Boris pops the bubble

 

It's no surprise that Boris is on his way out. It will take some time as he hollers through his sub-Oxbridge speeches. His Party is riven with poisonous factions. No one has been able yet to pick up Johnston's (fading) charisma. But the reality is that Johnston is getting weaker and weaker, shackled with party-gate and massive public debt, Northern Ireland and Scotland. His giant domination of Parliament has become the apologies offered by the new Tory MPs as they spend their time listening to unhappy criticisms in their constituencies. Boris is over. The timescale may stretch, but the new Tory party will convulse and the current Tory government is unavoidably in trouble. Yet this was supposed to be the novel 'new' type of politics and politicians in the UK since WW2. And now it's going to hit the wall. The Tories' only hope for a future is their awful, incoherent alternative. 

The Tory Party, now running over 12 years in government, has evolved rapidly but in a new way. The Boris Tory Party shows little continuity with Cameron and May, who ran the governments from 2010 to 2019. Boris's crashing 'success' over the traditional Labour strongholds elevated the 'man who got Brexit done' and a new future that would improve the lowest conditions outside London. It was a genuine Tory political novelty. And, as Boris continues, the Tory Party is still, reluctantly unhappy in many places, as it is shifting its new character. 

One of the many mistakes of Labour leaders is their constant squawking about the so-called 'same old Tories.' True Boris and company continue to adore the wealthy. But so did the Blairite Labour Party leadership, quite openly. Both main parties, excepting the partial moment when Corbyn turned in a different direction, have always supported the wealthy. That's not new. What's new is that Boris has shifted away from what used to be the historical and 'normal' British democracy. 

Boris has not done this himself. Certainly he has been swallowing what has been emerging in the US and the EU. But his approach is not scientific. He is grabbing what has happened to the West's new model as it dropped the death of the social democracies - with their pretences of the taming of capitalism by the state. Boris doesn't have a clue of the social and economic manoeuvres that have been erupting in society, in either the UK or anywhere else. He is not interested in the deep moves of late, western capitalism. He is interested primarily in his own rich, much loved and praised existence. But he is the first leading British politician that sussed what Blair, the EU and Trump has become in the new politics. 

Picking up one version of the new political development in the West, an essay of Wolfgang Streek in the London Review of Books (27 January 2022) suggested a way of looking at the new politics and its relationship to the West's social and economic classes. The critical points in his argument were one; the breaking down of the traditional working class (added with the reorganisation of work and housing), two; the removal of ideology in politics and the use of the state to 'fix' problems, locally and distinctly one by one, three; the new democracy should have no theory of class conflict but instead manufactured consent is the incentive, four; the absence of the past, its avoidance of real history (instead of slogans) and no futures for the aim of society in general, is the focus. There is no sense of the moment in which we are to live.

WS calls this as 'technopopulism'; the deliberate type of a version of involvement in politics organised by the government. It is an anathema to the existence of alternatives created by the public. The historic core that traditionally created a genuine society, particularly under capitalism, was the organisation first of trade unions. The new politics reveals that a worker can be offered single advantages where necessary. A trade union or collective bargaining or workers on the boards of companies must be destroyed. 

WS catches a real concept and program for this new politics. Going forward he is reflecting that the tiniest collective demand that emerges outside of the state is unacceptable. Moving on from WS, the West's new politics is based on the destruction of the remnants of social democracy in relation to three new modern essentials. First, independent organisations with the demand of their own stakes in society are out, replaced by either destruction, as with the UK miners strikes, or re-construction, as with unions re-composed into 'professionalism' ie., seeking to accept harmony with the government. Second, the movements against racism and the fight for women have to be both insistently separate, swallowed by state via their offers and decisions, and reduced of independent activity through state law and order. Third, the silent and unseen motor of capitalism, when mentioned at all in any alternative individual presence, is beyond the argument by the state and silent in respect of society's problems. 

