Second Wave of Socialism. October 28, 2020
Socialism is great? If you do not think like that, don’t worry, it’s ok - so long as you believe that it could be fine - if all the blocks that have kept stopping it from happening were removed. If you don't want socialism anyway, even if it worked, and stayed working, well, you've had it, at least from bothering to read this. If you find that you really desire personal wealth and power? Bad luck and fuck off. For the rest of humanity, it's pretty obvious that conscious and thoughtful efforts, carried out by the big majority of human beings, should be a way to create a better society; better than the one that we have been living in (under various nations, conditions and relations) for what, four hundred years? A better society that is, which finds a successful way to make socialism work, over the long-term. Which of course would mean an entirely different civilisation. You choose. Or at least have a look at this.
Before tucking into my explanation 'why we don't get to a rosy, socialist future - and how we might', it is worth registering a fascinating note about socialist ideas up to now. Despite their endless failures, semi-successes and outright defeats, it still remains the' big other.' Top politicians across the globe either deny that socialism can exist anymore - a la Blair, or that they need to destroy it - a la Trump, or that they are actually claiming to be carrying out socialism for billions of us - a la Xi Jinping. It turns out that socialism is the constant political loadstone for what is happening in the planet; how it is being defeated, how it has died in History, what is the imminent danger that it suggests. It's like something that our leaders and would-be leaders cannot get out of their minds - and their throats. It's a permanent pain for them. Somehow our actual, real society, our current civilisation, can't get past the bloody socialism idea, despite its many so-called funerals. Why is that?
An example. Historically, what were actually political philosophers from the Enlightenment onwards (although the likes of Machiavelli and Hobbes didn’t know it) started by discovering the individual God-like figure using reason for need of ‘the master’. Then the philosophers coupled the ordinary individual's life with goals that had been assumed were decided by the creator. Then, latterly, they understood ‘the being’, ‘the self-alone’, which made an abstract logic of the ‘self’. This vision was then absorbed in nature that apparently resolved truth and satisfaction. But misery and individual crises broke out from literature, art and a tempest of revolts, which studied the new life of millions, thereby exposing the creations of new classes. Breaking out from this connection, the actual activity of life threw itself open to the practical evidence of society. The novelty of machinery, production and wealth – related to others – changed philosophy and the individual now witnessed the new ‘life’ - as defined and then practically delivered by the multitude of books on society and then the community and then, scarily, the value of labour.
At that point, following two World Wars and many revolutions, modern western philosophy simply collapsed. With the earlier exception of Gramsci and then Sartre, western philosophy finally struggled itself into a set of grotesque abstractions, to break away from any real life at all. And of those efforts have now drastically failed. What the post modernists and their ferociously abstract pals were unable to do was to explain human life let alone their intention to dissolve socialism's fundamental arguments about the possibilities of humanity's existence.
These are all particular fancy-pants assertions, but bear with me. It is surely inevitable that organised thought in any sphere, including philosophy, has to set its questions in terms of the circumstances that are defined by real life, albeit those conditions may be muddled and need to be reorganised. Indeed, a fundamental idea defined by Marx remains utterly critical regarding all social thought. Existence proceeds consciousness. The human mind evolves out of the perception of what is. The 84% of Americans who believe in God don't get their fantasies from spectral beings, no matter what their pastors tell them. God is necessary for religious humans to define their own order of the world, including their own personal conditions. They create God for all sorts of necessary and worldly purposes. 'Pie in the sky when you die' is the most elementary. And it still works for old, US billionaires, as they spray their holy winnings across the sad world, hoping for repentance for their early days and more pie available post death.
Why did (does) philosophy stall? (Which sadly includes much of the Frankfurt school and their self-styled Critical Theory. Exception made of Adorno – who at least criticised German and Western ‘civilisation’ to the bone, unlike his friends, who vaguely criticized the world but hovered over Stalin.) My view is that, just like modern capitalism, there are no solutions available in today’s western civilisation that can seriously develop the declining and more and more calcifying system of capitalism’s society. If today’s thinkers offer futures (available in huge numbers) they tend to provide us with amusing banalities regarding shopping, or speculations about robots. (There’ll be more about these bloody robots.)
