The Epic of Everest: The Mystery of 1924

One hundred years ago today, two young men set out on one of the most remarkable adventures in human history. 37 year old George Herbert Leigh-Mallory, the greatest climber of his generation, and 22 year old Andrew Comyn 'Sandy' Irvine, an expert at repairing the new fangled oxygen equipment they were using, left their camp 7000 metres above sea level, and attempted to be the first people to reach the summit of the highest mountain in the world. They were never seen alive again. 

The first person to be asked to climb Everest appears to have been a chap called Francis Younghusband. A Victorian British Army officer he made his name with various acts of daring-do in what came to be called the Great Game, a sort of  Cold War in the Himalayas between the British and Russian empires. The conversation took place in 1893, on the polo ground in Chitral, an obscure place on the northwest frontier that had just been the scene of one of the bloody little wars of empire. Captain Charles Grenville Bruce of the 5th Gurkha Rifles suggested it to Younghusband, although it could have been other way round. Grant, a volcano of a man in both size and temperament, is the person who introduced shorts to the British Army and had once commanded Younghusband's Gurkha escort during one of this Great Game expeditions.

It took nearly 30 years for the plan to come off, by which time both men were too old for the climb themselves. By this time Younghusband was president of the Royal Geographical Society. He was also a mystic who believed in free love, the unity of the world's religions and a cosmic intelligence living on a planet called Altair, but this didn't stop the RGS teaming up with the Alpine Club to launch a reconnaissance expedition to Everest in 1921. The team included Mallory, who spied out the terrain and chose the route he would use the next year to try for the summit. 

Prior to this expedition, British surveyors had only seen the top of Everest. They had no idea what the rest of it looked like, or even if they would be climbing rock or snow. What they saw was impressed them, but did not put them off. "An easy rock peak" was the verdict. Imperial arrogance, for sure, but also the voice of experienced Alpine climbers. Everest stands 10,000 feet above the Tibetan plateau. By contrast, Mont Blanc stands 14,000 feet above Chamonix. What makes Everest a challenge is not its prominence, but its altitude. Climbing at 29,000 feet is not the same as climbing at 15,000 feet.

The party could not do much about the weather, except pray that the monsoon was late, but they could do something about the lack of oxygen. When they returned in 1922, with the team by General Charles Bruce, as he now was, they brought oxygen cylinders with them, much to the chagrin of Younghusband, who thought they should have more faith in the human spirit. These early systems were heavy and unreliable, but they proved their worth.

But the 1922 attempt was ended by tragedy. Mallory and the climb team accidentally caused an avalanche that carried away seven Sherpas following up below. At this time the Europeans didn't appreciate that Sherpas were the key to Everest, instead using them as little more than high altitude pack animals. The compensation the families of the dead received was £13 a Sherpa, which seems insignificant, but is actually, when you allow for inflation, more is paid today. The reaction to this amongst the team was interesting: "Why was it not one of us?" said Mallory. This was the guilt of a survivor of the Great War.

The party returned home, defeated, and it would be two years before they could return. Mallory was now in his late thirties, and negotiations with China for access to Everest were getting difficult. All concerned knew this would be the last chance to reach the top of the world. So, on the morning of 8 June Mallory and Irvine set off for the summit from Camp VI, clinging to the mountain just below it's Northeast Ridge. Did they make it to the top?

At first glance it’s quite implausible. Compared to modern expeditions, Mallory and Irvine camped further down the mountain and started their final ascent after dawn, rather than in the night. Expedition barometer readings taken at Base Camp, when analysed with modern technology, suggest they were also attempting the summit in low pressure, which reduces the oxygen in the air and effectively makes the mountain a few hundred metres higher. They were also  hit by a snow storm for good measure, which in those conditions is often fatal even for climbers in modern clothing. They were going where no man had gone before and were having to invent their own route as they went. The odds were very much against them.

There are clues as to what happened. Noel Odell, who was one camp below them that morning and following them up the mountain, believes he saw two figures climbing the Northeast Ridge just before 1PM, when the swirling mists parted for a moment. A subsequent failed British attempt to climb the mountain found Irvine's ice axe just below the First Step on the ridge, then in 1999 a search party found one of their oxygen cylinders, and then, below the First Step, the body of Mallory himself, seemingly killed in a fall. They also found a mitten and a sock, all below the First Step. The body contained some clues. As well as confirmation of the number of oxygen cylinders they were carrying, Malloy was not wearing his goggles, which suggested he fell in the dark, and the picture of his wife he was to leave on the summit was not in his pocket. 

The physical evidence though doesn't put Mallory and Irvine any higher than that First Step on the ridge, still a thousand feet below the summit. The only hint that they went beyond this is Odell’s eye witness account, which is problematic. Odell was a one-man support expedition, and was nearly a mile away when he claims he saw two figures climbing one of the steps. He appears to have given in to pressure to say this was the First Step, but he seems to have always thought himself it was the Second, or maybe the Third. His diary entry of 8 June is unfortunately brief and ambiguous. 

The trouble is, almost nobody else thinks Mallory did climb the Second Step, as it's a technically very challenging section, and in the opinion of many climbers beyond his abilities. Even if he did climb it, he didn’t do it in the five minutes Odell says it took. Then there is the implausibility of the hundred-to-one chance that the clouds would part just at the moment Mallory was cresting the most challenging part of the climb.

The Second Step is the major technical challenge Mallory and Irvine faced on their route. Three days before their colleagues Teddy Norton and Howard Somervell had tried to get up a lower route, the Great Couloir, that bypassed the Second Step. This may have been Mallory’s intended route. If it wasn’t, it’s likely it became the intended route after Mallory saw it from the ridge. The Second Step looks intimidating at the best of times, and in 1924 pictures show there was a significant snow cornice. Mallory may have felt up to the challenge, but Irvine was a much less experienced climber. If Odell didn’t see Mallory and Irvine at the Second Step, then maybe it was the Third Step, almost at the base of the final pyramid. That puts them nearly at the top, but also means they would have made record progress from their camp to be there by 1PM.

This is where it all starts to get confusing. Odell went to his grave convinced the two had made it to the summit, but died there. Odell was almost the only one of his contemporaries who believed this, but in time it came to be the majority opinion amongst researchers. 

By modern standards Mallory and Irvine were woefully under-equipped, even for a walk in the Lake District. However, with over sixty years of Alpine experience to draw on, their gear was actually surprisingly practical. Their boots were thinner than those of today’s climbers, making them better for more technical ascents, and by not wearing bulky clothing they could see their feet, which makes a huge difference. They also carried far less gear than modern climbers. All told they were well equipped for a quick dash to the summit, but not for an extended stay on the mountain. That they’d climbed up, but not down again, was believable.

