“WE ARE seeing a simultaneous breakdown in economic and geopolitical orders.”

Thus Gordon Brown, the most interesting of our coterie of eight ex-prime ministers; a low bar to clear for sure.

He continues: “We are not only in a more protectionist era but are moving from a unipolar world where the US was the sole hegemonic power to one that has many more centres of decision-making power.” The present world order is beyond saving, he recognises.

Brown is right. A critical word in his summation of our times is “moving.” This is a moment of transition, so we should hold firmly in our heads that the destination is not foreordained.

Since capitalism became the ascendant world system there have been several such transitions before. The classical liberal order based on free trade and a state that had an extremely limited role in the economy and society was the first prevailing norm.

It rested in large part on a British hegemony underpinned by the gold standard and the Royal Navy.  That order first eroded and then collapsed through mounting class struggle and inter-imperialist rivalry, culminating in World War I.

Huge efforts were expended by the elite to reconstruct the old system after the war. Those endeavours eventually collapsed into fascism in some countries and economic crisis – and protectionism – in all. 

Nor were imperialist rivalries overcome. Britain lost its role as suzerain without any replacement to hand, and one sixth of the world was socialist.

A new order only emerged after a further monstrous war. It was foreshadowed by Roosevelt’s New Deal, but governments across the world took it further and faster, creating a “social democratic consensus” founded on a much greater economic and social role for the capitalist state.

One-third of the world was by this stage socialist, creating what proved to be an unfounded expectation of ineluctable advance.  The rest of the world had a new hegemon – the mighty imperialism of the USA. Colonialism retreated before liberation movements and its own unviability, to be replaced in too many cases by new relations of metropolitan domination.

The next transition, to what is now termed the neoliberal order, was driven by class struggle requirements – growing working-class social power to the point where it impacted on the rate of profit – and the relative decline of the US, represented by the ending of the dollar’s convertibility into gold.

We all know how the new era turned out – a prolonged assault on working-class institutions, on the social wage and on the sovereignty of the countries of the global South, with the state receding from some of the obligations it had assumed after 1945 – the maintenance of full employment for example.

Socialism was overcome in most of the countries where it had conquered, while in China it took a different course leading to a very high degree of integration with the capitalist world economy, and the only power in town was that of unipolar Washington, renewed through Cold War victory.

Neoliberalism met its own Waterloo in the crash of 2008. The stagnation in living standards since has been paralleled by an intellectual stagnation of the ruling classes, unable to easily preserve the old systemic assumptions yet equally incapable of transitioning to new ones.

There is a case that the incoming regime of capitalist governance is a nationalist authoritarianism in a multipolar world, including the declining US reorganising for confrontation with rising China.  Marxist intellectual Perry Anderson argues this point in a recent article in the London Review of Books.

Anderson makes relevant points. First, “neoliberalism has not gone away. Its hallmarks are now familiar: deregulation of financial and product markets; privatisation of services and industries; reduction of corporate and wealth taxation; attrition or emasculation of trade unions.”

Trump and Farage aim to keep, indeed extend, all of that in their new order, just as neoliberalism was obliged to accept some of the economic and institutional changes bequeathed by the years of the “consensus,” except in those countries like Chile where it ruled through unbridled violence alone.

Indeed, Anderson points out that Obama worked mightily to maintain basic neoliberalism, as did his European counterparts. But the effort has come at the price of an intense democratic alienation spreading across electorates which believe they have been failed.

Broadly, the populist right has been the beneficiary. It has been on the front foot because of “the disappearance of any significant political movement calling robustly either for the abolition or the radical transformation of capitalism. By the turn of the century, socialism in both of its historical variants, revolutionary and reformist, had been swept clear of the stage in the Atlantic zone.

“The revolutionary variant: to all appearances, with the collapse of communism in the USSR and the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself. The reformist variant: to all appearances, with the extinction of any trace of resistance to the imperatives of capital in the social democratic parties of the West, which now simply competed with conservative, Christian democrat or liberal parties in their implementation,” Anderson writes.

Of course, no small effort was expended successfully defeating radical challenges from the left, be it Corbyn, Sanders or Syriza.  That may have headed off one obvious set of problems for the elite, but it has not averted turmoil, as Trump amply establishes.

However, it is clear that at each previous transition within the capitalist system there has also been an alternative path of exit from it. Socialist revolution was an available option in 1918-1923 in Europe, and more profound transformations than Attlee’s were possible after 1945.

The move to neoliberal norms was also strongly contested, a movement politically represented in Britain by Tony Benn, in France by the early Mitterrand, who ruefully reflected amidst the ruins of his initial reforms that “in economics there are two solutions – either you are a Leninist or you won’t change anything.”

Put like that, it is easy to understand how neoliberalism has maintained its death grip on the political imagination of the capitals of capital. So this is where we are — Britain’s social democratic premier “pragmatically” takes control of the country’s last remaining basic steel plant, while the populist neo-Thatcherite Farage calls instead for its full and immediate nationalisation.

Starmer clings to the tatters of US world leadership while tiptoeing ever so cautiously away from the Blairite playbook, appearing one moment as Herbert Morrison, authoritarian imperialist nationaliser, and the next as George Osborne, high priest of austerity.

The eager faces on the Labour benches behind Jonathan Reynolds last Saturday as he announced the Scunthorpe legislation spoke to a keen desire that this be the harbinger of a new dawn.

Workers at Port Talbot and Grangemouth, not to mention the disabled and pensioners, will be sceptical. The people of Gaza facing a London-endorsed genocide will not likely pause to reflect, but British imperialism, the world policy of the bourgeoisie, has continuities through all changes.

Previous transitions have been accompanied by war, or at least violent social convulsions. Anderson suggests that something comparable may be required to lay low neoliberalism and open up alternatives.

Certainly, neither history nor contemporary reality suggest that prolonged economic misery will on its own be sufficient. Alone, that hands the initiative to the Trumps, Le Pens and Weidels who embrace a lot of Hayek and a little of Hitler, a rhetorical dash of Roosevelt and nothing of Lenin.

Back to Gordon Brown who, conveniently forgetting the Iraq aggression at the height of his City-infatuated Chancellorship, bemoans the “violent displacement of a rules-based global order by a power-based one.”

Power is generally taken to reside in states and their leaders, and certainly that is how Trump proceeds.  But that is not necessarily the case. Working-class power is more diffused and less articulated than at previous moments of transformation, but combat for an egalitarian alternative has never been completely stilled.

Anyway, it seems relevant to recall the old adage that if socialism is not to arise from war then socialism has to forestall it. Put another way, the present rulers of the Western world have manifestly run out of this road, and need to be put out of their misery, and ours, before they embark on a still worse one.