Boris's political bubble is already shrinking after party-gate and popping while the UK opens up the opposition to Boris's new politics. His shaky new politics is interestingly represented in the hands of 2 billionaires - one from the US and the other from the UK. The latter, John Armitage, gave the Tories more than half a million since Boris became the PM. Now Armitage wants to get rid of Boris, and the current political situation he has found is 'tremendously upsetting.' Bad show. Boris lies and pretends and turns solid straight forward Tory standards into mob slogans. 

In the US the West's picture is sharper. Peter Thiel, who has a wealth of about $2.6 billion, is focusing on 2022 Trump type candidates in the State elections, says he 'no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible'. He deplores 'the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women' (after 1920.) 

Our traditional Tory is shamed at one side of Boris's politics. The direction of the new Western politics is suggested from a new Trumpet on the other. 

What is this politics? The politics emerging from the West is not creating the next millennium, or even a decade. From the EU banks dominating countries that are causing public eruption and destruction, nationalist racism, to the worst labour laws in the UK whose leaders claim the greatest freedom across Europe, to a US on the edge of State wars, the present politics is a serious disaster. We are inevitably at the start of a new revolutionary period in the West. And it will require an organised revolution to prepare, to be ready to throw down the current, swelling dangers and create public governments and states with the full energy of a collective society

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Preparing for wars

1. When the western leaders go anywhere or do anything, it is the US Presidents that are most wrapped up in the significant defences available across the planet. Endless care and consideration are applied to prevent presidential vulnerability. The process starts when the presidential elections begin and it increases to an epic height as the victor wins. Yet out of the forty-five US Presidents, four have been murdered and ten have nearly been murdered. US politics is a very dangerous game and remains so. 

What Trump and his weasel Mark Meadows did was simply a step over the brouhaha of Presidents' infallibilities. They realised that murders of Presidents do not work so well. As the offices of state have developed, a particular President being bumped off does not clear the way for the would-be victor. So instead Trump used a big part of the US government itself. He very nearly slipped into a made-up Presidential office - without any real problems. Trump intended to use the Vice President and the Republican Party to stop the vote and change its result. Mike Pence was the pivot. Alas he wanted to be President himself - so he shut up. But it was very, very, close. And now over 30 States so far are preparing to fiddle the vote to make sure of just that same goal, together with the Republicans and the Supreme Court - ready for a successful round next time.  

In reality, this is the stuff of war. The tricks and fiddles run by Trump covers rooted millions across the States, a mass population still infuriated by the failure of their 'American dream' and poised to win the politics of the hard right. This movement will not accept an apparent Washington slip again. It has a party. It has many States and it has the Supreme Court. It still has the anger that it will not accept a constitutional defeat again. 

It is too early to define exactly what a coming US civil war will be like. At the moment the shape of the battle seems to be based on State decisions manipulating their votes. There are of course vast organisations that are supposed to defend the US government, besides the two main parties. But civil wars open conditions that can break up even the government forces. The US society and its structures are lining up in new splits. One potential example; there are a million active soldiers in the US. But a civil war is internal and fractional. The US military army has 57% white soldiers, 32% black and hispanic and the remaining 12% are also non-white. And then there is the armies' leadership. The top four star generals are 11 white and 1 black. And it is worth noting in times of apparent chaos and post war conditions, 4 star generals have regularly offered themselves as interim Presidents. But in a crisis, a lot of the base of the army would most likely join the local militias, dividing on a State by State basis. 

The great US corporations appear to despise Trump and certainly would not want any civil war. But the pandemic doubled the wealth of the ten most rich in the world since March 2020 and nearly all of them were US citizens. They are doing OK. In a concrete decision, they mainly believe a deep loathing for any Washington government that supports any sort of company taxes. Our billionaires are almost all of the view in favour of a very, very, small government.

