The Political Significance of The Beatles

 

What was the political meaning of the Beatles? I realise this is a rather dilatory question to ask of a band that broke up in 1970. But fascination with them endures and the real answer to this question, is, in my opinion, utterly different from the ones that are usually put forward.

On the surface, the political significance of the Beatles is exactly that, superficial. The company they established, Apple, did not embody, in Paul McCartney’s description, “Western communism”, whatever that was supposed to mean. John Lennon’s utopian, anti-materialist song ‘Imagine’ undoubtedly had, and still has, influence but personally I can’t take seriously someone wondering if I’m able to “imagine no possessions” while playing a grand piano in his stately home (and employing a gardener, a cook, and an art advisor).

As political role models, the Beatles were terrible. They moaned about paying too much tax – which Lennon claimed made them “anti-establishment” – and expected the minions they employed to indulge their every wish. In 1969, their press officer, Derek Taylor, was prompted to wonder why on earth he worked for them:

Whatever the motivation the effect is slavery.  Whatever the Beatles ask is done. I mean, whatever the Beatles ask is tried. A poached egg on the Underground on the Bakerloo Line between Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross? Yes, Paul. A sock full of elephant shit on Otterspool Promenade? Give me ten minutes, Ringo. Two Turkish dwarfs dancing the Charleston on a sideboard? Male or female John? Pubic hair from Sonny Liston? It’s early closing, George (gulp), but give me until noon tomorrow. The only gig I would do after this is the Queen. Their staff are terrified of them, and not without reason. They have fired more people than any comparable employer unit in the world. They make Lord Beaverbrook* look like Jesus.

But despite the egotism, they managed, in their later years, to produce the most innovative, experimental and influential music in pop history, while remaining – to quote a phrase – more popular than Jesus. In April 1966, for example, they recorded this and in the same month this ‘song’. In a two month period spanning December 1966 and January 1967, they produced Strawberry Fields Forever and A Day in the Life, which no-one, to this day, has come close to imitating. In the summer of 1967, when a normal band would have been promoting their last ground-breaking album, released a few months before, they took a completely different tack. The following year, the sound changed again and again from month to month. In 1969, they could still knock out classic pop songs while increasing disliking each other. And they probably invented heavy metal, either in 1965 or 1968.

In 1967, they were warned by the press that the Maharishi, the Indian meditation teacher under whose spell they were falling, was “commercial”. To which, Lennon replied, “Well, that’s fine because we’re the most commercial band in the world”, or something like that.

And, in terms of sales and merchandise, they certainly were. But judged by the standard of our current definition of “commercial” – following established trends, playing it safe for maximum sales, not upsetting anyone – the Beatles were anything but.  That determination to innovate, to go against the grain, to not give a damn what anyone else thought – while successfully remaining  at least as popular as during Beatlemania in the early sixties  – is what makes the Beatles historically interesting and politically significant. Their last album, Abbey Road, sold more copies in America than Sgt Pepper which, in turn, sold vastly more copies than the early Beatlemania LPs.

Barry Miles, a friend of the band who, as owner of the Indica bookshop in London introduced them to underground books and trends, said something perceptive about them a few years back. “The interesting thing,” he noted, “is that the Beatles were not only the world’s most commercial band but, at that point, [1966] they were also the world’s most experimental band, which was very unusual”.

“Brian Epstein [their manager] was concerned that they were going too far ahead of their fanbase,” he added. “But they were always very sensible, they wanted to bring the fans along with them. They did want to become some wild, avant-garde band that only 150 people had heard of.”

Back in 2009, the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher spoke about the “cult of minimal variation” – the pervasive compulsion to produce cultural products that are almost indistinguishable from those already successful. But, said Fisher, this ignores what people instinctively desire which is “the strange, the unexpected, the weird”.

“These can only be supplied,” he went on, “by artists and media professionals who are prepared to give people something different from that which already satisfies them; by those, that is to say, prepared to take a certain kind of risk.”

This is precisely what the Beatles, devoted members of the cult of maximum variation, were determined to do, even when it was met with incomprehension or hostility.

To this day, some Beatles fans complain that eight minutes of the White Album is taken up with ‘Revolution No 9’, a non-song consisting of noises and snatches of conversations aimed to paint in sound, in Lennon’s words, “a picture of revolution”.

