This essay has been prompted by the spate of recent articles and posts all pointing out that we are in a new world. There has been an outporing of angst picking up on two things; the international environment seems to have shifted and in many countries the far right is making headway. One commentator was prompted to ask the question, have we already lost the war? [Trigger] and defined the war as the asault of neoliberalism on democracy.
I agree that reading the news has become grim and depressing and that many people seem discombobulated. And yes there is a campaign against any meaningful form of social contract recruting for suport the very people who need one. Some might call it a class war [Class and War] . What I want to do here is suggest ways to resist, and above all I want to say keep the faith and don’t despair.
- Details
The trigger for this article was this blog post by Richard Murphy
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/02/23/have-we-already-lost-the-war/
'Richard Murphy is a British former chartered accountant and political economist who campaigns on issues of tax avoidance and tax evasion. He advises the Trades Union Congress on economics and taxation, and founded the Tax Justice Network'
Class is a form of categorisation. Categorisation has become endemic because it works for advertising - the error rate, those who don't fit the category can be ignored. When it comes to politics the idea of class is problematic because people do not conform or fit to it, there are millionares in favour of wealth taxes https://millionairesforhumanity.org/about/
With increasing micro targetting messages are crafted to marginal seats with smaller errors and we have just been given a master class in the 2024 election. But millions of people feel their views are ignored -they just don't live in marginal constitiencies. Class categorisation can go disaterously wrong, for instance when it was regarded as heritable the children of so called Kulaks were murdered (Russia in the purges).
War is a problematic term when used as a metaphor. The reality is bloody and brutal. The use of terms like The war on Terror, or The War on Drugs should ring alarm bells - they usually signal that some combative reaction is being called (an easy fix, except it isn't) and usually signifies the absence of political will to deal with the underlying issues (e.g. drug rehabilitation) or the employment of a systems approach to untangle all the factors and work out what might actualy help.
See also https://brianfishhope.com/the-human-system/the-weight-of-culture?start=1
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom - Introduction
Change management is a specialisation in business education, it is based on the recognition that managers have to lead changew ithin an orgnisation. In many change management theories used in business it is said that an easy way to bring about change is to have a crisis. An early example is Lewin whose prescription was Unfreeze, Change, Refreeze. Unfreezing happens in a crisis, possibilities open up - as business peole say room for manouvre is increased. This is still widely used - a google search will being up lots of management consultants still using it.
This may be a place to start as it rounds up the criticisms as well https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2004.00463.x#ss4-title
See
Lawrence M, Homer-Dixon T, Janzwood S, Rockstöm J, Renn O, Donges JF. Global polycrisis: the causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement. Global Sustainability. 2024;
They say 'The term ‘polycrisis’ appears with growing frequently to capture the interconnections between global crises, but the word lacks substantive content. In this article, we convert it from an empty buzzword into a conceptual framework and research program that enables us to better understand the causal linkages between contemporary crises. We draw upon the intersection of climate change, the covid-19 pandemic, and Russia's war in Ukraine to illustrate these causal interconnections and explore key features of the world's present polycrisis.'
It was possible to see much of this comming, I published this in 2019
https://brianfishhope.com/past-present-and-future/future/113-political-challenges
My defintion of the polycrisis was expressed as a formula giving rise to the 4 horsemen of the appocolypse;
[Catch up Development x (Resource depletion + Power Bloc Competition for resources)] + Population Pressure + Climate Change= Death, Famine, War and Pestilence
https://brianfishhope.com/past-present-and-future/future/114-possible-futures?start=1
I should hace said copy-cat development i.e. using carbon in the way we do - we started by accident, we continue in denial). I highlighted migration in the footnotes,, it dosn't adeqalty highlight impact that mass polution movement will have (we talk about migration) its already underway and accelerating, it is an inevitable byproduct of the polycrisis - people will not stick arround in unlivable areas (why should we expec them to). In the face of this 'stop the boats' is an offensive and purile political slogan.
Information about Tufton Steet thinktanks here
https://www.desmog.com/55-tufton-street/
Project 2025 here
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c977njnvq2do
The Soverign Individual, Mastering the transition to the in formation age, James Dale Davison and Willam Rees-Mogg, Touchstone ISBN 978-0684832722, my edition has an introduction by Peter Thiel - the only techbro powerful enough to be able to absent himself from the Trump Inauguration. Amazon has an extended product description (I wonder why) so you can read a summary without buying it.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sovereign-Individual-James-Dale-Davidson/dp/0684832720
I also found this insightful - The Comming Storm. In particular the penultimate episode of series 2 (Wonderland) which may explain why the tech billionaires are supporting Trump - if they are persuaded that a crisis is comming and the collapse of the nation state is inevitable then why not use Trump to try and power through it?
