Revolt in the West

The West, including the US, has not been so fragile at any time since WW2. But is that true? You could argue that the Cold War, when the Soviet delivered atomic missiles into Cuba (and the prior installation of the nukes were installed in Turkey by the US) were the most dangerous moments for the whole of humanity. Both sides backed down and both sets of the missiles were withdrawn - at the last minute. (Although the West's leaders never mentioned their own retreat.) But the point of the 'success' which stalled nuclear war was that both governments in the US and the USSR were able to shift these issues. The leaderships in both countries could manage their risk. So the nuclear risk could be manageable, or at least substantially reduced, in the context of the politics and the economics of the day. And that is the difference with the crisis of the West now.

We all know the ticking time bomb that festers in the centre of western politics and economics. It has been constantly hidden for decades. It is still regularly distorted by governments and political parties, for example through organised racism, but is now more and more exposed as the real failure of the West. It is simple. Working class people, the majority of national populations, are having their lives more and more reduced and their conditions are worsening. Wealth is more and more centralised and is generally not used to support social advance. In Britain, owned-assets (houses, rents, land, foreign and local tax havens, etc) are six times the size of the British GDP. (The gross domestic product or GDP is a measure of the size and health of a country's economy over a period of time, usually one year). Britain is not alone. There are a hundred and one examples of the modern growth of poverty in the West and the concentration of wealth.

Our rulers now work within a system of politics and economics that does not, that cannot, provide a context which allows much of a turn-around, even if they wanted to. Historically, the mechanism of capitalism and its national and international engine could be tinkered with, or even considerably altered by 'reformers'. (These who thought capitalism could be permanently turned to the good and others, who were frightened of change but sought shifts. See examples of both Roosevelts or Keynes or Lord Hailsham, he who warned in 1943, 'If you don't give the people social reform, they will give you social revolution.') These 'heroes' could not deliver now. And most of the social democrat parties in the West have long gone giving up any challenge to capitalism. The context of today's capitalism, of globalisation, is organised via not so much by production, more by day-to-day monetisation and most of all by the global creation of wealth, by building debt!

All of the western 'powers' loan wealth massively more than they produce riches. Production, aside from super-rich items and communication kit, do not mainly come from the West anymore. Reforming big corporations and banks, as the Roosevelts did in the 20th century when they broke the 'trusts', or latterly used the state to create mass jobs, no longer applies. Capitalism does not work like that these days. The battle with China (that Biden will continue after Obama and Trump) is, ultimately, an attack on the main centre of production in the world (and its resulting exports.) The battle will use finance and withdrawal of investments, despite the huge US national debt, as a means to stall foreign production. Since 2008, America's national debt has surged nearly 200%, reaching $27 trillion as of October 2020. The debt is owned by banks and the state. The banks sell the debts for profit via the stock exchanges and the moneterising of assets. The expanding and remaining debt and interest on the debt is used to run the US, from pensions to soldiers. 

So we get to the time-bomb. Many commentators and politicians now shout loud about the the need for a redistribution of wealth in most Western societies. And here we can see the political barbed wire as well as the economic invincible structure preventing any terms of structural reform. The EU has been called many things, including the extension of the brotherhood of 'man'. It, apparently, has stopped European wars and now stands up to the US as well as China. Less talked about is the extraordinary, completely undemocratic and corrupt lid that has been built, like a ceiling of concrete, across the European nations. This is in respect of the absolute requirement for saving the banks in 2008/9 and crushing any and all nations in the EU into various types of austerity. The EU saved their banks and stock exchanges as a globalist structure that could not even be questioned by 446 million European people.   

What's happening? What's happening is a period of revolt and revolution. The left in the US has taken the lead, at least initially, in the struggle in the US. Biden's opposition to Trump will go nowhere, but the anger in a country that is failing large parts of its society will continue to rise from both the right and the left. There will be a modern battle that has to remove the unfinished US's historical civil war. And only a massive shift between wealth and poverty will now be able to carry through a new economics and politics based on the rights of the whole of society. Besides the US, the upheaval across the West takes other forms but all arise from the same source. 

The UK government has just allowed the highest proportion of Covid deaths anywhere. Its abysmal failure over the Pandemic and the results of its cock-handed economy based on services, is already breaking up  the doubtful success offered by the Tory Brexit among all sections of the working class. Meanwhile Scotland is preparing for the break up if Britain. History goes fast when the fundamental rot in society comes clearer and clearer. 

