As we enter the new decade, many all over the globe feel that we live in an era of increasing uncertainty and political instability. Our bourgeois leaders are struggling to maintain a grip on public support from France to Chile, from Iraq to Haiti. New independent powers are emerging. New forces are rivalling old ones. Contradictions are heightening and a re-emergence of the bloody fighting for the redivision of an already divided world is coming back into high focus. So, what is the backdrop of the current situation?

On one hand it is the conditions created by the so-called “long peace” that emerged out of the lack of conflict between western imperialist powers since the Second World War – a peace which was formed in part due to the power of the Soviet Union, a power that greatly, and rightfully, petrified the ruling class into rallying itself behind the United States against its existential threat.

“The rise of the new nationalism of the 2010s in the imperialist nations typified by Trump, the Brexit movement, Le Pen, Bolsonaro etc. are emerging in contradiction with the status quo of entrenched neoliberalism”

But this unity of imperial nations is still being upheld despite the symbolic removal of the red menace. The conditions that were created to contend with the existence of a strong socialist rival are gone and so attempts at holding together this unified hegemony are falling apart again. Cracks in the phoney “bourgeois internationalism” are, and have been for the past 30 years, intensifying.

The bourgeoise is not an ideologically homogenous class. Like the working class, it too has divisions and schisms despite ultimately having the same class interests. And thus, inter-ruling class conflict only deepens as contradictions in society intensify. The rise of the new nationalism of the 2010s in the imperialist nations typified by Trump, the Brexit movement, Le Pen, Bolsonaro etc. are emerging in contradiction with the status quo of entrenched neoliberalism – an ideology which attempts to justify the latest phase of globalisation which started in the 90s. But how long can this be kept up? How long until the contradiction between new nationalism and neoliberalism turns into open antagonism and conflict?