The history of politics, simplified.
The history of politics, simplified.
Blue Revolution.
When it comes to politics, we all feel confused. ‘Left’, ‘Right’ or maybe ‘Centre’. Liberal or totalitarian, Socialist, Revolutionary Socialist. What all these political ideas lack is a broad understanding by ordinary people.
Political change has always involved a small group of sometimes angry people like some of those above taking control of the state in the name of ‘the people’. This has never been a good idea, but it continues to go on, even now. Politics is therefore about power, who has it, how they get it and what they do with it.
This pamphlet was written to help the curious. It adopts a modern theory based on peoples’ experience. We call it ‘lived reality’. Today it reflects the reality of living in a globalised ‘free market’, but ‘lived reality’ works just as well for the lives of people in the past.
Our lived reality, therefore, describes how we got to where we are economically, politically and socially.
According to the Blue Revolution, all political decisions should be grounded in the reality of all working people- not a small minority. The last time this happened was thousands of years ago when we lived in tribal communities.
In Box
Politics is confusing. Too many political ideas are in existence with many ideas conflicting. Politics is all about how politicians, be they kings, political party members or business leaders get power, or influence those who have it. But it is also about how ordinary people experience the power of politics.
Chapter one
Power in ‘tribal’ communities. A harsh equality starting in the Middle East.
The earliest type of organisation is the tribe: a community of people and basic rules and principles which ensured order.
Rules controlled every aspect of life. For example, ‘marriage’, which today is a legal ‘contract’ between two adults in tribal times was instead an arrangement between different males and females in a tribe. In a tribe, rules were just accepted. Broken rules were punishable by death in order to preserve the values necessary to protect all its members.
Things like child marriage were not considered strange, the average age of death was 33 years old. The tribes’ survival depended upon it. Child ‘marriage’ minimised problems of adjustment by putting children in different households at a very early age.
Religion evolved from economic necessity and reflected the need for survival. Religions were used to legitimate authority and control behaviour. Stability created economic and social value.
Tribal rules required a fair distribution to all. Generally, men hunted while women reared children and were homemakers. There was a strict division of labour, but men and women would have been equally as important to the maintenance of the tribe. This is the sort of world that Islam’s prophet Muhammed would have known and explains why Islamic ideas take the form they do and why some Muslims are outraged by modern criticism of what are essentially the social and economic values portrayed in the Qur’an. ‘Islamism’ is an attempt by some radicalised Muslims to promote these ideas and impose them on others by force. They unquestioningly accept as ‘truth’ the Muslim holy book the Qur’an.
Most but not all tribal societies evolved over many thousands of years. Australia and what became the USA before Europeans arrived, were cut off from the economic melting pot of the Mediterranean and Middle East, so it meant that economic and social evolution failed to happen.
These Australian and North American tribes remained completely intact until European settlers revolutionised their ‘reality’ and changed their society by changing their economy. These tribes went from simple hunting and gathering to overt control based on the top down authority of the imported Christian church and British and Dutch monarchy. Even today some individuals have not adjusted to this cultural change of pace and like many people in the twenty-first century, are culturally conflicted or confused.
Try and imagine being part of a tribe in the Middle East or Mediterranean as it evolved between 5000 to 500 BC. Life was harsh with continual fighting for resources between tribes, but generally within the tribe itself, things were harmonious. Everyone had a role and values were simple even though practices like child marriage, cruelty or banishment of those who broke ‘tribal custom’ may have been normal.
There would be little rule breaking as people would have been socialised to conform by repetition of rules. You can still see the repetition of rules practised in certain communities today. Think about a person’s reality if they live in the western world having migrated here from non-western communities where ‘traditional’ values are still important. They may have to come to terms with rules or behaviour, some of which might be incompatible with their own culture of origin.
Imagine what tribal communities would make of western culture; our freedom, absence of different roles based on our sex as well as our different sexual lifestyles, our apparent lack of care for the elderly and our unregulated sexual behaviour. Our modern lives may be classed as immoral. Tribes had to have all these things under some sort of control. There was no choice.