The forward momentum for Irish nationality is now opening another stage because of the weakening of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in the UK controlled North of Ireland. This follows from the combined Irish government (of the ex-mutually hated) Fianna Foil and Fianna Gail - which has not so much doubled their strength, but rather sliced these old corrupt parties in half - in an effort to block Sinn Féin. The clock is ticking fast for a united, radical Ireland. 

In France a continuous battle by sources across the country have first cut away the far right's leadership as the main beacon for change. That now continues with a semi-permanent street-led battle against the police and, behind that, the tipping over of Macron's state as yet another mini-napoleonic failure.

These and many other western crises all share two inexorable facts. First, there are no obvious answers in the present system of society, or in the present economics and the politics in the West, that are currently able to provide any clear and sincere answers. Second, a revolt is rising across the West. 

Many revolutions

Trump hailed his rag-tag and bobtail army into action on the 6th of January - only to march them down again. Not a pleasant sight. I'm sure it felt scary at the time and in the place but, besides some baseball bats, no armaments were waved by the would-be revolutionaries. A Trumpite shouted herself to death-by-cop. Some dodgy hearts popped. After a couple of hours the insurrection gently dissolved. Trump told his latest lie that he opposed the attack on the government that he never used the words to set the mob up in the Capitol in the first place - and suggestively, that he (alone) would allow a successful presidential inauguration. A serious hint about who will really decide the next game. 

Nobody believes a single word, including Trump's followers, as Trump claims he is now for peace and harmony. Everybody in the US understands that he has to prepare for the Senates' trial for impeachment, which could include his denial for future office. It's touch and go. Trump would lick Biden's feet to block that. First because he insists he is the genuine President and not least because of his personal financial disasters now looming as a private citizen. 

Trump intends to carry on pretending he is the genuine President. He'll spend his time building his social base in the next period. But, unlike requiring the domination of the Republican Party inside the Capitol, he will instead emphasise the proper organisation of 'the folks' outside of the Capitol. Trump wants his army. His first military effort was wet and windy. Trump's citizen-military will be organised and lead properly. He believes that the Republican Party or a good part of it, will continue to follow his public and his votes anyway. The implication, for the next political period, is that the main domestic politics in the USA, will happen on the ground, in the streets, following action-led mobilisations and mass movements. So, you could say that a US revolution of sorts is starting now. We will return to this US revolution later.

For now, we can look at a whole lot of self-defined 'revolutions' that are offered on TV or in radio programs, as well as the specific actions and events that expose the need for radical changes, including a footballer forcing a government to feed impoverished kids! Is this the result of Covid? Partly. In fact many of the arguments and discoveries over 'life after Covid' have actually emerged from a long period of unhappiness and dissent, particularly across the West. 

The fundamental basis of the crises coming to a head in the West (and in developing countries) is the decades of the constant reduction of the living standards for the great majority of people - coupled with an obscene eruption of vastly increasing wealth among a tiny minority. Now the Covid crisis has begun to offer a clearer view. Covid has happened, in the open, death by death, and it turns out that welfare and health organisations are barely functioning for the old and poor, millions of care workers and health workers are on their knees, millions of children go hungry. Even the multiple minimum wage jobs are sliding away. And this is in the 'rich West. 

So, besides the growing movement for climate change, it is many of the more petty 'revolutions' have been examined by the various media. The real crux of the failures in Western society is emerging from time to time, but like an iceberg, with only a tenth in sight. The revolutions that seem to be offered most, stem from big digital based companies whose fans tell us that their revolution has already happened; that the digital revolution has pushed society (in the West?) ten, fifteen even twenty years ahead. We are already in 2041. Big shops are gone. Work from home is sooo much better. Digital conversations between doctors and the ill can be a useful step sometimes - at least to get more time, but is already being used to reduce 'costs' of national health. That's the health revolution!

All of this clutter of 'revolutions' offers little in a desperate future. The essence of change comes from the substance of the economics and politics of society. That has to change. And, so far, it is Trump that is going for it.

Trump (and his egregious presidential followers across the globe) understand that a real revolution is potentially at hand. So they are playing with it. It is a very serious play. The winner in the Trump-type politics is the one who offers to defend the great corporations in their nations, against the simmering revolution. To do that you have appear that you lay down with those most who are in poverty, in desperation, who seek visible enemies, who feel their lives have been broken, and who are in their millions. It's an old record. Hitler and Mussolini played it. 

