Sunday, May 19, 2013
The Rise of a New Left - speech at the Subversive Festival posted by Richard Seymour
I spoke at the Subversive Festival in Zagreb on Friday. I think the video will go online at some point, but because I spoke too fast I promised to post the transcript of what I said online. I also append my notes from what the other speakers - Haris Golemis, Francine Mestrum, and Waltraud Fritz Klackl - said.
I have to say, parenthetically, that the city went mental for the festival. The tourist board and local hotels were in on it, there were banners across main streets in the centre, there was a raft of institutional and media sponsorship - even, dare I say it, corporate sponsorship. There were some big names, Oliver Stone, Zizek, Tsipras, etc - but mostly people were there for the high minded leftist debate. Given how long the festival went on for, and given the easy distractions of the cafe culture - cafes with big outdoor awnings everywhere - it was remarkable that it was sustained.
Most of the below will be familiar to regular readers.
_________________________________________________________________________
I think the title of this talk, The Rise of a
New Left, is clearly to some extent projection of a desired outcome; of course,
there are elements of a New Left visible.
Not just the indignados and occupiers, but also the radical left
challengers: Syriza, the Portugese Left Bloc, Die Linke, the Scandinavian
Red-Green alliances, Front de gauche, maybe some elements of the Pirate
Parties...
Still, we have to begin by acknowledging that
we are speaking from the waste ground of a world-historic defeat that is, even
at this moment, being inflicted on us. I say this right off because there is too much
invested in the abstract idea of resistance - look at the beautiful sparks of
resistance, if only we have more resistance, then the problems can be
solved. Of course, there has been
resistance, social movements, strike waves, quite remarkable events - the Arab
Spring, the Occupy movement, student rebellions, riots, near-insurgency levels
of strikes and protests in Greece. Yet,
one outstanding fact is that not one serious defeat has been inflicted on
austerity, not one.
And the neoliberalism which we all hoped was
going to experience an emaciating crisis when the credit crunch struck in 2007,
and especially when the idols of Wall St from Lehman Brothers to Bear Sterns
started to crumble, lives and thrives.
Far from being weakened, it has adapted and come back more coherent in
its objectives, more daring, and more successful.
Of course, the current success of the
ruling classes is no surety of their future success. Our present predicament is no guarantee of
ongoing failure. But we have to drop the
consolatory notions - that the fight hasn't really begun yet, wait until next
year, you'll see. We have been waiting
five years for a win. Syriza is the
closest we have seen, a point I'll return to.
Or, we hear that however weak we are, the ruling class is also weak. In
some respects they are. Ideologically,
the traditional parliamentary parties are weak, and the traditional sources of
authority are diminishing. The dominant
conservative and social democratic forces are degenerating. But the ruling class's control over markets,
their colonisation of all the major state apparatuses, their command of the
dominant institutions, the dominant media, the academic and ideological
mainstream, and so on, stands in stark contrast to the Left's paucity of
infrastructure, its lack of institutional
advantage, its disarray, its dumbfounded attempts at analysis, the disorganised
state of the working class underpinning it, the morbid symptoms arising from
the secular decline of social democracy and the trade unions.
There's a
tendency to enthuse about various substitutions - social media will make up for
our lack of an infrastructure, forgetting that its 'individuating', commodifying
tendencies pose as many problems as are solved by the creative autonomy
facilitated by social media; or, we suppose that a new class of degraded
subjects, the urban poor in the US, the graduates with no future in the Middle
East and Europe, or relatedly the 'precariat', will make up for the
degeneration of the organised working class; or, as mentioned above, the
weakness of our opponents will make up for our weakness and give us a more
level playing field. I think all of this is dangerously complacent and
delusional.
I don't think the answer to this crisis is
simply to bet on more 'resistance' 'kicking off'. It isn't kicking off everywhere There's a real problem here. We should expect as materialists that a
crisis of capitalism would also be a crisis of the Left. Insofar as we have built up our patterns of
self-reproduction in the existing spaces of capitalism - say in student
politics, the public sector, manufacturing workers, etc - a crisis necessarily
threatens to erode the bases for our ongoing existence. We have to find a new way to develop if we
are even to continue to exist.
Eventually, this crisis is going to be resolved in some way - probably
to the massive disadvantage of workers and the Left. The pieces of the kaleidoscope will fall into
place, as it were. What is then left is
quite plausibly what we will have to work with for a generation or so. So what we do now, counts for a lot. And we have found ourselves torn between
inertia and hyper-activism, the latter often covering up for the former, while
basically getting nowhere. This is not
to say that none of what we have done is worthwhile - it is to say that we have
been impeded by old catechisms and fetishes that prevent us from seeing what is
new,
I won't focus here on why neoliberalism has
proved far more resilient than any of us expected. On this, I recommend three books: The Making of
Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin; In and Out of Crisis, by Greg Albo, Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch; and Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To
Waste, by Philip Mirowski. Rather, I
want to look past the Left's strategic perplexity for a second, and try to find
the seeds of a possible solution in what we've been doing for the last five
years.