2. The prospects of a coming US war is not a lonely phenomena. Putin is currently bombarding the US (and the new NATO countries) with significant and drastic threats. He has recently published his own document - an Article by Vladimir Putin "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" July 12, 2021, which affects all of Eastern Europe. Putin has decided to reconquer what was the old Soviet Union, and the proposal is that the Ukraine etc, would become part of the extension of the nation of Russia and not, as was previously, different national Soviet Unions, with the right, in Lenin's days, for succession. (If nothing else Putin thinks, 'Russification would be an answer to the current and deep decline in Russia's economic life.) If/when Putin starts his armies into eastern Ukraine, the battle will have at least two fronts; Putin's discovery that even the eastern side of the Ukraine will fight back, unlike his previous grab of the Crimea, and second economic warfare that will play a dominant part form the West, particularly the US, as Russia will instantly lose 40% of its wealth. 

Meanwhile Northern Africa and the Middle East are laced with constant internal revolts against right-wing, corrupt dominations. Simultaneously, millions suffering from these now constant conditions are seeking what is already becoming the militarisation against the movement of African and Asian exoduses. These people face more and more barriers as they try to enter the declining West. With rare exceptions, immigrants struggling to enter into Europe and the US are now being trapped in military prisons. 

Even where there have been failures of the recent western imperialist adventures, which denote the growing weakness of the West, the West have also burned out most of the possible social futures available in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. This leaves the prospect of local civil wars, major migrations and the blockage of any development, except through dependence on larger nations. These new 'independent countries' are attached almost entirely to larger powers that often, ultimately, depend on the West. Permanent, fluctuating battles constantly emerge, which reduces many of these ex imperialist societies into desperate tribe-based criminality. In other words, since the success of the Vietnam war and its decisive alternative against US capitalism, the weakness of western traditional imperialism still stalls and crushes nations. Their lack of an alternative to capitalism despite their overthrow of the Western military conquests, are now smothered by a new world wide capitalism, through globalisation.   

3. The partial pattern described above is only one part of the 21st Century. But it is enough to describe a deep malaise in the world. To summarise, there has been a previous historical moment that also exposed a deep break-down across major countries and their empires. This earlier conflation, besides its layers of death, had a particular character, which does not appear so obviously in the 21st century. WW1 hugely promoted the first major waves of socialism - in both of its directions. It simultaneously destroyed the largest socialist party in the world by its collaboration with the German military State, and it also ended up propelling a successful socialist revolution in Russia that changed the world for the decades to come. 1914 to 18 were wars that were fought for domination over other capitalist countries as well as the imperialist empires. It was followed by new capitalist wars organised to fight to destroy socialist nations. 

The rising of wars today, both technologically and politically, are also bedded in capitalist competition. Today we face the increasing violent contradictions of the new, global capitalism. Direct battles led by socialist alternatives do not (yet) apply. But the domination of global capitalism in the West is faltering and declining and war is becoming more and more required to develop a new world order. In this stage of the new war, revolutionary socialism is simultaneously hidden behind the decline of the USSR and the state-capitalist regime of China, as well as the absence of any socialist advance globally since 1974. The new socialist wave can therefore only emerge as a new phenomena; as a means of refusing and declaiming the capitalist wars and then, and only then, by seizing, totally, the possibility of a new society and a new civilisation, thereby entirely changing the context of the capitalist wars. 

This hypothetical socialist emergence is more obvious than it might be imagined. The huge mass actions, aimed against ruling classes and their controls are constant across the globe today. From the Arab spring, to the fight for ecological survival, world wide battles today and emerging new politics are being defined through the actions of a potential revolution. And not as the ferocious demands of witless goals that the status quo must prevail; a feature of history that has never succeeded. 

4. Four key structures are beginning to coalesce towards a second, new wave of practical socialism across parts of the world. These tentative structures, emerging as a result of the absence of any realistic alternatives, are trying to deal with the rash of unsatisfactory societies.  

