Scary economics for globalisation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boris's pseudo working class politics

Start; 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AUKUS/PAUCUS

25.36 million Australians have decided, or have been forced, to stand in the front row of the 1.4 billion Chinese in the case of their aggression.  (China supports an active 2.9 million soldiers.) 

But it's all ok, because 'AUKUS' (A...UK...US - get it?) will have Australian based nuclear submarines that could put out China in what? 19 hours or two? The Yanks (closer than the UK by an hour) can fix the nukes in the Australian subs. Voila! Shame that they have to wait for the flight over the Pacific. Maybe the Australians might sneak an early one or two nukes for their submarines from the impoverished Brits? 

Here are some implications. 

The military West, led entirely by the US, has expanded their nuclear weapons in the world in order to prevent the continuous expansion of China. Does anyone believe that the Australians, now with their nuclear subs, won't have the weapons? The whole point is not (of course) safeguarding China's intentions to seize Australia. It is for the US to have a wider ring of Indo/Pacific bases, which are designed to enclose China's economic progress across the world - and which includes China itself. China WILL have Google, or, sadly, it's universal bereavement for us all! Here's the thing. For some time the West has been trying also to monetise their (unused) nukes. Now they can blossom in Australia. 

The US kit that runs nuclear subs are the most secret bits of US war tackle. Only the UK is supposed to share it but everybody who knows this stuff understands that the key secret codes do not belong in London - or in the hands of Boris - thank the gods. Apparently the Australians are going to have empty nuclear subs anyway. But do we, the mugs who pay for and die for our wars, believe that? What will happen with the Aussie subs is that they will be called 'carrying non nuclear based weapons' but they will be non nuclear weapons only to the Australians.  Actually the nukes will be ready inside the Australian subs to shoot - but from Washington. The Chinese will get to know that if they haven't had an Email already. 

Up to now Chinese State Capitalism has proved an enormous benefit to Chinese development and has shifted the largest part of mainly Chinese humanity out of poverty in a way the World has ever seen before. The US's Biden and Trump Presidents have decided that Chinese State Capitalism must be destroyed. It is too successful in China and in its increasingly dominant role in the spread of global capitalism. The real danger of AUKUS is that AUCUS is the long-desired 'one jump ahead' for nuclear success; the cloud that covers the newly termed Indo/Pacific - a term that doesn't mention China but which tells China who rules the East. 

The US fired not one but two nuclear weapons over Japan. Recent documents have arisen from the Cuba drama in the 1960s showing that most of the senior US military were hell-bent on wiping out Cuba - and the USSR if possible. The estimated 15 million US dead in that scenario was denied purely as a political decision by the shaky President. A very close nuclear ring around China is not a Western defence. It is the ultimate step for any wobbling China, that apparently shows its (vague but apparently global) nuclear dangers, which have to be resolved, no doubt with desperate sorrow, by the Pentagon - and another mad or sad US President.   

Conclusion

A very serious and a very dangerous step has been taken by the West to deal with its sinking economic (and political) domination across the globe. Its action will unravel previous 'solid' blocks in the Western world as well as its perimeter. The EU supported and French led commitment to Australia - with conventional subs - has been broken up by the US - directly in favour of more aggressive steps. That measure defines the real relation of the new US President regarding the EU. It is worse than Trump's EU fun and games. 

The Australian proxy for the US, Indo/Pacific, war front is a serious and hostile act aimed at China and will necessarily increase an alternative combination of China, India (after Trump backed the Taliban and therefore Pakistan), Russia and even in some quarters, Turkey, as a new military front 'responding' to nuclear advances increasing in the East. 

India/Pakistan's intolerable non-relations - which were already threatening both their weaponised nukes - have now ramped up since Modi annexed the independent Kashmir. Pakistan is responding by quietly supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan and offering China's role in the region. The Indian/Chinese border battles are now evolving from Modi's intentions to break up the proxy Pakistan core in this increasingly dangerous and growing momentum. He will not stop at Kashmir or the Muslims. And he has to break China's intended hegemony. 

The constant assumption presented by the politicians and their military - that the presence of nuclear weapons is actually a positive situation against dominant nations carrying out vast wars that destroy many nations and kill millions of people as with the two World Wars, is now dissolving fast. Nuclear threats, like all of the shuddering and dangerous aspects of today's capitalist system, are now more likely to erupt than at any stage since WW2. Why? Because the international domination of capitalism, centred in the West, is breaking up. Nuclear war is not in any way a separate part of the global economic and political systems. Destruction is a seminal part of the system of society that we all live (and die) under.

Afghanistan defeated imperialism?

