Many political and social organisations are raising their banners for 'revolution'. Even Britain has a part of the picture; from small left organisations and groups, to the BBC that runs a program about post Covid revolutionary change. Nearer the core, from Hong Kong, through to Myanmar, Afghanistan, Sudan, Belarus, Poland, Hungary, Columbia, Senegal, Thailand (against the army and monarchy), Peru, anti-Modi movements in India, actual revolts are emerging. From the West's point of view, there are also numerous direct-actions against governments and states. For example, the Gilet Juanes remain active across local France (while regional voting is very low, including the fascists vote.) Most significantly of all in the West is the conflict against US racist police, the occupation of the US Capitol and the reduction of the franchise across many US states, further reducing non-white suffrage. The US is building up into a genuine insurgency.
By mid-June 2021, 17 US States had provided 28 laws designed to stop black voters. 14 States installed 19 such laws in 2020. The Supreme Court is largely accepting the rights of these laws so far. The Brennan Centre for Justice, based at New York University School of Law, has stated the new laws are 'an unprecedented assault on voting rights' and 'voter suppression effort we have not seen since the likes of Jim Crow.'
The multi-versions of calls for revolutions are not mainly the products of any pandemic. Revolutionary speculation and tentative action are not surprising in current conditions. Particularly in the previously world-dominant West, momentous shifts in both politics and economics have broken-down the post WW2 consensus and thereby the Western domination of the globe.
The West created their supremacy over large parts of the world during centuries - initially via the 'discovery' (read extermination) of the Americas, together with Britain's industrialisation of slavery. The peak of the West's domination was the period from the French Revolution to the British Empire, followed finally by US hegemony across the globe. This was 250 years of the capitalist-type of politics and economies which defined the West - as the basis of all significant human progress on the planet.
But the peak of the West's authority is now over. The West is in relative decline in virtually all aspects of modern civilisation. Progress in all levels of the West are slowing or reversing - most obviously in comparison with the development of the 20th century and the advance of the previously under-developed Far East.
As a result, the politics of the West has become more and more tangled and mangled. Created from the wealth of imperialism, western politicians were often able to absorb the pressure from their own working classes, accepting parties that both bridged demands for reform but which also supported the capitalist status quo. Nations in the West began over decades (albeit reluctantly) to widen their franchises under the force of the working classes and women's demands. (They obviously denied any votes that dealt with the key organisations of wealth - whenever they could.)
Now, the shift of the West's politics is based on its growing global weakness and the bulk of western nations allow no serious reforms whatsoever. The traditional parties for reform have largely disappeared or been broken up. Biden's desperate attempt to re-enact the 'New Deal' is the one, last, shot by the world's largest capitalist country. Biden is trying to make major, if one-off, concessions for the working class, as a means of invigorating the immediate current in the US economic decline (and thereby blocking the emerging prospects of a US proto-fascism.)
Today, the West's main supposedly democratic politics has become a ridiculous show and it is largely treated as such by most of the electorate. Even if voting is high, cynical responses are continually prevalent. Meanwhile the century long extension of the expansion of the franchise is now retracting - in Europe via the economic leadership of the banks led EU - in the US via the recalcitrant States that exclude non-white voters, and in the UK, via new rules that are being legislated against voter-checks as well as curbing protest movements.
Behind the scenes, it was and is the western economic engine, rather than manic politics as such, that is creating the decay. To get to the heart of the matter; from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Century, two enormous, economic forces effectively ran the economic world. The greatest part was the role of Western imperialism. Imperialism decided the economic motion of most of humanity, from world wars, to banks, from the rape of Africa, to the glory of the City of London and the final domination of New York.
The second, and the other more minor economic emergent across the world, was the 1917 and 1947 revolutions. This created a different and independent economic development. This, new and conscious revolutionary step fought against imperialism from 1917 onwards. The toilers' successful struggles in Russia, then later in China, were both independent of imperialism, but rapidly, in turn, the toilers faced a privileged bureaucracy that degenerated, through ‘the Party’ in the USSR and the Army in China. Via the grasp of the ruling bureaucracies, taking away the control of any democratic power of the working classes, a new, self-constructed class of bureaucrats delivered their political domination against their worker's democracy. They further centralised themselves in the immense efforts required in the great wars that came after the revolutions. Nevertheless, the 1917 and 1948 initial breakthroughs, despite their political failures, maintained their resistance from Western Imperialism.
Following the World Wars, the dominant bureaucratic layers in the USSR and China defended themselves by blocking any further control of Western international imperialism in their own countries. But, increasingly, the bureaucracies tried to gain concessions from Western imperialism around their parts of the world - given that in their own countries' their control would be able to continue. The result of this so called 'peaceful co-existence' ultimately led to the contradiction and the crash of the Soviet Union - a collapse without any direct western intervention as such - and which now once more shakes the paradox of China's state capitalism, whose contradictions and power are rapidly facing the break-up of globalisation.
