A spectre is haunting 2035: the spectre of communism

The British Army has been brainstorming about what the world will be like thirty years into the future. They want to plan for the sort of risks, shocks and challenges the army might be facing in Britain in the year 2035.

According to Rear Admiral Chris Parry of the Ministry of Defense’s Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre, there’ll be inequality, overpopulation in Africa and the Middle East, shanty town-style urbanization, climate change bringing heat and soil erosion to developing countries and a big freeze to Europe, people with computer chips in their brains, and Flash Mobs mobilizing faster than the authorities can respond. Oh, and the return of Marxism.

Yes, even as Vladimir Putin promises a new Cold War, the British Army is foreseeing a 21st century resurgence of communist ideology and preparing to battle, well, not the international proletariat but the middle classes:

“The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx,” says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest”. Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the “sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism”.

I must say I think the British Army is right. We’re all sick of postmodernism, yet we know that there are really only two ways out of it: fundamentalist Islam and communism. I know which side I’m on.

The idea that the British Army is preparing to fight the British middle class does raise the worrying question of who the army is actually for, though. Doesn’t the British middle class basically fund the British Army with their taxes? And isn’t “the world’s middle classes uniting, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest” pretty much a definition of the normal workings of any republic?

But Britain isn’t a republic, of course, and the army is still loyal to the royals. It’s Her Majesty’s Army, loyal, in 2035, to King William, presumably.

A republic is a nation which has had precisely the kind of revolution the army is preparing to quell; a middle class one. America had its middle class revolution in 1776, France in 1789. Britain, then, is scheduled to have its very own in 2035. Guardian readers — middle class proto-Marxists every last one — must be quailing to read that what they thought was their own army may well use “unmanned electromagnetic pulses” against their tactical Flash Mob uprisings, knocking out their communication networks and stymying their attempt to foment the kind of revolution other advanced states achieved in the late 18th century.

A child of the American republic, Jeffrey D. Sachs, sketches out a much more sensible vision of the future in the first of the 2007 Reith Lectures, Bursting at the Seams. Director of The Earth Institute, Professor of Sustainable Development at Columbia and a former advisor to Kofi Annan at the UN, Sachs also sees climate change and overpopulation as the major challenges the world faces. But instead of advocating, like the Rear Admiral, giving more money to the army so they can fight the very people who fund them, Sachs wants to take some of it away.

“One day’s Pentagon spending could cover every sleeping site in Africa for five years with anti-malaria bed nets,” he says.

[tags]politics, sustainable, development, futurism[/tags]

(Via Click opera.)