Those with a desire to maintain simple faith-based or tribal values and practices may struggle to adapt to the modern free market and reject our twenty-first-century values. This has led some liberal-minded western people to play down the impact of traditional cultural practices on those from non-western backgrounds even when those practices conflict with western values of free choice and consent. This ‘liberal’ approach promotes the interests of certain groups instead of the individuals within those groups.
Many modern westernised people would find it hard in a strict tribal society. For the modern westerner, our reality is based on personal and economic freedom underpinned by our experience of the free market. Today we desire individual choice!
Cultural ‘conflict’ therefore is caused by lived realities being based on different sets of economic and social expectations. Globalisation is responsible, but western governments are to blame for the problems this causes. They do this by failing to promote the rights of individuals in the face of demands for collective rights, which may discriminate against groups, for example women. The demand by some groups to protect religious practice is one such example where individual and collective rights conflict.
It isn’t possible to adopt, promote or impose one simple set of moral rules and maintain personal choice. The contradiction for militant Islamists is that whereas tribal values were coherent with the economics of tribal society militant Islamists want to impose simple religious values on non-tribal twenty-first-century societies….by force.
In box
Once we all lived in tribes and accepted simple tribal values. There was economic equality within tribal communities but different roles for men and women. Today conflict comes if different sets of values based on different economic expectations clash.
Chapter two
Humanities first Revolution. Political power becomes normal as kings take control.
In the Middle East, around six thousand years ago, tribal society started to change due to technological improvements. These improvements created the first agricultural revolution and gave rise to power by a minority over the many, political power! This helped create the Middle Eastern faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All these faiths tried to deal with the unfairness of political power by turning simple values into a set of ‘moral’ behaviours for all people.
‘Top-down’ control (which is like feudalism, as well as other systems of top-down authority) came about because people were able to organise the economy so that surplus food was available (a bit like a profit). To begin with, it was not a money surplus, but as people created more food than was needed, it became possible to trade and eventually money and wealth became possible. Inequality was born! A few people who did not work themselves could acquire wealth from the work of others.
As a result, ‘immoral’ behaviours like prostitution and adultery became possible. These would be activities almost impossible in tribal society but with surplus food production, people were more than able to support women (or men) who provided sex. It was also possible for rich men to support ‘their’ women, so some women did not have to work as they had to do in tribes. Patriarchal society was born, and the control of women in society began.
In its latter stages this period was an era when art and beautiful artefacts could be created by artisans, who were paid to create beauty rather than to hunt for food.
This economic revolution obviously changed peoples lived realities. The Old and New Testament of the Jewish and Christian faith and the Qur’an plus other religious views expressed by the prophet Muhammad are all about trying to re-establish a virtuous society during this period of economic upheaval.
Over thousands of years, where surplus value was created the bonds of tribal society were permanently broken, allowing a minority of people, an elite, to take the surplus value from working people and slaves and make it their own. They used this economic advantage to create and maintain power structures, so they could dominate and control ordinary people. Once this authoritarian system was established, life would never be the same again for billions of ordinary people.
Can you imagine how the Reality of the majority was affected by this significant economic and social change? People had lost tribal loyalty, tribal equality and predictability and were now subject to authority from elite minorities. For ordinary people, life was a complex mix of submission to various authorities, observance of religious rules and working hard to create property and wealth for others.
Authoritarian societies were thus considered by many to be very bad indeed. With economies in the hands of greedy kings, this era became humanities ‘nation building’. It started in the Mediterranean and Middle East with the earliest power based authoritarian systems in Egypt and Iraq. These authoritarian systems existed when other people, even in the same area of the world were still living in simple tribal society.
The ‘top-down’ model created by feudalism and similar authoritarian systems was very efficient and is still used today in politics and public service and public administration. People at the top of organisations and their ‘leadership teams’ make ‘decisions’ and as a result, earn more than the people creating the value whether it be an economic surplus value (profit) or social value (e.g. caring for society). It is not the nature of the activity that is the problem but the difference in reward which should as in tribal society be proportionate to the overall needs of society and its ability to pay.
