BRICS and the G7 Hegemony
The Unwisdom of the New Right
At Home in BRICS
The Sacred WASP Democracy of the USA
Millionaires as Wealth Consumers
Snippets
Taiwan – Beijing Could Just Blockade
A Palestinian Anne Frank?
Non-Wealthy IT Pioneers
BRICS and the G7 Hegemony
BRICS is now claiming equal authority with the G7/NATO hegemony.
It represents many of the successes among the nations that suffered from imperialism.
It confronts the nations that hang onto huge advantages gained during European global imperialism. Including the export of whole European societies to lands suitable for European agriculture and only thinly populated: the USA, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
Russia, which itself exported Russian society to the tribal lands of Siberia, changed alignments in 1917. Changed thanks to Lenin seizing power at a time when most Russians had lost confidence in what they were. Today it gets sneered at as a coup; but in the open vote for the 1917 Constituent Assembly, Lenin got a solid 23%.[1] The Constitutional Democrats, believers in capitalism and western values, got less than 5% – much the same as Yabloko, their current heirs.[2] And at least 50% of those who didn’t vote for Lenin still wanted some sort of socialism, only they were not quite sure what.
Most places east of Berlin that had tried Western parliamentary systems had lapsed into some form of popular autocratic rule even before Hitler adopted the same system for Germany. This included Poland, where the socialist Pilsudski had to give up most of his socialist ideas to become an efficient autocrat.
Lenin meantime had a clear democratic majority in the alternative system of the Soviets. He set about building socialism on that basis. And undermining imperialism, with the former Tsarist empire turned into a single state with citizens who were theoretically equal.
A socialist version of Tsarism under Lenin and Stalin allowed for huge advances in working-class power, and a global advance for anti-imperialism. Sadly, far too many on the left express hatred of that legacy, or will at least write it off as a failure. They take an unrealistic view of what was likely to happen had Lenin and Stalin not been efficient autocrats.
Capitalist democrats in Western Europe had to gradually move away from direct imperialism, under US influence. And Communist voters alarmed them: a fifth of the electors in France into the 1970s and at least a quarter in Italy up until the Soviet collapse.
But the decent social welfare and full employment that Western Europe enjoyed till the 1970s turned out to be wholly dependent on Moscow Communism being there as a serious alternative.
So did the idea of a world where all nations were equally valued and important. Even though the Soviet Union failed to live up to this for the nations they had occupied in their anti-Nazi war.
Imperfect though Soviet power was, we soon learned that things could get much worse without it.
Everyone now knows that the UN General Assembly count for nothing, and can be biased by small poor countries being bribed to do the will of the USA. So the stronger countries in the Global South have increasingly got together. And in the Global North, they once again have Russia as an ally.
The Unwisdom of the New Right
The victors of the Cold War had bad intentions. But over the decades, it has become clear that they are also rather bad at implementing those bad intentions.
The Soviet collapse occurred at a time when New Right thinking dominated the West. These were believers in the virtues of the pre-1914 system of liberal capitalism. They had a naïve belief that Global Imperialism had ended naturally and without the Soviets doing more than cause trouble. And that now it would be easy to make a world of capitalist parliamentary democracies accepting the values invented by the West in the 19th century. Or at least those updated with some 1960s radicalism: that was and is an area of ambiguity.
Those people were sophisticated operators, excellent at day-to-day politics. Even year-to-year politics. But they’ve been guided by a creed of pure ignorance and deception on the vital decade-to-decade politics where the world is actually shaped or reshaped.
George Soros was briefly wise, when he suggested a Marshall Plan for Russia. Generously putting money in, rather than letting Russia’s wealth be squandered or exported by a Pure Capitalism that soon became pure fraud and criminality. But it seems beyond this supposed philosopher to connect this with the vast popular support for Putin and for other anti-Western politicians. And the rest of them were not even that insightful.
Yeltsin tried to be pro-Western, and found that Russia’s economy was shrinking when it followed Western advice. Putin was drafted in to stop the rot, and did stop it. But the West kept disrespecting him. They imagined that there were a horde of pro-Western Russians eager to replace him. Ignoring that it was about the same one-twentieth who had hoped for capitalism and Western values back in 1917.
