Metaphorically speaking, with only two specially groomed political horses in what amounted to a two horse race, how could the US systems syndicates that have bought and fed both horses, NOT win? What is true of the US political system is true of the UK and the rest of the countries dominated by the capitalist mode of production. In the UK the two horse race was between Tories and Labour, both dedicated to defending the capitalist system and groomed by wealthy co-owners. In the US the jockeys riding the political horses were of different genders as has happened before and will happen again, but the needs of the systems syndicates running the show and placing the bets, remain essentially the same. The names and breed lines of the bourgeois backed political horses were not democracy and fascism, as some confused ‘lefts’ claimed, but capitalism ‘main‘ and capitalism ‘back-up‘.

Fascism is something that has to be built from the ground up to meet an authoritarian political elite who have been selected because they are actually prepared to unleash large-scale civil war on their own populations. The US and UK along with most other ‘advanced’ capitalist countries are not at that stage yet. The clear understanding that the bourgeois political spectrum was merely one broad defence system with two or more ‘main‘ and ‘back-up‘ political faces, has been around for over a generation, but it has been almost completely missing from the modern lefts perspective in the 21st century. Instead, a cacophony of fantasy and fiction was served up by the ‘left’ during the summer and autumn of 2024, to try to scare ordinary people into voting for one or other of the bourgeois funded political parties. The imminent appearance of Fascism was repeatedly mentioned by the bourgeois left without any serious reference as to how and when bourgeois authoritarian political tendencies are transformed into fascist type movements.

Fascism is a form of authoritarian political movement which creates a militarily uniformed and organised elite who are linked with organised community based citizen combat squads who are willing to kill or beat anyone to within an inch of death and who are protected by various state and non-state institutions. Fascism is the result of a mass social movement involving large numbers who have sufficiently stifled their humanity and have fully committed to a narrow, authoritarian political tendency. Most hierarchical mass societies are not at that stage yet. We are now in a crisis stage of established bourgeois political parties who are wallowing in their own incompetence and greed. Fortunately, we do not need to go back as far as the 19th century for evidence of how the bourgeois political system actually functions normally and why voting for a ‘main‘ or ‘back-up‘ representative by the exploited and oppressed is a waste of time, for it was made clear in the US in the 20th.

“In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no “two evils” exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say. There is no third party.” (Why I won’t vote. W.E.B. Du Bois.)

I suggest that the author was mistaken in considering that democracy in the USA had disappeared by 1956 for after the final overthrow of the British authority, around 1783, democratic voting in the USA for that generation and more was only ever exercised by an elite male upper class minority whilst the rest of the population, settlers, slaves, native Americans and women were never even consulted. However, the above author was not mistaken when he continued writing;

“This Administration is dominated and directed by wealth and for the accumulation of wealth. It runs smoothly like a well-organized industry and should do so because industry runs it for the benefit of industry. Corporate wealth profits as never before in history. We turn over the national resources to private profit and have few funds left for education, health or housing. Our crime, especially juvenile crime, is increasing. Its increase is perfectly logical;” (ibid)

These symptoms are the basis of the actual democratic political norms which still remain flexible according to elite needs. We need only add that these apply not only to the US but to all modern hierarchical mass societies, in the global North or the global South. The question arises why was none of this alternative level of understanding of the bourgeois political charade promoted by the left in the 21st century? Why has the left turned it’s back on social and biological reality? Furthermore, how can much of the liberal left suspend the long researched and accepted socio-biological understanding of gender and substitute an ideological contructed counter-understanding that asserts if a man insists he is a woman then this must be accepted by others as true? In other words, his ideas of himself are deemed to be the reality and his evolutionary biological reality is nonsensically deemed irrelevant.

I suggest much of the left have avoided evidenced based reality and have journeyed like the fictional Dorothy ‘somewhere over the rainbow’, ‘where dreams really do come true‘. Yet another group of left intellectuals have been ideologically seduced into entering a virtual world of hope and imagination, in which individual desires can also be allowed to redefine reality for them and those they can influence. In this way it is asserted that the hope for fairness, equality, security and justice in life can be furthered by voting for one or other of the current political pro-capitalist tendencies. The well documented social reality, however, is that all the established political parties are completely under the control of one or other of the hierarchical mass society systems oligarchal elites! I suggest a material part of the process of intellectual seduction of past and present left individuals from evidence based socio-biological reality to ideological constructed virtual realities, came after the Second World War, during the post-war period of reconstruction.

