A great philosopher two centuries back asked what the ends of history were. That is, what is all of human history going toward, what is its purpose. In recent times a not so great philosopher announced that history had ended and it was all going toward the triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy.
In the past few years it looks like history has got going again. Once again, there is a real possibility of humanity reaching the end of its history. That is, The End; everything goes up in a nuclear cloud.
Toward understanding where history is going, I read something interesting recently. It did not seem so salient as I read and I failed to save it. Yet it stuck in my mind though I cannot find it again.
Someone had been commenting on politics, especially Alberta politics, for a long time. He had always thought he understood why things were happening. Now, beginning with the Election of Donald Trump in the USA and then with the increasingly weird politics in Alberta, with the premierships of Jason Kenney and then Danielle Smith, he believes he no longer understands anything. He is considering changing his vocation.
Alberta, for those readers not in Canada and new to my writings, is my home province in Canada. I left it many years ago, to preserve my health and sanity, but I remain concerned about it. My recent writings about it are here.
In contrast to the perplexed pundit referred to above, I am starting to understand the times well. For much of my life I was baffled by the world, wondering about the ends of what I was seeing around me, the point to it all. In recent years the world has started falling apart but my understanding has been coming together.
Another piece I read recently, which also stuck in my head, asserted that the great epistemic divide in contemporary times is not between left or right, but those who believe the status quo is working and those who believe the world is broken. The article makes no definite conclusions about these perspectives. However, the status quo in western countries is objectively not working and our systems are indeed breaking down.
The problem is not that there are fewer status quo people and more ‘brokist’ people. People need to move away from the status quo. It is that there is no insight into why things are breaking down, and no useful models presented to replace our failed system.
This is what ‘the left’ should be about. The left is not present. Instead, the ‘brokists’ are being mobilized by the same right wing forces which have been a main cause of the breakdown. The only solution they find is a megadose of what has been accelerating the breakdown; neoliberal and libertarian ideologies.
This was well shown by the recent Alberta elections. It was a contest between the status quo and the ‘brokists’. On the right was the UCP led by incumbent premier Danielle Smith, and on the nominal left was the NDP led by former Premier Rachel Notley.
The names of both these parties are nonsensical and say nothing about what they are. New Democratic Party long ago made some pretense of being ‘socialist’ or at least ’cooperativist’. At some point it started calling itself ‘democratic’ on the notion that trying to mimic the democratic party in the USA would make it more acceptable to the Canadian upper middle classes. The word ‘democratic’ has lost all meaning in current political discussion.
‘Conservative’ means, to seek to preserve the status quo. UCP is the party of the brokists who have accepted all the Alberta libertarian, crypto-fascist, and resource state nonsense. It was formed by forcing together two right wing parties and forcing out the moderate conservatives who still had a presence in one of them.
These old ‘Lougheed Tories’, or at least business conservatives who do not see breakdown and disorder to be in their interests, have been holding their noses and giving support to the ‘socialist’ NDP. Thus, those terrified of change and clinging to the status quo are now concentrated in the NDP. The ‘rip it all down’ people are on the right wing and concentrated in UCP.
Again, if you have trouble understanding this, you would want to refer back to my most recent blog on Alberta. It is not how it is supposed to work in standard political theory. The left is supposed to want to reconstruct the social economy, and the right to preserve it or to change it only slowly.
As the libertarian right wing has grown in Canada in this century, politics has been said to shift to the right. It is also noticed that Alberta seems to lead this shift; as goes Alberta, so follows Canada a few years later. So the outcome of this election in Alberta is important to Canada.
The polls were all over the place but most called it a very close race. I was not optimistic that the NDP under Lady Rachel were going to win. I have never been impressed with the NDP.
Rachel Notley had already been premier of Alberta and failed completely at government. The NDP were shown to have absolutely no capacity to deal with the challenges facing the province. In 2019 and again this year, they ran very poor campaigns.