First there is the escalating contradiction of the intense drive for so called free profit on the one hand and cartel conduct through globalisation on the other. For example, the US government sets up a huge rain of market duties that prevent Chinese goods selling at their own prices and promoting their own. Second, the West's peoples' are more and more disgusted by their own sham democracies. Third is the failures of leaderships and the social systems in regard to the world's ecological dangers. And finally there is the grotesque distribution of wealth and class across most of the world. 

The response of mass actions in East Europe and in South Asia are already huge, aimed at failing leaderships and the lack of popular needs, politically as well as socially. Now that parts of the Covid pandemic are potentially reducing in the Western Europe, so large clashes will be rising, in order to demand much greater responses to the people's huge, prior efforts and the damage they see of a future which appears to be an appalling distribution of resources. Some European governments are frankly blind to the furious momentum that is coming.

The present question is who will act in these struggles that can define a collective movement for action -  that can organise change? And how will such a movement be able to develop the deep and coherent ideas that will need to come from such actions; that will be able to create a system of policy that can overturn the current and increasing failure of our civilisation? What now is the second wave of socialism?

5. As the battles for positive change break through the crises and wars, new experiences and common possibilities will emerge. The youth have led the upsurges across the world that have broken many times in the last 12 years. The working classes, from New York to Angola, are now deeply ground-down with the power of labour law, of the police and of the razor of living standards and the increasing ruthlessness of trenchant capitalism. Nevertheless, the upsurges that have emerged, over ecology, over women and racism, over public authorities and over corrupt leaderships go directly to the rotten source of power, often overrunning partial gains and minor steps.

As the pandemic ceases and globalisation continues to shake and shudder, which will again expose states and their leaders, so the mass actions will grow. Organisations will rise, conducting and defining their opposition to society, in the name of the common people and with their own arguments and propositions.  It is inevitable. However, the crucial point is not this Party or that particular issue, it is the amalgamation of key actions that will aid the break up the current social system. And there are some critical steps in this direction - to bring down the modern wretched states and their economies - that are already evolving. 

6. The entire rock of the Southern Irish political and social law and culture was overturned by 4 consecutive randomly selected citizens assemblies, creating, in turn, three successful referendums at the end of the 2020s. The victory over state and religion has still ricocheted through the century-long backward, hostile Parties that are now hanging on to each other, declining in their clutches of globalisation. This is a new type of democracy which is utterly opposite to the rank 'democracies' now serving through both the EU and the US. And the Irish assemblies and referendums have become the start of a revolution across the whole of Ireland and beyond. A paradigm shift for genuine, revolutionary democracy.

The understanding of the youth and the effect of the huge layers of extreme exploitation of the working classes are aware of the real hypocrisy of the internationalisation of globalisation. The youth in particular see the virtual necessity of international science, of health and of education. They are stunned by world wide developments which are deliberately tied to these human gains to wealth and to competition, a competition defined as globalisation. 

Millions, especially the young, now see the world seeking both common parts of all the nations as well as local and national countries that are able to maintain and thrive humanity. These millions seek for the overthrow of current capitalism in defence of human society. As days go by, so the struggle will become more and more acute. The focus on capitalism's greatest surge, a globalisation that reduces common human endeavour, increases the destruction of the planet and is motorised by the worse competition, the seeking of money and power of the ruling classes, becomes more and more obvious as the greatest barrier to human success. And millions are moving to bring it down. A socialist revolution. 

Some areas on the planet utterly demand the need for common agreements, currently denied by the single competitions for wealth. Davos in Switzerland the last time it came together it had 119 billionaires, 309 private jets and 53 Heads of States. Oxfam states that lower incomes of the world's poorest have  contributed to the extra death of 21,000 people each day during the pandemic. The world's richest men more than doubled their collective fortunes since March 2020 ($700 billion to $1.5 trillion, March 20 to November 21.) The authors of the Oxfam stated that the 10 richest represented 'a record breaking increase something like of which we have never seen before.' The rich in Davos? They wanted and prayed to for all to remain the same - subject to more $ trillions. The same for them to control the world's wealth. 