***
I think three types of strategic orientation
for the Left have emerged in the folds of this crisis. The first is that signified by the
autonomist-inflected democratic movement of the indignados, Occupy and so
on. This is based fundamentally on the
idea of claiming a visible space - the idea of protest as communication - then
using it to organise a form of communal democracy - the idea of protest as
prefiguration - and then letting it become a launch pad for other forms of
direct action - the idea of protest as disruption. I think this was enormously fruitful, but it
has run into the problem that visible spaces are not necessarily the
strategically most important spaces to control and, anyway, the authorities
didn't take that long to figure out ways to smash our protests up. Our disruptive capacities, and our resilient
capacities, turned out to be too weak in this case. The second is a more traditional strike-led
approach, in which it is hoped that through the exertion of working class
muscle in the public sector, the rank and file will gain in confidence and
their militancy will encourage other workers to start organising. This is not so new, and it relies on the idea
that there is a rank and file or a vanguard waiting to fulfil such a role. Nonetheless, I see this strike-led approach
as containing a necessary part of a viable strategy.
The third, which has posed serious dilemmas
for us, is the strategy of building radical left parties to occupy the terrain
vacated by a declining social democracy.
The dilemmas are familiar - how far does one end up moving to the Right
in order to be elected? Once elected, what will one have to do to maintain a
functional government? How much pressure
from the dominant forces both inside and outside the state apparatuses can one
withstand? Already, we have seen Tsipras
move to the Right on a number of issues, and attempting to placate
Washington. The Dutch Socialist Party
moved sharply to the Right before the last election and did very poorly anyway. And of course we should remember the debacle
of Rifondazione, collaborating with a centre-left government and implementing
both neoliberal policies and imperialist policies, then diving into historical
oblivion at the next election.
But just because these are dilemmas doesn't
mean we can avoid posing the question - the question of alliances, political
representation and governmental power (not the same thing as state power). It was once possible to say that between the
old reformist parties and the far left, there was nothing. This period, marked by the long-term
decomposition of once dominant social democratic parties, is quite different. A
typical feature of emerging radical left parties and coalitions is the
involvement of a left breakaway from the old reformist parties, as well as a
realignment of some of the Communist parties associated with them. There is a
structural gap between what such forces represent on the ground and what they
can project in elections, which makes any success extremely fragile.
Nonetheless, today there are quite serious forces between us and social
democracy. And in the circumstances, this is no bad thing
Syriza, the Greek radical left party, was the
first radical left party to get within reach of taking power, but it is
unlikely to be the last. For, unlike in
previous crises, this process is marked by the long-term decomposition of once
dominant social democratic parties. This
is one reason why a consistent feature of the New Left parties is the
involvement of a left breakaway from the old centre-left parties. Amid the breakdown of the old, there has been
a profusion of the new: red-green alliances, pirate parties, neo-communist
parties, and anticapitalist coalitions.
They strive toward unity, recognising their fragmentation as a weakness. Often this plea for unity is pivoted on the
question of governmental power. Syriza
won mass support in Greece on a slogan calling for a united Left government to
block austerity measures. That same
demand is likely to resonate in other situations, where austerity combines with
political instability.
However, as I've said, there is also a
profound fragility about this. Syriza’s
basis in Greek society, for example, has hitherto been relatively shallow. Yet it is now potentially a government in
waiting. The anticapitalists around
Olivier Besancenot in France, whether in the form of the Ligue communist
revolutionaire (LCR) or the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste (NPA), represented a
groupuscule in terms of their real social weight, but could muster up to 10% in
parliamentary elections - before, of course, being out-manoeuvred and overtaken
by the Front de gauche (FG).
I actually think this is not limited to the
electoral terrain, it is a feature of the conjuncture. When you think about how very small and
unrepresentative groups can suddenly project disproportionate influence in
situations like student movements or occupations, it is clear that this is
because the breakdown of the old hegemonic forces of the Left has not yet
resulted in any clear successor. This is
partly a problem though, of course, the unpredictability presents opportunities
for us.
***
Well, I think if we want to see a New Left
emerging from this, we need to change the relationship between these strategic
elements.
First of all, we need to
recognise the limits of a strike-led strategy based on public sector
workers. These groups of workers are too
narrow for the most part, and their conditions of work too atypical, for them
to transcend the 'economic-corporate' moment by themselves and become the
vanguard of a counter-hegemonic movement.
Their strikes, while important, are going to be largely defensive. Given what neoliberalism has wrought, we have
to stop identifying the working class with its organised minority, and start
think about strategies for organising the unorganised workers, and that
includes confronting the problem of precarity.
Second, we need to go beyond the
utopian moment of Occupy, and think about how we can deploy its principles of
communicative, prefigurative and disruptive power. So, for example, one might ask, is there a
way that we can introduce these principles into a new labour movement, one
based on the ideas of social movement unionism?
