West politics and revolution

Western politics is in a dangerous mess. A wild set of half-way indications are breaking out from the previous post WW2 settlements. It has created political melees. As yet nothing is permanently settled. But forceful trends are competing and are at loose. 

Biden has not managed to blow Trump away. Trump remains supported in a solid third of the electorate. And the overwhelming structure of the Republican Party is still attached to Trump. They calculate that there is nowhere else to go. Trump has established his place as an oligarchic in the US and the Republican Party as his personal popular movement. 

Germany is about to lose Merkel, which is facing the widest uncertainty for the coming elections since the fusion with East Germany. France's mini-Bonaparte, Macron, has failed regarding his plans with the EU and with the technical, de-classe future that he offered to France's 'new' population. He launched his attack and produced a revolt as a result of his Thatcherite labour policy. His party is expiring as quickly as it was born. Sweden's navigation is diminishing - even the shared history of what is now its empty social-democracy is melting away. Denmark and the Netherlands are soaked in the immigration farrago — apparently without any alternative future to offer. Spain has recently developed a new political 'national defence' which is reducing the impact of the left's model for the future across the country. Italy may still have the worst political chaos of all the West, competing with proto-fascism and mounting corruption, but now it is threatening to rock the most coherent European society. Italy has generally managed its social coherence by broadly by-passing its politics. That is becoming the past. 

UK politics exposes the deepest change in the new type of potentially dangerous politics, second only to the US. 

There is much debate in the West about social media causing the rumpus in politics. Many, indeed almost all correspondents that study politics offer the idea that it is the social media that has changed the nature of Western politics. Certainly huge proportions of the population, especially of the young, believe that. The whole argument appears to have become a stereotype. 1. Everybody can now say what they really thought; 2. Everybody can make up their own mind by deciding that others are liars or 'on their side'. 3. Politics is an instant right and is based on perks.

We can all agree that Western politics is in trouble. What follows is a revolutionary perspective of one country, the UK.

The increasing decline of most people's lives in the UK has been obvious for decades. The main political parties in Britain have hung on to their supposed principles while they are unable to change life circumstances for most people in the British nations. The changing character of Capitalism after the 1970s did not allow social reform. The capacity to distribute gains in society became almost entirely channeled into successful wealthy global corporations and their owners. In the case of the British, especially the English and the Scottish, traditional politics had less and less purpose.  

New politics began to emerge as answers to the failures of the traditional parties. The first came out of the decaying Labour Party, with the exciting proposal of a rise of a new economy. A second, non-traditional party arose, initially around immigration and then tied itself to Brexit. And it was this step outside Parliament that reorganised the nature of the Tory Party. The Tories broke off their traditional ruling class domination and instead created a right-wing populist party mainly constructed around Brexit. 

Brexit was presented as the means to restore or rebuild money and resources from the EU to be returned and delivered to the working class in the UK - especially in the north of England and the NHS. The Tories maintained racist policies, but the importance of a democratic vote over Brexit became the more significant means to get Brexit for sure. Radical Labour's policy seemed less obvious and unsure of the Brexit offer. The ruling class also organised a huge attack on Corbyn, which reduced his credibility further. 

The Tory Party have subsequently kept a populist front, but the Tory leadership are now stressed by the lack of their promised perks in the north of England, plus the turn taken in Scotland (and increasingly Wales) to build different countries - as their answers to the decline continue to face most of their people. Additionally, a ruling class layer based in Britain is now forced to move more than ever, connecting up to a wavering US. The new Tory Party is as fragile as their empty schemes that they claim to make better for the working lives in the UK. Consequently, their enormous majority of Tory MPs and their constant nonsense about the future of the UK will blow away with any one of their major crises. The question is not how the Tories can possibly keep 'winning' (or indeed if Labour can ever win again). This is also not a social media resolution. The new politics will break through by decisions that most people across the UK believe are the most potent to raise their living standards. 

A new country designed already as a single radical Ireland, is moving close. Scottish independence has two exceptional bases for its future, away from the declining England, which is only just beginning to realise that they have won nothing and are going nowhere. Renewables met 97% of Scotland's electricity demand in 2020. This is the second, and now ecological, North Sea abundance that Scotland will demand. Additionally, the Scandinavian block, although under the pressure of the general capitalist decline, is still supporting much higher social conditions, managing close to 50% corporate taxes and having high level welfare more than anyone else in Europe, including Germany. As far as Scotland is concerned, Scandinavia is a much more promising future than an attachment to England, which is in rapid decline. 

Such developments in Ireland and Scotland will not be determined  by nationalist arguments in supreme courts and the decisions of the divine Westminster; they will be bitter fights and struggles. This is the beginning of the revolution. The will to fight will need to be led by the young, not lawyers, in fights with the state, mainly in direct action against the police; those who want the nukes out and those who don't; those who want an end to the UK's history of imperial wars and tax havens, and those who don't;  those see a future of small nations bent mainly on social objectives and those who don't. In other words the new revolution has to show its positive future to the people in its majority.

Brexit was a fake in terms of building a positive future for ordinary people. But the Brexit millions made what was a huge decision. New parties sprung up. Movements forced their views against the media. Traditional parties either melted or were changed utterly from their historic foundations. Immense politics like these will inevitably get larger. Already Manchester and London are fighting the Tory Parliament without care of the large number of Tory MPs. And the cities, particularly Manchester and Liverpool, are designing their own conditions. The political shocks will come fast. The new revolution will show the action of the Brexit and Grenfell type - and more. To win, beyond the Brexit story, the revolution must act again - on the basis of a clear, new future, which all can see and understand. To succeed it must be direct. Westminster is secondary.  

