Between Class and Discourse: Left Intellectuals in Defence of Capitalism 0367478080, 9780367478087

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Between Class and Discourse: Left Intellectuals in Defence of Capitalism

This provocative book addresses the ideological and political crisis of the Western left, comparing it with the problems facing leftist politics in Russia and other countries. The author presents a radical critique of the current state of the Western left which puts discourse above class interest and politics of diversity above politics of social change. The trajectory away from class politics towards feminism, minority rights and the coalition of coalitions led to the destruction of the basic strategic pillars of the movement. Some elements of this broad progressive agenda became mainstream, but in fact this made the crisis of the left even deeper and contributed to the disintegration of the left’s identity. The author demonstrates that a simple return to “the good old times” of classical socialist politics of the industrial age is not possible, suggesting that class politics must be redefined and reinvented through the experience of new radical populism. This book speaks directly to the way the identity politics/class politics divide has been framed within the English-speaking world. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of political science and political sociology, international relations, security studies and global studies, as well as socialist activists. Boris Kagarlitsky is Professor at The Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (Shaninka), Russia. He is the author of Back in the USSR (2009) and From Empires to Imperialism: The State and the Rise of Bourgeois Civilisation (2014).

Rethinking Globalizations Edited by Barry K. Gills University of Helsinki, Finland

Kevin Gray University of Sussex, UK

This series is designed to break new ground in the literature on globalization and its academic and popular understanding. Rather than perpetuating or simply reacting to the economic understanding of globalization, this series seeks to capture the term and broaden its meaning to encompass a wide range of issues and disciplines and convey a sense of alternative possibilities for the future. BRICS and MICs: Implications for Global Agrarian Transformation Edited by Ben Cousins, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Sergio Sauer and Jingzhong Ye Migration, Civil Society and Global Governance Edited by Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Branka Likic-Brboric, Raúl Delgado Wise and Gülay Toksöz Authoritarian Neoliberalism Philosophies, Practices, Contestations Edited by Ian Bruff and Cemal Burak Tansel The Redesign of the Global Financial Architecture State Authority, New Risks and Dynamics Stuart P. M. Mackintosh Challenging Inequality in South Africa Transitional Compasses Edited by Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar Between Class and Discourse: Left Intellectuals in Defence of Capitalism Boris Kagarlitsky For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Rethinking-Globalizations/book-series/RG

Between Class and Discourse: Left Intellectuals in Defence of Capitalism Boris Kagarlitsky

First published in English 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Boris Kagarlitsky Translated by Renfrey Clarke The right of Boris Kagarlitsky to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Published in Russian by HSE Publishing House 2018 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-47808-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-03658-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Introduction 1

The logic of fragmentation

1 15

The cult of the creative idler 16 Globalisation and labour 20 The revolt of the elites 23 The rebellious periphery 27 The adaptation of the intellectuals 31 Feminism and other identities 38 The political economy of migration 42 The schism of the left 50 The “lesser evil” 56 2

Europe versus the European Union

64

The comfortable catastrophe of Syriza 65 A minor shock in Germany 79 Brexit 85 The revolt against the institutions 95 3

The era of populism

102

The return of mass politics 102 The experience of Latin America 107 The Corbyn phenomenon 113 The strengths and weaknesses of populism 120 4

The lessons of America The Sanders phenomenon 126 The price of vacillation 133

126

vi Contents After Philadelphia 134 The cruel revenge of the American working class 138 The left against the workers 143 The contradictions of Trump 146 5

France: from republic to oligarchy

153

Playing at resistance 153 Intellectual corruption 156 The rise of Marine Le Pen 159 The crisis of the establishment parties 163 The revenge of the establishment 165 6

Unreasonable rationality

171

Stability and protests 171 The Ukrainian shock 174 Ukraine and the split in the left 178 The Navalny effect 182 7

Overcoming the crisis of thought, in order to begin to act

185

New policies for a changing economy 185 From populism to a new historic bloc 188 The road to change 191 Conclusion

195

Index

199

Introduction

In the final months of 2007, a series of financial crises destabilised the economy of the United States. After Lehman Brothers, one of the five largest American banks, had tipped into bankruptcy, a panic similar to the one in 1929 that had marked the beginning of the Great Depression broke out in the stock markets. As was to be expected, the recession in the US called forth analogous calamities around the globe. In 2008 a slump in production gripped the main expanses of the world economy, with the exceptions only of China and of a few East Asian countries in which growth continued as if from inertia. Initially, it appeared as though the scenario of the Great Depression was being repeated. By the summer of 2009, however, the situation in the markets had stabilised. This had been achieved through active state intervention; the government and Federal Reserve System in the US had provided the banks with trillions of dollars to meet their current commitments and to prevent further bankruptcies. While still declaring their faith in the principles of private enterprise and the free market, the governments of leading countries deliberately resorted to nationalisation. China set in motion an unprecedented program of building infrastructure and new cities. No one travelled along the roads that had been constructed under this program, and no one lived in the cities that had been built in order to take advantage of the funds that were being handed out. Nevertheless, desperate measures such as these made it possible to increase global demand. Since the precipitate decline had ended by 2010, and the world and US economies had begun to record growth, even if this was exceedingly weak, the experts and politicians made haste to declare that the crisis was over. The calamities that had transpired were dubbed the “Great Recession”, letting it be understood that however dramatic the events involved, they were short term and in essence did not extend outside the framework of the standard market cycle. Meanwhile, the crisis was still far from having run its course. The Moldavian historian and political figure Mark Tkachuk wrote in 2015 that although the events of the preceding years had totally discredited the dominant paradigms of liberal-bourgeois thought, paradigms that earlier had appeared obvious and unshakeable, there was no basis for speaking of the triumph of any new ideology or paradigm of development: We are now witnessing the sole possible, completely predictable reaction to this historic challenge. This reaction is revealing itself in the form of

2 Introduction conservative quests for a bygone greatness, in attempts by people to shut themselves off, to isolate themselves, to hide from reality, to find refuge in a contrived reconstruction of things that have never existed – of radical Islam, of Orthodox fundamentalism, of a common European mentality, of an eternal conflict between East and West, north and South.1 Although all the predictions and warnings issued by critics of the neoliberal economic order have been confirmed with exceptional accuracy, Tkachuk notes, there is no basis for maintaining that the recent crisis has altered existing global strategies. Each in its own fashion, the ruling elites have adapted readily to the current state of affairs, and have advanced unhesitatingly to meet the constructed world that, as explained earlier, has turned out not to be ours, and not to be new either.2 The measures undertaken by the ruling elites as they sought to stabilise the crisis transformed an abrupt downturn into drawn-out degradation, creating a “new normal” in which, even at the level of popular consciousness, the premonition arose that if today was worse than yesterday, tomorrow would be even worse than today. The crisis changed its shape, shifting to a new level and a new stage. The policy enacted by the state of systematically rescuing private banks and other companies resulted merely in the crisis of corporate finances turning into a crisis of government budget deficits. State organs in turn found no other way to stabilise their financial positions apart from implementing harsh austerity measures at the expense of the majority of workers. In this way, a radical redistribution of funds took place from the middle classes and the poor of society to the corporative and financial elites. The economic crisis was stabilised at the cost of strengthening the preconditions for social and political crises. Under the conditions of globalisation, the financial centres were effectively able to shift their problems onto the periphery, and this in turn resulted in the weaker and more dependent countries becoming sunk in profound depression, exacerbating the serious debt crisis. This applied not only to the so-called outer periphery of the West (the former colonial and dependent countries that in the 1960s had come to be termed the “Third World”) but also to the “internal periphery” of the European Union – the states that had been integrated belatedly into this club of developed countries. Ireland and the countries of Southern Europe, which a few years earlier had been cited by experts as examples of successful development and modernisation, found themselves on the verge of bankruptcy. The European financial system, of which these countries had become part, fell into a situation of unremitting turbulence in which short-term relief measures adopted by one country or another merely prepared the way for a new spiral of financial instability in the immediate, highly predictable future. The eurozone, the unified currency area that shortly before had been an object of pride for bankers and bureaucrats, became transformed into the source of countless problems. From the very moment when the euro was introduced as a

Introduction 3 common monetary unit for countries with extremely diverse economies and social structures, experts had warned that financial integration along these lines, despite initially stimulating consumer demand (through providing citizens of relatively poor countries with credits from more developed states), would lead ultimately to a serious destabilisation of the entire system. These prophecies now came to pass and in the most radical fashion. In order to maintain the exchange rate of the euro in relation to the dollar, the European Central Bank was forced systematically to strangle the economies of less prosperous countries that were simply unable to make ends meet in a situation of artificially low inflation. The result was that countries that already lagged behind the leaders of European integration were cast back even further, with no chance of catching up with their more fortunate partners. The difficulties that the European Union was experiencing then impelled its political and business leaders onto the road of foreign expansion, and this led swiftly to a confrontation with Russia. In Moscow in the first years of the new century, any foreign policy apart from one based on partnership with Western Europe, viewed not only as an economic partner and purchaser of raw materials but also as a counterweight to American global hegemony, had been inconceivable. By the middle of the next decade, Russia and the European Union were involved in a fierce confrontation arising out of a struggle for influence over the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Moldavia and Belarus. For Russia’s ruling circles, the confrontation with the West served as a priceless means of explaining away their growing internal difficulties that in fact stemmed from the dominant economic and social order shared both by our country and by the West. Even before 2014, when the conflict in Ukraine broke out, all of the leading non-Western economies – the states of Latin America, and then Russia and China – had begun experiencing problems. The dynamic governing the development of the crisis, however, was not even or synchronous. In the upshot, the dilemmas of particular countries turned into success and growing influence for others, only for it to be quickly revealed just how premature the celebrations in the latter states had been. The economic slump of 2008–2010 in the US and Western Europe, occurring against a background of relative stability in China, India and Brazil, altered the global relationship of forces, creating the illusion in these countries that they could transform themselves into new centres of the world capitalist system. As a result of the measures adopted to rescue and stimulate the US banking industry, financial markets were flooded with dollars. The funds supplied to the corporations never reached the ordinary consumer and failed to stimulate demand. Instead, they poured into speculative markets and into foreign investments in countries where quick profits could be made. The eventual result was to spur growth not only in the economies of China and Brazil but also in raw materials prices. Speculative buying and selling on the oil market ensured artificially high economic growth indices in Russia, whose ruling strata perceived this as evidence of their own success. The elites of Russia, China, India and Brazil, once they had overcome the initial panic stirred by the events of 2008, were inclined to make use of the crisis in order to reconfigure the global relationship of political forces to their advantage.

4 Introduction Providing a basis for such hopes were not just the just the comparatively high growth rates of industry in these countries (especially when compared with the stagnation in the West) but also the scale of the production that was occurring, the relative stability of the various national currencies and the dimensions of the countries’ internal markets. Also playing a part were the claims made by these states to regional hegemony. All of the countries listed remained regional leaders, possessing significant military, political and intellectual potential. Western journalists combined these countries into a single group referred to by the acronym BRIC: Brazil, Russia, India and China. Later, they added South Africa, after which the group came to be known as BRICS. The leaders of these countries met the journalists’ discovery with great seriousness and set about conducting multilateral consultations, holding summit-level meetings and launching joint projects. Decisions were taken to organise a joint bank and other bodies intended ultimately to become, if not a replacement for the system of institutions founded by the West after the Second World War, then at least a supplement to it. But despite the constantly heard criticism of the existing world order, it remained quite unclear how this order was to be replaced and on what basis it would be reformed. This contradiction was an altogether natural consequence of the position of the ruling classes and dominant elites of the BRICS countries. On the one hand, they sought to enhance their status within the global system, but on the other, they were themselves the offspring of this system and part of it, while their policies in relation to their own peoples, their methods of accumulating and employing capital, and also the means they used for maintaining their power were in no way an alternative to the order that had been implanted throughout the world in the course of the neoliberal reforms. Hopes that the BRICS countries would become a new collective locomotive for the world economy, dragging it onto a new trajectory of growth, and perhaps also its hegemon were preserved right up to the end of 2014, when a fresh wave of crises swept across these states as well. The currencies of all these countries began to experience growing difficulties, and to lose their value, while enterprises shut down and levels of consumption fell. Overcoming the global crisis proved impossible; all the measures adopted served merely to shift it from one world economic zone to another. Paradoxically, the main reason for the “tenacity” of the crisis and for the difficulty of surmounting it was the stability of the political and social system set in place by the leading world powers. Although the source of the crisis had been the exhaustion of the possibilities for economic growth within the framework of the neoliberal model of capitalism that had prevailed since the 1990s, the political and social institutions everywhere were so durable that they effectively blocked all attempts at substantial change. The system kept on reproducing itself even after its economic and social foundations had been exploded. Despite this, every successive cycle of reproduction served merely to exacerbate the crisis. Short-term problems were dealt with through an increase in the socioeconomic disproportions and a strengthening of all the contradictions not only in a long-term but even a medium-term framework. Since the reproduction process no

Introduction 5 longer worked predictably, additional resources were constantly required if equilibrium was to be preserved. These resources had to come from somewhere, and the ruling circles thus reacted to the crisis by imposing austerity policies that allowed them to maintain the reproduction of large-scale capital through an ever-more massive extraction of resources from the main strata and classes of society (including a considerable section of the bourgeoisie). Simultaneously, the demand arose for a new wave of geopolitical and geo-economic expansion essential for meeting the needs of the capitals of the countries making up the Western “centre”. With the entire world, excepting only Cuba, North Korea and the swamps of tropical Africa, already incorporated into the system of global capitalism and living by its rules, this expansion could take the form only of a “return” or “revisiting”, in which countries that had already been subjected to neoliberal reconstruction were compelled to undergo it again, this time in still more harsh and radical varieties. Ireland, the countries of Southern and Eastern Europe, and the republics of the former Soviet Union, all of which earlier had inserted themselves more or less successfully into the world system, now came under growing pressure, not just economic but also political. Meanwhile, the compromises and social mechanisms that at an earlier stage had lent resilience to the established social order were blown apart. In parallel fashion, the terms of the compromise between local and global elites, between the ruling classes of the centre and periphery, also came under review. The resources that earlier had remained at the disposal of the rulers on the periphery were now required to be yielded up to the rulers at the centre. On the ideological level, this shift found its expression in the sudden, extreme preoccupation that the Western ruling groups suddenly began to show with the corruption and authoritarianism of peripheral governments and oligarchies. The politico-economic restructuring needed in order to resolve such problems would mean the inevitable replacing of local elites who retained a relatively high level of autonomy. Substituted for them would be teams of administrators under the direct control of international institutions, of transnational corporations and of supra-state formations, the most notable of them the European Union. Ultimately, this approach became increasingly dominant with relation to the Western countries themselves, and this in turn gave rise to a new wave of dissatisfaction and conflict. Since the political systems of the leading countries preserved their stability, the system began to collapse “from the edges” in states with weak institutions, from Egypt to Ukraine. These revolts and revolutions were inspired by extremely diverse ideas, ranging from progressive, democratic and left wing to nationalist and reactionary.3 But what these upheavals had in common was that in countries with weak, dependent economies, lacking their own state traditions and with undeveloped political cultures and disorganised societies, they failed to open up perspectives for realising new models of development able to provide an impulse for change in the rest of the world. The revolts, insurrections and revolutions carried out a work of destruction, but as soon as the question of positive, creative work arose, they met with failure. The political earthquakes were followed by reactionary offensives after which, with only rare exceptions,4 the new authorities (if these managed to consolidate themselves at all) turned out to be worse than the

6 Introduction old. Political and social relations finished up in a state of chronic instability from which escape proved impossible, and a new logic of social reproduction was not established. Not only the oppressed masses but also significant layers of the bourgeoisie began to experience growing stress, which developed into a need to resist the policies being pursued. This resistance, for the most part of a forced and inconsistent character, spread throughout the world. While in 2014 the zones of instability and confrontation were Greece and Ukraine, in 2016 acute political and social conflicts developed in the United States, France and Great Britain. The “Great Recession” was no more than an episode in a far more profound and larger-scale historical drama, whose significance and consequences may prove to be no less than in the case of the events of 1929–1932. What is now occurring may be termed the “Great Crisis”. Ultimately, the striving by the ruling elites of the leading countries to defend, at any price, the neoliberal model of capitalism that had been undermined economically by the crisis after 2008, led to a gradual but unremitting growth of political instability which, by the end of 2016, had been transformed into a sort of global revolutionary situation. The institutions impeding changes whose time had come were doomed to fall not just because they had turned into a brake on the development of society but also for the reason that in attempting to preserve themselves unchanged, they merely deepened the crisis, weakening the underlying conditions for their own existence and reproduction. Everywhere, maintaining the political system unchanged required measures that brought about a destabilisation of social relations, and this in turn reduced to a minimum the chances that the political system would survive. In these circumstances, the political crisis inevitably took the form of a huge social convulsion, and the question of whether the masses of one or another country were prepared for such a turn of events, of whether the objective and subjective preconditions for revolutionary change had ripened there, became secondary. This was because society after society, and country after country, had been drawn into the whirlpool of a global crisis, irrespective of their will or of their readiness for change. But in the same degree as the objective dynamic of the collapse of the neoliberal model revealed itself on a world level, the bankruptcy of the notorious subjective factor, as embodied in the left and anticapitalist movements, parties and organisations inherited from the previous stage of the development of capitalism, also became obvious. The problem could not be reduced to organisational weakness or to ideological backwardness or to the “unpopularity” of left-wing ideas, discredited by the defeat of the Soviet Union, by the Stalinist repressions, or by the failure of other socialist projects. To the contrary, the endless references to these facts and circumstances were no more than a convenient justification that concealed a far more serious drama. It was by no means a lack of new ideas that transformed the members of the left into helpless observers of the crisis that was unfolding around them. Indeed, as soon as various politicians became ready to appeal seriously to traditional ideas and slogans of the workers’ and socialist movements, ranging from nationalisation

Introduction 7 to the fight for a welfare state, these politicians scored successes with astonishing speed, rapidly winning hundreds of thousands and at times millions of new supporters even while lacking a firm organisational base. This is what happened with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the British Labour Party, and with the sudden transformation of Bernie Sanders, a little-known senator from the state of Vermont, into one of America’s leading political figures. These very breakthroughs, however, demonstrated with particular acuteness the systemic weakness of the left, whose members turned out to be unprepared for the new situation and who were confused and frightened by it to a significantly greater degree than were the members of the ruling class. Concealed behind the organisational and ideological weakness was a quite different, far larger and more tragic problem involving a fatal rupture between the left and society, with the transformation of the left political and intellectual “class” into an organic part of the liberal project, and the hopeless marginalisation of all those who were unready or unwilling to subscribe to this project. The political regime that has become established in the developed European countries and in the US is not, of course, authoritarian, but neither is it democratic in the sense to which society became accustomed during the twentieth century. It may be termed liberal post-democracy.5 A fundamental principle of such a regime is the open and often even demonstrative ignoring of public opinion and the will of the majority at the same time as all the formalities and procedures of democracy are observed. Ultimately, the ignored and systematically humiliated majority is forced to express its will and defend its interests outside the bounds of the official democratic institutions that have finished up being privatised by a privileged group of politicians divided only conditionally into right and left. The political basis for this system consists of mutual guarantees accepted by the bourgeois elites, accompanied by the unspoken (or sometimes explicit) complicity of members of the left who have long since been integrated into this system and have been corrupted by it. In essence, the democratic process is transformed into a simulative spectacle through which the results of decisions and compromises reached outside the public arena are given formal shape. As early as the 1960s, the French Philosopher Guy Debord wrote of the transformation of democracy into the “society of the spectacle”,6 referring to the growing power of television and to the banishing of content from public discussions, but at the same time, his use of the image was hyperbolic and cautionary rather than amounting to a description of an actual process train. Since the second half of the 1990s, however, Debord’s prophecy has started to be realised, and in the most tragic fashion. This is not so much because of the growing power of the mass media but because the ruling circles have succeeded in integrating into their system former protest leaders and intellectuals ‒ and often, too, mass organisations of working people, parties and trade unions, transforming reformist structures into collaborationist ones and stripping these social movements of any practical perspective. In this situation even the organising of protests becomes ritualised and loses its meaning, often pursuing the sole aim of “letting off steam”. Meetings and

