History repeating itself – but as What..?

In his poem, September 1st 1939, Auden, talking about the Thirties; wrote;

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Auden wrote this three days before World War Two began. So far we haven’t such a prescient summary of the decade just ending - 2000 to 2009. Called the ‘noughties’ or whatever - this decade could, in other equally lethal ways, be as important, as pivotal as the Thirties because it has a sense of being a cross roads or even the searching, waiting feel of an interregnum (in Webster’s an interregnum is, ‘...the time during which a throne is vacant between two successive reigns or regimes.’

Now I’m not talking here about any one country but the globe itself and its politics because, below the surface, what a political sea change the last ten years has seen! The decade began with only the one world power, America, cleaving, or at least the ruling Republican party, to Fukuyama’s notion of the ’End of History’. This was where all the old ‘isms’ of the nineteenth and twentieth century; socialism, communism, fascism had been worked to destruction by the unforgiving politics of reality and a new but inevitable era had emerged. Of simple, clean apolitical politics, of straight forwards political and social management through the omnipotent medium of self regulating market forces. The great cleansing era of untrammelled capitalism had finally arrived.

And this was to be both the new and also the final global disposition for the 21st Century onwards (The End of History) - and with it came the parallel conviction that any backward or awkward state, once opened up by (unilateral if necessary) armed intervention (Iraqi, Afghanistan) to the self righting flow of market capitalism, would quickly and seamlessly be sorted from the grass roots up - or in these two cases, from the desert sand up – and that would be that.

Then in the last decade, three events came along in succession and turned everything on its head. First the insane dot.com boom went bust. It had been posited on an ever ascending, insane proposition that a business with say, fifty employees at fifty computers producing nothing that could be exchanged for anything remotely useful could justify market valuations in the tens or hundreds of millions! Kenneth Galbraith wrote a tract about this phenomenon called ‘A Short History of Financial Euphoria’ that had it all.

Then along came Bin Laden and the Twin Towers followed by the irrational response of the invasion of Iraqi – irrational unless you were George W Bush proving to his dad who was really the toughest!. A political cretin who, ‘...knowing no history, was doomed to repeat it..’ Unfortunately he doomed a lot of other more innocents to a real death.

Then in the last years of the decade, this marvellous self regulating tool we had all been waiting for since the beginning of time, ‘the market’ again proceed to swallow itself, with millions of dollars/pounds/euros, what have you, disappearing in milliseconds (The question was had they ever existed?). This was when real economic (manufacturing) power stopped pirouetting and began lurching away Eastwards to India and China, the latter buying up vast chunks of American equity in a race for diminishing collateral – while Bush and the neocons cons watched, apparently with great equanimity, while the last great Communist Dictatorship bought up the last great bastion of Capitalism...you couldn’t make it up.

So in the last ten years the world went from the certainties of the new and final capitalist settlement to spectral uncertainties of unknown enemies emerging from caves or slums to give the us all convulsions - whereas the real disaster for the West, hardly noticed, was the surging flow of economic power Eastwards.

Because, of course, Al Qaida and the Muslim extremist are not the threat to the West. We have this wrong as well. The Twin Towers and the urban incidents of exploding waistcoat are only external expressions of an essentially local and internal struggle in the Moslem world, a struggle between the irredeemable crass fourteenth century politics of the old ruling orders and the twenthfirst century aspiration of their educated middle classes, educated by the internet, satellite TV and the mobile phone to want out of medieval cultural purdah - and by definition, the middle classes will always win. And this old order is so far off the money it can’t see that this century particularly needs woman because it needs a special type of lateral intelligence and not the old blind clash of male egos - and in any case if the Muslims had onions instead of oil, we would hardly know about it.

The big thing, not anticipated by students of the status quo – and I’m talking here of most politicians and business people in the West and apparently also many historians and academic, was the now seeming inevitable flight eastwards of capital and power. And the thing is that this has been clearly signalled at home for maybe two generations and in the plainest of terms. The trouble is no one was looking in the right place...in everyday life, in the schools and the streets. Industry/commerce requires an educated and self disciplined work force and the west increasing now has neither simply because the future knew and arranged this, that they, the western proletariat, would soon be surplus to requirements.

This has all been shrieked at us for about half a century - for the future is made by people, it does not just appear out of the sun, and the future is always with us, around us – a huge cavity thousands of miles away in a desert would first be harbinge by tiny movements of sand around our feet, so is the future forecast by incremental changes in social mores, fashions and the predilections of people a generation or two before, not marked in big one off events. This is not Marxist Historical Theory sublimely ignoring the intervention of the Great Man, we’re talking here of social forces so overweening, so overwhelming they eventually sweep everything before them.

I didn’t mention Global Warming because it makes all the above a game of Russian Roulette staged on a level crossing with the midnight express coming round the corner..! It’s another story - or maybe after all, just a part of the main..!

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were...