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.

Q: What else could we do with £100 billion other than blow it on Trident?

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A: Spend it on renewables and give us real national security

The Tories, the media and right-wing Labour MPs appear to be of one voice on the importance of spending a vast fortune on the next generation of submarine-based WMDs. Jeremy Corbyn’s insistence that he would never use them has apparently cast him into the wilderness of the unelectable and the dovishly naïve. Russia’s Putin is apparently rubbing his hands with glee at the thought of Britain’s imminent nuclear nakedness.

But in an age of austerity, when the government claims it has to cut the income of 3 million low-income families to the bone, while slashing subsidies for renewable energy following the hottest year on record, surely the question of value for money in achieving security for Britain should be paramount?

It’s not as if climate change has no impact on national security. Charlotte Church was sneered at for mentioning a report that found Syria’s uprising was in part caused by a severe drought over three years that drove thousands of people off the land and into slums prior to the 2011 protests.
Across the world, traditional rain patterns are being disrupted by climate change, adding to stress in regions that are already wracked by social violence. When the Pentagon recognises climate change as a bigger threat to global security than terrorism, the smart move for policymakers would be to invest heavily in green energy, not blow the nation’s resources on an unusable instrument of nuclear terror.
The cost of the subsidy for renewables soon to be axed by the government is £1.5 billion – a billion less than Trident 2’s annual cost of £2.4bn. Britain, by investing a big part of its Trident budget in a renewable revolution, could by 2030 have created a new green economy and weaned us off dependency on OPEC oil (36% of oil imports) and Russian coal (42% of coal imports). This change would surely offer us far greater security than to continue to rely for energy sources on countries who could, at some not too distant future point, suffer violent political change and possible economic collapse.
In a modern economy, energy security is central to national security. Following development of oil and gas production in the North Sea, the UK became a net exporter in the 1980s, but North Sea production peaked in 1999, and the UK returned to being an energy importer in 2004.
In terms of energy security, things have gotten worse since David Cameron came to power. In 2013, 47 percent of energy used in the UK was imported, up sharply from the 2010 level, due to the decline in oil and gas output.
In 2013 Russia remained the leading source of our coal imports, accounting for 41%, with the US at 25% and Colombia 23%. For crude oil we rely on Norway, which accounted for 40% of imports, with OPEC countries – including Algeria, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia - supplying a further 36%. Norway accounted for 58% of UK gas imports, with the remaining 20% as Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), with over 90% of this coming from Qatar. UK oil production in 2013 was 70% lower than the record 150.2 million tonnes in 1999. Gas production in 2013 was 66% lower than the record levels seen in 2000.
So there you have it – we are increasingly import dependent for fuel, with a significant portion of this coming from Russia and OPEC countries. Britain in other words, is reliant on fuel from countries – in the Gulf, Russia and Africa – who effectively have a gun pointed to our head over energy. Billionaires from these countries have been accumulating vast portfolios of British real estate, mostly in London.
In the case of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, they have funded the advancement of conservative Islam across an arc from North Africa to Indonesia that has helped spur militant violence across the world.
So Corbyn’s best option to win the argument, and for Britain’s future prosperity and energy self-sufficiency, is to propose investing a big portion of the £100 billion that was due to be spent on Trident in a green economy that will genuinely give us national security in a highly unstable world.
Alternatively we can continue with Cameron’s option of dependency on coal, oil and gas from our friends in Russia, the Middle East and Colombia, while holding a very expensive stick of dynamite and pretending that it makes us safe.

Crimean War II now unfolding

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Crimean War 2 in 2014 anyone? I was kind of expecting this but it's unfolding very quickly. It is the centenary of WW1, when apparently local events in south-eastern Europe spun into a major war. For some time I have been expecting a major conflict to break out.
Surely this is going to end in bloody conflict. But of course our wise political leaders knew this when they supported the armed overthrow of an elected government by 'protestors'.
Look at Syria today - that is likely to be Ukraine in the not too distant future. At the moment it seems unlikely that the West will be sending troops in to defend Ukraine or fight Russia, as they did in 1854 when Britain and France came to the defence of Ottoman Turkey in the first famous Crimean War.
In the run-up to this revolution against the Yanukovich government, I noticed a very clear political agenda at work in UK reporting and political responses to the events, which, as in 2002 in Iraq, the media is loyally repeating and reinforcing. The protestors used violence to attack police and destroy government buildings but western sympathy and traditional anti Russian suspicions blinded people to the dangers and also the dubious nature of some of the protesters, Reports ignored the protest groups' violent antics and the surprising restraint - until the final days - from the elected government of Ukraine. The Right Sector is an openly neonazi organisation, but somehow that deserved little or no comment because they are 'freedom fighters'. This is where reporting fails in its job to inform the public. How long would the UK or US government put up with mass occupations of public space? Certainly not three months.
Realistically, we cannot honestly expect Moscow to do nothing when the government of their near neighbour is overthrown with the support of the West? Remember Newton's third law - for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
What is galling is that nothing has been learned since Syria - the west told Assad (who, unlike Yanukovich, was not elected) that he 'must go'. That is not a policy, that is the rhetoric of war - especially after the brutal end of Libyan dictator Colonel Qadaffi. And, lo, it led to war. In the case of Ukraine, Yanukovich did not have the kind of military backing enjoyed by Syria's Assad, nor the ruthlessness (after all he did very little against protestors for 3 months). But Putin will not be a walkover like the ex-Ukrainian president. He will be preparing to give the western Ukrainians and their western backers a bloody nose. A reckoning cometh, and it will probably start in Crimea.