Brexit versus Corona virus?

As the 'baked in the oven' Brexit pie appears to have collapsed, it is time to get to grips with the emotional beliefs of those who have accepted Brexit at all costs; if you like as a national necessity. Ex Chancellor and expelled Tory MP Kenneth Clarke said on the 10th of December that he accepted Brexit now, but that a no-deal would be a suicidal decision. He seemed incapable of finding any rational basis for such a step. Of course there are plenty of Brexiteers still cuddling the notion that they are being hood-winked by 'project fear'. They simply do not believe that things will get worse. Others, especially several cynics in the Tory Cabinet, including PM Boris, will use the economic result of the Corona virus to hide the consequences of 'no-deal' or an extended bad deal. They, and the banks and economists, know that a no-deal Brexit would be even worse for British capitalism. But there remains millions of mainly white working class English people, in the Midlands, the North East and across a thousand towns and villages, who have decided that whatever else might be said, Brexit for them has summed up their first success, as opposed to decades of their rejected culture. 

On the other hand, in the last 20 years or so the media, the universities, politics, the theatres and parliament - all of the apparent structures that look like the interests of a ruling and upper middle-class culture - have been playing with their 'culture wars!' How did that come about? What does it mean?

Starting from the working class, the destruction of trade unions and traditional work from the 1980s, thereby the reducing living standards, has led to the deterioration of the working classes' in all parts of life. Stemming first politically from Ronald Reagan's Presidency in the US and Thatcher's Prime Ministership in the UK, the self-confidence and the coherent history of working class people was smashed in the Anglo-Saxon West. The sense of purpose and immense historical achievements of the working class were thereby largely lost. A whole majority class in the US and UK appeared to dissolve. 

What was left? In the UK a core of trade unions has evolved over years and gradually radicalised but they are as yet unable to lead a social class, a class that as a whole is now largely detached from unions. In desperation, many English working class families began to look back to the 2nd World War as the only inspirational motif around which they might understand their own place in society. The actual and long gone millions who fought in WW2 did not see themselves as heroes. But the War period became a prevailing fantasy for the lost sons and daughters and the grandsons and grand daughters that swallowed a dream of a working class success in mid 20th century life, tied to the success of a 'national' Britain. In the US, the social gaps had a different evolution culturally, which was filled with criminality, with immense drug use and with hostile detachment from politics in general. (There are some parallels across Britain, at least in terms of the cultural use of drugs, in the West of Scotland for example.)

Politics does not allow permanent gaps. In both the US and the UK a numb irritation surfaced against sectors of working and middle class society that appeared to have achieved successes - or at least some sort of recognition. In the UK the monetisation of housing courtesy of Thatcher, became one avenue of advance at a cost of millions who have to rent. This was, in reality, the only means by which some of the working class might succeed. And, gradually, this and other sectors of the working class were dissembled and defined by the new, self-employed ways. 

Promoted by upper-middle class liberal sectors that dominated the media and defined poverty and oppression in terms of sectoral groups and minorities of society, led to the working class, the largest collective socio-economic part of society, being broken up, not only politically and socially but also culturally. Parts of the women's movement for equality for example, or particular upsurges by black movements against oppression, appeared to be promoted primarily by liberal authorities, which were often presented as against the working class. Liberal ideas peaked in the Blair era. They were used deliberately to determine significant bits of oppression as a worthy improvement in society so long as they maintained the opposite of any general working class resistance. In this period Thatcher's anti-union laws, the privatisation of health, 'freedom' for banks and the start of widespread casual employment were all supported along with the acceptance of the police's institutional racism.   

Also emerging simultaneously were new political forces that deliberately began to try and mobilise white working class people. These forces used the social, liberal 'causes' negatively. Specific challenges by black people, women, gay and gender movements were poisoned; described as the choices of the middle and upper classes. The government and liberal initiatives had become, for many, the symbol of the weakness and marginality of the working class. In the absence of their own history, the rights that had been won, the causes that had been fought, the white working class instead saw specific individuals, promoted and deliberately coupled with the upper middle class's desires, as liberals who wore their cultural badges of honour. Inevitably raw racism surfaced as the response to these 'liberal successes'. The new politics was gathering a revolt in the remains of the traditional white working class against what should have been a common cause. The definition of the referendum for Brexit was thereby created, against enemies who appeared to be part of the cosmopolitan culture and were supported by the predominant, higher classes' in Britain. 