The £2 Trillion debts that are owned by the Tories in Westminster will drastically demonstrate the collapse of wages, of labour rights, of free education, of health and welfare. The decline for most of the British population described earlier will drop like a stone. Movements and parties, in the recent memories, can split up to defend rights, re-establish the local utilities, take over banks and deny the debt until the wealth of the country and those who own it, distribute it for all. The UK, led by an Etonian mini Trump, will not hold. A different future has to be formed and acted upon. A revolutionary perspective has begun to emerge in the wavering UK.  

Building the new futures in Northern Ireland, in Scotland and in England and Wales; for the new Ireland, overthrowing Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, starting from the radical Sinn Fein; in Scotland winning the Scots to a future that throws out Westminster's domination in politics and in action; in England, learning the lesson that new politics can win in action and a new economy must be built to survive on all fronts. This is the start of the new revolutions. It is the future.

When a slave master had his statue thrown in the river, that was the future. It was connected to 'Black Lives Matter' which British politicians insist is not political. Why? Because it is political. It is the political necessity of bringing down the police and its total reorganisation. It was the direct action of millions to drastically change something that has always been vile. Together, with the developments of new futures, the new revolution begins. 

There are (at least) two versions of hegemony. Coming out of western politics in the 1920s and 1930s, the analysis of the Italian Communist Party, made by studying Antonio Gramsci in his prison writings, saw the West as developed states and societies that meant it was possible to 'win' these elements, socially and practically and overcome capitalism. This crude analysis required endless arguments over Gramsci's works. Now a second variant has 'naturally' born.

When the Grenfell fire (14 June 2017) created a movement about how wretched their condition was; the deep inequalities; the total failure and fear of the parliament and the government over Grenfell for weeks; the main features of the cities and the emerging momentum of 'the ordinary people' Grenfell became the leadership of society. Grenfell was a few hundred people. But they led the country and inspired the feelings of millions. In the context of flash-bang social media, of endless political humbug, of unconnected politics, the 'big ordinary' became dominant. This is the hegemony of the new revolution. 

Brexit had elements of it, even to the extent of the final decision on Brexit, which became the right of democracy rather than immigration or the UK's glorious past.  The NHS are about to enter a battle that will, if the rank and file take the lead, do the same. From these concrete, risen moments comes the new revolution. The next step of the revolution is the combining of the new hegemony

New revolutions.

Many political and social organisations are raising their banners for 'revolution'. Even Britain has a part of the picture; from small left organisations and groups, to the BBC that runs a program about post Covid revolutionary change. Nearer the core, from Hong Kong, through to Myanmar, Afghanistan, Sudan, Belarus, Poland, Hungary, Columbia, Senegal, Thailand (against the army and monarchy), Peru, anti-Modi movements in India, actual revolts are emerging. From the West's point of view, there are also numerous direct-actions against governments and states. For example, the Gilet Juanes remain active across local France (while regional voting is very low, including the fascists vote.) Most significantly of all in the West is the conflict against US racist police, the occupation of the US Capitol and the reduction of the franchise across many US states, further reducing non-white suffrage. The US is building up into a genuine insurgency. 

 

By mid-June 2021, 17 US States had provided 28 laws designed to stop black voters. 14 States installed 19 such laws in 2020. The Supreme Court is largely accepting the rights of these laws so far. The Brennan Centre for Justice, based at New York University School of Law, has stated the new laws are 'an unprecedented assault on voting rights' and 'voter suppression effort we have not seen since the likes of Jim Crow.'  

 

The multi-versions of calls for revolutions are not mainly the products of any pandemic. Revolutionary speculation and tentative action are not surprising in current conditions. Particularly in the previously world-dominant West, momentous shifts in both politics and economics have broken-down the post WW2 consensus and thereby the Western domination of the globe. 

 

The West created their supremacy over large parts of the world during centuries - initially via the 'discovery' (read extermination) of the Americas, together with Britain's industrialisation of slavery. The peak of the West's domination was the period from the French Revolution to the British Empire, followed finally by US hegemony across the globe. This was 250 years of the  capitalist-type of politics and economies which defined the West - as the basis of all significant human progress on the planet.

 

But the peak of the West's authority is now over. The West is in relative decline in virtually all aspects of modern civilisation. Progress in all levels of the West are slowing or reversing - most obviously in comparison with the development of the 20th century and the advance of the previously under-developed Far East. 

 

As a result, the politics of the West has become more and more tangled and mangled. Created from the wealth of imperialism, western politicians were often able to absorb the pressure from their own working classes, accepting parties that both bridged demands for reform but which also supported the capitalist status quo. Nations in the West began over decades (albeit reluctantly) to widen their franchises under the force of the working classes and women's demands. (They obviously denied any votes that dealt with the key organisations of wealth - whenever they could.) 

 

Now, the shift of the West's politics is based on its growing global weakness and the bulk of western nations allow no serious reforms whatsoever. The traditional parties for reform have largely disappeared or been broken up. Biden's desperate attempt to re-enact the 'New Deal' is the one, last, shot by the world's largest capitalist country. Biden is trying to make major, if one-off, concessions for the working class, as a means of invigorating the immediate current in the US economic decline (and thereby blocking the emerging prospects of a US proto-fascism.)  

 

Today, the West's main supposedly democratic politics has become a ridiculous show and it is largely treated as such by most of the electorate. Even if voting is high, cynical responses are continually prevalent. Meanwhile the century long extension of the expansion of the franchise is now retracting - in Europe via the economic leadership of the banks led EU - in the US via the recalcitrant States that exclude non-white voters, and in the UK, via new rules that are being legislated against voter-checks as well as curbing protest movements. 

