Politics and the fourth great revolution

This was all driven by the new ideas of the Enlightenment, which also promoted individual rights and ideas of democracy. We now take these ideas for granted in the West, but they were utterly radical notions when they first appeared.

The Industrial Revolution, especially as it transformed into the mass-Industrial Revolution after the 1870s, gave us our modern, contemporary forms of politics. The rise of two new social classes, the industrial working class and the (increasingly professional) middle class, generated new tensions as they asserted their right to political power. This ultimately resulted in the division of ‘legitimate’ politics into two basic camps, Conservative/Liberal and Labour. In the US the political distortions caused by the Civil War prevented the Democratic Party from becoming the true working/middle class party, but after the late nineteenth century the Republican Party clearly became the party of big business in that country.

A two party system, the most stable form of multi-party politics, vying for power within recognised parliamentary practises became established throughout the West. Other parties, and thus other political ideas, were largely excluded through the ‘barriers to entry’ created by the two-party system. The two major parties achieved both mass membership and general legitimacy.

The two-party system had other effects. It made it much easier for vested interests, such as the owners of mass media and other powerful corporations, to control governments through funding and positive or negative media exposure. Constant polling and constant media commentary made it very difficult for new issues to get into the political debates.

There is no doubt this consolidation and concentration of politics was a major part in the success of the developed nations of the West in the 20^th century because it maximised stability. It survived two world wars and global depression and maintained overall legitimacy, only really challenged by the revolutionary internationalism of Communism or alternatively for a short while Fascism. It even showed a reasonable level of flexibility with the post-war rise of identity politics (gender, race and sexuality issues) and issues related to environmentalism.

However, by the 1990s there were growing signs that the mass-industrial, mass-political system was under stress. The first sign was a growing loss of faith by populations with voter turnout and participation in party politics markedly declining. In particular, there was a feeling among the young that they were not catered to, a sense exacerbated by the US establishment’s harsh response to Vietnam War protests.

The rise of neo-liberal ideas - which focussed on the individual, markets and minimal government - in the 1980s also impacted negatively on the whole notion of politics as a way of deciding core socio-economic issues.

All this was matched by the rise of an increasingly professional political class that thought they should be left to run things unhindered by popular opinion. Basking in the glow of fifty years of sustained growth and relative peace, they felt like they had it pretty much worked out. They became increasingly insular and arrogant, focussing mostly on internal contests as the corporate sector increasingly ran the actual economy. Working in politics became just another career choice, with self-promotion the main aim and a second more lucrative career on the horizon.

Aside from a continuing disaffection on the part of youth, a few problems arose that presented problems for the two-party political system. The worst existential threat, global nuclear war, had rather fortuitously ended when Russia gave up the race to match the US technologically. But just as this happened, scientists began to warn of another such global threat in the form of carbon pollution. Then in 2007 the global finance sector, the most advanced form of what was by then global capitalism, imploded. Governments were forced back into the drivers’ seats, but generally failed to deal with underlying problems, now discussed in terms of gross disparities in wealth, such as ‘the one percent’.

          The underlying shifts that were eroding the mass political system were due to basic changes in the way the day-to-day operations of the world occurred. Since the 1950s the introduction of digital technologies – computers, telecommunications and then silicon chips in just about everything – changed work, play, social relationships and much else. The new technologies had initially been promoted by, and in turn promoted, the big systems players – notably governments, the military and big corporations. They thought digital systems would increase their control over things generally, and for a while they did. The military developed powerful new weapons (like GPS), while the banks and industrial firms also shifted their operations to the global level, and increasingly into cyberspace.

But by the turn of the century new trends were indicating that some basic changes were afoot. Initially digital technologies enabled big systems to operate more efficiently, but the distribution of capability began to erode the advantages of size. In short, digital networks were becoming more efficient than big hierarchies.

Two effects of this were the rise of new kind of terrorism (most obviously Al Qaeda and then ISIS) and a new form of social dissent known as ‘hacktivism’, such as the hacker network known as Anonymous.