8 Introduction demonstrations, along with angry press articles, are transformed in essence into additional methods for legitimising the decision taken by the elites since the organisers of such actions do not pose for themselves the task of blocking in practice the process they are criticising, but they are merely expressing their “attitude” towards it, something that fails to alter the essence of what is occurring in any way. After marching through the streets with placards and balloons, the crowds of the dissatisfied populace disperse to their homes, while the intellectuals, politicians and trade union leaders who have organised the procession return to their offices or resume sitting on parliamentary commissions together with their “ideological opponents”. From being a means of mobilising the masses in struggle against the policies of the elites, protest actions are transformed into a substitute for this struggle, into another spectacle devoid of any consequences for social reality. These actions do not implement any strategy of struggle or achieve any escalation or development. In this situation dissenters simply have “nowhere to go” and “no one to turn to” since the licensed fighters against the system are themselves part of it and often its most corrupted and shameless part. Nevertheless, escalation starts occurring spontaneously, set off by the rage and frustration of the masses that can no longer be kept within the framework of the roles assigned to them in the spectacle. The more open and flagrant the breaches of civil rights, the more radical the protests become. This inertia of protest begins to seize hold of particular representatives of the system who are prepared to risk their positions for the sake of new opportunities that are opening up or who are simply sick to death of their roles in an interminable, pointless spectacle. Meanwhile, people who have spent many years on the sidelines of the political process, remaining intra-systemic marginals, are suddenly transformed into leaders of mass movements, political figures of the first rank. The street takes the place of the parliamentary platform not because the dissatisfied masses have lost their desire to vote or to take part in official debates but because they are not admitted to these counsels; their rights and their wishes are blocked by the compact of the elites. The growth of the protest movements is answered in turn with repressive methods, and the system accuses the resisters of a lack of respect for the democratic procedures from which the system itself has excluded them. Typical examples of such situations are the protests against the denial of voting rights in the US or against the Labour Code in France in the spring of 2016. In both cases officialdom openly and demonstratively breached democratic procedures – closed polling stations, struck people off the electoral rolls, falsified vote tallies, or, as in France, enacted legislation while bypassing parliament. The judicial authorities did not react to this or reacted in a thoroughly listless fashion. The results of the rigged voting were allowed to stand even after the breaches had been acknowledged, and legislation was adopted in violation of democratic procedures entered into force. Unsurprisingly, this situation stirred further anger and radicalised the protests, after which the establishment press accused the protestors of “violence” and of “breaching democratic norms”. The people presented as enemies of democracy were not those who had openly committed outrages against the rights of citizens, but the citizens themselves, when the latter sought the restoration of their rights.

Introduction 9 Throughout most of the period since the collapse of the USSR, the main efforts of left thinkers have been aimed at seeking the most effective models for ideological adaptation to neoliberalism, which supposedly constitutes an “objectivity” that cannot be surmounted and that is subject to change only in a virtual world of cultural symbols or amid the clouds of an intellectual utopia, but never on the field of political action or in the struggle for power. Moreover, the very idea of a struggle for power has been consciously and systematically discredited as a holdover from the authoritarian culture of the past, while the class struggle has been transformed from a question of practical strategy to a source of nostalgic cultural images without any connection to politics. It was, of course, possible to support workers’ strikes and to declare one’s solidarity with the activity of trade unions, but this was all reduced effectively to activism in defence of human and civil rights, something fully compatible with the logic of neoliberalism. Collective struggle was reduced to mounting resistance to the excesses of the system, after any orientation to transforming the system, even in a reformist manner, had been lost. It is noteworthy that the very word “resistance”, elevated in tone and imbued with associations of antifascist struggle during the Second World War, came into fashion and ousted other terms from the vocabulary of the left. In 2016 British Marxist Alex Callinicos, contemplating the success of the radical left populist, Jeremy Corbyn, who to near-general astonishment came to head the Labour Party, emphasised that this success did not “do away with the classical dilemma concerning reform or revolution”. Callinicos stated that “the real test for revolutionary socialists” was the degree to which they were capable of uniting with everyone who supported Labour under the Corbyn leadership.7 The problem confronting the left was not the choice between abstract concepts of reform and revolution but the fact that in the existing historical situation neither the reformist nor the revolutionary wing of the movement could get by without the other. But were the radical socialists, who were calling constantly for a mobilisation of forces and for waging campaigns of every conceivable sort, capable of playing their part in the common cause? In the first instance, their part did not require the repetition of eloquent phrases but demanded that they carry on day-to-day work among the real masses whose views, sentiments, and most importantly, objective interests differed sharply from what the left-radical ideologues had attributed to them. The most important cultural lesson to be learnt from the Zapatista movement in Mexico in the 1990s was that after setting off into the backwoods of the state of Chiapas to create their “revolutionary focus”, the young big-city Marxists discovered how different their ideas of the people were from the real state of affairs in the Indian communities. Subcomandante Marcos and his comrades, who later became the leaders and ideologues of the Zapatistas, drew the correct conclusion from this and began to learn from the people whom, not long before, they had set out to teach. But the lesson of Zapatism was not assimilated, or more correctly, it was interpreted in the spirit dictated by the need to reject classical Marxist theory. This, incidentally, had its effect on the Zapatistas themselves, whose successes proved extremely limited. Making a turn to real dialogue with the masses

10 Introduction does not by any means signify a need to reject revolutionary tradition and theory but merely confirms that this theory constantly needs to develop on the basis of changing practical experience. Nor does it mean that the masses are invariably correct. In every respect, the life of the masses is steeped in prejudices, collective illusions and errors. The point is merely that one cannot solve a problem simply by stating a particular fact. If encountering an exotic Indian “other” forces a white intellectual to acknowledge his or her limitations (as a rule, in an excessively exalted form), then encountering people who represent a precisely similar “other” apart from belonging to the intellectual’s own race and nation evokes incomprehension at best, and more often is simply ignored. The misfortune of the members of today’s European left, however, is that culturally and socially they stand counterposed to the bulk of the population no less than big-city Mexican intellectuals are counterposed to the Indians of Chiapas. Unlike Subcomandante Marcos, unfortunately, they take no account of the degree to which they have turned out to be alienated from the very class whose interests they set out to defend. The passive presence of members of the left within the neoliberal system has given rise to a definite logic and culture of behaviour, one that is hostile not only and not so much to the existing order as it is to the spontaneous efforts, coming from below and hence invariably “incorrect”, of the offended masses to change this order. While rejecting Stalinist claims to exercise “vanguard” leadership of the masses “from outside”, the members of the left intelligentsia do not renounce in the least the habit of looking down on most of the population. The left intelligentsia has simply lost interest in the masses. While Antonio Gramsci in the 1930s called for the formation of a stratum of “organic intellectuals” linked indissolubly to the class, acting as a sort of medium and formulating mass interests in the language of politics and culture, a directly opposite principle has now triumphed involving the formation of a new intellectual elite who, unlike in the time of the Bolshevik revolution, makes not the slightest claim to act in the role of a vanguard. This elite has stood above the masses, considering it both impossible and undesirable to lead them or educate them and not displaying even the slightest interest in their thinking. The left intellectual elite has based its claims to competence and legitimacy not on the approval of the “uneducated” masses but on receiving recognition from elites who are a precise match for itself, except in being bourgeois. This “new opportunism”, however, has not been perceived in the least as a sign of moderation since its most important ideological and cultural component has been radical discourse, featuring a critique of capitalism that is brilliant and unremitting but that is not directed at the practical transformation of capitalism here and now. Consequently, the radicalism of transcendental goals has not only provided a justification for banal accommodation to the present order but also represents a sort of constant rebuke directed at the petty pragmatism of the masses, confronting everyday cares and tribulations. Worse still, many of these problems – for example, competition between local and migrant workers in the labour market ‒ have been declared to be fundamentally non-existent and consequently undeserving of the strategic consideration that might help solve the

Introduction 11 contradictions involved. If the source of the problem lies solely in the thinking of inadequately educated workers, then popularising correct slogans and publicly condemning racism and xenophobia will be enough to put it right. How the practical relations between workers belonging to different ethnic or religious communities take shape in this instance is of no significance. Of course, the problem cannot be reduced to the behaviour of members of the left since any model of behaviour is objectively confronted by various alternatives, less advantageous in the short term perhaps but also technically possible. The dominance of a new opportunism is augmented by the genuine weakness of the labour movement, a weakness that stems from the social, technological and economic changes that occurred during the last decade and a half of the twentieth century. Under the conditions of the globalised capitalism that triumphed following the collapse of the Soviet Union, hired labour in the traditional industrialised countries suffered defeat after defeat. The relocation of production undermined the familiar geography of the working class, while technological changes destroyed the accustomed socio-professional structure, not only in the developed countries of the West and in the states that succeeded the USSR but also in Asia and Latin America. The new geographic division of labour meant that workers who belonged to different groups by virtue of their professions and qualifications finished up being divided further by state boundaries. In the old developed countries, the demand for highly qualified labour remained, but the basis for its reproduction kept narrowing since significant numbers of jobs requiring mid-level qualifications were being exported to new industrialising countries. There, by contrast, the best qualified (and hence, also, most educated and organised) stratum of hired workers was extremely poorly represented. While the geographical gap between workers of middle and high qualification levels widened, unqualified workers and semi-proletarians who had no permanent workplace or dependable trade proved to be the most mobile, comprising an ever-increasing section of the working population in all parts of the world, including the wealthy countries. The production of computers might be transferred abroad, but the same could not be done with the cleaning of streets or the grilling of hamburgers. It was, however, possible to bring impoverished people to a rich country where they would perform this work for a pittance. The lowest stratum of hired workers, petty stall-holders and semiproletarians also finished up being divided above all on ethno-national lines as a result of the mass employment of migrants, who on the one hand lacked civil rights and on the other offered their labour power at cut rates, undermining the positions of the local population. As a result of these processes, the structure of society became increasingly unstable and diffuse. Class contradictions did not disappear but with every new stage of development of neoliberalism, grew more acute. The objective conflict of interests between labour and capital, however, did not mean an automatic consolidation of the working class or a strengthening of its social structure. To the contrary, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the working class had finished up far weaker and far less integrated than a century earlier. The strengthening of class contradictions still was not bringing with it the automatic creation of the

12

Introduction

conditions for class politics, resting on the corresponding grass-roots organisations, on recognised interests. All this needed to be worked on. Meanwhile the dominant ideology among members of the left was one that fostered the concept of “differences” instead of the principle of commonality and that counterbalanced the accustomed democracy of the majority with the cult of “minorities”. This not only failed to help solve the problem but exacerbated it. In one way or another, the accumulated protest was bound to burst through to the surface, expressing itself socially and politically. Nor is it surprising that it often manifested itself in forms unfamiliar to traditional political science, and especially to the left. The protest movements sometimes identified themselves as left wing, sometimes as right wing, and at times were completely incapable of self-identification. They had a variety of political trajectories. What all these movements had in common, however, was that in their ideological contradictoriness (and sometimes indistinctness) they reproduced the rickety and dilapidated structure of society. Uniting them was not ideology nor, alas, class consciousness but merely a sense, growing to the point where it was completely intolerable, that it was impossible for people to continue living as they had been doing. The masses became aware of the collapse of neoliberalism earlier and more powerfully than the intellectuals or the politicians. Or more accurately, they did not just become aware of it but felt it – on their own skins. Precisely at that moment, the left was confronted with a fundamental choice: what was the criterion of solidarity – class or culture? The lower orders of society were obviously less refined and far more susceptible to prejudices of every kind than their supposed superiors. Did this mean that members of the left who were true to their political culture should prefer the wellmannered bourgeois to the mass of vulgar, uneducated and less-than-politicallycorrect workers? Surprising as it may seem to people used to making political judgments on the basis of endlessly repeated ritual slogans, the answer appeared to a significant part of the left movement to be simple and self-evident: the educated and “civilised” elite with its “European values” needed to be defended from the “barbarous” and “irresponsible” masses, who were, alas, indifferent to those values. This situation reappeared again and again whenever the question arose of a popular insurrection in Novorossiya or of voting for Britain to leave the European Union, or when intellectuals in the US sought to persuade voters to support the establishment candidate Hillary Clinton in order to prevent the victory of the populist Donald Trump, or when in France radical leftists, in analogous fashion, called for defending the decrepit welfare state of the Socialists from the attacks of the National Front and then joined in supporting the hireling of finance capital Emmanuel Macron. In reality, the choice was of an implicit class character, despite this being concealed by various rhetorical devices intended to hide the contradiction between the point of departure ‒ that is, a theoretical critique of bourgeois society ‒ and the eventual destination, a defence in practice of the existing social order. One way or another, the latest schism occurred in the left movement, less spectacular than

Introduction 13 after the beginning of the First World War and in the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917, but no less acute. This time, it was not a split between the right and left wings of the movement or between revolutionaries and reformists. History posed the question differently and in a far more practical fashion. The political choice was not defined by the degree of radicalism of the goals and certainly not by the radicalism of the language employed. It was defined by solidarity. The choice was whether to support a mass uprising against neoliberalism while recognising that the masses are not always impelled by the most progressive ideas and benevolent emotions or to defend the existing order. The choice was not as simple as it might have seemed at first glance since the outrage of the masses at the perverted form of liberal democracy that held sway in most countries by the beginning of the twenty-first century was very often accompanied by the spread of authoritarian moods, by the demand for a “strong hand” and by hopes in a “leader” who could by no means be guaranteed to lead society to new heights of freedom and progress. The mass protest that was stirred by the Great Crisis was democratic in its essence but not always in its form. People everywhere were anxious not just to defend the welfare state, against which the neoliberal reforms of the preceding twenty-five years had been directed, but also to regain the possibility of determining their own fates. They were demanding respect for the rights of the majority but often had no idea of what they would do beyond this. Along with other rights usurped by the elites, the oppressed majority were ultimately demanding the return to them of the right to make mistakes. Any mass movement is heterogeneous, and such movements almost always include the most diverse elements, including authoritarian, reactionary ones. Any radical transformation also involves risk. It is precisely a readiness to accept the risks of change that ultimately determines the choice in favour of supporting a revolt of the masses – and consequently, to choose in favour of history. Attempts to defend a doomed social order are hopeless, and representatives of “progressive society” who make it their aim to defend this order are doomed to go down to defeat along with it, despite whatever eloquent words they might use to cover their actions. Solidarity with the worker masses, however, does not free one from moral responsibility or from the obligation to defend one’s views or from the necessity, in aiding the movement, to do everything possible to help it avoid mistakes – mistakes that will be more dramatic, the more heterogeneous, inconstant and unstable the movement’s social base. People who accept the challenge of history and who perceive its logic do not, by any means, always finish up victorious. But they at least have a chance.

Notes 1 M. Tkachuk, Gryadushchee proshloe. Tri esse o rozhdenii, gibeli i nadezhde [The approaching past: Three essays on birth, death and hope]. Kishinev: Stratum Plus, 2015, p. 249.

14

Introduction

2 Ibid., p. 211. 3 For an analysis of the “first wave” of uprisings and revolutions that arose out of the Great Crisis, see: Boris Kagarlitsky, Neoliberalism and revolution. St Petersburg: Poligraf, 2013. The term “Great Crisis” is used here by analogy with the Great Depression. 4 The sole instance in which the democratic upsurge in the Arab world during the period from 2010 to 2012 ended in success was the revolution in Tunisia, where the French political model was more or less reproduced. In the countries of the post-Soviet expanse, the situation was far worse – so long as the changes did not engulf Russia, the attempts to install a nationalist regime in Kiev, and the counterposed struggle for a socially oriented state of Novorossiya, were equally doomed. 5 The term “post-democracy” was introduced into modern political discussion by Colin Crouch. See: C. Crouch, Post-democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. 6 See: G. Debor, Obshchestvo spektaklya [The society of the spectacle]. Moscow: Opustoshitel’, 2014. 7 International Socialism, 2016, no. 152, p. 5.

1

The logic of fragmentation

The main victory secured by capital over labour around the beginning of the twenty-first century did not lie in the world-wide restraint of wage growth or in the general weakening of trade unions or even in the fact that left governments and parties of all stripes were forced to surrender their positions. The most significant victory of capital was ideological and consisted in the general acceptance that the changes that had taken place were “irreversible”. Neoliberalism imposed on society the hegemony of its ideas, and as a result, numerous political groups and currents, even ones that had zealously and sincerely criticised the ruling class, made their peace with this hegemony. Needless to say, this ideological victory reflected a changed relationship between the power of various social forces and classes, but at the same time, this temporarily established relationship of forces became set in the consciousness of the vanquished as something fixed and immutable with an objective existence. This revanche of capital was interpreted as the objective process of globalisation, viewed as acting in a manner that was at once neutral, positive and irresistible. This process did in fact have an objective existence, but only in the sense that it did not occur in a vacuum, having its own premises, conditions and limits (on the latter, naturally, the discussion surrounding globalisation maintained a studied silence). Globalisation was said to be foreordained not just by the logic of economic and technical processes but also by the outcomes of the struggle between social forces; it was held to give rise to its own distinctive contradictions and conflicts, destined inescapably to alter the social relationships by which it was surrounded. Although it is quite natural for any victorious class to consolidate its political and social success in ideological terms, achieving this created definite problems on this occasion both for the victors and the vanquished. The problems had derived from the flagrant contradiction with the logic of development that had been dominant over the previous 200 years. The triumph of social reaction meant that progress was reversible in historical terms (which, logically, might signify that any social changes, including ones that had just transpired, were similarly reversible). Meanwhile, if the logic of historical progress were repudiated by a thesis positing the irreversible nature of changes that were diametrically opposed, this would create problems for the legitimation of the bourgeois system itself. In one fashion or another, this system legitimised itself historically on the basis

16

The logic of fragmentation

of earlier progressive developments. It was no accident that both socialists and liberals appealed to the tradition of the Enlightenment and to the heritage of the French Revolution. The contradiction of late capitalism discussed here was resolved through the simultaneous dissemination of two ideologies: neoliberalism and postmodernism. While neoliberalism laid claim to a certain continuity, merely changing the customary appraisals and insisting that progress was precisely what had earlier been considered a brake upon it (restricting the rights of workers, rejecting public control and regulation and so forth), postmodernism called progress as such into question. Neoliberalism was intended for the triumphant bourgeoisie, postmodernism for demoralised left intellectuals. Together they “allowed the dancers to change places”. Conservatives appropriated the banner of progress, while their critics not only acted as opponents of change but also recognised, in the ultimate analysis, that there were no objective tasks, historical perspectives or socially meaningful goals for which it was worth fighting. In other words, there was no point in joining with society. But unlike the spontaneous “war of all against all” described by Thomas Hobbes in the early capitalist epoch, late capitalism offered people an orderly contest on the basis of the system’s rules between “minorities” who sought access to resources invariably controlled by the elite. How long this contest would remain peaceful, voluntary and managed was a separate question.