Just in case you hung around during '68, beyond formal religion, there are many versions of thought that describe themselves as imagination, detached from day to day (that is real) reality. But imagination comes with the mud on the ground, the clouds in the sky, the life that is lived. It is inescapable. Which is what gives its weight to this pesky, shot-down, poisoned and mangled - socialism - and why it refuses to go away. Socialism is a human proposition about a more equal, shared and successful society. All sorts of conditions have to apply to get there, from the requirement to re-build the green in the world, to politics that is governed by the people. These are not the blocks and fences against socialism’s possible success. Many people in the world want such things. The blocks to successful socialism obviously start from the reality of social classes in our current, dominated society, those that already rule the world - or who damn well want to.
Let’s follow the diversion about robots. FANG and their corporate friends started with robots as young ‘freshmen’ (all men.) It led to Facebook, Apple, Netflicks and Google - machines that suck up wealth through controlling billions of peoples’ purchases on the internet. But our futuristic proprietors still pretend that a new world of a utopian capitalism is at hand through AI, if they could just let the internet alone. These titans have now got the same wealth as France. But they have got nowhere on AI and robots, and some are already preparing for the giant catastrophe that humanity is about to face. So far, the robots and algorithms allow what you get out of them is what you have had put into them. Alas, the big deal – is that AI has to get more than what you put into them. AI has to bridge its own, previously unavailable gap, between what they get into them and what they get out. But other than being quicker, no big deal is on sight. Philosophy AND robots have stalled. Why? The capitalist system of society has stalled. Of course, the new tech has created new ways of working. They have helped to reorganise the world’s working class. But the new (actually quite limited tech) of the last six decades goes, historically speaking, goes much slower and much less significant than the six decades before. And our new titans are partly recognising their failure and largely becoming the internet’s bank.
This growing fact of capitalism has helped finish off another line of politics, Social Democracy, in the West. There are no ways round this particular point. Sadly, good old Corbyn, (a British Labour Party leader who lost) even if he had turned his 10 million votes in 2019 into 15 or 20 million, he would still have needed a big majority of the people to fight to the end to get anywhere. The followers of Labour in 2019 often insisted that 1945 and Labour's Clement Attlee achieved great reforms without revolution. But Labour had a big majority of voters and, more significantly, 4 million soldiers and sailors and their families behind them that, together with Russia, had just had their victory over fascism. But even with that strength every hour following Attlee's victory was moulded, by the state, by the rich, and by most of Labour's MPs, towards the re-alignment of the previous social system and away from definitive socialist reform. And this became the start of the real life of social democracy when the European west staved off the chance of revolution via a welfare state – and it worked. Western social democracy offered the framework and it was accepted. Today, with the partial exception of (highly pressed) Scandinavia, capital is systematically rolling back ‘welfare’, most obviously shown by the relentless decline of European states’ expenditure. The framework is dismissed. Another new social democracy is an ancient proposition – for modern Capital. Today you’ve got to fight for all of it.
The British example - of a stalled revolution in 1948, resulting with a slow socialist-crash - was a long-term event in history but hardly major in relation of the world-wide experiences and the world's most general blocks to socialism's progress and success. After all, two World Wars had smashed society. Huge new anti-capitalist states had erupted, some (except Yugoslavia) as immediate vassals to the USSR and others, from China, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, all results of genuine nationally based, self-styled socialist revolutions. In other words, so far at least, it is not the power of the capitalist system alone that has prevented the success of socialism in the world. That is if, like me you agree that, with some partial exceptions in the case of Cuba and Vietnam, the vast majority of supposed socialist countries became failures. (If you disagree with that bit - stay. ‘Down with sectarianism, I say!’)
