From austerity to revolt

Friday, 29 April 2022

From austerity to revolt

Keir Starmer, the UK Labour leader, has recently said that, 'People don't want a revolution. They do want how I am going to pay my energy bill.' Sorry for your clunky speech Sir Starmer. Here is the clearer reality. A lot of people want to use energy, yes, and they are considering that they will need to do it by a revolution. 

Natural gas costs 20 times higher than the lowest point of the pandemic; a third more than January 2022. The government has lifted energy companies costs from 54% - using tax. But fuel bills are increasing another £700 per 6 months starting in October. Energy companies made £7 billion profits in the last 5 years. Time to open up a general wealth tax and the nationalisation of energy.

Apples are going up by 25%; Milk by 7%, Margarine 31%. Fertiliser is rising from £280 to £1000 per ton.  Guess what happens to crops. 

Meanwhile incomes are falling; so far by 2.2%; the steepest fall since records began. And that is today. 

Universal Credit is cut by £20. Meanwhile inflation is rising towards 8%. Households £1100 worse off and rising. Average annual spend on groceries is now more than £1300 per person. Those in the poverty line faced their food budget being wiped out. Additional 1.3 million people, including the additional half a million kids, are tipped into current poverty. We are now, this moment already, 60% below the median. 

And Britain is dropping alongside its neighbours? So the UK can feel bearable? The Food Foundation in 2017, compared with the EU, discovered that Britain has the highest proportions of children 'living in a severely food insecure household'. (And in 2020, 2500 kids were admitted to Hospital with malnutrition, twice as many as in the year before.)  

Billionaire Chancellor Sunak jollied with the press when they asked him what loaf he had in his family. His household has lots of loaves, he said.

Prime Minister Boris told the British people when he won the General Election in 2019 that the previous ten year austerity had been swept away. In fact a desperately worse austerity appears that it is here to stay in the UK, magnified this time by the whole general West's rapid decline. Traditional politics is beginning to shatter and has already broken down in the Western margins. Globalisation has lost its dynamic. Modern capitalism is depending on a decreasing US financial hordes and providing billionaire wealth rather than unacceptable, long term, would-be dodgy, investment. World wars are beginning and climate crises, despite heroic individual efforts, are going backward.

Looking at the overall West's picture, Sir Starmer's view of the world seems timid indeed. In reality this UK's Labour's Lord has already failed and is certain to hang-on to the more and more decrepit status quo than any change of a new society. He is much more frightened of any new revolution, much more than he worries that he won't replace Boris in the good old style.     

What would be a change; a new, developed, democratic, socialist revolution? 

In 2017 Labour leader Corbyn, following the largest Labour vote for decades, nearly won a radical program of reform which might have been a significant platform that could have prepared to win against the current crisis. Corbyn's failure over Brexit, by then focussed on its democratic demand and not led through racism, broke the potential social democratic left. Nevertheless, despite the most vicious attack on Corbyn, mostly led by Labour leaders, 10 million still voted for his program. If this huge population, (despite the 13 million that voted Boris) had been encouraged to have remained an active movement - with Corbyn's principles - then a real opening for a socialist change could well have taken the lead in society in today's increasingly desperate conditions. 

Alas, even Corbyn's social democracy is not socialist revolution. But the current conditions and the memory of the ideas of radical changes in the recent past can still play a part in a new turn towards genuine revolutionary conditions. 

How can that be?

The new thing across the West - and most apparent in the breaking up of the UK - is not only the shift of the anger at the wealthy self-serving, lying, 'democracy', it is the awkward day to day life that constantly irritates and causes annoying trouble. Everybody knows the big picture of increasing wealth and its connection with increasing poverty. Some imagine and hope that this will 'pass away.' But the unexpected things and the dangerous things constantly prick the failing government and the real problems in society. 

Passports don't work and planes don't fly. GPs are unavailable (and the UK is the lowest across all of the main European countries.) Potholes are opening and education is declining and closing. (Again, education is dropping compared with Europe in general.) The railways don't work and they cost a fortune when they do get going (like everything else.) You can't pay for your dog food. Your drive to work is more than half of your wages. You've decided not to go to Uni because you are going to pay for it, if necessary for the rest of your life. And yet the rich and the corporations still get richer and richer. Chucking out Boris is far and away not enough. Sir Starmer doesn't do much better. This is the beginning of the breakdown of a society - of many societies - still dominated by rulers who maintain relentless wealth.  

