Category Archives: Capitalism

From Then To Eternity. A Long Personal Political Journey

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Every morning I get up and I watch the world go mad before my eyes. That’s every single day. I don’t think I’m alone. Make a cup of tea and read on. It’s a long piece so a plate of biscuits or two is also advisable.

This is not the world I thought I grew up in.

I was political with a small p from quite an early age. Dad and I argued about most things but agreed that Moseley should be locked up and shouldn’t be holding a rally in Trafalgar Square.

I survived Dad’s involvement in the Civil Defence Corps, the Cuban missile crisis and eventually the Cold War. I survived watching “The War Game” in Mitcham Town Hall but I never forgot it.

I survived the Beatles and Mitcham Grammar School.

I was a weekend hippie from South London. I wanted love and peace; especially a lot more of the love bit. I “Imagined”. I wasn’t the only one. Sadly I survived John Lennon.

I wanted to save the whales. I demonstrated against the Vietnam war at Grosvenor Square. I failed to ban the bomb. I read International Times and Oz magazine. I loved prog rock. I watched the events in Paris in 1968 from afar but with enthusiasm. I dabbled with the softer recreational substances without much commitment and without addictions apart from the legal ones: beer and cigarettes.

I had one foot on the magic bus and one foot in one job or another at all times.

I became a union rep and a Friend of the Earth. I had my grandfather’s ambition.

At university as an unqualified mature (23 years old) student of Politics with no tuition fees, a grant and an indulgent grandma plus real experience as a proletarian I became what I now realise was a sort of noisy, uninformed, romantic revolutionary. I still Imagined but read Lenin instead of Lennon.

I became a member of the Communist Party but gravitated quickly towards the Euro-Communism of Santiago Carillo. In the absence of Conservative students at my university I distrusted everyone else: from the anarchists to the Socialist Workers Party, Militant, the International Marxist Group, the Labour Party, even unto the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party. The Cubans were OK with me. I so wanted them all to do better. I was a sectarian increasingly in a sect of one.

Building on my Woodstock streak and Rolling Stone magazine I also (quietly) believed that there was a really strong streak of genuine democratic progressive idealism in politics, especially in US politics where there was no bending of everything by the dominant old public school class system of elites in the UK. I think I really believed that the USA – the home of rock – was capable of change, even after I’d argued violently with a Reaganite American long-haired hippie in a Paris youth hostel.

Years passed. And now I’m here with you.

When I first read Noam Chomsky’s “The Myth of American Idealism” just a few years ago, I thought he was going a bit far. As a by now an ex-Communist ( the Party had dissolved around me) I was suspicious of Chomsky as an anarchist but the events he described betrayed the reality of capitalist American politics, international manipulation, war and terror.

I’d thought at least Obama was a good guy doing his best. And Bernie Saunders was saying things I really believed in. Putin’s Trump Series One was clearly a dangerous aberration. But then came the disappointment of steady Joe Biden with all the rings Netanyahu and Putin and ultimately Comeback Trump ran around him and the unfortunate Kamala Harris, who with more time might have won.

With Trump Series Two the American Empire has been revealed in all its enthusiastic banal, fascist, bullying and openly bad taste corruption, guided by The Heritage Foundation with its Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership. And celebrated idiocy. Don’t forget the idiocy. And whatever Putin’s got on Trump. Don’t forget that.

I have very little hope at all of a Democrat revival that might bring meaningful left change. The Democrats are bought. I now see the USA – even with divisions closing on civil unrest – with absolute clarity as just another Nuclear Empire among Nuclear Empires like the Russian empire and the Chinese empire.

I have lost an innocence. But to lose all hope in one empire does not mean a transfer of hope to another. We are powerless specks. Here’s a speck’s eye review of current empires…

The Russian Empire continues to rot slowly within (read Alexei Navalny) becoming more dangerous the more it feels endangered and surrounded by a NATO that simply has to surround and endanger it by the logic of its official raison d’etre: its defence of its constituent states.

The Chinese Empire is evidently going from strength to strength. They and Russian empires appear to be moving closer. Russia needs China. Perhaps China needs peace to continue to thrive and overtake the USA. The Chinese obsession from ancient times has been with stability. Without stability it becomes ungovernable. War would not be helpful to stability even if fought by robots. My personal hope is that the obsession with stability behind the wall of “peace through strength” – a strength to resist the US power that continues to target them with nuclear weapons from air, sea and neighbouring countries – will lead them to “assist” Putin to find peace with Ukraine and stability in his Empire. We’ll see. What China does next in relation to Russia and Ukraine will make things clear.

