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| 'Don't forget who runs your economy now.' |
For the 1 percent who rule society, democracy seems more
than ever a hindrance to ensuring that the most calamitous economic crisis
since the 1930s is paid for by the 99 percent below them. The most obvious
expression of this is the installation of unelected technocrats as prime
minister in Greece and Italy, in order to keep the countries’ governments
firmly on the path of ever-deeper austerity programs designed to keep those ubiquitous
“markets” happy.
It is here that we can see Lenin’s statement that “politics
is a concentrated expression of economics” playing itself out concretely as a
crisis of production and debt has mutated into a crisis of the political class,
the state, and national sovereignty.
Democracy: Going,
going, gone?
Behind all the platitudes being mouthed about the potential
for economic mandarins to seriously address these interlocked emergencies,
there remains the stubborn fact that in each country the problem was a
political elite unable to maintain a social consensus for the brutality being
inflicted to keep the Eurozone together. In
neither country was there an election and nor in each case did the leader even
lose a vote of confidence on the floor of Parliament. Indeed, in Greece George
Papandreou won such a vote only to immediately step down in favour of a “government
of national unity” headed by a little-known neoliberal bureaucrat.
The only legitimacy accessed by Papademos and Monti has been
a negative one, based in the deep
unpopularity and lack of authority of all sections of the political class
across Europe. It is a situation where the
factions of the Greek far Left together hold better poll results than either of
the two main parties, and where Berlusconi was so deeply discredited that
his premiership may have collapsed even without the pressure coming from Berlin,
Paris and bond holders.
Left Flank has argued
before that 2011 has been a year of global resistance from below on a scale
not seen since 1968, but one key feature of any such conjuncture will be
manoeuvres by ruling elites to head off and break rebellion through a mixture
of coercion and consent.
The imposition of technocratic rule is just one of the
mechanisms available in a period of sharp crisis, and it is neither new nor a
sign that the ruling class can necessarily impose its will. As Marx argued in 1853
in relation to a period of “technical” rule in Britain, “The best thing perhaps
that can be said in favour of the Coalition [technical] Ministry is that it
represents impotency in [political] power at a moment of transition.” However,
the experience of Weimar Germany suggests that such subversion of liberal
democracy can also lead to the imposition of ever more authoritarian forms of
government, ever further from the niceties of popular consent. We are not there
yet, and it would be wrong to overplay rumours that the Greek generals are
thinking of staging a military coup, for which there is little evidence at
present. It’s not that such moves may not be attempted if things get worse, but
to raise excessive fears about their prospect can easily feed an argument that
the Left should accede to a very real technocratic coup so as to try to dodge
authoritarianism down the track.
These events have occurred concurrently with new attacks on
the Occupy movement across the United States, where it has emerged that Mayors
involved in the coordinated crackdown colluded not just with each other but
the US Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.
Conservative forces have also played their hand in relation
to the Arab Spring. Western Powers gained new legitimacy thanks to the NATO
intervention in Libya, with sections of the Syrian democracy movement looking
to a similar deal with the devil. Yet while direct Western intervention
looks less likely, the key players in the region — brought together in the
Gulf Cooperation Council, throwing its weight around via influence within the
Arab League — are seeking to divert movements from below and to drive a
wedge against a key opponent, Iran. Nobody should shed a tear if Bashar
al-Assad falls, but to see foreign meddling in his downfall as innocent of such
dynamics would be naïve.
Imperialism is not just something that happens in the
developing world. You can see it in the imposition of ECB/IMF rule on Greece
and Italy and in other machinations at the top of the Eurozone hierarchy. Angela
Merkel told her CDU party’s conference that the monetary union needed new rules
to impose even tougher fiscal discipline on member states, under
the banner of “closer integration”. And Finland’s Europe Minister has
called for the six Triple-A rated economies in the Eurozone to
be given extra powers to dictate what happens in the 11 non-core economies
and new entrants, over the heads of locally elected governments.
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| {Source: FT.com} |
The far Right on a
new terrain
The current crisis is so serious that such manoeuvres may
well come to nothing. There is a real prospect of Greece (and/or some other
country) defaulting on its debt and exiting the Euro. If the existing elite
structures cannot provide a clear path out of the crisis, there are darker
forces hoping to win support for more authoritarian solutions. For example,
Dutch hard Right populist Geert Wilders has started
to publicly talk about taking his country out of the Euro, and French
presidential candidate Marine LePen — of the fascist National Front — has
been gaining
mainstream traction through her party’s objection to the single currency.
In Greece the far Right LAOS party has joined the government of national unity.