 

Behind the scenes, it was and is the western economic engine, rather than manic politics as such, that is creating the decay. To get to the heart of the matter; from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Century, two enormous, economic forces effectively ran the economic world. The greatest part was the role of Western imperialism. Imperialism decided the economic motion of most of humanity, from world wars, to banks, from the rape of Africa, to the glory of the City of London and the final domination of New York. 

 

The second, and the other more minor economic emergent across the world, was the 1917 and 1947 revolutions. This created a different and independent economic development. This, new and conscious revolutionary step fought against imperialism from 1917 onwards. The toilers' successful struggles in Russia, then later in China, were both independent of imperialism, but rapidly, in turn, the toilers faced a privileged bureaucracy that degenerated, through ‘the Party’ in the USSR and the Army in China. Via the grasp of the ruling bureaucracies, taking away the control of any democratic power of the working classes, a new, self-constructed class of bureaucrats delivered their political domination against their worker's democracy. They further centralised themselves in the immense efforts required in the great wars that came after the revolutions. Nevertheless, the 1917 and 1948 initial breakthroughs, despite their political failures, maintained their resistance from Western Imperialism.   

 

Following the World Wars, the dominant bureaucratic layers in the USSR and China defended themselves by blocking any further control of Western international imperialism in their own countries. But, increasingly, the bureaucracies tried to gain concessions from Western imperialism around their parts of the world - given that in their own countries' their control would be able to continue. The result of this so called 'peaceful co-existence' ultimately led to the contradiction and the crash of the Soviet Union - a collapse without any direct western intervention as such - and which now once more shakes the paradox of China's state capitalism, whose contradictions and power are rapidly facing the break-up of globalisation. 

 

The US ruling class, led by both Trump and Biden, demand the reduction of Chinese development. Unlike the decay of the UK vis a vis the USA, the US ‘will not gently go into that night’ when it comes to the Chinese leadership's further development. Why? Because ultimately Chinese state capitalism, despite its immense 'success', is not led by capitalism! It is led by the politics of the Chinese bureaucracy and its formidable Chinese Army.    

 

The West maintains a continuing difficulty with its declining global domination, both economically and politically. Imperialism is weaker now since any time of its history. The defeat of the 20-year war in Afghanistan is yet another proof. In China in particular, the second greatest capitalist economic system in the world, is still controlled by a bureaucratic, state-capitalist state, designed to increase development, but outside of the West's so-called world-wide free-market and competition. The overall global acceptance of this clearly incoherent economic and political process, which promoted the world into globalisation, is already a ten-year capitalist project that is failing - mired by the mass of its own contradictions.

 

This increasingly dramatic background produces speculative arguments about change rising across the globe. (One evidence is the list of unsettled countries mentioned at the beginning of this essay.) In the West there is clearly a disequilibrium in respect of institutions that were previously accepted for decades as solid and successful. Meanwhile, again across the world, there is very little positive sense among the majority that the future will improve, especially among youth. Social polls and surveys constantly tell us tell us that large parts of developed countries see the old order as corrupted and failing in their goals. But this itself is not revolution. These are only the beginnings of conditions for revolution.

 

The difficulties that the working class and youth face in most of the world's countries are the growing pressures that increasingly limit the possibility of achieving reasonable lives. Revolution only begins when these social layers and their allies identify the politics and economics that are creating the barriers to the lives they need and seek. Work, including the absence of work, pinpoints social exploitation. But this is still only one of the new conditions necessary for the next wave of revolutions. 

 

Taking one example; the UK’s working class, particularly the youth, is almost entirely organised in service industries and mainly paid by the minimum wage. The public sector comes second, but is highly ranked and ‘professionalised.’ Both sectors have little or no trade union support. A large number of older workers, especially in house-building (and a significant sector of youth working particularly on internet arrangements) have been broken down into a more traditional petit bourgeoise condition – where ‘single’ labour is personalised, without legal conditions, and personal ownership, not collective bargaining, is seen as more beneficial. The current political implications in the UK include significant parts of the re-creation of the traditional political parties – where immediate responses as with immigration, Brexit or Grenfell or pork-barrel local offers, become the superior questions. And state politics reflects or sets up rapidly developed leaderships, based on immediate, dominant issues, often repeated by fascists today.   

 

More widely, social exploitation is also identified by the millennia of women's lives and of racism, now deepened by the enormity of current capitalism, but which were planted in all the stages of human existence, right from the start of thousands of years in all class-based social control. These long-lived horrors of the past (and the present) are now connecting with more immanent crises of the climate. The climate is now an immediate context of destruction and exploitation. And, as with the long-term failures of all the class-based stages of history, climate has now added its own immediate critical decay in what will be seen in the future as the capitalist period, second only to its economic crises. 

 

The first socialist wave must therefore be improved on a much wider base than 1917 or 47. Socialism must be expanded by its second wave; moving beyond mass industrial labour and basic development that remains particularly in China and South East Asia.  

 

What was the first revolution and what is now the new, second revolution? 1917 and 1947 won their development. (And 'development' still remains the most important feature for two thirds of humanity - albeit not necessarily via traditional industry.)  Winning traditional 'development' today, in the conditions of the final and decaying global capitalism, will not work. Copies of Soviet Russia even in the positive period of 1917 - 24, or indeed even now, with the Chinese state capitalism, are frankly far too limited and futile in their scope. 