Whether he succeeded or not (he later thought it was “anti-revolution”), Revolution No 9 became, in author Ian Macdonald’s description, “the world’s most widely distributed avant-garde artefact”. The track was “one of the most striking instances of the communicative power of pop”. Rather than remaining “the preserve of the modernist intelligentsia, Lennon’s sortie into sonic chance was packaged for a mainstream audience which had never heard of its progenitors, let alone been confronted by their work.”

The point is not whether the Beatles experimental work was good or bad (half a century on, I think the jury’s decided that most of it, maybe not ‘Revolution No 9’, was extremely good) but that, in stark contrast to today, they were able to produce it whilst remaining wildly popular. What the Beatles had, in fact, was an out of control popularity, which is why powerful people (like Nixon’s future Vice President Spiro Agnew or the anti-communist John Birch Society) were always trying to ban their songs, often for exceedingly dumb reasons.

Music aside, the Beatles’ influence – popularising meditation, promoting LSD or inspiring Charles Manson – was questionable but it certainly existed as a force and they knew it did. This is why Lennon spent the Beatles’ dying days planting acorns and singing about peace while sitting in bed – because he knew the media would report whatever he did because of who he was.

And there is something inherently subversive about uncontrollable popularity, whether it is used wisely or not. This is while the elites that have power within western societies are fixated on controlling popular opinion. They’ve realised there’s no need to ban radical manifestoes, uncomfortable facts, or avant-garde expression but just make sure that only fringe minorities are exposed to them. Usually this works quite efficiently.

But when elites lose control of the narrative most people consume, that’s when they get desperate. The ‘shock’ 2017 General Election campaign – in which the left-wing, anti-imperialist Jeremy Corbyn got 41% of the vote in reactionary old England – happened in large part because the broadcast media were suddenly legally obliged to report what the socialist Labour party was actually saying, rather than just amplifying smears from the billionaire-owned right-wing (and liberal) press. Everything that has happened since – the blatant lying, the purges, the establishment arrogation of the liberal media, the mysterious algorithm changes, has been about regaining control.

This multi-fanged operation has undoubtedly been successful, at least temporarily. But the genocide in Gaza has revealed that controlling the narrative is more difficult to sustain in era when people have alternatives to legacy media at their fingertips. And the desire to control popular reaction is leading to outright repression, even in esteemed liberal democracies. Whether this impulse will be ratcheted up is a distinct possibility. The Hague Invasion Act, authorising the US President to invade the Netherlands should the International Criminal Court put any of its citizens on trial was passed in 2002 under George Bush but has now been extended to Israel.

Whether faced with overt authoritarianism or the manipulation of opinion (or, as is likely, a combination of the two), the only ‘cure’ is reform of the media to ensure that diverse opinions reach the mass of people: ‘cure’ in the sense that the patient may die in a nuclear conflagration, or endure the slow death of global warming, if this course is not followed. But because of what it will lead to, it will be fought tooth and nail.

In this future conflict, what the Beatles said politically or explicitly represented is really not interesting at all. It’s a total blind alley. What is interesting is that they were able to experiment and reach hundreds of millions of people directly while remaining beyond the grasp of their detractors and conservatives of all stripes. That is the most precious form of power of all.

 

*Beaverbrook (Max Aitken), a sort of proto-Rupert Murdoch, was the owner of the Daily Express (in addition to being a government minister in Britain in the two world wars) and was famous for sacking journalists whose output was not to his satisfaction.

Drag Me to Hell – Why are we so right-wing?

 

Margaret Thatcher is known for many things – declaring war on trade unions, initiating the mass privatisation of publicly-owned utilities, selling off council houses, deregulating the City of London, cutting taxes on the rich, to name a few. But one thing she is not famous for is being on the Left.

Nonetheless, in 1982, she did something which, in today’s climate, would be seen as left-wing, even ‘far left’. She suspended arms sales to Israel. This was in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which was prompted by the fact that the Palestinian Liberation Organisation had relocated there.