The discovery of Mallory’s body below the First Step changed all this though. Now the people who put him on the summit, also had to get him back down again, to within a few hundred yards of his camp. To climb for ten or so hours to the summit would have been an incredible achievement. To climb ten hours back down again, without oxygen and mostly in the dark, would be something else again. It just doesn’t seem possible but, how else do we fit where he was found with what Odell saw?

There are theories. One has Mallory leaving a possibly injured Irvine and returning alone along the lower Great Couloir route. But it seems unlikely that Mallory would return a different way to how he’d come up, in the dark, with Irvine above him. Another has Mallory and Irvine both ascending and descending via the couloir, a route that has rarely been used since, which would explain why so few traces of them have been found. But in that case, why is Irvine’s ice axe up on the ridge? And so on. Each new theory brings more problems. Until some hard evidence places either Mallory or Irvine beyond the First Step the balance of the evidence is that they did not reach the summit. They turned round at some point either on the Northeast Ridge, or in the Couloir, and then fell on the way back to their camp. Maybe 

But to the question of is it possible that Mallory, with or without Irvine, reached the summit of Everest 29 years before Tensing and Hillary the answer is, yes, it is possible. The vertical distance they had to cover was not much more than 650m, half the height of Ben Nevis, over terrain that Mallory would have tackled in the dark if it had been in the Lake District, travelling light and with the knowledge that if they stopped, they were dead. 

Mallory, it was said, was the most formidable enemy a mountain ever had. When Everest was tackled again in 1933 three climbers, on two successive days, retraced Norton and Somervell's route, and turned back at the same point. Also with the party was Odell, twenty years older than the other climbers, but still able to outpace them on the mountain. Odell, when ten years younger, had not been able to compete with Mallory, so there is no doubt the 1924 party was more capable than the 1933 one.

This would take nothing away from the 1953 achievement of Hillary and Tenzing. Mallory’s may be the better story, but Hillary and Tenzing’s was the greater achievement. That said, a Mallory who summits Everest and then dies only 300 yards from his camp is not the reckless fool who got up the mountain, but couldn’t get down again, as was believed until 1999. If proved to be true, this would be one of the most incredible adventures ever. Imagining them both on the top of the world, knowing that they only had themselves to rely on and that no help was ever going to come, is awe inspiring.

But the crucial question on this centenary day is does Everest have more secrets to give up? And the really huge question after that is ‘what do the Chinese know’? Chinese climbers have said, off the record, that they found evidence of Mallory and Irvine. Some of those accounts appear to refer to Mallory, but others describe a different 'English dead', in a different location and face up, rather than face down as Mallory was found. The location described has now been thoroughly searched, both on foot and by drone, and there is nothing there. Either the accounts were wrong, or the body has been moved. And if the body has gone, have other clues gone too?

Certainly there are rumours, Mark Synnott has described the search in his book The Third Pole, and has found out more since. There appears to be a private climbing museum in China, secretly recorded on a mobile phone, containing pre-war artifacts. There are even rumours that Irvine's camera was recovered, although attempts to develop the film failed. 

Why is China so paranoid and secretive about this? Chinese team climbed Everest from the Tibet side in 1960. This is a big deal in the country. It is their 'Moon landing'. The Communist Party would not want anyone to even suspect someone else had done this before them. They certainly wouldn't want proof that anyone ever had. So, is China just being careful, or do they actually know the answer to this puzzle and it's not the answer they want?

Fatherland UK

If the Nazis won the war it seems to be assumed that the Holocaust would be covered up, a guilty secret that must be kept. Fatherland by Robert Harris is the best known example of this trope.

The reality though would probably be different. Two hundred years later, with democracy restored, the Holocaust would in fact be a subject of study at school. There would be be academic books and TV programs on the subject, and a Holocaust museum which bored school children would be taken to visit.

Some people would no doubt be pointing out that antisemitism was still rife in society, that Jewish people were still subject to racist abuse from more ignorant members of the public, were more likelly to be stopped by the police or sent to prison, and that the government was still 'accidentally' deporting British Jews back to Palestine. However these few lone voices would usually be shouted down as 'unpatriotic snowflakes' or 'social justice warriors' who 'hate Britain'.

More enlightened commentators would give a 'more balanced' view of the Third Reich. They would point to the suppression of communism, the national parks, the motorways and the campaign against smoking. They would acknowledge that the Holocaust happened, of course, but point out the ruinous folly of embarking on another world war to stop it. Meanwhile, the number of prominent Jews in society would be evidence of how much progress had been made. Why, even in New Berlin these days these you can buy menorahs in the gift shops.

However some problems would continue. One thorny issue might be the statue of John Amery, the leader of the British Free Corps, standing proudly near his home in Chelsea. It wouldn't just be his statue either. There would be the issue of Amery College, Oxford, the Amery Hospital and the other benevolent institutions he founded. The 'social justice warriors' would be campaigning to get rid of the lot.

Statue of Edward Colston in Bristol

But if Amery's statue was to go, others would argue, what about the one of Churchill in Parliament Square? Was he not also a right wing conservative, a big fan of the British Empire, and at least partly responsible for a million deaths in the Bengal Famine? True, if Churchill had had his way he would have had Amery shot for treason, but why should such intolerance be respected?

The British Free Corps is part of our history, most people would say, we should be proud of it and the part it played in making Britain great again. We should be free to fly the swastika with pride and celebrate 'our boys' who died bravely fighting in Russia.

 Most people though would be just fed up of the whole business.

(This blog is influenced by - meaning blatantly plagiarised from - Fatherlands by Jack Graham, which can be found here)

The Toys I Never Owned

It's nearly Christmas and it's time to start thinking about presents for the kids. These days it's all electronic, and some they don't even unwrap, they just download.

How different it was when I was a lad in the seventies. This was the era when cheap plastic made toys and games affordable for the first time in quantities that could fill an average domestic house in just a few birthdays.

How we looked at toys was also different. First we'd go to an actual toy shops, where we'd get some catalogues to take home. For a generation that's grown up with the internet it's hard to explain the mystical nature of the catalogue. Here were all the toys you'd dreamt of, usually displayed in wonderful dioramas, being played with by children who were deliriously happy because they were playing with best toy that had ever been made.

I think I probably spent more time reading catalogues, either at home, in school, than I ever did playing with my own toys. Probably because of this when I think back to my wonderful, care-free, self-indulgent seventies childhood it's the toys I didn't own that I remember most. They were the toys that always did what they said on the tin, that never broke and never got boring.

These offering from the gods will now only ever exist in my imagination. Sure, I could buy the lot on ebay. But I'm not eight any more, I just wouldn't enjoy them in the same way.