 

Of course, the tremendous rise of millions out of poverty was led by a unique 'development' in China. And, paradoxically, it would not have taken place without the first stage of revolution, which cornered its own capitalism and used the defeats and weaknesses of Western imperialism. But globalisation is now breaking down. And the Chinese bureaucracy are desperately holding on to their capitalism at the moment of its most contradictions. The Chinese leadership simultaneously ache for western style 'development' in terms of the most modern technology, and at the same time the leading capitalist nation, the US, is determined to reverse China's state-led capitalism. The Chinese leadership has arrived to the climax of its own state development. The question now is war or the next revolution? 

 

The next revolution cannot be about maintaining development alone. It is no longer enough. The fight to come is the fight for a different civilisation. The first revolution turned out to be the battle for development. A halfway battle. The second socialist wave of revolutions needs to challenge and overwhelm our increasingly dangerous decline of capitalism.   

 

What then is the keynote to both accept development for all and to sweep away the rulers and their capitalist systems in the west and the bureaucracies that fought for their own dominations? Sorry. This will not be managed by requiring a new Lenin, with a longer life, or a Trotsky, this time who managed to overthrow a Stalin, or a more painted-up Bolshevik Party, however attractive such answers might feel. The second wave of socialist revolution will need to be much wider. It will need to make a plan that will have to apply the collective watchword, in all the aspects of civilisation, as 'equality.' Equality has to apply from every child's rights to the largest organisations on the planet. The second wave will aim for an end to exploitation, to class rule, to second-rate gender, racism, undistributed wealth, privileged politics, all becoming unacceptable, as equality becomes the condition of all parts of humanity. The second socialist revolutionary wave is the struggle for deep equality, based initially and frontally on the working class and its allies. But the removal of the quivering and increasingly dangerous capitalist system is, obviously, only the first step that will need organised collective development wherever it is necessary and full equality whenever it is possible.

 

In a nutshell a new revolution is not and cannot be a repeat of the revolutionary past and neither can it be described as a set of would-be social democratic demands from an already brutalising state and a more and more hazardous economy. The second wave of revolutions should aim for a different civilisation, where development, as such, is won via equality and where the undoubtedly necessary new states becomes subordinate to equal democracy in all matters.

 

The new state powers in the new revolution (following the unfortunate but almost inevitable clash of war with the core of the old capitalist states’ systems) will be subordinate to the new politics. The new politics will be held by the premier right of all those who agree to support the decisions of collective democracy and who reject the old rules. That could include all 16 plus youth, all toilers that rely on work to live, but also political parties, commissions, and movements. The new democracy will decide all major actions that will be delivered by the state. 

 

The committees of the revolution – open to all who promote the revolution – will defend the new democracy, test the delivery and the implementation the democratic decisions. The order described above, as we begin the new civilisation, will be crucial.

 

But what are these speculations, yet to be created and managed by the second wave of socialism? Are they just a set of fantastical propositions, down even to specific organisations, that amount to unsold and unknown pie-in-the-sky? Perhaps. However, the historical development of the human race has taken definite stages, stages with definable conditions across the millenniums. Great Empires have risen and then have fallen – as technology or climate or limits of growth have changed. In all of these steps involving human development, or its decline, no conscious human understanding has applied itself to the shifts and breaks that have pushed and pulled the sections of the human race as each of the civilisations were gradually built up and then broken down. Humans sought Gods and demons to understand the nature of their world. Even the early dominant capitalist system, that spread across the world from the 16^th onward, was barely understood as such. Indeed, understanding  of general systems of society, made with specific and definite engines that were dominated by ruling classes, economics, politics and wars, were beyond material analysis until the second half of the 19^thcentury. 

 

The first wave of socialism, started by the Paris Commune, which rolled, finally, upto the Vietnam war, was the first effort by human society to define and create a new society. There had been idealistic notions before; from the French Revolution onwards. But the critical shift of the first wave of socialism was to understand class and the material movement that had to be used to overthrow ruling classes. The pivot of capitalism had to be replaced by the rule of the enormous majority of toilers as the democratic leadership of a different society. 

 

The first wave of socialism, as we have seen, became partial and is itself reaching a potentially declining stage. The demand, at all costs, to place first ‘development’ was a partial success – including the retreat of imperialist powers. But using capitalism, led by a state-capitalist bureaucratic class, has now reached the contradiction summed up by China and the US as well as the marginalisation of the big majority of society. As we have seen, ‘peaceful co-existence’ is over. The first wave of socialism was unable to provide for the majority of humanity. It could not move into a new civilisation and the dangers of the decline of capitalism, the breakdown of politics and war, means that the second wave is essential. 

 

To begin the shape of the new revolution we seek blocs - which will bring together all of the parts of work, organisations, active unions, society and politics who demand the end of current danger and decay and who favour equality. Second, we seek circles based in the population that decide what the exploited need action for change and the measures to get it. Third we need referenda on all major state and political decisions, organised equally across society with a state that primarily carries out those decisions.  

 

In summary, that is how the new revolution defines itself. Of course, it is crucial to understand what became of the half-revolutions in 1917 and 1947. They succeeded in fighting back imperialism and they achieved the economic development of their people for a time. But those were revolutions of the most internally violent and oppressive cost. To 'win' development in the face of the violence of imperialism was a great measure for all humanity. But the paradox was that it was the internal, counter revolutionary processes in the evolution of the revolutions, and not just the attacks of the capitalist nations, that destroyed one success in the Soviet Union and now that threatens China. 

 

 

(Note; The conditions and history of both Cuba and Vietnam both have stepped beyond simple development as their focus. The political developments of both those societies need to be studied independently of the Soviet Union and today's China.) 

 

Biden building a new democracy?

