West grabs carnival capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

There is progression.

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

Brian Heron

Scary economics for globalisation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boris's pseudo working class politics

Start; 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.