Growing feudal and authoritarian societies encouraged further economic and social development because they allowed risk. They gave the power to change society and takes risks, to a king (or in some nations a queen) and abolished permanent tribal rules imposed and upheld collectively. The creation of economic surplus set humanity on the march towards modern politics and modern society but also created the inequality we still experience today.
Early and successful Middle East authoritarian systems were conquered by Islam. Some of these then adopted and developed mainly Greek science and other modern ideas of the day.
Whilst Islam in the Middle East was able to conquer authoritarian systems, these sorts of economic systems were eventually willing to accommodate Christianity too.
With Christianity, authoritarian systems such as feudalism adopted a religion which was unconcerned with earthly power and so accepted the idea of inequality on earth. Whilst Islamic authoritarian societies were forced to accept economic inequality, within Islam itself economic inequality was haram or wrong. For some devout Muslims today, this remains a major cultural rubbing point with western economies and some Muslim states like Saudi Arabia. In Islamic law there are strict rules about profit and fairness.
Like everywhere else in Europe, and parts of the Middle East, Britain was finally wealthy enough to develop feudalism after the Romans left in the fifth century. It became fully established after the Norman Conquest in 1066. Its decline began after the Black Death in the fourteenth century when a shortage of labour forced wages up and drove economic innovation.
In Box
Feudalism was the theft of resources from the many by a small elite who set up power structures to maintain their authority. The ‘right’ to do this was at odds with tribal values but elite politics won the day. Britain developed feudalism after the Romans left in the fifth century.
Chapter three
Nothing lasts forever. Feudalisms decline and the rise of capitalists power. The action moves to Europe.
In Europe Feudalism endured for centuries and in various forms it still exists today in parts of the world that are not yet industrial but are no longer tribal. Its main characteristic is still its top-down, unaccountable authoritarianism.
In Britain we consider ourselves beyond feudalism, but traces of it appear in ceremonial form in ours and many other modern European States. These states maintain power based on status/property/income and have as a ‘democracy’ a system based on the representation of the people by an elected as opposed to hereditary elite. This is promoted by politicians and generally accepted by the people as the acceptable antidote to past unaccountable feudal power and authoritarianism.
Britain remains in some senses feudal with democracy grafted on, because we now elect and pay our elite. We are still subject to their rules and decisions, however much we disagree with them. Disagreement between the people and our elected elite seems to be getting more common as they no longer seem to ‘represent’ the people who pay them. Us!
In Britain, feudalism’s decline began due to increasing levels of prosperity generated by education, science, further agricultural advances, and the work of an intelligent emerging ‘middle class’. This change began to develop after the ravages of the Black Death in the fourteenth century when labour was in short supply and wages were going up.
The earliest challenge to the British feudal system came about because ordinary working people were trading and by their combined efforts and expertise were creating greater wealth than had been previously possible. The feudal aristocracy who ‘owned’ all wealth were, therefore, getting rich at the expense of ordinary hard-working people. The aristocracy was also wasting wealth on wars and personal vanity.
Kings who at one time broke society away from predictable tribal society were no longer promoting economic and social evolution but were holding back changes demanded by a working middle class who were not benefitting politically from their skill and enterprise.
This middle class made up of innovators, merchants and hard-working ‘entrepreneurs’ was getting restless, angry and their workforce hungry. There were riots in England from the fourteenth century onwards due to food shortages and abuses of feudal power.
In Germany, ideas were developing based on religious scripture that supported a new economic model based on hard work that challenged the idea that the church was entitled to the economic wealth created by ordinary people. These ideas also challenged the role of the church in supporting the poor.
As with the change from tribal society to top-down authoritarian power like feudalism, the reality of different groups of people was again coming into conflict. This gave rise to revolution. The final stage of this economic revolution began in Britain in the seventeenth century, France in the eighteenth century and wider Europe in the nineteenth century and Russia and China in the twentieth century.
These revolutions put capitalist ideas into what had become declining feudal societies. These revolutions broke the power of those born to rule and replaced it with power based on the economic or political interests of a new elite. The elites were landowners and capitalists and their group interests became political Parties. Much later ‘workers’ gained their own parties too.