President Biden has been defending US democracy. He has to. Trump is about to go to his Summer rallies. QAnon conference speakers, assembling mass audiences, suggest the overthrow of the Biden government on the basis that Trump really won the Presidential Election. States, led by Texas, are cutting the franchise for potentially poor and non-white voters. During 2021 States will be partially voting for the Senate (currently held by the Democrats by one vote) and the House of Representatives. 

The US has a well known history of Democrats and Republicans mounting filibusters and meddling with  votes. The particular significance in today's case is that Biden's Democrats have no intention of fiddling the vote - as an organised purpose - but the Republicans, including nearly all of its leadership, are designing exactly that. The GOP proposes to drop democratic measures and instead has decided to create a new(ish) political formation - mainly independent of the norms of US democratic consent. 

If the GOP break into a Senate majority this year it will freeze Biden and extend the polarisation that has been building since the huge failures of Clinton, Bush and Obama. In reality the US right-wing, bolstered by key states, are moving towards the subordination of the US's shaky democracy in favour of a virtual dictatorship and, if resisted, to a version of another civil war. 

The reduction of the franchise is now a regular feature of Western's dwindling democracies. Frankly it is a response to what was becoming dangerous possibilities, where key structures that managed big economics (and therefore politics) were breaking down. The EU and its response to the 2008 crash began to dissolve its domination, which is still happening. Britain cracked via a democratic referendum. It is still now wobbling from its previous core foundations - the EU dependancy, the City of London and the unity of the UK are all in trouble. 

The crisis of globalisation and its effects began initially to move movements in the West in order to demand blocking immigration. This has polarised too. Over three or four years, most particularly in Germany, France, the UK and even now the US, the fear of immigration has declined, becoming instead a hard-line minority social base in the population, but considerably lower than the main, majority demands. The top requirements now are seeking good jobs, health, homes and schools, all below immigration. 

The requirement to use democratic means has never been more essential, as the post-war West collapses under pressure of the East and of the fragility of globalisation. But what has happened is the leaderships in the West are becoming less and less willing to use what was always limited, democratic responses to the crisis.  Several western countries are now are reducing their franchises - which from the 1930s onward had always been expanding. Police measures are being prepared to block public mass-action. The end of Covid 19 will test the real relation of forces in the West as the people come onto their streets for reform. This, in turn, will test the Trumpet cult in the US, the fascists across France, Italy and the UK. Sadly, but essentially to understand, the battle will become more and more combined with direct parts of the state - that is, if popular change appears to break through. 

A new democracy? A new democracy will not emerge from any aspect of the current conditions available in the West - as the western countries continue to reduce democratic means to deal with their crises. Corbyn was blocked, to pieces; now Biden faces the US right. The situation remains open. Two certainties will apply. There will be conflict across the West. Some will want it to be a confrontation with China, others, part two of the US civil war. The battle in the UK will be initially the future of Ireland and Scotland. Europe is disaggregating in various directions. A second certainty will be facing an economy that doesn't work any more. It will be the most dangerous and most international moment in the history of modern capitalism.  

 

Friday, 28 May 2021

The decline of Western democracy. 

Recently in Britain a self-centred, would-be political genius, Dominic Cummings, denounced the Health Secretary for his lies and for both Secretary Hancock and the Prime Minister, Johnson, for their mistakes that meant 'tens of thousands' had died unnecessarily in the Covid 19 pandemic. Cummings had run the Brexit campaign, which brought Johnson and the Tories roaring into government and placed himself, for a month or two, as the guru of British politics. The guru rapidly discovered his plummeting fate. Johnson had fitted up his own holy man - himself. The 'political genius' therefore finally decided to become a rich(er) nobody - for now. Funny, if it was not so dangerous.

Here is another advisor. This one, Paul Krugman, is, unlike Cummins, the genuine article. He won the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics. He is a sustained 'New Keynesian' economist and supports Biden so far. A few days ago he published 'The banality of democratic collapse' in the New York Times. 

Cummings attacked Hancock as a complete disaster and Johnson as an 'unfit Prime Minister'. That was the main issue for the media. More interesting was Cummings's version of the three failures of the state and government that he also proscribed in his 7 hour prattle to a Parliamentary Committee. The failures were -  not accepting outside genii to run things; basing a government in peril because of its chopped up parts that ran separately under the civil servants; - and allowing the single horror of the PM to have the power to decide everything. (Both Johnson and Corbyn were called 'donkeys controlling lions'.)

Cummings sees the weakness and errors of Britain's state and government from the platform of his own brilliance (now swept away) and the dominating bureaucracy (which also stood in his way.) His main reform in answer to Britain's crisis was to set up combined leadership groups, led by a scintillated leader like himself (not elected) to 'get it done', managing the organisation over everybody's head!  

Krugman's essay offered a quite different study of western politics in the US. The incipient role of the Good Old Party, the (new) Republicans in particular, were dismantled and explained as a warning in respect of the US democracy. 

Essentially, Krugman exposed the new Republican Party as a turning point in the US. The example of this turn was the continued maintenance of Trump's central role, not just among a public layer but in the continuing leadership of the Republican Party. That leadership now overwhelmingly supports Trump's political direction, and, most significantly, the obviously hysterical notion of the so-called theft of Trump's presidential vote. It is patently obvious that the vote was not 'faked'. Yet all of the major leaders of the GOP maintain the fake. This amounts to a clear shift in the US's party structures.

