Can the pattern of revolutionary change be predicted?

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As Lenin said in March 1918 in the wake of the October revolution, "There are decades when nothing happens and then there are weeks when decades happen." (The Chief Tasks of Our Day).
History does not proceed in an orderly fashion, but in fits and starts, with long quiet periods followed by a telescoping of spectacular upheavals in a matter of weeks and months.
The title of this piece refers to this pattern of historical change - like buses, none come for ages and then several turn up. Historians draw on past events to give a deeper perspective on current events. In the age of social media, stepping back from the daily tweet storm to assess underlying forces and processes is a useful exercise.
Today we are confronted with profound issues of global economic imbalances, vast movements of people, populism and nationalism. Through the modern era there have been a few historical moments where events can be seen as causing a radical discontinuity, a fundamental changing of the framework of what is possible in human political affairs.
The modern era, demarcated by the discovery of the Americas and the end of Muslim Spain in 1492, has seen one such "crack in history" every 125-130 years, after which nothing is quite the same and no return to the status quo ante is possible.
The first of these was the Protestant reformation, declared by Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521, followed three years later by the German peasant revolution, in which ordinary peasants across the Holy Roman Empire took up arms, inspired by more radical Protestant leaders. The popular uprising was brutally crushed by the aristocratic ruling elites, supported by Martin Luther, who urged on their slaughter.
Possibly of even greater consequence, 1521 marked the downfall of the Aztec empire at the hands of Hernan Cortez, 400 conquistadores and local allies, sparking a devastating period of conquest and genocide. European conquest of the Americas, and the creation of a global capitalist economy, began here.
Thereafter the Protestant revolution became a clash between the new urban classes and the ruling elites of Europe, rather than an open class war. The ripples of revolution and attempts to cast off the feudal-clerical order continued for decades, sparking the Jesuit counter-reformation. The new creed was adopted opportunistically by Henry VIII in England for his own personal reasons.
The revolution put the word of God into the hands of ordinary people, thanks to radical publishers deploying the social media of the age, the printing press. No more listening to Latin liturgies that few understood from a class of elite clergy. God spoke directly to believers and the interpretation of his works fell to members of the congregation and radical preachers. It was this new form of religious consciousness that eventually led to the next historical break: the English revolution.
In 1649 - 130 years after Luther - a successor to Henry VIII, Charles I, was the first king in the western world to be executed judicially, marking the beginning of the era of republican government. The Cromwellian revolution did not fare well after the death of Cromwell, the Lord Protector, in 1658. Charles's son was restored to the throne in 1660. However the tumult of the revolution created a new kind of constitutional principle that brought the king down from the realm of divine rule into the earthly reach of popular sovereignty. Eventually in 1688, the last absolute ruler of England was dethroned and a Bill of Rights set the limits to kingly power, which has never been rescinded.
A third revolutionary break in western European history was in a sense a radical continuity with England's revolution 130 years earlier. 1789 gave birth to a kind of radical democracy, which, like its English predecessor, could not sustain itself and collapsed in bloodshed and terror, giving rise to the rule of Napoleon and a European war. Despite the Bourbon restoration of 1815, things could not be put back to where they were before the storming of the Bastille. A new wave of revolutions spread to Latin America and the age of democracy in Europe was more or less born in 1848.
The embedding of the bourgeois order in mid 19th century Europe also sewed the seeds of the next revolutionary break, which arrived in 1917 - the import of this event is not yet settled, since it is so close to us it is not merely dead history but still echoing in the present. For a period it seemed as if socialism was the future, until the harsh model created by Stalin gradually unravelled and collapsed in 1989. The significance of the second, Bolshevik, revolution of October is still hugely contested. It is hard though to claim that it did not mark a seismic upheaval in the world system the ripple effects of which have even yet not fully played out. The Trump-Kim Yong-un showdown is perhaps the last, senile iteration of the 1917 cleavage between east and west. As in previous such cleavages, it is only in the death throes of the previous historical earthquake, when the dust finally settles from the first eruption, that the outlines of a new upheaval will unfold.
The North Korean regime was effectively installed by Stalin in 1948, he being the Napoleon figure of the Russian revolution, who, like his Corsican predecessor, created an empire out of a revolution. Like Napoleon, Stalin remained on the lips of many revolutionaries long after his departure from the stage. Stalin was Napoleon to Lenin's Robespierre.
Rather than socialism, the more lasting legacy of 1917 is the western welfare state - rolled back strongly since 1989 - and even more so, a model of non-colonial development and the delegitimation of empire. China is the leading inheritor of this national revolutionary path, today a powerhouse of Leninist state capitalism that could yet eclipse the United States.
If the next definitive upheaval arrives at the same interval as the previous three, it should occur at the beginning of the fifth decade of this century. That's 25 years from now. For an oldie such as myself, that's a long wait.
Between these breaks it is possible to delineate, in each case, an initial period of revolution, followed by counter-revolution, followed by a period of consolidation of the social-cultural changes that emerge from the dialectic of the previous two processes - the second (counter-revolution) in effect a direct reaction to the first (revolution).
I have deliberately not connected this to the economic processes that interact with the politico-social dynamic under scrutiny - although they are clearly intimately linked.
What is certain, apart from the obvious fact that such a projection is a kind of numerology that can only be confirmed if and when it happens, is we can't know what, where or how the break will come, but that come it must.