A short history of state crimes

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The rise of the modern state has brought with it a new capacity for total war, genocide and other forms of state imposed mass mortality, such as famine and sanctions, that earlier thinkers could not have imagined. My political journey began with Marx and Lenin moving through Keynes and Hayek. The father figure of modern Thatcherism, the Austrian economist and writer Friedrich Hayek was a profound libertarian thinker. Currently, everyone talks about Ayn Rand, who I haven't read, but Hayek should be up there too.
While studying a masters, I read 'The Road to Serfdom' which he penned in 1944 at the height of the war of totalitarians - Hitler and Stalin. He tried to explain how the state could never substitute itself for the hidden knowledge and ingenuity of individuals and entrepreneurs and claimed that socialism would lead to slavery. At the time one could see his point - although he was a lonely voice in the 1940s when state collectivism was widely employed to fight the war and was seen as part of an inevitable future. The book had a big effect on me, and added to my growing understanding of the failures of authoritarian collectivism, primarily Stalinism and its offshoots.
It was undeniable that Marxism had failed to foresee the capacity of all-powerful states to oppress and terrorise the population, often in the name of Marxism.
This does not mean that I think Hayek was right, or that Thatcherism was good - far from it. We live in a world in which the reality of oligarchical capitalism is far more relevant than the theory of the small firm. Small firms and workers ought now to be in alliance against oligarchy and corporatism. Traditional free market theory only serves to obscure the reality of a world dominated by giant firms.

For a quick summary of the death toll of the 20th century, by decade, we can see the consequences of war, state terror, imperialism and genocide. I have only included those incidents of more than 0.5 million dead.

Decade
1900-1909 - Belgian Congo - 5-8 million
1910-1919 - First World War - 10 million - (Germany, UK, France, Russia); Armenian Genocide - 1.5 million (Turkey)
1920-1929 - Russian Civil War famine - 7 million (USSR, UK, France, Japan)
1930-1939 - Stalin's Ukraine famine and terror - 10 million (USSR)
1940-1949 - Second World War and Holocaust - 40 million in Europe (32 million Central/Eastern Europeans, 7.5 million Germans); 20 million in Asia (Japan); Bengal famine and Partition - 4 million (UK)
1950-1959 - Korean War - 4 million (USA, UK, China); Chinese revolution - 2 million; Algerian war of Independence - 1 million (France)
1960-1969 - Great Leap Forward famine and Cultural Revolution - 32 million (CCP-Mao Ze Dong); Vietnam war - 3 million (USA); Biafra civil war - 2 million (UK, France); Indonesia, Suharto coup and terror - 0.8 million (USA, UK)
1970-1979 - US War in Cambodia-Laos - 1 million (USA), Khmer Rouge - 1.7 million (China); Bangladesh independence war - 1 million (Pakistan, USA); Uganda - 0.8 million (Idi Amin-Obote);
1980-1989 - Soviet Afghan war - 1.3 million (USSR); Iran-Iraq war - 1 million (Saddam Hussein, USA, UK, France, USSR); Mozambique - 1 million (South Africa); Angola - 0.5 million (USA, South Africa);  Ethiopia civil war and famine - 1 million (USSR)
1990-1999 - Rwanda genocide - 0.8 million; DPR Korea famine - 1-2 million (Korean Workers Party); Iraq sanctions - 1 million (USA, UK).
2000-2009 - DR Congo - 4 million (various states - Rwanda, Uganda); Iraq war - 1 million (USA, UK).

In eight out of 11 decades, the consequences of leftist revolution and terror caused millions of deaths. The UK was involved in major mass mortality incidents in seven out of 11 decades, in some cases a junior partner; USA six out of 11. I include countries where they provide support to the genocidaires, such as US support for Indonesia and Pakistan, UK support for Nigeria in Biafra, and Soviet support for Mengistu in Ethiopia.