At the same time both Russia and China seem to feel the need to tidy up territories after the second world war and the Cold War. Hence Ukraine. Hence Taiwan?

When Empires compete economically and form a global ecosystem of mutually exclusive military alliances War is not far behind. We are somewhere before Sarajevo but with nuclear weapons.

I may have become harshly realistic, horribly so, even unto myself. So I’m not a romantic revolutionary anymore. My heart is still with the People but democratic power is not.

Someone in Trump’s administration is also being harshly realistic. When Trump is grabbing attention daily with some new outrageously fascist move at home, the Realist among his puppet masters has steered his attention to China and to the melting Arctic. He might (and I mean might) be embarrassed at the limits of his power to gather a Nobel Peace Prize via Gaza or Ukraine, both of which must manifest as really annoying taps on his shoulder from the east as he looks westwards across the Pacific and north beyond Canada and Greenland, The US empire may be in decay and become more dangerous as it proves untrustworthy and loses its global hegemony to China.

The UK, although a nuclear-armed vassal state to the nuclear US Empire is currently divided against itself by a nostalgic bitterness at the loss of its racist empire.

The UK has failed to look its decline in the face and become a nuclear free Scandinavian country high up the happiness index. Being mostly populated by descendants of Norsemen – Vikings and Normans – this should be a serious option. Imagine (that word again). Dump the “independent” nuclear deterrent that in reality won’t deter anyone when it all kicks off. Rebuild and renew health and public services, invest in humanity without breaking the Chancellor’s fiscal rules. Live well and wisely up until the apocalypse. Nothing else seems sensible. Imagine.

UK governments have not dared to go public to their own citizens about its vassal status. Most really believe they live in an independent sovereign liberal democracy where voting in a necessarily revolutionary socialist government could be allowed. UK industry, finance and commerce, IT infrastructure and privatised services are overwhelmingly owned by companies one can trace back to monopolies and billionaires in the USA but few people know. And if they did, what could they do?

The UK maintains a respectful stance towards the overwhelming power of the US Empire – Trump is coming to embarrass King Charles this month – while hiding its impotence behind strident admonitions and minimal gestures regarding Gaza and Ukraine. Sanctions yes but arms supples and spy flights from Cyprus. The UK government (a.k.a. Labour Friends of Israel) is just not to be trusted. But it is buying Trump’s weapons to give to Ukraine, training Ukrainian troops etc. Sneaking a more assertive role via Europe whilst not drawing it’s master’s wrath.

The European Union is standing with Ukraine as much as possible without provoking an attack by being all NATO unless attacked: having to buy arms from Trumperica to pass to Ukraine, ready to secure a peace if it’s ever declared. It’s a kind of mini empire without an emperor; almost independent and a complex irritant to both Trump and Putin.

An aside: I notice that the Germans have been very clever by using a lot of the defence spending increase demanded by Trump on strategic autobahns. There are historic precedents from the late 1930s I’d best not mention but it worked well then and if there’s no war they can drive even faster. Maybe the UK could pull a similar move to build the strategic HS2 or the infrastructure to better distribute power from solar and wind plants…

Europe is where I live, powerless, voteless (unless I count Runnymede in Surrey) but now realistically so. Perhaps an eyes-open pessimist but still able to post my outrage on Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, on the repulsive X and even – if I hold my nose – on TruthSocial (an absolute toilet) where I like to tease MAGA.

It’s a futile form of artistic self-expression but it’s mine.

The last scales of my misguided romantic idealism about politics have now fallen away from my eyes. I might call myself a romantic realist to avoid the term romantic fatalist. Either by climate collapse, nuclear war, pandemic, geological extinction event or a simple idiocy that enables any or all of the above doom inevitably awaits. They are each in a very bleak race to get here first.

On the bright side, as Spike Milligan once said about the atom bomb they’ve made no progress since they invented the spear. They can only kill me once.

I’m 74. No need to hurry.

I have grandchildren so resistance remains futile but essential, even if we only Imagine.

It could be worse. I could be a citizen of the USA.

It Is Up To The Rest of Us

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If you want to make some serious money sell clothes pegs for our noses. It stinks out there. The paperboy or girl might as well deliver a bucket of manure every morning. At least it would be honest…

This week seems to have been all about Bankers. I doubt if I can add many more words or expletives to those you will have read or spluttered into your cornflakes this week. So, I won’t add many…except to say what an exceptional time we seem to be living through. What follows is not about the Bankers because this is about a lot more than the Bankers.