The US ruling class, led by both Trump and Biden, demand the reduction of Chinese development. Unlike the decay of the UK vis a vis the USA, the US ‘will not gently go into that night’ when it comes to the Chinese leadership's further development. Why? Because ultimately Chinese state capitalism, despite its immense 'success', is not led by capitalism! It is led by the politics of the Chinese bureaucracy and its formidable Chinese Army.
The West maintains a continuing difficulty with its declining global domination, both economically and politically. Imperialism is weaker now since any time of its history. The defeat of the 20-year war in Afghanistan is yet another proof. In China in particular, the second greatest capitalist economic system in the world, is still controlled by a bureaucratic, state-capitalist state, designed to increase development, but outside of the West's so-called world-wide free-market and competition. The overall global acceptance of this clearly incoherent economic and political process, which promoted the world into globalisation, is already a ten-year capitalist project that is failing - mired by the mass of its own contradictions.
This increasingly dramatic background produces speculative arguments about change rising across the globe. (One evidence is the list of unsettled countries mentioned at the beginning of this essay.) In the West there is clearly a disequilibrium in respect of institutions that were previously accepted for decades as solid and successful. Meanwhile, again across the world, there is very little positive sense among the majority that the future will improve, especially among youth. Social polls and surveys constantly tell us tell us that large parts of developed countries see the old order as corrupted and failing in their goals. But this itself is not revolution. These are only the beginnings of conditions for revolution.
The difficulties that the working class and youth face in most of the world's countries are the growing pressures that increasingly limit the possibility of achieving reasonable lives. Revolution only begins when these social layers and their allies identify the politics and economics that are creating the barriers to the lives they need and seek. Work, including the absence of work, pinpoints social exploitation. But this is still only one of the new conditions necessary for the next wave of revolutions.
Taking one example; the UK’s working class, particularly the youth, is almost entirely organised in service industries and mainly paid by the minimum wage. The public sector comes second, but is highly ranked and ‘professionalised.’ Both sectors have little or no trade union support. A large number of older workers, especially in house-building (and a significant sector of youth working particularly on internet arrangements) have been broken down into a more traditional petit bourgeoise condition – where ‘single’ labour is personalised, without legal conditions, and personal ownership, not collective bargaining, is seen as more beneficial. The current political implications in the UK include significant parts of the re-creation of the traditional political parties – where immediate responses as with immigration, Brexit or Grenfell or pork-barrel local offers, become the superior questions. And state politics reflects or sets up rapidly developed leaderships, based on immediate, dominant issues, often repeated by fascists today.
More widely, social exploitation is also identified by the millennia of women's lives and of racism, now deepened by the enormity of current capitalism, but which were planted in all the stages of human existence, right from the start of thousands of years in all class-based social control. These long-lived horrors of the past (and the present) are now connecting with more immanent crises of the climate. The climate is now an immediate context of destruction and exploitation. And, as with the long-term failures of all the class-based stages of history, climate has now added its own immediate critical decay in what will be seen in the future as the capitalist period, second only to its economic crises.
The first socialist wave must therefore be improved on a much wider base than 1917 or 47. Socialism must be expanded by its second wave; moving beyond mass industrial labour and basic development that remains particularly in China and South East Asia.
What was the first revolution and what is now the new, second revolution? 1917 and 1947 won their development. (And 'development' still remains the most important feature for two thirds of humanity - albeit not necessarily via traditional industry.) Winning traditional 'development' today, in the conditions of the final and decaying global capitalism, will not work. Copies of Soviet Russia even in the positive period of 1917 - 24, or indeed even now, with the Chinese state capitalism, are frankly far too limited and futile in their scope.
Of course, the tremendous rise of millions out of poverty was led by a unique 'development' in China. And, paradoxically, it would not have taken place without the first stage of revolution, which cornered its own capitalism and used the defeats and weaknesses of Western imperialism. But globalisation is now breaking down. And the Chinese bureaucracy are desperately holding on to their capitalism at the moment of its most contradictions. The Chinese leadership simultaneously ache for western style 'development' in terms of the most modern technology, and at the same time the leading capitalist nation, the US, is determined to reverse China's state-led capitalism. The Chinese leadership has arrived to the climax of its own state development. The question now is war or the next revolution?
The next revolution cannot be about maintaining development alone. It is no longer enough. The fight to come is the fight for a different civilisation. The first revolution turned out to be the battle for development. A halfway battle. The second socialist wave of revolutions needs to challenge and overwhelm our increasingly dangerous decline of capitalism.
