THE CRISIS OF THE LEFT: PART 1

 THE NEW ATLANTIC CENTURY

    The global left is fast approaching a crisis in its own ranks, the likes of which we have not seen since the rise of the “New Left” in France in the 1950’s. Indeed the move towards an anti Stalinist left, which we saw grow around the world in the 1950’s and 1960’s, is the closest analogy that we are living through currently for almost exactly the same reasons. 

    Then we saw the “New Left” rise in the liberal democracies of the west, as they began to realise the serious abuses of human rights that Stalin was committing in the Soviet Union, especially along ethnic and racial lines to the many different groups of people that lived within its borders at the time.  This laid bare a lie that the Soviets were in fact workers utopias, as the politburo had become yet another entrenched oligarchy that enriched itself from the working class, in much the same way the recently deposed Monarchists had across Europe. 

    The ‘New Left’ sought to retain some Marxist economic models whilst avoiding the wholesale dictatorship that Stalin was forging across the East at the time. Sadly this dictatorship did much disrepute to the Left and reactionary right-wingers to this day are able to dubiously cast doubt upon all of Marxism by holding up the Soviet Union as an example.

    Today we are faced with a new bugbear of the left. That of the growing might of China. For many on the left they are reflexively supporting China, as they believe it is the inheritor of a Maoist state and it stands in opposition to the classical imperialism of the European block. However this lie is very easily exposed, as we will attempt to do in this piece.                                                                                                       To start we must acknowledge that the global left has been struggling now for some time, since the dawn of the new millennium. This rot set in when the Blairist model was installed firmly in the United Kingdom. Coming off the back of the previous decades of Thatcherism it is astonishing that the British public stood for such a thing. The Blair model was just the exact same Neo-Liberal model that Thatcher espoused, with a few softer social service parameters thrown in. 

    But by and large Blair brought the global left firmly into a new alliance with the Neo-Conservative right and formed the basis of a new Western Empire. As a part of this he brought many Labor parties around the world into support for the preeminent act of Western Imperialism of the 21st Century: the invasion and destruction of the Baathist state of Iraq.  Astonishingly this Blairite left found itself supporting the annihilation of a secular Marxist state, in preference for a land of religious theocracies. It turned on its head the normal orientation of support that one would have seen during the cold war. 

    The stated goal of this new empire was to bring in a century of Globalisation and a completely integrated world in every nation. This new world empires power base was to be located in the Atlantic region, a term used to describe the NATO alliance that had brought together the nations on both sides of the Atlantic in North America and Europe. Neo-Conservative strategists in the United States famously laid out the military plan to achieve this goal, in the ill-fated Project For A New American Century’s manifesto.

    As a result of the massive amounts of money spent on transnational organisations, designed to stitch this empire together, a vast bureaucratic deep state formed, whose allegiance was mainly to this new empire and not necessarily to the nation states that hosted them.

    This gave many across the west the feeling that democracy had been severely strangled. There was only the option of voting for pro Global Empire parties and anyone who wished to oppose imperialism was derided and made to feel like an enemy of the state. You got some slight variation in choice between candidates at elections but you were essentially voting for Right Wing Neo-Liberalism or Left Wing Neo-Liberalism. There was no other option on the table.  And any time an option tried to present itself, antidemocratic forces of the deep state prevented them from having a fair hearing at the ballot boxes.

    The hard left however for a time held the main title to being against this empire. They had rioted in 1999 in the city of Seattle against the rise of the World Trade Organisation, one of the pre-eminent transnational institutions being formed to manage this empire. They had lead three years of violent protests against the World Economic Forum and the World Trade Organisation across Europe and the Americas. Most in the labor union movement rightly saw that this empire offered nothing to the working class of the world. It was not a controversial position to hold, in many quarters of the activist left at the time, to say you were against globalisation and the institutions that under pinned it, such as NATO, the WEF, the WTO, the IMF or the World Bank.

    This position was confirmed for many as the failure of the neo-liberal model underpinning the empire soon became drastically apparent, as the disastrous invasion of Iraq did not end in a cohesive Middle-East spanning arc of control, under the guidance of the Atlantacist's Empire. Further evidence that the model was a bunk came in 2008, when the now dramatically integrated world economic system, proved that such heavy centralisation could only lead to total collapse. The world financial system promptly shat its pants and has not been able to restore any equilibrium since that point.

    This caused a curious evolution to occur in Western politics. Rather than just being about traditional Left Vs. Right economic models we now had two new poles forming. Those who supported a globe spanning Empire and those who realised a sustainable model could only exist if we restored the concept of the sovereign nation state and the smaller, localised, body politic. We now saw insurgents appear on both sides of politics in Western countries and the political support for them was too high for the deep state to contain them any longer.

    Infamously, on the right wing of politics, we saw the Trump revolution rise to the top in America. What was surprising about this rise was that in many ways Trump was talking about exactly the anti imperial talking points that the activist left had always held for themselves. He attacked NATO, he attacked free trade, he attacked the big banks and he vowed to purge the pro Globalisation bureaucracy. But for some reason, because of some hysteria around him, the left decided to suddenly go against anything Trump said, despite his ideology being largely the ideology of a late 1990’s activist leftist. 

    This lead to astonishing scenes of activist leftists rioting as hard as they had in 1999 against the WTO, now turning their rage against one of the WTO’s biggest detractors and indeed they now seemed to increasingly be rioting in SUPPORT of many of these institutions across America. The activist left now merged with the Blairite left of the Democratic Party, in the United States, and became a strange parody of itself as it spent the next four years attacking every position that they used to hold dear themselves. 

    In the United Kingdom similar forces were now taking over both sides of politics. The pro Brexit move caused chaos in the ranks of the Conservative parties who had traditionally been huge supporters of the integration of the European Union. They could no longer resist the Alt-Right in their own ranks now as it increasingly sounded like the late 1990’s left, as the collapsing global empire more and more disenfranchised the working class.

    On the left we finally got an insurgent leader who really stood for classical Marxist concepts in the form of Jeremy Corbyn. The Blairite left by this point largely controlled the media in the United Kingdom and they went into a hysterical overdrive painting him as some form of new neo Nazi as a result of his successes.  He too could have begun a serious push for nationalist decentralised visions for the global system, in order to contend with the failures of the integrated world empire. Alas he was hard balled by the Blairites still present in his own party and forced to go against his own principles of supporting Brexit. He famously had campaigned against Britain entering the EU to begin with all the way back at the start in the 70’s.                                                                                                                                         He too correctly understood that integrated imperial structures, such as the EU, would never benefit the working classes of any parts of the world. Now in the Brexit campaign he was forced to go against his beliefs and support the EU. A halfhearted effort that was never going to be believed by the general public of Britain and it inevitably destroyed him as a party leader in the UK Labor party. That last election had become a referendum on Brexit and the only position any working class person was ever going to take was in support of Brexit, lest they be completely dispossessed, as had been the case over the past decades of the Empire. 

    Then we arrived at the dawn of 2020 and we began to see that because of Trump’s continued purge of pro Globalisation forces across the Western world a new plan was being cooked up. To shift the base of the empire out of its traditional Washington, New York, London arc and move it over too Shanghai, Beijing and eventually Hong Kong. That brings us to our discussion for part two. The Rise of China and the serious conflict it poses for the left in the western world.

GO TO PART 2