Many civilians were killed and Thatcher’s government took immediate action. An invitation to Israel to attend the British Army Equipment Exhibition was withdrawn and arms sales were stopped. One Foreign Office memo stated, “It would be odd if we were now to conduct bilateral business with the Israelis as though nothing had happened”.

Contrast this with the current British government’s reaction to the genocidal Israeli attack on Gaza, which has already killed far more civilians than the Lebanon War did. In fact, the official number of dead – 30,000 – will be swelled by so far unreported deaths – those dying at home and missing because they are buried under rubble.

Atrocities definitely happened in the 1982 war, most famously in refugee camp massacres. But, as far as I’m aware, deaths from malnutrition did not occur, as they are now. Nor were starving people deliberately massacred by the Israel Defense Force.

Nonetheless, this time Britain is definitely conducting business as though nothing had happened. Arms sales continue, and indeed the “defense relationship” and “growing Israel-UK partnership” is celebrated by the IDF.

Virtually the only person in the UK Parliament to object to this state of affairs is a propagator of ‘far left’ ‘socialism’ who has been cast into out darkness on the patently ridiculous grounds that he enabled antisemitism to flourish when he was leader of the Labour party.

I doubt somehow though that Thatcher is turning in her grave.  She regarded her greatest victory as compelling the Labour party to renounce its mixed economy, social democratic ideology in favour of her right-wing, corporate friendly, anti-worker economic world-view. Something Corbyn, all too briefly, reversed.

The Ultimate Compliment

Present leader Sir Keir Starmer is the perfect compliment to Thatcher’s legacy.  Despite being elected on a promise of upholding Corbyn’s economic policy, he has jettisoned every element of it, leaving a husk of Thatcherite nostrums impeccably attuned to the political and economic establishment which has grown to such dominance in her wake.

For example, in throwing overboard a pledge to spend £28 billion a year on green energy projects, Starmer and de facto deputy Rachel Reeves consciously aped the language of the Cameron-Osborne government employed to justify austerity. They accused the government of “maxing out on the nation’s credit card”. The same mind-numbing phrase cropped up in Starmer’s response to the Budget.

Reeves has, in redoubtably conservative fashion, promised to balance the nation’s books, despite, somewhat hilariously, having her own Parliamentary credit card taken away in 2015 for over-spending on expenses.  She has also promised not to reintroduce a cap on bankers’ bonuses abolished by the Conservatives, as this would mar the charm offensive with the City of London that she and Starmer have methodically deployed over the last few years.

A Different Country

The question that should then be asked is how did British politics get so sclerotically right-wing, especially when, in terms of social attitudes, the diametrically opposite trend has occurred?

Last autumn, for example, the researchers behind British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) proclaimed that Britain had undergone “a near revolution” in terms of social attitudes over the last four decades:

One clear theme emerges. On many social issues, such as sexual relations or whether women with young children should go out to work, there has been a long-run secular change trend towards a more liberal climate of opinion. In what might be thought a near-revolution in the country’s cultural outlook and social norms, Britain has increasingly come to believe that what people do in the bedroom, what kinds of family they live in, and how they combine family life and paid work should be up to them. The job of government is to respect and facilitate the decisions they make rather than try and take those decision[s] for them. 

In 1983, half of all respondents said that same sex relationships were “always wrong” compared to just 9% two years ago. Over three quarters of people support a woman’s right to have an abortion, compared to just 37% 40 years ago.

Other seismic changes can be found in attitudes toward premarital sex, having children outside wedlock, and gender roles in the workplace and the home. In 1987, for example, 48% agreed that ‘a man’s job is to earn money, a woman’s job is to look after the home and family’. Now only 9% of people do.  Britain “now looks and feels like a different country from 40 years ago”, the BSA says.

These are all welcome changes but in terms of politics, and the attitudes underpinning it, Britain doesn’t “feel like a different country from 40 years ago”. It feels like a worse country.

To go back to the example that introduced this article, in 1982 – when dinosaurian attitudes on social issues held sway – Margaret Thatcher could, with minimal opposition it seems, suspend arms sales to Israel. It is inconceivable that such a policy would be enacted today and if, by some miracle it was, it would be instantly accompanied by howls of antisemitism. 