That NDP did as well as they did is a testament to the repulsiveness of Danielle Smith and her UCP. But this is much like the election last year in Ontario, my adoptive province. The NDP here also ran a very bad campaign against an obnoxious conservative government which should have been very easy to defeat.
The good and bad about this is that UCP will also be incapable of governing. They will fall apart again the same way they did under Smith’s predecessor. But no effective opposition to them will be raised and the province will continue to deteriorate.
The reason for all this is that neither of these parties have any ideas. One is about clinging to a status quo which is not working, the other is about rejecting the status quo. Neither of these are viable approaches to government, but the UCP is better at conning the disenfranchised. They offer to remove at least some of the more offensive aspects of the status quo.
If Rachel Notley had become premier again, then as before nothing substantial would have changed. NDP would be afraid to do anything. The creeps running the UCP, and the desperate people they have been able to delude, would have harassed and obstructed them every way they could for the next four years.
I am also following an election in my home city of Toronto. It is very similar and very different. If you want to know my views of Toronto the Good, and the present unexpected Mayoral election , go here.
The horse race to succeed the disgraced John Tory, the ultimate tory, is settling in. Olivia Chow is well out in front. Much is made of the fact she was well out in front in 2014, and her lead evaporated. Tory came into office.
Note that formally, no political parties are allowed in local politics in Ontario. Yet Chow is very connected to the local NDP establishment. She was a long time city councilor, but also ran several times for a federal seat, mostly failing.
I have read people theorizing that her failure in 2014 was due to a ‘flawed strategy’. They never seem clear on what the strategy was and why it was flawed. It seems to me that her failures in 2014 and in other campaigns for various offices were due to following the standard NDP template.
This is something I repeat often about the NDP. It applies to left parties anywhere. If they expect to win office consistently, they have to have something to offer beyond just being ‘left’ and ‘nice’.
Most left parties these days seem to keep on passively defending the status quo. Increasingly, they are pushed into adopting the ‘woke’ and ‘climate’ ideologies which are toxic to the working class. Fewer people are clinging to the status quo, the set order of things, on the assumption or hope that problems will somehow solve themselves.
More people are withdrawing from politics or turning in desperation to the demagogues of the right wing. Serious ‘left’ options are not there for them. Olivia Chow is still not offering anything substantial.
Her advantage this time is that the conservative forces are caught flat footed by this surprise election. They have no effective candidate to offer. The Alberta style libertarian extreme right has yet to fully take hold in Ontario and especially in Toronto.
So, Miss Olivia could pull it off this time. The question is, then what? Nothing about her indicates she would be able to deal with the problems facing Toronto.
These problems are complicated and worth a blog or two in themselves. Basically, the city must get out from under the iron heel of the provincial government. But behind that iron heel is the dislike oligarchy has for large cities, where opposition to it usually develops first.
The public must be mobilized to take on the alliance of provincial conservatives and downtown big money. To do this a vision of a better way of running things must be present. Ending the ‘get along and go along’ approach to dealing with the Ford government is good as far as it goes.
The candidate most likely to be able to do this is Josh Matlow. He takes a semiserious ‘left’ view but is not tied to the NDP establishment. He is at present tied for second place in the horse race.
If the hollowness of Chow again begins to be seen through, support may begin to flow to him. Or perhaps he is before his time. We will see, and we have a month to go.
Even more than with Alberta, the Toronto situation illustrates what is wrong with government in Canada. There is no real democracy. Nothing is serving the public's interest.
Little oligarchic power centers are maneuvering to increase their own power. They are starting to break up existing governing structures in order to increase their influence and opportunity for corruption, and to settle scores with enemies. This trend is becoming intense in Ontario due to the bad precedents set by premier Ford, most recently the abrupt and arbitrary breakup of the Peel region government.
The need is for a serious overhaul by responsible people, to reestablish the principle of democratic and evidence based decision making. This is obviously not coming from within the existing system.