In the US, the mobilisation by Trump of large parts of the smashed-up, working class, has been used to shift liberal capitalism into a para-nationalism. Huge resources of big capital have, momentarily, stopped that flow. But with Biden's victory, there is not yet the slightest opening of any independent working class America. 

While the Biden 'success' means nothing yet for the American working class, with the US Civil War still be resolved, there has, on the other hand, been a substantial shift in the English working class's view since 2016 that supported Brexit. The shift in the Brexit argument has evolved in a definite class direction. The political views of mainly working class Brexiteers moved away from their initial, racist, response to the Brexit referendum, and has shifted its priorities to the desperately required issue of democratic rights. In the course of this development, 'immigration' has been reduced to the third most important issue in the polls that study support for Brexit. And democratic rights, attached to the severe contempt of the current political leadership, has grown into the first issue. Racism remains - in all classes. But it has stopped being waved as the main flag by the white working class regarding Brexit. In fact an opening for a newly reconstructed English working class is tentatively emerging.   

It is perhaps not surprising that a society-wide crisis, that has to involve the testing of politics, economics and of the culture of social classes, opened up with the pandemic Corona virus. As with great movements in the past, new definitions of society are created against the experience of a fragile status quo. There is a large list with large events that can and will be studied, torn down, supported or recreated. Right at the front in Britain is the NHS (and associated carers.). Most significantly, the NHS is mainly a multi-racist, low paid, overwhelmingly female, proletarian, institution. It came to the fore with Corona virus. Even the Tory government desperately praised the NHS denying their obvious future, in monetising health. 

The real shift of consequence regarding the NHS and the care workers is that it was built by working class decision; it was praised to the hilt by the working class in the main (anti-Brexit) cities and in the towns in the Midland and the North. It belongs to the working class, collectively, more than any Tory Minister or modern Labour would-be. The working class has saved the country. A part of the working class, led by health and care, followed by teachers and transport workers, risked their lives for others. PM Boris Johnson became fitter than a 'butcher's dog' after Corona and Trump 'rose again' following his multiple wealth and care. But the heroes are the workers. And millions know it. 

This is the potential new working class history in the UK. Its new collective culture. And from this new working class history comes the need for the class that built this amazing moment, first to defend the NHS and carers against moneymaking and second, to use this moment, this working class victory, as the momentum for a politics and economy.      

Socialism and human nature

Here's a thing. 'We'd all like Communism...' said a friend from the coast. You could hear the 'but' in the air. But - every effort to apply it has failed hasn't it? (Unless you agree to conditions and regimes that most people in the West would not choose.) Communism doesn't deal with real human nature. There are good and bad in all of us - mostly bad when it comes to power and politics. (Those were additions from my friend.) We (human beings) have always been like that. (Another addition.)

Before getting to 'human nature' and communism, we need to grapple with the West's particular version of its own type of socialism, (not communism) which has had its tussles, via 'peaceful', socialist reform, and which promotes the 'reform of the capitalist system'. It has now become pretty obvious that this kind of western socialism, social democracy, has closed down in the last four decades. Social democracy had always been helpless outside the West. And now, in the West, despite the use of traditional but hollow names, social democracy has virtually disappeared in the shape of major political parties. 

Suddenly, this trend appeared to turn over. Contrary to the decline of European social democracy as a whole, on the wave of a new, youth radicalism, the genuinely social democrat - Labour leader Corbyn (loathed by most Labour MPs) got close to recharging real social democracy in 2018. The split of the British working class over Brexit was enough to show what a ruling class can do with an up-to-date, modern, social democracy these days. Britain's rulers' determined the creation of a temporary fusion from all its corners, despite the divisions over the EU (the EU was deeply desired by the UK's big capital) rather than allowing a genuine social democratic government. They created the organised destruction of Corbyn and forced, wherever they could, the removal of Corbyn from mainstream politics. All sorts of lessons apply. Corbyn's destroyed effort is just one of them. It shows what happens in today's capitalism regarding any serious social democratic project.

