As far as South Korea is concerned, is it impossible for new bourgois states to be created? What is the theoretical objections to states undergoing a bourgois revolution in this day and age? You could argue, I suppose, just like Eastern Europe was ‘socialist’ on the strength of the Russian Revolution, the South Koreans are capitalist on the backs of the Americans, who (I assume) rebuilt their economy following the Korean War, rather like they did in Japan.

Afraid, or maybe fortunate, my maritime visits never got further up the river than the Greenock dockside Jimmy.

“All major factions and figures in the Tory party are neoliberal in that they support privatisation, deregulation, and the shrinking of the public sector and the economic role of the state.” The current ideology of the Tory party is undoubtedly neoliberalism, but there remains a strong Burkean strand beneath the surface that believes the market must ultimately be subservient to the community (by which they mean the “nation” and the establishment).

John Redwood’s advocacy of “neoliberalism in one country” is an example of this tension, as the phrase is clearly a contradiction in terms. As Roger noted, the Tories are nothing if not pragmatic, so Vicar of Bray-like they will happily profess loyalty to neoliberalism while it remains the official ideology, but should the EU break up (or the UK simply exit), then you can expect their tune to change if and when international capital deserts.

@Roger, bourgeois liberalism remains a novelty in historical terms. The “reactionary intermediate institutions” of family and community are more tenacious that you perhaps think. It is an ideological prompt to believe that they have already been disabled. Your pessimism about technology, and its capacity to make us “loathe and despise” each other, is perhaps the recognition of a “morbid symptom”. The evidence remains mixed as to whether the current comms revolution is a boon or a threat to capital.

I think your point about the supra-national nature of the current crisis is spot on. Neo-liberalism has failed to slough off the nation state. This is the fissure that will fracture politics.

http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/comment/67490/the-non-jewish-jews-who-became-scholars-ideological-dreamworld

“Following Trotsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union, many European Jews were attracted to his standard. The study of Marxist theory and the intellectual cut and thrust of debate appealed, but real power and state responsibility was the prerogative of the Kremlin. The purity of theory was seductive, but it also led into an other-worldly existence and quite often to bitter schisms about ideological issues that tended to be incomprehensible to the outsider. There were often uncanny resemblances to a Chasidic court with its “rebbe” living in poverty and devoting his waking hours to the study of Marxist texts.
Despite his recognition of the virulence of antisemitism in the 1930s, his growing understanding of Jewish nationalism and his opposition to assimilation as a solution to the Jewish question, Trotsky, like Stalin understood the Second World War as a fight between rival imperialisms. Even if the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers’ state under Stalin, it had to survive. Indeed why should workers die – as they had done in their millions in the First world War – for the cause of the capitalists?
Shortly before his assassination, Trotsky wrote: “As victors, Britain and France would be no less fearful for the fate of mankind than Hitler and Mussolini. Bourgeois democracy is not to be saved. Lending aid to its own bourgeoisie against the foreign fascism, the workers would hasten the victory of fascism in their own country. The task set by history is not to support one part of the imperialist system against another but to cast the entire system over the precipice.”
Many future leaders of the far Left in Britain followed Trotsky’s line. Tony Cliff, founder and mentor of the Socialist Workers Party, was born into the Zionist aristocracy as Ygael Gluckstein in Zichron Yaakov. His father was in business with Chaim Weizmann’s brother. His uncle was Chaim Kalvarisky who was involved in the purchase of the Jezreel valley and an advocate of Jewish-Arab reconciliation. In the 1930s, Gluckstein moved from a social democratic Zionist position to a Trotskyist one and along with figures such as Avraham Stern (of the “Stern Gang”) was imprisoned by the British on the outbreak of the war.
On his release, he led a small group called Brit Spartakus, which tried to persuade Hebrew University students not to join the British war effort in fighting Nazism. Brit Spartakus argued for “an end to the imperialist war and for a peoples’ peace”. No one heeded this utopian vision. Millions continued to die at the hands of the Nazis. In 1946 when Jews were attempting to enter Palestine, often illegally from the displaced persons’ camps, Gluckstein sailed in the opposite direction to Britain.
Others such as Ted Grant, the mentor of the Militant Tendency of the 1980s, was born Isaac Blank in Johannesburg and was part of a group of Jewish Trotskyists who arrived in Britain in the 1930s.
Like the eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm, Cliff, Grant and others tried to make sense of the dire situation in 1940 and guarantee the survival of the USSR. The revolutionary imperative, however, came before any danger to themselves and their families because of their Jewish origin, no matter how insignificant in their eyes. In the larger picture, Jewish national interests were secondary.“