Third, we need to see think of these radical left formations not as
better, upgraded versions of the old social democratic left. One problem with social democracy was that
it always tended to rely on a degree of political passivity in its base. It would support a limited degree of
'economic' action by trade unionists, but political action had to be strictly
channelled through the controlled, top-down structures of social
democracy. And there would certainly be
a temptation for any radical left formation, particularly once in office, to
try to use any social depth or influence that it attained to try to politically
control its supporters in order to allow it to translate its ideas into the
language of state policy, which would mean all sorts of compromises and
betrayals. These formations should not
be captivated by electoralism, nor should elections be conflated with politics
as such. Rather, we need to develop
parties with a much broader repertoire of political actions - including the
sorts of actions that would not be good for an electoral strategy, but which
can be said to enhance the wider objectives of the movement.
_________________________________________________________________________
After this, Haris Golemis (Nicos Poulantzas Institute, central committee of Syriza) introduced a discussion of Syriza that differed from my approach in a few respects. First of all, he suggested that while the main question in 2009 was why the radical left was not increasing its influence amid a profound capitalist crisis, this was no longer the question at least in parts of Europe - Greece, Spain, Portugal, and France had seen leftist upsurges. Second, he offered an analysis of the reasons for Syriza's growth and success, which wouldn't be familiar to most readers - the destabilisation of the parliamentary system, the erosion of Pasok's base, the social movements influenced by Tahrir Square, social resistance by trade unions and unorganised workers, Syriza's role in the movements, its opposition to a 'government of national unity', its principled call for a government of the left, opposition to the memorandum and support for renegotiating the debt based on substantial debt repudiation and a 'growth clause' similar to that reached with West Germany after WWII. He defended the stance on Europe, which he characterised by referring to the slogan 'not one sacrifice for the euro, but no illusions in the drachma', but acknowledged that Antarsya's call for an exit was supported by a left-wing within Syriza. And he added that despite the problem with relying on charismatic leaders, Tsipras's persona played an important role. He concluded that the success of the radical left in Greece was perhaps due to a series of phenomena as singular as that leading to a meeting of two planets; but if it is replicable, the extra-Greek Left should support Syriza and try to creatively apply some of its lessons. Later he added that he didn't think Tsipras's trip to Washington was necessarily a bad thing: it was just sensible to exploit inter-imperialist rivalries.
Waltraud Fritz Klackl (European Left Party secretariat) commented briefly on the development of the European Left Party, and added a few points on the idea of a 'New Left'. She argued that at the centre of the current struggles was the problem of political
representation. For those looking to build left parties, it was necessary to move beyond the concept
of representation and think along the lines of providing a political space
*including* representation where people who want to meet and take action. She added that it was right to address such a project to the organised minority of workers, and to the 'precariat', but said that it was also necessary to somehow include
the 'excluded' who are turning their backs on any party, left or right - unlike the 'precariat, who may often be well-educated, the 'excluded' are denied
education and services, and are ironically often the ones who are often brought into the
bargain against the Left. It was necessary to offer such people a place where they
can find themselves again: we need to build
alliances around these stratas of society, or
we lose the fight for sure. She added that while the left is rising, it is not adequate and not uniform across Europe. Addressing herself to my comments, she pointed out that it would be wrong to appropriate the social movements for the Left: not all
indignados are on the Left; these movements we cannot claim as such. Regarding
political power, she argued that we must not refuse to take governmental power; it is different now, of course,
because managing the state is not the same as before, because you have fewer
possibilities; the political class has much less before than ever before. But we
need to fight for it because real democracy cannot be split from
power. All very well, she said, for the indignados to experiment with direct democracy, but
this has nothing to do with having power.
It is pedagogical. Later, commenting further on the question of representation, she said that she thought people had a right to be passive if they wanted: that people have the right to be at home, and read a book, and rely on representatives to carry out their agenda. She said that she was suspicious of the idea of democracy based exclusively on active participation, as if being an activist should give your voice for weight.
Francine Mestrum (Belgian sociologist, activist) explained that she had never belonged to any of the left parties, and that her frustration with these had to do with the fact that left-wing people begin by interpreting a desire for change as a desire for socialism. And since it is not clear that most people want socialism, and since no one has defined what it is, it makes more sense to focus on what we need to do right now. She argued that our main enemy is not institutions, it
is an ideology, it is neoliberalism, it is capitalism: in that fight, we may
find we have to change institutions, but we do not start off by seeing institutions as the problem. But
if you want to fight an ideology, she added, we need power. How do we get that power? The audience for the Left is not that large in
Europe, so how can we enlarge that audience: what kind of change do
people want now? She explained that beginning with the obvious needs that people had - jobs, healthcare, pensions - she started to work on rethinking the idea of
social protection. Whatever regime you have, people need protection: the Right offers it traditionally in the form of police, and the
military; the Left, traditionally through socioeconomic rights. But then, by posing the question of security, this forces you to think about
changing the mode of production, and the form of democracy. Social protection has to come from the grassroots,
since people have to express what their needs are.
If you start from social protection, people's needs, you start to find
yourself forced into transformative agenda. She acknowledged that for a New Left, we need both democracy and power - but we should not forget that we already have power, that we are not powerless, and we should make use of the spaces we have.
1:32:00 pm |
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