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Home일반・기획・특집통일The new 21st century frontiers of the left (2)

The new 21st century frontiers of the left (2)

The new emerging century

Nations and the return of class

The latest two decades have been good for poor nations of the world. Since the late l980s, what the international economic organizations call “developing Asia”, mainly China, India and the ASEAN countries, has been growing at a pace about the double of the world as a whole. Since 2001, Sub-Saharan Africa, in the last third of the past century the tragic laggard of development, has been outgrowing the world, as well as the latter’s “advanced economies”. Latin America is growing faster than the rich world since 2003, and the Middle East since 2000. Except for post-Communist Europe, “emerging and developing economies” also weathered the Anglo-Saxon bankers’ crisis much better than the rich world.

Here, I think, we are experiencing a historical turn, not only in geopolitics but also in terms of inequality. The l9th and 20th century international development of underdevelopment meant, among other things, that inequality among humans became increasingly shaped by where they lived, in developed or underdeveloped areas, territories, nations. By 2000, it has been estimated that 80 per cent of the income inequality among households depended on the country you live in (Milanovic 2011: 112). This is currently changing. Inter-national inequality is declining overall, although the gap between the rich and the poorest has not stopped growing. But intra-national inequality is, on the whole, increasing, albeit unevenly, denying any pseudo-universal determinism of “globalization” or of technological change.

What this amounts to is a return of class, as an increasingly powerful global determinant of inequality. Class has always been important, but in the 20thcentury context of mainly national class organizations and class struggles – albeit including some networks of “proletarian internationalism” – national class inequality overshadowed the much larger and fast growing global inter-national gaps. These national struggles led to national equalizations, very substantial in Europe after WWI, in USA after the crash of l929. Now, nations are growing closer, while classes are growing apart. In the Anglo-

Saxon countries, we are back at the distributions of the late l920s.

The class side of the new global distribution pattern was established in the l990s. That was the time when Chinese inequality soared, even more than along the capitalist road in the former Soviet Union, when the modest tendency to (rural) equalization in India was reversed into increasing rural as well as urban inequality. In Latin America, Mexico and Argentina had their neoliberal inequality shocks. An IMF (2007:37) study has shown, if not properly reflected upon, that on a global scale the only group which increased its income share in the l990s was the richest national quintile, in high as well as in low income countries. All the other quintiles were losers, although not dramatically.

The most important changes have taken place at the very top of the income distribution, between the richest 1 per cent and the rest – and between the 0.1 or 0.01 per cent and the rest. Between l981 and 2006 the top 0.1 per cent of income earners increased their share of US income by six percentage points, the rest of the richest one per cent by four points. The four next per cent of the earners, percentiles 96-99, gained 2.5 points. The five per cent below them, P91-95, kept their share, while the remaining ninety per cent lost. (Pear 2011; Krugman 2011)

The US Nobel economist Joe Stiglitz has recently (Vanity Fair May 2011) pointed to the capture of his country by the richest one per cent, who own 40% of the nation’s wealth, who appropriates nearly a quarter of annual national income, and who make up virtually the whole US Congress. Around the last turn of the century the richest 1/100 took of 15 % of US income, as against 9-11% in India (Banerjee and Piketty 2003).

The inegalitarian trends of China and India, and of developing Asia generally, have continued in the new millennium, like in USA. (Luo and Zhu 2008; Kochanowicz et al. 2008; Datt and Ravaillon 2009) Accelerated economic growth in India, for instance, has hardly had any positive effect on the poorest fifth of Indian children, two thirds of whom are underweight – a life-long weakening condition – in 2009, as in 1995 (UN 2011:14). The vigorous economic growth in the 2000s of what used to be the Third World has had no effect on hunger in the world. The number of undernourished has risen from 618 to 637 million people, 16% of humankind between 2000 and 2007. (UN 2011:11) Food prices continue to rise.