Or the lack of it, John Harris captures it here;
'It would also be very welcome to see something so far completely lacking: ministers applying the energy and imagination swirling around some government departments to the most basic issues of taxation, spending and the public services they pay for. This country needs a lot more than the myopic parsimony of pen-pushers and bean-counters: if it doesn’t push beyond it, the future will not be about our national condition deteriorating before it improves, but something much, much worse.' https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/10/keir-starmer-rachel-reeves-britain-pensioners-winter-fuel-allowance
The reverse applies for international relations - we talk big but don't have the tools to deliver. Unlike 1938 when Chamberlain apeased Hitler Britain was already rearming at pace and Chamberlain eventually declared war on Germany. Our armed forces are currently in a dire state to that extent that one has to worry that firm talk cannot be delivered upon. Check out commets by the likes of Dannet and Ricketts. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czep44jn9jyo and https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-war-has-changed-britains-relationship-with-the-eu/
Maybe there is the beginning of a realisaton that the Labour Party is a lost cause, well put by Owen Jones here and he urges left MPs to 'Call the bluff of your assailants: leave, and form an alliance with the Green and leftwing independent MPs' https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/05/labour-left-keir-starmer-power-right-britain
To which I'd add that the name Labour in Name Only is now warranted by the facts
'Of the £21.5m in cash received by the party in 2023, just £5.9m came from the trade union movement, compared with £14.5m from companies and individuals – a huge increase on the previous year, and indeed more than in the three previous years of Keir Starmer’s leadership combined. As trade union contributions have dipped slightly, from around £6.9m in 2020 and 2021 to £5.3m in 2022, donations from businesses and individuals have soared: they totalled £2.3m in 2020 and rose to £3m in 2021 and £7.6m in 2022 before nearly doubling last year' https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/labour-conservative-party-donations-2023-spending-analysis/
Which means that this Full Fact article isn't as neutral as it sounds - it used data from 2019 to say unions were the biggest funders of Labour when responding to 2024 election comment https://fullfact.org/news/nadhim-zahawi-labour-rmt-funding/
Failed State, Why nothing works and how to fix it, Sam Freedman, Macmillan, 2024, ISBN 978-1035026593
Sam Freedman was a political advisor to Micheal Gove and has since move to academia.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Failed-State-bestselling-Britain-struggling/dp/1035026597
The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, Martin Woolfe, Allan Lane 2023, ISBN 978-0141985831
Martin Woolfe was the chief economics commentator on the Financial Times
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Crisis-Democratic-Capitalism-Martin-Wolf/dp/0141985836/
I'd love to be proved wrong about this government, and it is better than what went before, but...
So far we have seen a self chosen set of fiancial constraints with contradictory messaging. I suspect that the minset that can finesse the election by concentrating ruthlesly on marginal seats is also at play in government; this could explain why you abolish a univeral benefit portraying it as a hard choice instead of just making it unavailable to higher rate tax payers? Why else would you raise taxes in a way that deflates the economy (Employers NI) instead of raising personal allowances at the same time as increasing higher rate taxes balaned in such a way that the necessary £20bn is raised? Why else would you cut aid to increase defence when soft power is needed to compliment hard power? Why else is necessary for a backbencher to use a Private Member's Bill to get renationalisation of water on the agenda (Clive Lewis - support him). The water companies gearing is through the roof to the extent that they would go bust if the regulator (chaired by an ex Water Company executive) didn't up their borrowing limits. Why is it OK for Water Companies be hock but the government isnt allowed to borrow? What about the 2 child limit? What about social care? Why so much outsourcing to companies that have failed? Why bend the knee to Trump when our interests and trade lie with Europe?
There are vast numbers of people in the country who want more dynamism and bravery, they just don't live in margial seats - see War and Class in the notes. No wonder levels of trust are so low and why disillusion can be exploited by Reform.
For zombie companies and much else besides see; What Went Wrong with Capitalism, Ruchir Sharma, Simin Schuster 2023, ISBN 9781668008263
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/What-Went-Wrong-with-Capitalism/Ruchir-Sharma/9781668008263
If you are up for it look at Aristotle's critique of democracy, according to him democracy isnt a good system because it can be taken over by plutocrates - guess what?
The idea of a social contract goes back to Hobbes notion of the Leviathan; the state has the liberties we give up to be protected. it is telling that the libertarian plutocrates now taking over the US dont like the state and that the Soverign Individual contenplates it collapse with glee. John Rawls is classed as a social contract philospher esentialy arguing that if we didnt know where we'd end up in a society we insist that it was eqitably organised.
Wikipedia is your friend here - itself proof that we can collaborate and argue to create a common good without resorting to coercion and bullying (and the Talk pages are great)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle
Thomas Paine , Rights of Man, 1792
Comments addressed M. De La Fayette as an introduction to Rights of Man, Part second, Combining Principle and Practice.
Letter from Prison, 1929.
David Forgacs, The Gramsci Reader, Seleccted Writings 1916-35, New York University Press, 2000, ISBN: 0-8147-2701-8, this has selections of Gramsci's written works including the prison notebooks with editorial commentary providing context and chronology