Hornby Operating Breakdown Crane



I must admit I never got train sets. My dad was a bit of a train buff, and he built me a model railway, but I wasn't really impressed. The train went one way, then it went the other, and that was that. There was no skill involved and you couldn't race them. Boring. Making the scenery was fun, but best of all once you'd finished you had a battlefield where my little toy soldiers could fight. But the trains didn't really impress me. They just didn't do anything.

However that didn't stop me reading the catalogue and wanting one of these, the Hornby Operating Breakdown Train. The really neat thing about it is that it did actually do something. The crane went up and down. That was pretty neat in the seventies.

Of course, the reality was somewhat different.This was, by modern standards, a pretty cheap piece of kit. The wheels were plastic, and so would barely go round, the crane's mechanism was plastic too, so operation was hardly smooth, and the whole thing was so light that if it did try to pick up an actual locomotive the whole thing would just fall over, even if you had managed to get the plastic legs in place, which was not guaranteed.

If you were really, really clever you could fit little electric motors into the thing and actually make it work. Now that really would be cool. Anyone who doubts how cool should look at this video of a couple of the things in action. Is that not amazing?

Well, in my head the one I never owned was just as amazing. And it will now stay that way forever.

Lego Space Galaxy Explorer




I grew up with Lego. I played with it at home, I played with it at school. I even took it with me when I went camping.

However for anyone who is only familiar with all the fancy themed stuff that Lego produces today, it must be difficult to imagine that when I was little it pretty much was just little square bricks of different sizes. Even the Lego people didn't have real arms and legs when I was born.

Then in 1978 came Lego Space.

This was the year after Star Wars. Space was big, and now here was Lego ... in space. Suddenly we had yellow see-through bricks, rocket engines, space suits - without visors unfortunately - and massively over-sized radios. It was Lego, but not as we know it.



I had a number of the smaller sets: a Space Scooter, a Mobile Rocket Launcher, a Mobile Control
Centre - which was amazing because one of the bricks had a control panel on it - and a One-Man Space Ship. Like all my Lego kits I took them home, made them once following the instructions, then took them apart and mixed the bits in with everything else. That was how normal people played with Lego. For most of my collection the next time the pieces were all back together again was when I sold them in the eighties.

However the real prize, that I never had, was the USS Enterprise of Lego kits - the Galaxy Explorer. This could clearly boldly go to galaxies far, far away. This model would never be dismantled, it's parts never cannibalised for anything else. But I never owned one, nor did any of my friends, not anyone else I knew.

Nor have I ever seen one since. A Lego Space guy made a cameo in the Lego movie, but apart from that Lego Space has gone. The Danes have instead sold their soul to any franchise that will have them. Great adventures are had by small people playing with all of those things, I'm sure, but not as great as the ones I'd have had with my Lego Galaxy Explorer. If only.

Thomas Salter Adventure Kit



Please don't think that I spent my entire childhood indoors playing with my Lego. My parents were teachers, which mean they had long holidays, and were friends with a farmer who would let them park their caravan on his farm for free. So, for several weeks each year, I was free range on a 500 acre farm in north Norfolk. That meant adventures.

For an adventure you don't really need anything except an imagination. However, capitalism being what it is, there were plenty of people willing to sell you stuff which they claimed would make your adventure so much better. The people I believed at the time were Thomas Salter.

They made a number of different kits. The one most people wanted was the spy kit, as it had invisible ink. But I wanted the Adventure Kit. Binoculars, a camera, a water bottle, a compass, a whistle: well, yes, nothing too exciting there for sure. However, it had the name: Adventure Kit. A kit for making

adventures. Wow!

Being an enterprising sort of lad, I made one myself. What's more, the one I made was probably better as the stuff in it actually worked and wasn't made of cheap plastic. But it wasn't the same.

Thomas Salter went out of business years ago, but other companies of moved into the 'adventure kit' market. Look at this one for example: camo cream, para cord, a tarp. I could have done with this during my road protesting days.

However, this now and that was then. I still have adventures, really good ones, but not as good as the ones little me would have had in Norfolk, if only I'd had an Adventure Kit.

Airfix Fort Sahara



When I was born the Second World War was still being fought. Nazi Germany may have surrendered a quarter of a century earlier, but all across the country little boys were still fighting using little Airfix soldiers. We all had hundreds of these things.

However constantly fighting the Germans, and occasionally the Japanese, was all very well, but World War Two just wasn't as exciting as the colonial conflicts of the century before. On TV I could watch Zulu, or Khartoum, or Northwest Frontier or Carry On Up The Khyber (possibly the most realistic of the four) and this is where my imagination went. Why would anyone want to be freezing to death on the Eastern Front, or slogging through the mud of France or Holland, when you could be on the veldt of South Africa or the sands of the Sudan or in the foothills of the Himalayas?

The problem was the figures. There weren't any. Like many Victorian schoolboys, HG Wells had
played with 2 inch high Boer War figures when he was young. However by the seventies Britain was no longer so proud of her Imperial past. It wasn't until I was in Secondary School that an Italian company brought out some 1/72 scale plastic figures for the Zulu War and I could fight the battles I had been watching on TV since I was little.



Airfix made Arabs and Foreign Legion - foreign wars being less controversial - but they were rubbish. Most of the Arabs wouldn't even stand up. What's more there were no decent films in colour about the Foreign Legion. Beau Geste and Morocco were black and white, and no kid wanted to watch a black and white film in the seventies.

However what they did have was a fort. The WWII people had some stuff you could buy as well: a derelict house that was a command post, a bailey bridge and some Atlantic Wall style fortification, but whilst they were practical they were hardly romantic. Fort Sahara though was something else, and with a bit of modelling skills you can make it into something fantastic.

Yes, fantastic is the word. You can get really good 1/72 Foreign Legion and Arab figures now by other companies too. So please Airfix, please re-issue this model. Please. Pretty please.


Action Man Secret Mission to Dragon Island




Airfix were great, but of all the toys I has as a child the one I was closest too was my Action Man. Indeed, many people tell me that I seem to have got my dress sense from Action Man.

My Action Men were hardly badly equipped. They had guns, a small tank and more uniforms than they could wear, many knitted by my grandmother (I wasn't the only one in the family who'd get a Christmas jumper). However there was one set I never had, one that always intrigued me: The Secret Mission to Dragon Island.

The set itself was the usual Action Man mish-mash of historical items. There was a modern British sub machine gun, a World War Two American helmet and some dynamite apparently from the Wild West.



The mission itself seems to be set in the contemporary Cold War, with Action Man signed up for "a highly dangerous mission. To find and destroy the hidden rocket site on enemy held Dragon Island. It is a solo mission. Action Man can expect no help." The enemy were apparently Chinese, and I presume it was due to the cuts the characterised the seventies that the poor chap had to go on his own.