I still find this record hard to deal with as I was brought up a leftist and continue by and large to be one. Perhaps the very profound nature of the social struggles made such violence in part inevitable. On many occasions, the brutality was a consequence of attacks from imperialism and counter-revolutionary violence. The brutality of revolution does not happen in a vacuum - it happens in a life-threatening environment. Revolutionaries do not always start out as mass killers. However, the apparent success of the Bolshevik revolution with its liberal use of revolutionary violence had severe consequences throughout the 20th century. Only its failure and collapse in 1989-90 brought an end to the power of the example of October 1917. I too was a Leninist. I now prefer the model of participatory democracy as emergent in Latin America.

Imperialism of one kind or another is the biggest culprit in the great majority these atrocities and mass death incidents - if we include Soviet, as well as German, British, French and US imperialism. The biggest mass death incidents are the Nazi war and genocide (33m), Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution (34m), Japan's war in Asia (20m), Stalin's famine and terror (11m) and the First World War (10m).

Imperialism features in nine out of 10 decades, but the scale of deaths only reaches the truly staggering in Belgian Congo, First World War, and the Second World War at the hands of nazism and Imperial Japan. By contrast the biggest mass mortality incidents under communist rulers Stalin (10 million) and Mao (32 million) happened in peacetime, mostly as a result of state-induced famine.

The failure of both social democracy and other lefts to reap benefits from the Great Financial Crisis in part stems from from this legacy. If there is a future for actually existing social democracy it is by forging new paths out of new situations. The Arab Spring shows too that revolution does not have to have a leftist hue. A coherent ideology and unity are required to forge a vision for a different society be it secular or religious. The ability to win a significant minority, or as pollsters say a plurality, of society and to mobilise them to support such a vision is the point at which an altered society can be born. Today the people have knowledge and voice at their fingertips and need not rely on all-powerful leaders. The Greens in the West arguably have taken the mantle now from socialists, and may yet combine with various forces in resistance to the might of global capitalism. In Latin America it is variations on Bolivarian and populist democracy. But for now, despite the crash, capitalism in various guises (neoliberal or statist) prevails more than ever in all corners of the globe.

Condemning electoral fraud - unless it's Mexican

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Pic by Rafael Stedie

If the news of election shenanigans had been from Russia or Iran, our media headlines would be screaming fraud. As Counterpunch's Paul Imison reports,Washington has quickly recognised Mexico's election result unlike its condemnation of recent elections in Russia. Although there is no immediate prospect of a return to the mass protests of 2006 following that disputed election, it's not just defeated left candidate Lopez Obrador condemning massive fraud.

The PRI’s Enrique Peña Nieto is officially the president-elect. Despite evidence gathered by both defeated leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) and the #YoSoy132 pro-democracy movement to show that vote-buying, threats and ballot-tampering were widespread on July 1, he will likely remain so – in large part thanks to the Federal Electoral Institute's (IFE) refusal to condemn what AMLO’s Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) has called “the dirtiest election in Mexico’s history.”

For the record, the official count (after the partial recount) by IFE goes like this: Enrique Peña Nieto with 38.21% (19.2 million votes), AMLO with 31.59% (15.9 million votes) and Josefina Vazquez Mota of the incumbent PAN with 25.41% (12.3 million votes).

Yesterday AMLO gave his final word (for now) on the election result, presenting 500 pages’ worth of evidence including 300 videos and 400 citizen testimonies to the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judiciary (TEPJF), along with a claim that the PRI spent some US$297 million on Peña Nieto’s campaign, vastly exceeding IFE’s official cap of $25 million.

El Pais has told Mexico's left to dump Lopez Obrador for his refusal to accept the election result, tainted by mass bribery, paid-or news coverage favouring 'winner' Pena Nieto and fixed pre-election polls.As Mexico and Gulf reporter writes:

Spain's El País, the most influential newspaper in the country and one of the most respected in Europe, today called defeated PRD candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador a poor loser and a "dead weight" on his leftist Democratic Revolution Party.

The lead editorial was published in Madrid under the title "Obrador es un lastre." Lastre means a burden or weight.

El País wrote that there is "no evidence of widespread irregularities" in the July 1 election. Mexico's federal electoral authority says PRI candidate Enrique Peña Nieto won by more than 3.3 million votes, or 6.62% of the total cast.

AMLO hits back

Referring to the severe economic woes which the once great imperial power is now facing (including 25% unemployment), López Obrador told the prestigious paper, "It would be better to focus on your own responsibility in the disaster which is now Spain."