It may justifiably be pointed out that these changes in social attitudes did not just happen. According to journalist Ian Sinclair, reporting on the BSA survey curiously neglected mentioning the role of “groups like the Women’s Liberation Movement, Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front and Outrage dealing with violence, threats and abuse in their struggle to win equal rights, changes in the law and shift public opinion.”

But there is no shortage of activist groups – on anti-austerity, public ownership, the rights of disabled claimants, inequality, and corporate taxation for example – trying to shift Britain’s economic policy and politics marginally to the Left. But in this case, barring minor victories on things like the municipalisation of bus services, they have just been banging their heads against a brick wall.

Why is this? Why did activists, admittedly after years of struggle, succeed in prising the door open on gender issues, gay rights, and sexual choice but in terms of politics and economics meet a defiant ‘No Pasaran!” from the elite?

1983 will never die!

I can’t give a definitive answer but one notable feature of British politics over the past four decades has been an innate conservatism in the worst sense of the word. Instead of taking on vested interests, it has opted to protect and preserve them.

In party political terms, we have one side fixated on a perpetual emulation of Thatcher’s epoch-changing 1983 victory facing off against the 1997 Reenactment Society. Rather than changing, as social attitudes obviously have, politics is frozen in aspic, like some endless rerun of Yes Minister (which for those who don’t know was a ‘comedic’ representation of the right-wing Public Choice Theory and obsessed with cutting government waste).

In 2008, our necrophile political system bailed out, with public money, a financial system that had imploded entirely due to its own inner workings. Not only was this an enormous transfer of wealth from poor to rich, it also rescued and further entrenched a sector of the economy that feeds off debt and thus loves conservative economics.  

Finance wants austerity because, as a result, wages are held down and people become even more susceptible to getting into debt and having to make interest payments. For the same reason, it has an aversion to trade unions. Finance is also a prime mover behind the privatisation of public assets, funding the Private Equity groups that often take over public services, like water or health, thus benefitting from the rising user fees that people are compelled to pay to gain access to basic services.

If ‘market failures’ exist and they aren’t being dealt with, you can bet that for some people, invariably extremely well-off, these aren’t failures at all but successes and the source of their wealth.

Hysterical Billionaires

And when the billionaires who run Britain’s mass media organisations ran into some turbulence after revelations of phone hacking, the obedient political class was on hold to limit the fall out. The initial enquiry into unlawful conduct by the newspapers, led by the judge Brian Leveson, was meant to be followed by a second part (‘Leveson 2’) that would have looked into “corporate governance issues”. But this was scrapped by Matt Hancock because of the “significant progress” that had apparently been made.

As a result, rather than clipping their wings, moguls like Rupert Murdoch were emboldened. His News UK launched the right-wing Talk TV station in 2022, emulating the hysterical Fox News in the US despite laws against broadcasting bias in the UK which didn’t seem to make much difference. The fact that Talk TV is soon to become a streaming only service does not denude from its intention to further lock British politics into a right-wing direction.

Its ‘rival’ GB News plays a similar role. The co-owner of the channel is hedge fund billionaire Sir Paul Marshall. In a previous incarnation he funded and edited the 2004 ‘Orange Book’, a collection of free market espousing essays by leading Liberal Democrats which set the tone for their role in the Cameron coalition after 2010.

Marshall, who has been outed for seeming endorsement of far right conspiracy theories, has previously lamented the fact that financiers like him ‘made out like bandits’ as a result of the government’s decade-long Quantitative Easing programme. But despite this honesty, he hasn’t been deterred from putting the money to effective use.

If you create a large coterie of billionaires, as our political system has, you shouldn’t be surprised when they use that enormous wealth to mould public opinion and protect their interests. 

Liberal and progressive opinion in this country has been profoundly shaped by the Whig theory of history, which is convinced that the British story exhibits a steady, if slow, progress towards more liberty and rights. However, the experience of the last 40 years does not bear this out. Progress and reaction can co-exist, each in their own separate sphere of influence. Reality, as opposed to the idealised narrative that exists in our heads, is frequently messy and may point in two contradictory directions at the same time.

 

 

Who is Jeffrey Sachs and why is he saying these things?