More boldly, they harassed and eventually destroyed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Failed to realise that his Baath party were the main westernising force. Only after being ignorantly destructive did the West realise that the pro-Western Iraqis were few and shallow, and some may all along have been ‘false flag’. Definitely, it is a mix of religious and pro-Iranian politicians who keep winning the elections.
Just as short-termist in Afghanistan, which was neglected once they had pushed the Soviets out. They never thought to recruit the left-behind pro-Soviet government as agents of Western power, which a lot of ex-Leninists became. Became where the voters found them sensible in open elections: but elsewhere the New Right were keen to avoid those who might be contaminated by having once dared think the wrong thoughts. And were amazed that a slew of mercenaries and drugs cartels in Afghanistan had no intention of staying when the going got tough. Those who were honest were mostly not good fighters. A few died bravely, but far too few to defeat the Taliban.
Before the USA invaded, the Taliban were a movement that had begun in the south and was resisted in the north. This time round, the Taliban had won over the north and took power there, before advancing on the capital Kabul. And naturally, most of those who had relied on the departing USA joined them in running.
At Home in BRICS
“Turkey’s ‘balancing act’ with BRICS bid raises NATO concerns”.[3]
This from France 24 is typical of how the Western media can’t understand why they are losing Turkiye. They are too self-absorbed to realise it is a bad idea to ignore a proud nation’s official change of their own name in English.
English has become the unofficial shared language of the entire world. It is collective property, yet most Anglos act as if they own it. And the French are mostly no longer independent-minded enough to ignore this. In French they come close to the Turkish form, but in English they accept that The Truth is whatever the Anglosphere says it is.
Really slow to learn, or not learning. The Global South puts trust in Russia and China, since Russia abandoned its dream of being the core of a World State in 1989. China was lukewarm about it even under Mao.
During the Cold War, when the West feared to lose everything, there was no problem about newly independent states discarding inaccurate imperial names. Or changing them several times. But now, they are expected to conform to whatever the West sees as true.
It is both rude and unjust. Self-naming is a part of independence. As I see it, if some small eccentric nation-state decided it must henceforth be known as Donald Duck’s Dominion, they would be within their rights.
We could get that, or worse, if independent space colonies ever got going.
Turkiye is being cautious, but seems to see BRICS as the way to go. Particularly since their long-standing application to join the European Union has been ignored, and seems unlikely ever to happen.
India too had choices. They were founder members of BRICS, but also gave a lot of attention to working with the USA. But seem now to have chosen, winding up a border dispute with China that was never about anything serious.
Modi is well aware that the USA and Europe would like someone else running India, whereas Russia and China see it as none of their business.
The Sacred WASP Democracy of the USA
The USA was the first place to try to mass-produce democracy.
Up until then, there were many self-governing communities that had popular voting. Each could assume there was enough fellow-feeling to keep the community together.
It was also normal for the self-governing community to be selective in who could vote. Common for the original citizens to give inferior status to more recent arrivals. Or to have inherited class status – the mediaeval and early-modern Polish Commonwealth had a super-democracy just for a gigantic minority who had ‘noble blood’. And more commonly voting was limited to those with significant property – roughly equivalent to the modern upper middle class.
Women seem never to have had a vote on political matters, perhaps because these had military matters as their core. Women actually did better in aristocratic systems, where a strong and competent woman might be the best representative of the interests of a powerful family.
There was also an unhappy pattern of parliaments getting locked into factions. And for political disputes to escalate into civil wars. The Roman Republic, which was never democratic even for the all-male body of free citizens,[4] had an unhappy habit of electoral disputes turning into full-scale civil wars.
The new USA began as a loose assembly of thirteen self-governing colonies, plus a self-governing Vermont Republic that had intermittently fought the British. Sensibly, both sides compromised and Vermont became the fourteenth US state.
It was not intended to be a modern democracy. Until they changed the rules in 1913, members of the senate were elected by state legislatures.[5] And the President and Vice-President are elected by an Electoral College, because it was felt ordinary voters would make bad choices for the best man to run the distant Federal Government. But since the Electoral College had nothing else to do, it became normal for delegates to it to be pledged to a candidate who would have campaigned nationally.