At the other end, in March 2011 Forbes magazine gleefully announced two records of its listed billionaires of 2010, their record number, 1,210, and their total wealth, $4.5 trillion, larger than the GDP of the world’s third largest national economy, Germany. 413 are Americans, 115 (mainland) Chinese, and 101 Russians.

However, there is nothing fatal, technical or economic, to increasing inequality. From its admittedly vulnerable position as the world’s economically most unequal region, Latin America is currently the only region of the planet where inequality is decreasing CEPAL 2010; UNDP 2010) As this is largely a political effect (Cornia and Martorano 2010), of revulsion against the neoliberalism of the military dictators of the l970s and l980s, and of their more or less democratically elected civilian successors, the ongoing redistribution policies of Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela and others also pertain to class analysis, as well as the money-grabbing of the rich oligarchs.

Another way of comparing (income) classes across nations is to calculate their Human Development Index, which includes income, life expectancy, and education, a heroic, very complicated operation with margins of error. Nevertheless, it gives a noteworthy picture of world inequality. The poorest American quintile has a lower level of human development than, e.g., the richest quintile of Bolivia, Indonesia, and Nicaragua, below the most lucky forty per cent of Brazil and Peru, and has a level about equal to the fourth quintile of Colombia, Guatemala, and Paraguay. (Grimm et al. 2009:table 1.) Class, at least as a reference of distributive justice, is likely to grow also for other reasons than national economic convergence. Existential inequalities of racism and sexism, even if still potent here and there, are clearly being eroded. An important recent example is the fall of apartheid in South Africa. Democratic South Africa is also giving us one of the most dramatic examples of class inequality after institutionalized racism. Daring World Bank economists, Branko Milanovic (2008: table 3), and others, have estimated the Gini coefficient of income inequality among the households of the planet at about 65-70 in the l990s-2000s. But in 2005 the city of Johannesburg has one of 75! And measured in consumer expenditure which always gives a lower inequality figure than income measures (UN Habitat 2008:72) Even allowing for margins of error , it does not seem presumptuous to say, that the post-apartheid city of Johannesburg harbours at least as much, and quite probably more economic inequality among its (mainly) citizen inhabitants as there is among all the humans of the planet.

Four Roads of Class

The likely resurgence of class may take at least two, very different directions, a middle class and a working-class one, each with two major sub-variants. One, ideologically predominant, middle class variant looks forward to an emerging global middle class taking possession of the earth, buying cars, one-family houses, and an endless amount of electronics and consumer durables, and spending on international tourism. While this globalized and upgraded consumerism may cause nightmares in ecologically conscious people, it makes businessmen, the business press, and business institutions salivate. Middle class consumerism has the great advantages, on top of business profits, of both accommodating to the privileges of the rich and of providing a quiescent horizon of aspiration to the popular classes.

These business dreams are not beyond the possible, but they tend to underestimate the social explosiveness of the current race of economic distanciation and exclusion.

The widening gap between the middle class and the rich might , as a second alternative, carry the former into politics before consumption. In recent years we have seen something which Europeans, at least, hardly have seen since l848, middle classes mobilizing in the streets, even making middle class revolutions. Many of these middle class mobilizations have been socially and economically reactionary, like those against Allende in Chile and Chavez in Venezuela, or, more recently, the US Tea Party. Contrary to liberal mythology, there is nothing inherently democratic in middle class mobilizations, the Thai “Yellow Shirts” of 2008, or the drivers of the putsches in Chile and Venezuela bear witness to that.

But others have also have had an edge against oligarchic, “crony” capitalism as well as against oligarchic politics. The so-called Orange revolution in the Ukraine may come closest to the ideal type. But the “Arab Spring” of 2011 also included a significant, probably crucial middle class component. The exclusive capitalism of high finance or of high politics, the political economy of, by, and for the richest one per cent, might bring an angry middle class onto the political stage with unpredictable outcome.