One by one the respected pillars of society – once respected by the gullible as institutions of morality – have become exposed as deeply corrupt, opportunist and exploitative of the rest of us (or maybe as the rest of us).

The law has always been an ass. Barristers have always told very tall tales for money. We expect little better. If ever I need one I hope she does a good job for me. But lately…MPs fiddling expenses, priests fiddling with little boys and girls, other priests covering up for them, Church of England Lords taking twenty-seven grand plus a year for turning up, phone tapping, policemen abusing women and taking bribes from journalists (and who knows who else?), bankers taking our money in bail-outs, mis-selling, insider dealing and fixing interest rates, supermarkets fixing prices, oil companies not passing price falls to the pumps, the already very rich giving to charity (and some very dodgy charities among the genuine) before paying tax whilst the rest of us buy our poppy after paying as we earn (or being “loaned” their pay by offshore holding companies (alternative comedy can’t even laugh at itself now) etc. etc. etc..

Suddenly all but the determinedly deaf will have woken up to the fact that not only the moral high ground but the very legitimacy of the institutions and persons that rule our lives has been nothing but a facade; a fantasy stage set behind which they can get on with all their dirty dealing, theft, perversions and embarrassingly conspicuous consumption that is obviously the reality of life behind the scenery and outside the theatre the rest of us were mis-sold tickets for. Honest MPs, bankers, politicians, priests, vicars, police officers, journalists and comedians must feel particularly sick.

Everyone is entitled to be an ass sometimes. In the Seventies sensible people – and anarchists – used to challenge me about the corruption in the Soviet Union. They were outraged by the theft of the aspiration of human liberty by grey men who put the Party ahead of people and themselves somewhere ahead of the Party. Men so immersed in bizarre, systemic hypocrisy and corruption that all they could hope was to learn to somehow direct it’s petulant and unpredictable tides whilst everyone else aspired only to float on the flood and avoid open drains. I tried to answer by pointing out Socialism had only been going since 1917. Capitalism had a 400 year start and had brought us a thousand little wars of empire and two world wars. A pathetic excuse for murder, famine, red empire and the gulag. But I was a EuroCommunist and it had nothing to do with me…

Corruption in a socialist state is something to point a finger at and be deplored as hypocrisy. However, capitalism IS organised corruption. Buy low, sell high, fix the market, intimidate, monopolise, export poverty, underdevelopment, disease and environmental degradation. Rob them, rule them, fool them with religion and racism, enslave them with credit, trade inside. Screw the rest of us. Keep the bonuses coming. The last few years have been a political education and more and more of us are learning.

These incidents are adding up to more than the sum of their parts. The rot seems to be running everywhere. The columns are crumbling quite severely and the temple is in impressive danger of collapse even without the crisis in Euroland. What will we read in the news tomorrow?

I find myself using the phrase “the rest of us” a lot in this article. I’m wondering how long The Rest of Us are going to put of with this behaviour. These days “The Rest Of Us” could be the big banner at the front of a very big demonstration or even the basis of the fabled broad democratic Alliance of the Outraged that overthrows the Coalition government to replace it with a Labour government that broadly demands…an end to austerity and a more humanitarian and compassionate capitalism. More fantasy then?

More than ever, it is up to The Rest of Us. A very nice young woman from the Green Party phoned me on the M2 this week and asked me to double my subscription. I did. Join me.

A Family Party On The Edge of Civilisation

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It is a sunny fresh Saturday morning, even here in Walton Leisure Centre where Heather is selling books to passing gymnasts and swimmers. The coffee shop manager has three kids and two jobs. She is not quite at her best this morning. It has been an exhausting week for everyone. This will be a long blog entry. I’ve been working, listening and watching not just drinking and sleeping…

My Dad used to ride a bike around Westminster as a messenger for Conservative Central Office during the Heath Government. His political conclusion from this and other experiences was that the country was best run by the Tories with a very strong, inquisitorial, challenging Labour Opposition.  We used to argue like any working-class Tory and his teenage socialist hippie son but now I find myself wishing the country was in just that position as maybe some kind of improvement over the messy incompetence we are splashing about in on all sides. I also wish Mr Altzheimer hadn’t knocked Dad off his bike and ridden off with it.