Last month the economist Jeffrey Sachs said something which should have sent shockwaves around the world. “I chaired a commission for The Lancet for two years on Covid,” Sachs told a conference in Madrid. “I’m pretty convinced it came out of US lab biotechnology, not out of nature; just to mention after two years of intensive work on this. So it’s a blunder, in my view, of biotech, not an accident or a natural spillover."

 This is not the kind of claim that can be safely dismissed – as claims going against the orthodoxy invariably are – as a ‘conspiracy theory’. Sachs is a famous economist. Twice one of Time Magazine’s most influential people in the world, he was responsible, as an advisor to Boris Yeltsin, for imposing shock therapy on post-Communist Russia (coincidentally the 1990s saw life expectancy in Russia fall by the largest amount, outside of war or famine, in any nation in history). Since then he’s undergone something of a metamorphosis, endorsing Bernie Sanders in the 2020 American election.

The Lancet is a famous British-based peer-reviewed medical magazine, not noted for its articles on the Loch Ness monster, Big Foot sightings and the lost city of Atlantis.

The Sachs/Lancet combination is therefore not one that can be plausibly accused of spreading fake news in order to garner a few thousand likes on Twitter. But what Sachs had to say wasn’t greeted with the kind of peaked curiosity you might expect from the media. The UK right-wing press – Telegraph and Daily Mail – did register his comments, though noticeably without the level of glee that accompanied claims from the year before that China, alone, might be responsible for Covid. State media (the BBC) and the liberal press (The Guardian) were conspicuous by their silence. Likewise the left-wing, and generally pro-China, Morning Star.

‘This was teamwork’

If Sachs is too close to the Establishment to be branded a conspiracy theorist, claims he is merely a “Xi propagandist” (Xi Jinping is the President of China) don’t really stack up either. After all, what he is saying does not exonerate China. To do that, he’d have to parrot the Chinese government line – and that of many western scientists – that Covid definitely originated in the wild.  Or echo Chinese media claims that the Covid-19 virus was cooked up at a US military base in Maryland. But he’s doing neither. He’s saying it’s very possible – not definite, no-one can know for sure without transparency by all parties – that SARS-COV-2 (Covid) was a deliberate creation of a US-Chinese scientific partnership and leaked out inadvertently as a result of a terrible mistake.  

It’s a matter of public record that US government agencies funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology among other places. This was a result of a 2014 Federal ban on such research in the US because it was considered dangerous. There were, Sachs says, grant applications that wanted to manipulate coronavirus strains to make them more infectious to humans (the logic being that if you do so, vaccines are supposedly easier to formulate). The National Institutes of Health – the US government agency that doled out the funds – says that no such proposals were approved. But, retorts Sachs, it’s common knowledge in these fields that some research is always undertaken in advance of the securing of funding.

“If this came out of a lab, it was US biotechnology that made it possible,” asserts Sachs. “The US actually trained the people at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they were engaged with them, they were part of the same grant proposals. This was teamwork.”

Two caveats should be made. One if Covid was released from a lab, it was a catastrophic error, not part of some dastardly plan to create a devastating new bioweapon. Two, there is no certainty. “We don’t know for sure, I should be absolutely clear,” Sachs cautions. “But there’s enough evidence that it should be looked into and it’s not being investigated, not in the United States, not anywhere. I think for real reasons that they don’t want to look underneath the rug too much.”

 

Oops

 

But what is clear is that, Jeffrey Sachs aside, there isn’t much of an appetite for truth here. Some people – US Republicans, Tony Blair etc. – were all for lifting up the rug when they thought China was the sole perpetrator. Certain Trumpists even wanted to go to war over it. But the enthusiasm on the Right for the unvarnished truth has waned the more the plot has thickened.

American Democrats and centrists and liberals of various hues are fervently attached to the zoonotic explanation for Covid because to depart from it puts science in the crosshairs when it belongs firmly on a pedestal.  When the Chinese government isn’t agreeing with them for slightly different reasons, it’s urging the World Health Organisation to investigate the sudden closure of the US military base denounced as the harbinger of Covid.

But Covid as the bastard child of a joint US-China scientific project gone cataclysmically awry? That doesn’t have quite the same partisan appeal, not least because you can’t blame communism or the US military. Ironically, if it is true, the only possible scapegoats for a death toll of, conservatively, over six million and counting, are the signature forces of our age, globalisation and outsourcing.  I mean who’d have thought they could have any downsides?