In these conditions new battles are already emerging. In the UK there are dozens and dozens of workplaces that are striking. Many of them are winning. (See News From the Frontline.) Nationalisation is becoming a deeply sensible response to private money grabbing - especially among the services, utilities and banks; and most significant is the new ideas and demands that are arising, aiming to 'sort out' the UK's ridiculous Parliament.

The 'mother of all Parliaments' is simply the most ridiculous 'democracy' in the world. The Lords who are solely chosen by Prime Ministers, and as is well known, they are the largest part of any Parliament in the world, except the Chinese Communist Party's annual conference. From time to time waves of corruption causes the notion that the Lords must go. Except they never do. The two main parties, Tory and Labour, are just as linked to these corruptions. Except, in the last few years, because Tory and Labour leaders are becoming more and more versions of the autocrats like Trump, Orban and Duda, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party and the Greens have begun to demand deep and wide changes. And, in the despair of Southern Ireland's ancient parties, a new democracy has erupted, which shows how ordinary people can decide the answers to key questions and the real democracy has begun.  

But there is a status quo in the UK and the West in general. It has worried about its regal, centuries, place.  There is no question that the current decaying politics will use every resource that they already hold to prevent the rise of a new root and branch for a new economy and a real democracy. The revolution will come out of the battles by ordinary people, who, as they push and then they battle for their rights, will start for the prospects of their future. The sooner the better it is vital to make that clear.

For that reason; the reason for the power needed for a real revolution, following France, a radical UK needs now to build a bloc. Melenchon recently led the left to a degree that it could lead the major part of French society in the direction of change, similar to the needs of the UK. The new French Popular Front is a proposal for a combined left; for wages and genuine social care; for the fight for ecology, for women, for people of colour and support for immigration; for a new socialist society. (It has nothing to do with the Popular Front of the 30s, which believed that fascism would be defeated if capitalism came in together. Fat chance!)  

Previous blogs in the past have theoretically suggested, after 10 million voted for Corbyn, that it would be possible to build such a step. The UK's servant, that bows to one of the worst Parliaments in the world, stopped dead the possibilities of a powerful left, and the millions were dumped. Now the results are so much more obvious. There is the possibility of a new leadership in society. Now it is not theoretical. 

Posted by Brian Heron at 17:22 

Labels: Chance for revolution?, Parliament is over?, What's next in politics?

The breakdown of the West and a new socialism

The destruction of the Ukraine, broken up by Russia's Czar-Putin, now in a battle with the previously sleepy, creepy NATO, is the fresh signal of the end of the Western's global monopoly. Germany is arming. NATO is expanding all over Europe (again) and the US/Biden has told us it's genocide. What is true is that tens of thousands have been killed. What is also true that the Yemen or even Syria have been faced with and are still facing, slaughter or 'genocide, but with faces of colour'. Regardless of the disgusting response of these particular unconsidered 'genocides', the military convulsion in and with the West remains a shift of the West's future. The core of the West is rotten, frightened and getting armed up. Putin smelt it first.  

We can return to this after some thoughts about the past and future of the meaning of socialism. 

V. I. Lenin spent his final thoughts focussed on three main items. The first was the developing success of state capitalism in Soviet Russia - particularly the new, partial ownership, of the land, of light industry and, in his own words, more in hope than any immediate success, the heavy industry yet to come. The New Economic Policy, or NEP nevertheless had born fruits from 1921 onwards. It started after the years of wars and famine. Capitalist initiatives, allowing profit and partial-shared ownership, drove the economic engine of the new, desperate, yet to be achieved, socialist economy.  

Lenin placed the NEP at the centre of his final speeches to the fourth congress of the Communist International and the Plenary Session of the Moscow Soviet. Lenin told his followers,'True, the sum have obtained so far barely exceeds twenty-million gold rubles; but, at any rate, the sum is available and it is earmarked exclusively for the purpose of reviving our heavy industry.'