I have, I must confess, always been so intrigued by this set I never had that I have sought one out to find out what it was actually all about. And you know what? It doesn't tell you! There's a map with some generic names ("Orient Sea", "Eagle Mountains", "Lion Forest", "Lava Bay") and some vague orders, but that's it. It turns out the great secret mission only ever existed in my head.

Action Man is alas no more. Action Figures continue, and for serious money you can buy seriously detailed historical figures from Dragon, or for a slightly more reasonable cost there is the HM Forces range. However these are not Action Men. These are serious soldiers, who probably always obey orders and turn out for parade on time. Boring toys for boring adventures. Action Man, by contrast, was clearly a bit of a rebel. He did his own thing.

So what did he really get up to on Dragon Island? Well, the only way to find out would be to go back there. And, guess what, somebody has!



To find out more, click here.

So Where Did It All Go Wrong?

This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

Douglas Adams’ The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Pan Books, London, 1979

So where did it all start to go wrong?

With the exception of the most wildly optimistic Bright Green, most environmentalists believe what passes for Western Civilisation made a disastrous wrong turn some time in the past. This has resulted in us facing, at the very least, a Sixth Great Extinction, and at the very worst our own extinction.

But when did we go wrong? Perhaps not as far back as Douglas Adams, writing at the end of the 'Decade of the Environment' suggests, but perhaps not.

So when exactly did we go wrong? When did we have alternatives?

The combination of Trump and Brexit looks set to see a bonfire of environmental legislation, but we were hardly heading for paradise in 2015. The War on Terror has provided a huge distraction from more pressing issues, whilst Dubya's decision to ditch the Kyoto Treaty set progress on climate change back by fifteen years. However for my first junction I will choose:

1989 The Fall of the Berlin Wall

The end of communism in Eastern Europe was a moment of optimism. A system that had promised paradise on earth, but which had delivered only poverty and oppression, had fallen. Democracy had triumphed, and with it capitalism, although rather fewer celebrated that.

The subsequent closure of polluting communist factories led to the only significant drop in European carbon dioxide emissions since industrialisation has begun. Things looked good, but it wasn't to be all good news.

Capitalism in the third quarter of the twentieth century had been different to the rest of its history. Now it wasn't enough to just make the rich richer, the poor had to also be kept happy enough not to want to vote in the dreaded communists. In the UK we got a National Health Service and in the US factor workers got complementary health insurance. Trade unions were tolerated, a labour policy tried to keep full employment, and when Rachel Carson and others revealed the extent of the damage to Nature caused by industrial pollution, a raft of government bodies were created to try to deal with the problem.

But with the red threat gone, capitalism had no need to compromise with anyone any more.

When George Bush Senior went to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 he basically said no to any steps to deal with any of the problems discussed.

At the same time intelligence agencies, with time on their hands now, turned their well honed skills on Green campaigners. So effective was this that when the War on Terror gave them a new threat to worry about, plenty of time was still found to deal with the 'terrorists' who targeted fossil fuels.

The men and women who broke the Berlin Wall in November 1989 had not wanted this. They had wanted the best of both worlds, socialism and democracy. However those brave pioneers were naive about what they were letting in. The world on the other side of the wall was not what they were expecting, and it has become increasingly clear that without communism to keep it honest, capitalism itself became the monlithic ideology prepared to do anything to defend itself.

The difference is that the 1%, unlike the geriatric rulers of communist eastern europe, look unlikely to go quietly.

1971 The Rise of Neoliberalism

On 15 August 1971 President Nixon broke the financial system that had run the capitalist world since the end of the Second World War.

France had sent a destroyer to New York to claim its share of the US Federal gold reserve. In response Nixon took the US dollar off the Gold Standard.

Nixon was responding to a growing crisis in the US economy, caused by the state living beyond its means whilst trying to keep the cost of the Vietnam War off the books. However the move was the first victory for a group that had been plotting the downfall of the western model of capitalism since 1945.

This group were radicals, but not left wing ones. The Mont Pelerin society, named after Swiss hotel they met in, were followers of the economic theories of Freidrich von Hayek. Hayek told them exactly what he thought of the sort of mixed economy, introduced by Roosevelt to deal with the Great Depression, with the title of his book The Road To Serfdom.

The doctrine he espoused was neoliberalism. At its simplest it said that the only transactions that matter are those involving money. Industry was not important, unless it was a way to make money. Family, society and the environment certainly didn't matter. The only role for the state was to maintain law and order, meaning to maintain the laws that allowed corporations to do what they want, and the order where the rich were protected from anyone who might object.
When the US launched a military coup in Chile to remove a democratically elected communist, it gave neoliberalism exactly the conditions it needed to thrive - total chaos. Whilst the army rounded up the leftists to be tortured or killed, the military regime imported Chicago school economists to rewrite the rules.

The election of Thatcher in the UK in 1979 and Reagan in the US the next year saw neoliberalsim rolled out across the western world. Trade unions were crushed, taxes were cut, and environmental laws slashed. The result was that when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the USSR fell apart in 1991, the chaos that followed was ruthlessly exploited by the neoliberals.

Flooding in New Orleans, the invasion of Iraq, the Credit Crunch. All these provided opportunities for the neoliberals to extend their grip. Green capitalists belive that government regulation, smart taxation and a controlled market can make us sustainable. Neoliberals believe regulations, taxes and controllign the market are all morally wrong.

We cannot save the world whilst the neoliberals run it.

1945 The Triumph of Consumerism

Having lived my entire adult life in the chaos of the post-Cold War neoliberal world, it's easy to be nostalgic about the world my parents inherited after the Second World War ended.

Unlike the other eras in this blog, this one was carefully planned in advance. In 1945, with the world in ruins, the memory of the Great Depression still fresh, and Stalin's tanks in Berlin, Prague and Budapest, the free world met at Mount Washington Hotel in Breton Woods, New Hampshire, to work out how the capitalist world's economy should work. The genius behind it all was Britain's Maynard Keynes, although he wouldn't get things entirely his own way.

Compared to wht followed, the Bretton Woods was very sensible, It provided the engine for social democracy which made the West somewhere that most people were actually happy to live.

But something had to power the machine, and that thing was consumerism. This was not a new idea, but one that accelerated after 1945. Things were no longer manufactured to meet needs, but desires. Unlike need desire, if the ad men did their job properly, was unlimited. From cars to washing machines industry produced a house full of new gadgets for people to want, and new forms of credit allowed them to buy it. 

The result is that we entered the exponential age, when everything, except the earth's capacity to sustain us, increased by a little more each year.