The cult of the creative idler The revolt of the “New Left” that broke out in the West during the late 1960s directed its ideological fire not only against the power of capital but also against the social democratic institutions with whose help the radical students considered the subsuming of the working class into the bourgeois order had taken place. The achievements of the post-war epoch had indeed softened substantially the confrontation between classes in European and North American society. In this context, the anticapitalist uprising by the students was doomed to failure. Nevertheless, the left-radical critique of the state and of social policy came to be drawn on – only not by the workers’ movement and opponents of the system but by the ideologues of neoliberalism, who began an assault from the right on the very institutions for which the revolutionary students felt such a dislike. Those who had criticised the welfare state from the left proved unable in later times to explain why, during the years of neoliberal reaction, the ruling class displayed such fury in dismantling, and even demolishing, the same institutions that the left radicals had considered (not altogether unreasonably) to be props of the bourgeois order. There is nothing mysterious about this situation; all that is needed is to recognise the contradictoriness of capitalist development. The welfare state, which arises out of the development of the class struggle in just the same degree as the naturally changing needs of the economy, itself alters the relationship of forces within society. For this very reason, it is the object of bitter attacks by capital even while the system experiences an objective need for the results of its functioning.

The logic of fragmentation 17 This contradiction is in turn responsible for the apparent inconsistency of neoliberalism, which at every stage proves unready to act in line with its own rhetoric and to do away with all manifestations of the welfare state once and for all. In part, this situation is explained by the strength of worker resistance, but there are other reasons as well. The resistance of the masses has proven effective on each occasion, despite the dominant strategic position of the neoliberals, precisely the issue that has concerned something greater than the class interests of the oppressed. The demands of the struggling lower orders have reflected definite social needs, which not even the triumphant bourgeoisie itself has been able to ignore completely. The conceptual approach of neoliberalism thus represents an attempt to preserve some of the fruits of the welfare state at the same time as its institutions and bases are undermined, and most important, while its class content is banished. It is from this that the three main principles of neoliberal social policy are derived. First, we have commercialisation, the transformation of unconditional state assistance and obligations into a sum of social services. These services may be provided free of charge or subsidised, but the approach itself is altered. A list of paid and free services (unlike inalienable rights) may be reviewed arbitrarily depending on the priorities of current policy. Second, welfare policy undergoes a process of fragmentation in which a unified complex of social services and civil institutions is replaced by an array of programs that can also be reviewed and varied since they are not connected in any way. Welfare spending may even increase in financial terms, but its overall effectiveness invariably declines, which in turn provides a basis for the radical wing of the bourgeoisie to demand that the list of programs be reviewed and cut back, as a pointless waste of money. Third, and last, the principle of targeted assistance comes to prevail. This assistance is not provided to all as an entitlement of birth and citizenship but exclusively to the “weak” and “needy”, the list of whom is again compiled and reviewed arbitrarily by the bureaucracy, together with liberal experts who determine the criteria. The paradox lies in the fact that this approach invariably increases the dependence of citizens on the state rather than reducing it. Boundless possibilities open up for the exercise of bureaucratic caprice, and the situation also explains the explosive growth in the number of state functionaries in all the countries that undergo market reforms. Although the neoliberal critique of the welfare state accuses the left of implanting paternalism and parasitism, these phenomena arise precisely from the universal introduction of targeted assistance. The principle of the welfare state which presupposes the universality of rights and the equality of citizens runs directly contrary to the paternalist approach, which is based on the fatherly care of the authorities for one or another category of their subjects. In a welfare state, citizens have no reason to thank rulers or bureaucrats for anything; laws and regulations that are general, and the same for everyone, are simply required to be obeyed. The situation is different in a society where a system of targeted assistance and welfare programs holds sway. There, the authorities are at liberty to include individuals, groups of people or entire regions in the category of the needy, or

18

The logic of fragmentation

else to exclude them. Those who receive assistance are condemned in turn to be incorporated into clientelist relationships, doomed to dependence on a patron. On the international level, the same paternalist principle became a reality within the setting of the European Union, where particular regions or groups received direct aid from Brussels, bypassing their own governments which were transformed into hostages of neoliberal integration. This was particularly evident during the 2016 referendum on the exit of Britain from the European Union. Regions that had received targeted assistance from Brussels were inclined to vote contrary to the majority of the population and against the interests of their own country since they had been caught on the hook of the corresponding programs, becoming in essence clients of the eurobureaucrats. It was this, and not separatism or any peculiarities of the national mentality, that was responsible for a majority being in favour of the EU in Scotland, to which the eurocrats had consciously directed streams of money, trying to create a counterweight to unyielding, independent England. The same applies to labour relations as well. The systematic weakening of the trade unions and the reform of the labour market put a substantial sector of the workforce in the position of a “precariat”. Although this term was coined by sociologists comparatively recently,1 the phenomenon itself is by no means new. In fact, many hired workers found themselves by the beginning of the twenty-first century in the same position as the proletariat of the first half of the nineteenth century, before the organised labour movement had begun to emerge. In the earlier case, the social situation was changed by the advent of strong trade unions. Now, everything is somewhat different. Unlike industrial workers, who are easily organised and who are capable of mounting an effective struggle for their rights by stopping production, a substantial part of the precariat is concentrated in the area of services and in new post-industrial sectors. There, the conditions of labour are by no means conducive to organised struggle. In this situation, strengthening the position of workers in the labour market and altering their status becomes a directly political question that cannot be settled through conflict with a specific, individual employer, but that demands the reform of the labour relations system as a whole. In this context, the idea of a universal basic income (UBI) has achieved currency and won the support of numerous politicians from both the right and left. On the one hand, this concept proposes a return to the universalist principle of welfare policy, while on the other, it does away with the nexus between the class interests of workers and the development of the welfare state. The twentieth-century welfare state, in both its social democratic and Soviet variants, rested on an employment policy according to which people with jobs, who made up the bulk of the population, supported their unemployed or disabled fellow citizens through making contributions to the financing of health care, education and culture. The Marxist idea of the universality of labour was thus embodied in practice. A “universal basic income” will not lead in any way to the disappearance of work or to general idleness, but it is meant to break this nexus and to weaken society’s work ethic, in both the protestant and proletarian understandings of this concept. Further, this approach is technically feasible only in the richest countries and is intended to increase the gap between the countries of the “centre” and “periphery”, while

The logic of fragmentation 19 undermining solidarity between various groups of workers on a global level. For these reasons, a reform that might seem to embody the ideology of equality and universality in the spirit of communist utopias has enjoyed unexpectedly strong support among right-wing liberals in a number of wealthy countries. Orthodox Lutherans, Calvinists and Baptists (just like socialists) have always condemned unearned income. This was reflected in the results of the referendum in Switzerland in June 2016 that saw the country’s population overwhelmingly reject an initiative calling for the introduction of a UBI. This fiasco ended an attempt to make the demand for a UBI a slogan in the socialist election campaign in France a year later. In Finland a UBI began to be introduced from above in the form of an experiment, whose initiators were trying to gradually get society used to a new reality. The resistance of the mass of people to attempts to impose unearned income on them is quite understandable. In a certain sense, left ideology grows logically out of the “spirit of capitalism” expounded by Max Weber. The corresponding critique of bourgeois society presumed not only a protest against growing inequality, but in the first instance, a refusal to accept the fact that this inequality bore no relationship to the quantity and quality of socially useful labour that people expended. The initiators of the idea of a universal basic income proceeded from a directly opposite logic. Instead of doing away with unearned income, they sought to turn it into a universal basic principle. The question “Who’s going to pay for it?” is far less complex than it seems; those who would do the work would be migrants, workers in China or India, and, of course, a few robots. Meanwhile, the members of Western European society would be transformed into a uniformly creative class for whom work would be transformed into pleasure, entertainment, a game or a means of self-fulfilment. This is also a sort of communist utopia but one that is fundamentally hostile to both bourgeois and proletarian values; it reflects the self-satisfied conception that the creative class has of itself as the ideal of future humanity. The universal basic income was posited precisely as an alternative to socially useful labour, as a source of wealth that would allow people to belong to the middle class while doing absolutely nothing, while not expending any effort and while not doing anything beneficial for anyone. In other words, the state is supposed to provide a stimulus for people to set themselves apart from society, for their social atomisation and for the destruction of the economic bonds between them. Of course, the authors of the idea were quite correct in objecting that even after the introduction of the system, a considerable number (even, probably, a majority) of people would make a choice in favour of labour. The problem, however, does not lie in the number of citizens who would continue working, or who would prefer to parasitise others, but in the question of what would become the basic principle for the distribution of income: the logic of behaviour and the dominant ethic in society. The liberation of human beings from the “curse” of labour is an age-old idea that can be traced back to the myths of the Garden of Eden and a lost paradise. But in the Marxist tradition, it will not be brought to realisation through turning the

20

The logic of fragmentation

creative idler into the ideal of the free personality, but through the transformation and humanisation of labour itself so that the human individual ceases to be simply a living appendage of the machine. What is required here is a social revolution, or reforms that affect the mode of production, the social relationships and the structure of the socium, not a redistribution of wealth in favour of those who refuse to share the burden of labour with their fellow citizens. To the contrary, the utopia of the people behind the Swiss referendum suggests a future straight out of the H.G. Wells novel The Time Machine, in which the refined Eloi parasitise the labour of the brutish Morlocks – until, of course, the latter crawl out from underground seeking to devour them. The emergence of such a project bears witness to a crisis of the idea of social transformation. What we find here is a modern-day, late-bourgeois social mathematics that urges us to divide everything up while leaving out nothing. Discussion on the justice of this is reduced to the question of effective distribution and stable consumption. No one is interested in how values come into being, in who controls them, or most important, in everyone being able to receive their share. No one is troubled anymore by the organisation of production or by questions of power and property. Instead of altering social relations (including labour relations), we are urged to give inhabitants of wealthy countries the opportunity, on a mass scale, to lead a parasitic existence. Meanwhile, these people will acquire an interest in maintaining precisely the kind of system that allows them to live at the expense of others, above all through exploiting the countries of the periphery.

Globalisation and labour Summing up nearly three decades of the globalisation and neoliberal economic policies that triumphed on a world scale following the collapse of the USSR, specialists have noted an unexpected trend – a continuous decline in the rate of growth of labour productivity.2 They have tried to explain this phenomenon in various ways, basing their arguments either on cycles of innovation or on an exhaustion of the current paradigm of technological development (which sounds particularly strange, following so soon after the much-vaunted triumph of the information revolution). Nevertheless, the inevitability of such an outcome was predicted by Marxist sociologists as early as the beginning of the 1990s and has nothing to do with a crisis of scientific knowledge. The reason for the ineluctable stagnation of labour productivity lies in the labour relations logic that triumphed around the turn of the twenty-first century. A key principle of neoliberal globalisation is the search by capital for evercheaper labour markets. It engages in what trade unions refer to as a “race to the bottom”; investment flows unerringly to the point where wages are lowest, where the taxes used to finance welfare programs are lowest, where environmental standards and state regulations are least strict and where workers are poorly organised and incapable of defending their rights. If a government takes such an approach, its ability to develop the economy of its country successfully depends on whether it can ensure that the population

The logic of fragmentation 21 receives the least possible benefit from that development. As soon as economic growth begins to stimulate wage rises, and a strengthened middle class begins to make demands for an improved quality of life, for protection of the environment, for better social standards and so forth, the country’s attractiveness to investors declines. Capital flows across to other markets. In the early years of the new century, the triumph of neoliberalism was consolidated in ideological terms. This was not achieved, however, through ideological victories. In the same way, there is no basis for asserting that the capitalist economy has improved its efficiency over the past quarter-century. Indeed, the opposite is true – the degree of corruption has risen sharply, while unproductive expenditure and unnecessary losses have dramatically increased. The dominant classes once again prefer to squander their incomes on luxury consumption without putting sufficient funds into production. One might also recall the inflated advertising budgets, whose effectiveness, analysts admit, is often zero apart from the cases in which they irritate and frighten potential buyers (and where their effectiveness is negative). Capitalism has become less rational. But the globalisation of the market has sharply altered the relationship of class forces in the old industrial countries, from Germany to Russia and from Canada to Argentina. Everywhere, the spectre of capital flight alarms governments and trade unions, forcing them to agree to the annulling of regulations and to the lowering or ignoring of labour and environmental standards. The shift of employment to China and a few other Asian countries has been accompanied by changes to the labour market in Europe, Russia, Canada and the US. Increasing numbers of people are now employed in the services sector, work at home or in an office or are civil servants. Such workers are far less united, lacking strong trade unions and traditions of organised struggle. It might appear that the decline of industrial employment reflects a historical tendency inseparable from technical progress: as the productivity of labour rises, more and more people will be liberated for creative, intellectual and social activity. Unfortunately, this is not the case – or to be more accurate, not quite the case. Despite the forecasts, in the early twenty-first century it is not robots that have forced out people, but people who have forced out robots. The sensational advances of robot technology, demonstrated for the entertainment of the public at a variety of exhibitions, have more or less brought to fruition the ideas and concepts of the 1960s. But for the most part, these advances have been immaterial to the areas of production where the relationships and technologies that have triumphed are ones that were typical of European manufacturing during the first half of the seventeenth century. This backward production has proven extremely competitive precisely because of the extremely low wages and lack of rights of the workers. Employment levels in the “old” industrial countries are sustained by the fact that various functions cannot be performed without modern productive capacities and the corresponding workers, and because the services sector still expands on the basis of unskilled and semi-skilled labour. The social effect of such processes on the labour market is not limited to a reduction of wages. Vertical mobility is

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The logic of fragmentation

blocked. One of the strengths of industrial society was the presence of a large number of middle-level jobs to which active young people could easily transfer, raising their qualifications and status. The new economic order has given rise to a multitude of “bad” jobs and an extremely limited number of “good” ones that require a very high level of training, knowledge and often connections (the possession of social ties is frequently a condition for effective work in the positions concerned). Most of the “middle level” positions are shifted to the countries of Asia, where they also turn out to have a dead-end character since the next level in the global productive, technological and managerial chains is located thousands of kilometres away. At a certain point, achieving vertical mobility requires a change of country, society, language and culture. In other words, the personal attainments of, for example, top-level managers who have shifted from an office in Moscow or Istanbul to one in London or Paris do not become a factor in the social lives of the countries from which the professionals who make up the global managerial elite have originated. Between the unskilled “lower orders” and the “worker aristocracy”, an almost unbridgeable gap opens up. Not only is solidarity undermined, but the basic elements of mutual understanding are lost, especially if the low- and high-placed individuals in the world of work belong to different ethnic and confessional groups. The bottom level sees the formation of a social ghetto from which it is almost impossible to break free (individual success stories do not amount to a mass phenomenon that alters the average statistical chances). At the top level in the hierarchy of qualifications, a critical shortage of personnel is discovered. Wages here might grow without justification, but that does not by any means signify that the position of the working class as a whole has been enhanced since the dissociation between its upper and lower strata has simultaneously increased. The freedom of movement of capital is not, of course, limitless, and the size of the planet is finite. However much transnational corporations might complain about Chinese who have allegedly grown lazy and who want too much money for their labour, the business activity concerned cannot be transferred in a simple fashion to Africa or Polynesia since the infrastructure and personnel for many types of production do not exist there. Nor are there such vast numbers of workers prepared to labour in factories even with the most primitive technology. But to make up for it, in the early years of the twenty-first century, wages in the leading countries of the “centre” were falling sharply. German or American workers, if their qualifications and the quality of their work are taken into account, are already cheaper than workers in China. The return of a certain number of jobs to the “old industrial countries” is becoming practically inevitable, and is already beginning to occur. But the question remains unanswered of the form this will take, at what tempo, on what scale and with what consequences. Ultimately, the main problem of neoliberal globalisation does not lie in the fact that the cheap-labour economy has objective limits but in the fact that it undermines demand. Here we have one of the classic contradictions of capitalism – between the logic of accumulation and the logic of consumption. The accumulation of capital requires the minimising of all expenses, and in the first order, restraining the growth of wages. But what represents a lowering

The logic of fragmentation 23 of wage costs for each specific enterprise amounts to a lowering, or at least a brake, on the growth of effective demand in the economy as a whole. Your goods become cheaper but still remain unsold since the population is short of money. This occurs on a planetary scale, affecting not just the old industrial countries but China as well. Here we have the essence of the global crisis that is now unfolding. Such tendencies were characteristic of the early industrial epoch (it is enough to recall the crises of the nineteenth century and the Late Victorian Depression). A solution was found either in wars for the redivision of markets, or revolutions and social reforms. In the latter case, society, while restricting the “freedom of capital”, simultaneously created stimuli for the more intensive development of the economy. Expensive labour created the demand for new and more productive technology, while high wages stimulated the growth of consumption, and most important, the demand for higher-quality goods and services, which in turn required more highly qualified workers. Taken all together, this favoured the development of science, education and culture. In the modern neoliberal system, these highly regarded areas are proving increasingly cut off from the general needs of socioeconomic development (which, in the best case, are replaced by individual orders and applications). Science and education are thus becoming degraded, even as state functionaries wax indignant at the limited effectiveness of scientists and educators, introducing ever-new schemes of control and supervision but lacking the slightest notion of what they should be looking out for or why. Just as in the early twentieth century, the conditions have ripened for a turn to an economy of high-priced labour. But now, as on the previous occasion, this turn cannot be accomplished without a radical redistribution of production without protectionism, without social and political transformations. In other words, this transition will be no less dramatic and painful than a hundred years ago.

