+It can’t have escaped anybody’s notice that Joe Biden yesterday joined a picket line of the United Auto Workers union in Detroit—striking for the usual reasons like more pay. This rather shames our own beloved No Shame Starmer, who instructed his shadow cabinet members not to join picket lines. Apparently it’s not part of the preparation for being in government. Partying with Rupert Murdoch is OK though.
+After the war there was clearly a big debate about whether there should be some form of world government. I blogged about Bertrand Russell’s thoughts on this (5th August) and now I’ve been reading Albert Einstein’s views—also pro-world government. Clearly these two intellectual giants were shoved back in their box, even though the climate crisis demands much, much more now than COP conferences and crossed fingers. Still, it is interesting to see how the idea was derailed, and in Einstein’s Ideas and Opinions he includes an open letter from members of the Russian Academy published in the Moscow New Times in 1947. In part this reads: ‘In the first place the idea of a ‘world government’ and ‘superstate’ are by no means products of the atomic age. They are much older than that. They were mooted, for instance, at the time the League of Nations was formed. Further, these ideas have never been progressive in these modern times. They are a reflection of the fact that the capitalist monopolies, which dominate the major industrial countries, find their own national boundaries too narrow. They need a worldwide market, worldwide sources of raw materials, and worldwide spheres of capital investment. Thanks to their domination in political and administrative affairs, the monopoly interests of the big powers are in a position to utilise the machinery of government, in their struggle for spheres of influence and their efforts economically and politically to subjugate other countries, to play the master in these countries as freely as their own.’ (p.135) The Russian Academicians feared a world government would just be an entrée for greater global domination by the capitalist interest. Now, one can see how prescient they were, where national interests can be overridden by WTO courts and where the internet has created a business model beyond the reach of lawmakers (no matter how hard they try). Why, it’s almost as if the capital interest has forced the End of History with a result which doesn’t quite chime with Francis Fukuyama’s victorious liberal democratic version (but since I haven’t read his book I may be doing it a great injustice). The global ‘government’ we are ending up with appears now more than ever to resemble the Academicians’ vision, against which stands a growing, primal nationalism, equally ugly.
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