A socialist revolution needs desperately to be set up in a new Davos. What should it do? It should decide a universal wage for all labour worked through by the assemblies across the globe. The distribution of wealth and the destruction of the vast mechanical politics and economics that block human success needs to be smashed. The billionaires and millionaires and the 53 plus heads of Governments will be an absurd and poisonous blimp of history.      

Democracy?

An uncertain, not to say a blind future, is becoming the increasing norm for politics in the West. For example, President Biden is organising a world wide symposium to salute democracy and to 'combat international corruption'. Sadly he doesn't reflect on his own 'democracy' while US States are gerrymandering the next elections. Instead Biden talks generalities about tax evasion and money laundering - missing the blazing dishonesty of the US States, the utter corruption of the alternative party, the Republicans, and the corporate-led domination of virtually all of US politics and politicians, let alone the organised, billionaire-led, political machinery, that runs the country. Biden, at the very least, totally misses his own point. 

Consider the last ten to fifteen years. There has been a drastic economic collapse, followed by social decline and austerity measures across most of the world and for the bulk of Europeans and Americans. Despite this failure of the political and economic system, imperialist wars were still led by the West in the same years. That led to at least 801,000 people that have been killed by direct wars. Now; today; the pinnacle of global capitalism has turned into increasing tariffs and the world smells of yet greater wars. 

The semi-fascist Russian regime is now testing the US and NATO for control of the Ukraine. The Covid pandemic remains with us all - despite the West's nationalistic vaccine programs. Deep tensions, in respect of women, children, race and inequality are at yet another huge rising but are stalled and in some contexts, pushed back. Finally, the most immediate potential disaster in the planet's ecology is practically treated as a side window in respect of the bulk of the West's led civilisation. In conclusion, the West appears to be stalled and in some areas reversed, if not collapsing in its decline.   

This blog previously spelled out the first and second stages of socialism. The first, and most extensive wave started with the greatest action in human history; the success of the defeat of Western imperialism in 1917. Early Soviet Russia and its ongoing memory became the famous 'other'; the then coherent, collective, reasoned alternative, as against the World's War madness of imperialist capitalism. 1917 became the alternative to war, to the corruption of life under capitalism and a symbol to the inevitable under-developed existence of the billions, who laboured - or worse - across the world. The impact of 1917, despite the Russian soviets that became mangled and destroyed through the decades, opened up a new world history, leading on through China, Cuba and up to 1974. Despite the increasing doubts of millions in the West regarding Stalin and Mao, the huge breakthroughs, ending in the Vietnam victory and the global young mass movements that covered the globe, still maintained a possible future. At least, the first wave of socialism had overturned Western imperialism across vast parts of the planet. Despite the weaknesses, the mistakes and the failures, the first wave of socialism provided a constant symbol of the possibility of humanity organising a genuine collective in the support of all, for the first time in human history. 

The argument made about the first stage of socialism as it subsided particularly in the West, was that its chequered failure was not only coming from the pressure of the US and European reorganisation of capitalism over the decades, but also from the prominent contradictions within the first socialist wave itself. It is not pertinent to rehearse what happened to this particular history just now. Where all need to go is towards a new, different, second wave of socialism. One which provides a new 'other' in the arguments in society, turning away from the retrograde repetitions of the past that have largely failed. 

The remnants of the first wave of socialism have maintained the independence from imperialism, most effectively in China's continuing development, despite the West's constant efforts to block its progress. But the reality is an increasing pressure both outside and inside of the last of socialism's first wave. The authoritarian regimes and the crushing of any working class democracy, coupled with constant efforts to link economically to the West, is gradually destroying any remaining socialism within. Meanwhile, the world's population has already bypassed the first-wave history. Secondly, the planet now requires at least one fully global political axis that can remove the gathering dangers of capitalist globalisation. The beginning of the second wave of socialism, requiring global technology, deeply collective organisation and new types of democracy is needed to successfully construct our ecological defences and the actual survival of humanity.  