The revolt of the elites In modern sociology, researching elites is a far more popular pursuit than studying the masses. The political life of the past quarter-century, however, actually has been a time when privileged groups, equipped with resources of power and property and able to control information flows, have played an ever-greater role, forcing all other social strata onto the sidelines. During the first half of the twentieth century, the conservative Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote irritably about the “revolt of the masses”,3 but at the end of the century, the American thinker, Christopher Lasch, was already speaking of a “revolt of the elites”.4 The sidelining of the masses from politics proved to be a near-universal phenomenon, observed to one degree or another in the most diverse parts of the world. It occurred against the background of a rhetorical acceptance, no less general in extent, of the values of democracy and of a similarly broad spread of the corresponding institutions (contested elections, a multi-party system and so forth). Of course, the masses as in the past appeared on television screens, people dropped voting slips into ballot boxes, marched in demonstrations, and here and there even

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rose in revolt and fought with police. Nevertheless, their interests, problems and ideas had completely vanished from the agenda. The contending elite groups actively exploited the dissatisfied (or else, loyal) population as voters and participants in mass meetings. By contrast, the attempts by movements of the lower orders to break through into “serious politics”, forcing the ruling strata to discuss questions being raised from below or to take account of popular views, came for the most part to nothing. Decisions that had earlier been viewed as befitting public discussion were now described as “technical”, to be considered only by experts. In this setting the opinions of “common people” could be regarded only as amusing curiosities. The certainty that “unpopular reforms” were “objectively indispensable” and should be implemented regardless of what the population thought of them became commonplace in economic journalism and characterised the activity of all governments with only the rarest exceptions. The difference between left and right was reduced to subtle cultural nuances, devoid of meaning and of no interest to the population. At the same time, such questions as the official registration of same-sex marriages, of interest to 1 or 2 per cent of the population at most, were transformed into major topics of national (and at times international) debates and political battles – precisely because they bore no direct relation to the real problems facing the majority. Splashed endlessly across television screens, on the front pages of newspapers and on internet blogs, these problems sooner or later took on a significance they had not possessed earlier, becoming the basis for genuine divisions within society. But this merely demonstrated the degree to which small elite groups were able to manipulate public discussion, not only choosing topics they thought suitable but also forcing others to define their positions and formulate their political or ideological identities on the basis of choices that had been forced on them artificially and that had no relation to the needs and experiences of their own lives. While the political evolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had the effect of turning the popular masses from the object into the subject of politics and history, a hundred years later the process was going in the opposite direction. When did that turnabout occur? What set it off, and why did it acquire such a scale? To all appearances, the turning-point in the West was two strikes staged by trade unions in the 1980s. After Margaret Thatcher had broken the resistance of the miners in Britain, and Ronald Reagan in the US had crushed protests by air traffic controllers, the relationship of forces between labour and capital in developed countries began to shift, clearly and without let-up, to the advantage of the latter. From being a slogan of the proletariat, class struggle became a well-spring of the existence of the bourgeoisie. The social conquests achieved by the masses during earlier decades were gradually revoked, restricted or reduced to inconsequence. The collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989 represented the final stage of the changes. It was not simply that the countries in which communist regimes had held sway crossed one after the other onto the capitalist road of development, seeking as fast as possible and at any cost to integrate themselves into the global economy, but also that almost no one resisted these moves; former communists refashioned themselves with astonishing ease into liberals, nationalists, social

The logic of fragmentation 25 democrats or conservatives. Almost any ideologies and symbols were in demand apart from those to which the ruling groups had sworn allegiance during the preceding historical period. It was not only members of the old communist elites who changed their colouration but also many dissidents. From democratic socialists and left liberals, they instantly became nationalists and conservatives. The fall of the Soviet Union marked a decisive break. After the West had ceased to fear the Soviet challenge, the readiness of the ruling classes for social compromise within their own countries declined sharply. The Cold War had forced both sides to keep an eye on the majority of their citizens and to take their thinking into account. Formal and conditional support from the people was insufficient, as was shown from the opposing side by the experience of the countries of Eastern Europe, where for many years everything had been more or less “normal” but where the system in 1989 collapsed in a matter of weeks once it had become clear there was no reason to fear Big Brother. By contrast, democracy in the West had developed in such a way that all attempts at external destabilisation were blocked, in the ultimate instance not by politicians or security services but by the population itself, which accepted and supported the existing system. The working class, voting for social democratic and even communist parties, might demonstrate its opposition to capital, and conflict between classes might not let up for an instant, but at the same time, both sides had an interest in retaining the existing rules and institutions and had no desire for chaos or for serious confrontation.5 It was rare for the class conflict to take the form of revolutionary struggle. The workers of the West did not want revolution to turn into the loss of civil liberties as in the USSR. Capital needed the political support of working people in order to defend liberal democracy. With the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the situation changed, and although neoliberalism had arisen much earlier (in part as a reaction to the costs of the welfare state and of Keynesian regulation, and in part as the result of a recognition by the bourgeoisie of the irreversible decline of the Soviet system), it was from 1991 that neoliberalism became harsh, aggressive, uncompromising and global. Following the events of 1989–1991, the communist parties in most countries collapsed, changing their names and renouncing their ideology. And what became of social democracy? It too went into swift decline. Having developed in the balmy conditions of post-war global equilibrium, it was unprepared for struggle under the conditions of dramatically more acute class conflict. The masters of negotiation and virtuosi of class compromise encountered a bourgeoisie that in the space of a few years, and sometimes of mere months, became transformed from a peace-loving “social partner” into a fierce and irreconcilable enemy. After a series of humiliating failures in which workers’ organisations suffered defeat not only in elections but also in strikes and public discussions, the leaders of the social democratic parties preferred to cross over to the side of the victors. While retaining their party names and symbols (unlike the communists), they changed their ideology and programs. As they set out to prove their loyalty to the victorious bourgeoisie, they were certain that their voters, even after seeing themselves

26 The logic of fragmentation betrayed again and again, would have nowhere else to go; an alternative did not exist. This tactic bore fruit, with social democratic parties beginning to return to power. They returned, however, not in the capacity of reformers but simply as managers of the system, lacking the resolve even to express their own views. They enlisted in the bourgeois political class and were dissolved definitively within it. Proceeding in parallel with this was an analogous but independent process that saw left intellectuals integrated into the bourgeois academic and cultural elite. Outwardly, this seemed to consist of the advancement of radical leftists, who had earlier appeared as marginal and rebels, to influential posts in the mass media, universities, state research organisations and so forth. This success, however, did not reflect any growth in the political or even ideological influence of the left. To the contrary, it was in inverse proportion to the social weight of anticapitalist movements. Explaining this paradox was the fact that the success of the former rebels had been bought at the price of adaptation to the system. The people concerned had not conquered the institutions (as the ideologue of the 1960s New Left Rudi Dutschke had planned) but had been swallowed by them. Accordingly, the source of legitimacy and influence for the “left” intellectuals was no longer the support of the working class and its parties but recognition by the liberal elite as equals who were worthy of respect within the framework of the academic, cultural and ideological institutions. This integration of the intellectuals led to a situation in which “radical discourse” (feminism, the cult of social minorities, same-sex marriage and so forth) became transformed into an obligatory part of the official ideology right up to the state level, while the corresponding ideas, formulae and slogans lost their subversive and anti-bourgeois content entirely. Capital successfully digested feminism, ecologism and the movement for the rights of sexual minorities, transforming their character from oppositional to conservative but in no way encroaching on their right to employ radical rhetoric for their self-legitimation. Initially, movements such as these were a source for the left of objectively essential criticism. Casting doubt on the orthodoxy of simplistic class ideology and reminding people that not all social contradictions can be reduced to the conflict between proletariat and bourgeoisie, they forced socialists to consider the complexity of social phenomena in the modern world. Quite soon, however, the ideas of political correctness, interpreting society as the totality of minorities that required the defence of their specific rights became transformed into a new orthodoxy, much harsher and more aggressive than its predecessor. Of key importance was the fact that the ideology of political correctness killed off the very idea of social progress, understood as the attaining of common goals, the accomplishing of tasks that had ripened objectively on the scale of social development and the resolving of accumulated economic, class and political contradictions. From then on, there would be no need to resolve the contradictions of capitalism; it would be enough merely to concern oneself with the “progress” (or more precisely, success) of particular groups, occurring within the context of the existing system through “positive discrimination”. In this case, too, the victorious ideology sought to pass off its objectives as reality. Promoting divisions within the

The logic of fragmentation 27 corresponding minorities inside the elites and successful groups, the policy of positive discrimination proved useless for ensuring uniform progress by the corresponding categories within the people as a whole since as a matter of principle it ignored the class differences within a particular gender, racial or religious group. Ultimately, such policies always amounted to the separating out of a privileged minority within a minority, with the favoured few also appropriating all the fruits of positive discrimination.

The rebellious periphery In the countries of the developing world, changes analogous in their thrust to those being observed in the West were under way. Following the collapse of the USSR, the ruling regimes in the states that had oriented themselves towards Moscow had finished up weakened and demoralised. Soviet aid had ended, and most important, the idea had vanished of the development perspective that needed to be pursued if success were to be achieved. Confronting the West and its global institutions one-on-one, former revolutionaries quickly began to change their ideological hue, agreeing to any conditions that would permit them to hang onto power and attract foreign capital. The swift reorientation of radical regimes to a market-based economic approach meant that at least on paper, the economic norms in such states became even more liberal than in countries that traditionally had leant towards Western models. Nevertheless, the fact that after the disappearance of the USSR the ruling elites in the countries that had chosen the non-capitalist path of development lost their key partner and found themselves in an extremely difficult position, does not explain the ease with which they changed course and transformed themselves from proponents of national liberation to advocates for neo-colonialism. In all these states, even before 1991, processes had little by little been going ahead that were analogous to those observed in the USSR and other countries of the Eastern Bloc. The ruling bureaucracies found themselves weighed down increasingly by ideological limitations, dreaming not only of converting their power into property ownership but also of joining the Western elites, whose lifestyles, culture and consumption remained an unattainable ideal. The politico-ideological collapse of the Soviet system gave them a chance to realise all these ambitions at once. They did not all succeed in this by any means, and those who did were not successful in equal measure. Serving as a tragically unsuccessful example was the Libyan Colonel Gaddafi, who throughout the 1990s did his utmost to secure friendship with the West. Gaddafi had his children educated in Europe and financed the London School of Economics but nevertheless failed to win inclusion in the trajectory of change. Ultimately, he was overthrown with the help of his European partners, who not long before had been receiving generous support from his oil revenues. Transforming a bureaucratic nomenklatura into a modern bourgeoisie proved a far more difficult and painful process than it had initially seemed. In its first stage, the radical change of administrative models brought an inevitable dependence not only on foreign capital but also on foreign specialist-technocrats, who were

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gradually replaced by young people of native origin who had been trained in the West or according to Western standards. These new cadres were precise copies of their Western counterparts, right down to their gastronomic preferences, aesthetic tastes, dress sense and haircuts. The only difference (as in the case of the Barbie doll, which became a powerful tool for shaping the cultural perceptions of little girls from well-off families) remained the colour of their skin, along with a few minor ethnic peculiarities. The new technocratic elite gradually replaced the administrators of the old temper. The more global the capitalist market became, the more successfully and effectively this new school performed, constantly expanding its sphere of presence and dominance. Unfortunately, the problem encountered by the newly minted technocrats was that by no means was the entire economy, and by no means were all fields of society included in equal degree within the global process of market liberalisation. Still worse was the fact that as the neoliberal model of capitalism spread across the world, its contradictions accumulated and manifested themselves in increasing degree. This appeared above all in the growing inequality of property ownership and in the resultant gradual fall in demand for goods. All of these problems, however, seemed inconsequential so long as the world contained a machine of growth – the Chinese economy – that functioned without let-up. It was China, which formally retained its red flags and communist ideology, that in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries acted as the main stabilising force for liberal capitalism. It was China that proved able not only to pour huge masses of ever-cheaper goods onto world markets, forcing the workers of other countries to reconcile themselves to low wages, but that also swallowed vast quantities of investments, of technological information, of machinery and of high-technology products and that permitted the maintaining of the relatively privileged elements of the Western economies. This made it possible to buy the loyalty of certain sections of the workforce and of business, sections that in other countries would have been prepared to come out against the system. The cultural transformation of the Chinese bureaucracy, of the administrative and cultural elite, followed the same logic as in the countries of the former Soviet bloc and in the states of non-capitalist orientation that were allied with it. The process, however, went ahead more slowly. The transformations were gradual, managed, and, as a result, less dramatic. It is not surprising that for a section of the Russian public, China’s success came to be perceived as a living reproach. It was possible, as it turned out, to make the transition to capitalism with minimal shocks, without losing the status of a major power and while avoiding a collapse of industry. But the “wisdom” of the Chinese nomenklatura was not defined by any intellectual or moral superiority but by the fact that it found itself in a different historical and economic situation. When we view the USSR and Mao’s China as similar post-revolutionary societies, we often lose sight of the fact that the Chinese system was thirty-odd years younger than that in the Soviet Union. The historico-cultural age of the system and of its bureaucratic elite is a fact that for some reason escapes our attention. Collective experience of

The logic of fragmentation 29 this kind, however, is something of fundamental importance. What is involved is not simply the coming to power of a ruling elite but also the experience of urbanisation, of industrial development, of cultural revolution and of the transition from a patriarchal way of life to the urban nuclear family. Consequently, the experience of China in the years from 1989 to 1991 should not be compared with that of its Soviet counterpart during the same period, but with the experience of USSR in the years between 1953 and 1956. At that point, following the death of Stalin, the Soviet ruling stratum also found itself at a crossroads but was able to overcome a crisis of generational change relatively quickly and effectively. Completing the analogy is also the presence in hindsight of an alternative variant for escaping from the crisis, a variant embodied in the Soviet Union by Lavrenty Beriya. Since the latter was swept from the scene at the very earliest stage of the intra-party struggle, analysing the idea of a “Beriya alternative” is very difficult, but in some ways this alternative is highly reminiscent of what transpired in China during the 1980s – an acceleration of economic liberalisation and a gradual shift of the system to a capitalist logic, accompanied by a retention of rigid political control. Victory, however, fell to the opposing line embodied by Nikita Khrushchev – a relative economic conservatism combined with political liberalisation. If we continue to compare China with Russia from the standpoint of their social-demographic and cultural evolution, we find that by the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, Chinese society had entered a structural crisis analogous in many ways to that which the USSR was experiencing in the years between 1989 and 1991. Population growth had been replaced by demographic decline, while social relations and the way of life had been modernised, radically transforming the psychology of working people. The bureaucracy had become definitively bourgeois, while the middle layers of society had begun laying claim to greater influence. From 2015 the Chinese economy had come to encounter increasing difficulties since foreign markets for the sale of its products had been exhausted. At the same time, the reorientation to the internal market of which people in Beijing had begun speaking with enthusiasm required radical changes in society. The absence of a universal pension system, monstrous disproportions between regions and no less scandalous levels of material inequality posed obstacles to economic growth and did not allow an integrated internal market to take shape. The illusion of endless, crisis-free growth, an illusion that in earlier times had accompanied the rise first of Japan and then of South Korea, lasted substantially longer in the case of China due to the immense size of the country’s economy, which had exceptional inertia. Nevertheless, this was no more than an illusion. The growing instability of the world system left the Chinese ruling stratum to face new challenges that were completely unfamiliar to it. At the same time, China itself was transformed from a stabilising factor within the global economy to an unpredictable element. Within the non-Western world, it was nevertheless the countries of Latin America that witnessed the beginning of the crisis. These were countries that first experienced all the positive and negative aspects of the neoliberal transformation. The victory that the technocrats gained over populists almost everywhere

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in the mid-1990s led to the stabilisation of local currencies that had earlier been exploded by appalling rates of inflation; to an influx of foreign capital; to the growth of exports; and to the appearance of a middle class analogous to that in Europe. By the turn of the century, however, mobile capital had rushed to other shores, relocating production to Asia and above all to China. The thesis is widely accepted that globalisation has destroyed jobs in the US and Western Europe. But in reality, the greatest losses were borne by the relatively developed countries of the developing world and Eastern Europe. The states of the West preserved their industrial output precisely to the degree to which their ruling elites wanted it preserved. While in Britain the policy was one of conscious deindustrialisation, German industry by contrast was maintained and strengthened, undergoing technological modernisation. But the countries of Latin America, along with the more developed states of the Arab world such as Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria, lacked the ability to exercise meaningful influence over the movement of capital. Dramatic growth, followed by social crisis exacerbated by economic stagnation and a series of financial crashes, led to a very real anti-systemic revolt in Latin America. This revolt brought the lower strata of society into alliance with business entrepreneurs working for the internal market, as well as with a substantial section of the lower bureaucracy that had been offended by the rule of technocrat-androids assembled on the conveyor-belts of the Western business schools. The result was a “left turn” in Latin America. First in Venezuela, and then in Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay and Nicaragua, leaders resting on left parties and social movements came to power. Unlike the revolutionaries of the 1960s and early 1970s, the leftists did not take control as revolutionary insurgents but won office through legitimately conducted elections and relied on familiar republican institutions. Their level of radicalism was also extremely diverse; while in Venezuela and Bolivia the process was one of revolution, in Brazil the government promised cautious reforms and in Chile it was quite difficult to understand how the left-wing government differed from the rightists who had preceded it. Even the most radical governments of the left, however, were unable to alter the overall trajectory of development, merely redistributing resources away from exports while trying to stimulate the development of the domestic market and to implement social programs. In the short term this yielded impressive results, but eventually the impulse to change was exhausted. Unlike the case under the Soviet system, the left-wing governments in Latin America did not manage to devise their own “machine of growth”, to alter the structure of society or to create new motivations and new social and professional layers. Least of all were they able to generate a new scientific and cultural elite, arising out of the popular masses. Dependency on the world economy was not overcome as mechanisms of development able to compensate for it were not constructed. After 2008 export revenues began declining rapidly, undermining the mechanism of redistribution. The Latin American revolt against neoliberalism ended in defeat against a background of the world crisis that was demonstrating, on a global scale, the need for an alternative to the neoliberal order.

The logic of fragmentation 31 The crisis showed that the liberal elites had only a limited capacity to control the situation and that their resources were being exhausted. The objectively increasing process of collapse of the economic model that had taken shape in the 1980s and 1990s made a deepening of the cultural and political crisis inevitable, and most important, impossible to overcome within the framework of the existing system. Feedback and dialogue with the masses had been replaced in the process of neoliberal transformation by manipulative practices that in turn were rapidly losing their former effectiveness, and the elites thus found themselves in a sort of social vacuum, experiencing disorientation and stress. Paradoxically, however, the consolidated nature of the elites and the lack of any feedback mechanism linking them to the masses could also turn out to be a factor impeding change. The changed system blocks the familiar reformist mechanisms that make it possible to readjust the social system without excessively severe clashes. The mass movements in turn, deprived of their earlier links to the political class and progressive intelligentsia, are constantly inspired by traditionalist, nationalist and religious ideas, becoming a support for populist leaders both of the left and of the right. Nevertheless, it is precisely from these movements, through a series of trials and shocks, that a new democratic culture able to overcome the burdensome consequences of the “revolt of the elites” will ultimately emerge.