After Lenin's increasing decline of his health, his notes still made the central role of NEP's future, but different concerns then emerged. He made a series of attacks on the revolutionary Russia's new state. 'We must strive to build up a state in which the workers retain the leadership of the peasants, in which they retain the confidence of the peasants ... and by exercising the greatest economy, remove every trace of extravagance from our social relations.' 'We must reduce our state apparatus to the utmost degree... We must banish for it all the traces of extravagance, of which so much has been left over from the tsarist Russia, from its bureaucratic capitalist state machine.' 'Only by thoroughly purging our government machine, by reducing to the utmost everything that is not absolutely essential in it shall we be certain of being able to keep going.' 'The most harmful thing would be to rely on the assumption that we know at least something ... for the building of a really new state apparatus, one really worthy to be called socialist, Soviet, etc. No, we are ridiculously deficient of such an apparatus, and even of the elements of it ...'

Then, thirdly, there was Lenin's focus on the Soviet Russian Communist Party and of the fate of  communism's future in general. 

It is well known that Lenin seriously criticised Stalin's leading secretary role and preferred Trotsky. The notes were written under Lenin's increasing alarm that the Russian CP might split. (And Lenin's words on this were released in 1956.) Lenin's comments on Stalin had a much wider aspect than simply preferring Trotsky. More historically significant, Lenin was insistent over two requirements that for him were crucial for any hope for genuine socialism in Russia's future. First because socialism, a socialist state, had not yet developed in Soviet Russia it required new, deep, reforms, even potential further revolutions. Overcoming (at least in part) the current weaknesses of the state and party meant the need for a Workers and Peasants Inspection. This would supposedly have the highest role (over both party and state) building a proper State and reforming the Party. But WPI was playing no such role. The actual politics of a vast, sprawling state apparatus was increasingly dominated by the party secretary Stalin - as Lenin himself discovered. 

Associated with Lenin's call for the WPI was his demand that the Party organisation should now be opened and expanded. Contrary, there should be the reduction of the constant bureaucratic expansion of the State. The increased numbers with different experiences in the Party membership and its wider leadership would thereby be learning how a socialist state might properly develop. And larger numbers would also be more likely to prevent any single Party domination, that centralised particular cliques clashing for possible total power over all. To that event, the widening of the Communist Party, the power that was supposed to be allowed to the WPI, also allowed Lenin to be calling for the Communist Party to be amalgamated with the Soviets, implying, in effect in necessary, the combination of an alternative State with a wider alternative regime  

Finally was his last essay that Lenin wrote over the future of communism. 

Being Lenin, his approach was absolutely concrete at the same time as his astonishing analysis of global trends. His view was that the defeat of Germany, resulting from the first war that covered most of the whole world, ultimately threw back the West's social and economic apparent victory against Germany. It was the German defeat in its widest sense that began to break the West's imperialism and the possibilities that could build socialism if not in Germany but primarily in the underdeveloped countries.

The failure of socialism in the West in the early 1920s was centred by socialism's defeat in the most developed country, Germany. This requires major consideration itself. But for the purpose of this article, the point of Lenin's view was that his understanding that a successful revolution after 1922 was now most likely to be dominated by the fight with a weaker Western imperialism rather than the main capitalist countries themselves, thereby creating the new revolutions from the underdeveloped nations. This was the combined and uneven process, they faced much more difficulty developing a new socialism compared with developed countries. Initiatives such as NEP and the particular character of politics, alongside an underdeveloped economy, required a completely different, complex, character which pushed for a type of socialism, similar to the early USSR. 

The new 20th century led by Czar Stalin had other ideas. He decided by 1928/9 that China would be immensely better for the right wing anti-socialist Kuomingtan to win China from their Royalty. Stalin argued for clear stages (except for Russia) and offered a lot of support accordingly. Lenin's view of those fighting revolution to defeat imperialism was exactly the opposite. The fight against imperialism was the new reality of socialist possibilities. However with Lenin away, Stalin followed his ideas. The Kuomingtan wiped out the socialists in the Chinese cities and were defeated by China's Royalty. 

Stalin's real role, which essentially succeeded from 1925 to 28, was the overthrow of the Russian revolution itself, let alone the spread of a genuine socialist society. The Stalinist counter Russian revolution was the spread and defined victory of the solid, untouchable bureaucratic State, combined with Stalin's mass murders and his gulag slavery. 

