The new 21st century frontiers of the left
Again,
“the times they are a-changing”, as we sang with Bob Dylan in the
l960s. In order to understand how and why, and to grasp how new
opportunities may be caught or opened, we had better a step back and
take a look at ourselves in a historical mirror. Against a brief
background sketch of the legacy of the 20th
century, I would like to indicate three important new developments:
1. The global return of class as a social force, in novel forms and
social configurations. 2. A new ideological dynamic, out of a shift
in relationship between political thought and political/social
practice. 3. The emergence of a new geopolitics of the left, posing
major challenges to the long and strong Eurocentric tradition, from
the Anglo-American and the French Revolutions, via the October
Revolution and Social Democracy to the early phase of the Chinese
Revolution, and to the brief worldwide resurgence of the Socialist
International in the years of Willy Brandt and Olof Palme.
The
Left Legacy of the 20th
Century
While
the century no doubt ended in defeats, disillusions, and
disenchantment, and widespread demoralization and abandonment, it
also left enduring achievements.
Democracy
as a universal political norm, violations of which nowadays require
special circumventing advocacy, is one. Before the end of World War I
most liberals and all conservatives were convinced that electoral
democracy was incompatible with the preservation of private property,
and that therefore the vital aim of the latter required severe
restrictions of the right to vote and/or of the rights of voters’
representatives.
The
defeat of Fascism, the less complete and more protracted defeat of
military dictatorships have, and the final falling, at the end of the
century, of institutionalized US racism and of South African
apartheid have established the validity of global human rights.
The
rights of wage-workers to organize and to bargain collectively were a
major gain of the Depression of the post-WWII conjuncture. In the US
and the UK they have been eroded recently, and are no longer
recognized by conservative forces, but they have spread across the
world, to Korea, Taiwan, and South Africa in particular, and they
remain strong in Latin America as well as in most of Europe.
The
past century can never be understood without a grasp of its great
revolutions, the Russian and the Chinese, with their huge, direct
repercussions in Central Asia, the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, and East
Asia, with their Caribbean offshoot in Cuba, their impact on Africa
on the l970s-80s, and their influence on Western European social
policy as well as on its labour movement. How they should be assessed
remains politically controversial as well as scholarly premature.
Undoubtedly, they involved large amounts of repression and of
arrogant modernist cruelty, e.g., in the Stalinist and Maoist
responses to the famines, unintended but not properly addressed, of
agricultutral collectivization and of the “Great Leap”,
respectively. Equally undoubtedly is their national geopolitical
power achievement, which is not a leftwing criterion of performance,
though. Decaying Russia, severely beaten by the Japanese in l905 and
by the Germans in l917, mutated into the USSR which defeated Hitler
and become the world’ s second superpower, in the mid-l950s era
seemingly seriously challenging US primacy. The Chinese Revolution
put an end to 150 years of dramatic decline and humiliation of the
“Middle Kingdom”, turning China into a world political power,
before its exploits along the capitalist road made it the world’s
second economy. This geographical upgrading was made possible by the
educational, technical, and collective organization achievements of
the revolutions.
The
20th
century revolutions seem to have left the world outside them at
least four important progressive legacies. First, their existence and
their challenge had a crucial impact on postwar capitalist reform,
e.g. ,on the land reforms of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, on the
development of social rights in Western Europe, especially in Western
Germany, and on “Alliance for Progress” reforms in Latin
America, particularly by the pre-Allende government of Eduardo Frei.
Secondly,
the challenge of the Communist alternative undermined Euro-American
racism and colonialism. Without the Soviet Cold War rivalry US
President Eisenhower would not have sent a federal airborne division
of troops of protect school desegration at Little Rock, Arkansas,
Central High School in l957. US Southern racism would probably have
lived on for another generation. Twenty years later, Cuban troops
defeated a racist South African attempt to conquer Angola, and
without the Communist challenge, it is difficult to see how the
isolation/boycott movement of apartheid South Africa could have
worked in the rich capitalist world.
Thirdly,
in spite of the ruthless authoritarianism of its leaders and rulers,
the 20th
century worldwide Communist movement produced an extraordinary number
of self-sacrificing militants, dedicated to egalitarian social change
and to national anti-imperialist dignity. They were wrong in their
adoration of Stalin or Mao, but they were very often not only the
best but also frequently the only friends of the poor and
downtrodden, women and men. At the level of everyday grassroots
commitment, the Communist movement deserves the respect of all
progressive late-born.
Its
current presence and significance are patchy. Communism has a
significant, but deeply divided presence in India: the Maoists are
pursuing a tribal natives based guerilla war, while the attempts at
pragmatic state governing policies of
the pre-destalinization Communist Party of India (Marxist), have
backfired into historical electoral defeats in West Bengal and in
Kerala. In orthodox forms, Communism is a non-negligible force in a
few countries – Greece, Portugal, Czech Republic, Chile, Japan. In
Western Europe, the most innovative outcome of the Communist
tradition is the German Linke
(Left), a merger of reform Communists and dissident Social Democrats,
and there are several other functioning heterodox or post- Communist
parties, from the biggest party of Cyprus to the mutated Swedish
Left. The reformed South African CP is influential in its alliance
with the ANC, and the Brazilian is also (a minor) part of the
governing coalition. The Arab Spring of 2011 brought the reappearance
of leftwing forces out of the Communist tradition, so far most
notably in Tunisia. But democracy in Indonesia has not resurrected
the party slaughtered in l965, the largest, or second largest,
political – non-ethnic – massacre in world history, equal to the
Stalinist “purges” of l937-8.
