Making sense of this crazy world

This week I’m going to look at someone who, along with Karl Marx, was perhaps the most important thinker in shaping our world today. He was a pamphleteer, a journalist, a propagandist, a polemicist, and something of a philosopher. His name is Thomas Paine and he’s important because he had a remarkable influence on both the American and French revolutions.

Having looked at the English Revolution, the civil war and its aftermath, this week I’m going to look at the political thinking that came in its aftermath. It shows the depth at which people were thinking about the business of governing in the seventeenth century and, in line with the purpose of this humble podcast, its had a profound impact on our world today. So, it's going to worth our time.

In a nutshell, England had been governed for eleven years, from 1629 to 1640, without a Parliament; for another eleven years, from 1649 to 1660, it would be governed without a monarchy. England, and by default, Britain had sorted out a democratic future for itself slap bang in the middle of the seventeenth century. Only to regret what it had done and bring the monarchy back. But of course, there was more to it than that, and that’s what we’re about to have a look at.

Last week I looked at what led England to civil war. This week I’m going to focus on how things on the Parliamentary side of that civil war really radicalised.

The English Revolution, that took place in England in the seventeenth century, is often overlooked. But it’s important in establishing the principle of parliamentary democracy and so, it’s certainly worth our time taking a look at it. And it was a revolution, even if that’s something we English are not famous for: not only did a king lose his head but the monarchy itself was overthrown and with it the established Church and the House of Lords. And not only was Parliament pitted against absolutism, but some incredibly radical ideas emerged in the wake of this initial shock, radical even in today’s terms, like the levelling of society.

Covering more than a thousand years of history, my focus will be on power and how it set up the conditions that led to the English and French revolutions as well as influencing the American revolution too. I

If we look carefully at it, ancient Rome stands in contrast to Greece because whereas we can say that Greece, for a period of time, was indeed a democracy, Rome wrapped a democratic cloak around itself, but in fact was an oligarchy of the wealthy. And for us today, we need to be aware that it is the Roman republic that has had a greater influence on the democracies of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their constitutions, than Athens had.

George Bernard Shaw said that democracy is the form of government that gives its citizens what they deserve. And that's where I want to turn my attention to: the way in which we are governed in democracies (probably with diversions to alternative ways of governing). Where has democracy come from? What lessons does the past have for us today? What do we mean by democracy? Should we be satisfied with what we’ve got? If democracy is important to us, it seems worth the journey. 

Having taken us from America in the 1920s to America today, last week I looked at the state of the capitalist system and the state of the richest 0.1%, 1%, 10%. Well, today, I’m going to end our look at America by focussing on the 90%, right up to Trump's current administration.

Having made the link between the Great Depression of the early 1930s and the Great Recession of 2009, in other words between the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Financial Crisis or Subprime Crisis of 2008, let’s take a look at how the capitalist system works in America today.