But the second wave of socialism is not even a slight, let alone a main, new 'other' in the minds of those who would seek a new world. In fact, the second wave does not yet apply the understanding, the mood, the argument, the study, the interest in any large section of the world's population. At the moment, and deeply buttressed by the recent pandemic, there is nothing like the decades before and after 1900 to 1975 when it came to battling with and for change with a wide sense that social, economic and political models could be understood for an alternative human society and civilisation. All sorts of arguments have been thrown up, particularly in the West. Indeed, in the West, an enormous collection of thoughts, ideas, speculations, personal implications and mysteries, instead take the place of the thought of advancing society and humanity. There are a billion comments about this substitute 'novelty'. And, in large parts of the West at least, it is a concoction of half baked histories, nationalist puffery, personal aggrandisement and retarded concoctions that offer a would-be new 'other.' It is the decline from the result of the defeat of the first wave of collective human self-organisation. It has grown from a pool of decay soaked by the West's itself's weakness and deterioration.   

The lack of a collective human future in thought and in hope is certainly a consequence of the limits of the first wave of socialism. The absence of alternatives from our daily lives comes from the deliberate, stubborn, backward inaction and the constant insistence of the decline of mass movements and of co-operative undertaking and achievement. The second wave of socialism is yet to be built. It is almost silent now, but it will emerge, not by theory, but by the necessity of an overthrow of a current dangerous and rotten edifice. A daily life of independent and active movement will create a real, new, 'other', as a result of the rising of the vast majority of people who will decide to change their own future. 

Hints are emerging in some western countries. The Irish Citizens’ Assembly was established in 2016 by a parliamentary resolution and tasked with deliberating on a number of issues, including the Eighth Amendment. Abortion was made legal because of ordinary citizens. The Citizens’ Assembly followed the model of its predecessor, the Convention on the Constitution, which ran from 2012 to 2014 and whose recommendations had led to the 2015 marriage equality referendum. Compare this with the USA's democracy that gives 26 States the right to abolish abortion via the new Supreme Court. The States are run by Republican millionaires. The Supreme Court is run by Trumpian millionaires. Of course there will be a ferocious battle - over what is really a democracy and what is actually permanent decisions of the rich and powerful. 

West grabs carnival capitalism

Part of the western fantasies includes the politicians that try to break up the real social memories from the working class's collective history, plus their knowledge and their understanding. One example of the politicians that have created a different history is shown by the new UK Tories. A section of the Tory MPs, including the Prime Minister, are cuddling-up to the small northern towns offering unlikely futures. They are attempting, like their counterparts in other western countries, to thoroughly dissolve the West's genuine social history of the ebbing and flowing of the working classes' seminal battles through the years. This new set of politicians has different faces across Europe - with the resurrection of religious political dominations in Poland and Hungary, to the new defenders of the so called 'culture' in France. But it's all the same. Apparently the bulk of the millions of working class people in the West have to embrace their new political media sovereigns, accept new images of a paternal leadership, enthral a deeper faked-up national identity and to swallow the fear of the drastic 'threat' of immigration, coupled with the dangerous hints of Russia and China shadows' perched on the western borders. This is the new/old history. It answers to nothing but an untruthful past designed to create another illusion.

In fact, as the Glasgow COP shows, a whole world is in peril and the fantasy politics coming out of the West barely touches, or more accurately it reverses, any collective, open and public decisions for the desperately required significant change. Instead the West faces the decline of their traditional imperialism having gradually swallowed the colonial riches over centuries. The West is now dealing with its waning international power. Western capitalism needs to play a new, last card. It is now aiming to retain its world leadership mainly via the manipulation of global finance, controlled by the US and less significantly with the EU. The most ridiculous fantasy of them all. Alas for the political and economic potentates of this world, the latest capitalist design is literally being broken up as soon as it has been set up, via the very same manipulation of the globalisation of the world's finance that led to the collapse of the very same finance - particularly in the West. 2008 was only the first shock. 