They’d have been wiser to switch to a vote by the majority of the nationally elected representatives, which is how most open democracies do it, and which is much less likely to produce bad leaders. As things are, Al Gore lost in 2000 despite getting more than half a million more votes than Bush Junior. Then in 2016, Hillary Clinton lost despite getting nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump. And Biden got seven million more votes in 2020, but Trump still tried to fix the Electoral College.
Similar things are almost certain to happen when they vote on 5th November – an ill-omened date for parliamentary systems. Happening because the rule is the first Tuesday in November.
I also note that the bulk of the Democratic Party show no interest in switching to a direct election. A plausible reason is that in 2016, Bernie Saunders could have run as an Independent and won. Many who voted for Trump would sooner have voted for Saunders, feeling correctly that Hillary Clinton was determined to stick with a system that was visibly failing.
Democracy is more a question than an answer. It allows the mass of the population to replace those who do the actual work of ruling, and this isn’t always a good idea.
When New Right politics got dominance with the election of Ronald Reagan, undermining the credibility of the system was still almost unthinkable. Nixon in 1960 had good grounds for arguing he’d only lost because of electoral fraud in Texas and Chicago: but was advised to stay silent and did stay silent. Now it is all falling apart.
Millionaires as Wealth Consumers
“Microsoft’s chief executive Satya Nadella earned $79.1m (£61m) last year, a rise of 63% compared to his compensation the year before…
“Elsewhere in big tech, Apple boss Tim Cook earned $63.2m in 2023, while the chief executive of the world’s most valuable company Nvidia, Jensen Huang, was paid $34.2m in the 2024 fiscal year.
“But none of them come close to Tesla boss Elon Musk, whose pay packet could be worth up to $56bn.”[6]
The normal excuse is ‘that’s capitalism’. But it’s not. Even allowing for inflation, managers get far more than they used to:
“The average base salaries and bonuses of Forbes 800 CEOs increased from 700,000 U.S. dollars in 1970 to more than 2.2 million dollars in 2002. This effect is even larger when stock options are taken into account…
“The ratio between CEO cash compensation and average pay for production workers in the U.S. climbed from 25:1 in 1980 to 90:1 in 2000.[7]
And it goes on happening:
“From 1994 to 2019, the average CEO salary more than doubled from $3.34 to $6.96 million.”[8]
The trouble is, socialists tend to lump in several different systems as ‘capitalist’. If you labelled the 1970s system Democratic Capitalism and the modern set-up Oligarch Capitalism, then a demand to return to Democratic Capitalism would be quite a radical demand.
Then look at the Classical Capitalism that existed before 1914. I’ve not been able to find figures, but I think most of the wealth was held by owners. Managers who were not owners probably didn’t have a 25:1 advantage over the ordinary workforce. One source suggested just 5:1 for Britain. The USA probably did better by giving large significance and large rewards to professional managers. But nothing like what they started getting after Reagan and Thatcher convinced much of the public that New Right fantasies were proven facts.
Both managers and entrepreneurs act as if the wealth that they manage or own would not exist without them. But overall growth in wealth has not been improved from what was regularly achieved before the 1980s.
It would be good if more socialists were to do what I’ve been doing – look for hard facts that discredit the Reagan / Thatcher mythology.
Denouncing the evils of what exists has its limits. Much better to have solid facts to show that even a modest return to the Democratic Capitalism of the 1950s to 1970s would be a radical improvement.
Snippets
Taiwan – Beijing Could Just Blockade
It gets forgotten that until the early 1970s, the USA insisted that the Taiwan exiles were still the legal government of all China.
China including Tibet and Xinjiang. The entire Mongolian Republic. And even more of the border areas disputed with India than Beijing claims. And which Pakistan agreed to omit from their claim to Kashmir, incidentally – it is anyway next to what India actually holds.
Nixon visiting Beijing was a signal to the timid majority in the United Nations that it was now OK to award China’s veto-wielding seat to Beijing. And almost all stopped recognising Taiwan as a sovereign body.