Meanwhile, Germany has been partly distracted from the
Eurozone crisis by revelations
that a Nazi terrorist group operated for a decade under
the nose of state security agencies, while carrying out a series of brutal
anti-immigrant murders. And Norwegian fascist Anders Breivik has appeared in
open court and been granted media access while he awaits his trial. Despite at
times ludicrous media attempts to situate his act of mass murder in crude
psychological terms, he
continues to state he is a “resistance fighter” against Islam’s destruction
of Europe via the encouragement of multiculturalism by the “cultural Marxists”
of the centre-Left.
It was issues like these that Guy Rundle and I discussed
with Phillip Adams on ABC Radio National’s Late
Night Live the other night (the interview can be podcasted here),
in line with the argument developed in our e-book, On Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe
(available here).
One key point I raised was the fact that in extreme socioeconomic crises, when
large sections of the middle class are — in Trotsky’s term — driven
to despair by the destruction of their aspirations and livelihoods, fascist
ideas can gain a mass hearing and apparently isolated individuals like Breivik
can act as a beacon to growing networks of extremists as they prosecute the
argument that only an extreme nationalist solution will resolve the crisis.
The point is not to see the accession of the far Right to
power as imminent (it is not) but to understand that it is not inevitable that liberal
democracy can reassert control in a situation where the social basis for it has
been so dramatically undermined. There is no guarantee that existing political
classes and state elites can restore stability in such a precarious situation,
and certainly not without resort to extreme measures that open the way for more
sinister actors to play a role.
Resistance and
politics
The coming period raises decisive questions not just about
the ability of ordinary people to resist the effects of the crisis but about
what sort of politics are needed to give them the best chance of pointing a way
out. Any such approach must start from a position of refusal to surrender to “the
dictatorship of the markets”, to stand with every social struggle against the
austerity measures being demanded and to argue that the 99 percent have the
right to reject any practical culpability for the crisis.
Already there have been mass
anti-government protests in Greece, on the anniversary of the 1973 student uprising
against military rule, as well as in
Italy, against a “bankers’ government”. Occupy London has to date defied
an eviction notice and even expanded
the protest into a nearby empty building owned by financial giant UBS. Any
thought that the SCAF had strangled the key movement of the Arab Spring was
also upset as one
of the biggest protests since February filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square and
other Egyptian cities. This doesn’t come out of nowhere, as workers’
strikes have spread and grown dramatically in recent months, underlining
the growing social dynamic to the revolution.
But beyond this there is no formula for how this plays out
politically. Lenin also famously said that Marxists should engage in “concrete
analysis of the concrete situation”, and that “politics must take precedence
over economics”. The Left is very weak internationally despite the
re-energising influence of the last 12 months. For example, notwithstanding the
brilliant Indignados movement in
Spain, the Left remains relatively marginal when it comes to the forthcoming
elections, in which the conservative pro-austerity PP is expected
to win a massive majority. In part this reflects the way that electoral
politics tend to lag social movement activity, but it is also a legacy of the
fragmentation of opposition to austerity, with the trade unions having
surrendered to PSOE’s attacks and the 15M movement (understandably but
mistakenly) reacting to this with an outright rejection of political parties
and unions, thereby partly abandoning the field to existing political actors.
Yet Greece shows that something different is possible. Not
only has the radical Left grown in influence, the argument of a section of that
Left for debt default, exit from the single currency and a radical program of
nationalisation, capital controls and other progressive measures has been
widely discussed. In this way, there has been a serious Left response to the
most unavoidable concrete fact of the crisis: The fragile position of the key
European neoliberal project of the last two decades — monetary union. It
is around this axis that all other questions pivot as ruling classes around the
Eurozone scramble to save the project, at the cost of social devastation.
As Costas Lapavitsas and his team at SOAS have cogently
argued in their latest
report on the Eurozone crisis (and as Lapavitsas argued in a major debate
at the Historical Materialism conference in London last week), such an action
program would not be a solution in and of itself, but could act as a bridge to
rebuilding a confident and politically-focused struggle for socialism based
inside the working class. The idea remains
controversial, particularly because for
some on the Left it is mistakenly seen as caving in to nationalism, but it targets
the glaring weak point of European capitalism and its austerity-focused
politicians and technocrats.
This is exactly the kind of revitalised, concrete, strategic
Left politics that needs to be fused with mass resistance already emerging in
response to the current crisis. Otherwise we risk being dragged ever closer to
the social hell our rulers seem to have no clear alternative to demanding of
us. This is the challenge we face.