What are the forces, movements and battles in the declining capitalist, western-carnival?

The defences of the future West are now swirling around as they seek answers to their troubles. But fake histories simply produce out-of-date palliatives. According to the UK for example, the West needs to have more nuclear submarines with Australia, a beefed up NATO, closer sucking up to the US rather than to the EU and French cops, especially them, to 'do their job in the channel!' Meanwhile finances rise and commodities are fewer than WW2. Other tired out versions are available.

But what could be the West's real chance of avoiding its collapsing decrepitude? First, get rid of the word 'West' and its baleful history. Second, stop the capital carnival. Capitalism is now faltering. Personal ownership has become a monstrous block against the world's needs. Its temporary use to build real development in China (as opposed to the discoveries of the playground in the West) has been the only significant progress across the debilitated capitalist globe for decades. But all of the main problems and disasters in the world today are now global in whole or in part. Nuclear weapons are world wide, increasingly ready and able to offer extinction. The ecology of Earth is entirely in danger and could desolate the planet and its peoples in a few years. Carnival capitalism has no means to focus on the huge requirements of the desperately necessary changes in the world. 

There is progression.

In this period of carnival capitalism, three prolonged human battles are again rising against constant exploitations that go deeper in history than capitalism  itself, despite the industrialisation that capitalism used for those exploitations. Millions are fighting for collective and social answers, to finally defeat the oppressions that have emerged long before capitalism and are still deep in it. Human degradation in our civilisations due to poverty and the lack of real equality, of the children and women being constantly reduced, as with the terrible depredation of racism; these surely are, at last, to be universal parts of the change of a new civilisation. It is breaking out everywhere and is the opening of a new wave of socialism whatever it is called. 

Brian Heron

Scary economics for globalisation

There's a new set of internet shows going round. Huge ships crash into other huge ships and boats and various harbours. These towering leviathans slowly break up and sometimes destroy parts of ports, decks, docks, heavy machinery and, as mentioned before, other boats. They do it with graceful momentum, seemingly so slow and yet utterly unstoppable, while hooting and howling from sad pipes and horns that smother the creaks and grinds of the cracking concrete or the scraping bellies of the other boats. There were no deaths or injuries in the pieces seen above. But tiny humans spread along the jetty gradually turned their walks into runs as the enormous pieces of the sea relentlessly ground down their full size and impact. This is not the beauty of the waves. It is the scuttles in the current hangover of globalisation. 

A large container ship engine is similar in size to a six story building. Well over a billion tonnes is carried internationally in containers. Between 2000 and 2017 containerised cargo trade grew three times and about one and a half time faster than the world's GDP. The number of crashes of ships is actually harder to assess. There are a lot of questions and few honest answers in this area. But the issue that is most concerning now is - will these epic behemoths smash up globalisation? 

The ships gathering in Los Angeles, unable to dock their Xmas cargo, has not only saddened the West Coast children but more significantly, created the opportunity of another Trump attack on President Biden.  The mayor of Long beach California says 

'We are facing an unprecedented cargo surge at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles due to major global pandemic productions shifts and decades old supply challenges'. 

The British Prime Minister Boris pretends that the West Coast block is simply part of the same problems that the UK now faces over fuel, food and energy supplies. In fact the LA blockage is mainly the increased demand from the US for Xmas goods and the increasing problem of old fashioned port capacity. Even that minor crisis is pushing critical political issues in the US. In the UK, these hiccups are hugely more serious, and they expose much more rapidly the potential, gradual disintegration of globalisation at its weakest point. Boris talks only lies. The UK's current connection with globalisation, unlike the problems with the LA's port, is becoming the most problematic of all of the main western nations. And now ship containers price their voyages from £2000 to £18000. And gas containers are dropping their agreed previous prices in mid passage and turning their bows to the biggest offers. 