Beijing was quite content to let Taiwan exist as a self-administering island, so long as it didn’t claim independence.
But as part of the trouble-making that cost Hong Kong the considerable political autonomy it once had,[9] a government run by a party aspiring to independence began making gestures that upset the balance.
With its growing sea and air and missile power, Beijing recently responded by deploying forces all round the island.[10] Forces that could easily stop all trade through what most of the world recognises as sovereign Chinese territory.
An invasion is unlikely. A blockade much more plausible. But even that remains just as a threat for now.
*
A Palestinian Anne Frank?
With the war being lost, the Nazis kept their belief in historic and incurable Wars of Populations. Extermination was winding down in Auschwitz, where Anne’s entire family had been shipped. She had been lucky not to be killed instantly, as most children and young teenagers were. At 15, she was one of the youngest to last. But then she and her sister, potential mothers of a future Jewish generation, were shipped to disease-ridden Bergen-Belsen. And did indeed fall ill and die.
A diary she’d been tidying before capture with a view to publication might easily have remained obscure. Her father had survived to be liberated by the Red Army in Auschwitz , and wished to respect her wishes. But no one showed a huge interest till it unexpectedly took off.[11]
Nowadays, much of the world is seeing touching pictures of similar innocents killed by Israeli bombing. Not just damaged victims, but also some pictures of the charming kids they earlier had been.
‘Much of the world’ does not include most British viewers. Nor US, I assume. But Sky channels includes al-Jazeera, and also Turkish news in English.
We are also prevented from seeing Chinese news on cable television. Though officially a private company, it is deemed state-run and unacceptable – unlike our own state-owned BBC. This while the super-rich can create and subsidise news channels to serve their interest.
For Palestine, Hamas with their October 7th raid must have been trying to provoke a War of Populations. But the dominant politicians in Israel had already decided it must be that. Rather than allow a regular independent Palestinian state for just Gaza and parts of the West Bank, they want it all. And clearly want no peace that would obstruct this.
Somehow they miss how the rest of the world is moving. They seem to have swallowed the myth of universal and incurable anti-Semitism. Fail to realise that many who feel neutral or positive about their Jewish neighbours are now hostile to an expansionist Israel.
*
Non-Wealthy IT Pioneers
I’ve mentioned before how the Internet arose accidentally and with no single inventor.[12] Arose because the US military were willing to pay people to develope crazy ideas that occasionally were big successes.
The World Wide Web was built on top of the Internet. An old idea: hypertext, a way to link one document to dozens of other documents. But the first useful system was created by a British physicist who was allowed to do it as a private project at CERN.[13] CERN spends gigantic sums on finding out things about subatomic physics that may never have any commercial relevance.
Now I’ve just learned of a third case:
“Ward Christensen, Early Visionary of Social Media, Dies at 78
“Housebound during a 1978 blizzard, he and a friend began devising the first computer bulletin board, a forerunner of online services like Reddit, TikTok and Facebook.
““Despite their groundbreaking collaboration, neither Mr. Christensen nor Mr. Suess made much money from their invention or achieved much fame because of it.”[14]
Gigantic wealth mostly avoided those who did the big pioneering work. Went to a lucky minority of those who competed to become the first internet and web service the public heard about.
As I said earlier, more wealth-consumers than wealth creators.
*
Old newsnotes at the magazine websites. I also write regular blogs – https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_1917_Russian_Constituent_Assembly_election
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yabloko#Election_results
[3] https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240905-nato-member-turkey-balancing-act-brics-bid-russia-china
[4] https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/Rome-s-Undemocratic-Republic
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
[6] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy1lkp71n2o
[7] file:///C:/Users/gwydi/Downloads/GersbachSchmutzlerFinalVersion.pdf
[8] https://www.janeeckhout.com/wp-content/uploads/Managers.pdf
[9] https://www.quora.com/q/pwgwxusqvnzzrlzm/Hong-Kong-Committing-Suicide
[10] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202410/1321159.shtml
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Frank#Publication
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web#Background
[14] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/21/technology/ward-christensen-dead.html – pay site
Labour Affairs 