Since 1945 we have been always buying, but never happy, whilst the planet has been always dying, but we never noticed.

1771 The Industrial Revolution

In 1771 the modern world was created in Cromford, Derbyshire.

Visiting Arkwright's first mill now it's easy to be beguiled it. Resting in a picturesque valley, and powered only by the water, it seems a far cry from the Dark Satanic Mills of Blake. But that is to miss what the Industrial Revolution was. Later there would be a coal revolution, and a financial revolution, but the first revolution was a social one.

Previously human life had revolved around the family and the village. It had been human scale. Work had ended with the setting of the sun and followed the rhythms of the seasons. Life could be nasty, brutish and short, and the main source of wealth - land - was not evenly shared. But the system was sustainable, both in balance with the earth and relatively unchanging over time.

Cromford Mill changed all that. Women and children were dragooned into the factories. The worked, not at a pace set by themselves, but by a brutal overseer. The speed of the machines was set by the power they drew from the water. The people kept up, or perished.

Welcome to the modern world.

1620 The Scientific Revolution

In 1620 Sir Francis Bacon published his great work Novum Organum, which aimed tofinally move western science on from where Aristotle had left it two thousand years earlier.

To many Bacon was the man who demystified nature, who removed the wonder from the natural world and severed the sacred bond with the organic world that was carried over from pagan times.

This is going too far. Science has given us ecology as well as ecocide, the Gaia Hypothesis as well as the China Syndrome. It is a tool to be used wisely, and it is not the fault of Bacon that we have chosen to use this tool otherwise.

But the fact remains that if, like China in Bacon's time, we had chosen stability over enquiry, we would not be where we are now. The rulers of the world in the seventeenth century had the power to make human life hell on earth, but without the revolution Bacon started the earth itself would have been safe.

c. 10,000 BC The First Agricultural Revolution

But if Bacon started the process that would eventually lead us to be able to win a war on Nature, he was not the one who started the fight. Anyone who puts a plough into the earth knows that they are starting a battle. As soon as you clear and till an area of land you are in conflict with weeds, pests and
disease. You don't have to resort to chemical warfare, but fight you must.

But it wasn't always this way.

12,000 years ago we were all hunter-gatherers. This may not be
everyone's cup of tea, but the evidence is that the agricultural revolution actually made things worse. Early agriculturalists worker harder, died younger and lived in more socially fragmented societies.

What's more, it is probably only in the last century or so that average human health improved over what it was farming, and we still work harder than our 'caveman' ancestors.

What farming did though was allow a small elite of kings, priests, warriors and so on to be supported by everyone else. You can see what was in it for them, by why did the rest of us go along with it? They probably didn't, voluntarily.

Agriculture also allowed more people to live on the land, and in a fight 100 half starved farmers will usually beat a dozen well fed hunter-gatherers. The agricultural revolution did eventually allow what we call civilisation. Everything from art to science, dentistry to Doctor Who followed on eventually to make our lives more pleasant followed on.

But twelve millennia on not still everyone enjoys these things, whilst the earth has less than a hundred harvest left in her. Was it really worth it?

Conclusion

We can't turn back the clock even if we want to. We can no more rewrite Breton Woods than we can unthink the scientific revolution. We wouldn't want to rebuild the Berlin Wall even if we could, and we couldn't return to being hunter-gatherers even if we wanted to.

We must continue the fight from where we are, not where we'd like to be. However by looking back at our history, and seeing how how many times what looked right at the time has turned out wrong, should at least make us more modest about our achievements as a species.

As Douglas Adams also wrote:

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

Eight Decades of the Soviet Union

Twenty five years ago today the world lost a superpower. That sort of thing doesn't happen very often.

To those of us on this side of the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union was usually presented as this grey monolith that never changed. Over here the Roaring Twenties became the Great Depression, the Atomic Age became the Space Age, but over there it was always the age of grey cabbage.

Not so.

The reality was that the Soviet Union never stood still. Instead it lurched from crisis to disaster, from oppression to invasion, and back again. When people looked back nostalgically from the grim years of Disaster Capitalism that followed, they remembered only a short, brief interlude in the seventies when things were dull, but stable; when life was grim, but tolerable.

1920s Civil War

The Russian Revolution was bloodless. More people were killed in the reenactment of the Storming of the Winter Palace for Evreniov's film than died in the real event. The civil war that followed though was anything but, as Red fought White, with almost every Imperialist nation lending a hand.

The Red Army, under the leadership of Leon Trotsky, was able to defeat the disparate and divided White forces, but in truth the Revolution was itself a very diverse affair. The urban proletariat of the Russian Empire had been tiny, and the use of a brutal War Communism had hardly made the Bolsheviks popular. So when the sailors on the island base of Kronstadt rebelled, it looked like it was all over. Had the Russian people been given a vote at this point, Lenin would have lost. Instead the Red Army, under the leadership one Leon Trotsky, was sent in to crush the revolt.

The next few years though were one of hope and a fair amount of freedom. Music and literature, Russia's great contribution to European culture, thrived. The country was ruined by war, but best economic minds were drafted in to devise the Five Year Plan. A planned economy would rise from the ruins of war.

In 1924, the man who had led this daring experiment, Vladamir Ilyrich Lenin, died. He was a difficult man to judge. Whilst genuinely committed to progressive ends, no means were too brutal to achieve them. A man who believed that history was inevitable, he'd done more than any person in the twentieth century to change it..

His death led to the rise of Joseph Stalin. An utterly charismatic man, he rose to power through the secret committees of the Communist Party, underestimated by everyone until it was too late. Trotsky was expelled from the party in 1927, and exiled from the Soviet Union two years later. Thousands of other party members followed him.

Then in 1928 their was a shortfall in grain production. Stalin threw the Five Year Plan out of the window and embarked on a massive program of collectivisation.

1930s Repression

Collectivisation failed.

Stalin blamed hoarding by kulaks - wealthy farmers - and so the process was speeded up. This turned failure into disaster, with up to 10 million people starving to death.

However starvation and counter-revolutionary 'kulaks' were not all that the people of the Soviet Union had to fear. In 1934 the popular mayor of Leningrad was assassinated, apparently by a 'fascist plot'. Over the next few years the Soviet people enjoyed the bizarre spectacle of dozens of senior communists, including every Old Bolshevik except Stalin and the exiled Trotsky, being paraded through court and confessing to being part of conspiracy to bring down the very revolution they had fought for.

These people though were just the tip of a very large iceberg of repression. Thousands of intellectuals, and hundreds of thousands of 'kulaks', Poles and others, were arrested by the Secret Police, and executed, tortured or exiled to the gulags in Siberia. In all, maybe a million people died. The final victim was the head of the Secret Police himself, Nikolai Yezhov.