The other class direction leads to the working-class. The era of historically vanguard industrial capitalism is now gone, the capitalist development which empowered its own opponent, the working-class movement, predicted by Marx in mid-l9th century, and materialized in Europe, in the Nordic countries above all. Europe and North America are now de-industrializing, private financial capitalism is outgrowing public sectors, the working classes are being divided, defeated, and demoralized. The resulting economic polarization and soaring intra-nation inequality is the North Atlantic contribution to the global resurgence of class (as a structural mechanism of distribution).

The relay of an industrial working-class has been passed on to China, the emerging centre of world manufacturing and of world manufacturing exports. Today’s Chinese industrial workers are largely immigrants in their own country, given the still lingering hukou system of different urban and rural birthrights. But the growth of Chinese industrial capitalism is strengthening the workers’ hand, as Marx once foretold, and as currently manifested in localized protests and rising wages. The political regime of China is still formally committed to socialism, in some sense. What will come out of it is anybody’s guess. But a new round of distributive conflict, driven by industrial labour, largely displaced from Europe to East Asia, is not to be excluded.A fourth class scenario would get its primary dynamic from the heterogeneous popular classes of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and their, perhaps less forceful counterparts in the rich world. Empowered by a rise of literacy and by new means of communication, the popular class movements face great hurdles of division, of ethnicity, religion, and of formal-informal employment in particular, as well as of dispersion of activities, such as street hawking, and among small sweatshops. But the barriers of organization, mobilization and rallying are not un-surmountable. India has spawned strong organizations of self-employed, The Red Shirts movement of the Thai popular classes returned as the country’s prime political force in the July 2011 elections, and popular class coalitions have produced left-of-centre governments in Argentina, Brazil and in a number of Latin American countries.


Each of these four class approaches to world inequality has a sociological plausibility, globalized middle class consumerism, middle class political rebelliousness, industrial class struggle – including possible ensuing class compromises – decamped from Europe to China and East Asia, and, fourthly heterogeneous popular class mobilizations, headed by Latin American and Southeast Asian movements, maybe South African and possibly involving Arab countries and Sub-Saharan Africa. The most likely foreseeable future is that there will be strides along all four roads, and that their relative significance is not only impossible to predict. Weighing the evidence as well as assessing the meaning and the value are also likely to controversial.


More clear, however, is that while nation-states remain formidable organizations and class conflicts will remain mainly state-bounded, the new turn of global inequality will make class rise and nations decline in determining human life-courses.


The New Ideological Dynamics


The great popular mobilizations of 2011, from the student movement of Chile to the anti-corruption movement of India, via the Mediterranean complex of southern (Arab) revolution and northern, west to east, rebellion, from Spain to Greece and Israel, and including the US movements of the Tea Party and of Occupy Wall Street, all manifest a new ideological dynamics. It resembles the Argentine mass movement in reaction to the collapse of its Creole neoliberalism in 2001.

Basically, it is a novel combination of rejectionism and pragmatism. There is a strong rejection of the incumbent system of political economy – eloquently expressed in the Argentine slogan of 2001-2, Que se vayan todos (They, the politicians, should all go). But in contrast to the ideological communities of the 20th century, there is no doctrinal program or strategy offered.

Where it will lead, and where it will erupt next are unpredictable. But the dynamics these mobilizations probably indicates an emerging historical shift in the role of political ideologies in social change. While not providing short-term recipes or solutions, nor concrete immediate forecasts, historical analyses are an integral part of all the Marxist traditions – and for good reasons. Historical perspectives place us, current fighters for global freedom, equality, and social justice, into an interlinked long history of radical thought, practice, and experience, as well as of long-term processes of social change, or non-change.

For this, practical much more than academic historiographic aim of finding ourselves in history, we may distinguish different epochs in the modern relationships of political thought and social practice, here, for obvious reasons focusing on such relationships on the left.

Modern political ideologies derive from European 17th and 18th century political and social philosophy. Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith and others laid out secular conceptions of good government and good society. They, in particular Locke and Rousseau, provided principles and arguments to the revolutionaries of the first modern revolutions, the American and the French.