The adaptation of the intellectuals Cut off from class organisation and from the practice of the mass popular movements, left ideology gradually becomes transformed from a tool of day-to-day organisational work into a “discourse” that is subsequently privatised by intellectuals and bureaucrats just as state enterprises were privatised by the more successful members of the bourgeoisie. Each of the intellectuals who could lay his or her hands on that resource and control it went on to seize and appropriate it. In this sense, the evolution of the left movement and of the left intelligentsia is thoroughly logical and organic in the general process of neoliberal transformation in the early twenty-first century. As early as the 1980s, the British cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, observed that pithy discussions of ideology were being replaced by “discursive struggle”. In other words, what was now important for success in debate was not facts, arguments, statistics or even logic but merely the ability to employ the necessary terms and symbols that were labelled from the outset as positive, modern and politically correct. By contrast, the very fact that an opponent might use terms that were branded as negative by the “owners of the discourse” doomed that opponent to defeat, regardless of what arguments he or she might employ. In this way, any socialist program possessing real content (even if couched in reformist form) was marginalised during the 1990s, while the intellectuals opted spontaneously for a strategy of adaptation to the dominant liberal discourse. The result from the beginning was that a politically correct “left discourse” became established, later to be transformed effectively into one of the subtypes of liberal discourse. In a certain sense this strategy of adaptation was perfectly natural and logical. Its sole

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drawback was that the leftists who adopted it became in essence an organic part of the right-wing project. Nevertheless, the only means of securing victory under the conditions of discursive struggle is to refuse on principle to take part in this contest. In the long term this strategy can succeed, but in the short term it dooms intellectuals to inevitable marginalisation, driving them into an academic or sectarian ghetto – until the rise of a new social movement creates the demand for a new program and ideology that resists all forms of the dominant discourse. The paradox is that often there is no longer any way out of the sectarian or academic ghetto, even in this case, since a prolonged (and often comfortable) stay within it gives rise to a certain way of life and mode of thinking, to a structure of motivations and rules that accords poorly with taking part in practical politics. Under the conditions of neoliberal hegemony, it is not just those intellectuals and politicians who have sold themselves to the ruling class and accepted its logic who have become incapable of carrying out the tasks of social transformation but also those who have maintained their principles and ideas at the price of political marginalisation. Nevertheless, the defeat and treachery of the intellectuals was provoked in turn by a series of failures of the labour movement. There was nothing accidental about these failures; to the contrary, they were bound up with serious changes in the structure of employment and in the labour market – both within the developed countries and on a global level. It is no surprise that in this situation the left-wing intellectual elite began to place their stake not on the propaganda of class solidarity and unity but on support for various identity groups. The hope of the left intellectuals was that for the workers’ movement, which had lost its earlier might, a different subject of change might be substituted: a coalition of every conceivable minority, each of which would address the system with one or another set of demands and claims.6 But even if such coalitions were to arise spontaneously, they would be extremely unstable and incapable of following a strategic perspective. The discourse of oppressed minorities mimics class analysis on the lexical level at the same time as it claims to expand and deepen this analysis. Classes, however, are united by shared social and economic interests. By contrast, minorities cannot be defined in terms of common economic interests for the simple reason that they lack any such thing; various members of the same minority have not just different interests but often counterposed, mutually exclusive ones.7 Consequently, “minorities” do not have interests but only “rights”. In its turn, this concept of rights as being profoundly individual and specifically ascribed to certain exclusive categories of citizens serves to undermine the logic of traditional democracy, which rests on the academic understanding of rights as equal and identical for all (in contrast to the liberties and privileges of the Middle Ages). Meanwhile, it separates rights from interests, transforming rights into a completely subjective concept whose content is formulated not by the collective subject of a particular right but by the will and fancy of ideologues who arbitrarily distinguish ever-new social minorities on the basis of criteria that they themselves have dreamt up. The constructing of ever-new minorities, together with their organisational processing, has given rise to an endless succession of specific new requirements

The logic of fragmentation 33 that inevitably come into conflict with one another. Meanwhile, numerous groups have been constructed, not just artificially but also without the agreement of the people being “defended” and without taking their views into account. The most grotesque instance is perhaps the animal rights movement. Whatever the people involved might wish, the creatures being defended cannot, unfortunately, either control their “defenders” or call them to account. Can there, as a matter of principle, be “animal interests” held in common by hares, hunting dogs, wolves and bears? While the answer may be in the affirmative, it amounts only to the shared need of all living beings for the preservation of the biosphere (where the interests of animals coincide with those of humans as a biological species). But even though wolves and sheep have different interests, many of the campaigns waged by animal rights defenders represent an actual threat to the creatures in whose names the struggles are mounted. Hence, a complete victory for vegetarianism would lead to a sharp reduction in the total herd of pigs and other livestock, while the disappearance from sale of furs would amount to a catastrophe for many species of fur-bearing animals since, unfortunately, the conditions for maintaining their present numbers have not existed for many years in the natural environment. The political problem lies, of course, not in the fact that modern society is heterogeneous but in the fact that this very heterogeneity and diversity create a still greater need for a unifying ideology. Accompanying the rise of the workers’ movement in the nineteenth century were also conscious efforts to develop a common, indivisible class culture oriented towards the overcoming of differences. Miners and industrial workers, sales assistants in shops and housemaids in genteel homes, agricultural labourers in the fields and locomotive drivers all needed to become conscious that they belonged to a single class to understand that they had common interests and that the things that united them were more important than the differences between them. Of course, this did not mean denying the objective existence of differences that were not only recognised but also overcome – through deliberate compromises which became an important part of the integrating work of the trade union movement and of workers’ parties. By contrast, the ideology of political correctness that has prevailed in the Western left in the early twentieth century has not been oriented towards overcoming differences. To the contrary, this ideology extols these differences and has cultivated them in every possible way. At the same time, these differences have been perceived not as contradicting the interests of working people and as needing to be resolved through complex discussions, mutual concessions and compromises, in all of which the decisive role is played by the majority, uniting the minorities around itself. Instead, the differences have been viewed as purely cultural phenomena; all of the contradictions in the interests involved are to be done away with simply through demonstrating mutual respect. In other words, the extolling of differences has been accompanied by a marked reluctance to acknowledge contradictions. This approach has corresponded in close detail to the principle of “divide and rule”, with the sole difference being that it is the left intellectuals who have been divided and the neoliberal bourgeoisie that has ruled.

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Does class solidarity do away with other characteristics of people’s personalities and behaviour? Of course not! Each of us has a multitude of real and potential identities, derived not only from religion or ethnic background but also from our parentage, education, everyday practice, way of life, place of residence, profession and so forth. Individual people may define themselves through their work and consumption, through their family, kinship, gender, sexual attitudes and practices and even through their attitudes to food, smoking or alcohol. Doing away with this is impossible and unnecessary. Without such things both personal identity and culture would be inconceivable. The norms, codes of behaviour and values prescribed by our various identities determine our emotional practices. As the student of culture, Andrey Zorin, notes, the emotional repertoire of many people may include different emotional matrices that often accord poorly with one another and that sometimes are simply incompatible. The different emotional communities to which people belong often dictate to them quite dissimilar modes of feeling, within which they are forced to orient themselves.8 This might be seen as relating not only to the emotions but also to the objective interests of particular individuals and even of whole groups of people. As consumers, for instance, they might have an interest in lower prices for the goods they purchase, while as hired workers they might set out to increase their wages, which indirectly or even directly will lead to price rises for the same goods. The fundamentally important thing, however, is not the identities that might take shape during the life-processes of a human individual or of a society, but which of these identities it is that determines our political behaviour. On this level, identities are nothing like equal worth or importance. Political correctness substitutes cultural for political questions without creating the possibility of resolving them. Actions are reduced to the ritualised reproduction of discursive practices, presented as ideological struggle. The essence of political correctness does not even lie in its prohibition of the use of various words and expressions that might, indeed, embody prejudices and discrimination on a verbal level. Instead, it consists in a ban on the problematising of certain themes and on the discussion of particular topics. It is no longer of any importance which position one might take in the course of discussion; what is impermissible is the very posing of a particular question. For example, it is impossible to discuss the social dilemmas connected with the influx of refugees to Western Europe or the problems resulting from “positive discrimination” in favour of groups whose rights have earlier been restricted. Providing a typical example is the way in which the question of single-sex marriages has been forced not only on society but also on sexual minorities. As late as the early 2000s, it did not even enter the heads of gay movement activists that such a demand might be put forward. Nevertheless, the issue was elevated by the Socialist government of François Hollande to a prime place in the current political agenda. It was no accident whatsoever that an administration that was

The logic of fragmentation 35 preoccupied with the question of single-sex marriage prepared the most reactionary reform of labour legislation in the modern history not only of France but all of Europe. The principal narrative of the “rights of minorities” not only fails to suggest any specific additional responsibilities in exchange for additional rights (of the type of preferential treatment, affirmative action and so on) but to one or another degree opens up the possibility of evading common civic obligations. In other words, these are not rights, but privileges. As a result, civil society, in which the totality of groups and organisations should ideally make up a unified expanse of participation and discussion, is gradually destroyed. The disseminating of the ideology of multiculturalism and political correctness, with its characteristic idealisation of minorities counterposed by definition to the society of “white males”, has from the very first, and consciously, been aimed not against the bourgeoisie or against discriminatory elite practices, culture and ideas (which the workers’ movement also criticised) but against the cultural norms and traditions of the working class. The assault on these norms has proceeded more unrelentingly the less the working class has been composed of “white males”. Paradoxically, the more actively policies aimed at defending minorities have been pursued in the West, and the more the corresponding ideology has been inculcated on the official level, the more the members of the minorities involved have encountered problems at the level of their everyday lives. The American commentator, Chris Hedges, is certain that the growth of racist and homophobic moods in the depths of American society has been a natural result of positive discrimination and political correctness, which have in fact acted as an essential cover and as an organic part of the neoliberal reforms and which, like any other program of targeted assistance, have expedited the dismantling of the welfare state. These policies, enacted with the full support of the left-liberal intelligentsia, have had their basis in “the double-dealing of the college-educated elites, those who speak the feel-your-pain language of ordinary men and women, who hold up the bible of political correctness while selling out the poor and the working class to corporate power”.9 The Democratic Party primaries in the US in 2016 revealed exquisitely the real meaning of positive discrimination and affirmative action policies as mechanisms for the suborning of the African-American elites, which in their turn have ensured the loyalty of the lower social elements under their control where the neoliberal project and its leaders are concerned. The loyalty of the minorities was exploited in order to mobilise electoral support for Hillary Clinton and the party apparatus and to block the efforts by supporters of Bernie Sanders who were trying to advance social reforms in the interests of these same minorities. The fundamental difference, however, was that the policies Sanders embraced treated AfricanAmericans, women and all other oppressed groups not as separate and specific communities, with whose leaders agreement needed to be sought and who needed to be bought off with sops of one kind or another, but as parts of working America in need of a new course on the general national and social level. The logic of clientelist relations ran directly counter to that of class and civic solidarity.

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The formation of clientelist relations that has ensured political control by the Democrats over members of various minorities, and in the first instance the African-American masses, has been financed by taxpayers while at the same time condemning the majority of the Black population in the US South to the reproduction of the existing structure with its poverty, dependency and denial of rights. The disadvantage suffered by the majority of African-Americans has been in relation not only to the “white” elites but also in relation to the Black population’s own community leaders who have been integrated into this system. Liberal-humanist clientelism has acted as a highly effective mechanism for undermining class solidarity since it has not only counterposed the interest of the individual worker to the interest of the masses but has also split the masses into a multitude of groups each resisting the others. All of these groups are organised vertically and are subject to their own corrupt elites. Needless to say, the traditions and practices of the working class have never been ethically blameless either. If we cast off the idealist romanticisation of the lives of workers that was typical of the left-radical intelligentsia of the first half of the twentieth century, there is a good deal of material for criticism to be found in the everyday lives of working people and in the activity of class organisations. Nevertheless, the political content of this criticism that unfolded in parallel with the general counter-offensive of capital against labour in the late twentieth century is completely obvious. The attack on the traditional values and practices of the labour movement was intended to erode its culture at the very moment when this movement, undermined objectively by the economic and social processes then under way, was experiencing institutional stress and needed to retain its cultural continuity as never before. In a certain sense, this critique of worker traditions reflected the shifts that were under way. Simultaneously, however, it reinforced and deepened these shifts, hindering the formation of new mechanisms of solidarity that could not have been established without, in the first place, a reliance on existing tradition, and second, without efforts to form and consolidate a robust new majority. In any case, accusing the traditional working class of being “white” and of being at least 50 per cent male is the same as demanding that children do penance for the sins of their parents ‒ while knowing, moreover, that the sins enumerated were in fact committed by completely different people and in different places. The idea of assigning guilt specifically to “whites” by virtue of their birth could enter the heads only of privileged white intellectuals who consciously exclude themselves from the group being subjected to ideological ostracism but do not forswear any of the privileges that membership of this group bestows. Although conservative commentators have been inclined to see hypocrisy or a sort of reverse racism in such utterances, the essence of the ideology concerned here has nothing to do with forcing “white males” to be ashamed of their provenance. An effective technology has been created that is consciously applied to undermining solidarity and splitting workers along racial lines (or those of gender, culture and so forth). Certain people ‒ minorities ‒ are assigned the role of victims needing the protection of progressive liberal (and principally white) elites, while

The logic of fragmentation 37 others are cast against their will in the role of sinners who are required to expiate their primordial guilt through renouncing the defence of their own interests and observing the ideological-political rituals of political correctness. The anti-solidary logic of this approach has been obvious from the very start, but the hegemony of the intellectuals combined with the necessity to adapt to the requirements of neoliberalism and to the academic regime that changes beneath its influence has created a situation of almost totalitarian moral terror in which any public statement opposing the dominant discourse is effectively blocked, or at best condemned as a manifestation of old-fashioned, patriarchal, conservative or Stalinist thinking. It is significant that the very language of “positive discrimination” is hierarchical and paternalist, in essence presenting minorities as invariably weak and suffering and thus as the object of the needed help. The subjects of action, the makers of decisions, remain the state and the intellectual-political elite. The system fundamentally excludes any possibility of real equality and emancipation since, if this were the case, helping the “weak” would become groundless and unnecessary. In other words, the “target” group (whether a national minority, women, homosexuals or whomever) in order to be given support must remain weak and oppressed or else the right to receive aid will be impossible to justify. The reproduction of “weakness” is a fundamental principle and the most important goal (though never officially proclaimed) of any “targeted assistance”. This is how such assistance differs fundamentally from a universalist welfare state that does not permit any discrimination, including positive discrimination, providing equal assistance to all. The question of how, why and on whose behalf the existing order may be criticised is also strictly regulated. Effectively, discussion of the flaws of the system is reduced to a set of mandatory words and formulae that must regularly be repeated regardless of the real processes occurring in society. Within the framework of the left-liberal approach, solidarity is conceived of at best as a sort of mutual assistance treaty between various groups and “minorities”, a sort of non-aggression pact under which a common agenda is formed out of the mechanical combining of a multitude of quite different agendas, the contradictions between which are studiously downplayed or ignored. A protest movement is viewed not as a single, solidary whole but only as a coalition, or even, to use an expression of Naomi Klein, a “coalition of coalitions”. By contrast, the traditional principle of class solidarity presupposed the formation of a single, common agenda on the basis of a fundamental basic interest that was shared as a matter of principle. The purpose of this solidarity lay not in the coexistence of various groups but in the overcoming of their differences, in their merger and in the creation, in place of a multitude of feuding “identities”, of a single class and prospectively, human commonality. This, of course, does not mean refusing to recognise cultural differences or failing to respect them. But it does mean that these differences should remain, and should be perceived, as cultural in nature and as needing as far as possible to be worked through and overcome in the field of politics. The logic of multiculturalism, postmodernism, feminism

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and political correctness presumes a directly contrary process of littering politics with cultural problems and of turning it into a form of the emotional experiencing and reproducing of a constantly growing number of cultural peculiarities and differences. The struggle for social transformation does not in any way signify rejecting the emancipation of women or of national minorities. But it does presuppose that objectively, the struggle for these interests can be successful only within the mutual framework of a complex and integral strategy for changing society. It is shared social priorities that must determine the political agenda.

Feminism and other identities A peculiarity of politically correct consciousness is that groups of any and all varieties are thought of not just as homogeneous but also as unchanging, as closed off from one another and as existing independently of one another, in the manner of Leibniz’s monads. These groups can be the victims of discrimination or the objects of targeted assistance. But they are never examined as changing, as internally contradictory, as interacting with one another or as drawn into a single process of the reproduction of the economy, society and political institutions. Moreover, constant stress is placed on the “exclusion” of minorities from various structures, a situation that needs to be replaced by their “inclusion”. The question is not even of the degree to which the thesis of “exclusion” corresponds to reality, especially after a near half-century of positive discrimination policies.10 Far more important is the fact that this thesis has no connection with analysis of the institutions themselves, with their functioning, development or transformation. Nor does the thesis rest on the analysis of economic processes and their dynamics or on an understanding of how the social division of labour functions. Even the ethical question remains unposed: should one seek inclusion in institutions that are part of a depraved system? In attempting to unmask the hidden gender problematic contained within class discourse, feminist analysis remains studiously abstracted from class differences; substituted for discussion of them are appeals for gender equality regardless of the social position of the people involved. In real life, however, equality of the sexes turns out to be quite different in its meaning and content depending on the social status and economic positions of the men and women concerned. A highly characteristic example of the hidden class content of feminist discourse is the analysis of the problem of the “glass ceiling”. Data on the top management of large companies, and to a lesser extent of government departments, show that women who make successful careers there meet with difficulties in reaching the very top level. This is confirmed by a large amount of sociological evidence and cannot be doubted. Nevertheless, this problem affects, at most, only 1 or 2 per cent of the female population and precisely that section of it that already occupies a high position in society, belonging to the topmost layer of the middle class or to the bourgeoisie. It is quite incomprehensible why members of the left should concern themselves with altering the gender composition of the capitalist hierarchy if their goal is the liquidation or radical transformation of that very system.11

The logic of fragmentation 39 At the same time, the many examples of women who have had successful careers and attained high posts in government structures, women such as Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel, are not accepted by radical commentators as proof of positive changes on the basis that these women politicians have not been feminists.12 Here, however, the question arises: whose interests does this discourse present? Those of women in general or of feminists themselves, or, more precisely, of the left-liberal community that exercises ideological hegemony among a certain section of the middle class? Needless to say, in the left versions of feminist discourse, one invariably hears repeated the thesis that the oppression of women is an organic component of capitalism or even an indispensable element of capitalist exploitation. This conclusion is corroborated as a rule by two facts which are beyond doubt. First, in most capitalist countries the average earnings of women lag behind those of men. Second, the burden of domestic labour, which within the family lies mainly on women, cannot fail to be reflected in the labour market and in the cost of labour power. There is thus a basis for saying that the capitalist economy includes within itself the gender division of labour. The problem, however, lies in the degree to which these two circumstances are essential and fundamental to capitalism, determining its nature as a system. Capitalist society has witnessed a relative evening out of the earnings of men and women, a redistribution of duties within families, the development of technologies that render domestic labour easier and the creation of a developed services sector that relieves women of a significant part of the burden of housework, but these have in no way undermined bourgeois productive relations or the institution of private property. Worse still, most of the progress in these areas has been achieved not through programs of targeted assistance but through the development of the welfare state – during the period preceding the triumph of feminism and political correctness. Feminist discourse, like other forms of left-liberal ideology, not only accepts bourgeois society as an unalterable given but also orients itself towards the bourgeois individual with his or her values, criteria and motivations. Accordingly, the relations between men and women are viewed either as competitive or as based on partnership and mutual assent (of significance here is the use of the word “partner” to designate one’s life-companion in place of “husband”, “wife”, “beloved” and so forth). In other words, relations between people are perceived exclusively as being between sovereign individuals, united by nothing apart from agreement.13 There is no place here for love or for feelings or for any form of commonality apart from identity so that none of the bearers of the discourse notice that something is clearly missing. Paradoxically, this individualist conception undermines itself in the long term since a compact that lacks any connection with social ethics and that is not aimed at achieving any goals beyond the bounds of a particular couple might, strictly speaking, be whatever one likes and hence does not have to be the object of public discussion and regulation. Something that in a different socio-ethical system would appear as a duty (not simply to one’s “better half” but also to society) is