The purge had also removed most of the senior military commander. When the Soviet Union went to war with Finland in 1939 the army suffered disaster after disaster.

If this wasn't enough dramatic change for a decade, in August the people learnt the world's only communist state had just entered into a pact with the world's only Nazi state. Within months the two strange bedfellows were carving up Poland between them.

1940s War

But the Nazi-Soviet pact failed to keep Hitler out. In 1941 he launched Operation Barbarossa. The result was the deadliest conflict in human history, with 30 million deaths. The Soviet Union survived - just - and eventually advanced into Germany and laid waste to Berlin, killing and raping as it went. Six million soldiers had died in battle and over three million had died after being taken prisoner.

The country was ruined by the war, but it also now occupied the whole of eastern Europe and part of Germany. The Iron Curtain came down across Europe and the Cold War began. The allies of the war years were now enemies.

1950s Thaw

Then in 1953 Stalin died. Disabled by a stroke, he was probably finished off by his doctor. By the end he admitted he didn't even trust himself. He was replaced by Nikita Khrushchev.

All the senior Soviet leaders were gangsters, but Khrushchev was a gangster who wanted to be a social scientist. Slowly he introduced reforms and reduced the oppression. Gradually intellectuals began to think again, and some people even began to dream.

It wasn't all peace and love though. In 1956 popular protests toppled the communist government of Hungary. Fears the country would leave the Warsaw Pact, and open a way for NATO to attack Russia, led Khrushchev to order in Soviet tanks to restore order. 200,000 Hungarians became refugees and 2500 died, as did 700 Soviet soldiers, many shot by their own officers for refusing to obey orders.

Russia had developed its own atomic bombs under Stalin, now under Khrushchev they built missiles to carry them. Along the way they also managed to launch the first artificial satellite into orbit. Sputnik One took off on 4 October 1957. It's signal could be picked up on an ordinary radio set, the beeping signal a dramatic statement of the potential of the Soviet Union.

Then in 1959 Khrushchev visited the United States of America. He was charming, he cracked jokes and he loved America. From it's hot dogs to its mass produced cars, this was a world he thought he could remake in the USSR. Stalin had been an aberration, the world of plenty promised by the communist revolution was still possible.

1960s Hope

Khrushchev's foreign policy missteps almost led to nuclear war with the USA over Cuba in 1962.
Disaster was averted, but things weren't much better on the home front.

Armed with the second best computers available (the best were working a missile defence system around Moscow) the Soviet planners were trying to finally make the planned economy work. A new system of prices was introduced, with the rates set by a complex algorithm. Logic would replace the market and the planned economy would deliver the workers paradise that had been promised for forty years.

The first result was that the cost of meat and butter shot up 25%. On top of other problems, this led to a minor revolt in Southern Russia. Twenty two people were killed, seven executed, and the authorities panicked. There were to be no more economic reforms.

Khrushchev had also tried, and failed, to improve agricultural production. Worse, he had started to take away the privileges of senior party members and talked about running multi-candidate elections. The party decided he had to go. In 1964 he was removed from power and exiled to his dacha. There he regaled passers by with his opinions of what had gone wrong, and wondered what sort of paradise this was that had to keep its people in chains.

He was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, who brought back repression. In 1968 Czechoslovakia decided it wanted 'communism with a human face', but instead it received Soviet tanks.  Back at home the arts and the sciences had to follow the party line.

The economy, already stuttering, went into terminal decline. Instead of taking raw materials and turning them into useful things - adding value - the Soviet economy did exactly the opposite. It dug valuable natural resources out of the ground, and turned them into things nobody wanted.

The only reason the whole thing limped on into the seventies was that in 1961 they had struck oil in Siberia. The USSR used the money to buy computers from IBM = killing off their own research program - and an entire car factory from Italy. There they made their own version of an old Fiat design, the crude but tough car that they would export to the world as the Lada.

1970s Stagnation

Kept afloat on oil money the Soviet Union crawled through the one and only decade in its history in which nothing of any significance happened.

To western visitors there were attractions to the country. Moscow and Leningrad were beautiful cities, with streets free of traffic jams, advertising billboards and beggars. The opera and the ballet were cheap and first class.

However by 1979 there were problems on the eastern frontiers. Afghanistan was a friendly communist country. However the repressive regime was not popular and soon large parts of the country were in open rebellion, with the rebels receiving support from the CIA. A palace coup removed the Soviet Union's man and so Soviet paratroopers moved in to remove his replacement.

Initially all went well, and it seemed a re-run of Budapest in 1956 or Prague in '68. But this was deceptive. Afghanistan was to be very different.

1980s Chaos

The 1980s started with the flamboyance of the Moscow Olympic games. Brezhnev died in 1982 and his next two successors were both old, ill and dead within two years of taking office. The communist party leadership realised that a change was needed. The new leader was Mikael Gorbachev, the youngest member of the Politburo and the first Soviet leader to have been born after the revolution.

By this time the war in Afghanistan was going badly. Gorbachev wanted to pull the troops out, but rightly feared the forces that would be unleashed if he did so. Desperately he tried to negotiate with President Reagan to end the cold War, but instead the USA launched a new arms race, and supplied the Afghan insurgents with more and more advanced weaponry, some of which would later be turned on their own troops.

At home Gorbachev introduced restructuring - perestroika - and freedom - glasnost. To the West he was a hero, but to those who had to live through his reforms he was more like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, someone who could not control the forces he had unleashed. His aim of a more democratic communism, combined with a planned economy, was similar to Khrushchev's, and the outcome was similar too: economic chaos and food shortages. However whilst a high oil price had bailed the country out before, now a low one doomed it.

In eastern Europe the Brezhnev Doctrine, of military intervention in any communist country that turned capitalist, was replaced by the 'Sinatra Doctrine', meaning everyone was free to chose My Way. By 1989 the old, out-of-touch leadership of the Soviet satellite nations were facing open revolt on the streets. When Gorbachev made it clear Soviet tanks were not coming to help this time, the Berlin Wall came down, followed by the rest of the Iron Curtain.

1990s Collapse

Eastern Europe had now gone, but Gorbachev's problems hadn't.

The Soviet Union was actually a federation of 15 Republics, although a very centralised one. Many of these states were formed in territories added to the Czarist Empire only in the late nineteenth century. Most were artificial constructions based around the predominant ethnicity. With the economy in crisis, there were fears that many would try to ceded.

In the end it was actually Russia that started to break away first, passing a declaration of semi-independence from the Soviet Union. Hard liners saw the writing on the wall and launched a coup. Soviet coups had been in terminal decline for a while. Budapest and Prague had gone all write, but in Afghanistan it had taken four gos before they managed to bump of President Amin. This one was even worse, lasting barely two days.

