Broke-back Democracy

Like this old Liberty ship, western democracies now seem to be falling apart. The SS Richard Montgomery broke its back on a sandbank off the coast of Kent c1944 with a cargo of explosives on board. What sometimes scuppers our so-called social democracy is the deeply unstable – undemocratic and anti-social – economy on which it habitually rests. But in this case the sandbank is not the work of inhuman nature but corporate wealth and the very rich few, mostly men, who shape it in their own interest. Or what they imagine that to be.

The current break in political formation across UK, US and EU reflects this underlying economic instability. Relatively prosperous politicians and fellow-professionals are left clinging to the superstructure, while those they were meant to represent and managed are left to sink or swim. A motley crew regroup on improvised rafts, shake their fists at elites and kick out at more-unfortunates to try to get on board. Whoever, wherever, whatever... 

New Pied Pipers, old tunes... Fairy tales and nautical images apart, I've tried to get the gist of it in a Castro letter to the Guardian Weekly. An earlier version was spiked by the Observer, but the Weekly is often more progressive, international and cheaper than its Guardian/Observer stablemates.

To the Editor

Guardian Weekly 06.12.2016

Fidel Castro didn't set out to be a Stalinist dictator, he got pushed. How could Cuba not have turned to the Soviets when the US blocked its sugar crop? How could a new leader countenance loyal opposition with the CIA breathing poison down his neck? Hadn't impeccable parliamentarians,Mossadegh in Iran and Allende in Chile been killed in coups prompted by London and Washington?

Democrat or not, Fidel made most of his people healthier, prouder, more educated and - for a long time - better off.  We sometimes hear the truth about ourselves from enemies and Castro was right that  'capitalism has neither the capacity, nor the morality nor the ethics to solve the problems of poverty'.

The same now goes for the 'social' democracy that overlooks and oversees our anti-social, top-down economy. Long before cold war or globalisation, US founding fathers and the UK mother of parliaments had a lot to answer for. From plantation to wage slavery, enclosures to company law, property ruled. Down the ranks of private industry and public services, we do what we're told and take what we get from bosses you dont elect...Or else. This duress,by cash not lash ensures that power and prosperity, education and opportunity trickle up.

When things come unstuck, endemic cruelties surface in repression and revenge, the worst of both worlds. Now it ca n no longer be a choice between democracy and economic justice by other means. Democracy itself must look to other means. Representative democracy, whether in elected government or company boards, must be grounded in a more direct democracy wherever we live and work. We all need time and space to meet, discuss, decide and act for ourselves, find commonsense in commonwealth.

GW

Swansea

PS 'Equality rules' says Dame Louise Casey in a race report for Mrs May, only to focus her findings on Muslim women, burkas and the Muslim Men who keep them down: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04k6v58

What's missing in this talk of social equality, as in most talk about social democracy, is any clear recognition of the economic inequality underpinning it.

What separates Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims from their more liberal whiter brothers and sisters is not so much religious prejudice - on either side - as the economic divisions that so effectively keep us apart. 
It so happens that most Muslims in the UK are also among the poorest people in the UK, with all that goes with it: poor housing, poor schools, poor jobs and little prospect of upward mobility. 
Race and class lines often correlate. Poor Muslims like many poor whites and so-called JAMs fall back on old instincts and traditions and make a virtue of necessity. It's not only Muslim men who are more likely to take it out on their wives if they can keep up themselves:  the more you're put down outside, the more important to be Master at home.

Social inequalities - race, gender and class - play out the economic injustices underlying them. In posher parts of Ireland, South Africa and central London, racial and religious differences may not disappear, but many of the tensions around them melt away, and people more often work together. Shared prosperity is the best mixer.