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now reduced to a private, individual choice. As a result, feminism and multiculturalism in certain situations may signify tolerance of the most repellent forms of patriarchalism, also perceived as manifestations of identity or as a choice. . . . If, for example, systematic violence against a partner is an aspect of relations entered into “voluntarily”, even if by force of custom, there is no cause to struggle against it. The fundamental differences within each specific minority are ignored. Within the framework of such a discourse the fact that women, for example, belong to different cultures, ethnicities, contending classes and parties becomes a trifling circumstance with no influence whatsoever on the essence of the matter. In analogous fashion, migrants appear to us as a single suffering and oppressed mass, though in reality they, too, are divided into groups that are often in sharp conflict with one another (for example, Islamists and those who are fleeing from Islamism, or workers and business entrepreneurs, or bureaucrats ousted from power and intellectuals seeking political asylum or the organisers of mafia networks and their victims). Transformed into the basis for practical politics, the idea of the homogeneity of the migrant flood assists in the creation of clientelist structures through which a group among the migrants and refugees that has come to control the distribution of aid and that has forged ties with the local authorities, the mafia and nongovernment organisations becomes able to control and exploit all of its fellows. The perception presented here of the nature of migrants was also responsible for the acuteness of the migration crisis of 2015–2016, when in the guise of Syrian refugees fleeing the zone of military action, hundreds of thousands of people who had never been in Syria and who did not even know the Arabic language surged into Europe. Since politically correct discourse deliberately rejects the very idea of differentiating between migrants, the attempt to distinguish genuine refugees, with the right to receive help, from the rest of the torrent was not just a fundamental political impossibility but was also condemned as a manifestation of racism. In one way or another, the conflicts nevertheless broke through to the surface and in far-from-pleasant fashion. One such example occurred during the 2016 New Year’s celebrations in Cologne, when groups of half-drunken young men from among the immigrants and refugees began making aggressive advances to local women. Public opinion, needless to say, became divided between people who called for defending the rights of migrants, branding as racist anyone who tried to discuss the incidents, and others who unleashed a powerful campaign around the issue of violence against women. Trying to ascertain which side in this discussion is correct is pointless since the question has been posed wrongly from the very beginning. It cannot be resolved within the framework provided by the logic of political correctness or on the basis of respect for “identities”. Moreover, it is precisely a disregard for which particular identities might be present at a given moment, and a readiness on the part of society to alter and transcend these identities, that is the most important and indispensable condition for social progress. One of the unquestionable successes of the feminist critique of classical sociology has been to expose the hidden gender bias that very often remains unremarked

The logic of fragmentation 41 on, even by the individuals responsible for various progressive statements. Unfortunately, “people in general” are too often identified unconsciously with men. Assertions that might appear neutral turn out in reality to be weighted in gender terms. The contradiction of feminism, however, is that its supporters, while discovering unconscious gender biases in the utterances of others, consistently do their best to avoid noticing the hidden and unconscious social and class bias in their own statements. Meanwhile, there is no need for an analytical microscope to detect that feminist discourse, which on the surface is weighted only in gender terms, in reality reflects the gender-neutral groups interests of a privileged section of the middle class. It is not difficult to trace this connection historically. The ascent of the liberal middle class was accompanied by a corresponding ideological evolution. The criticism voiced by this middle class was directed fundamentally against the old elites, whose place was to be taken by a new generation of educated liberal professionals with bourgeois ambitions. For this new generation, accusations of patriarchalism and of discrimination against women were a very convenient means of struggle against the people who were slowing its rise up the career ladder in corporations and government departments; in this way, the authority of the old hereditary elites could be undermined. The attack was aimed at the hegemony of the old bourgeois families, but in no way was it directed against the logic of capitalist hierarchy as such. To the contrary, places in this hierarchy were the main prizes awaiting the liberal generation as it thrust itself forward. Precisely for this reason, the discursive onslaught by the liberals was aimed simultaneously both against the old bourgeois elite and against the traditional left organisations, not to mention the mass of workers, who were stamped with the brand of “backwardness”. The triumphant discourse of feminism and political correctness did not presuppose that society would have a program of social change pressed on it, but rather that a particular culture and practice of social conduct would be affirmed. In effect, this would require the knowledge and acceptance of a set of symbolic codes, without which no one could lay claim to a leading role in society. On the one hand, the old elite would be placed under pressure and forced to accept the new rules, while on the other, the politically incorrect mass of ordinary people, whose conditions of everyday life simply did not allow them to constantly observe the demands of political correctness, would be cut out of the picture. For such a discursive code to operate, it was of fundamental importance that however much the code was propagandised, a significant mass of people would remain who for one or another reason would be incapable of obeying it. Accordingly, the struggle for progressive discourse would become permanent and would be transformed into the immutable content of political life, driving out other issues. Little by little, control over personnel policy at all levels – from capitalist firms to organisations of the radical left – would increasingly be monopolised by one and the same sociocultural layer. Only people who were knowledgeable and practised in correct discourse could be publicly recognised opinion-setters in the field of journalism, and only they would become the key activists in political organisations.

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The principal demand of politically correct discourse, a demand that united members of the left with the progressive liberal bourgeoisie, was for a break with the historical culture and traditions of the working class on the pretext that these were patriarchal and machista. Meanwhile, this was applied in equal measure to all the bearers, both men and women, of the culture concerned. Even in the trade unions, adherents of the traditional “blue collar” proletarian culture were gradually forced out of the leadership. In left-wing political organisations, the process went even further, leading to a deliberate and consistent exclusion of workers (apart from those few who were prepared to mimic the cultural norms of the liberal middle class). It is not surprising that many frustrated proletarians have finished up finding a place for themselves among the supporters of right-wing populism.

The political economy of migration During the 1990s and the first years of the new century, the key topics of politically correct discourse had been the positions of women and of ethnic minorities, but in the conditions of the growing world economic crisis thereafter, the figure of the migrant or refugee took centre stage. The people concerned had not arrived decades or generations earlier, eventually making a place for themselves as ethnic minorities within Western societies but were being driven across national borders by the sharply deteriorating international economic and political environment. They represented a new wave of immigrants, and the difference is extremely important since, between those who make up the old and new waves, there are extremely acute conflicts which politically correct thinking consciously ignores. Throughout the industrial age of European history, mass migration from the countryside to the cities, and also from poorer to richer countries, has created cultural problems which have nevertheless been resolved over one or two generations. The integration of migrants into the urban society that received them occurred within the context of industrial culture and of the productive process, which in and of themselves created the need for collaboration with the surrounding collective, the fulfilment of common rules and the development of common customs. But as the European industrial base has grown weaker during the epoch of neoliberalism, everyday cultural norms have begun to be dictated not by production but by consumption. Production requires productive interaction, but consumption, even when homogeneous and standardised, is a private, individual or at most family affair. Not surprisingly, each new wave of arrivals has been integrated by the receiving society with greater difficulty than the wave that preceded it. Under conditions in which a sort of taboo has prevented the discussion of socio-economic contradictions, public opinion interprets the problem as cultural and political. This ethnicising of conflict occurs both on the right and on the left. The rejection of class and sociological analysis necessarily presupposes that the contradictions existing in society will be thought of exclusively as ideological and cultural. Describing political life in a totalitarian state, Antonio Gramsci noted that “in totalitarian parties cultural functions predominate, and give rise to political

The logic of fragmentation 43 jargon; that is, political questions acquire cultural forms, and as such, become insoluble”.14 The hegemony of liberal political correctness and of left intellectual discourse has led to precisely the same situation. When the social problems and structural contradictions of society are interpreted as “cultural”, they not only cannot be resolved as such, but even the possibility of discussing practical solutions is blocked. This may be observed in equal degree on both the left and right ends of the political spectrum. Conservative-nationalist commentaries, for example, ascribe the inability of migrants to adapt to their religious and tribal traditions, while the left-radical intelligentsia explains everything on the basis of discrimination. Questions relating to the place of immigrants in the social division of labour, in the structure of employment, to the way in which immigration is used in the social (or more precisely, antisocial) policy of the ruling class, and to stratification within the working class and among migrants, are simply not asked. Meanwhile, without an understanding of these questions, and without the corresponding socio-economic measures, a declarative struggle against discrimination not only fails to solve the problem but has the reverse effect, counterposing various layers of hired workers to one another and transforming discrimination from above into resistance from below. If, on the other hand, politically correct members of the left were to ponder the social nature of migration, they would very soon find that the actual content of cultural contradictions is equally lacking in any resemblance to what the intellectuals think. The problem, which in the public imagination is reduced to religious and racial differences (and that must, accordingly, also be solved on the cultural level through the overcoming of racism), in reality represents a clash between hereditary townsfolk and a mass of immigrants from the countryside, immigrants who have been transformed into marginals due to a lack of industrial jobs and the impossibility of their integration into a new way of life. It is enough to recall the famous film of Luchino Visconti, Rocco and his Brothers, to discover that similar conflicts could be observed in northern Italy during the 1960s. At that time a mass of southerners, lacking a reliable means of subsistence, flocked to the prosperous industrial cities of the Italian north. Just as acute were the conflicts in the workers’ settlements of Soviet Russia in the mid-1930s or during the second wave of urbanisation in the 1960s. Everywhere, the same problems arose – crime, violence, prostitution, disputes with the “locals” and so forth. Providing a mechanism of integration was the “urban conveyor”, gradually acculturating the newly arrived population to discipline, solidarity and a certain order and rhythm in life. Analogous roles were played by the conscript army and the comprehensive school. The flow of immigrants from the countries of the Global South has become a problem not through anything innate in itself but because of the deindustrialisation being experienced by the developed countries of Europe and America. This process is not to be reduced to the closing of factories and the loss of jobs. It is not even reducible to the changed structure of employment and the growth of unemployment. Under the conditions of neoliberalism, the majority of European countries, as well as experiencing deindustrialisation, have encountered a

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weakening of other institutions that had arisen or been strengthened by industrial development. Conscript armies were replaced by professional forces or their numbers were reduced to the point where only a relatively small proportion of young people were required to serve. The role of the army as a mechanism of cultural integration came to an end, and nothing replaced it. Substituted for mass organised employment was a new labour market constructed according to the principle of chaotic individual competition. Job communities, with their specific cultures and ethics, were drastically weakened. The health system was privatised and fragmented on the basis that different social groups should receive different medicine. The only elements that remained were the bureaucracy, entry to which was by no means open to all, and mass education, which in turn was subjected to numerous reforms aimed at fragmenting what had earlier been a unified system. Education ceased to be thought of, or to function, as a mechanism aimed at creating citizens able to take part in society, instead becoming a system that supplied student-consumers with services, thanks to which they had a chance of receiving competitive advantages in the labour market. In other words, a system that had once promoted solidarity in society now aided its atomisation. Finding themselves in such a social environment, migrants fresh from their home villages absorbed only the culture of competition and consumption, and naturally counterposed themselves both to the “locals” and to other migrant groups within the framework of the dominant logic of a war of all against all. Within this situation tribal and other archaic identities, along with the bonds and relationships that arose from them, were not overcome but were strengthened and consolidated. These identities replaced the shattered mechanisms of interpersonal, workplace and class solidarity, helping the cohesive group to solve the problems of survival in a hostile world of liberal chaos. A decade and a half earlier than in Europe, this situation had arisen in the countries of the Near East, where in the context of a continuing exodus of people from the villages, a crisis of urban culture and a lack of jobs in industry had analogous effects. These included the rise of Islamic radicalism in countries (such as Tunisia, Algeria, Palestine and somewhat earlier, Iran) where it might have appeared that in the cities a shift to a European way of life had occurred long before. In reality, the notorious Islamic religiosity was a natural reaction by declassed village dwellers to the inability of the cities to integrate them. The economic situation did not spur growth in the numbers of the industrial proletariat but led to the emergence of a huge mass of urban marginals and lumpen-proletarians. The political culture of society changed in corresponding fashion, with fundamentalist ideologies of all conceivable types spreading apace. But was it only in Islamic countries that such problems arose? The politically correct answer to the immigration crisis has been multiculturalism, but in practice, this policy has rendered the crisis incomparably more severe. Not only has the mechanism of integration of new members of society been undermined on an objective level, but added to this on a subjective and political level has been the thoroughly conscious implantation of an ideology of preventing integration. Multiculturalism increases the fragmentation of society and creates

The logic of fragmentation 45 conditions in which the rights of “new citizens” continue to be denied on a huge scale. At the same time, it nurtures ethno-cultural sub-elites within immigrant circles. No one asks the migrants themselves whether they want to preserve and reproduce “their” culture and to what extent a traditional ethno-religious or tribal identity is desirable and “their own” for millions of new proletarians, thrust by the force of circumstances into societies that are new to them. The problem with migrants is not that they are bad at assimilating the norms of modern European individualism but that, to the contrary, they assimilate this individualism all too well. The individualist culture of consumption not only fails to provide the obligatory access to other aspects of European culture (to use a mobile telephone, for example, does not require a sound knowledge of classical English literature), but worse still, prevents people from mastering European values, which themselves contradict the demands and norms of consumer individualism. Adding to social disintegration is increasingly acute competition in the labour market. For capital, encouraging migration is just one of the elements in the neoliberal trend towards heightening the “mobility” and “flexibility” of labour power. Unlike the social democratic state, which sought to create jobs in the places where people lived, of Soviet centralised planning, which moved workers to the areas where industry was being developed and simultaneously constructed housing and social infrastructure for them,15 in this case it is assumed that people will move in search of jobs, taking the expense and risks on themselves. Since this relocation is spontaneous, it inevitably becomes excessive, with more people involved than there are jobs, affordable housing and so forth. Augmenting the intranational and intra-continental migration with a flow of immigrants, refugees and trans-border migrants, forced to agree to more modest pay and living standards, the neoliberal economic regime not only intensifies the competition between hired workers but creates steadily increasing pressure on the housing market and on social welfare institutions. The result is that the migrants exert pressure on the labour market even if they are not looking for work. Migration is always used by capital to create a “reserve army of labour”. But in the early twenty-first century, the situation has been exacerbated by the fact that many immigrants and refugees are not working but are receiving welfare benefits. In some countries, refugees are simply banned from working legally. This not only fails to improve the situation in society, but on the contrary, deepens the existing problems. Since the labour market and social programs are under constant institutional pressure, the opportunity arises to “discipline” the working class still further by dismantling what remains of the welfare state. Cutting benefits and social programs has nothing positive to offer the economy since it leads to a reduction of aggregate demand and does not spur new investments. But on the social and political level, it is an extremely effective tool for the struggle by capital against labour. Left-liberal ideologues, who are demonstratively unwilling to see any connection between migration and the general logic of the neoliberal policy of deregulation, stubbornly ignore the impact of the massive population influx on the labour market and the social welfare system. In sociological terms, their endlessly

46 The logic of fragmentation repeated argument that migrants do not compete with the “native” population does not match reality, and further, is based on the same racist logic according to which the new arrivals fill low-paid and informal jobs that members of the native “white” population consider beneath their dignity. But even if we were to accept this logic, it would still be necessary to recognise that the labour apartheid and segmentation of the job market that arises on this basis does not strengthen the positions of hired workers, does not strengthen the trade union movement, and does not help develop civil society. Jobs become “good” or “bad” depending on how well they are paid and the career prospects they open up. The fact that certain jobs are allotted to migrants in turn reinforces the status of these jobs as “bad”. But in conditions when employers are short of cheap labour, they are forced to raise the status of the jobs concerned, introducing mechanisation, improving work conditions, raising pay rates and creating career paths for workers. By contrast, the social dynamic that maintains the status of “good” and “bad” jobs undermines class solidarity, forming and reproducing within developed societies the same hierarchy of oppression that once existed between the West and the colonial world. Meanwhile, those who suffer the greatest harm from uncontrolled migration are the lowest strata of society, which in their turn consist of earlier immigrants, internal migrants and legally employed foreign nationals. For these people, the uncontrolled influx means constantly increasing competition that blocks any possibility of winning better terms of employment and that erodes islands of social consolidation and solidarity while denying the younger generation any chance of breaking out of the ghetto. Since the late 1920s, the policy of the left has always consisted of fighting for full employment, while the interests of the bourgeoisie have lain in encouraging competition between workers, using to this end the factor of mass unemployment, the existence of the “reserve army of labour” and ethnic segregation. By encouraging uncontrolled migration, the left-liberal intelligentsia serves the agenda of the bourgeoisie while basing this antisocial practice on “humanist” arguments. Entering the job market as unqualified and often illegal labour power, the new wave of migrants competes above all with people on the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy. It is thus unsurprising that capital-city intellectuals, university professors and highly paid journalists experience no special problems with migration and hence wax indignant at the “racist prejudices” of the socially deprived who encounter this competition. In reality, however, the clashes in the labour market have nothing in common with racial conflict since in the first instance the “new migrants” are placing pressure on the “old immigrants”, on those who settled and became legalised earlier. What ultimately arises is a situation, paradoxical at first sight but entirely natural, in which the demand to limit migration receives support precisely among ethnic minorities. We should not be surprised to find that not only are members of the traditional working class flocking to support right-wing radicals, but in France even immigrants are starting to vote in large numbers for the National Front. Well-intentioned left-wing sociologists recognise that illegal immigrants “are quietly integrated into the labour market as part of a highly exploitable and