After that the Soviet Republics didn't plan on hanging around to see if the hardliners would try again, and one by one they declared independence. Gorbachev was faced with a choice, send in the tanks or let them go. Once again he chose peace, and so on 21 December 1991 the Soviet Union was replaced by the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The world's first Soviet socialist republic had come to an end. There had been moments of hope, but most;y it had been a story of repression rather than freedom, of scarcity rather than plenty. The revolution had failed, and in the end the leadership accepted it had failed and let the Soviet Union die peacefully in its bed. To paraphrase Shakespeare, nothing it did in its life so became it as the leaving it.

It seems unlikely that the kleptocratic leaders of the fascistic gangster states that replaced the Soviet Union will leave power quite so gracefully.

References

I'm extremely grateful for the lectures given to the Glossop Guild by Chris Bins
Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives by Alan Bullock
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

How Capitalism defeated the Left and then itself

Paul Mason and Kondratiev Long Cycles

Marx was wrong.

Not about everything. In fact, all told, not about very much. But he was wrong about something that has been at the very heart of Marxism for a century and a half: the prediction that capitalism will face a crisis which will see it destroyed, and then replaced by something better.

It hasn't happened, despite plenty of people wishing it. Why it hasn't happened is a very important question right now, as capitalism is undoubtedly in a very deep crisis yet is signally failing to die let alone be replaced by something better.

This essay isn't about how to make that happen. Instead it is about why this has not already happened.

Crisis, what crisis?

The first half of Marx's prediction was undoubtedly correct: capitalism always faces a crisis. Or rather crises, because there have been rather a lot of them. This is perhaps Marx's greatest insight, that capitalism is not stable and these problems come round regular as clockwork. What's more, every now and again they are not ordinary run-of-the-mill crises but huge, industrial strength crises that threaten its very existence.

Marx lived through only one of these, so he missed the pattern, but in 1922 the Russian academic Nikolai Dimitrievich Kondratiev spotted it.

Kondratiev was the son of a peasant who had never-the-less managed to get into St Petersberg University. In 1917 he served for a few days in the social democratic administration that followed the fall of the Csar. With the Bolshevik revolution he returned to academia.

What Kondratiev spotted in his numbers was a 50-60 year cycle in interest rates. Marx had shown how overproduction caused regular recessions, but those cycles were over a much shorter time scale than these cycles. This was something much bigger and more fundamental. When he looked at other economic indicators the cycle appeared to be repeated. He traced two of these since the dawn of industrialisation.

This suggested that Marx's theory was wrong, or at least incomplete. If capitalism had survived two major catastrophe's already, why should the next one prove fatal?

Spotting the existence of the cycle though didn't explain it. Academics who followed Kondratiev thought changes in technology explained the cycles. These theories were plausible, but also contradictory. It's rare to find two that agree.

However of ex-journalist and fellow Lancastrian Paul Mason, looking at the problem anew from the present day, thinks there is more to it than this. Having witnesses recent events in Greece first hand, he knows a thing or two about crises. He also knows a thing or two about Marx, which is rare for a journalist.

This is his view of K Cycles and what they mean.

On your cycle

Capitalism requires growth. This is created by the capitalists using their unequal power over workers

to generate profits from the surplus value of their labour. In order to increase productivity they mechanise the workplace. That is Marx in a nutshell.

However, there are limits to this, and it is these limits that cause the periodic crises in capitalism. There is only so much work you can get out of a human being and, at any given level of technology, there is only so much labour you can save by investing in machines. There are other ways out of the conundrum too, such as new markets, new commodities and even new workers, but these have their limits too. At some point there is nowhere else for capitalism to go and capitalism faces an existential crisis.

According to the economists who explain it all with technology, the new machines then appear like magic to solve the problem. However according to Mason, the reality is a lot more messy.

But before we come to that, let's just sort out the time frames we're actually talking about.

The First Wave: 1780 to 1848

The first Kondratiev cycle started when capitalism started at the end of the eighteenth century. A lot of things happen one after the other, the first factories, the canals, better steam engines, railways, steel and so on. This is capitalism raw and primitive. Men, women and children exploited in Dark Satanic Mills. Labour was is unskilled, hours long and management is scary rather than skilful.

This cycle begins quietly but it's trajectory is evident from British, French and US data - the rest of the world is not yet affected much by capitalism - and that data points to it all coming to crashing end in about 1848, the Year of Revolutions and the year that Marx, along with his drinking buddy Engels, publishes The Communist Party Manifesto.

The Second Wave: 1848 to 1898

The second cycle follows on. This is capitalism as we know it. The bourgeoisie in their top hats and the workers in the flat caps. But this is different to what we had before. Labour is not monolithic. There are skilled and semi-skilled workers, there are trades, there are guilds and there is a financial system keeping the wheels turning. There are also Imperialists, seeking out new markets and new resources for exploitation.

But by the 1890s though the wheels are starting to come off the wagon. Economic crises are more frequent, labour unrest is more common and by Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee there is no part of the earth left which had not been brought into the global market. We are at the second crisis.

The Third Wave: 1898 to 1948

What rescues capitalism is the Second Industrial Revolution. New technologies arrive by the score.

The chemical industry produces artificial fertiliser, artificial dyes and petrol, which in turn powers cars, planes and motorbikes. Electricity lights us up and the telephone wires us up.

But perhaps more profound is the change in the nature of capitalism itself. The main actors are now no longer the rich capitalists, but the big corporations. These entities themselves appeared to fly in the face of everything Marx had written. Huge in scale, they ware protected by tariff barriers and operate state sponsored monopolies. Internally their organisation is based on function rather than competition. Writers as diverse as Rosa Luxembourg and James Burnham would eventually look at these big companies and wonder whether there really is much of a difference between capitalism and communism now.

The start of the downward curve of this wave is very easy to spot: the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which heralded the Great Depression. The final end came with the Second World War, a global crisis which, despite killing tens of million of people, never-the-less ushered in the next wave of global capitalism.

The Fourth Wave: 1948 to ?

The exact year this begins is a bit arbitrary, but 1948 is a good one, as it is the year of the Marshal Plan and the invention of the transistor. New technologies abound once again, but perhaps more significant is the change in the nature of society. This is the era of social democracy and the welfare state. 

No longer are the workers exposed to raw capitalism with no protection, they have health care, trade unions, unemployment benefits and representation in the political process. Over the next twenty five years almost everything the Left has fought for since the time of Marx comes to pass, and in return for these gifts from the capitalists the workers embraced consumerism, which in turn makes the wheels of the economy turn faster than ever before.