Ok, here we are getting to it. What then were the main blocks, up to now, that have prevented socialist success? Oh no! It's not what has just popped in your head? Human nature is the source of capitalism’s eventual success?! Look. Societies evolved and human beings still progressed (and the reverse) without understanding anything at all about the core processes of those experiences in the last, what, 15,000 years. They thought it was the God’s will or brazen luck. Why would they not, once they are able to see those processes and how they actually work, set about consciously improving their lot? The block here is not some version of human nature. The blocks were the nature of survival and the main activities of work that preventedany wider understanding and that simply stalled all independent thought and imagination - beyond the daily effort of living to exist.
But I digress. The blocks stopping socialism do not mainly result from successful counter-revolutions. And neither do they fail as a result of a permanent, rock-solid versions of 'human nature' (available in all good history books. If ‘a permanent human nature’ ran things – there would be no change in history.) I also want to argue (sadly) that the first socialist revolution wouldn't have been ok, even if Trotsky had replaced Stalin. (Sadly, because Trotsky failed to carry out his own view, that the USSR should be overthrown in a political revolution. And if he had tried it, the structures that were created by the USSR’s state and party would still have remained the decisive barrier.) Many on the far left of western politics thought and continue to believe that removing Stalin (and now Jinping) would have cracked it. But even the brilliant, analytical and practical Trotsky was too little and too late. It is Socialism itself, I beg to argue, both the self-styled social democratic model and the great revolutionary movements, which so far have an internal flaw – or flaws.
I know…; what then is this damn flaw!? Sorry, we first have to look at some important questions. Start with the big issues. Did the USSR and China 'win' against the dominant, imperialist West? It is hard to say 'no, they didn’t'. From 1917 to 1989 the USSR fought off huge attacks both militarily and economically. The USSR was victorious against the 1918-22 invasions and 1940-45 invasion. It was successful in the basic, industrial economic development of Russia from the 1920s until the 1970s - at least in the technical sense. And just in case you think I’m getting all gooey about Stalin and his henchmen, both the military and economic efforts carried out by the USSR's citizens were horrific, and their dreadful actions go down in history as one of the centuries' holocausts.
A policy, directed by Mao, tried to shape the organisation and collectivisation of the countryside in China, which also led to the death of millions - following desperate measures - similar to the effect of the USSR's collectivisation. But this failure led to an internal reform in China that was possible as a result of the gradual weakness of Western, especially US, imperialism. The half defeat of the US and the UK in Korea, the wholesale defeats in Cuba and Vietnam, the partial breakdown of the hegemony of the US coupled with the UK and France in the Middle East in the 1970s, forced western capitalism to accept, and gradually to participate, as a subservient force, in the huge industrialisation of China, via a state-controlled capitalist development. Totally unseen in history, China's progress and exceptional development is by far the most significant event in the 21st century so far. We cannot therefore say that the revolutionary national independence movement of China failed, nor did the USSR, at least up to 1989. But, despite these advances they are not socialism; at least in terms of the leadership and management of society by the working classes.
The question is; was it, like the earlier version of the USSR, impossible to make such advances (including the social 'use' of capitalism) in order to create a domination of society, of politics and of collective freedom, in order to get to there? Were the de facto Emperors, the secret polices and the vile extinctions of millions, essential to establish the 'socialist' effort? We have finally reached a key point. (At last!)
It is my view that socialist revolutions were never reached, either in the USSR or in China. (And no more was socialism achieved in any of the developed capitalist countries, courtesy of social democracy’s constitutional efforts.) There was, in fact, no achievement of the first wave of socialism at all. What objectively took place in the USSR and what is still taking place in China is the revolutions - for national independence. There, you have it!
This struggle for national independence has gone through two phases. The English, then British civil war opened the national revolutions, which were tied inexorably to the emergence of capitalism. And right through the centuries, up to and beyond the vast European wars and then the US wars that followed, national independence was won - nation by nation – based more and more distinctly on the further development created by capitalism. By the 20th century however, the rapid expansion of capitalism on a world scale, had started to crush possible development in a vast range of countries. In the British case in particular, the UK created subordinate and dominated sections of the globe that were specifically designed to reverse any further development, in order to prevent competition. The became the high phase of imperialism. And any country, empire, continent or would-be nation, was subordinated to the already established developed nations in defence of their continued capitalist evolution.