The logic of fragmentation 47 expendable and informal workforce”.16 No political conclusions, however, are drawn from this. Describing the situation surrounding the flow of refugees into Europe during the winter of 2016, Socialist Review did not suggest any solution apart from issuing the call to “Open the borders and let them in”.17 The question is not posed here of what would happen to the labour market and housing market, nor do the authors show the slightest interest in what would happen to the refugees themselves after they cross the border. The leaders of the German Left Party (Die Linke) Sara Wagenknecht and Dietmar Bartsch, who dared so much as to mention such questions, were subjected to furious attacks from the radical intelligentsia. Declaring such discussions impermissible, left commentators later stated perplexedly, “At the moment everything is moving to the right”, calling on their readers, in response to the deteriorating political and social situation, to “take on the racist arguments and to build an anti-racist movement”.18 No one asked why earlier, analogous efforts had not had the expected result, and even had the reverse effect. It is unacceptable to blame particular migrants for the misfortunes that are pouring on the heads of local workers (including in the first instance the members of previous waves of immigration). It would also be wrong to consider mass immigration the sole or even main cause of the weakening of the position of hired workers in the labour market. But to claim that there is no connection whatsoever between the influx of migrants and the weakness of the labour movement is to deny the obvious. In exactly the same fashion, sympathy for the sufferings of particular people who have been forced to move from poorer to richer countries does not alter the fact that the labour movement in virtually all European countries, including Russia and also in the US, has an objective interest in changing immigration policies that have been turned into a tool with whose help the bourgeoisie is reformatting the labour market in its interests. In these circumstances the “anti-racist” propaganda of the left is not just completely ineffective, but through its obvious inadequacy stimulates the growth in society ‒ and particularly in the working class ‒ of right-wing xenophobic moods which then rebound on the left itself, providing an instruction in the shortcomings of politically correct discourse. Condemning as “racist”, “xenophobic” or “fascist” anyone who asks uncomfortable questions about migration, and blocking serious discussion about the scale and methods integration, the left not only surrenders the field to the ultra-right but also legitimises real fascism and racism since the left-liberal approach makes no distinction between the aggressive neoNazi thug and the peaceful resident who doubts the need to hand over the local school to be turned into a hostel for refugees. By refusing to listen to such people, and refusing to recognise not only the legitimacy of their doubts but even their right to pose questions and suggest mutually acceptable compromises, left-liberal opinion drives ordinary people into the embrace of the right-wing radicals who are the only people prepared to discuss such topics. Meanwhile, the left itself is by no means free of racist prejudices. The attitude of liberal leftists to migrants and refugees may be defined as compassionate racism – a patronisingly sympathetic racism warmed by the

48 The logic of fragmentation acknowledgement of guilt for the past crimes and injustices committed by one’s own nation. This has nothing to do either with class analysis or with critical sociohistorical thinking. According to the general logic of politically correct discourse, refugees and migrants appear as a faceless, homogeneous mass of suffering humanity, devoid of other characteristics whether individual, social, cultural or psychological. The migrants and refugees are seen as having no problems apart from those that result from the insufficiently sympathetic and insufficiently protective attitude of the state and the local society. The fact that this is a mass of people who have been declassed, and declassed by force, is not just denied close attention or analysis by the liberal humanists but vanishes completely from their field of vision. Unfortunately, once we have stripped people of any human or social qualities, we are not only incapable of understanding the motives behind their actions or the processes of which they are part, but we are also incapable of giving them effective help. We cannot devise any practical strategy for the integration and adaptation of the millions of people who have crossed into Europe during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. This is not even among the tasks that left liberals set for themselves. When they discuss the question of helping the refugees, they are trying in reality to help themselves by solving their own moral and psychological problems. The answer to the crisis is not, of course, to follow the advice of the right, closing the borders and expelling from Europe the migrants who are there already. Providing real aid to the new arrivals is, however, technically impossible unless the process is regulated in some way and unless we enact appropriate social and cultural policies backed by resources and personnel. This in turn means it is essential to limit the flow and to assign the new arrivals to various groups, subjecting them to definite requirements, norms and discipline. These restrictions are indispensable and are in the interests of the new arrivals themselves, for whom genuinely functioning channels of social integration must be created. Under the conditions of capitalism, the alternative to racism is not a struggle for specific “rights of migrants” but integrating the new arrivals into existing workers’ organisations in order to provide them with equal pay and equal rights as hired workers. Most importantly, it is to create good jobs for them, jobs that not only supply them with a decent income but that also make high demands of them and that subject them to strict productive discipline. Similarly, the need is not to defend the “rights of illegals” but to fight for universal and complete legalisation ‒ compulsory if need be ‒ of the whole population that is present in the national territory. If successful, such actions will sharply reduce the stake held by capital in increased flows of migrants, and this in turn will cause these flows to decline to levels determined objectively by the political situations in various localities.19 What is required is not “anti-racist propaganda” that is abstract and devoid of content, but a struggle to change both migration policy and social policy. It is essential to put an end to the socio-economic situation that made the migration crisis inevitable. Once the mass movement of people from country to country has become a fact, solving the problem is impossible without resorting to

The logic of fragmentation 49 active socio-cultural regulation, without creating new jobs, without developing programs for the construction of housing, kindergartens, schools and trade training institutions and without the deliberate (if necessary, compulsory) assigning of work. In this context, the Soviet experience of economic and social planning may be useful. The USSR managed to “remould” huge masses of former peasants, along with members of different nationalities and cultures, into a more or less homogeneous urban population. The liberal intelligentsia will undoubtedly reject the Soviet approach as authoritarian, but it was far more humanitarian in its essence than a benevolent connivance that leads to the destruction of society and the growth of spontaneous violence from below. The new quality of life in the USSR, along with the cultural and social integration, resulted in more than just universal employment. Along with the industrial plants, cinemas, clubs and libraries were opened as well as children’s sporting associations and educational circles. All of this cost the state money, but it yielded monumental benefits to society, providing industry and science with a disciplined and motivated workforce. Today, we observe a quite different picture in the West and in the large cities of Russia. When liberal society has shown complete indifference to the fates of hundreds of thousands of newly arrived settlers from remote parts, it is not surprising that almost the only socialising factor for them is attendance at the mosque or at a gathering of fellow countrymen, controlled by corrupt patriarchal leaders (and often with close ties to liberal non-government organisations). Without the mechanisms that are organic to industrial development, the mass transformation of former peasants into urban dwellers is impossible. Industrialism is authoritarian, but this is an indispensable price of progress that has to be recognised and understood and that cannot possibly be rejected. “Post-industrial” society by definition lacks the mechanisms required for the assimilation of huge migratory flows since it is precisely the industrial system that performs this function (that is, the system as a whole, including mass education, a conscript army and other institutions). Unfortunately, the socio-historical task of industrialism on the planetary scale is far from complete, and consequently, we are not entitled to hope that post-industrial utopias will take the place of practical steps able to provide solutions to the problems that confront us. Without carrying out industrial development and restoring the mechanisms of class solidarisation, dealing with the cultural problem of migration on a mass scale is impossible. Courses in the language and culture of the host country will not help, and neither will repression and threats. The integration of the “new citizens” must go hand in hand with economic development and with the creation of new jobs oriented towards collective and collaborative labour. There are no objective reasons why such jobs cannot be created in the old industrial countries, but this is prevented by the economic logic of neoliberalism, which renders such development unprofitable. More advantageous to the short-term interests of investors is the exploitation of cheap, unorganised and non-solidarised labour power in the countries of the periphery and in Europe and America themselves.

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Finding a humanitarian solution to the problems that arise from mass migration is possible. But in order to develop such solutions, it is essential first of all to stop denying the existence of the problems themselves. Racist and anti-immigrant propaganda will be defeated only if people recognise the objective meaning of what is occurring, rejecting any effort to reduce this meaning to rivalry between various groups of workers in the labour market or to the redistribution of funds within the frameworks of welfare programs that are constantly being curtailed. And people must also see the alternative – a program for the constructive resolving of the contradictions concerned. This program will perform the function of ideologically mobilising and solidarising different social groups only if it takes account of the real interests of the groups involved, creating the conditions for practical compromise, and not for an imagined overcoming or ignoring of conflicts. Further, any practical steps that are taken will not be flawless or devoid of problems. Development without problems exists only in the imagination of liberal idealists with a poor knowledge of the social sciences. Ultimately, a substantial growth of the economy and an expansion of the welfare state, creating large numbers of new jobs and new channels of social mobility open to all social and cultural groups without exception, will be needed to alter the situation. The rivalry between the groups will need to be alleviated and then made irrelevant, while the boundaries between them are rapidly dissolved and the groups are integrated into a single class and national community. The re-industrialising of the developed countries is the sole effective mechanism for integrating the new population. It represents not simply a strategy for economic development but also the only civilised method through which the “old” countries of Europe and North America, including Russia, can be saved.

The schism of the left The victory of the left-liberal ideologues over other trends of left thought has neither been total nor universally recognised. People have constantly objected to these ideologues, argued with them and condemned them. But the forces resisting them have increasingly been marginalised, not only with relation to society as a whole but also to the left milieu itself. This state of affairs cannot be explained by political circumstances alone, even if we include such important events as the collapse of the Soviet system between 1989 and 1991. Further, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the left movement had clearly begun to be restored following the shock represented by the events in Eastern Europe and the USSR. The protests by the antiglobalists bore witness to the fact that the situation was changing and that a new generation was coming onto the scene, one not just ready to take up radical slogans but also prepared for radical action. Nevertheless, the next upsurge of the left movement, beginning in the new century, turned into a series of shameful failures and retreats. The left quickly began to lose the positions it had just conquered, yielding them to various right-wing populists.

The logic of fragmentation 51 It is noteworthy that these failures occurred against the background of a sharpened crisis of the very neoliberal model of capitalism that the socialists were criticising with such conviction. In other words, the unfavourable political conjuncture was the last straw for the members of the left, and the positive change in the situation not only failed to bring them success but in some ways even exacerbated their crisis. The reasons for this state of affairs lie both in the objective processes of transformation that capitalist society was undergoing and in the evolution of the left organisations and institutions themselves, including the politico-ideological ones. The key idea of neoliberalism is expressed in Margaret Thatcher’s formula, “there is no such thing as society”. This is not simply an aphorism but an operating principle for the reorganising of institutions. There is no such thing as the public interest; there are only interest groups. The fragmentation of society is not just an invention of post-modernist sociologists but was born of the social logic of neoliberalism, even though this process brings about a gradual weakening of all social bonds, including those essential for the reproduction of neoliberalism and capitalism themselves. Losing its restraining elements, the system begins to devour itself, and this is not the least among the causes of its crisis. Transnational financial capital is also one of the interest groups in the fragmentation of society, but it is the one that holds a monopoly on the taking of economic decisions. Within the framework of this logic, the monopoly is impossible to dispute, not so much for factual reasons as ideologically (it can be disputed only in the name of society as a whole, and this is impossible under the conditions of fragmentation). The ruling class is thus the sole, more or less consolidated and effectively functioning, class in society. The technological and socio-economic changes under way in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have gone nowhere near causing the contradiction between labour and capital to disappear, but they have brought sharp changes to the organisation of labour. The classical forms of industrial production have vanished into the past, not because industry has disappeared but because its structure, organisation and technology have been radically altered. Since the 1990s, industry has become ever-less concentrated in geographic and technical terms. The dispersal of production is changing the way of life of hired workers. At the same time, the importance of various forms of non-industrial employment, from the area of services to scientific research, is showing a marked increase. It is not so much that the world of labour is becoming more and more diverse and heterogeneous (it has always had this character), as that it is losing the organising core represented by the traditional industrial proletariat, around which other layers and groups of workers, from dishwashers to university lecturers, were able to cohere with relative ease. Accordingly, the dominant culture and ideology are being weakened. Losing its consolidation, the working class once again becomes blurred, finding itself transformed into the “people” or the “masses”, objectively possessing common interests but lacking in shared organisation or a common way of life or a single culture. Paradoxically, this evolution of the working class increases the importance of the political space, within whose frameworks the “encounter”

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between various groups needs to take place. The common interest needs not only to be recognised anew and articulated through political action, but it is objectively established through joint practice since the social groups are initially blurred, the borders between them are mobile and it is the experience of social action that allows them to be formed afresh. In the nineteenth century, Marx spoke of the “class in itself” that through struggle with other classes needed to become a “class for itself”. In the twenty-first century, this process must be repeated on a new level. The institutions of the left movement, however, have not only proved unready to carry out this task, but to the contrary, have been constructed in such a fashion as to make carrying it out impossible. Structures of the “old left” have been retained that have reproduced the political culture, methods and ideologies of the traditional industrial period, seeing any attempt to adapt to the new conditions a threat that their identity will be destroyed. For the most part, such groups turn to Marxist and communist traditions but see in Marxism a set of ready-made answers and not a methodology for seeking the truth, a methodology that allows one to formulate questions adequate to the real contradictions of society. To a declassed and atomised society, these groups attempt to apply “political technologies” developed for a society made up of consolidated class forces. As a result, the groups are doomed to defeat whenever they seek to move outside the niche in which they have managed to preserve themselves. At the same time, a multitude of movements, organisations and currents of the “new left” are taking shape. These echo the dominant discourse of the neoliberal epoch – the defence of minorities, feminism, political correctness, multiculturalism and so forth. Often, it is true, hybrid formations arise in which the discourse of political correctness and that of class orthodoxy are mechanically combined. Nevertheless, it is the “new” ideas that for the most part turn out to be dominant where political practice is concerned. A mechanical combining of “old” and “new” slogans, formulae and terms (class and gender, the defence of minorities and labour solidarity) is not a problem for the supporters of these tendencies since for them eclecticism is transformed into a sort of ideological norm. The point here is not that such ideas and formulae cannot be combined at all but that no one is considering either the contradictions that arise in the course of this process or on what basis and through what practical steps a compromise of interests may be reached or a conflict overcome. Any and all programs are transformed into meaningless verbiage and any discussion into a mechanical repetition of ready-made formulae. “Ignoring problems is not the best means of solving them”, wrote the scholars of contemporary Marxism Andrey Koryakovtsev and Sergey Visunov. Instead of addressing urgent socio-philosophical problems and through this, discovering a path that at least in theory provides a way out of the crisis of the anti-capitalist movement, the overwhelming majority of members of the left (and even of the most educated and authoritative theoreticians) spend their time trying to find ways to talk this crisis out of existence.20

The logic of fragmentation 53 For all its diverse variants, this approach is not only hostile to class politics on the level of content. At its basis lies self-interest in the reproduction of the process of social fragmentation unleashed by neoliberalism since it is within the framework of this process that these variants can effectively apply their ideas and practices – not in order to change society but to preserve and even expand the socio-cultural niches they occupy. This position is more often than not unconscious and spontaneous, but this simply renders it more thoroughgoing. By the same token, the members of the left do not have an interest in radical change but in the reproduction of the established system of relations, of which their activity is part. The problem is that this system is in a profound state of crisis and decay. This compels leftists of both varieties to climb out of their niches, taking decisions and carrying out actions that are outside the framework of their accustomed practice. But due to the very nature of such groups and organisations, these decisions are inadequate to the new situation and in essence are conservative. “Both in Russia and the West”, Koryakovtsev and Viskunov continue, and in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, numerous “left intellectuals” with brilliant university credentials have been in a state of internal ideological inconsistency and contradictoriness. This is shown by their complete incapacity for the inward labour of critical thinking, something that has always distinguished European culture. They have exchanged this intellectual labour for psychological experiences and for the adrenalin obtained from the latest “direct revolutionary action” – agreeable, but fruitless in practical and theoretical terms.21 Ultimately, the institutions and ideologies established by the left movement since 1990 have been just as great an obstacle to overcoming neoliberalism as the openly neoliberal institutions created by the bourgeoisie. It is not surprising that every time an institutional crisis has arisen in society (whether the situation with the possible exit of Greece from the eurozone, the struggle surrounding British membership in the European Union or the incipient destruction of the two-party system in the US) a significant section of the left has chosen collaboration with the conservative establishment. The transformation of the left movement is thus a crucially important condition for turning it into an effective force for social change. This transformation, however, is naturally accompanied by the destruction of already-established institutions and organisations. The conflicts and schisms that are an inevitable part of this process may be viewed in tactical terms as weakening the left flank of society. But in an historical perspective, this is the sole possible route. The split in the socialist movement in the early twentieth century was interpreted by V.I. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg as a clash between reformists and revolutionaries, between proletarian class politics and petty-bourgeois opportunism. Historically, however, the boundaries between reformist and revolutionary practice have been extremely fluid, and the reformism of the social democratic parties has a class basis that is no less solid (and often more so) than the revolutionary

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activity of the communists. The contradiction between the current short-term demands of the class and its strategic historical interests is an objective reality and forms the basis for serious differences. This contradiction between the demands of the present day and the strategic perspectives of the movement can be resolved within the framework of general political practice, but historically, another far-more-significant contradiction has grown out of it, a contradiction that in principle defies resolution within the bounds of a single organisation and that compels a split. This may be defined as the opposition between a politics oriented towards the practical transformation of society, and the politics of adaptation to reality. It is not so important which particular values are proclaimed by one group or another; the fundamentally significant thing is the degree to which the group orients itself towards implementing a practical variety of politics that transforms the logic of the reproduction of society. An adaptationist, or to use Lenin’s term, “opportunist politics” is not in the least incompatible with having a passion for change, but what it addresses is not systemic but secondary social issues, putting off more weighty transformations until the future. Since the early twentieth century, the politics of adaptation to capitalism has had a tendency to undergo a constant degradation. During the nineteenth century, such an approach was termed opportunism or possibilism, but in the twenty-first century, we find even possibilism being degraded. In earlier times the question was of solving practical, though secondary, socio-economic problems; subsequently, however, these issues came to be replaced more and more by cultural and symbolic pseudo-questions, such as an administrative ban on men in France calling young women “mademoiselle” instead of “madame”. From the politics of petty matters, we proceed to a cultural critique of capitalism, and from the cultural critique to the formulating of an alternative discourse within the framework of that system. Left discourse is then transformed into one of the accepted versions of bourgeois discourse that is imposed by the mass media. The acceptance of the logic of fragmentation renders any concept of socialism meaningless, reducing it at best to a utopian dream of some kind of “other world”, a world that does not in any sense grow out of the contradictions of the presentday world but that stands counterposed to it as an abstract, “external” ideal. The members of the left, however, are not striving to overcome the fragmentation; to the contrary, they accept this logic and seek to lend it the most radical form possible. This approach transforms them into the cultural vanguard of neoliberalism. While the initial principle of left liberalism was the defence of minorities, the next, natural step has become the ceaseless construction of ever-new minorities. Each of these unfailingly requires institutional recognition, in the absence of which both the practical implementation of a policy of positive discrimination and the reproduction of a clientele are impossible. It is not surprising that within the framework of positive discrimination, a relationship of competition has arisen between the self-propagating groups. Members of ethnic minorities are increasingly inclined to homophobia, while campaigners against homophobia turn out frequently to be Islamophobes and so forth. In earlier times, it was possible for the ordinary person to be completely oblivious