Let's get something clear about the success of the Taliban - as though it is achieving some kind of heroic anti-imperialism in Afghanistan. Sadly, some left currents in the UK are lining up with Trump/Biden (for different reasons) on the withdrawal of the retreat of the US (and UK and German forces.) These left groups are offering a (very doubtful) 'hurrah' about the end of imperialism in Afghanistan. Meanwhile the US Presidents were both determined to stop another $2.26 trillion (Brown University Cost of War). They both added the costs in injury and death involved. (There were 2312 US deaths, compared with 69,000 Afghan security and 51,000 Afghan civilians from 2002 to now - again analysed by Brown University.) The US figures provided the front cover at least for the US's more sentimental losses for the American voters. Biden now does not think so much of his would be Afghan comrades and avoids their 98% losses. 

More facts have arisen regarding the Taliban, now mooching round the streets of Kabul and the other 33 provinces, often carrying out exactly what is denied on the media by their leader Abdul Ghani Barada. The nine day 'battle' to win the 34 provinces overwhelmingly amounted to a huge, well trained and long expected kleptocracy. The provincial 'leaders' of the provinces were either living off the $2.26 trillion, spread out from the ex President's Ashraf Ghani's largess, or from the financial bypasses provided by Trump's 'deal' in Doha, who wanted the US money to go over the heads of the money-grabbing government in favour of the money-grubbing war lords. 

Despite the $2.26 trillion since 2002, Afghanistan's poverty line is below 54.5% of the population. Afghanistan is one of the least developed countries in the world. On the 2018 Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, Afghanistan ranked 172 out of 180 countries. Al Jazeera put it this way. ' Some are that poor management of the countries wealth, coupled with armed groups and local strongmen (to) illegally extract resources and sell them on the black market to neighbouring countries and beyond.' 'The Taliban earn between $2.5m and $10m a year from mining talc alone, which has become, next to opium, their main source of revenue.' Mining is the future of Afghanistan's development according to local experts. But the effective pact between the local war lords/Taliban and US funds, the country has been bought. In that sense the Taliban have simply pushed its power of what was the board of Afghanistan/USA. There was, and now is, no revolution for a real Afghanistan's development. The Taliban, from that perspective, is yet but another bandit that has stolen the country. It is a form of domination that acts as an imperialism. And in a more violent, and more backward way than before except that they live in the same country - sometimes. 

US imperialism has set up both its own failure in Afghanistan and the creation of another regime that is worse. Fundamentally, it is a further decline of US imperialism, but it is completely false to imagine that some advance has occurred for the Afghanistan people. What they have is more difficult and more dangerous. 

Today (18 August) at least two people have been killed after gunmen fired into into a crowd who had taken down a Taliban flag in the city of Jalalabad. There are now further eruptions. ' Reporting from Kabul, Al Jazeera said that the protests have expanded beyond Jalalabad to several other provinces.  

Afghanistan and the West

Trump floated 'a deal' with the Taliban, over the heads of his US installed government, to agree that there would be no more attacks on the West and then the Taliban would be able to share the government. Biden did not believe in the Taliban's offers (despite, for example, that they have said on the 10th of August that the West would not become a base for terrorists) but Biden did believe that the US trained Afghan army would hold the line against the Taliban - which would be enough to keep the West safe, (despite a likely endless fight in Afghanistan itself.)

These two military talents are only topped in history by the Brits, who lost three wars in Afghanistan, the latter providing a day of celebration in Afghanistan on the 19th of August. Any guesses about the date of the 'fall' of Kabul?

Afghanistan's current government is finished. But serious results will erupt as the factional lines, in and around the Taliban, break out across the country. One major probability is the renovation of al-Qaeda across the Pakistani/Afghanistan border, coupled with the prevailing pressure by China on both parts and on the Pakistan military. 

The result of the US forces' retreat (coupled by the exit of the mini UK) and the apparent 'success' of the Taliban, is a disaster for the Afghanistan people, particularly for women and children. This is a barbarism as awful as described by Rosa Luxemburg in WW1 and her judgement of the counter revolution arising in Germany. 'Socialism or barbarism' was her perception. 

Many in the US couple this moment with the 'terrible failure' of the exit of US forces out of Vietnam. But they reversed their judgement then and now. Vietnam was an historic success in South East Asia - and fired the optimism of millions across the world for a different life. Afghanistan today is the opposite. The turn to the dark-ages is certainly a modern aspect of a spreading shaky international capitalist system and an increasing decline of the Western imperialist adventures, but it is a turn to barbarism. The US (and the UK) as a result of their own weaknesses, have just turned forty million into a deeper hell. 