That’s the one certain ‘takeaway’ in the Sachs version of the lab leak theory. The world is a lot stranger than you thought. A new Cold War, even direct military conflict, is brewing between the USA and China. The most ‘globalist’ candidate to replace Johnson as UK PM, Rishi Sunak, promises to “face down China” as the biggest threat to world security. And yet here were these deadly enemies cooperating on extremely risky germ research. And that’s beyond dispute; they were cooperating even if at this point the Armageddon outcome is a matter of conjecture. I’m fairly sure that in the actual Cold War, even at the height of détente, the US didn’t farm out biomedical research to the Leningrad Medical Institute.

In all probability, even if some version of the lab leak theory is what happened, it will never become the accepted narrative. To concede that would be to invite a moral reckoning so seismic it would fatally damage the legitimacy of the world’s two superpowers and give a new fervour to the forces of ethno-nationalism and religion. I’d like to think the non-national, council democracy of the Kurds could step into the breach but I realise its libidinal reach is at present a lot smaller.

 It will be interesting to see how the final, peer-reviewed report of Sachs’s Covid commission in The Lancet deals with the issue; whether it will be as outspoken as he has been. If it is, I expect it to be one of the most unwelcome items of news in history.

Addendum, 1 Nov 2022

Maybe as expected, the Commission report hedges its bets about the origins of Covid, saying it is “feasible” the virus leaked out as a result of a “research incident” but also that a “zoonotic” explanation – a natural spillover – is equally plausible. In the absence of independent investigation of US laboratories engaged in “manipulation of SARS-CoV-like viruses” or laboratory research in Wuhan, it is not possible to say with any certainty what happened. “Commissioners held diverse views about the relative probabilities of the two explanations, and both possibilities require further scientific investigation,” the report says.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/lancet-report-claiming-covid-could-132931783.html

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)01585-9/fulltext

 

However, evidence for the synthetic origin of Covid-19 remains: https://twitter.com/mbalter/status/1583203103293071360

The Billionaires' World

 Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has, almost inevitably, dredged up the only historical analogy most people are capable of making – that of the appeasement of Adolf Hitler before World War Two. Sun columnist Piers Morgan – who according to the adverts ‘says out loud what most people are thinking’ – has dutifully obliged with the Neville Chamberlain vibe. But according to many American politicians it’s just like 1938 all over again …. again.

Actually, and more worryingly, the most apt historical echo is not the Second World War but the First, when a group of states who had, ideologically much in common, slogged it out for four long years over a cause few could remember, resulting the deaths of around 20 million people.

On the eve of the 21^st century, the Italian historian Domenico Losurdo recalled the 1910 funeral of Edward VII of England. It was, he wrote, “the occasion for a splendid procession which saw kings, hereditary princes and dukes, united by ties of kinship and common mourning, parade on horseback. Time seemed not to have made the least dent in the power and prestige of the European aristocracy. Nine monarchs, all descendants of William the Silent, occupied the stage …”

Yet a little over four years later, these same countries were dragged by a series of alliances into, at the time, the most destructive war in world history. These were resolutely capitalist nations – often officially led by people related to each other – that had, over the previous 30 years, taken possession of over 8.6 million square miles of Africa and Asia in the name of progress and trade. They were, on the surface, united by racial, economic, political and familial ties. Nonetheless these countries were plunged into insane nationalistic fervour and a seemingly endless fight to the death.

Of course certain ideological differences were stressed. Britain, France and, latterly, America – the Entente – were presented as bastions of liberalism in contrast to the militarism of the other side (Germany, Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire). But the Entente was also allied with Tsarist Russia, an absolute monarchy, police state and profoundly anti-Semitic regime.

Likewise today, Patriarch Kirill,  the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has backed Putin’s invasion on the grounds that it is a “metaphysical” struggle against immoral Western values (such as LGBT rights and same-sex marriage). At the same time, however, Boris Johnson has scuttled off to Saudi Arabia to beg for more oil from that erstwhile British ally, which happens to be an absolute monarchy and beheaded 81 people prior to his arrival. And which, in addition to visiting hell upon neighbouring Yemen, is also probably the most anti-Semitic regime on earth. Such does history rhyme.

