Podemos:
how Europe’s political centre is being eaten by the radical left
and nationalist right
As
the success of Spain’s upstart anti-austerity party shakes the
country’s two-party system, the most likely outcome for ailing
social democrats is a fusion with liberal conservatives
Paul Mason /
GUARDIAN
This has been a year
when social democracy has had to confront existential demons. Sunday
night’s surge by Podemos in Spain, to 20%, is just the latest
challenge from the radical, populist and nationalist left that saw
the SNP beat Labour in Scotland, and the far-left force its way into
coalition in Portugal. Traditional socialist parties saw their
territory captured by nationalist populism, too: Ukip in Britain, the
Front National in France, the wipeout of the social-democratic left
in Poland by its swing to the right in October.
Jeremy Corbyn’s
seizure of the Labour leadership is an exception that demonstrates
the rule: as his control solidifies, a whole generation of centrist
politicians has begun to contemplate a breakway from one of the
oldest socialist parties in the world, on the grounds that it is –
as former Blair adviser Peter Hyman put it this week – “over”.
That the reversals
were part of a long-term process is no consolation: long-term
declines in politics tend to produce intermittent seismic events. The
double election victory of Syriza this year, combined with its
mobilisation of 61% of the population to defy austerity in a
referendum qualifies as such an event. And whatever the outcome of
the Spanish coalition negotiations, the seizure of Barcelona, Madrid
and Valencia by radical-left coalitions in the local elections was
seismic too.
So what’s driving
the process? Though there are national peculiarities, the
similarities are too obvious to ignore. First, the disintegration of
class voting patterns noticed by sociologists from the late 1950s
onwards. It’s often forgotten, amid the angst and panic of today,
that the most fundamental challenge to social democracy was – long
before deindustrialisation and neoliberalism – the fragmentation of
class loyalty in politics. Next come the new demographics of modern
societies. The industrial working class is small, even in succesful
manufacturing countries like Germany; the salariat is large; the
phenomenon of the young, networked, individualist only adds to social
democracy’s existential problem, which is: whose values do we
represent?
The salariat is
liberal; the remains of the old, white manual working class can –
if its concerns are repeatedly ignored and downplayed – become
conservative. The networked individual thinks and acts globally; yet
social-democratic machine politics has been essentially national and
local for more than 100 years.
As identity politics
gained traction, from the 1970s onwards, social democracy absorbed it
successfully. But it has found it very difficult to absorb, respond
or adapt to radical nationalism. Hence Labour’s collapse in
Scotland, the marginalisation of traditional socialism in Catalonia
and the Basque Country.
But the biggest
problem of all is neoliberalism, and social democracy’s conversion
to it. The neoliberal economic formula may have delivered growth and
stability in the 1990s and early 2000s, but today it demands
austerity, rising inequality, the erosion of welfare states to fund
busted banking systems and the relentless reduction of labour’s
bargaining power.
If you accept this,
the question becomes: what would a non-neoliberal centrist socialism
look like? But it’s a question few in the core socialist parties of
Europe are prepared to ask. It challenges not only the leaders, but
the footsoldiers – the apparatchiks who quit Labour HQ over Corbyn;
the Blairite journalists mobilised across the newsrooms of Britain to
do him down; the councillors who would rather he did not exist.
But 2015 has also
begun to provide an answer. In Portugal, Spain and Greece the radical
left parties have each had to make compromises – with power, with
nationality and with more centrist forces. Syriza gained power in
January by moderating its original programme and by recruiting and
embedding numerousformer social democrats into its electoral offer.
It was these politicians who urged moderation and compromise,
eventually getting their way after Tsipras’s empty victory in the
July referendum. But on another signal issue, Tsipras had already
made the ultimate compromise. He had sidelined the issue of Nato,
appointed the head of a small rightwing nationalist party as defence
minister, and showed no embarassment himself at donning a military
flack jacket to inspect troops.
Syriza ran the Greek
capitalist state, though sometimes not competently. Its solution to
an untrustworthy and politicised civil service was often to “squat”
ministries, keeping physical distance from those parts of the machine
Marxist theory tells you to keep your eye on closely: the military,
the intelligence service, the diplomatic corps.In Barcelona, the
Podemos-aligned En Comú movement, which took the city council in
May, has been more radical – setting housing activists to run
housing policy; instituting a crackdown on platforms like Uber and
Airbnb. But Barcelona is not a state. In Portugal, these are still
early days for the coalition of socialists, communists and radical
leftists who squeezed through the constitutional hoops to gain power
in November. But the price of the inclusion of the radical left in
government was its prior commitment to honour Portugal’s debt
repayments.Paradoxically, a mixture of realpolitik and the absence of
monetary sovereignty has forced the radical left into a space that
looks a lot like the answer to the question: a non-neoliberal
social-democracy for the networked world.
If we consider what
social democracy originally signified, it comes closer still: the
workers’ parties that emerged in the 1890s chose the word
sozialdemokrat, knowing it was a term of insult for Marxists. It
meant relegating revolution, and the abolition of capitalism, to the
status of a distant “maximum” goal, while being prepared to run
capitalism in a more socially just way, according to a “minimum”
programme of reforms.
Whatever Podemos,
Syriza and Corbyn’s Momentum movement say they want, what they are
actually proposing fits quite well with the maximum-minimum programme
of the 1890s, except in one regard: the “maximum” goal has become
woolly and centred around environmental targets rather than planned
production and state ownership.
But this is not a
steady-state solution. Politics in the developed world is challenging
centrist structures from both right and left. With rightwing
nationalism and social conservatism achieving, in many countries,
about 25%, and the radical left pushing close to the same, there may
not be room for more than one pro-global, pro-market centrist force
in between the two.
It won’t happen
suddenly, but the most likely outcome for European social democracy
is the one being secretly contemplated on the Labour backbenches: a
fusion with liberalised conservatism. So 2016 will be the year in
which the true believers of centrist socialism will hear the message:
“You can’t beat us, join us” from all sides.
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