As Labour veers right, the left needs to learn from the Leninist neocons

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The world has crept into my new dad bubble and now I must respond with political analysis...

Chris Leslie, Labour's Treasury spokesman turned shadow chancellor, comes across with all the political passion of a smooth-talking bank manager.

His interview in last Sunday's Observer was a manifesto for a post-Miliband Labour economic policy that eschews anything remotely radical in favour of pure managerialism. It's an unashamed bouquet of promises to do absolutely nothing that ruffles the feathers of big business.

Sadly, Labour doesn’t seem to get that it is perfectly possible to be left wing and also believe that free markets are actually necessary and good - within the framework of a mixed economy. Alas, an economy in which public and private co-exist in healthy competition was abolished by Margaret Thatcher and her successors.

Leslie used to run the New Local Government Network, a think tank that spent the 2000s arguing for deregulation and privatisation of local government services. In the interview, Leslie takes an axe to all of Ed Miliband's progressive policies - rail nationalisation is out, as too is rent control, capping banks' market share, even the mansion tax was "too crude". Deficit reduction, predictably, is a favourite. Market "transparency" is his watchword.

Instead of supporting competition in the private sector combined with strong public regulation of natural monopolies and essential services (health, education, housing, utilities, rail etc), nice Mr Leslie offers blind support for big business.

Leslie may or may not continue to be Labour's economic spokesman, but with this approach, he clearly puts himself to the right of Ed Balls and anyone with a hint of pinkish social democracy. This man is cut through like rock with neoliberalism and the promise of never being outflanked to the right by Osborne or anyone else.

It is a peculiar thing that Labour politicians always see electoral defeat in terms of failing to appeal to middle England Tory voters. Yes, the Tories won the most votes in the south, but if you combine Ukip, SNP and Green votes, that's nearly 6 million people who actually want left-of-centre economic policies that favour working people, such as a living wage, nationalisation of rail and utilities, rent control and so on.

Labour is not interested in these voters, and it wants nothing to do with the emerging progressive alliance of parties - SNP, Green, Plaid Cymru - as witnessed by Miliband's fatal refusal to make a deal with Nicola Sturgeon. (Once voters saw that Miliband was blind to the inescapable fact that Labour needed the SNP’s support to form a government, he was toast.) Amazingly, Labour’s tribalism and blinkered hostility to new political forces meant it cut itself off from potential allies, and left itself adrift and without credibility come election day.

So, if Labour refuses to reach out to the parties who do win progressive votes – or to adopt policies that win back working class votes from Ukip, eg rail nationalisation and strict enforcement of the minimum wage – then where does that leave the hopes of non-Tory Britain?

As the pitiful Labour leadership campaign has already shown, whoever wins the Labour leadership will focus on reaching out to big business and Tory voters in order to win back those marginals. It’s a narrow, opportunist politics that eschews fundamental principles and long-term thinking in favour of pure electoral machination.

This idea - to see politics purely as a short-term electoral game under current badly broken rules - is a fatal aspect of Labourism, and can be contrasted with the long-term hegemonic strategies of the Right to not just win the immediate battle but to win the class war.

Learning from the Neocons 

Since the 1970s at least, neoconservatives and their UK counterparts in the Tory party have approached politics with a Leninist, revolutionary focus that uses emergent crises as opportunities for “clean breaks” – and for reshaping politics in their own interests.

This was seen in the aftermath of the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, when chief ideologue of the Tory right Nicolas Ridley came up with a plan to break the miners by enticing them into a confrontation and then smashing them. This was part of a plan to break the back of the labour movement, and so move Britain away from socialism, which at the time was seen as a mortal threat to the British capitalist system. They used the global oil crisis of 1979-81 to begin a process of deindustrialisation, a brutal form of social engineering that gutted the communities that were the rock-bed of the post-war social democratic consensus.

Neoconservatives were never parochial or short-termist in their outlook. Like good Leninists, they were internationalists – 1989-91 was a key moment in the victorious march of western-led globalisation, when first the east European communist states, then the Soviet Union, collapsed after a long period of armed confrontation. Afghanistan and a bankrupting arms race finished off the Soviets. After 1991, neoliberal economic specialists moved in to radically overhaul the post-Soviet economy, causing devastation to millions. Since then, the 9/11 attacks, and more recently the 2008 crash, were both huge crises in the international system that neoconservative forces used to re-engineer society toward militarisation at home and abroad, and ever increasing concentration of wealth and corporate power.

The left naively believed 2008 would mark the end of neoliberalism. But where were the left-wing Leninists plotting to bring down the system thanks to its own fundamental weaknesses when it was on its knees? They certainly were not in the Labour cabinet – Gordon Brown, rather than seize the moment and bring the banking system to heal with a new model of state-regulated and socially responsible finance, rushed to the rescue of the banks, leaving them largely unreformed. He was not thanked for saving capitalism, instead the voters rejected him - and the Tories managed to make Labour’s economic record an election issue in 2015.