For
the rest, it is remarkable how the Communist tradition evaporated
after the loss of power in l989-91, either into nationalist
conservatism, as in Russia and in the Central Asian and Caucasian
successor states, or into rightwing, liberal “Social Democracy”,
as in Poland or Hungary, in Italy finally finding even “Social”
too leftwing, and therefore ending up as a “Democratic” party.
Finally,
the very survival of Communist party states after l989-91 means that
a socialist option remains open. Here the key country is China. If
the Chinese rulers were convinced, either that the national power of
China would require a socialist economic base, or that further
travels along the capitalist road would entail costs imperiling the
social cohesion of China, they still have the power and the resources
to change track.
The
non-revolutionary wings of the 20th
century labour movements have also left an enduring legacy. In
contrast to a century ago, there is today a world-encompassing trade
union movement, although its strength outside Western Europe is
patchy or delimited. Its significance in countries like Argentina,
Brazil, South Africa, Korea, and Australia is rather exceptional.
Social Democratic and British-type Labour parties remain, with larger
electorates than a century ago. Geographically, though, they are
still basically confined to Europe and the “White Dominions” of
the former British Empire. The opening up of Socialist International
affiliation and association yielded little extra-European
socialdemocratization, as the examples of Palestine Fatah and Laurent
Ghagbo’s Côte d’Ivoire “socialism” illustrate.
In
Europe and its non-US offshoots, Social Democracy is still a major
electoral force, occasionally still a vehicle of progress, supportive
of women’s rights and gay rights, for instance. With respect to
social and economic policies, on the other hand, most of it has
succumbed to one variant of liberalism or another. Its original
workingclass base has been economically eroded and politically
marginalized.
The
welfare state, a state of civic social rights, is the most important
outcome of 20th
century reformism. It is currently under attack, and weakly defended.
In the rich countries it is likely to take some hard blows, above all
the small US one. But it is not going to be dismantled. And its
policy principles are spreading over the world, onto the Chinese and
Indian agenda, and it South America it is expanding.
Explaining
Defeats: The Suspension of the Grand Marxian Dialectic
There
are, then, lasting progressive achievements of the 20th
century. But the defeats of the left also have to be understood. The
mainstream Euro-American interpretation, a l970s profit squeeze and
subsequent capitalist revenge with neoliberal policies and globalized
outsourcing , offers no viable explanation of why this capitalist
war of revenge succeeded.
Marx
made the prediction, that the private capitalist relations of
production would increasingly come into tension, conflict,
contradictions with the increasingly social character of the forces
of production, i.e., of the optimal technological bases of
productivity. This was the Marxian Grand Dialectic, and, shed of its
apocalyptic interpretations, it was one of the most successful social
predictions of the l9th century. Communications, transport, energy,
strategic natural resources were increasingly taken out of pure
capitalist relations of production and nationalized, or publicly
regulated. The ideological colour of governments may impact the form
of this process, but hardly its content. Public investments in
education and research became increasingly decisive for economic
competition. In USA this latter was achieved through military
investments, which also spawned, among other things, the GPS and the
Internet.
In
the l970s this Grand Dialectic was suspended, indeed reversed. The
success of neoliberalism is not just an advance of evil. It had, as
any Marxist at least should suspect, a material basis. At the level
of relations of production, financialiazation – marketing of
currency exchange, lifting of controls of transnational capital
flows, capital pooling in maturing pension and insurance funds,
digital trading – generated enormous amounts of concentrated
private capital. Even outside the new financial casinos, in the
summer of 2011 Apple had more liquid cash than the US federal
government.
At
the level of forces of production, the electronic revolution enabled
private management from afar, in global, customized commodity chains,
and did away with many of the industrial economies of scale. In this
new context, privatization and marketization replaced nationalization
and regulation as the trans-ideological trend of governmental policy.
This
turn should be taken seriously, but not as a fatality. The Grand
Dialectic of socio-economic history may turn again, and even before
it does, it may be circumvented, which is what the Latin American
“socialists of the 21st
century” are trying to do, drawing upon a complexity of social
contradictions outside the orthodox Marxist canon – as did the
successful revolutionaries of the previous century.
The
Little Dialectic, of capitalist development generating workingclass
strength and opposition to capital, was at the same time displaced by
core de-industrialization. The rich countries began to
de-industrialize, discernible from l965, having got momentum by the
mid-l970s. That is, just before the peak of organized labour
strength, in l975-80. Basically, this was an epochal structural
change, of declining industrial weight in developed capitalism,
starting just before the peak of industrial workingclass power.
Manufacturing
was then moving outside Euro-America. There, in China and East Asia,
in particular, the dialectic took some time to develop. But now it
is operating , although mostly in very localized forms of workers’
protests and actions. Chinese wages and working conditions are
improving significantly. Some capitalists are now looking for lower
wage countries.
