainly dumped Prime Minister Truss in the UK, or the more solid President Macron in France, are continually offering apparently new brilliant but actually empty approaches, as a result of what is becoming yesterday's capitalism. In reality Macron (and most of the others) have already failed to deal with the beginning decline of twenty years of globalisation. Most capitalist major processes still continually remain out of the hands of many western countries - with the main exception of the US. Globalisation is not at all entirely gone. But now, various desperate efforts are being tried to establish national initiatives to rebuild more local capitalist developments, based on the nation’s creations of wealth - as try Truss did. 

The most immediately, half-baked idiocy was to be seen was the Truss's demand for local 'growth, growth and growth' (planned by possible alliances through Singapore and the South Eastern nations.) Truss nearly smashed the UK's economy when she started her first day 'growth' campaign. The UK is still wobbling. With her eyes on the labour conditions of Asia, Truss's so-called growth-based ideas remains old and dead. The UK is still failing regarding Truss's mini-imperialist efforts and the pretence that she could still win the failing glories of Ronald Reagan was always frankly fatuous. We wait to see if the likely next new UK PM and the already new Chancellor Hunt are properly kneeling to the market. This will increase the further decline of health and welfare, of education and benefits etc., as he did before the 2019s when he was minister of health.

The desperate conditions of the billions of people in the South continues. China is currently the major force for development in Africa. The US now mainly focuses on South America and, as much as they are able, to determine the Far East. But as life in the West gets more and more difficult, it means that what used to be the 'normal' traditional politics just doesn't work anymore - whether it's Macron or Truss or Italy, Scandinavia or even Germany. Traditional politics are breaking down. The failure of these connotations inevitably push new movements and actions, sometimes direct responses, that involve immediate anger towards the 'old status quo's, shaking the traditional Parties. In the UK (supposedly with the unchallenged political history) there have been four Tory PMs and two General Elections in five years. Two PMs failed in months and the last is likely to fall very soon, if not now! The UK population (and others) have never been more concerned and worried about their politics but have never been more angry because of the failures of politicians.

The empty, proud and swollen-headed PM Truss, is a clear example of all the decline of the pompous notions that rulers and leaders, particularly in Britain, as they imagined their dominance in their own nation. A handful of mainly old Tories thought Truss was a Thatcher part two and put her in as the UK's leader. This tiny rich group creating an enormous folly, which now shouts to the world of the desperate failure of the UKs democracy. Meanwhile the UK’s economic and political failures are found across the whole West, from Hungary to the US. The characters and conditions vary from parliaments to executives, but the wealth and power of the capitalist system continually blocks any requirements for essential change. Wealth and then its power smothers almost all that any real possible politics and real required democracy. 

What is a genuine democracy that will change the peoples’ anger, now rising across the working classes? It is the action of the people who are already pushing against the status quo. The total assumptions of the Truss's and the millionaires like Hunt, which are happily preparing the removal of the growing trade union strikes, are now going to clash with true democracy. The battle to come is an example of the creation of the possibility of a new democracy, when democratic workers are trying to vote for their wages and conditions. 

Then there comes the real barrier. Capitalism 'works' only for ruling classes. Its object is more and more obviously wealth and private possession. When Tory MPs will vote against strikes, the rich MPs are 'defending' their bit of capitalism. Despite the fact that they are a small minority in the country, they are already wealthy and they are frightened of the workers, in that they could lose their general domination. The battle with the strikes inevitably faces up to the possibility of real democracy. 

This direct moment is the coming-clash against classes in society in the UK. But it also could be the beginnings of a real democracy. The workers who are collectively organising to achieve better wages and conditions could further invite the same discussion and make the decisions regarding how, for example, with the utilities, that could be used, developed and widened, in the general public's ownership. This would be a clash of dramatic consequences. Moving on, small businesses ownerships, an immense proportion of UK labour, can equally build collective management and distributions. 

More widely, the core of capitalism in the UK, the banks and the trusts, will inevitably have to be broken down as more and more of workers, youth, the poorer, continue to fight back. The growing disaster of UK's capitalism - increasingly felt to different aspects across the West - has only one answer. Their answer is to do anything possible that ensures holding up the UK's capital and pushes down most of the population. 

The centuries of the UK's imperialism, of slavery, of class and wealth etc etc., is one particular of an example, of a very obvious example, across the whole declining West. Capitalism in the West is getting sharper and sharper. Societies are in trouble and some are already breaking down in the destruction of what was already the normal, minimal, democratic activity. The new actions and battles, marches and organisations, are the platform for the new democracy.