I’m a relatively old (let’s say more than 40, less than 55) guy living in a dependent country in the periphery capitalism (Brazil). It always felt to me that building strong socialist movement in core capitalist places like the US or in Western Europe would be damn near impossible.
Back 20 years ago it felt like those countries had a very solid way of providing life’s necessities and a more or less comfortable existence for a fraction big and politically strong enough of their populations that it would be really hard for organic movements to raise and make people see the exploitation. Hell, it’s hard to talk about radical politics with workers here, who see the exploitation first hand and are mostly aware that the game is rigged against them. I imagine how hard it would be in a place where everyone you know have a car, a house and so on.
Of course that was built on the backs of the Global South. But it felt like exploitation had been exported to places where it was invisible and wouldn’t make any waves back in the places to which this wealth was flowing.
I’m not a well versed in marxist theory to be honest. Just enough to understand we’re all being fucked and need to take over. But I always thought that any next big revolutionary movement with international impact would start in super-exploited places like Latin America, South East Asia, Africa, … I made an analogy with the Russian Revolution. The first revolution happening in a rich but relatively relatively peripheral country. It was Russia, not Germany or France. It wasn’t the most advanced capitalist country. It was a place where there was enough capitalist development for a proletariat to emerge and material conditions that made proletarians more readily radicalizable for whatever reasons.
So, I thought, maybe it will be India or the Philippines, places that already have active revolutions going on. Maybe it will be Brazil, Malaysia, etc…
But this right-wing turn in politics in the last 10 years, the successive crisis and the need for more and more exploitation to keep ever increasing accumulation seems to be bringing over-exploitation right to the core of the system. More and more the working classes of Europe and the USA are being impoverished and denied what used to be available to them.
I wonder if that doesn’t make those places a lot more prone to political radicalization than they were 20 or 30 years ago.
I’ve been wondering the same thing for a while now, and all the evidence I see is that yes it does. People are a lot more prone to political radicalization than they were 20 or 30 years ago. But unfortunately all I’m seeing is a growth of the far right.
Being on the left is hard, people want easy answers.
depends on what countries, the far-right are making huge gains in germany, spain, Scandinavia and eastern europe. But France, belgium and the UK I have noticed a large conscious awakening, the workers party in belgium is growing steadily over these past few years, france has seen riots against the authoritarian-liberal macron state, and the UK I’ve seen the old corrupt trade unions are now finally being replaced by new radical ones.
My analysis is that there will never be a time where europe can de-radicalise anymore, the corporations have too much power and veto anything that can take away their wealth, and the liberal democracies refuse to even implement sufficent anti-trust laws, even when companies goes against state interests! (like agri-corps funding the farmers protests in the netherlands, and blockading ukranian grain from the european market, and implementing inflation continent wide wo reap more profits). I can go on forever why this is the case but with the wealth of world being diverted from the Atlantic to the pacific is also a major factor, unlike the cold war where most of the wealth was in the western world, the global south is seeing an increase of the middle class, whereas in the west its declining. Sure propaganda will play a part, and more europeans will become insanely more racist, xenophobic, and anti-communist (because they need something else to blame other than their shitty liberal-democracies), but soon there’s going to be a wake up call.
I’m a relatively old (let’s say more than 40, less than 55) guy living in a dependent country in the periphery capitalism (Brazil). It always felt to me that building strong socialist movement in core capitalist places like the US or in Western Europe would be damn near impossible.
Back 20 years ago it felt like those countries had a very solid way of providing life’s necessities and a more or less comfortable existence for a fraction big and politically strong enough of their populations that it would be really hard for organic movements to raise and make people see the exploitation. Hell, it’s hard to talk about radical politics with workers here, who see the exploitation first hand and are mostly aware that the game is rigged against them. I imagine how hard it would be in a place where everyone you know have a car, a house and so on.
Of course that was built on the backs of the Global South. But it felt like exploitation had been exported to places where it was invisible and wouldn’t make any waves back in the places to which this wealth was flowing.
I’m not a well versed in marxist theory to be honest. Just enough to understand we’re all being fucked and need to take over. But I always thought that any next big revolutionary movement with international impact would start in super-exploited places like Latin America, South East Asia, Africa, … I made an analogy with the Russian Revolution. The first revolution happening in a rich but relatively relatively peripheral country. It was Russia, not Germany or France. It wasn’t the most advanced capitalist country. It was a place where there was enough capitalist development for a proletariat to emerge and material conditions that made proletarians more readily radicalizable for whatever reasons.
So, I thought, maybe it will be India or the Philippines, places that already have active revolutions going on. Maybe it will be Brazil, Malaysia, etc…
But this right-wing turn in politics in the last 10 years, the successive crisis and the need for more and more exploitation to keep ever increasing accumulation seems to be bringing over-exploitation right to the core of the system. More and more the working classes of Europe and the USA are being impoverished and denied what used to be available to them.
I wonder if that doesn’t make those places a lot more prone to political radicalization than they were 20 or 30 years ago.
I’ve been wondering the same thing for a while now, and all the evidence I see is that yes it does. People are a lot more prone to political radicalization than they were 20 or 30 years ago. But unfortunately all I’m seeing is a growth of the far right. Being on the left is hard, people want easy answers.
depends on what countries, the far-right are making huge gains in germany, spain, Scandinavia and eastern europe. But France, belgium and the UK I have noticed a large conscious awakening, the workers party in belgium is growing steadily over these past few years, france has seen riots against the authoritarian-liberal macron state, and the UK I’ve seen the old corrupt trade unions are now finally being replaced by new radical ones.
My analysis is that there will never be a time where europe can de-radicalise anymore, the corporations have too much power and veto anything that can take away their wealth, and the liberal democracies refuse to even implement sufficent anti-trust laws, even when companies goes against state interests! (like agri-corps funding the farmers protests in the netherlands, and blockading ukranian grain from the european market, and implementing inflation continent wide wo reap more profits). I can go on forever why this is the case but with the wealth of world being diverted from the Atlantic to the pacific is also a major factor, unlike the cold war where most of the wealth was in the western world, the global south is seeing an increase of the middle class, whereas in the west its declining. Sure propaganda will play a part, and more europeans will become insanely more racist, xenophobic, and anti-communist (because they need something else to blame other than their shitty liberal-democracies), but soon there’s going to be a wake up call.
well said