Social democracy in general has been kicked, or been swallowed, to death across its whole, previously more fertile, western history. Our 21st century rulers, even in the West, perhaps particularly in the West, don't and won't make social democratic reforms and concessions anymore. This will be the norm, whether or not the decaying and increasingly baseless 'Labour Party' in Britain is allowed to take its turn for government. So social democracy as well as communism appears to have failed.

Back now to 'human nature'. Good old Marx can help. He might have avoided speculations of a communist nirvana and neither did he try to study individual minds. What he did do, among the many glorious understandings that he opened up, was to insist that it is existence that proceeds to consciousness. This is a basic and fundamental concept. Of course people of all sorts, from epic philosophers to murderers, might think that they (and we) act otherwise, from the spark of our own brain. And it could be argued, correctly, that consciousness, having proceeded from existence, could itself help create a change in existence, as it evolves through peoples' specific thoughts and actions. A thought can also become the reason for an action, and if an understanding of a thought is shared, then most will comply with that thought. Isn't that human nature? Sorry no. That would be the organisation of humans in the consequence of their conditions. And that opens the real problem of 'human nature'. 

Humans, to exist, need to organise with other humans, from childhood to the grave. That's a truism. But the type of organisation that collective humans live in, in their histories so far, have yet to be considered and then decided on by humans themselves. Small numbers of privileged humans have ended up arranging whole societies over the millennia, often without knowing it themselves. (They simply demanded their own dominance via their gods or by using brute strength or both.) More recently, ruling classes do become more self-conscious. They prepare accordingly their places (as rulers) in society. That's the experience of our history as a species up to now. What utterly bursts the continued fallacy that 'human nature' is fixed is the simple observation that human kind, even without control of its history, has, nevertheless, changed constantly. 'Human nature' shifts and turns in the effort by most non-rulers to find what they see is the best possible available existence for themselves, their families, their friends, alliances and most of all, from their work, throughout the different systems of society that they do not control. Most humans have never been allowed to decide what sort of civilisation that they live in. 

Therefore 'human nature' constantly changes as our societies change, as it flows through the changing contexts that place us in our society. History unfolds unevenly. In the last 100 years for example many (but not yet most) human beings face the expansion of technology and the use of literacy. But these developments are still the same, that is to say they still depend on a social society; one that also forces exploitation, drudgery, violence, incapability and horror. These negative features of society cause humans to try to build their defences. But the world, which has always up to now been run by a small elite, turns its society on its head. For those that defend themselves against the difficulties created by society are presented as the reason for the negative effects of society and are blamed for the problems they face. So called 'human nature' is turned into the opposite of the reality of life and living. Each person is different from everybody else who has ever existed. Theoretically everybody has their own nature. OK. But consciousness does not proceed to existence. Although humans are different they are made in the very earliest aspects of their shared lives in common, by a society. Human natures are responses to society and not a person's original choices, uniquely created, which decide our society. It is the other way round.    

Collective experiences of societies come and go. People become more and more curious, angry, bereft about specific items of their society - including other people; and then they become conscious to a degree, when daily-life forces the decisions of human interventions. This finally has led, in the last hundred and fifty years, to the wavering understanding in very large large numbers of the world's population for the need for a society that meets all human's basic needs. Of course individual humans will continue to be savage, to paint great art and love their neighbours. They are still, albeit odd, responding to society. But a human social society, one which is organised consciously by most people, would inevitably tend toward collective support and shared purposes. Life will still require analysis, singers, law, labour and education. But the overwhelming majority would not, if they really got to choose their own society, want or accept what is happening in their lives and the lives of others like themselves, in the frankly unacceptable here and now. 

Take an example. The pandemic, in the current UK society, has just been served with its cost. In the UK the Tory Chancellor has told the British people that the price is £400 Billion this year. He wants to cut public worker wages (already cut for ten years.) And this is nothing compared with what is to come. Meanwhile, the UK newspaper, the Observer, ran an article that pointed out the Swiss Bank UBS calculated that the world's billionaires have surged to a record $10 Trillion by the end of last July. Talking again about Britain, even the International Monetary Fund (a capitalist thinktank) argues that it is 'absolutely crucial to mobilise revenues in an equitable way.' But our Chancellor is married to a millionaire. His government is run by the most personal political corruption since the 18th Century. And we live as the majority in our (capitalist) society, run by a couple of thousand people, which will now fire a giant blow against the welfare, education and their work (or lack of it) of the big majority of the UK population. 