By freeing people from feudalism and reforming religion so people had to work hard for wages or make a profit rather than live on ‘welfare’ from the Church, capitalism promoted the world of the economic rather than the religious or feudal elite. Capitalism like feudalism still relied on surplus value being created, but under capitalism it was created by workers free to contract with capitalists for work. The surplus value was then acquired by capitalists in the form of profit. To succeed as an economic model capitalism needed people to be free to think, speak, innovate and trade. The legal principles of contract, choice and consent were the basis of capitalist economics, not as had been the case under feudalism: compulsion, coercion and control.
Capitalisms values of contract, choice and consent have been and continue to be liberating for working people, which is something that many left-wing politicians struggled to accept. Before capitalism, as we have seen, the aristocracy controlled the nation’s wealth. It was revolutions that had to be used to dislodge them.
In Russia and China, one form of feudalism with kings was replaced by revolutionary socialism: a system based on control of the economy by one political party that believed it represent the working class. Any one-party state is called totalitarian. Revolutionary Russia and China therefore did not become capitalist instead they fused their one-party political system with industrialisation. This undermined the workers who, whilst still creating surplus value (as in capitalism proper), were subordinate to the one-party state.
All ‘modern’ political systems all over the world including within western democracy promote the importance of the political party, but in ‘democracy’ there is a choice of parties to support.
In the west, capitalism did liberate innovators, workers and people of science from what had become the menace of the European feudal system. Once the scientist and innovators had ‘industrialised’ there was no holding back this engine of economic and social progress. A combination of people and machines created more surplus value than the world had ever known.
The British Empire was financed by capitalism. Like all empires, it had many moral failings. Eventually it was based on trade, freedom within the law and the accumulation of capital (surplus value turned into property, wealth and bankable money). Whilst based on trade, it was still skewed in favour of the capitalist economic elite. By the eighteenth century, it was fully exploitative of the nations it had conquered but to function properly it was able to leave a legacy in some ex colonies of contract, choice and consent and British common law.
Societies that could not innovate within the capitalist model due to religious observance, for example, created growing poverty for their subject peoples. As a result, Islam’s Eastern empire had disappeared by 1928. Islam is now re-emerging as a moral force across the globe funded by Saudi oil money.
Whilst capitalism as a system did not discriminate, it impacted harder on poorer, predominantly black or religious majority nations who have historically been unable to build up the capital or wealth necessary to be part of the capitalist system. Today many poor countries have authoritarian heads of State who don’t believe in liberating their people using freedom based on contract, choice and consent.
By creating so much wealth industrial capitalism was widely viewed as a force for prosperity and liberation, particularly for those middle-class owners of capital who maintained the system. They disguised its unfairness with religion, parliamentary democracy and the law. This is what is known as right-wing thinking; promoting the interests of capitalism.
However, capitalism was experienced as very unfair by the workers or as they were called then the ‘working class’ They knew they worked hard to create the surplus value necessary to make others very wealthy.
From the nineteenth century onwards, within western democracies industrial capitalism reigned supreme until the turn of the twentieth century. But industrial capitalism was a system that had in built ‘contradictions’ such as too few winners and too many losers, so over time legislation and taxation had to be used to minimise the bad impact of capitalism on the working class.
Capitalists wealth came and went often within families and usually over several generations and when capitalists failed the capitalist system took workers down too, leading to unemployment.
Whilst capitalism might have been ‘just’ because anyone, man or woman of any ethnic background could in theory become a capitalist by employing workers and accumulating wealth, it was unfair because it exploited the workers (exploited means making them work harder for their wages, so they created surplus value or profit for the capitalist). The unfairness of the capitalist system created ‘left wing’ thinking.
In Box
Capitalism took over old feudal systems and created a form of democracy that promoted the interests of its wealthy capitalist elite. Workers were ‘free’ but had to contract for employment and were exploited by capitalists. The unfairness of this economic arrangement gave rise to left wing political ideas.
Chapter Four
Change again: Socialism. The rise of the left wing political elite.