National revolutions that blew up in the imperialist age could not throw down their monarchs and their divine rights and thereby to achieve nationhood, nor through their military power push away the armies of the imperialist nations. Why? Because by the beginning of the 20th century, a genuinely ‘independent nation’ could only be constructed by removing the rights of capitalist property ‘owned’ by the imperialists, which already dominated the local economy and society - from the outside. Inevitably, this fact became tangled with the inflexions of ‘Permanent Revolution’. (Wait for it.)
Invented by Parvus, promoted by Trotsky and adopted by Lenin, PR is not some heady toxin. It is the simple understanding that underdeveloped countries, dominated by the world’s imperialist regimes, cannot go through their own, paralleled capitalist phase that would create a majority of workers, that could stir up its own banks and technology and then, once modern capitalism was achieved in their society, go for the next socialist revolution. PR centred on the requirement of the minority of workers in alliance with the much greater peasantry, to overthrow the old regime and to lead society. But PR did not ensure the success of socialism.
What happened? The Russian revolutionaries in 1917 successfully overcame capitalist leadership without much difficulty, because Russian capitalism was entirely attached to international capital and they offered only their most tentative and feeble reaction to the huge changes needed in Russia. The mistake of versions of PR was not that development could now mean overleaping the social and economic conditions of countries otherwise choked by imperialism. That worked. The mistake was calling that socialism. Russia, as it became the USSR, managed an incredible surge of development, albeit all on the economic side and not at all socially. It was a terrible joke that the workers and the peasants led society. And in no way could the Russian revolution be described as socialist, despite the great leap it created and the initial mass movements that ran far beyond its previous history.
Both Lenin and Trotsky hinted as much (that the USSR was not socialist) when the fully developed Germany failed to win its socialist revolution, which could have opened the possibility of a giant federation, and which could have led to real socialism. Instead, the response to that defeat went in two mistaken routes. The least error, from Trotsky, was his view that the overthrow of the bureaucracy would allow a return to socialism in Russia. But socialism was not available in Russia and the problems of development and national independence remained, with or without the bureaucracy. The second was the grotesque view of Stalin, who called for ‘socialism in one country.’ (Much more acceptable and even comfortable in the self-styled communist world.) Completely abandoning reality up to WW2. And while millions of working-class people in the West were delighted that the USSR had led the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, daily life in Russia did not charm the western working class at all. Socialism seemed promising, but not of the so-called soviet type.
The national revolutions in Russia and China stood and stand for independence and therefore had to stand against imperialism to win their independence. In China, since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping in 1979, capitalism has been re-created because imperialism had been thrown back. The ‘new way with capitalist elements’ is still subordinate and restrained in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party after 40 years. But China is not a socialist country; and its successful revolution with its added capitalism, is successful as a nationally, independent country.
Oh yes. The tragedy of all this. The tragedy is what happened in Russia in 1989. It was inevitable – but only if you realise what the real revolution in Russia was. Everybody appeared to be amazed when the Soviet Union collapsed. The US in particular fought a cold war from 1946. But that had not stopped Russia’s nukes, their Sputnik, more doctors by head of population than the UK, etc., etc. What crashed was the rule of Russia – its bureaucracy. Why? Because that bureaucracy had (it believed) achieved its full role. By the 1980s they knew that what they were doing had nothing to do with socialism. They had ‘modernised’ Russia and now they wanted to grab the real goodies on offer. Sadly, that is also the future of China. The capitalist servant will become the master – via the increasingly corrupt bureaucracy. The national revolution has been won. And, like the USSR, it too will, in due course, be festooned with the phrases and mottos of socialism – which have never been real.
On to the second wave.