This is the workings of the new type of modern capitalist society. As western capitalism declines (a key reason why we face the end of Europe's social democracy) so the pressure on the big majority is reflected in the political and economic choices that are emerging from capitalist societies. The manipulation of human nature into its opposite is at at the highest degree, at least in the West. Why? Because the old 'truths' are shaking, and manipulation and corruption are essential to make the regimes work.

Boris and Keir dissolve the remnants of British democracy

Only two British newspapers regularly criticise the new British government. But an overwhelming majority of the international media, including the Scottish and Irish papers, share a less starry-eyed view. Most of the British media are still hanging on hard to the Prime Minister's tails. Trying here to blame the PM's top advisor (especially now he and his mate have been sacked) - claiming there that 'world beating' Covid management has inevitably prevented other proper government initiatives, except that the UK has the worst health results in the West, behind only those of the US. So Boris is still presented in most of the English media as a potential knight in shining armour. Nowhere else.

The reality of the British Tory leadership is the inevitable, hopeless extension of the previous 11 years of Tory austerity government. Boris is saying that they are different from the previous Tory governments; 'we are not going for austerity' he bellows. The rest of the world looks at Britain's mess. They pick up the hints from the Government's Treasury; they turn to the history of Britain's post war economy from 1945 to 1960, consider, and then say - oh yes? 

The political alternative to Boris? The second Keir, in his own second-rate way, has already collapsed. 20 Labour MPs have called for Corbyn's re-establishment as a Labour MP. 13 members of the National Executive have walked out. The leadership of Labour is now involved in the narrow business, primarily designed to kill off Corbyn - an expected conclusion of the ruling class's relentless attacks on Corbyn after he nearly won the 2018 General Election. Social Democracy always seeks contracts with the powers that-be. The political death of Corbyn and his supporters was and remains paramount to them. Sadly for Keir mark 2, even if he dumps Corbyn's 20 MPs and his National Exec., supporters, he will have no base outside the Labour Party from which he could push the ruling classes for any sort of contract, because he is trying to dismantle the 10 million who voted for Corbyn. Most of that base do not want and will not support, another, adenoidal version of Blair.   

The two main parties demonstrate the spectacular failure of British politics in the 21st century. Here is what the failing parties will do and what they will not do. Starting with the government; it is the most personally corrupt since the 19th century. (See blog on corruption; 13 November; now covered across many media.) It is going to fail spectacularly in its fight with Scottish national independence. It is going to set up a new austerity of desperate proportions. Mass action will turn to revolt - by students, the unemployed and workers who are going to have their wages cut yet again. All this will redouble the Tory Party factionalism that previously ripped across Brexit, in the government efforts that will be used, by state borrowing, in order to keep Boris's connection with the working class split that he fought for in 2020. 

The government's main opponents in Parliament will also fail - and carry on Blair's destruction of the UK's social democratic party. It will reject the most radical part of the working class action and its demands - despite the context of direct and desperate struggle against the government's program. It will seek a Wilsonian offer, to 'calm things down', that will be unacceptable for most people and which would offer the opposite in the Scottish and Northern Irish radical developments. 'We are not as bad as them' already failed with Miliband in 2012.        

What neither of the two main parties will not do is approach the key crises that are expanding fast in British life. They will trip away; denying the driving significance of poverty and the untouchable wealth of the rich, the British nations requirements and their bubbling future, the direct responses (except via the police) to direct action, the breakdowns and the new, critical decisions of the people. Why? Because the main Parties are rotten. Because British democracy has less and less of a role in Britain's current politics. 

Here's at least one version of what could be done.

First, Corbyn, with his 20 MPs and his 13 National Executive members, should take the step of founding a Socialist faction in Parliament. The new faction would stand for all of the 2019 manifesto; a minimum wage as direct support for all unemployed after Corona; increased wages for all, based genuinely on reversing austerity; opening up and supporting critical referendums required by all sections of the UK and organising social conferences across Britain to deeply reform the basis for a new type of democracy. 

Of course various well meaning but narrow ideologues will shiver at the thought of 'undermining the unity of Labour.' But this particular and ancient notion has run its course - if it ever had one. The single Green MP carries more political weight in society than lorries full of the two main parties of MPs. There is no foreseeable future for any decisive development towards socialism unless a core of millions, already utterly disgusted people, who reject the status quo, can associate themselves with the ideas and policies that they can really fight for. Corbyn and his current supporters can begin to help building that movement: Inside and outside the current but decrepit British Parliament. 

questions from socialists about the 'new wave of socialism' (29 October)

A Few Questions

1. Why is a new social democracy ‘an ancient proposition’. I agree instinctively but not sure of why. Is it because the capitalist class don’t need to make concessions of that order because they are so strong, or can’t afford to be so weak/ needing to centralise? Or not able to because capital reorganised multi nationally ?