Lenin once said that socialist revolution for under-developed nations would be relatively easy to win but it would be desperately hard to establish the socialism that was meant to follow; and vice versa. Lenin himself considered the daily realities of Soviet Russia, the 1917 revolution and did not believe that the Soviet Russian Revolution had resulted in any sense a socialist society. Particularly in the case of the Russian State. He defined it, in 1922 and 3 as opposed to socialism in its bureaucratic, 'capitalist' nature. His fears of his understanding were rapidly confirmed. 

Conditions for socialism today?

Turning to the prospects of socialism; Western imperialism continues to decline mainly through its failure of imperialism. But the 20th century, would-be socialisms have also failed as an alternative - to western capitalism and, increasingly in the 21st century, to the other Continents. The Soviet Union destroyed itself by 1928. As a socialist society and as the chances of socialism that Lenin began to open up and that Trotsky tried to develop, were smashed by the Stalin Party/State. Stalin played no real socialism except the new Czar's insisting on the name. 

On the other hand the defeats over Western imperialism and the successes of some revolutions have highly developed China, Vietnam and partially Cuba etc.  Those mentioned present themselves as socialist but, with the partial exception of Cuba, are, in reality, bureaucratic state capitalist countries. Those traditional countries, now modern states, are dominated by a Party that is organically attached to State politics, which prevents any possibility of providing the leadership of society, that could be led by the majority of working class and peasants. State capitalism has become the engine of development.

The expansion of state capitalism is the main consequence of successful revolutions (if not socialist societies) and the defeats, partial and total, of Western imperialism. The enormous progress of the use of state capitalist type nations certainly defined a genuine great leap forward in their development. (Mao's 'great leap forward' that ultimately killed millions in the 1950s and 60s and achieved only poison until the later Chinese leadership turned to the use of organised state capitalism.) But, again, these forward movements of state capitalism, developed out of Western imperialism, still did not create an alternative society led by and in charge of the large majority working class.   

Social democratic type western 'socialisms' have also collapsed in the large majority in Western Europe. No western living socialism, despite titles, provides any actual, genuine socialist success in the West.  As the revolutions in the 1960s and 70s that were being fought in countries battling with imperialism and that seemed to succeed, had wide support from youth in the West. But, as the effects of the post revolutions were revealed, they were nevertheless largely rejected in the West as models for their own societies. 

We are however at a potential new road. As the West declines more each year and its inequality and poverty increases, so a new large-scale, mass-action potentially rises. It carries a serious potential and social reaction larger than the major crises in capitalism in the 1930s. Something huge will have to cover the new space.

As western imperialism hollows out, the failure to totally dominate the globe evokes new, marginal class leaders that are opening new tests in society, sometimes both militarily and economically. These are using the crises of western imperialism to provoke problems of the people because the traditional political and economic rulers were still trying to suggest that all that was remains fine, while the West gets worse. The growing scattered employment, of the self-paid workers, of the unemployed and over-employed, can hear a voice in that new leadership. It creates a version of an apparent success in a ritual past, based on a crooked notion of security and the danger of different peoples and centred on the sovereignty of nationalism. In a nutshell, this coming rock-solid cloud across the West favours what was believed to be the gains of the traditional imperialism, now somehow blown away by the rise of the newly developed nations.   

The significant importance of this theme in the West is not so much the likelyhood of a vast change of the working-class deciding for fascism, it is a new leadership that offers an untrue past in order to run a society installed above the people and for permanent pretence of a would-be security. It is another sign that the previous socialism no longer offers a different society and that there is an enormous hole in the future. 

New socialism?

The failing and insecure sections in western society show the stark reality that there is no other type of society or civilisation available, other than a decaying and increasingly dangerous capitalism.  Traditional versions of so called socialism have become unaccepted, or impossible, or an historic failure. Yet no other genuine system of societies applies. 

Socialism in the West will have to change. The current context reveals the direct opposite of traditional notions of western security. A large part of western nations, and probably a majority of the young, already do not accept current futures as they have been rolling out from their past leaders. The capitalist, Tzar-led Russia has demonstrated the West's future in his battle at the weak margin of NATO and which grabs the Ukraine's coal and oil, duly named a wider Russia. Small wars in marginal countries will follow. 

Meanwhile the US is close to political chaos, despite its slogans and dollars sent to Ukraine. Biden's desperate goal is to keep the Russia war on as far as he can, while he can try to break up the Republican Party (and Trump's Russian friend) that are heading for States and race wars at home. Connected in the background is the international fight about nukes that are starting again, more dangerous than ever. More of the new raft of the holocausts are surfacing in human society.