Does that mean that the West's invasion, (following the USA build up of the Taliban, organised and funded to defeat the Soviet Union's invasion) was, or is, right? Of course not. But it would be absurd to follow a 'what's if' trail to simply apply Afghanistan independence. That would need to be going back at least to the Victorian 'heroes' and their gatling guns. 

It has to start with an Afghanistan (nominally created as a nation by the UK) that was and remains an area of enormous value and importance. As China has advanced, so Afghanistan even now demonstrates its centrality in the movements between East and West that constantly created huge distributions between the rising settlements and populations, from the Mediterranean to the China seas. Imperialism; the British imperialists, blocked that flow in the 19th century. They wanted a frozen India/Pakistan and the isolation of Russia and China. A blocked Asia laid out north and south and run by London. So, history does turn, but only starting in the present.

What, as somebody once said, should be done? 

There is more than a core of Afghan people that will not give away their expectations into the violent hands of the dark ages. The imperialists have failed them. But there are others that are now able to at least support a new battle for a proper, independent life. China, because it has to function on globalisation and it  is scared of religious cults, will tentatively and at some distance support (but not imperialise) a serious movement, starting with Kabul (alien to the Taliban and entirely based on force) which can build an organisation that will win back the cities. In due course non-military international brigades can provide aid delivered by Afghanistan people that was so deeply unwilling in the hands of the UK, the USSR and the US. The Taliban undoubtedly lead a significant portion of Afghanistan, but less, much less than 2000. History, even for the Taliban, does not stop.   

Capitalism dying?

Lots of correspondents, mainly from the left, are writing about the post-Covid type of capitalism. US President Biden's apparent renovation of his own version of the 'New-Deal' is propelling the argument for a type of Keynesianism in most of the western world. The prior, von-Hayek model, which reduced State expenditure, sought low taxes, free trade and trickle down benefits, appears to have failed - even among the cautious EU. We know that Reagan and Thatcher set up the political shape required to energise Hayek's economic ideas. But now economists, including Eliot, the newspaper Guardian economic correspondent, are praising the return of Keynes, despite the continuing traditional political shape of Reagan and Thatcher, which has been maintained. State money is distributed, sure. But the Reagan/Thatcher attack-laws on labour rights, remains a vengeance. 

Half-baked Keynesianism actually started not with Covid but with the 2008 collapse of the banks. The banks fell and their rescuing was a very particular State-like shift away from Hayek (but not at all towards Keynesianism).  It started with the huge quantitative easing from States to banks and then from banks to the stock exchanges and then from stock exchanges to shares of companies and then from shares to the super wealthy. Hayek's trickle down benefits and the increase of profits then became no sorts of benefits at all, trickle or otherwise, just simply austerity. This was literally capitalism-as-social-theft. In previous blogs we have noted the decline and indeed the destruction of social democracy in the West - the political sign of capitalism-as-social-theft in the West. 

Has Biden (or for that matter UK's Prime Minister Johnson) pushed history back? Is the old Keynesianism really emerging ? Sorry, no. It is true that social and political turmoil is rising, including in the West. It is true that Biden has distributed large, individual, increases of wages and some parts of welfare. (Boris peels off here.) It is also true that he wants to increase taxes, particularly corporation taxes, to renovate the USA's infrastructure and to broaden the development of green jobs and industry. But the conditions for Keynes no longer apply. How is this? It is the fact that the waves of capitalism are not constant. They do not repeat their patterns or combinations, anymore than the evolution of humanity repeats its lives. Are there discernible patterns and cycles in capitalism? Yes; patterns and cycles are understandable, similar and pliable, but because they are always moving they are never exactly the same.  

The content of Biden's plan has little to do with the terms and conditions of Roosevelt's New Deal. Roosevelt saw the rise of fascism as little worse than his views about the danger of the UK's empire. (At one point in WW2 at a separate meeting with Stalin, he suggested that India should be like the Soviet Union and break away from the British Empire to allow modern development.) Roosevelt's State wealth distribution could dominate the great US corporations, their taxes handed over, as the price to control risings and to prevent the grip of communism in the US. 

Biden has no such context. (And Johnson is another joke entirely when he denies the continuation of austerity to his UK electorate.) The great corporations, nominally in the US, that Biden requires for the use of his State taxes, are not of the like of the 1930s of Ford or Bessemer Steel. They are located in the global sphere. Equally, there is no 'communist threat' forcing US corporations to accept their tax payments in order to defend capitalism against the workforce of the US. The workforce of the US are barely beginning to organise. Instead it is 'communist China' that is the threat for the new corporations that are based globally. In reality the 'threat' that Biden is trying to use on the corporations in the US is the 'threat' of Trump-based fascism. A step that would rapidly place China as the leading economic country in the world. Alas, as history suggests, big capital has had a rather respectful response when it came to associating with fascism.   