The Democratic Party remains a coalition of various parts of the US (no doubt mostly directed by New York and the West Coast wealth). The GOP also retains parts of the US's capital and wealth but is doing something new. It is continuing to build a cult. And the cult subordinates the (albeit dubious) public democracy up to now in order to fuse together a permanent social block, based on racism and patriotism. The block will undoubtedly be manipulated. Today it is the fantasy horror of the Democrat's socialism. Yesterday over 40 states already reduced the franchise under the screen of 'sly immigrants' and criminal, read African-Americans. Tomorrow something else. Texas has just destroyed abortion tights. These initiatives flow into the cultist construction, setting up the 'Good Old' America that will be run by the GOP. 

What is this? It is the systemic narrowing of what previously stood for western democracy. Of course the developed West has never actually used democracy to manage and run the place. Most of the important decisions rarely found their way via the franchise from the 1920s onwards. Capital determined the flow of decisive politics. Since WW2 certain shibboleths were set up to 'manage' what certainly could not and would not be managed by any western type democracy. In the UK, first Empire, then the City of London coupled with 'there is no alternative' ran the show. In the US, world capitalist domination was promoted with anything other than a vote. In Europe, the EU and the German Banks decided europeans' fates. 

But here is today's paradox. Even Cumming senses something shifting about what Covid 19 and the new type of PM that now, apparently, stands for britishness. Krugman spells out that the republican leadership, half of republican America, are openly deciding to dump even their dubious democracy in the US, in favour of changing their main political machine. 

The paradox in the so-called democratic West is that the West has discovered that it is now that it has to find a real role in the new decade for their parliaments and senates. Global capitalism is faltering. And if the parliament and senates cannot be seriously controlled, a la Trump or the EU, then they will need to be replaced. We see the fringes of that across Eastern Europe, in Macron's mini Napoleonic domination, the shift of the British Tory Party, plus the new set of curbs on voters and the increased police powers against real democratic, public, action. One way or another states in the West will have to recoup in the fading light of international capitalism and the global successes of the past. And accept their previously carefully managed democracies, which are under greater strain than anytime since the revolutions in the early 20th Century. 

The direction is clear for the West's apparent democracy. As globalisation subsides so state measures will be needed to maintain economics via politics. If the politics do not work, what democracy remains will be shaved, dictator by dictator, to the bone. The alternative is a deep and real democracy, starting with the economy we need and want.   

The greatest political crisis

Andrew Marr was the political Editor of the BBC from 2000 to 2005. He is now running his own Sunday morning show. He is well known in the UK media but most people of course will have never heard of him. But he does have a significant role in the political world of the UK, so when when he hinted about his own views it is worth a look. When he was asked at first Marr restrained himself. 

"I cannot tell you now because I will lose my job." 

But then he did offer a general, wider perspective of his judgement of future politics. He commented in an interview with Ruth Wishart in the Glasgow Aye Write Book Festival -  

"At some point I want to get out." This is not all he said. "What I would say safely is that I think we are going to go through a period of politics - the next 20 years - much more turbulent and much more interesting and testing and challenging that anything we have seen in the last 10 years, which has been big enough." This blog agrees with that view. But Marr's predictions are countered by a big majority of modern prophets, at least in the West, who see the future as 'getting better all the time'. Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, particularly those anchored in the main universities, at the top of corporations etc., claim the future is mainly bright. So we look at some of the biggest potential milestones that suggest Marr's more dubious and turbulent future. 

Consider war.

There are great conjunctions that generally criss-cross the world. In no particular order, and accepting the interconnection between and across all of these suggestions, we start with the most dangerous - the place of modern wars.

Right away there is a legion of pundits that promote denials about modern wars. Compared with the 20th century they argue that, so far, wars have been smaller and less deadly. Look, they say, humanity is becoming more sensible and less-accepting of war. The world is getting less violent. Hmm.

Oneearthfuture.org is a public US organisation that exists to oppose war. It has studied the measure of the relative comparisons of wars in recent centuries. It is well known and its particular focus is not aligned in any political direction. Recently, an OEF study was published, 'Is there really evidence for a decline of War?' The significance of this publication was an inclusion of sizes of population that was first taken into account in the number of battle deaths. The limit of the analysis was the definition of wars as interstate wars, not including civil wars. The conclusion is presented as follows; 'the last two decades (up to 2020) have indeed been more peaceful than average...On the other hand, the statistical record provides little, if any, evidence that this recent peaceful period represents a long term decline in interstate war.'

A short term absence of the major state to state war, measured for example by WW2 - and its 70 million war deaths, offers several reasons for hesitation among the rulers of big states. The death roll; the impact of atomic war; the refusal of large scale (mainly) working class people in the front lines; all of these seem insoluble - for the moment - in any sort of major state to state conflicts. As a result, virtually all of the state wars since 1945 that have happened were imperialist adventures, most of which have caused immense destruction, made the victim countries worse and barely achieved the large states' goals.

The idea that is generally led by US scholars, believing in a Pax USA, and that are now still hovering on the rather sickly 'End of History' flag, may like to consider that the US is only just now deploying from its longest ever - and its most failing 14 year, Afghanistan war.

And the dangers of war now? Certainly we can drop any idea that humanity has any current power to decide for (or against) war. Sadly, humanity does not get to decide wars. It is people like Trump, with his denunciation of China's plague, that initiate wars.  Indeed, the political rash of wars, that demonstrate, over and over again, that Western imperialism, in particular, constantly loses its imperialist wars (albeit that it often destroys the countries that finally heave the imperialists out) is therefore shifting the new war theories of the generals.  Paradoxically, large states against other large states and civil wars are, once more, preparing future agendas. In the Pentagon, the argument is now about winning a first strike in favour of keeping down the enemy, or a good, old, normal war, together with parallel threats about the nukes. (4315 US nukes now available.)

