We Live In Interesting Times

Busker Shorts

I’ve been saying this for about nine years since Jeremy Corbyn became an unlikely socialist leader of the Labour Party in the UK. The fact that this happened was testimony to the changes that we were witnessing, when ‘all that is solid, melted into air’ (to paraphrase Marx). But none of us who were using this phrase back then had any idea how interesting these times would become. No one expected the insanity of lockdown, the ‘impossibility’ of ‘masks’ (i.e. face coverings) and the imposition of experimental ‘vaccines’ (mRNA jabs are not vaccines) on the world’s population. It was a difficult time for those of us who opposed these things and refused to participate. This was the state (or states) showing its (their) true colours and reinforced my belief that I was right to side with Bakunin against Marx in their dispute at the First International. In my view, all states (including the Workers’ state) end up being oppressive institutions.

With the benefit of hindsight such actions were relatively sane compared to the Western response we have witnessed to Russia’s SMO over the past two years. It seems that the Western world has entered a self-destruct mode: it’s as if it wishes its own downfall.

On the other hand, a thing called BRICS became more prominent in the public eye recently (i.e. for many of us) and represented an alternative to the US led ‘rules based order’. In the context of an Empire, that simply means ‘do as I say’. And in recent years this organisation has provided countries in the South with something they have never had before: an alternative. The emerging Multi-Polar World Order is the shiny flip side of a coin that features the worn and tattered Unipolar World Order on the other side. The world will notice the difference.

In this knowledge, many of us realised that we were privileged to be alive while a massive paradigm shift was occurring in slow motion before our very eyes (before our ‘wide open’ eyes). Not only was the US Empire collapsing but so too was the Western dominance of the world that had been in place for many hundreds of years.

For those who were paying attention, it was already clear that Western capitalism had entered a debt crisis from which there was no escape. Economists such as Steve Keen¹ pointed out what his peers were ignoring: i.e. that the personal debt crisis compounded the problem of corporate and government debt making recovery problematic to say the least. Some say that there has been no recovery since 2008: rather, governments have made it appear that a recovery has happened. Printing money and therefore devaluing the currency contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire and is a key component of the current collapse.

The emerging Multi-Polar World Order is a positive world development even for people such as myself who wish to see more radical changes occur. But perhaps this development is a necessary prerequisite to further, even more favourable changes. If the BRICS countries are sincere in their belief that no country should dominate another maybe they have learned a lesson of history that it suited the imperialists to ignore. No one can know whether the BRICS project will work out: only time will tell. However, it seems to me that the acknowledgement that oppression or dominance of one country by another is a bad idea could lead to a line of reasoning that suggests that dominating people is also a bad idea. The Ancient Greeks gave the West the idea of a direct form democracy but it has never been emulated it. Instead, a form of representative government has masqueraded as ‘democracy’ in the modern era. In my view, the term ‘democracy’ has been abused as much as the term ‘fascist’. Neither is employed in a precise sense and the latter has come to mean ‘anyone who disagrees with me’.

This was something I had to get off my chest after watching Garland Nixon, most of whose views I share enthusiastically. Here he is in action. If you can’t spare an hour and a half just view the first 30 minutes.

Best Rob

1. Can we avoid another financial crisis. Keen, S. Polity Press (2017)