A new socialist movement in the West

Start with some 'socialist' fundamentals. 

The huge leftwing parties in the first half of the 20th century; the Communists led by Stalin's role in the Soviet bureaucracy; and the Social Democrats, who were constantly scared of revolution, leading instead towards efforts to link with capitalism, have both failed. In the second half of the 20th Century and the first quarter of the 21st, the mass working classes in the European west felt a deep suspicion of all these decaying parties despite even the various minor Trotskyite alternatives. The communist parties declined before the1980s and finally collapsed after the fall of the East German wall. Meanwhile the constant failures of social democracy became the desperate 'turn to middle ways', openly trying to support from mainly middle class political bases. Macron and Blair are still banging the hollow bell. Finally the remaining worker's movements had broken in the turn of the century, created by deliberate government decision in the case of the UK, leading to a rapid decline of large-scale industry in the West. The most significant working class industries were re-created by the development of nations that were defeated by the imperialist West, most significantly by China. 

The weakness of the socialist left was also undermined by the promise of Western democracy between 1914 and 1950. But the 'precious gem' of Western democracy and the parties that organised their votes, rapidly passed their peak after the full franchises were finally forced for the vote by women and trade unions. At the end of the second world war the franchise became mainly ruling class systems that were narrowed into what was 'the vote'. Instead 'democracy' was used by huge wealth to maintain the upper classes status quo avoiding all major aspects of the social system. Gradually, through world wars and a hundred years or so of the vote, the mechanisms of the West's 'democracy' is now also increasingly becoming unacceptable as a genuine advance among the majority of the new working classes in the West. The features of this are spreading and patently obvious as Berlusconi twirled his cheery stage in Italy, followed today with another clown in the UK, desperate for power and money. Fake democratic and fake political 'offers' are now presented to the new working classes. Even where the ruling class were stubbed by Brexit for example, there was no change at all of the 'ownership' of the UK and not the slightest concessions to the working class.

The old versions of socialism have broken down. But so have the means of Western democracy. Another working class is rising. In the West we are having to work out a new socialism. 

The beginnings of the new socialism in the west.

Significant risings from workers are growing in France and the UK. Several UK unions are organising for equal pay for the 10% price hike. Large and continued strikes are, de facto, assembling united actions. Serious pressure is being developed by governments against workers and vice versa, despite previous elections. Government promises were dumped after their elections in both the UK and France. 'Ensemble', the latest French parliament left combination, despite Macron's disappearing 'centre', is beginning to lead French society and challenging the right. 

Meanwhile, an enormous number of self-organised groups, attached from schools, from churches, from the streets and the local areas are directly managing the growing problem of food and heat, totally outside of government. 

The UK government and both the main parties in Parliament are facing the break-up of Britain.  There is the increasing role of the self style Welsh Labour leadership, the Scottish leadership that have decided to set up a new Scottish independence referendum and the UK Northern Irish Sinn Fein Party, elected by the NI voters, which is unable to carry on through supporting the people because the UK government is dropping its own treaties. 

Some immediate steps.

The new socialism has to first centre itself as a part of the actions of the new working class and its contexts. Those actions are the central necessities. For example, the gathering and combining of those who are supporting the unions and those working on providing food, heating, etc.  There are those who seek the support for social and medical difficulties. The more that combines - the more people will step ahead. We can build examples by pinning buttons for everyone, green with black lettering stating 'support the unions and communities'; making noise outside Number 10 with demands on party food; demanding rations across the most poverty areas and the most rich. Most significant, starting from France's 'Ensemble', socialism needs to help blocks that will be bringing together all those that act together. From there comes the new movement learning for a new society.

Socialism cannot simply reconstruct the roads of the old parties took, added with a few set of different theories, however genius, and to expect this or that leader in history that will really deliver the answers that will no longer fail. Socialism has, like the growing populace, to learn in the now, using our histories to change in the practice of the difference of now. The theory and practice of socialism with different ideas and different activity has only just begun.  