More broadly, among the studies of modern capitalism (see for example the New Left Review piece by Cedric Durand - 'Forces of Change') the impending contradictions of both the Hayek and Keynes capitalisms suggests the need for an entirely new cycle. A cycle that requires a particular, new character, one of building drastic social and political interventions. Why? In order to continue the sovereignty of the economics of capitalism, so far dominated by us and by our five-hundred year capitalist system. Because ... capitalism's recent dynamics are breaking down. 

It is necessary to avoid any foolish assumptions that capitalism will destroy itself, a view that many times has been shouted out from childish versions of Marx or Lenin etc. So far the capitalist drive has recovered and reorganised all its crises. But it is equally blind to imagine that previous capitalisms will simply repeat themselves. More; the contradictions and social stresses of capitalism become more heinous in ever mounting stages. In such situations, catastrophes make the capitalist system less and less bearable for the overwhelming majority of the people of the world. It is arguable that we are at just such a terrifying moment today. And the consequences become more and more barbarous.

To pick up the new context of capitalism's next circle (or circles) a set of observations should be offered.

1. Note the sets of analyses regarding the mechanisms of capitalism, largely independent of social and political interaction, on the assumption that the economy of capitalism is the core of society. The greatest such model was the amazing books and essays of Ernest Mandel. 

2. The 'self destruction of capitalism' idea is simply empty in all of its history.

3. But today we note that the crisis of capitalism becomes both intensely more problematic - AND  - intensely more tangled, with the rising social crises so common in modern times. It would be absurd not to coalesce, not to see the combinations, of what is often only described as an economic engine. The modern economic engine, now itself reorganised by effects of the world wars, is partly reordering new societies and vice versa. The analyses of modern capitalism does not proceed from a capital A then to a small b and then to c.    

4. And the wider and wider mystification applied to modern capitalism has never been a more developed complexity. (This of course is part of the means designed to deny the implications of a system that exploits the overwhelming majority in the world.)

5. While capitalism in itself becomes more and more difficult, crises ridden and dangerous - the combination of the increasing social crises together with capitalism creates the more and more likelihood of human extinction. (As WW1 and WW2 hint.)

6. Capitalism has to move onwards to sustain its role in society, through competition, mergers, acquisitions, monopolies, technology and most of all labour, to create its object of wealth. 

7. Logically, globalisation can only be the ultimate end for any further extension of capitalism.

8. But as globalisation is reaching its peak across the planet, it becomes weaker and weaker as a force, first because of the failures of imperialism across the globe and second because it has stalled away from the key mechanisms spelled out above. 

9. This capitalism failing at its own height is most obviously apparent in the herding of wealth for personal purposes among more and more millionaires (who rarely trickle down.) Virile Capital, albeit viciously and violently, built social and technical revolutions in the past. This aspect of modern capitalism has become less and less.  

10. Less apparent but more decisive is the failure of capitalism, more and more, in relation to the world's danger. 

The capitalist system accepted and partly swallowed two world wars. The system and its corporations  were used to defend the results including a nuclear bomb. Today capitalism is unable to solve or resolve any of the planet's main dangers; heat, nuclear battles or any sense of billions of people that they have a chance of sure progress. Today, vast resources in slowly moving ships and concentrated internet deals about wealth at light speed, are constantly bought and sold, borrowed and paid. The novelty of this endless, world above the world, is its gradual, but relentless, detachment from the world. The US holds Japan and China's debts. Both countries hold wealth equivalently more than their debts. Both countries use their US debts to pressurise sales from their countries to the US. Now Biden, and Trump before, were and are closing down China's sales. They have to. China is getting richer than the US. US capitalism, already based on money and not production, now needs to make its own products. The aim is to force decline in China. And so it rolls on. 

Consider. The state capitalism of China alone is now overwhelmingly the single social advance in the last two decades. The main motor of the world's general world capitalism, capitalism led by the US, is declining at a pace. Capitalism in the West is now necessarily required to halter and diminish social welfare, political democracy and any substantial reform of the working class. Living standards are also declining. The planet is in ecological danger. Wealth is more and more concentrated and unavailable for reform within the system. Technology offers a narrow development and reflects the smallest achievements in centuries. The remains of democracy are reducing and nukes are expanding. The capitalist system no longer advances. Worse; it prepares for degeneration and social destruction.

Posted by Brian Heron at 16:48