Our Revolutionary Aims

A Brief History of Time.

How have we got to where we are today?

If we go back in time and consider the fabled “hard working family” in the 17th century we would see it divided internally by sex and sociologically by class or status. A situation largely unchanged for thousands of years. This was the period when the feudal system was going through its death throes and capitalism was emerging as the new ideology on the block.

The old certainties so beloved of the rich and powerful were being challenged by an aggressive merchant class, the ‘bourgeoisie’ as Karl Marx (3) called them, who were not prepared to bow down to ‘God ordained authority” but who were increasingly of the opinion that they were as good as anyone else and indeed could prove this through their economic achievements. The capitalist system was being born. Its father the old feudal system, its mother Protestantism and the ranks of brave souls who had died to preserve it in the face of Catholicism’s stranglehold over economic growth and social progress in Europe.

Like the feudal system, Catholicism (a feudal system with a Pope) did not like people to act freely politically or economically. Authority must be top down and sanctioned by God not humanity. People who could see an opportunity for self-advancement were initially considered a threat to this ancient system but through sheer perseverance over the next century they held their nerve and by the middle of the eighteenth-century Britain was a prosperous, technologically advanced capitalist nation. All this due to economic freedom based on revolutionary principles of contract, choice and consent which overthrew feudalisms reliance on control, coercion and compulsion.

On the continent, old ways continued; their feudal and Papal patronage gave rise to poverty and numerous revolutions. As with Brexit, Britons saw the writing on the wall even then.

With a protestant, Britain powering out value from its factories and farms, wealth grew, and with expansion into new global markets the culture of Britain’s capitalist system became embedded in Britain’s empire. Tribalism went into a slow retreat as Britain’s Empire became a force for liberation turning tribe’s people into workers. Just as feudal serfs became workers under capitalism, so the tribes of Africa where they were urbanised became workers too. The birth of a global working class and bourgeoisie or middle class had started. It is still work in progress.

Now those on the traditional “left” will claim this was all immoral economic and cultural imperialism. However, we do not claim it was all good, but we need to be objective because our feudal or tribal family was riddled with inequalities and cultural abuse. Many horrors we still observe today were cultural norms until capitalism challenged the legitimacy of them. Those who claim some golden age of tribal or feudal culture are as naive as someone saying, “please sir I’d like to be treated like a fourteenth century serf”!

No person alive in the free world whose consciousness (4) has been shaped by contract, choice and consent would want to return to the tyranny of political life before capitalism. A world predating capitalism is still observed in parts of Africa the Middle and Far East where rights are contingent upon the erratic will of totalitarian ideology or a belief in the divine; the will of God. Twenty first century ‘right and wrong’ based as it is on contract, choice and consent bears little moral resemblance to a world based on Halal (good) or Haram (bad), Prescribed (good) or proscribed (bad). Liberated woman or Gay men, as well as animal welfare agencies will attest to that.

The idea of God was however important to early capitalism as it required the low cost associated with moral behaviour based on conscience, and not the costly control by fear based on religious compulsion backed by earthly retribution.

Some socialists will say capitalism was unfair to the working class, women and minorities. Those with deeper knowledge of left-wing politics might ask about “alienation” (5) and “exploitation” (6). To which we would say; yes, all of those were major flaws in capitalism, identified by numerous thinkers in the nineteenth century, many of whom promoted a return to the old religious and feudal ways or dreamt up socialist utopias to get away from capitalisms divisive energy, drive and economic anarchy. That energy, drive and anarchy was necessary because as we will see it has ultimately liberated us all.

The reason it has taken time to embed liberty is because capitalism’s mother might have been Protestant consciousness and contract, choice and consent but its father was the feudal system. So, like feudalism it had a patriarchal (7) structure and status-based hierarchy. It might have created modern principles of contract, choice and consent and thus conferred “rights” but if you were poor, or a woman you could not exercise all those rights at least not until much later in the twentieth century.

The history of the last two hundred years has therefore been about rights that existed in theory for most and for some wealthy heterosexual, middle and upper class men, in practice, being extended to other groups too. So before condemning capitalism outright consider that without capitalism’s core principles these “rights” (Contract, Choice and Consent, freedom and democracy) would not have existed at all, for anyone! So, whatever your identity, the rights and freedoms you enjoy you owe to capitalism.

More latterly rights have extended beyond economic rights and now include rights to free expression. The right to be who we feel we are, unconstrained by social norms associated with tribal society, feudalism or with protestant conscience-based principles of good and bad behaviour. These rights have been described as “identity politics” and rather than being seen as springing naturally from humanities growing belief in freedom for all based on capitalist principles of choice and consent, the link to capitalism has been obscured by prejudice about capitalism by people who don’t understand it. Identity politics could not have existed before capitalism, capitalism liberated people from feudalism and religious oppression. Something forgotten by the traditional socialist ‘left’.

In socialisms defence however to extend rights to as many as possible and certainly to extend rights beyond those which were necessary for capitalism to function (rights to contract for work for example) it was necessary after the Second World War for the government to step in. Capitalism had some of its father’s feudal DNA so when capitalisms privilege was working for the benefit of the rich and workers were disorganised, no one in power saw any need to change anything. But as the capitalists themselves began to excessively exploit working people change was eventually demanded by the workers and granted by politicians.

In 1945 a landslide Labour Government came to power and introduced a programme which had been influenced by left wing thinkers and academics like Karl Marx. These enlightened thinkers could see that whilst capitalism had liberated humanity from much of feudalism it had stopped short of liberating everyone economically and the reason was that the value or wealth created by workers within the capitalist system, the capitalists kept for themselves using some of it to pay for their privileged system. The government had the power to intervene and re-distribute the capitalist’s wealth more fairly and did so nationalising industries and creating the welfare state.

For an adult population many of whom were born during Queen Victoria’s reign or raised by people born during Victoria’s reign it must have felt revolutionary, offering freedoms and opportunities only capitalist money could have afforded previously, such as the working classes entering the “establishment” and complex health care, free at the point of use. It was also still possible to rely on Christian values that ensured ‘moral’ behaviour continued at every level of society.

Unfortunately, things started to go wrong in the 1950s. Where we are now (2019) is a legacy of things going wrong back then. Some of the things that went wrong are down to “the establishment” feeling threatened by the power of the workers entering the establishment and some of what went wrong is down to the workers themselves. The working classes who by, the 1950’s had fully absorbed the principles of capitalism were unable to recognise that they should challenge capitalisms inherent unfairness and elitism rather than using these characteristics to enhance their own occupational position at the expense of others. This has been the problem with socialism, it has become divisive just like capitalism misusing contract, choice and consent to promote personal and political self-interest. Hence Karl Marx coined the term ‘bourgeois socialism’(8)

Blue Revolution is an attempt by informed “non-experts” to start a new revolution, to take the legacy of capitalism and socialism and forge a new future of freedom and personal fulfilment. Be part of this revolution by simply looking at things with a different consciousness. Using contract, choice and consent not with a view to self-advancement (bourgeois thinking) but with a view to making society better, fairer and healthier.

SUMMARY

Elites have ruled working people for thousands of years. It was a situation we could not change because we as ordinary people did not have the power to change it. The means by which wealth was extracted from working people became more and more sophisticated until eventually the exploitation went on under a veil of legitimacy based on principles of contract, choice and consent. In themselves these principles enhance the lives of people but until recently only the elite could take advantage of them. We now have a crisis in the western economy and society, and we need to let the workers have more political power based on contract, choice and consent between the working people and their state.