But don't be late!

The UK Secretary of State Truss has just explained why the UK should have got going earlier over the Ukraine war, and should now prepare a fight over the Chinese about Taiwan. This dangerous idiot (another minister who hasn't read, or has decided to dump the British - Chinese treaty) is the mad, half-baked leadership, declining at home and dangerous abroad, as the UK's bandit society is running itself down.

End of globalisation ... and capitalism?

Some investors that were settling in Davros Switzerland called for the distribution of windfall taxes. Why? Because social eruptions are beginning across the globe. The rich fear the instability of modern capitalism. The British Tory Members of Parliament have just sprayed £15 billion across the poor (and the rich) hoping to smother the beginnings of mass strikes and to maintain the continuation of the government itself. Across the West and the South and the East the countries, in different conditions, are rising against the effects of the end of globalisation's domination.

Economists see the demise of the three decades of the era of globalisation. 'It's going to reverse.' (Financial Times.) 'Grappling with vital (new) strategic decisions.' (Davos, World Economy Forum.)

Current political leaders blatantly see it is now that the governments are needed to hold back and cover up the overthrow of the drastic disintegration of globalisation. There are many versions of these exercises but all have the same purpose, from escalating wars, to offering older versions of apparent 'benefits' from previous histories. All of the new politics is used to turn peoples' directions away from their own, genuine, grievances that have actually arisen from the break up of global capitalism. For example Prime Minister Boris Johnson suddenly wants to use the Queen's ancient birthday to turn back metric EU measurements. Hurrah!? 

At the same time as Boris offers pints of beer in pubs there is to be a major review of all EU laws automatically kept on the statute book since Britain exited Europe. 'Brussels-made legislation will be improved or repealed if it is not to benefit the British people' booms the new future. (Government press release.) But the UK 'improvement' and its 'benefit' covers much more than beer and bananas. Along the governments list, tucked away, is the (already feeble) EU Trade Union laws. 

Boris and the UK government have been watching the postal workers strikes, the decisions for action from teachers and health and welfare workers. They are studying the enormous 'yes' union votes for strike actions. Railway workers are fighting against potential sacking of thousands, where the remaining railway workers will have their wages cut and where those that are facing pensions will be sliced up in old age. This is piling up for a massive clash with Boris's government. 

And here is the ticket. Boris is trying to use Brexit by turning the entirely legal union actions (that are already dealing with the worst labour laws in Europe) of the workers, particularly now on Railways, to smash these critical union decisions, which will affect all of the working class. The rail workers' battle is now the most critical. Here is the Boris's plan to use his version of Brexit. Boris's aim is to break all the remaining organised working class by using the removal of the EU's laws. The destruction of the remains of the unions will be smashed up by the UK taking its own way against European decisions. Boris intends to mobilise commuters, families with children at school, the public that is part of the six million or more seeking NHS requirements and many others, as the means to end what are already poor workers' legal rights.  

Already Boris and his cronies have been developing a new law to allow railway workers to continue certain work if the strike goes ahead. Already he and his ministers are considering the removal of unions among teachers replaced by 'professional' organisations. These and others will be presented as a big part of the potential success against the EU. 

Boris, who was called a new Berlusconi by EU officials and who had the doubtful pleasure of talking with him, is now desperately wanting to be a Thatcher. The wave of union votes is already raising the need of a collective, joint-action, which could provide the only means to prevent the intended new, crushing Thatcherite block of the current government and instead allow the reality to open out of its real conditions of and for the vast majority of a despairing society.  

These are some of the political mechanisms, particularly in the West, that are being used as the fundamental issues, pushing away the key questions of the dissolving of capitalist globalisation and the creation of new alternatives. Already the Trumps, the Bolsonaros, the Orbans, the Dudas, the Putins etc, respond entirely by using brutal force to deal with the crises through those who show any opposition to them. Other political actors, from Biden to Macron, spend their time insisting on the return of the 2000's, while trying to find means that might save time by a temporarily diverted society. 