And then it all goes wrong.

Twenty five years into the cycle is 1973, and there, sure enough, is a huge crisis - the oil shock of 1973. Actually we could have picked other dates in that decade: the Nixon Shock in 1971 when the USA dropping off the Gold Standard or the second oil shock in 1979. Which ever one we go for though, it is clear that by 1980 the good times are over.

No Fifth Wave

If history had followed the deterministic course it appeared to be set on, the next cycle should have

started in 1998. Looking back to that year you can see some evidence for this. Bill Gates launched the second incarnation of his Windows software, and in the next few years Google, Youtube and all the architecture of the information revolution would be up and running.  At the same time we have the Kyoto Agreement of the previous year, potentially ushering in a new green industrial revolution.

But if this was the start of a brand new cycle, then we should not have had the biggest financial crash since the 1920s just ten years later. Instead of recovery the problems of the 1970s just carry on getting worse. Instead of a 25 year downward curve we have a forty year one, with no end in sight.

So what went wrong?

How Cycles End

To answer this question we need to look back at how each of the previous cycles ended.

But first a recap on what is going on here. After twenty five years of growth fuelled by increasing productivity from mechanisation, the economy starts to stagnate. Capital needs to look elsewhere for profits. With all the known markets all full there is only one source left, more exploitation of the workers.

Winding back to the 1810s, here we first see the staggering growth rates of the early industrial revolution start to falter. Capital has to call in the army to deal with the Luddites in 1812, and again in 1819 when 80,000 people gathered at Peterloo to demand reform. By 1832 though the Establishment is getting rattled, and agreed modest reforms. By the 1840s the Chartists are marching and, although an army of Special Constables is drafted in to meet them (including future Liberal PM Gladstone) the government effectively gives in.

Fast forward fifty years and the workers are marching again. Anarchists, communists, socialists and most of all trade union are fighting back. In organised labour capitalism appears to have finally met its match. Many of the bourgeoisie really think the end is nigh.

So here we have it. The new cycles of capitalism are not created by the fortuitous arrival of new technology, nor by the enlightened insight of the capitalists. Capitalisms natural instinct is more repression, and only when that is stopped by the workers fighting back against does it try a different direction. It was not quite how Marx predicted, but not that far off.

Now let's look at the end of the third cycle in the 1930s. Once again the workers are mobilising, here and around the world. But lets ignore for a moment this country. Here we have austerity, but after the Royal Navy mutinies over pay cuts we dropped off the Gold Standard, listen to Keynes and start on the road to recovery. It is bad, but it could have been worse.

And in Europe it is.

The Death of Labour

When Hitler came to power in 1933 his first target is organised labour. When Dachau opens the first people to be enslaved there are 5000 communists and social democrats. Between 1933 and 1946 3.5 million Germans are interned for political reasons and 77,000 judicially executed.

The Left lost a civil war in Austria in 1934, resulting in the Social Democratic Party being outlawed, whilst between 1936 and 1939 Franco kills 350,000 anarchists, communists and republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and more in the repression that follows.

In Greece the dictator Metaxas bans all political parties (including his own, which was a somewhat unique move), arrests the communists and embarked on a war on Greek culture which sees even Plato put on a list of banned authors.There are other crackdowns in Poland, Hungary and the Baltic states.

In Russia the gulags have even more inmates than the German concentration camps, and a similarly terrifying death rate. For good measure the NKVD sends a team over to Mexico to put an ice axe through Trotsky's head.

What Orwell called "the flower of the European working class" is dying. Had Hitler stuck to exterminating his own people, and not had a go at the Poles as well, it may well have died completely. In the First World War many socialists became conscientious objectors, refusing to fight a war for capitalism. That does not happen in the Second World War. The survival of the Left depends on an allied victory.

Capital Wins

Fortunately the allies do win. Organised labour survives, but it is a close run thing.

For a while it prosperes too, but with the fourth cycle starting on its downward spiral this isn't going to last forever. The USA had thought it had been fighting communists since 1950, but really it was fighting nationalists. In 1973 though they have a real working class enemy in Salvador Allende of Chile.

Allende is deposed in a military coup and commits suicide. 3000 of his followers are killed and 27,000 are locked up, many being raped or tortured. Chile, meanwhile, is subject to a radical experiment to try to save capitalism. Now we call it free market reforms, or neo-liberalism, or austerity, but then it was known as the Chicago School model, as that is where its architects came from.

Taxes are be lowered, the state is shrunk, corporations are be given free reign, money is set free and organised labour is crushed. The capitalists ledgers are back in the black again, with the hit being taken by the working poor or the work-less even poorer. 

It works, sort of. Actually the free markets bits aren't that great a success, and Chile has capital controls in place for longer than Milton Friedman's fans like to admit, but crushing the trade unions proves to be a tremendous success. The model works, now it just needs to be rolled out.

The election of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA allows this to happen. Reagan has striking air traffic controllers led away in chains whilst Maggie crushes the miners. Environmentalism, which for a while in the seventies had seems almost as big a problem as the oil price, is brushed aside, as Reagan tells us that most pollution is caused by trees.

Capitalism is back in business.

By the 1990s it appears that even the Left agrees. Clinton is elected to balance the budget and New Labour sweeps into power boasting that it doesn't mind if people get "stinking rich". The EU, which has been a bastion of social democracy for so long, goes with the flow.  

Then comes the credit crunch.

New exploitation, new technology and new financial products, it turns out, can't keep creating new money out of nowhere forever. The Left has been defeated, but still the problems of capitalism have not gone away.

Marx is suddenly being disinterred.

The Future

Kondratiev himself had paid a high price for his insight. His theory that capitalism wasn't inevitably doomed, but could reinvent itself with enough of a push, did not play well in Stalin's Russia. He was imprisoned in 1932 and then, on a cold September day in 1938, he is led out to the firing squad. He is the age I am now, 46.

 

His theory's status in economics is mixed. The Right had no interest in capitalism having a crisis, whilst the Left had no interest in capitalism surving a crisis. A handful of futurologists read him, but it took a journalist of the credit crunch to bring him into the twentifirst century.

Mason's view of what happens next is clear. We need to start the delayed fifth cycle. We need a new version of capitalism that will be based on information technology and a green industrial revolution. What's more, just like in the previous four cycles, we also need to redefine the nature of work. Mason believes that a new vision of intellectual property will set information free and a universal income will set people free.

He may be wrong on the details, but I do not believe he is wrong on the fundamental problem. The left's defeat was ultimately capitalism's defeat as well. The sooner we all, left and right, see this and move on, the better.  

Paul Mason Postcapitalism: A Guide To Our Future (2015) Allen Lain