The British Guardian newspaper now faces its Bidenic hero when he insists that the US will go to war against a Chinese intervention in Taiwan. This is a deeply serious initiative against China. Up to now, the Chinese policy is that Taiwan is Chinese. The Chinese leadership has consistently insisted on a peaceful and prolonged return of Taiwan to China. The US policy used to be supporting that approach. But Biden has turned the wheel and put possible war first. (His administration is desperately trying to dissolve Biden's statement into the previous, essential, non-developed Taiwan process.)

This is the sort of sword that slices the ultra modern capitalism's largest development - into pieces. The pillars of globalisation are not the ships (although they are becoming more and more unconstrained) they are the vast connections between the US, the EU and China. Biden has deepened what was Trump's intention to break down global capitalism into nationalistic dominations - with the single leader (and the minor copycats) determinedly on top. 

Boris's pseudo working class politics

Start; 

Beating Boris is no longer a party political issue. Starmer is the most self aggrandising, chest-thumping, soggy-wet, adenoidal-Blairite that Labour has ever swallowed. The previous election, where a minority 10 million voted for Corbyn, despite the immense attacks brought down on them, could have forced the 20 odd Labour left MPs into a new practical challenge against Boris across the country. Those MPs, and the 10 million, could have separated away from Labour's squeaks in Westminster - get locally organised against Boris's right wing directions - call on the huge minority vote and with crystal clear ways — forward for Brexit and for the key nationalisations — which would have shifted and led the UK society and another election ultra-fast. 

Now, this is fighting a cult; a cult which is trying to build up a working class base, just like Trump. Most among Britain's rulers were aware of this and hoped that Tory grandees would pull back Boris - even throw him out. The Times newspaper , etc., are wringing their hands and demanding that the ruling class does something! They don't understand the Boris miracle. But the miracle is simple. Boris has spoken, is speaking and will speak in the future — directly to the working class. It's been a long time since PMs in the UK did that. And the ones that tried, Wilson, Callaghan, partly Thatcher (via sales of council houses) — all of them eventually failed. The last Labour PM, Blair, decided to deny the existence of the working class. And it was Blair that finally dissolved Labour's link with working class people. (That's what Starmer wants to retrieve!)   

Ok. How, now, can the real fight start against Boris and his personal politics?

1. Disclosures; 2. Hard truths; 3. Clear action.

1.While Boris talks to working class voters about higher wages, he lies about the facts and he opposes higher wages where he can. First he says wages will grow because immigrants accepted lower wages. But in the last 35 years wages have been declining. And the only time there was a brief change was the early 2000s — when immigration workers were actually at the peak. Wages dropped again from 2008 to now. Boris uses one or two upticks from private companies to pretend that it is he that wants higher wages. (Most of it is the bump back from 2020.) The 6 million public workers that Boris is directly in charge of are going to get a wage cut.   

2. Wages have dropped for decades. Why? Because unions were broken by anti-union laws that are still going, with the most recent law in 2010 and more yet to come.

3. Workers need to fight together for their unions and higher wages. Boris wants big votes for the smallest wages. 

1. Boris lies about fuel and food, transport and schools. He starts by lying that most countries are worse after the Covid pandemic than his new Britain.  

2. Fuel was under-planned over the last 10 years. Food was underplayed in supermarkets and farms in the last 2 years. Transport was privatised, hugely subsidised (eg., Rail) and it doesn't work. English private school fees are 90% higher than state school spending. The gap between private school fees and state school spending has more than doubled in a decade. 

3. Boris is smashing up all sides of the lives of ordinary people. Get him gone.  

And so it goes on - in virtually all aspects of an increasingly dangerous society. 

Action is needed in the absence of the weak and weary parties in Westminster.  We need local assemblies, including councils, across the UK's nations, to decide what should happen next. We need direct action, following the active Green agenda, to make sure that can show that real changes can and should happen. Workers need to build and lead new unities, pulling down the barbwire laws, crossing the collective boundaries.