But society cannot avoid the pretence that the previous 'success' of globalisation is collapsing by the day. Not one of the current political leaderships, whether initially subtle or openly violent, inevitably fiddle with the only perspectives that they really have; splitting up their 'dangerous' working classes and its allies and / or going to war. 

The real and possible response? Action for truth. Stop, or prepare to stop, wars resulting from the dying capitalist state competitions - as with the Russian/NATO proxy battle. Retrieve decided proportions of profit to the needy. Re-establish rations once more, starting with heat and food. Wages should rise at least with inflation. Creating direct public votes for key decisions. Starting a new peoples' society increases the rights of those who face drastic decline. Introduce the increasing power of the vast majority. Hidden change created by backward politics and politicians that pretend that they will give us an apparently previous status quo, has to be swept away, in favour of the new practical political reality.

Brian Heron

Ukraine; tragedy and farce.

The tragedy; the NATO proxy war between the Ukraine and Russia is creating swathes of the dead and dying, which, at worse, is pushing the eventual road to a possible nuclear death. And at its 'best' NATO will create yet another total collapse of Russia, the largest country in the world, as a result of a hollow, western 'victory'. The farce; well, just look at Boris and his clowns all firing away behind his own British type NATO called JEF. It was built after eight years of UK pressure. Boris is now apparently the leader of the 'anti-Russia coalition', and now has just overthrown seventy years of neutrality in Sweden and Finland. 

NATO has swollen drastically since the East German wall fell. The Russian leaders, including Gorbachev, agreed that the wall and East Germany would not be over-run, so long as NATO, then with 12 members, did not move across eastern and northern Europe. What happened? NATO rolled eastward and now northward and at present has 30 members. The new honour of Britain's JEFF will add 2 more. Britain's public-school gurus have always wanted a medium type war since the banking crisis of 2008 as a result of the utter military failures of the UK in the Middle East. A serious diversion is also called for in order to cover up the UK's increasing failure in their economy and between its increasingly separate nations.

The good old BBC offers daily summaries about the various results of the battles in the Ukraine. The corporation is careful to make it clear that the BBC cannot exactly offer a fully true description of the military movements, their 'successes' or their 'failures'. From time to time various speculations emerge about the wider canvass and huge considerations bubble up. These bubbles, like the 'withdrawn' of Putin in his speech on May 9 victory parade, when his war planes did not fly because of the rain, was an example. It caused a plethora of commentator sensations. Before the destruction of Mariupol, Ukraine was right, said the western pundits. Ukraine was going to win! Then the battle of Mariupol was over and those creeping but progressing Russians were going to make it a matter of years. Then some BBC 'experts' discovered that the Russians were 8% down on their economy but the Ukraine was 30 to 50% down. (The UK is on 9% inflation.) Oh no! More quick calculations discovered that for Ukraine's recovery it would require much more than the Marshall plan that the US re-built for Germany in 1945 - 8! A new hesitant wave in the West is now speculating about a possible truce.  

Boris's farce continues. He has his war and another battle with the EU. He desperately hopes that the war and the EU clatter will be enough to grab the next General Election. The real crisis in Britain is the shocking collapse of wages, of the millions that are now one and a half percent more declining than the pressure on the wealthy, of the collapsing health and welfare systems and of the mass poverty and hunger. 

The breakup of capitalist globalisation.

Recently President Biden asked the Saudis to open up more OPEC oil in order to reduce the staggering costs of fuel in the West and to reduce the role of the particular horde owned by Russia. Mohamed bin Salman, Saudi's Crown Prince (and known as the murderer of journalist Jamil Khashoggi) refused point blank. He is close to Jared Kushner, Trump's son in law. Notwithstanding Jared's lack of experience he has just recently invested $2 billion in his new investment firm. All of course incidental. And all another  small part of the increasing mangling of the greatest proposition of modern capitalism; that of globalisation.   

