We republish here a commentary by Roger Silverman in London, Britain:ON THE BRINKREVIEWING WORLD PERSPECTIVES: AN INTRODUCTIONA NEW ERAAll we can say with certainty is that a new era has started, although its character and outcome are not yet clear. After decades of relative stagnation, history is catching up with a vengeance. Marx once quoted a reference from Shakespeare, to liken history to the mole of revolution which burrows deep for decades before unexpectedly poking its nose through and breaking the surface of the earth (“well burrowed, old mole!“). Subterranean processes develop over decades before unexpectedly erupting in sudden crisis. What are the underlying historic tensions that have now blasted to the surface?
1)
The end of the tripartite division of the world into a stable equilibrium of separate mutually balanced sectors, such as evolved in the post-war period between the poles of the US and USSR. The world is sucked ever more rapidly into a common vortex of crisis and horror.
2)
The end of the “American century”. Despite the premature jubilation of 1991, when their ideologues were crowing triumphantly about “the end of history”, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the postwar ascendancy of US capitalism, its unremitting relative decline. The supremacy of the dollar, which had enjoyed a booming recovery from the Vietnam war and the shocks of the 1970s, is now once again in question. World capitalism is thrown into crisis by the falling rate of profit, a malaise from which there has been no remission in the decade after the Great Recession of 2008. There is a massive surplus of capital, a huge fluid ballast swilling around in search of a profitable niche. Following the end of the 25-year postwar upswing in 1974, it found temporary expedients in a grotesque rise in arms expenditure, then the dot.com bubble, a flood of economically senseless privatisations stripping the state bare, then finally a further descent into an orgy of rampant and increasingly complex speculative gambling, ending in a gigantic crash prompting massive redistribution of wealth to the super-rich and ushering in a prolonged recession. Now outlets are becoming exhausted. This has always in the past heralded slumps and wars. The decline of US imperialism has aggravated tensions and brought to imminent crisis long-running pressure points throughout the world, from Syria and the Middle East to the Korean peninsula.
3)
The collapse of the USSR and its satellites. The downfall of these states, for all their monstrous brutality, corruption and stagnation, still dealt yet another mortal blow to the morale of the labour movement; while the removal of an alternative power bloc to imperialism, which had allowed a certain scope to play off rival power blocs, meant a material defeat for resistance movements against imperialism and a closure of radical populist options to governments in the former colonial world. All that is left is the wreckage of the Soviet legacy and the survival of a few historically anomalous bizarre relics.
4)
The world is threatened as never before by environmental catastrophe. The consequences of climate change and the depletion of natural resources constitute an existential threat to human society; a threat which can be resolved only under a socialist plan which can alone safeguard the environment and protect human survival. Capitalism doesn’t just pose a looming threat of imminent human annihilation; its legacy of environmental despoliation has already precipitated unprecedented turmoil: a succession of environmental disasters, local wars and civil wars, natural devastation, mass migration, an unprecedented refugee crisis, and major wars for the control of diminishing oil and water reserves. According to a report by the UNHCR, there are currently 65.3 million people who have been forced from their homes, including nearly 21.3 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18.
The threat of environmental collapse has also tended to undermine the appeal of socialist ideas. Among the challenges we face is a mission to restore confidence in the ability of the working class to harness science, industry and technology to the cause of saving humanity. And yet with the development of 3D printing, robots, renewable energy, synthetic meat, electric cars, energy efficiency, etc., society today has within its reach unlimited scientific potential to create a world of peace and plenty.
5)
Albeit a secondary and minor complication*, mention should also be made of the rise of terrorism and religious fundamentalism. For all the hysteria whipped up against it, the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism and similar manifestations actually represent little more than a symbolic gesture of impotent defiance against decades of murderous imperialist plunder. And yet this phenomenon suits the ruling class perfectly, enabling it to promote chauvinism, xenophobia and racism and divert attention from the real causes of the crisis in society.
6)
The decline of industry in the old metropolitan countries. Europe and the USA represent a dying power, increasingly peripheral to historical progress. The new technology created the conditions for an era of globalisation, in which the old industrial proletariat was fragmented if not decimated in most of the former strongholds of industry. This led to an erosion of the material gains of the postwar era: deep cuts in wages, welfare and the “social wage”. Trade union cohesion was weakened, and along with it the socialist traditions that had taken root in the labour movement. In Britain especially, the old concentrations of the proletariat have been liquidated in the new era of insecurity, deindustrialisation, the gig economy and zero-hour contracts.
Faith in a mission to assume power and reorganise society comes more naturally to steel workers, miners and manufacturing workers, housed in industrial communities and concentrated on assembly lines with their hands gripping the levers of production, than to temporary packagers, couriers or sales clerks. For the moment, the working class remains relatively dislocated and its combativity accordingly weakened. However, these super-exploited workers too are painfully learning the lessons of organisation and struggle.
7)
For the first time in history, the working class constitutes an overall majority of the world population. On a global scale there has been a colossal and unprecedented growth of the proletariat. It has spread with meteoric speed to every corner of formerly peripheral outlying continents. Within the old metropolitan societies too, the working class now encompasses strata considered in previous decades privileged members of the middle-class. Exploited and unionised, teachers and hospital doctors for instance are now among the most combative of organised workers.
8 )
Above all, women have taken their places in the forefront of industry and now constitute a majority of the working class worldwide. Still condemned to continuing dual exploitation as domestic slaves and child-minders, women throughout the world are now also among the most highly organised and militant of production-line workers.
9)
The meteoric rise of China on the basis of a bureaucratically managed economy. China’s unprecedented growth was made possible by a unique combination of factors: a revolution that had swept aside landlordism and released almost inexhaustible labour reserves; globalisation, which created the material basis through exports and the new technology to facilitate enormous industrial investment; and strictly administered state planning. The result is a society resembling a projection of Russia’s New Economic Policy on to a massively higher plane: “state capitalism” in its original sense. Ultimately the contradiction of Stalinist bureaucratic state control and a rapidly growing capitalist class must eventually be resolved one way or the other in future explosive upheavals. The impressive growth of the proletariat and the consequent rise in labour combativity (a crucial new element that has been hardly even noticed by the traditional left) represent potentially the most historically decisive factor in the world situation. Now a predominantly urban society, China now has nearly 200 million industrial workers – more than all the G7 countries put together. On a much grander scale, China today resembles Russia in the period from the 1890s to 1905. A generation of peasants find themselves uprooted from the level of the feudal wooden plough and transplanted into the most sophisticated super-technological centres of industry, with correspondingly revolutionary effects on their consciousness and combativity.
Just as the English proletariat created the conditions for the First International, the German the Second, and the Russian the Third, so the Chinese today are busily and silently creating the foundations for the new international – a global force organising and mobilising a working class which has for the first time in history become a majority of the world population.
* – Oaklandsocialist comments: We are not so sure that it is correct to label the rise of terrorism and religious fundamentalism “a secondary and minor complication.” On the one hand, for example, the Christian religious fundamentalists were absolutely central to the election of Donald Trump and they remain as his core base. His recent decision to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem was made to please that base. On the other hand, religious fundamentalism has been the main factor in driving back the movement in the mainly Muslim world. Islamic fundamentalism is also a main selling point for the racist, chauvinist right wing parties in Europe. Religious fundamentalism and terrorism have played an important role in the period of reaction, sectarianism and division which we have been experiencing recently but which may now be coming to a close.