2. Do you mean previous efforts to create socialism couldn’t succeed because to beat the imperialists and develop economically / industrially they needed a capitalist state?

And that what they succeeded in was independent national development and shouldn’t be thought of as ‘workers states’ ( ‘deformed’ or otherwise)?

3. So that means that on their own (in one country) movements couldn’t achieve socialism or go beyond national liberation, whoever was leading the movement eg Latin America in the 80s, would always have been limited even if it hadn’t been led by liberal nationalists ?

5. But Scottish and Irish nationalists need to break up the British state, hence are inherently progressive even if not socialist. So if these movements became overtly socialist, could they develop socialist states? 

6. Agree about nature of capitalist state - role to defend class interest even if some of the apparatus - nhs, schools etc - result from concessions, from society pushing back

7. So - and this is my main Q - what are you saying about a socialist state? Do you mean movements need to be seeking to take over the state as it seeks to take over politics? Ie as was starting in Greece with a parallel system then supported by the new Syriza gov? What does it mean for how movements organise now? 

Responses

1. The essence of social democracy (SD) is its contract with the capitalist system. The UK, the second most powerful capitalist country in the world in 1945, created such a contract. All the SD contracts were with developed capitalist countries. There were  no SDs in underdeveloped countries. Today, SD cannot make contracts with developed capitalist countries – regardless  of the working class causing extreme pressure for change -  because, with the exception of the US, capitalist organisation is centralised in three main blocks with global corporations and a banking system concentrating most profit and wealth. Most capitalist nations borrow globally. For some time, SD has been unable to increase significant resources for working class people in virtually all the individual capitalist countries and has therefore declined as a political force. Capitalism now uses splits of the working class or will use police or military force to stop any serious widespread anti-capitalist action – rather than offer any SD concessions. 

2. The first would-be socialist revolutionaries did not create capitalist revolutions. They wanted socialism and they called it so. But their revolutions (with the evolving motors of state bureaucracy) created societies that were completely run by the new state. It was the new state that used everything it could, including state capitalism, to achieve modern development. They were therefore not creating socialist states and neither deformed or degenerated socialist states. They were, and are, brutal, successful, national revolutions that pushed back imperialism but often used state capitalism (of different types) to develop. They were the second wave of the national revolutions that started in 1645. And they broke down some of the most important 20th century imperialism’s barriers to do so     

3. Socialist-named revolutions spread across what was ‘the third world.’ In reality they were fighting western imperialism to win their own development. Spreading several countries might have created possible bases to start building socialism, if they were powerful enough not just to push imperialism back but also the capitalist system of society. The capitalist / imperialist blocks today, the EU and the US, would also be powerful enough to challenge the capitalist system of society – should a wider international revolution develop. Cuba and Vietnam have pushed furthest towards opening socialism, but they are still dominated by the US – and China - preventing any genuine socialist step.

4. If they succeeded, the radicalism of Irish and Scottish nationalism would break up the UK log jam and force a reassessment of a second ‘Scandinavia.’ This would open more possibilities for the working classes, which already have access to modern development, and could understand socialism via new demands for a different sort of society. A general coalition / federation across these small nations could be a first step.

5.-7. In 1917 Russia, dual power (which should have been fully understood as two states) clashed for the leadership of society. The soviets represented exclusively the workers, peasants and most of the army. While the Bolsheviks, eventually, argued ‘all power’ to the soviets in 1917, in practice they did not see the soviets as the exclusive representation of the working class and peasantry. On the contrary, they replaced the possibility of a new leadership based in new soviets with their own party and then with the inevitable bureaucracy of their own party, which in turn pushed exclusively for national economic development.  The creation, as full as possible, of the self-organisation or organisations, created by workers and their allies, as the day-to-day alternative to the capitalist state, must be the engine room of a future socialist society. The socialist parties cannot replace this new state. And in the already developed countries, the goals of the new state must include the earliest possible subordination to a new society – via the peoples’ decisive democracy