The ‘Spirit of 1945’.

The post 1945 pro-capitalist settlement in the advanced countries included the existence of a new social welfare form of capitalist economic activities within the various hierarchical mass societies. These societies were intended to create full adult employment and a work based government form of taxation. Therefore government income and expenditure would be based primarily upon gathering in the different rates of taxation spread among their entire populations. In theory, the most wealthy individuals would pay the highest rates of taxation, the least wealthy individuals would pay the least and the extensive range in between top and bottom tiers of income would have graduated levels of taxation to pay.

According to the post-Second World War general petite-bourgeois consensus, this spread of taxation was to be levied upon all primary forms of productive (i.e. profitable) economic activity such as producing commodities and services, which would then allow the funding of important but largely unproductive (i.e. non-profitable) public services such as health, education and social welfare. Most of the middle and working classes at the time bought into this ‘dream’ or Beveredge spun ‘vision’ of a reformed capitalism and it sort of superficially worked for a short while.

Nevertheless, capitalist economic reality soon began to nudge aside this politically self-induced dream. Once the war-torn countries began to re-tool and increase production, (particularly in Europe and the West) the competition between countries for sales, eventually reduced the general rate and level of profits on commodities and services. This in turn eventually led to post-war reductions in the relative levels of employment and thus reductions in the relative levels of income based taxation the governments were obtaining. During the same period of post-war economic expansion, (1960’s to 1980’s) the consensus on social welfare systems gradually dissolved within the elite and a new generation of wealthy individuals via ‘their’ political parties, obtained reductions in the rate of taxation on their wealth and profits.

The gradual reduction of these two sources of taxation (from working incomes and profits) along with the increasing costs of public services, led governments to top up the gap between income and expenditure by borrowing from the financial markets. This tactic kept remnants of the dream of 45 circulating to a certain extent. However, government borrowing consequently increased in most advanced countries until the governments were (and now are) paying an increasing proportion of the taxation they get in interest payments on the government debt that successive governments have steadily accrued.

Thus there are now three reductions in the sources of public funding to support social services such as health, education, pensions, social care, etc.. 1. Reductions in the absolute numbers of those paying income tax. 2. Reductions in the relative proportions of tax obtained from sources of wealth and profit. 3. Relatively large increases in government debt and repayments due to fluctuating interest rates and to the accumulated and accumulating debt owed to the financial sector. This symptom has been described by some (including the Labour Government in the UK), as a ‘black hole’. However, in reality the ‘hole’ is not something imaginary, esoteric or situated in a galaxy far far away, but is a clear case of successive governments decreasing relative  levels of taxation for the wealthy, allowing reductions in the number of workers employed in industry and commerce and lowering the wages and salaries of those remaining in work.

This background in essence explains almost everything that is taking place, within most hierarchical mass societies. This particular problem for capitalist based hierarchical mass societies has existed since the 1970’s and the means to radically solve it has been studiously avoided. It has been avoided because under the existing system and its disproportional power distribution among classes, there is an unequal struggle as to which classes will bear the costs to support those services; the elite or the rest of us by means of succesive levels privatisation.

So the problem of how to either prop up or completely dissolve the post-45 concensus on social welfare lies behind practically all the current struggles and disputes between the respective classes of modern hierarchical mass societies. For example if you accept the legitimacy and principles of this current capitalist system, the following questions on welfare arise; Do you increase the tax on wealth; increase employment and pay wages and salaries high enough to be sufficiently taxed? Or do you reduce the rates of interest on borrowing? Of course powerful individuals and elite collectives in every country oppose increases in taxes on wealth; they generally also oppose increases in employment and wages; and the financial sector generally oppose reductions in interest rates.