So, in summary by the late nineteenth century, the UK, USA and Europe were capitalist countries, using representative ‘democracy’ to legitimise the capitalist systems so called ‘exploitation’ of workers.
It is at this point we meet socialism for the first time. There exist two kinds of socialism. Democratic socialism is not to be confused with revolutionary or single party-based socialism (like early twentieth century Soviet Russia, China or Nazi Germany).
Whilst capitalism was based on contract and choice e.g. a worker had ‘choice’ of who to work for, it also meant working people toiled on low wages and in poor conditions to make a few people rich. The rich were rich because they employed millions of people and took the surplus value those people created banking it as their own.
As workers became more educated and organised (both expected within a ‘progressive’ capitalist system) they began to see the unfairness in what was happening and how the whole religious, political and legal system justified their exploitation, holding them back economically.
Left wing socialist ideas started to be promoted by an educated working and politically ambitious ‘middle class’. At first, they demanded capitalist industrialisation should be destroyed by violent revolution and replaced with socialist industrialisation. This was revolutionary socialism. It took hold as we have seen only in places like twentieth century Russia, China and North Korea
Concerned about possible revolution, democratic governments who wanted to improve capitalism used taxation to support those who fell out of the system and into unemployment. They also restricted the capitalist’s ability to take advantage of their workers.
In the free western world, over time, governments improved workers conditions and introduced clean air, education, housing and employment rights. Much of this is what revolutionary socialists had demanded. Similarly, rights like the right to vote or stand for parliament, rights that only capitalists enjoyed in the eighteenth century were extended to more and more people. It started with working-class men in the nineteenth century and then women in the twentieth.
This use of laws to support workers was the beginning of socialist ideas. Most would agree that this was the elite doing good. Revolutionary socialists disagreed they wanted economies taken over and run by socialist parties.
In the early twentieth century Russia and China experienced the revolutionary socialist elite taking control of the economy. For many decades after World War Two, this form of socialist state industrialisation became a political-bogeyman which western leaders called ‘communism’.
For working people in so called communist countries, the reality of industrial work was little different from the west. But with more freedom and innovation the west was more profitable and could offer a better lifestyle to its workers than communism, particularly in the USA.
All economic systems apart from tribal ones, need surplus value/profit to invest in maintaining the economy/society. Revolutionary socialist Russia never created enough surplus value/profit to pay for its bloated industrially inefficient state. Russia’s socialist experiment ended in the 1980’s. Arguably the EU is a similar bloated system today.
From the end of the second world war British capitalism was viewed as an economic model that had too many problems such as poverty amongst the working class, to be allowed to continue without some state involvement. Various means of re distributing wealth were introduced by the post war democratic Labour Party. These ranged from public ownership of some industries like Coal mining, Ship building and Railways (Nationalisation) to tax changes that put a high burden on the rich.
The welfare state and National Health Service also came into existence. It was also seen as desirable to control the economy by pumping in money when it began to stop employing people because demand for what they had produced was low and they were unemployed.
With a growing need for so much state control, the elite became ‘experts’ trained to manage the economy and society. The elite were now just as likely to be state employees like civil servants as capitalists. The term used at this time was the ‘mixed economy’. It was capitalism controlled by socialist ideas.
In Box
Capitalism was unfair to workers so ‘socialist’ ideas developed in Britain. After the second world war ‘democratic socialism’ regulated Britain’s economy. The idea behind democratic socialism is to take wealth off capitalists, wealth which workers have created and spend it on state provision like health care or welfare.
Chapter Five
Government ‘experts’ and politicians become the new elite. Debt to the rescue!
The changes introduced by the socialist British Labour government after the Second World War led to a period of sustained prosperity. Inefficiency set in from about 1970 onwards. At this point the tax payer began paying for the nationalised industries that could not pay for themselves.
Because of changes in the global economy that have taken place since the 1980s capitalism in the west has had to evolve into what we now call the ‘free market’.
A free market is exactly what it says it is. Anyone can, in theory, become a producer or consumer. A process helped by the internet with ‘You Tubers’ making millions in sponsorship. People can produce almost anything and consume almost anything.