Ecological activity is equally deadly and immense, and closer, increasing as studies and events show the coming destruction on the planet and the particular, global responses to the mass movement across the earth. The western people will very soon face the centre of that movement. 

The West is now facing a drastic drop of money and resources especially among the lowest classes and simultaneously aware of the continuing rise of the wealthy. Millions are aware of what is an international failure of capitalism. This is a battle that will inevitably be fought socially, politically and on the streets.  

Who and what is socialist?

Lenin had to see imperialist owned, underdeveloped nations as the possible future for revolutions, given the failure of Germany (and other developed nations) after WW1. Now we see the breaking-up of the developed, but decaying imperialist nations, under the condition of wars, external and internal, facing nukes and climate disaster, and poverty, much of which can and will destroy humanity. The new socialism (the only alternative to any coherent system) has to fight in every pocket of possibility and their struggles, but understanding the global background that defines the international aspect of our lives. Socialism is the defence against our present systems, against the background grinding our lives with a vile capitalism and that transfigures the systems and the ordinary people who now change our lives.

Young people in the West are huge in numbers in the respect of interest in internationalism, of global activity and hostile to war in general. The working classes and all those in poverty will see the word capitalism now as the critical end for change. The creation to build vast movements that join up together into a current charter, underlining the great and common changes that are needed to live and to build a new way. 

And how does that happen? We need the main focus on the real dangers, a different democracy now, right away, wherever we can set it up, and new different states in a new international. How can this be organised? When we make action. When we throw down the classes who rule and the racists and sexists are fought to a finish. When we organise to discuss at doors, build our way to speak and question in the crowd, act on the beginnings of collective chosen decisions and present and work on real democracy, the peoples decisions here and now and the connections across the nations. Action and movement needed now to let people see what can be what is next in the world. 

Self determination in the Ukraine

The extraordinary determination that has maintained the efforts of the Ukraine military and their population is not the reason that Putin will still have lost. Even if the Russian military manage to blow the main Ukraine cities apart Putin will still fail. This blog (see West Wars 4 March) argued that the Ukraine citizens and their leadership should have surrendered to Russia's threat of war. So far thousands of Ukrainian and Russian injuries and deaths could have been avoided. The reality is that Putin would still have failed in his determination to fix his Russian-based subaltern leadership of the Ukraine, even if there had been not one Russian shot. 

Ukraine, with its large and politically active population and its developing facilities would have eventually broken down Russia's capacity to manage this nation. Russia has a large army with 11% of its money dedicated to military strength and the ownership of the majority of nukes in the world. But Russia's real resources (absence of nuclear oblivion) are something else. Here is a table of resources of the main countries in the world

1.China $113 trillion, 2.United States $50 trillion, 3. Germany $14 trillion, 4.France $14 trillion, 5. United Kingdom $7 trillion, 6. Canada $7 trillion, 7.Australia $7 trillion, 8. Japan $3 trillion 9. Mexico $3 trillion, 10. Sweden etc., etc,. Russia is ranked 43rd among 45 countries in the Europe region and its overall score is below the regional and world averages. 

Russia's attempt to create a new regime, which is smashing up buildings and will continue to kill thousands, will never be able to run a massive country, particularly one that it has been locally developing its productivity. The many WW2/Nazi parallels that have been thrown at Putin's war are utterly absurd. The real Nazi organisation in the 1930s and 40s Europe was easily the most successful war machine in history. It required years and at least the 3 world-leading nations to defeat it. 

And what of nuclear war? It is no longer the cold war. The US (and the UK when it comes to the new subs floating in Australia pushing back China) together with a massively advanced NATO (where we all get the bomb) has already created a hot war. Putin therefore has now put his nukes on the table. A real threat to block the expanding NATO permanently. The West (read the US) have actually used nuclear wars twice; once to save their unbelievably difficult control over Japan and the Pacific, and second to warn the USSR's expansion in 1945. 