In 1973 I bestrode the stage of the Colwyn Bay Theatre for four nights as a new, young, enthusiastic member of the Colwyn Abbey Players as a cuckolding dentist in a medley of Alan Ayckbourn sketches with a performance that the critic from the North Wales Weekly News described as “barely competent” (It’s OK I’m over it now). Ed Milliband bestrides the Political Theatre stage to similar acclaim. People come and applaud at the end of the play because it was well written, some of the other actors are quite good and they are very bored with the black and white “Austerity” documentary playing endlessly at the Gaumont down the road in Llandudno. Tickets are sold but there is muttering in the theatre bar and the young would-be star is blanked back-stage. The electorate swept the Tories and their orange labadoodles out of Town Halls in reaction to the incompetence of the Coalition and in spite of the incompetence of Milliband. I left the Abbey Players and both they and I moved on to better things. Labour needs a Real Star for The Next Time.

The fading Livingstone’s predictable failure in London should be a very sharp lesson: with Milliband as leader Labour won’t win the next election, even if Cameron loses it. With you, me or almost anyone else at the top of the bill they might win. I’m sure he’s a nice man though.

Globally the Great Economic Experiment has become more interesting .

A “socialist” France (how socialist it will be we’ve yet to learn) will seek a sort of hopeful, Keynesian, Nouveau Deal, growth-led route out of the depression of recession to set running alongside the British public service cuts-led route that seems to be based upon the increasingly obviously mistaken belief that the sainted private sector will take up the challenge to provide the services and paid jobs that will allow people to spend on their credit cards again and get the whole bloated illusion of capitalism off the ground…again. If only UK wages and pensions can be depressed enough to make investment attractive enough in competition with the Chinese, Indians and soon-to-be desperately poor and desperate for jobs Greeks. Let’s see who gets out of recession first. The French? or the UK? Where would you invest? In people with hope or in people without hope? Either option means working people accepting – and one way or another paying for – a “reality” they did not create and need not accept.

The extraordinary people of Greece have not accepted the Poverty Is Inevitable option and have voted; expressing their anger at having been told the crisis is all their fault and at the same time distrust and confusion in the absence of any clear political alternative. Recently unified (remember?) and energised Germany, who might (perhaps embarrassingly) have been quietly achieving dominance in an increasingly politically unified Europe (a kind of bloodless 4th Reich?) now seems increasingly willing to let Greece leave the Euro if those unreasonable Greek voters insist upon having decent schools and a health service. The Greeks are, when you think about it, further down the road of Prosperity Through Impoverishment than the Tories can yet confess they are about to lead the UK.

Sadly the various Greek fascist parties have become dangerous again as Greek voters (this time including the ignorant and angry searching for scapegoats) get desperate enough to vote. In the UK the Nasty UKIP offer populist, petit-bourgeois, free-small-business, cut-red-tape (read workers’ rights), foreigner-blaming, solutions in a relatively small way so far.

Meanwhile Simon Heffer in the Daily Mail attacks Cameron for not being a Conservative and not using the Queen’s Speech to pledge still deeper cuts to public services so we have enough cash available to shore up a couple of the banks that might be overexposed in the Eurozone. Simon, what if we just said “Bollocks!” to that. Maybe a new spectre should be haunting Europe…

Obama has begun his campaign for a second term with speeches from a moral ground considerably higher, more competent and more intelligent than that scrapped over by the collection of bizarre Republican personal grooming models that oppose him.

China’s economic miracle/threat has faltered a little because people in the West can’t afford to buy stuff even at their prices. Russian generals threatened pre-emptive action if the USA and NATO pushed ahead with the deployment of anti-missile technology in Poland (designed to stop any stupidity from Iran we are told) whilst Putin was sworn in (again) and blessed (again)  and continued to back the Wrong Side in an Arab Spring after which only the truly courageous and lucky look like seeing Summer.

The world is not without hope, even if it looks more disgusting and disturbing the closer you look (especially around Rochdale). We do our best to make our way in it. Before it gets right down to you or me it gets down to families and here, a little closer to the abyss at the edge of Civilisation families must strengthen and enrich themselves as the secure and loving home from which we venture out into the wasteland that is being created by a capitalism that looks like it is running out of wheezes. We might not be able to vote with any meaning but we can do that.

Stick together out there and bring something to the party. We did. My son William was 21 on Wednesday. Together we recommend Bluebeckers ribs followed by chocolate cake with candles on.

I have recovered from The Swarm at Thorpe Park, which is best visited on a rainy day it turns out…