The free market relies on economic relationships which are negotiated by a global economic elite who, depending on how you see the free market, have either a monopoly over how this free market works or have no control over it what so ever. Those who influence the free market are amongst others the Multi-National companies, tech giants as well as national governments including the EU and global trade organisations.
The free market, unlike eighteen and nineteenth-century capitalism, is not concerned with personal morality it only needs ‘consumers’ with enough income to buy products. So, thanks to the free market’s need to have consumers, ‘lifestyles’ previously discriminated against by religious or cultural prejudice can be accommodated by economic freedom and the acceptance, for the time being, of the western political elite.
To enhance consumer choice some western businesses have sent their production to developing countries to save money on worker’s wages and thus maximise profit on their popular retail brands. This makes people in a few companies very rich but reduces the number of wage earners and taxpayers employed in the west.
Because of the way the free market operates it is seen by many as not just unfair but immoral. The free market is not capitalism. It is not an economic system based on a set of unfair but coherent economic principles reinforced by religion, politics and the law. It is essentially a global economic free-for-all. A religion of personal self-interest, desire and choice.
The free market has progressed around the world spreading the same values that gave rise to freedom in Britain, the United States and Europe, but in these economies its wealth-creating capacity has become weaker. So, to support its profitability money must be pumped into the economy by governments. Money based on debt and taxation.
To complicate things further, profit made by big western corporations is often taxed ‘offshore’ and therefore doesn’t contribute taxation to help pay for state the state bureaucracy we have inherited since the second world war. The government must therefore borrow money to pay for the services it provides. Services which many of us use.
The result is that powerful western elites and their parliaments, political systems and bureaucracies who in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would have been paid for by capitalisms tax payments are now relying ordinary workers to pay for them via income tax and indebtedness. Workers are therefore sacrificing their power to consume, to pay for the state and government.
As we have said the ‘free market’ is a consumer market, therefore, the next revolution has its basis in spending power. It’s here we find the free market’s major problem. Expensive western governments reduce the ability of workers to consume. But to remain ‘free’ with values promoting personal freedom under pinning it, the free market needs consumers.
New consumers are also needed beyond the economically troubled European and American economies. Brexit should be about creating a greater global economic fairness by spreading consumer equality via spending power beyond the so called ‘rich’ but indebted nations of the west.
In addition to tax reducing consumer spending, consumer spending is worsened because the big corporations sit on mountains of profit and don’t put it back into the world economy as ‘spending power’ via wages. This economic model is unsustainable.
In Box
What was left of capitalism finally stopped working in the 1980’s. It became the market financed by debt and managed by global experts. It needs consumers, but governments take money from consumers. The global elite are making us pay for them and this limits our consumer spending. The free market protects our rights but is now debt dependent.
Chapter Six
What future the free market as the elite go global. Power for the few, debt for the many.
Governments need money just as individuals do and the money needed is no longer available through the profitability of western capitalism. Today our state with its big employment bill relies on debt and tax to pay its way on our behalf.
No one questions the need for state employment (Dr’s, nurses, social workers, police etc) but the cost of paying the elite that manages them is no longer justified due to the nation’s lack of profitability and reliance on debt.
If free of the burden of too much government debt and tax the ordinary worker can become a more effective consumer, spending more of what they earn to enable other workers to be employed locally in businesses, shops, coffee houses and bars or in caring for their local community at large.
Above a certain wage level, payments do not add directly to local consumer spending but end up in the global economy. The power base of our wealthy political and economic elite.
To add to consumers woes much of our private debt which we are encouraged to take out to help with consumer demand, needs to be underpinned by some form of value. This value comes from land or property. In the case of land, an increase in land value works its way through the financial system as people raise money by mortgages. This gives us a contribution to national income based on asset value-based debt. This is what led to the 2007-2008 banking crisis when loans to customers were backed by land values and land values went down.
By basing much of a nation’s ability to pay its way on debt we are slowly gobbling up our food production capacity by selling land for debt backed development etc. This model provides well-paid work to service sector employees like bankers/lawyers/estate agents and land managers. It also provides taxation on profits for the state. Big corporations benefit too as tax income plus government debt pays for contracts to do work in NHS/defence/education and criminal justice or indeed build roads. All political parties in the UK must uncritically endorse this value backed debt model. What is the alternative?
