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. 

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.