Most of the West (again see the US) have played NATO's pretended caution as the signal to the world (and particularly the Chinese) that there are no intentions for any sort of NATO military action that might 'provoke' a nuclear Putin.This sounds like lies to Putin. So, what Putin wants is not nukes but the vast implications of his enormous stockpile of nukes (much of it in dangerous decline) to increase the weight of Russia's borders. Putin's demonstration of his nukes is the fantasy that he has the power and the kit to grab what really would be a broken fence against NATO. Putin is mad for power, like Trump or the bad days of Boris. But he wants to be in History, not its absence.

The best thing for the Ukrainian people was to endure Putin's half-witted desire for 'Russia' to be extended - albeit from a poor and declining Moscow centre. Some years perhaps would open up new alternatives for the Ukraine. The Ukrainian war will inevitably expose Putin's role and leadership and will increase the breaking away of the Russian people from their own leaders. But thousands are already dead and dying to no ultimate cause. The only version of what was and what could have been, at least in part, was a new country with an independent view against both Putin's Russia and the West's NATO. Starting with the slogan 'No War for Putin or NATO.'    

Instead the faltering slogan offered to the death and misery for the Ukrainians, especially in the West, still flies first. 'Self-determination.' What a brazen offer, without any real significant support against the actual chaos in the clash between Putin and NATO. The history of capitalist countries and their subordinates, virtually all of the major and minor nations of our globe, have emerged from bitter wars over wealth and power. The large majority of the nations were created by external warriors named 'traders' that made their nations for their personal property and wealth. Even the longer term nations have distributed additions, seizures and destructions to decide their 'self-determination' via the struggle of one ruling class over another. 

Most successful nations have fought to the core against, not years, not decades but centuries in order to establish themselves. But the 20th century has begun to change new types of nations. The new and real 'self determination' became decisions, universally fought by bitter battles, led by the common people. Then 'self-determination' would apply in a common, genuine democratic, development, as with the battles to win a country and society based on the popular, democratic common-wealth. And as the huge struggles battling imperialism, the most successful nations that have fought and won their genuine 'self determination' against the domination of the previous external (and subordinate toadies) are precisely self determinated' on that premise.

West's wars.

The western wars have begun (see blog 23 January 'Preparing for wars'). The latest weekly briefing about the war in Ukraine, written by Lindsey German from 'Stop the War', is a rock solid explanation of how the dominant west smashed and grabbed its way into countries across the world for centuries up to today. Lindsey also focussed on the political purposes of war - to re-group and reorganise the status quo in the centres of capitalism. The immense danger of the battle in Ukraine, led by Putin's grab for his Russian empire and by the constant enlargement of NATO, may be enormous in its consequences but, as Lindsey spells out, the same old function of the capitalist system will strengthen its capacity, promoting the spoils of death and destruction.

The reality of the wave of murder in the Ukraine is the beginning of a potential, momentous part of our new history to come. But first we have to burst the dreadful approach that is starting to build up, particularly in the UK, which cries for more war and more infant heroism, as Prime Minister Boris tries out his Churchillian verbosity, added byTory MPs' fiddling with their toy soldiers. What is the real truth for Britains now seeing and thinking about the worst war in Europe since WW2? The answer is the war must stop at all costs and if necessary with all the concessions. The terrible battle in the Ukraine cannot be won by its people. All should be aware that besides the actual damage of this war, the immense increase by NATO since 1990 has created the prospects and purposes that have now been used by Putin and which has multiplied the fear of the Russian people. It is likely that Putin will eventually fall. But not before the increasing terror and destruction that will now grow wide and high unless all call for the stopping the war under all the conditions.

Wider developments will flow out of the Ukraine and Russia that will shift the whole world. Putin is only the beginning. First, It is a fantasy that the war against the Ukraine is converging and uniting the west. In fact it is demonstrating its fragility.  

The capitalist west is already under large-scale pressure since the lack of a resolution of the Banker's crash in 2008; the failure of austerity (named differently in different countries) from 2010 to now and the Covid pandemic. The decline of the west is outlined by the tremendous success of China' state capitalism, the rise of India and south Asia, the imperialist chain-of-failures across the globe that were launched by the US and related supporters and, finally, the increasing contraction and centralisation of the EU. The biggest western disaster however is globalisation.