More seriously, with all our debt we are slowly eroding the long-term viability of our planet as we in the west over consume its natural resources. The debt based free market system is damaging the planet to a far greater extent than any system before it. However, it has extended people’s rights and ended illegitimate abuse of those held back economically by low status or discrimination under earlier capitalist, feudal/authoritarian and tribal systems. As a culture our attitude to the free market is therefore ambiguous.
Some people believe the moral confusion of the free market requires a return to ‘faith’, Christian or Islamic. Others believe in taking whole national economies under government control.
A modern free market economy only works when people have almost complete economic freedom without fear or sanction. With state ownership, we might have jobs, but we give our economic freedom to the state and compromise our right to contract, choose and consent as we, rather than the state sees fit.
To see the impact of religion on a society look at Iran or Saudi Arabia. People crying out for the economic and social equality offered by the free-market, particularly women and the gay community. Lack of freedom affects prosperity and peoples happiness. It causes anger by supressing freedom and makes states oppressive.
Religion and traditional democratic socialism, therefore, fail the freedom for the worker test. They are solutions to a looming economic and ecological crisis that simply can’t reflect the expectations of a modern workforce enjoying lives based on choice, consent, freedom and limited democracy.
Blue Revolution is based on what is called ‘economic determinism’ or economic reality. In other words, the reality of working people. What working people experience should be instinctively more important than the views of people at the ‘top’ with their unconscious ‘global’ self-interest.
Ideas to improve society must come from the economic experience of working people and not from various political party conferences where policy is created by party members (a tiny minority of the people) then imposed on society (all the people) when parties get into government.
To preserve freedom ordinary people must now set the political and economic agenda just as the middle-class capitalist did in the eighteenth century. Political parties products of the eighteenth century have no significant role in influencing this process.
People should take more control in politics because having fought for the right to choose and consent and having gained our freedom and our limited democracy, it now seems like political parties and a global elite both paid for by our debt and taxes are taking our rights away and imposing their ‘global ideology’ on us. An ideology that accepts the abuse of people elsewhere in the world whilst undermining western national identities and the hard fought for rights that go with those national identities.
In Britain we need to reform our political system so for the first time ever it becomes a system that protects western values and our belief in the principles of choice and consent, freedom and democracy. Working western people would preserve and extend these rights to all the world’s working people. Every other class or powerful group restricts them as they always have done to preserve their power.
Look around you, most people you see would support all your freedoms unquestioningly as you would support theirs.
In Box
The free market creates our rights to choose and consent, but it relies on an economy which is dependent on debt. We need to preserve our free market to ensure we preserve our rights as working people because in much of the world people have few rights. If the debt dependent free market disappears our rights will go with it.
Chapter seven
And finally, people power? Another Revolution where the people replace the elite!
We have been through this brief history of wealth and public power otherwise known as politics, explaining how working people have created wealth but have not held the power that wealth should grant. In the twentieth century the left wing had believed it was working in the interests of the people but once they had the power of the ‘state’ behind them they undermined economic rights with policies which increase the expense of the state, at a direct financial/social cost to the taxpayer.
Governments need to recognise that far from being an asset to the British economy, they are a pitiful hinderance to it by taking too much money in tax to pay for bits of their system that we no longer need, like their hierarchy and power structures in politics and in the public sector.
State costs reduce peoples spending power. Spending power is needed to preserve our free market economy and therefore our choice-based lifestyle.
So, what can we the nation’s working people do today to protect ourselves? Ordinary working people did not bring down feudalism (it was the capitalists that did that) and we did not bring down capitalism (it has been saved by corporate global economics and as the free market it is financed and threatened by debt). The next revolution is our revolution and we can’t afford to mess it up. Yet most people don’t even realise a revolution is needed.
Some things to consider
Firstly, Blue Revolution doesn’t need to have all the answers. We do not want to be like a political party promoting policy and selecting candidates in-house. We are simply a political ‘Brand’ anyone can use should they wish to.