There are 4 great ideas (based on reason) still at work in the world, and they can be usefully aimed at some glimpses of a socialist future. Human organisation across the globe is not a product of ideas as such. It is the opposite. It is the concrete action of billions who live in layers of social classes and that exist in permanent contradiction and conflict. (Yes. That had to be mentioned!) However, the 4 ideas indicated are now mostly used by the ruling classes to categorise their own meanings of their rights to the leadership of society. The 4 ideas are Economics, Politics, Society and the State. Perhaps surprisingly, having described the critical flaw in the first wave of socialism, now turning to the erasing of the flaw in socialism, can be discovered via the possible, new, active hierarchy in daily life! In other words, Economics, politics, Society and the State, can have a new hierarchy that has yet to be analysed and arranged, but which can be helpful in the full understanding of a successful socialist world.
Starting with ‘Economy’, modern Western capitalism had (and has) every interest in preventing collective economic development (and political change) especially in the many under-developed countries on the planet. In fact, the struggle for revolutionary socialism has, so far, been mainly a prime battle against western capitalism’s control of economic life in the under-developed countries. Social democracy on the other hand has campaigned for its variety of controlled capitalism in the already developed countries in the West. (This variety of socialism has failed as well.) Revolutionary socialism so far has centred its aim on the economy, on capitalism. Social democracy, generally based in the heartlands of capitalism, focused on democratic institutions to win reform. The leaderships of pre-dominant capitalism essentially deny its existence at all! The ‘economy’ as described by the overwhelming majority of the West’s political leaders, over 60 years, was nothing but capitalism – until the 2008 banking collapse pulled the curtains open to the world.
The politics (of capitalism) are relatively matter-of-fact, and are directly attached to the capitalist economic system. But the rulers of the world, who are still mostly dominating the world from the West, despite the US’s gradual decline, deliberately still do not call themselves capitalists and deliberately do call themselves democrats and ‘free.’ The countries that these people rule are described as ‘free countries.’ But western democracy has largely become a fatuous farce; in that its various establishments have systematically shrunk ‘democratic’ choices to next to nil. The small points that parliaments and senates argue about are largely third-rate issues and mostly cover self-enhancement. (In Britain, the first real politics for decades has burst out of the regulated and detailed, organised regime that runs parliament, albeit in a muddled way, through two referendums on Scotland’s fate and on Brexit.) The paradox of western democracy and its politics in the last half century is that it prevents any real freedom at all. The example of Trump, who claimed he would launch a deliberate and open attack on the political elites that provide an empty shell in US’s established ‘democracy’, has ended up with the proposal to have no democracy at all. Trump was right about who runs the US but his proposal is to set up a dictator! Why? Because he will not reveal the real engine of US society that has always been the starting point of any important decisions – which is – how to best safeguard US capitalism. Because the US’s politics are more and more exposed as rotten, Trump wants to turn that truth (of which he is the putrid opposite) into a TV based, semi-fascist, regime. Trump has learned from the 1930s fascists. It is impossible to drive down the working class and its allies when capitalism is ruthlessly centralising its wealth – unless you put neo-Nazis on the streets .
So, the world’s politics is largely created by the world’s economics. Yet the two systems try to deny their interdependence, and thereby often turn politics into a smokescreen.
‘Society’ is a contradictory concept under the capitalist system. It is a dilemma because it is based on what is, the most fundamental aspect of human activity, collective labour. To that degree ‘society’ is a concession that capitalist economics and politics find tricky. And as a result, ‘society’ in the West has often become middle class charities and the fiction of the close lives (in moments of peril or patriotism) that all of the social classes apparently share. Yet ‘society’ is a deep experience of human life once the snake oil is poured away. Moments when ‘society’ among the millions who depend on work or welfare, turn towards a general connection, often result in the push-back of the ruling class economics and politics that normally manage most citizens’ lives. The social welfare, hugely enlarged by the most capitalist states because of the Corona Virus, is a case of such a push from society against the main role of the capitalist state. The organised construction and definition of ‘society’ and its rights, will become a keystone of the second wave of socialism.