The collapse of globalisation and its results have been with us before Covid. But Covid and now an east-west war have rapidly increased the coming capitalist break up. Shell has just reported their largest quarter profit ever; $9 billion. BP, Shell bosses etc., are all hugely delighted. But they are also all frightened -  between the clink of champaign glasses and the scary future. For example BP has said that they were aching to offer a windfall tax! The British Tory government declined, so far stating that these companies are going to need their super pile for worthy investment when the oil runs out. Meanwhile Shell needs to increase their pile saying that it will be used as a windfall to buy back company shares, which will increase their company's stock. They are laughing but they smell a crash to come. We are no longer in the great, worldwide, constant, global miracle. Capitalism has always collapsed in its centuries of domination. But this time, after every means that have been used, a global economic catastrophe is the worst so far. And this particular collapse is already being threatened with nukes.

Look around. The 10 leading shipping lines in the world are in profit in 2021 to the record of $120 billion; the highest profits in 117 years. That is in Covid times. In February 2022, the 'investment monitor' tells us that 'the constraining supply and pushing prices up' and globalisation as we know it is gradually on the retreat and 'US-Chinese-trade tensions (are) rising levels of protectionism everywhere.' Shipping, the most important mechanism of globalisation, unstuck up to now from any particular country or tax, is declining fast.

Do you like bread? Global food crises are erupting. Tom Stevenson in the LRB explains the coming catastrophe. Just in case, as is often described by scared politicians, it was all Covid causing these crises. But it is just not so. While Ukraine and Russia account for huge parts of the export of grain, particularly Sudan, which in this case will double its acute hunger to 18 million in the next couple of months, more generally the Food, Agriculture Organisation states that the war 'revealed the fragility of the dominant global food system.' Egypt, Lebanon, Syria etc etc, are facing starvation in the millions. The World Food Program tells us 'an unparalleled global hunger crisis' is ahead.' Stevenson states 'an important part of the story has to do with the movements of poorly regulated commodities markets, dominated ... by a handful of financial institutions and corporations. Investor speculation drove the price of food out of the reach of most of the world's poor during the economic crisis of 2008.'  

Does any thinking person, somebody not already yet crushed by war and starvation, avoid the conditions to come? The portents are with us all. Of course 'nicer' leaders than Trump, or his extremely unpleasant echoes, can be found in abundance, but what are we understanding? The old 'nice' leaders have already failed. They failed because their decades of the status quo has failed. The leaders that have insisted on the status quo cannot believe that their domination cannot, anymore, set themselves in the history of Western capitalism because its history has gone and Jared Kushner grabs the wealth. It is particularly in the shrinking west, that the traditional leaderships have been creating their own downfall. 

There are now two roads in the current life of today's capitalism. China's The Belt and Road Initiative is a global infrastructure strategy adopted by the Chinese government in 2013 to invest in nearly 70 countries and international organisations. A third of it has already been broken up by corruption. But the two great movements through Africa and the East, led by China, is an effective construction against the West's imperialist long histories. China, using their $ trillions-plus to create a Chinese led, state capitalism, development, strikes a new and positive capitalist turn in low and medium developed countries. The US, of a Biden or a Trump type basis will ultimately go to war to prevent China's new empire against US hegemony. 

The second path of late capitalism has already partly started. Centred in the crucible of the West, a thorough and essential destruction of all the social benefits in society is the only means of revivifying a new capitalism's increasing progress in respect of the ruling classes and their police, army etc.. Again, as with the China proposal, the result will be war, but internal of the sort that Trump began in his fight for the 'States'. Capitalism will not, despite the mechanical theorists that see inevitable stages that draw definitive lines in history, simply fade away. But its future is now much more limited in its possibilities.

The alternative? The second wave of socialism. Is there any other holistic alternative that is based on human needs and the right of self organisation, on the collective requirement of all equals, the control of all human discovery and a planet supported for life?    

    

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.