Moreover, this elite class of individuals are part of the same, financial, economic and social ‘establishment’ elites who continue to control and/or undemocratically influence politics. This leaves the working classes who partially or fully understand the problem with a considerable dilemma. Lacking any formal and direct sources of influence or power themselves, they must try to locate some ‘agency‘ which will solve the problem by not reducing their wages, salaries and welfare benefits further or their access to social support mechanisms. But of course there are no such agencies. The only agency which is powerful enough to challenge the current system are the combined and organised working and middle classes themselves, when they are united and not divided into sectarian or narcissistic factions.

The historical evidence indicates that by the mid twentieth century, the reality of the capitalist mode of production had caught up with and shattered the elite part of the concensus behind the 45 dream of a socially responsive economic, financial and political system. In contrast many of the dreams supporters among the middle and working classes have not yet caught up with reality. They still dream and still ‘believe’ that the ‘vision’ of a social welfare system can be resuscitated and delivered within the neo-liberal phase of capitalist mode of production.

The dreamers reason (even after decades of elequent persuasion,) that the systems elites can eventually be convinced by facts to do the humane and sensible thing. However, those working and (now unworking) classes of people who are faced with exceptional hardship are not convinced and are abandoning the systems compliant established political parties and some are mistakenly looking for a strong political force which will compel the system to reinstate at least some of the social welfare programs and levels of economic well-being that existed prior to the mid 20th century neo-liberal phase of capitalism.

This is the general sentiment behind the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ and in the UK the popular appeal of getting out of the European Economic Community in the UK. The disgruntled classes want better living standards by voting for those who appear to promise this ‘great’ outcome. The working class understandably want a life worth living, but are mistaken in thinking they can get it from voting for populist political parties, with tough leaders who will use force to bring about this dream of a return of good living for good people. This is because the ruling elites are also not stupid and know they will need strong authoritarian political forces to forcibly maintain their system against the increasing demands of the many. This is why (as elites did in the 1930’s) they have increasingly funded and groomed these populist individuals and parties so as to still have representatives forceful enough to enable them to continue to game the system and come through it still in control.

The class war built into the foundations of all hierarchical mass societies, including the latest capitalist based economic one, is being transformed from its previously established post-war patterns of dispute and control into new ones. This is causing confusion between those on the left who are still committed to achieving the dream of 45 by political means and is paralleled by those awakened to the climate and ecological dislocation that the current mode of production is creating. Both the dreamers and nature protectors think this economic direction can be negated or diverted by the current elite dominated political means.

However, from within it’s own ‘real’ existing parameters, and not any idealised ones, the system of capitalism will not be altered, slowed down or stopped by its elites. This is the case because the profits and interest the elites live upon are absolutely dependent upon this continuous cycle of extraction,  production and consumption. It is clear from the ruthless elimination of human life on earth (men, women and children) by past and current elite instigated wars and genocides, (Gaza, Ukraine etc.) that nothing outside of their own elite interests is sacred to them. Anything and everything can be sacrificed to save the control of their ‘system’.

Therefore, human destruction, ecological destruction, climate change or essential species loss will not be allowed to interrupt the profitable cycle of extraction, production, consumption and waste disposal which underpins the capitalist mode of production and thus sustains the lives and wellbeing of the dominant elites. This is why a new 21st century phase of the class struggle – if sufficiently unified – and avoids being led into dead ends, by left and right sectarians and dogmatists, will determine not just whether the masses within hierarchical mass societies can in future enjoy decent meaningful lives by the process of ending the current capitalist mode of production, and replacing it with sustainable modes of production,  but this struggle can also determine much more.

The outcome of those existing and coming struggles will determine whether life on earth in general (microorganisms, insects, photosynthetic algae, plants, and animals etc.) will face or not face further mass resource extractions, mass destruction of natural habitats, mass pollution by the mass disposal of unwanted chemical, nuclear or material byproducts of production. For only the prevention of those mass production symptoms  will determine whether essential species survive in sufficient numbers to sustain a much broader spectrum of the unique bio-chemical organisms that have evolved on this amazing and possibly unique planet. That is the basic economic, biological and ecological reality which lies beneath the systems current virtual world of superficial considerations, the uninterrupted spinning of elite and nonsensical lies and the constant deliberate ideological distortions of reality.

Roy Ratcliffe ( November 2024.)