Of course this problem is world wide. Almost everywhere there is a need for a modernization and democratization of institutions. The most encouraging development is the restructuring of international institutions which is now going on.
Most of the world is now in outright rebellion against Atlanticist or ‘western’ hegemony. The rhetoric is about moving from a ‘unipolar’ to a ‘multipolar’ world; from American domination to an alliance of regional powers. This is based on a move away from the American dollar and American run systems of international money transfer.
Change is being demanded to the way the United Nations is organized. The over 200 nations in that body now want the security council, controlled by the dominant powers, to be replaced.
Developments in Africa on these lines is especially encouraging. The publics of most of these countries are questioning the ‘liberal’, representative democracy forced on them by the colonial powers after independence. They recognize this model as facilitating corruption and abuse of power. They are discussing other models of governance and some are experimenting with them.
The old global status quo is not going away without a fight. Right now the focal point for that fight is in Ukraine.
Many commentators still express bewilderment at what the Atlanticist hegemony is trying to accomplish in Ukraine. It should not be hard to understand. The way the Atlanticists are reacting is analogous to the way sociopaths react when they are seen through and challenged. That is, ‘off the scale’ rage and a frantic effort to eliminate the challenge no matter how much harm it does to themselves.
Some elements among the global elite may see a nuclear war as the way out of their dilemma. It is the same as when individual or small cliques of sociopaths become suiciders or mass murderers when they reach the end of their rope, with no way out of their emotional dilemma. This is why the Russians have proceeded slowly and carefully in Ukraine, but know that they have no choice but to fight.
The old elite, whom the status quo was set up to protect, will be defeated unless they manage to start a nuclear war. They will run screaming off into oblivion. The way will be open for something new and better.
It seems this change is coming from the top down. The end of the global hegemony will lead to the end of national hegemonies in countries like Canada. It will still be a complicated process.
In Canada at least, it is likely that the right wing libertarian crackers will take control for awhile due to the absence of any effective opposition to them. They will be unable to govern or to fully act out their ideas. However, these are going to be difficult times for most Canadians.
At some point, people with ideas about how a post capitalist society will work, and with the competence to apply them, must come into power. The ideas are here already. They are mainly suppressed, often severely.
These ideas, and the people applying them, will initially be very unpopular. They will very likely be applied after a breakdown, a failure of fascist government, and creation of a provisional dictatorship. Once people are free of all the suppression and manipulation, and begin to think clearly, the basics of a post capitalist order will become very popular.
Many people in western ‘democracies’, especially Canada, will not like the above paragraph. They are mainly the same people enraged by Russia taking on the Atlanticist NATO military machine in Ukraine. They are the ‘phony left’, the NDP left.
While all this plays out, life goes on. History rolls to its end. I have found a satisfying pastime in studying and commenting about it.
I like to look at it from multiple levels, going from the global down to the local. What happens at the high levels seems to shape the local. Globally and locally, all over the world, we are in an era of upheaval and transformation.
The last such era was that of the world wars and the interwar period. Before that it was the Napoleonic wars. Almost everyone reading this has lived their lives in the stable and certain ‘Potsdam’ era, 1945 to 2020.
The crack happened right around 2020, with the pandemic, the launch of alternatives to the western banking system (Breton Woods), and the final break between the Eurasian and Atlantic powers.
I blogged in 2020 that we are going to live in a turbulent decade. I do not think this period of ‘Interregnum’ will last as long as the previous two. If mother earth does not get nuked, we will be in a new period of stability and prosperity after 2030.
My main reason for believing this is that there is a leadership in the world, mostly outside of the Atlantic world, with a clear idea of where they are going. They are not making it up as they go. They have a well thought out idea of a post capitalist world and they generally agree with each other on the main points.
When you think about it in this way, events do not seem so odd, globally or locally. History is working itself toward its ends.