Globalisation was always meant to be another word for the new type of concentration of profit/wealth in the hands of the US. It was never designed to bump up SouthEast Asia or to unite Europe. The US banks held more and more of the wealth of developing sectors of the world, particularly through Japan and China, which then allowed the US to press down competition if necessary. The immensely cheap labour that was drawn out of the worlds' wealth via the East and South and into the US banks, was accepted and called 'globalisation'. 

But the US has now failed to dominate the world's most important gains, aside from money. High tech is sovereign but smothered with more and more US tariffs, installed by both Trump and Biden. The US now demands the stop of  'unfair' state capitalism (known and understood from the very first proposals for US importing cheap labour based Chinese goods.) Globalisation is over. And the European war will show it.

The impact of these developments and now with the Ukrainian war, changes the balance of post WW2 global conditions. Greater pressures will push the US beyond its shaky global hegemony. And it will be expressed in the US itself, summed up by the drastic failures of first Trump and now Biden. Internal combat will replace the external military hostilities as the American states press their leadership inside the US government. The internal battle in the US is now fast approaching and the response to Ukraine in Putin's hands will lose interest in the US. Trump got around his antipathy of NATO by pretending that NATO was ok but the members had to pay. In reality Trump was and remains hostile to NATO. Some believe he has a 'thing' with Putin. Who knows? What is true is that Trump opposes NATO as an essentially European counter block to the US. Trump has sought the weakness of Europe. And this has a massive base.   

The Chinese are also re-assembling their military geography. The Putin initiative is not sought as some good global effect in the Chinese context except for one critical consideration. Xi Jinping has already dealt with the weakness of the UK regarding the reorganisation of Hong Kong. It has become, in part, a solidified and one China. The other part of China is more difficult. But equally Taiwan is crucial to China's future and the new shifts in Russia, the US and the EU might provide an essential, much wanted Chinese leadership step.

The closest short-term shift following Putin's step is the movement which is now essentially required of Germany. Already the German Chancellor is banging up military costs, currently through NATO. NATO may have a rash of nations behind it but all who care to look will be nervously considering the core of the EU plus the UK, to build up a common military. The UK would rather run around the US, but the US is not necessarily going to both fight their own difficulties and, at the same time, fight for Europe. The battle in Europe is going to be fought in Europe with NATO waving the flag, but with the likes of Trump, the hard work will stay in Europe. And Germany will lead. 

The comments suggested above are the potential part of the changes likely to emerge. There will be others. At the centre is the collapsing of the Western society and its last basic throw of Western capitalism. Globalisation, the US progenitor and its EU followers, is over; now led by the US! More obvious arising to the surface are the many changes in politics and economics some of which have been considered above. These shifts and others that emerge which will also recreate thinking and acting about what is now the real meanings of our societies, their states and governments and their futures. It is in this context that the second wave of socialism will become primary.        

Revolution in the West?

The idea today that the working class across the West would be able to rise up in revolutionary ways; ways that would bring down governments and states in order to set up new societies; building nations that could be led and organised by the basic majority populations, seems fantastical. 

But such a possibility is far from absurd, despite the carefully constructed barriers preventing the hidden realities of life. Starting from obvious facts in the modern West, we find the increasingly negative views in vast populations about current governments and states. These feelings are becoming the norm for large portions of the youth, for women, for people of colour and for those millions who live in the increasing experience of growing poverty.

This immense fact is a constant feature among the huge numbers who fight for key necessities, only to find the absence, indeed the opposite, of the governments and states, with their total failure when they come to supporting the elementary requirements for a decent life. That fact shoots out to all and the standing governments and states fail more and more quickly.

Yet, in the decades of the 21st century so far, the anger that flares up from many corners have not yet become collective. For example, the fights with the Police in the US and now with other countries, especially in France and the UK, does not combine with the actions of women fighting against their social subordination, yet which has also becoming a well-known aspect of the foul role of the police. The totally unfair wages and jobs, which contain huge proportions of the population that are also fighting racism or sexism, is also often separated from the direct battles of the trade unions and collective labour in general. The several campaigns that seek to save the planet are divided, both in their own separate organisations and among the wide range of battles that challenge modern capitalism, which is destroying the planet.

One revolutionary socialist party in the past, the Russian Bolsheviks, played a critical role in constructing collective socialist victories. It was apparent, once the revolution started to bubble up, that Lenin focussed intently on the relatively small section of industrial workers in 1917. Was this the means to win the revolution? Yes and no. The core of the industrial workers were the 'vanguard'. Not because their fire power could bring down the Tzar, the traditional army, the would-be constitutionalists and capitalists. The workers vanguard led the creation of a vast collective across the whole of Russia. 