In the current world the ties that don’t bind are not based on monarchy, aristocracy or Empire. Rather the common denominator across liberal, conservative and authoritarian countries is the dominance and ubiquitous presence of the ultra-rich. In 2021, there were 2,755 billionaires in the world, 660 more than the previous year. During 2020, a new billionaire was created every 17 hours. Billionaires are, collectively, worth $13.1 trillion, up from $8 trillion just 12 months previously and less than $3 trillion in 2006. To give a sense of perspective, a billion is a thousand million.

Their mere presence inevitably dominates and skews the societies they inhabit – be it the U.S, Britain or Russia. It is widely known, for example, that Russian billionaires – the infamous oligarchs – were created after the collapse of communism through the process of “voucher privatisation” which enabled a small group of people to acquire former state assets and amass stupendous wealth. But the number of Russian billionaires has, in common with the rest of world, dramatically increased in the 21^st century; from several to over 100. They are taxed at just 2 per cent more than the rest of the population (and this increase was introduced in 2020!), while the rest of the country is subjected to austerity.

Venerated Ukrainian war leader, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, posed as an anti-oligarch in order to be elected president in 2019. But his campaign was launched on the TV channel of billionaire Igor Kolomoyskyi. And his putative hostility to oligarchs hasn’t stopped him, together with the partners in his TV company, owning a network of offshore companies registered in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus and Belize. Repressing the Left and gutting labour rights, which Zelenskiy has done in the middle of a war, is strangely in tune with the interests of the mega rich.

Controlling the state, and using it to amass and protect great wealth, has become almost customary in the 21^st century. Ba’athism emerged in the 1940s and 50s as a pan-Arab, quasi-socialist ideology, though one which was brutally repressive of leftists. But under Assad in Syria, Ba’athism has simply become the means through which a small elite have enriched themselves through privatisation and neoliberal ‘reforms’ – a process which has notably intensified since the turn of the millennium. In China, the official communist ideology and an interventionist state has proved no impediment to the leadership and company managers accruing huge fortunes. The Panama Papers, for example, named the families of eight current or former members of China’s politburo. Levels of inequality are similar to those of South Africa, peasants are regularly stripped of their land and turned into proletarians and super exploitation of workers occurs.

The liberal heartlands of America and Britain – despite their ostensibly democratic institutions – exhibit the identical thumbprints of billionaire domination, manifested in the gravy train of privatisation, quantitative easing, political funding and control of the media. Oligarchs in Britain, George Monbiot said in 2020, “use their economic power and translate it into political power, which is what oligarchs do the world over”. And given that billionaires (oligarchs) have hugely increased in number in the first two decades of this century, the process will only get more explicit.

It may be objected, plausibly, that the interests of billionaires lie in a strong state that protects them and ensures the conditions for their continued accumulation of capital, but that they definitely don’t lie in the division of the world into warring blocs that impose sanctions on each other and confiscate wealth. This is undoubtedly true. But it was also the case that the so-called liberal ‘golden age’ of capitalism (1870-1913) degenerated into the internecine carnage of World War One despite it being in no-one’s interest that it do so. The pre-WW1 era and our own are remarkably similar in many ways. The resemblances include a commitment to a globalised economy, few cross border restrictions on the movement of goods, capital and people, and a belief in balanced government budgets. But the liberal age of capitalism can to an abrupt and brutal end in 1914. Ours can too.

Those old enough to remember the 1990s will recall the air of triumphalism around the collapse of Communism and the fervent belief that, now the world was entering an era of globalisation, free trade and liberal capitalism, countries would regard war as irrational and anachronistic. No two countries with a McDonalds’ franchise have ever gone to war with each other, it was said. Well Russia has – or had – McDonalds.

The question which now inserts itself is whether nationalism, racism, authoritarianism and war are the inevitable shadows of liberal capitalism and market fundamentalism. That despite many in the global elite not wanting a world of war and division, the world is inevitably predisposed to such a disaster because of the inequality and suppressed conflict inherent in a  global economy designed exclusively around the needs of the rich.

If you ignore the noise about Hitler and appeasement, you can hear those chimes of history ringing now.