In the wake of the revolutions, doctrines of new future states and societies developed, the ideological isms, liberalism, nationalism, republicanism, socialism, communism, anarchism. As a reaction, counter-ideologies also had to be formulated by the challenged powers of tradition and privilege, conservatism, monarchism, legitimism. These ideological isms became banners of battle, armed as well as unarmed, in the course of the l9th century.

In the first half of the twentieth century, political ideologies, sometimes with a strong religious component (Christian above all), developed into massive organized identity communities and into strategies of power. Towards the end of the century, however, these ideological communities eroded rapidly, and political power stratagems became increasingly dissociated from any doctrinal aims. In some parts of the world, religious fundamentalism, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, stepped into the void, but without being able to fill it.

The first decade of the 21st century has experienced a new ideological dynamic, radical, political, secular. It is not driven by any specific ism, it has neither a programme nor a strategy for taking power. Nor is it an organized identitarian community. The alter-globalization movement and the World Social Fora constitute major planetary example. In 2011 the new dynamic drove the Mediterranean revolutions on the south shore, and the rebellions on the western, northern, and eastern shores. In Latin America it turned the Chilean student protests against bad and expensive private education into a nationwide middle and (organized) workingclass mass movement. In India it sustained the Gandhian anti-corruption movement of Anna Hazare.

Mostly, so far, this ideological dynamic of mass mobilization has been de facto leftwing, while deliberately avoiding left identity badges and canonical formulae. But the game can also be played from the right, of which the US Tea Party is a formidable illustration. While mainly carried by the Christian right, it presents itself as above all a small government movement, and ducks critical questions about capitalism and inequality by lashing out against the collusion of the Washington government and Wall Street, not without some credibility.

This new dynamic of political mobilization is a noteworthy phenomenon of contemporary politics. How far its combination of principled rejectionism and ideological pragmatism will go is another matter. On its own, it is probably not sustainable for very long. Ten years after the militant Argentine mobilization, ordinary, if left-of-centre, politics, and even confidence in politics are back in Argentina. The large, very inventive Spanish movement, theindignados, did not prevent the Socialist government fiasco from issuing into a much more rightwing government after a landslide election in November 2011.

On the other hand, the doctrine identities of the first three quarters of the twentieth century are unlikely to return. Instead, we should expect, also on the radical left, a future of disparate, discontinuous, only loosely connected ideological appeals or “interpellations”. The World Social Fora and the new Latin American left bear witness of their force. In sharp contrast to the recent Southern European trying the rightwing door out of the crisis, Argentina managed an economically as well as politically successful progressive exit out of its crisis, because the flood of massive angry protests could be politically channeled, through the broad, ideologically heteroclite and chameleontic Peronist movement, by an astute, previously marginal provincial politician.

The New Geopolitics of the Left

The third aspect of the changed context of the Left in the early 21st century, that I would like to underline, is its new geopolitics. In the beginning of this century the banner of socialism has passed from Europe and Asia to Latin America, the only region of the world where socialism is currently on the agenda, officially proclaimed as the “Socialism of the 21st Century” in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. The only region of the world where left-of-centre governments have the upper hand, due to the weight of Brazil and Argentina ,and, not accidentally, the only region of the world, where economic inequality is declining, though admittedly from Andean levels. This is a very original development, emphasizing its autonomy of 20th century Eurasian leftism – without denouncing the latter – , of heterodox ideological motivations and of heterogenous social forces.

In this sense it is clearly a postmarxist left. It fits into the new historical context after the exhaustion of industrial socialism, of which the implosion of the Soviet Union was the most dramatic instance.

The progressive forces of Ecuador and of other Latin American countries, draw primarily upon ethnic/existential and popular versus oligarchy mobilizations. However, on a global scale, the Marxian Little Dialectic of class struggle has not been suspended. Its capital-labour fulcrum has been partly displaced to China, but in mutated form it is returning with a global vengeance, in Latin America recently also to the last neoliberal fairyland, post-pinochetista Chile. Marx remains crucial.