What then is the keynote to both accept development for all and to sweep away the rulers and their capitalist systems in the west and the bureaucracies that fought for their own dominations? Sorry. This will not be managed by requiring a new Lenin, with a longer life, or a Trotsky, this time who managed to overthrow a Stalin, or a more painted-up Bolshevik Party, however attractive such answers might feel. The second wave of socialist revolution will need to be much wider. It will need to make a plan that will have to apply the collective watchword, in all the aspects of civilisation, as 'equality.' Equality has to apply from every child's rights to the largest organisations on the planet. The second wave will aim for an end to exploitation, to class rule, to second-rate gender, racism, undistributed wealth, privileged politics, all becoming unacceptable, as equality becomes the condition of all parts of humanity. The second socialist revolutionary wave is the struggle for deep equality, based initially and frontally on the working class and its allies. But the removal of the quivering and increasingly dangerous capitalist system is, obviously, only the first step that will need organised collective development wherever it is necessary and full equality whenever it is possible.
In a nutshell a new revolution is not and cannot be a repeat of the revolutionary past and neither can it be described as a set of would-be social democratic demands from an already brutalising state and a more and more hazardous economy. The second wave of revolutions should aim for a different civilisation, where development, as such, is won via equality and where the undoubtedly necessary new states becomes subordinate to equal democracy in all matters.
The new state powers in the new revolution (following the unfortunate but almost inevitable clash of war with the core of the old capitalist states’ systems) will be subordinate to the new politics. The new politics will be held by the premier right of all those who agree to support the decisions of collective democracy and who reject the old rules. That could include all 16 plus youth, all toilers that rely on work to live, but also political parties, commissions, and movements. The new democracy will decide all major actions that will be delivered by the state.
The committees of the revolution – open to all who promote the revolution – will defend the new democracy, test the delivery and the implementation the democratic decisions. The order described above, as we begin the new civilisation, will be crucial.
But what are these speculations, yet to be created and managed by the second wave of socialism? Are they just a set of fantastical propositions, down even to specific organisations, that amount to unsold and unknown pie-in-the-sky? Perhaps. However, the historical development of the human race has taken definite stages, stages with definable conditions across the millenniums. Great Empires have risen and then have fallen – as technology or climate or limits of growth have changed. In all of these steps involving human development, or its decline, no conscious human understanding has applied itself to the shifts and breaks that have pushed and pulled the sections of the human race as each of the civilisations were gradually built up and then broken down. Humans sought Gods and demons to understand the nature of their world. Even the early dominant capitalist system, that spread across the world from the 16th onward, was barely understood as such. Indeed, understanding of general systems of society, made with specific and definite engines that were dominated by ruling classes, economics, politics and wars, were beyond material analysis until the second half of the 19thcentury.
The first wave of socialism, started by the Paris Commune, which rolled, finally, upto the Vietnam war, was the first effort by human society to define and create a new society. There had been idealistic notions before; from the French Revolution onwards. But the critical shift of the first wave of socialism was to understand class and the material movement that had to be used to overthrow ruling classes. The pivot of capitalism had to be replaced by the rule of the enormous majority of toilers as the democratic leadership of a different society.
The first wave of socialism, as we have seen, became partial and is itself reaching a potentially declining stage. The demand, at all costs, to place first ‘development’ was a partial success – including the retreat of imperialist powers. But using capitalism, led by a state-capitalist bureaucratic class, has now reached the contradiction summed up by China and the US as well as the marginalisation of the big majority of society. As we have seen, ‘peaceful co-existence’ is over. The first wave of socialism was unable to provide for the majority of humanity. It could not move into a new civilisation and the dangers of the decline of capitalism, the breakdown of politics and war, means that the second wave is essential.
To begin the shape of the new revolution we seek blocs - which will bring together all of the parts of work, organisations, active unions, society and politics who demand the end of current danger and decay and who favour equality. Second, we seek circles based in the population that decide what the exploited need action for change and the measures to get it. Third we need referenda on all major state and political decisions, organised equally across society with a state that primarily carries out those decisions.
In summary, that is how the new revolution defines itself. Of course, it is crucial to understand what became of the half-revolutions in 1917 and 1947. They succeeded in fighting back imperialism and they achieved the economic development of their people for a time. But those were revolutions of the most internally violent and oppressive cost. To 'win' development in the face of the violence of imperialism was a great measure for all humanity. But the paradox was that it was the internal, counter revolutionary processes in the evolution of the revolutions, and not just the attacks of the capitalist nations, that destroyed one success in the Soviet Union and now that threatens China.
(Note; The conditions and history of both Cuba and Vietnam both have stepped beyond simple development as their focus. The political developments of both those societies need to be studied independently of the Soviet Union and today's China.)