Though Cowards Flinch

Don Paskini has an article over at Liberal Conspiracy celebrating the fact that in many countries around the world, the Left is actually in power. By demonstrating this, the Don wishes to dispel the (seemingly) dominant narrative that the crisis has not really benefitted the Left. Recent victories in Norway, Portugal, Greece and even Germany, where the Left was ousted from government but collectively polled 46% to the Right’s 48%, are recruited to show that actually many Left ideas are back on the agenda and that the Left is advancing.

Yet all of history is a process. If the Left is elected to stem the tide of capitalism and to redress inequity, deprivation and other social problems, then it must either do this decisively or face defeat and disillusionment. The signs of this happening anywhere – either in Europe or even in the most radical Left regimes of Bolivia or Venezuela – are not good. So what seems like success is ultimately ephemeral, as the “soft” Left is caught within its own contradiction. It cannot on the one hand support healthy capitalist growth and on the other, want peace, equality and socialism.

That this contradiction is real should not be doubted. Germany’s Finance Minister under the previous government, Peer Steinbrueck, was the man who criticized Labour’s massive programme of state expenditure as “crass Keynesianism“. Steinbrueck is a member of the Social Democratic Party. This should show just how wrong we would be to trust to what we know of party political lineage. The SDP may have been the political inheritors of the first mass Marxist party, it may have the party of the German working class, but is it any longer?

Designating someone “left-wing” covers a multitude of sins, not the least of which is not being “left-wing” in any practical sense that extends beyond the rhetorical milieu in which one moves. In America, Obama’s election succeeded on the basis of his social promises, but the key difference between Republicans and Democrats was over fiscal stimulus. Fiscal stimulus has gone ahead, meanwhile what social promises were made have been substantially watered down: the debacle of Afghanistan continues, and social medicine languishes.

This is a phenomenon which seems set to repeat around the world: Papandreou’s PASOK victory in Greece, Stoltenberg’s Labour-led coalition in Norway and so on, though few of these are truly convincing victories. Even in Portugal, where PDS has been virtually New Labour-lite, the re-election has not been particularly convincing, for all the populist rhetoric Socrates could muster. Things like “cutting state bureaucracy” (sound familiar?) have been on the agenda, and the major spending projects have been geared towards a more efficient capitalism.

As Chris Dillow masterfully summarizes, the “Keynesian” approach to fiscal stimulus is essentially pro-capitalist life support. Is that what the Left parties were elected to do? And if so, what makes them Left?

In cases such as Britain and Germany, social democracy has been forced into the role of capitalist handmaiden, gearing up for cuts whilst ploughing money into the banks, essentially depriving Keynesian economics of its one-time social content. As Lenin points out, socialists will not be able to protect the Socialist Internationalists from electoral oblivion. That oblivion has been well and truly earned. There is not a person on the Left who could be enthusiastic about Gordon Brown, despite David Cameron, so why on earth would we expect any less from the average voter?

Yet the “alternative” appeal of social democratic parties that were in opposition as the global crisis has unfolded will soon wear off. Without an organised, democratic, determined movement to hold their feet to the fire, these parties will play out the contradiction enshrined into their ideological attempt both to embrace capitalism and socialism and will be promptly turned out of office by voters who never really got the alternative that they voted for. Obama’s approval ratings, for example, have already begun slipping.

Without this movement, “Left” victories in elections are essentially meaningless. As New Labour has shown, social democratic parties can play a similar role to outrightly capitalist parties. Even here, at the end, Labour has not learned its lesson. Private Eye this week documents some of the corporate funding of the Labour Party conference and the desertion of Labour by their erstwhile corporate friends, all to the sound of a string quartet valiantly playing on as the wounded ship coasts slowly away from the gigantic iceberg.

Even in those places where there is a powerful popular movement, such as Venezuela or Bolivia, there has been no final victory. The strength of “the Right” is derived from the hegemonic and material power created by a system of private ownership and market exchange. Neither of these have been overturned, and in situations where the Left actually has the potential to threaten such interests, the natural recourse of the capitalist ruling class is towards violence. Such has it been in both Bolivia and Venezuela, where the Left has gone furthest.

Neither of these South American movements has delivered on their promises, however. Whilst literacy is increasing and land has been shared out among the peasants, poverty is rife and – especially in Venezeula – Chavez’ regime is increasingly showing its willingness to attack workers in the interests of what was private capitalism and is now state-owned capitalism. This is another contradiction: Chavez’ strongest support comes from among these very workers, and yet here he is using the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state to beat them into submission.

We should be careful when speaking of Left successes, then, in this period of economic crisis. The ‘success’ of winning electoral victories – which is different from actual power – is often ephemeral. Even where it reaps real benefits for the working class, through education or health or social welfare, the very fact that there is no next step means that the step back is almost inevitable. “Left” leaders become assimilated into the political elite, connections are cut with the mass movements that created the electoral opportunity, promises are reneged on.

Obama has managed this effortlessly. Social media, once so important to Obama’s campaign, has actually been quite critical of the new government as a result.

None of which is to say that there aren’t successes. The rise of Die Linke, representing a new strand of militant trades unionism and including many socialist activists attempting to radicalize Germany from the ground up, is a great success. The doubling of Die Linke’s vote is merely the icing on the cake. A new generation is growing up without the familiar, comforting (and tranquilizing?) effect of social democracy; they are looking around for radical ideas which will solve the problems they encounter as a direct result of capitalism.

Leaving aside the new generation, this generation has not said its last word either. The recent London CWU vote to disaffiliate from Labour is a product of the titanic pressures which the Labour Party is holding back through bureaucratic trickery. In Ireland, the traditional hinterland of Irish Labour did not believe the leadership’s assurances that jobs were to be had by approving the Treaty of Lisbon. The poorest and most militant constituencies of Ireland rejected the treaty. The ties between labour and social democracy are fraying.

A few Left electoral successes, in such an unstable climate, and where even Left parties play the part of retrenching capitalists, mean relatively little.

Lastly, but significantly, it bears mentioning that a powerful workers’ movement will be built on the corpses of all those “successes” vaunted by the Don – because not one of them offers a genuine alternative. They are all subject to the contradiction I have laid out above, and must be resolved – either in our favour, with their deepening and broadening to a revolutionary movement (more than likely against the wishes of their leaders) or to inaction and ultimately electoral defeat. So much is up for grabs – of that, these electoral successes are merely a sporadic symptom.

What they don’t demonstrate is that the Left has fully grasped its opportunity: and I think the actual fact is that we have not – globally or, more particularly, here at home.