It was the industrial workers who knew best how to show the coalescing of the whole working class and much of the peasantry, to combine, to bring all that wanted deep change and then how to construct assemblies of all the poor, from the peasants to carpenters to soldiers. This was the concrete assembling of the wide range of the people that became the country wide Soviets. The Soviets were the combination of all who joined the revolution and the industrial workers were the first to show how it could be done, including parts of the belated Bolshevik party. 

Post Lenin, the entrenchment of the role of the party had already dominated. Soviets had been dropped in the starvation of 1919/21, the wars with the counter revolutions and the incessant role of the party focussed everything. The inevitable party became its leadership, then its sole leader and finally was the decisions of all of the main initiatives from 1924. Trotsky's belated call for the return of the Soviets in 1924 became Stalin's version of the Soviets becoming the tool of the party.

The failure of the first wave of socialism was finally the domination of the party over the Soviets. (See 'Polecon' blogs on the 'Second Wave of Socialism'.) The parties first replaced Soviets and then became the normal means of socialism that decided how the new socialist governments and the new states would be organised. The process of this failure has been prolonged. Outside of the richer west, the anti-imperialist battles (China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Vietnam) etc., were often dramatically successful against the main capitalist nations. But the role of the party in these successes have gradually declined, at different rates, without the certainty of any sort of socialist future except via a complete hierarchy of the party. 

In the richer West a different version of socialist parties started, which failed more rapidly. Their attempt, based initially on the German model, organised together with the capitalist states and have flopped almost entirely. Over the years, that part of the first wave of socialism has almost completely collapsed.

The fundamental construction for the second wave of socialism, particularly in the West, is not useful when aiming to create another effort to reconstruct a Bolshevik Party 2. In fact, the most significant discovery among radical forces that have gradually emerged in the West since 2000 is that seeking yet another version of apparent Bolshevism simply fails. However, this understanding  has, without a solid and collective counter approach, tends to cause the new radicalism to become weak and ineffective (that has been discussed in paragraph 4.) The new potential revolution in the West is being scattered.

It would be false to see modern socialism as declining. New socialism, the second wave, has never been more open to see the corrupt, the declining development of the Western governments and states and the breaking down of today's globalisation, particularly in the West. The answer maybe simple but as we practically apply such a simplicity, it is fiendishly hard to do. 

One example could be the moronic world of Boris's UK. When every conceivable lie was thrown at Corbyn, by the state, the government, the media and the Labour Party, nevertheless 10 million voted for him. Of course the attack on Corbyn did its narrow, historical, political job.10 million potential socialists were dissolved, mostly by the anti-Corbyn Labour Party and the standard social democratic response that failed to build up a huge independent movement. But an enormous block, standing against a so called society, could have been started through entirely different movements organising to act and unite for a new future. In reality Corbyn's leadership, from that point trailing the Labour Party in its election, led Corbyn to his own social democratic a catastrophe. The creation of socialism is more than possible but something new needs building.

There are now millions in the UK seeking and partly acting for a new society, economy and state. Part of this answer is to assemble of all those who now see each of the elements in which they fight for justice and change and to cohere the ten million plus in a collective program across the whole of society. The names of this movement are immaterial. Call them assemblies, citizen talks, circles, open parties or conferences. Insist on the combination of all organisations that challenge the governments, states and the economy. Use collectively all of the huge and increasing parts of those who challenge the domination of the status quo.   

The battles that socialists have tried and fought over the decades since the rot of Stalinism are rarely understood but have often offered potentials for the future of the second wave. For example, Yugoslavia, independent of Stalinism over decades, developed worker control in business and development. Cuba astonished all in its spread of health in what was the 'third world'. Cuba played the key role in the defeat of the South African army and opened the door to anti-apartheid. A war ravaged Vietnam, not the US or a hesitant China, overturned the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. And so these incredible marks and others have built a socialist basement for the second wave. 

The second wave of socialism is gathering. Frankly there is no other humane proposal, any alternative, meaningful, rational, intelligent, future, for the majority of human kind. The current conditions of capitalist decline are breaking up in a howling mess.           

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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