Where are we when you need us?

I left on a gloomy note at the end of my last blog. Here comes the symphony.

I've been banging on for months about capitalism's great crisis and its serious, even historical, weaknesses - the possibilities if you like, of a fundamental change of direction for human civilisation. If anything I've minimised the system's structural weakness. But, of course, the real issue is the crisis of the left.

The facts, as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (look him up) used to say, are revolutionary. What he meant was that reality, sometimes in all its stark awfulness, insists on being faced. It faces down all theories borrowed from a book, all empty slogans and posturing. If you have a mountain to climb, best to know how high and how difficult the damn thing is.

Just look at three recent facts. 34 striking South African platinum miners were killed by a South African (SA) police force which is run by the ANC. In Brazil a new mass workers party, whose victories opened the current left turn in Latin America, has and still is turning, inexorably, to the right. The Chinese Communist Party has let the market rip at home and, along with South Africa (and Brazil) has created one of the most unequal societies on earth - and the greatest social unrest of any society in the world - according to UN figures. (SA is second.)

I could have picked a hundred examples of 'failures' of the left since 1989. Social Democracy appears finished - organising its own suicide - in its home continent of Europe, leaving behind millions who are defenseless. And I am not ignoring new struggles - in North Africa and the Middle East - except to say that the organised left as we have traditionally known it is completely absent from those events. But I picked the three above because all of them have an avowedly revolutionary leadership. All of them see themselves as part of, and trace their own history from, the revolutionary traditions of the 20th century. And in case any followers of Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (look him up) are reading this, you should know that most of the currents that followed him were represented, in one form or another, close to the central leadership of Lula's workers party in Brazil. But, you say, it was your particular brand, with its unique grasp of what the great leader meant, that was absent. Perhaps. But as far as the rest of us are concerned, you share the honours. The organised left, as most of us know it in most continents in the world, has 'failed to grasp the opportunities' as they would say, of the end of the period opened by the collapse of the USSR in 1989 and the greatest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s.

Don't worry. There have been previous collapses and deep failures of the organised left. Nothing new.

Since 1789 and the onset of the French revolution there has been one, overwhelming object of most of  the political activity, of most of the people, of most of the planet, for most of the time; the desire to create a society that serves the interests of the people rather than any (and every) ruling class. It has rarely been made that consciously explicit. But a momentous effort has been made, since then, by millions and billions, under every variety of banner, to make the world a better place. It remains the major unresolved issue of human civilisation. It can be held back, it can be broken up but it will not go away.

There have been two occasions in the last hundred years where this thirst by humanity, a thirst created by the very triumphs of capitalism, was made most explicit, most clear and most direct. These were the  revolutions in Russia in 1917 and the Chinese revolution of 1948. Billions took direct action to end the curses of feudalism, landlordism, famine, the pogroms and of capitalism. One failed and the other is failing. And now the greatest crisis of a weak and flailing capitalism system faces a left that appears to be congenitally unable to represent the next mass surge of action and hope of the toilers of the world for for a new society.

When the huge, mass socialist parties of europe walked into their national parliaments in 1914 and voted in favour of their own nations at the start of WW1 the handful of socialists that remained and who still stood for the pre-war resolutions to call general strikes against any coming conflict, felt as though they had been submerged by a tidal wave. Seemingly everything that they had helped build had been shattered to dust.

What did they do?

Faced with catastrophe - in their own camp - and the inevitable disasters that would (and did) result for millions, they hit the books. That's right. Vladimir Ulyanov went to a Swiss library to (re)read Hegel. He changed his views about Hegel, about Marx, about the coming revolution, about everything.

Now as everybody knows that is not it. These were among the greatest and most successful revolutionaries that the world has ever known. They thought - in order to act. But they thought and rethought - from the very start of things. As the left needs to do now. Quickly. From the very start of things. In order to act.