However, recent Latin American experiences and hopes should be situated in a global historical context. Hitherto, the global left has had two centres, of two different kinds. One was Western Europe, above all France of the Revolution and Germany of the Marxist labour movement. It represented the coming future of the modern world, the coming future of the most developed, most powerful part of the world. This centre provided social analyses, ideas, programmes, principles of organization, and models, of movement and of change. It also provided important, though indirect material support. France was open to radical exiles from all over the world, the well-organized, dues-paying German labour movement helped to fund poorer movements. The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung is still doing so.

The second kind of centres emerged in the semi-peripheries of world power and wealth, due to revolutionary breakthroughs. The Soviet Union was the first, and the most universal, but, more regionally, China and, even more so Cuba, also acquired central functions. Above all, they constituted models of successful social change, of seizing power and of revolutionary social transformation. As such, they were sources of inspiration, as well as of direct material support, global in the case of USSR, regional in the cases of China – before the late-Maoist rivalry with the USSR – and Cuba.

Communism, as well as Social Democracy and Radical Republicanism were all European-originated movements, among whom Communism proved to be the most adaptive and successful globally. While these movements still live on as an enduring legacy of the past century, we seem to be discerning a new world geography of the Left.

What a post-Eurocentric Left will look like is still too much in the mists of the future to be ascertained. Most probably, in the short run at least, it will, first of all. be de-centred. However important regionally, the Latin American Left is unlikely to make up a global centre in the foreseeable future. The social changes under way, even if fully implemented, are not dramatic enough, and the power of the hemisphere is not big enough. If an outsider may be allowed an intellectual request, it should be Latin American analyses of Latin America in the world. While there are several very sophisticated analyses of inequality and of the left, in Ecuador, in Brazil, and elsewhere, there are still very little of global Latin American studies and reflections.

The world future of the 21st century Left will be decided in China and India, both very uncertain prospects. But the Left itself is more likely to be more global than Sino- or Indo-centric.

The defining core of the Left is a commitment to global human freedom and equality. A post-Eurocentric Left will have to be globally informed and connected. Cultural diversity, ethnic identity, national traumas –of colonialism and racism above all -, religion, and planetary history will have to be given their due in discourses and practices of emancipation and equality. New economic policies will have to be developed to get out of the liberal straitjacket in which the European left and left-of-centre are contained.

Conclusions

A new era is dawning, upon the ground of the legacies of the 20th century. New relationships of class and nation, of ideology, identity and mobilization, and of global leftwing politics are emerging. The end of the Cold War brought no peace dividend, but a new cycle of wars. The capitalist triumph over Soviet socialism, did not issue into universal prosperity, but into accelerating inequality and into recurrent severe economic crisis, the East Asian of l997—98, the Russian of l998, the Argentine of 2001, and the current Euro-American one of 2008-?

The classical leftwing issues, of capitalist exploitation and capitalist imperialism, of ethnic and gender exclusion and hierarchy, have been reproduced into the new century. Lotta Continua. The struggle will go on.

References

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CEPAL 2010, La hora de la igualdad. Santiago de Chile, CEPAL

Cornia, G.A., and Martorano, B. 2010. Policies for reducing income inequality: Latin America during the last decade. workingpapers@unicef.org

Datt, G., and Ravaillon, M. 2009. ´Has India’s Economic Growth Become More Pro-Poor in the Wake of Economic Reforms?´, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 5103, www.worldbank.org

Grimm. M. et al. 2009. ´Inequality in Human Development. An Empirical Assessment of 32 Countries´, Luxembourg Income Study, Working Paper 519, www.lisproject.org/publications/wpapers

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Luo Xubei and Zhu Nong 2008. ´Rising Income Inequality in China: A Race to the Top´, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4700, www.worldbank.org

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Milanovic, B. 2011. The Haves and the Have-Nots. New York, Basic Books

Pear, R. 2011. ‘Top 1% increase share of U.S. income’, International Herald Tribune , October 27, p.5.

UN 2011. The Millennium Development Goals Report 2011 www.un.org

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UN Habitat 2008. The State of the World Cities 2008/9. www.unhabitat.org

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