It is remarkable how the Tories were allowed to get off scot-free for their support for financial deregulation since the 1980s that ultimately led to the crash of 2008. If Labour had any political sense, it would have mercilessly slayed Osborne for his restoking of the housing bubble, rather than weakly echo the homeownership myth. Miliband, to his credit, saw that housing was a major issue, but the mansion tax was too ad hoc a policy to sound coherent (compared to land value tax), and rent control was only announced in the last month of the campaign.

There is no short cut to a revival of social democracy in Britain. But looking to Labour as a vehicle for radical change is almost as daft as expecting Fifa to reform itself. Labour needs to embrace the fact that the era of its big battalions is over and it will never again be given a mandate to rule without the support of other parties.

The next crisis

Governments lose elections, oppositions rarely win them.

The lesson taught by the neoconservative strategists is to look ahead to the next crisis and prepare for a political offensive when it comes, so that for once, the left can seize control of the political narrative. We can’t know what or when it will be exactly, but capitalism goes through a slump on average every ten years. Cameron and Osborne have recklessly reflated the housing and credit bubble and that bubble will burst. International crises can be expected – the Middle East is slipping towards apocalypse, while a new cold war is flaring in Europe.

The message of progressives must be one of hope, always, but hope not built on an unsustainable model of financial capitalism, ever-rising debt, climate crises and endless war. All these factors points toward disasters down the road but also the possibility of a saner, greener, more equitable politico-economic model that could replace this broken one.

Either the movement against neoliberalism will be ready to fight back when the next crisis comes, or, as in 2008, the financial oligarchy and their neocon allies will once again turn it into a new assault on what’s left of society to further enrich the 0.1 percent.

Marx and Soviet anti-fascism – a tenuous link

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The Soviet role in the war was unique and heroic, but the ‘socialism’ it built bares little relation to Marx’s revolutionary ideas, says Joe Gill 

On the 132nd anniversary of the death of Karl Marx, communists and marxists commemorated the great thinker's contribution to social ideas and for a new society in various ways.

Some gathered at his grave and drew a link between his life's works and the struggle against fascism that ended in a costly victory in 1945, led by the Soviet Union, which paid a terrible price in millions of lives to defeat nazism.

But in reading the Morning Star's editorial on the day, I had a terrible sinking feeling. The leader stated that only one of those states fighting the nazis was socialist: the USSR. It continued: “The Britain that fought the genocidal racist regime in Germany itself ruled a vast empire and treated many of the peoples it kept prisoner as subhumans."

While this was undoubtedly true, it can, in some ways, also be said of Stalin's Soviet Union - officially according to its 1936 constitution, the Soviet Union upheld the highest democratic ideals. In reality by the late 30s, it was a dictatorship in which neither the working class or any other class enjoyed full democratic and social rights.

This was discovered by visiting delegations of trade unionists, who were shocked at working conditions in factories, and was recognised by the writer of the introduction to the 1948 centenary edition of the Communist Manifesto published by the US communist party, which contrasted the ideals of Marx with the realities of the Soviet Union in which basic human rights were lacking.

 The editorial paints a picture of the battle against fascism that upholds the Soviet Union as a model of socialism that directly inherited the ideas of Karl Marx. This is profoundly misleading. Marx, as a synthesiser and revolutioniser of the ideas of English political economy, French socialism and German philosophy, did not envisage, nor would have uncritically approved of the USSR under Stalin (I suspect he would have hated it).

 It is true that the anti-fascist alliance was a triumph that also, via the victories of the Red Army, introduced millions of workers to the ideas of socialism. But the post-war division of Europe did not fulfil those dreams. The carve-up created a series of satellite states that built a deficient model of socialism.

That model lasted 40 years – and required the intervention of Soviet troops on two occasions to suppress rebellions in Hungary and Czechoslavakia - before collapsing under a weight of economic and political stagnation. It is difficult to argue that this version of the dictatorship of the proletariat was the one that Marx had in mind.

For the sake of left unity and progress in Britain we should not resurrect false utopias but stick to analysing the complex reality of 20th century history, in which the Soviet Union, especially under Stalin, represented an iron wall against nazism, but ultimately also a negative example (we can cite the prevalent use of terror, cult of personality, forced collectivisation, slave labour, national chauvinism) that held back socialist advance and distorted the states that were created in its mirror image.

We are still living out the legacy of that inheritance in terms of negative views of socialism, that are not simply the result of anti-communist propaganda. Of course, there are examples from the era that we can uphold as better versions of the model. Yugoslavia, Cuba and Vietnam, as independent revolutions with their own national and social base, were able to circumvent the worst excesses of bureaucratic dictatorship and imbue the construction of socialism with more humanity. The Chinese revolution, under Mao, exhibited examples of the best and worst.

 But it is in new thinking and participatory models of socialism and democracy along the lines attempted today in Latin America, that hope lies, and perhaps here in Europe too in the coming years.