We reproduce this article by Tim Pendry of the Workers Party of Britain
Sep 03, 2024
We are supposed to be either surprised or outraged by populist (both Left and Right) victories in the regional elections in East Germany but, leaving outrage to partisans, it should not be a ‘shock’ to anyone with half a brain. A simple map of the location of German corporate headquarters tells you much of what you need to know – the economic powerhouse of Germany remains in the West and Berlin. Much of East Germany excepting liberal Berlin is a relative economic wasteland. 34 years have passed since political reunification. A political decision changed nothing fundamentally because that decision was only about identity and power and not about the market and its relationship to ordinary people.
But we could go far beyond Germany to produce similar maps of economic disparity that have intensified rather than diminished under the neo-liberal regime triggered in good part by the arrival of Paul Volcker as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. We are all aware of the state of South Yorkshire but a comparison of London with significant parts of the West Midlands or the North West might be equally fruitful. The assumption seems to have been amongst the emergent pointy-heads and technocrats of the 1980s and 1990s that total growth was going to be sufficient to trickle down to most voters across the West and that any losers (the unskilled working class above all) were too atomised or too nicely captured by social democrats with a stake in the system to present much of a political threat to the new order.
Of course, the events of 2008 shook up this complacency a little as they started to drag more lower middle class and skilled workers into a stealthy proletarianisation eventually triggering populism and new forms of ‘reactionary’ identity politics to counter progressive variants. A highly emotional upper middle class and white collar rage has emerged against the likes of Brexit and Trump. The assumption has become that moral right is on the side of those in power with their progressive values, that doubling down on those values was the way forward whenever the hegemony of the existing order was threatened, that certain freedoms were negotiable if it ensured the maintenance of the existing system and that, while the populists of the Right were an ideological threat, they would never be a real threat. This was because the Left could always be coerced into support for the existing order, create a majority and block the rise of what was decided to be ‘fascism’ (although, historically speaking, it was nothing of the kind).
The abandonment of restributionist strategies as social democracy became replaced by neo-liberalism apparently increased notional global wealth but, within the West, this was increasingly concentrated around already prosperous people and areas. The areas sucked in migrants while leaving ‘indigenous’ peoples on welfare benefits and in vulnerable low paid work or, although not in such a serious position, struggling as micro- and small businesses in a world changing beyond recognition. Yes, further continuing growth would have flattened out these discontents but that is not what we got. We have seen shock after external shock because of elite policy decisions (from lockdown to the insane destruction of Europe’s competitive advantage related to low energy costs). Now, in 2024, we have the prospect of serious fiscal austerity in the three major European economies – the UK, France and Germany.
Still, our view is that power is power and not easily dislodged. The neo-liberal order had the commanding heights of information and communications control and its political organisations all accepted a broadly shared vision of Atlanticism and neo-liberalism in opposition to socialism and nationalism. Discontent was (as we have said) atomised and marginalised into left-wing groupuscules, into ineffective liberal-left single issue movements that were easy to appropriate with rhetoric (and a bit of bunce for their activists) and into a new Right pigeon-holed as nasty troglodyte beasts ready to destroy democracy and offer us little but the jackboot. The complacent remained complacent.
In fact, a slow-burning revolution was under way. New technologies shared out access to information and communications. The priestly cast of journalists and intellectuals found themselves with some severe competition from a rapidly self-organising democratic resistance sponsored by self-interested billionaires. Once again, as with the printing press, technology was proving the potential for the downfall of a ruling order although the first effect of the new technologies was to isolate further individuals and encourage emotional venting that changed nothing. The quiet revolution starts when the ‘venting’ function of social media becomes replaced by its organisational, reporting, information exchange and campaigning capacity. It is at this point that order has responded by seeking to shut the stable door with investigations and arrests of dissident journalists and attempted persecution of the enablers of dissent such as Durov and Musk. But more of that on another day.
The first important and a partial consequence of this technological revolution was the emergence of populism as a methodology of politics exploiting these new technologies, making emergent organisation increasingly resilient in the face of mainstream ‘black’ narratives. Dissidents were even strengthened to the degree that existing structures sought to crush them through initially negative story-telling. Propaganda morphed into direct lawfare attacks where the existing order had pre-shaped the law to be a weapon in defence of itself.
Although there are strong historic and ideological constraints on their use, neo-liberal governments have stretched those constraints to the limit and quietly put in place over recent decades a range of emergency powers and regulations. Each use may discredit them in the eyes of more and more voters but (nevertheless) they can be used ruthlessly when the old order feels under existential threat. The draconian use of Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 in response to recent riots in the UK was expressly designed to use social terror against people defined by the pre-existing narrative as terrorists. They were certainly denied any voice independent of their actions. In other words, the State was also terrorist but psychologically – that infamous ‘chilling effect’ designed to frighten people into remaining atomised.