How has this new shift - preparing a full-on, major state to major state war and civil wars - happening? It is the decline of capitalism-imperialism and the subsequent waning economics of the US that is the present answer. Countries, like Britain, accepted their decline - but only after success in the Napoleonic wars and failure after 2 of the greatest wars in the 20th century. That is why the US is preparing for war.

Consider young people. 

The World Economic Forum spells out the conditions of youth today, across the globe and from the recent past. 42% of all people in the world, including children, are 25 years old or less. 18% of the world's people are 18 years to 25 years old. Nearly half of the world's young live in sub-Sahara, Africa.

In 1995 there were 200 million children in conflict areas, in 66 wars. By 2016, 357 million children were in 52 wars and conflict areas. 

In 2000 there were 377.5 million children in schools. In 2016, 263.0 were in schools.

Between 1997 and 2017 the overall youth population (above 16) grew by 139 million, while the youth labour force shrank by 35 million. 70.9 million were unemployed in 2017 and that is rising.

Despite the decreasing condition for young people, 49% saw Climate Change 39% saw Conflicts and Wars and 31% saw Inequality as their overwhelming problems. 56% disagreed that their countries considered young people's views.

There is little to add, except the growing political anger of the newest generation that, including advanced western countries, are perfectly aware of the reduction of the conditions of life that they are experiencing compared with their parents and carers.  

Consider the planet.

There is now a vast and global effort, led in action by the young, forcing the most meagre steps from the corporations and their politicians, to transform society. Such a global perspective invariably contains a number of perspectives but the increasing argument owns up the real purpose of capitalist economy and its defenders. A new version of how people could and should live is genuinely in front of daily life. It is effecting all aspects of our civilisation.

The obvious failing of the old days of roaring capitalism makes the norms of our politics and economics - our structures - more and more absurd and dangerous. There is (at the moment shielded) a fight for just who will dominate the planet. The sooner the real conditions are fully exposed, the failure and decline of capitalism, the real world wide existence of the 2 thirds who live in medium and low income nations, the danger of war will force direct action. And the realisation that the Earth and its people are the sole life that we will ever see in the universe,  demonstrates the necessity for fateful, structural change will surely break open. 

Consider wealth.

There are dozens of estimates about wealth, with all sorts of caveats. Starting (and finishing) with the Wikipedia, in 2008 1% of adults were estimated to hold 40% of world wealth. But by 2013, 1% of adults were estimated to hold 46% of the world's wealth (and around $18.5 trillion was estimated to be stored in world wide - read mainly UK - tax havens. )

This imbecilic aspect of the 'management' of a declining civilisation shrieks for itself. And the figures are getting worse. 

Consider nations.

The fundamental organisation of human activity is largely determined by classes. But two critical aspects often emerge to cloud out these facts. This is a period, which Andrew Marr has hinted, when exploited classes begin to grip and tear the false aspects offered by the ownership of the rich. The tumult he suspects 'in the next 20 years' is the inkling that the next 20 years is not just going to be quicker, noisier, with a lot of changes but also and in-fact essentially, a bitter struggle between classes. 

The aspects mentioned above include the role of the nation. Nations were truly formed in early capitalism to unify society in a common conception, with shared types of work, with types of income and expenditure, with a new and defining emergence of a specific type of personal wealth. The nation has always evoked itself to battle when lower classes demanded rights.   

But, as we see in the case in the case of Scotland and Northern Ireland, 'nation' can now be appropriated as capitalism's power reduces. In the case of the UK, the US and in some European countries, 'nations' will be part of the rolling struggle between classes - a process of many dimensions - and Mr Marr may yet be right with his 20 year prediction. 

The other vail in the struggle between the classes is that 'there is no alternative!' A nation/ruling class makes that particular syllogism or dialectic sound like a common and collective action and decision made where we are all involved in a shared requirement. In the UK, in France, strangely in the US, in Italy, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands political vails are already partly torn away. The working class have moved to bargains with their politicians. Choices are selected on the basis of key political decisions, not a sense of political commitment with the state. Of course this has both a right and left aspect. But there is little doubt that class choices now feature on the basis that they will not decide simply on prior history. Paradoxically, this begins to reduce the grip of 'nation.' 

Last comment.

Neither of the main social classes are prepared for the destruction of capitalism. But both are prepared for struggle - across a swathe of western countries, in parts of the Middle East, countries in South America, particularly Brazil, in south west Asia and both north and south Africa. 

The milestones mentioned simply give the sense of the new politics but yet its deeply under-developed  background. 

Nevertheless, capitalism, while never having been so wealthy, so apparently universal and claiming the future - it has never been so weak. 

Hard Labour

Sir Kier Starmer, Labour's shadow Prime Minister, just changed his shadow 'cabinet'. Political media were universally unimpressed. One of the many pieces of under-developed commentary that popped out of his head was a fatuous insistence that 'I will entirely take the blame (for the flat failure of Labour's recent election for councils, mayors, political police chiefs and the Welsh and Scottish partial parliaments). Sir Keir's second decision, after 'taking the blame', was to throw out key figures of his leadership - except of course, himself. Wet, wet ,wet. In the end Sir Keir had to re-install his main, shadow-cabinet minister into a new post, because she had been voted as Labour's deputy and had decided to stay.  

London, Manchester and Liverpool held the mayoral Labour vote. Manchester increased it. The Tory drive into the Midlands and the North East continued. Scotland saw the start of victory for independence and Labour came in third behind the Tories in Scotland. Only Welsh Labour could crow that they nearly won a majority in the Welsh Parliament.