And the state. This is the greatest conundrum for socialism’s second wave. The difficulties do not lie in any doubts about the need to completely destroy the current capitalist state machines. The long-term failure of social democracy in a more and more hazardous capitalism that is curtailing the remains of the democracies, stands for itself. The states, even in the richest countries, are in dangerous moods as their previous structures in economics and politics fray. But where politics in the time of capitalism creates smoke-screens, provides laws to limit the needs of subaltern classes, focuses away from the apparently impervious rules of capitalist economics, etc., states themselves organise action against a class or selected classes that seek serious change. As revolts get closer in the West and as capitalism falters, the core role of the state is exposed.
The dilemma is their replacement. Local military and the imperialist forces attacked the Russian revolution after the revolution. A vast, military state, led by a single party, was installed by the Russian Communist Party. The defeat of imperialism and their local armies won the revolution in China. The successful military/party were installed as the new state. When both Russia and China were held by the revolutionaries they turned to new economics first. While the new economics was organised, where it could, and to the benefit of the working class and the peasantry, despite mistakes, a new type of state was not organised. Where a gradual, more complex economic system was able to be administered, the New Economic Policy which instituted ownership in the land in Russia and a more unsuccessful collectivism in China, there was no new state created, despite the opening being possible. In reality, the two states of the USSR and of China petrified until the extinction of the Russian revolution in the 1980s and the CCP today. The second wave of socialism has to solve this deadly error.
Looking at the need to change the hierarchy and relationships of Economics, Politics, the role of society and the state, we are talking about a new civilisation. Just a note… Good fun.
Let’s spell out some critical requirements of the ‘second wave.’ (You know you want to!) Starting with the quality of socialism; it is in the conscious capacity of the big majority of people across the world to decide on, and to organise, the way they want and need to live. This is a first. No human activity of that sort has ever been fully seen. There have been glimpses in the West in moments in WW2 and much wider. Much more in the many revolutions across the world. Today there is the swelling movement of millions, perhaps billions, trying to save ourselves, together, from the ravages of capitalism across the planet; demanding a different, more considered, more collective and more aware sort of society, in the struggle to save planetary health. But are these only moments, consciously changing history? And is this vast green revolt enough to secure the necessary, equal, standards for changing daily life – let alone extinction? Not yet.
What does that mean? It means starting by resolving two matters. The first pops up as a word that left-intellectuals play with (very seriously!) ‘Agency.’ I think that means, who is it now that will carry out the socialistrevolution – now that the working class has disappeared, or been middle-classed, or cut away from the history of the industrial working class, or having to live with the weakness of trade unions, or large parts of the state covering health, welfare and education in the West - meaning the whole state can be reformed based on that? Poor intellectuals. There is no theoretical answer or rather no theoretical solution about the new socialist revolution, at least not yet. An entirely new working class has happened - across the globe - but the new revolution has not yet happened.
What is happening are momentous movements, like the world-wide greens, like the new surge for women’s rights, from Hollywood to Warsaw to Calcutta, like the new anti-slavery, black-rights’, battles with the state in the US, the UK and in Continental Africa from Cape Town to Nairobi. In the UK there is a majority of Scots who demand partition; ten million British voters who voted for the devil Corbyn; immense pressure on a reluctant state, which is desperately shoring up capitalism during the Corona Virus pandemic and that will spill out in mass action the moment that there is a vaccine.
(Sticking for a moment with the dissolving UK after the 2019 General Election, various efforts, including from me and some other friends, tried to start a political bloc, seeking a joint movement between Labour’s left in Momentum and the Peoples’ Assembly, outside Labour. Our dismal failure pointed out that linking together the modern fantasy of Attlee’s Labour and the outside Labour campaigners, seen as from the Bolshevik tradition, was probably the last place to start!) Nevertheless, the new working classes in the West – and across world have been re-organised by Capital or in the battle for nation building, and their gathering action, now seen and known across the globe, seems a good enough potential ‘agency’ for me.