Instead of constantly being forced into illiberalism to defend the liberal order (the infamous ‘burning a village in order to save it’), the obvious political solution should have been to recognise the cultural and economic discontents of very large but highly localised minorities (in the context of nations as a whole) and find ways to compromise without actually changing anything very much and certainly without doing bad things – a case of throwing a bit of pie along with the crumbs from the table. To some extent, conservative parties have been trying to do this on the cultural side but splitting themselves in the process. These conservatives fail to see that the issues are just as much economic as cultural and are intimately linked to the social failures of three decades of neo-liberal theory and practice. It really is about extreme inequality and a collapsing social fabric.
Now we are seeing the slow emergence of something new – the emergence of left-populists in opposition to liberal progressivism (such as Sahra Wagenknecht’s Party [BSW]). This gives ‘social democrats’ the opposite problem to that of the conservative centrists. They cannot bend ideologically from their own ‘soft’ neo-liberalism and Atlanticism because this is now who they are but they also cannot bend (as conservatives can) in the direction of cultural conservatism. Suddenly, instead of being able to play off the Left and the Right in order to ensure power for the Centre, relying on the two extremes to loathe each other, we see working class and lower middle class movements emerging with similar levels of cultural conservatism (although the Left retains its basic compassion and tolerance) just as the populist Right’s economic policies, apparently libertarian, contains the possibility of accommodation on state action to preserve employment and working class conditions.
Unification of interest against the centre has not happened yet and may never happen although Tulsi Gabbard’s and RFK’s emergence as a form of Left-Trumpism and the scuttling of conservative Republicans to the Harris-Walz camp suggests that something is up. Perhaps what is up is a rediscovery of class as that which is below looking at that which is above rather than looking sideways. The bulk of the Left will always be weak in the face of centrists painting emotional and often absurd pictures of the rise of fascists and Nazis (although the fact the Left-liberals are in bed with the real thing in Ukraine and the Baltic seems to go unnoticed). On the other hand, the populist Right is always vulnerable to conservatives stealing their clothes sufficiently to push them back into the undergrowth. But the existing order can no longer take this for granted.
With years of serious austerity to come, vast sums being wasted on military-industrial obsessions related to Russia and on the green transition, with job losses likely from the loss of self-inflicted competitive advantage in relation to China, a total lack of control of migration (with the suspicion that migrants are just future voting fodder for progressives) and the 50:50 chance of the global hegemon being ruled by a populist, the possibility of Left inter-nationalist and Right nationalist populism eventually combining to oust centrist neo-liberal internationalist administrations becomes theoretically feasible – that is, if the centre does not move sharply to the Right or to the Left in order to survive at which point the two factions of centrism have to separate in bitter struggle with one another. That would be in itself a return to the world before a shared neo-liberal hegemony.
In this analysis, we can see that ’centrists’, who are not yet out of power but are everywhere that matters (UK, France, Germany, US) threatened with loss of power if current trajectories are maintained over the next half decade or more, are going to have to ensure high levels of economic growth/redistribution and/or the handling of cultural discontents through pragmatic compromise. Cultural conservatism and economic growth become a balancing act where economic neo-liberals are going to find themselves at war with social and cultural liberals to the degree that social liberalism with cake for all the activists faces the brutal reality of austerity politics – the alliance will be over.
The alternative strategy of the existing order might be to use manipulative and security strategies of dubious effectiveness to hold the line until economic conditions improve at some distant future – in other words, to become the social fascists of Communist myth while waiting for the funds that permit liberal largesse. The problem here is that liberal centrism is fundamentally ‘ideological’ and not pragmatic. The core activists (feminist, environmentalist, Atlanticist, neo-liberal, progressive) that hold the system together and end up in Cabinets actually believe in these things. They hold together as loose coalitions where betrayal of just one set of values destabilises all the others. Even capitalism itself (the large corporations) are presented with serious destabilising risks if they selectively try to draw back from progressive politics. Current senior management need Kamala Harris to restore order this November or they will face some board room reshuffles to accommodate the arrival of the populists. Dynamic pragmatic leadership at the centre is just not possible under these circumstances.
Each of the three major European economies is now under severe pressure because of this clash of substantial minority discontent with central ideological rigidity. Each centrist leadership is dealing with it in different ways but not in ways that ever deal with the core of the problem which is a malign association of declining living standards, collapsing community and cultural fear.
Starmer’s Labour in the UK is in the strongest position constitutionally because it has won a very large majority in the legislature. This is controlled by the executive through party discipline but this victory relies on only a third of actual voters and a quarter of possible voters agreeing to it. It has to deliver growth or die well within in five years and not only growth but material improvements in the conditions of at least the lower middle classes and skilled working class. Starmer’s solution to dissent is to try and crush it in the meantime by using the State’s panoply of emergency powers whenever dissent crosses boundaries set by the State or to ignore that dissent on the basis that it is impotent because it has no access to a vote for another five years. The various discontented minorities are still fragmented and divided but they too could become a majority in their discontent under austerity.