We suggest that political policy must not be developed and implemented by a party elite. The most grotesque examples might be the Blair/Bush war on Iraq or the creeping power-based unification of the EU, but there are lots more examples besides, like the creation of the police and crime commissioners or The High-Speed Rail link (HS2) These policies never had the peoples approval.
Under our eighteenth-century parliaments political policies generally have nothing to do with the views of real working people. We, therefore, need to change the political system to make working people’s views more relevant. We need to stop our elite 650 British MP’s using their party’s membership to manipulate democracy in favour of their special interests, be those interests bankers, house builders, Trades Union Barons or militant identity groups.
Blue Revolution believes the only solution is to extend to the lowest legitimate political level, for example to parish councils, the power to contribute to debate and vote on national policy. Voting using technology would be very quick. A debate would be more interesting too, with a level of engagement that would be massive. It would be set up to ensure that where necessary every contributor had knowledge of their subject.
The effect would be that the elite Westminster bubble would burst because a parish councillor may advance the best challenge to an idea from a remote village in some-where-shire. The government would still be drawn from the largest group in Westminster but the people who debate their proposals and vote would come from a group of people considerably larger than the current 650 ‘handpicked’ party political MP’s.
The role of religion needs to be addressed too as traditional moral views are being promoted within a newly confident Islam. This poses a risk to equality in a way not seen since the seventeenth century. Religion has always been used by elites or those who would like to become elites. It does their mind controlling for them by promoting ‘spiritual’ compliance within the elite sanctioned faith.
To deal with ancient moral systems we need to dismantle all state authorised religious teaching and recognise faith as a personal choice that reflects a person’s spirituality but does not extend beyond that into the realm of politics or public life. Religion takes advantage of peoples innate spirituality and turns it into something that supports a political ideology. There should be no obligation on the nation or her people to accept any religion.
Today we see the consequences of religious morality as it violates twenty-first-century human rights, rights extended over centuries by progressive economic and social development in the west. This fact is lost on our culturally illiterate European elite who protect all religion, irrespective of that religion’s commitment to preserving the rights of the individual.
In addition to managing religious influence maybe working people should not have their opinions ‘informed’ by an over promoted media elite working to maintain a failing party based parliamentary political system.
The news department of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) should avoid bias and become a limited ‘public service’ news department paid for as now by taxation or licence fee, but which provides fact-based news or the attributable opinion of a wide variety of informed people. This would mean that the BBC or its employees would not be allowed to express their own opinions on air.
With News coverage based on facts and the shared reality of working people, workers could shape policy and make politics truly dynamic operating in the interests of the economy and working people and not the state or any elite.
Finally, unless change takes place the western economy will in the words of Karl Marx collapse under the weight of its economic contradictions. Today the most troubling contradiction is western government debt being used to enable consumers to buy goods made abroad. This does not generate sustainability for western workers or the free market system upon which people’s rights are dependent.
Reliance on this system will bankrupt the government first and then, the nation itself. Moreover, western companies like Amazon diminish jobs in retail and sit on a mountain of profit which doesn’t become via wages, more consumer spending. You can’t run an economy on this basis. It will eventually collapse. And then what? Religious authoritarianism, political totalitarianism, both?
Please support a Blue Revolution simply by thinking aloud and differently about your life and your needs. Think about your values and where your values and ideas come from and how you could become more outspoken to protect those values from the many challenges faced by working people in the twenty-first century.
If you want to you can donate even a very small amount to our group by going on our website ABlueRevoluton.Org.
Better still stand as an independently thinking and voting candidate for the independent brand Blue Revolution (read our website for details of how). You are totally free to promote your own political beliefs with Blue Revolution. We are not like other parties we have no bureaucracy and simply endorse you as a candidate if you share our values. You will be the people’s choice!
Alternatively, just contribute to the debate in your own way.
Remember peoples personal freedom is shaped by their economic and social life experiences and these are now under threat because we have a near-bankrupt western free market. We need to start the discussion. We can’t trust the elite anymore……if we ever could.
Thank you for reading.