The principle of bloc building, mentioned rather weakly above, connects to the second ‘matter’. (Look above and pay attention!) What is the political vessel that can turn the world’s level of disturbance and revolt into a plan and programme to change the economy, politics, society and the state? That was another failure of previous would-be socialist revolutions, if you remember. Well; we have learned that it is certainly not achieved by a repetition of the various would-be Bolshevik parties which, by theory, manage a state and a society until capitalism is pushed back (ok, good?) but then the new workers and their alliances have to fall in line regardless of the sole party and its state (definitely bad.) You will remember that repetition does not achieve better change, it produces the same results as before. This time without the developed nation that at least pushed imperialism back.
The ‘new’, means gathering the stirring actions that are troubling the status quo from various directions and building a bloc of them - and their supporters. Let all of the major, radical movements share their demands for each and all of the radical changes needed. We can be sure that at the heart of such a bloc will always be the youth, those who provide welfare, health and education, those who face the worst wage slavery and those who struggle to survive. This combination would inevitably and practically examine capitalism’s economic system, its politics and the society that is really needed to achieve their demands, and, I do not doubt, will therefore come up against a more and more hostile state. Naturally a plethora of parties will spring up in this process and add their weight. So be it - so long as the bloc takes precedence through decisive votes as the battle for change develops its politics. Is that enough ‘agency?’
After the ‘agency’ matters comes the decisions about how to defeat the capitalist system and how to develop a genuine democracy that is able to build its own, entirely subservient, state. In history we have the two, or three-year examples of soviets. Momentary experiences of a soviet type developments also ran through revolts and revolutionary actions in Germany, Spain and France etc., over the decades. In modern times, perhaps surprisingly, another type of democracy has arisen. We have the partial collapse of the deteriorating British parliament and its associated parties that resulted in two referendums, most importantly, on critical issues. The renewed Scottish National Party also led a serious, largely temperate and long – very considered - public debate. In the end the vote went for the status quo due to fear of weakening the economy (or UK capitalism.) The second referendum, designed to keep the Tory party in the EU, turned into a concafany, but was nevertheless more democratic than any General Election since 1945. But these two scary experiences (which seriously damaged Britain’s ruling classes) and now the next Scottish fight for another referendum, which has a large majority for independence and no longer fears UK capitalism, are, albeit, crooked models of what real democracy could be. In Scotland the majority of working class people will now try to detach from the UK. Why? Because the first referendum showed that great issues could be decided by ordinary people. The voters for Brexit have already reversed the state’s purposes. The main political parties were utterly changed and more people in the working class were more mobilised by more politics – demanding and achieving their decisions over all other negative aspects of the state, of its economy’s wishes and of the initial views of the political parties. Not soviets, but a lesson in democracy for the next socialist wave.
The next socialist wave? At first it means the overthrow of the dominance of capitalism. The economy that runs politics. (Capitalism can still be useful in a wider context and under collective control.) That achieved, it means the conscious decision to break up class rule, replaced by the rule of the wide majority who work in all fields collectively, and which implies the agreed need for the equal distribution of society’s wealth. The first action of the new economy – which is to be led by politics. The ever-more concentrating rich of the first part of the 21stcentury will be utterly dissolved. Instead the deep unfairness, so essential to all class-based societies, can be replaced with more and more societies attaching themselves to the new, second-wave of socialism.
This established, with a regular democracy, that has the systematic power (hinted by the best moments of the referendums in the UK, the early Soviets, etc., and an elected and diminishing state) the great horrors of human history across all History’s’ stages can at last be destroyed. Since civilisation was first ordered by its fledging ruling classes – and at least as early as the agricultural revolution – the evils of racism, of the vile definitions of women’s subordinate lives and all the attending aspects of lives created to be unspeakable, will, at last, finish.
The second wave of socialism tries, at every possible step, to subordinate the state in favour of a collective society and its new democracy. Economics becomes subordinate to politics, that is itself the engine room of society, replacing that state. Enough.