Virtually every known public media pundit, from across both the unhappy right (that still worries about the PM Boris) and the ragged part of the liberal left, have suggested that the 're-construction' of the British working class is what has suddenly changed politics. But a little thought contradicts this strange idea. For example it supposes that the British working class, say those previous to the Thatcher period, would have been lapping up Sir Keir (and dumping Boris). Which would leave us today with the idea that it is the working class's political changes that are failing Sir Keir! 

On the other side, if you listen to Blair, Labour only started winning elections because it became Blair who built an empty but smarter Tory-type party! Sir Keir was too traditional for Blair. In Blair's world, the working class had changed completely. Thatcher's legacy had been swallowed. So, Sir Keir was too busy checking the water and trying to dissolve the remnants of the mass party that Corbyn had built. He did not manage to out-Tory the Tories! 

This palaver is becoming 'common sense' both inside and outside the Labour Party. But its bedrock actually emerged from the deep relationship between British Liberalism and the origins of the Labour Party. In modern times it was summed up by Blair's 'Middle Way' but there were many historical stages of LibLabism, which has become the specific feature of the British social democracy. And, in this Labourite world, it is the curious and sometimes incomprehensible 'do-ings' of the British working class that is blamed for the failure of the would-be, morally profound, Labour Party - that works so hard and without (only a few) millionaires. Now some analysts suggest Labour's political failure was a result of the worker's (new?) cultural shifts, instead of their ancient class politics ...    

So much tosh is needing to be squashed. Sure, there have been great economic, social and political changes across all the classes since 1945. And part of those changes in the British working class was certainly related to the increasing shared approaches of the two main political parties over the years. Social democracy in Britain (and in France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries) have dissolved or is dissolving. The British social democratic decline is part of a Western development. Which is part of the world wide (failing) globalisation. The social democratic parties have largely responded to this fact - but not to the actual deep and increasing decline of the real changes of the working classes. Social democracy cannot do that. It has always been set up to maintain the working class within the interests of a system that can offer reforms. Easier when you have an empire. Insoluble if the historic concessions are dissolving in thin air. 

The main features of the working class in Britain (and across the West) are the reduction of its funds. Funds are the acceptance of income, deriving from various sources. Throughout working class history, work has constantly changed. From farm labourers to car factories to private carers. The division of labour has been organised and reorganised and reorganised again in the name of profit. Today, the shift of Western workers, especially the youth, has taken a global feature in that a distribution of their labour turns more and more away from what used to be high-ended pay and resources to underdeveloped and semi-developed payment, coupled with increased work time. 

More recently, working class funds now include the diminution of public welfare that were won previously in bitter battles in parts of Europe and East Asia. Fully private old age welfare now dissolves the public remains of health and welfare. Private developments that used to provide funds for the working class are reduced or removed, as with transport and housing. In other words, the modern change in the working classes is the constant drive to remove or cut working class funds, with wages being the most heavily reduced among the young. 

Why does this elementary crisis of the working class not force politics to challenge and change a system that is so unbearable? 

Farm labourers (shoe makers, coal heavers, cotton weavers etc) found it very hard to collect their class together, bring their demands together, and to create mass action, in the early 19th century. Yet the Chartists nearly broke the most powerful state in the world. The car factory workers in the 1930's USA led the New Deal much further than FDR. Their strikes and lockdowns provoked new state governors, linked across the continent from ports in San Fransisco to the New York rag trade and increased wages and maintained employment in a desperate period. The Social Democratic politicians may have shot their bolt today. But working class people can and will again create the means to build up new unities and bring in old and new workers' unions to take up the major crises of their lives. There are new hints already surfacing. The Scottish young want independence for what? To put up flags and sing patriotic songs? No. This is a new unity beginning to work out the design for a new society. A large part of the UK NHS is working to define its base in society and the means to guarantee its resources independent of Westminster. 

To summarise; we are not getting working class decisions to 'go Tory' - anymore than the working class supported Thatcher in the 1980s. Working class people determine immediate and direct responses in what is a field, the far distant political classes, of little interest and less connection. Following the 1950s in Britain, Westminster politics as such were seen, gradually, as a deeply disinteresting part of society, largely owned by a different class. Indeed, after WW2 the working class has trailed away from the interests of Britain's so called democracy and, latterly under Blair, even the remains of the Labour Party. Inevitably, the association with the mystical politics in Westminster only erupts where there is a direct interest and, as working class life becomes more difficult every day, only a direct interest works for obvious reasons. 

Attlee delivered the NHS. Thatcher, after defeating the most radical unions, sold out public housing. Boris threw down Brexit. But politics does not belong to the working class. They have to make their own. 

Here are some examples of working class politics in the UK. Bristol youth, led by black youth, the most impoverished sector of the city, toppled a slaver's statue in the river. The same people have started the battle, now enshrined by the Queen's speech, to push the police back against their new rights to stop demonstrations. (The core of the Jilet Jaune movement in France.) Black Lives Matter and women's self-defence have broken out of the lock-down defined by the police and Westminster politics. Major meetings are trying to bring the NHS into the hands of those who need it. It could be added that 10 million voters stood by Corbyn's reforms - despite the real role of Westminster politics and its powerful allies. (The well expected tragedy was the failure of Corbyn and his MPs to set up a new party based on the 10 million.) The voters in Scotland have decided their own politics - which will have to break Westminster if it is to win. In Northern Ireland a new Ireland is being created - outside the UK. 

The real creation of working class politics is yet to come, but from the Charter, the mass unions, the beginnings of the Labour Party, and now the growing response to the deep difficulties of working class life, there is more than hints of a new sort of change.