In France, Macron’s absurd recent electoral gamble has created a centrist administration that exists on sufferance because the two main and now substantial discontented minorities (also a majority if they united which they cannot) hate each other so much along traditional Left and Right lines. The usual bunch of technocrats and preservers of property are left free (for the moment) to meet European Union demands for budget cuts. Starmer too is having to use his control over the State to enforce ‘austerity’ as a priority while the German Finance Ministry is having to cut back radically on ideological ‘necessities’ like support for Ukraine because the numbers no longer add up. In each of these countries, the primary neo-liberal ideological position is creating pressure on ‘spending-related’ ideological positions undermining the very majority coalition of interests that sustain centrism.
Returning to Germany, we find, as in the UK and France, political centrism, still in command of the State and probably able to hold on to power in the immediate future as an increasingly ramshackle coalition, crossing its fingers for two developments that would enable it to say ‘and with one bound, we were free’ – the election of the Harris-Walz ticket in the United States and peace in the East. The first would reaffirm the primacy and hegemony of the dominant ideological formulation that has ruled the West since the adaptation of the Thatcher-Reagan revolution to progressive ends. It would imply (although not certainly) the restoration of growth based on controlling inflation, lowering interest rates, maintaining free trade (and so export potential) and (increasingly) state investment in technologically-based military industrial projects and the Green Transition. Hence the alleged need (according to its theory) for State austerity on current account to invest in ‘growth projects’ for the future. Ho, hum. Let us see if there is the cash for this in any of our three key economies.
But then we face another problem – competence. Just as central banks only became competent (they have broadly proved competent if uninspiring since the 2008 crash) when short-termist politicians no longer were in a position to take decisions on short term electoral advantage or under conditions of panic, so the ‘ecole’ and other administrative systems that proved so effective in rebuilding Europe after 1945 have become sclerotic, rigid, regulatory, incapable of encouraging entrepreneurialism on the one hand (along American Lines) or restoring and of managing a corporatist system under conditions of globalisation. Only socialism or autarky are left and neither of these are acceptable to the propertied and, to be honest, suffer from the fact that past versions in Europe were failures far beyond the excuse that they were made to fail by the US (which is true enough). European attempts to control information flow for ideological reasons are also laughably inept and merely strengthen the mentality of resistance to centrist rule. Europe is becoming ever more sclerotic and incapable of managing politically the cultural shifts required to revitalise it.
It is uncertain how Sahra Wagenknecht will play the decisive hand given to her by the recent regional elections. In Thuringia she is king-maker and theoretically could either buttress another ramshackle coalition or break the mould and risk obloquy and some of her base by working with the AfD. In Saxony she is weaker and we would expect a ramshackle coalition-on-sufferance led by the CDU. But none of this is as important as her stated pre-election demand that the price of the BSW’s collaboration with the centre is radical and cuts at the very heart of the latter’s ideology – that Thuringia would make a stand against the flow of funds to Ukraine and argue for spending funds on welfare, education, healthcare and other working class needs. Will she fold? If she does, left-populism becomes a joke – just another fragmented part of a fragmented European Left. If she does not, although Thuringia has no say over foreign and defence policy, she rhetorically rises to the high ground of public discontent about incoming austerity. The Atlanticists are faced with a dynamic propaganda centre positioning the BSW as the only non-Far Right defender of German working class interests. In contrast, Die Linke is all over the place and the SDU is tainted.
If she does this, just as the populist Right became internationalised on local victories so the populist Left will start to do the same – in the US (where RFK plays a sort of weak John the Baptist role), in the UK (where the WPB has barely started its own rise) and amongst those in France unhappy with the rather soppy coalitional strategies of Melenchon who is little more than France’s Corbyn and we know how that turned out. The point is that left wing liberal democracy appears to favour loose coalitions of single issue activists who claim a vague progressive identity when what the working and even lower middle classes actually want is a firm unified ideology that can be seen to operate in their own economic interests and respect their cultural priorities.
We should stop there and leave further critique for another time. This is just a preliminary overview of a crisis in Western ‘civilisation’ where the key takeaways are these:
- first, that the progressive and conservative heirs of the Thatcher-Reagan revolution who sought to moderate and manage it through activist and corporate alliances may still be in power but the writing is on the wall for them if economic growth with sufficient redistribution does not shrink the ranks of the discontented;
- second, that centrism is in power only because liberal democratic forms have been gamed to keep them in power and because the discontented are either fragmented or in direct conflict with each other; and
- third, that ‘centrists’ are now so bound by ideology as a mechanism for coalitional building that the pragmatic compromise required to ensure the maintenance of their power in the long run is extremely difficult to effect. This latter is made worse by the dominance of the liberal technocratic and regulatory frame of mind.
In this context, the emergence of right populism is logical. The emergence of left populism follows with the same logic. The latter is weaker than the former because the objective conditions that allowed it to emerge have not existed until now. Even today, it is relatively weak and vulnerable both at risk of the cowardice and fear of the middle class white collar Left’s intellectual inability to break free of the old narrative (and its continuing hopes of having its finger in the pie) and right populism’s own possible ‘turn to the Left’ to build a solid working class base. What happens in the coming months and years is something we will be reporting on with interest.
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Labour Affairs 