The logic of fragmentation 55 to the existence of single-sex couples and not to think about them, until positive discrimination created a practical conflict that affected his or her interests. In precisely the same way, the xenophobic moods that are present in any society and that are exacerbated by a mass influx of migrants are not overcome but strengthened against the background of the campaigns waged by liberals and the left. Interpersonal contradictions and conflicts are becoming directly social in character, drawing into their orbit everything in their vicinity – within the framework, that is, of the logic of institutionalised competition. The differences that divide people and set them against one another are cultivated and emphasised in every possible way since a steady reproduction of clienteles would otherwise be impossible. But the more stable these clienteles become, and the more numerous the people who make them up, the weaker the society. The disintegration of society is now an effective reality that undermines the conditions for social reproduction. The ideology of Margaret Thatcher assumed that the market would restore and maintain an equilibrium between interest groups. But even though the process of institutional and cultural fragmentation of the socium is directly associated with market reforms, this process is creating new contradictions and disproportions. Resolving these with the help of the market is impossible since the subjects are not market agents. In this sense the class corporativism represented, for example, by the labour unions of the twentieth century was perfectly able to be incorporated into capitalist society, transforming it but not solving its problems, whereas the organised group egoism of socio-cultural communities destroys society without transforming it. These relationships, born of the market but disrupting it, themselves inevitably become the objects of cultural criticism from the right. This criticism, inspired by obvious examples of absurd political correctness (such as the removal from a school curriculum of “incorrect” classical texts reflecting the actual subordinate position of women in the nineteenth century), in its turn merely reinforces the dead-end character of the discussion – neither side is prepared to discuss the class character of the contradictions that give rise to social disproportions and inter-group competition. Moreover, the neo-patriarchal utopia is no less abstract and other-worldly in its relation to reality than the left-radical utopia since there is simply no practical possibility of mechanically returning to the earlier ethnic and cultural homogeneity or to the traditional family values that presuppose the subordinate position of women. For left liberals, however, the very fact that a new conservatism has appeared provides a saving confirmation of the need to continue the struggle against a new enemy that they themselves have created. The main object of criticism by the left is now no longer the bourgeoisie or the state bureaucracy but “white males”, who embody all the conservative and patriarchal values. Since the bourgeoisie quickly appropriated political correctness and has promoted it in every possible way, the typical representatives of the backward “white males” have become workers, who since they are not involved in the cultural games of the advanced middle class and do not fall within the scope of positive discrimination, do not experience any special sympathy. This is very well understood by Marxists in the countries of the Global South, where they are less subject to the politically correct subterfuges of European and American

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left liberals. “Something is desperately awry”, wrote the Indian Marxist Dayan Jayatilleka, when the leadership of the left is unable to relate to the angst of working people, the directly productive working classes. There was a Third world within the First and they weren’t only people of color, many were poor and white as well.22 In the context of the ideological struggle of the late twentieth century, “white males” have become an image ideally suited to the discursive discrediting of the traditional labour movement and to undermining class solidarity. In practice, approximately half of these “white males” – that is, members of the labour movement – are in fact women, and at least a third of them are members of quite different non-white races. But to the liberal discourse, this is unimportant. The logic of combining to perform common tasks and to pursue shared goals is depicted by this discourse as an attempt by “white males” to impose their dominance on minorities, with their specific, peculiar interests and to discriminate against them. The fact that exalting these special interests not only prepares the way for discrimination against the majority but also gives rise to a war of each against all, a war whose victims will ultimately be those very minorities, is of no significance. The aim of this political approach is not to defend minorities but to fragment society while simultaneously granting privileges to the liberal elite who directs the redistribution of resources between the minorities, whose relationship to the elite becomes that of clients. The idea of overcoming racial and other barriers, an idea that lies at the heart of any kind of solidarity, is not simply alien to multiculturalism and political correctness but removes the grounds for their very existence. Multiculturalism not only reproduces barriers of all kinds but also extols them in ideological terms, making barriers of various identities that in turn are institutionalised, becoming the sources for a range of specific rights, claims and privileges.

The “lesser evil” All radical changes are associated with risk. There are never any guarantees that in the course of events, the situation you are trying to improve will not still become worse. Precisely for this reason, any ideology that calls on us to reject risk, and that attempts to frighten us with the spectre of an “even worse evil”, is an ideology that seeks to maintain the existing order, however this might be concealed by tactical motifs and discursive practices. Throughout the quarter-century since the fall of the Soviet Union, the “choice of the lesser evil” has been the main strategic principle applied by the left in Western Europe and in the post-Soviet space. Reconciling themselves to their own weakness, socialists, communists, environmentalists and even anarchists have been prepared either to renounce participation in serious politics or else to participate without an independent agenda, making their choice in favour of a “lesser evil”.

The logic of fragmentation 57 The question of which evil is in fact greater presents an extraordinarily open choice since it would only be possible to give a definitive answer if both evils were to materialise simultaneously and in their full extent so that a comparison could be made. Historically, such situations are extremely rare. Leaders and activists of the left can therefore define the criteria applying to evil quite arbitrarily and follow them as suits their fancy. Since the coming to power of the Nazis in Germany in 1933 is the main and, in essence, the only justification ever cited for the “politics of the lesser evil”, it makes sense to turn to the history of the Weimar Republic. The generally accepted explanation for the success of Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party relates to the economic crisis and to the division between the Social Democrats and Communists that in 1932 and 1933 prevented them from acting as a united front. The principal blame for this division is usually assigned to the Communists, who themselves acknowledged this indirectly when between 1934 and 1936 they sharply altered their political line; as a result of “work on mistakes” carried out by the Comintern, the earlier course was replaced by the slogan of the Popular Front. The self-criticism, of course, was not public; Stalinist political culture did not permit open recognition of errors by the party. Nevertheless, the conclusions drawn by the Comintern leadership from the tragic German experience lay at the basis of subsequent interpretations of the events concerned. The crucial question, however, remained unanswered: how was it that National Socialism had transformed itself from a marginal current throughout the 1920s, before the beginning of the Great Depression, into Germany’s leading political force? The tactical errors made by the Comintern in the years from 1930 to 1932 do not explain the overall political dynamic underlying the German experience. Meanwhile, the “politics of the lesser evil” pursued by the social democracy throughout the entire period of the Weimar Republic, and assuming the support of “moderate” bourgeois parties, led to a gradual undermining of the authority of the left and to the transformation of its parties into hostages of liberal democracy and its crisis. The social democrats participated constantly in bourgeois coalitions of all kinds, both on a local and international level, and as a consequence accepted responsibility for the policies enacted. From the beginning of the Great Depression this resulted in a catastrophic helplessness, with the leaders of the party incapable either of distinguishing itself from the liberal bourgeoisie as it suffered collapse, or of defending it from the wrath of the population. Meanwhile the National Socialists, attacking the traditional major parties from the right, were transformed in the eyes of the masses into an alternative to the bankrupt existing order. Under the conditions of crisis, the rejection of radical anti-systemic action “from the left” did not bring about a stabilisation of the prevailing system but led to the forces of protest being consolidated and mobilised “from the right”. “The primary strategy of the SDPD during the period of crisis”, wrote the Russian historian A.O. Tselintsev, was to prevent the National Socialists from coming to power, calculating that Hitler’s movement would eventually collapse as a result of its internal

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The logic of fragmentation contradictions. This not only proved futile, but also impelled the party to endless compromises within the framework of a policy of unspoken support for the Brüning cabinet, at the expense of the authority of the Social Democrats. Adhering to a policy of supporting the “lesser evil”, the Social Democracy did not avoid either the lesser evil, or the greater one.23

In discussing the responsibility of the Communists, said to have “betrayed” the social democracy in 1932, various scholars forget that it was the uncompromising attitude of the Communist Party, contrasting with the moderation of the Social Democrats, that was the main reason for the Communists’ successes. In other words, if the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD) had not taken its distance from the policy of coalitions, if it had from the very beginning given its “critical support” to the Social Democrats and, accordingly, to the ruling liberals, it would hardly have been able to grow and become a force on whose positions anything depended, and that could have “betrayed” the moderate social democracy. The Communists presented a real alternative to Nazism not because they consistently observed the principle of moderation and showed support for bourgeois-democratic institutions but precisely because they refused to do either one or the other. In a society where disappointment with the bourgeois-democratic order had not only become widespread but also represented a completely natural and just reaction to the crisis and self-destruction of the institutions concerned, this position brought growing influence. The only possible alternative to National Socialism was not bourgeois moderation but a radical break with liberal propriety and a refusal to support the “lesser evil”. We are thus confronted with a dual substitution. Not only are the features of the specific situation in Germany in the early 1930s transferred arbitrarily onto a quite different political, social and cultural setting, but this situation is itself interpreted in a one-sided and distorted fashion. Ultimately, both the social democracy and the communist movement in the first half of the twentieth century rested on the organised working class, though on different factions of it. Both movements constructed their ideology on internationalism, not on political correctness. And unlike Nazism, they acted as bearers of a universalist ideology. The problem now is that not only are the present-day right-wing populists, including even the most reactionary currents, in no sense a reiteration of classical fascism under modern conditions, but far worse, the present-day left is in no way an ideological continuation of the classical socialist and communist movement of the twentieth century. To the contrary, on the ideological level today’s left acts as the direct opposite of that movement. While the tragedy of the classical left of the early 1930s lay in its inability to unite its forces against the bourgeoisie, the comic failures of today’s left are to be explained not only by its constant urge to side with one or another bourgeois faction, but also by its invariable readiness to choose the most reactionary of them if it would only accept the discourse of multiculturalism. In this case we are not discussing the politics of coalitions or even collaboration by the left with bourgeois and non-left organisations. So long as politics and

The logic of fragmentation 59 class society exist, compromises remain an inevitable condition for successful tactics. These tactics, however, must open the way to achieving strategic goals. To this end, it is both possible and necessary to form coalitions, including the kind that to zealots for ideological purity will seem less than correct. The politics of “choosing the lesser evil”, by contrast, dooms the left to trailing passively after a spontaneously developing process, within the context of which leftists simply try to find a more comfortable place for themselves. The “evil”, whether greater or lesser, holds the initiative, decides the agenda and takes action, while all that we are given is the opportunity to choose an evil and to support it. The ideology of political correctness and multiculturalism provides a particularly suitable criterion for such a choice that we are to make on the basis of evaluating the discursive practices that feature in one or another variant of evil. In this system of coordinates, bourgeois politicians who are capable of coming out with a progressive discourse are naturally far less evil than populists who seek to mobilise working people against liberals and especially less evil than the workers themselves, who do not command the subtleties of progressive discourse and who express thoughts that are not politically correct. Meanwhile, the politics of the “struggle against the greater evil” that is waged by the left is itself a major source contributing to the development of this evil. Moving constantly to the right, intellectuals, movements and parties also shift the balance of public discussion to the right, and in the course of events not only betray their traditional social base, the “white” working class, but objectively leave it with no alternative but to support right-wing populism, which in turn, on the level of everyday practice, begins objectively to fulfil the very functions that the organisations of the left fulfilled earlier. As a result, right-wing populism grows steadily stronger, and this provides a further pretext for left-wing politicians, intellectuals and ideologues calling for still closer collaboration with the liberal “centre” and the parties of financial capital – in the name of combating the “greater evil” of populism. This, in turn, impels still broader masses of people to the right. A vicious circle has arisen. The ignoring by the left of the socially deprived throughout the decade of the 2000s drove the masses into the embrace of rightwing populists, who did not shun dialogue with the bulk of the population, but to the contrary, actively promoted it, demonstratively accepting “popular” opinion as their own declared ideology. The prejudices of the masses, which are a distorted reflection of real conflicts, were not subjected to critical rethinking and, as a result, grew stronger. Compared to the utterances of those who denied that any problems existed, a distorted interpretation of these problems seemed more convincing. Most important was the fact that the open hostility of the intellectual elite not only to the prejudices of the masses but also to those who held them (that is, to the mass of the population) naturally provoked a reciprocal response – of plebeian anger and of contempt for privileged idlers. The call to put an end to right-wing populism “at any price” has been turned into the foundational principle for an indissoluble bloc between left liberals and the liberal bourgeoisie, a bloc that, from being the source of the problem, has been transformed into the “one and only salvation”.

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The justification advanced for the policy of the “lesser evil” lies in the obligatory identification of any nationalism or right-wing populism (and often, of any form of populism at all) with fascism – in other words, with the “absolute evil” that provides a subsequent basis for any political deals, even the most unprincipled. Meanwhile, the abstract-ideological critique of neoliberalism not only fails to prevent leftists from acting as its political allies each time the question of power arises but also serves as a sort of ideological alibi that makes it possible to reproduce, undeviatingly, the same practice again and again without the slightest pangs of conscience. Among the left-liberal public, the politics of the “lesser evil” has created a peculiar complex of impunity. Inasmuch as the bearers of progressive consciousness completely reject independent action, they also renounce all responsibility for what occurs. They merely analyse, comment, “take positions” and “express critical support”. Action is left to others. In essence, the members of the left act as the bearers of a radical version of liberal moralising. It is not so much that they lack the ability to change the world as that they lack the desire to do this in practice. To criticise the system; to condemn it; to stay aloof from it or to occupy particular niches within it; but in no circumstances to change it: there is the logic of modern left liberalism. It is no accident that sheer appeals to utopianism have achieved such currency in left-wing circles. After all, a utopia is not only something that does not exist but also the image of a just society counterposed to a vicious reality. Utopian thinking does not presuppose rough practical work on the continuing reconstruction of this reality but promises everything at once, only in a different time and place. Of course, in periods of revolutionary upsurge, revolutionary dreams have taken hold of masses of people. Starting with the slave revolts of ancient times, peasants and artisans sought to realise one or another utopian project. But the utopianism of their social programs was by no means the strong side of these attempts; to the contrary, it predetermined their inevitable collapse. Social utopias were a forced reaction to oppression at a time when the popular masses lacked scientific knowledge, their own intellectuals and a developed theory. Utopias take on a quite different meaning when they are propagandised by intellectuals who are exquisitely familiar with the attainments of the most modern sociology, philosophy and even economic theory. In this context, utopian thinking becomes openly reactionary, serving exclusively the interests of the most educated elites as they attempt to justify their inaction and opportunism. The bloc of liberals and their left allies has merely strengthened the hegemony of various nationalist and populist forces among the lower orders of society. In existing circumstances, the only real alternative to right-wing populism is leftwing populism, which often displays openly “incorrect” features from the point of view of the accustomed discourse of the intellectuals. But it is precisely the growth of left populist movements that reveals in the most striking fashion the reactionary essence of the left-liberal elite, that in relating to these movements feels awkwardness and confusion at best, while at worst exhibiting hostility.

The logic of fragmentation 61 In sum, it was not the forces of the left but right-wing populists who managed to suggest an alternative to the dominant discourse of liberalism when the masses began demanding such a choice. The strength of these right-wing populists was precisely their anti-intellectualism. Through it, they avoided the corruption and temptations that had become an organic part of the left-liberal intellectual culture and of the professional activity corresponding to it. But anti-intellectualism, which at the initial stage of the struggle became an advantage of right-wing populism, has at the same time been its Achilles’ heel since without theory and without a developed political culture, it is impossible either to develop programs and strategies or to create the conditions for long-term ideological hegemony. Encountering these problems, right-populist movements are destined either to move leftward or to evolve further and actually transform themselves into fascist organisations. The danger that right-wing populism may be transformed into fascism actually exists. However, it is connected not with a specific discourse but with the social dynamic of the breakup and evolution of similarly complex and heterogeneous movements that are capable of evolving in both directions: to the right and left. Nevertheless, the principal goal of the neoliberal stigmatising of populism is precisely to try to block any prospect that it will evolve along anti-bourgeois lines. A stratified and disorganised society naturally gives rise to the demand for populist politics. Whatever howls of outrage this might arouse, the growing crisis of the neoliberal order merely reinforces this dynamic. But populism, as a symptom of the crisis, is incapable of developing a strategy to overcome it. This strategic goal can, however, be posed and achieved by the left. For this to occur, it will be necessary to reject once and for all the utopian thinking and abstract “revolutionary” dreams that are the reverse side of unprincipled adaptationism. It will be necessary not just to transform society but also to advance a strategy for its socioeconomic development that is able to restore its integrity.

Notes 1 See: G. Standing, The precariat: The new dangerous class. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. 2 See: A. Mal’tsev, “Tekhnologicheskaya stagnatsiya v global’noy ekonomike” [Technological stagnation in the global economy]. Levaya Politika, 2015, no. 24. 3 See: Kh. Ortega-i-Gasset, Vosstanie mass [The revolt of the masses]. Moscow: AST, 2005. 4 See: C. Lasch, The revolt of the elites and the betrayal of democracy, 1994 [K. Lesh. Vosstanie elit i predatel’stvo demokratii]. Translated into Russian by Dzh. Smiti and K. Golubovich. Moscow: Logos, 2002. 5 For a more detailed treatment, see: B. Kagarlitsky, Dialektika nadezhdy [The dialectics of hope]. Paris: Slovo, 1988. 6 In corresponding fashion, the concept of hegemony also began to be rethought. Instead of a broad alliance around the working class, what was now sought was the assembling of a movement out of an array of heterogeneous elements that had somehow to be united with one another. See: E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. London: Verso, 1985. 7 The contradictions manifest themselves not just on the class level but even within politically correct discourse – for example, in the symbolic positive image of the “Muslim

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9 10

11

12

13

14 15 16 17 18 19

The logic of fragmentation woman” who “has the right” not to submit to the requirements of women’s emancipation, to reject equality of the sexes and so forth. As a typical example of the violation of social logic within the framework of left-liberal discourse, one might cite the article by Sławomir Sierakowski, “The Female Resistance”, in which the comprehensive gender category of “women” is counterposed to the political category “populists”. Class and sociological categories, of course, are not employed in this analysis. The conditionally generalised “women” are identified fundamentally with the specifically feminist image of the feminist. The fact that in statistical terms more women support populist movements than adhere to feminism is not taken into account. The conclusion is inevitable that according to the author’s logic and within his system of concepts, women who are not feminists are not women either. See: www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ populist-war-on-women-resistance-by-slawomir-sierakowski-2017-02. A. Zorin, Poyavlenie geroya: Iz istorii russkoy emotsional’noy kul’tury kontsa XVIIInachala XIX veka [The emergence of the hero: From the history of Russian emotional culture of the late eighteenth‒early nineteenth centuries]. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2016, p. 36. Chris Hedges, “The revenge of the lower classes and the rise of American Fascism”. Truthdig, 2 Mar. 2016. www.truthdig.com/report/item//the_revenge_of_the_ lower_classes_and_the_rise_of_american_fascism_20160302. Within the context of this approach, the question of how communities that are “excluded” from the capitalist system might simultaneously be the objects of specific exploitation (since they are included in the process of reproduction of the system) remains outside the bounds of discussion since it is not explained how “exclusion” manifests itself in concrete social terms. Here one might raise the contrary argument that such practices exist not only in the ruling class but also in left organisations themselves since these are by no means free of the influence of the dominant corporate and bureaucratic culture. But in this case, the answer to the problem lies not in a generalised critique of the “glass ceiling” as a whole but in achieving gender equality in practical terms within one or another structure. It is interesting to compare this feminist discourse with the traditional discourse of class. It has been quite natural for members of the left to discount the examples of vertical mobility represented by workers who have become millionaires, on the basis that once these individuals have transformed themselves into bourgeois, they have automatically ceased to be workers. The vertical mobility of an individual can testify to an improvement of the situation of a class as a whole only when people achieve success without changing their social status. But women who achieve success as politicians or top managers do not cease to be women as a result of taking up their new jobs. On the whole, the vocabulary of political correctness shows a clear tendency to replace concepts that carry a personal and emotional charge with depersonalised bureaucratic terms associated strictly with the logic of market relations. Hence, we find the use of “gender-neutral” terms that are anything but neutral on the level of social ethics. To the contrary, they demonstrate the triumph of bourgeois-bureaucratic thinking over traditional popular culture. A. Gramshi, Izbrannye proizvedeniya [Selected works], vol. 3. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo inostrannoy literatury, 1959, p. 136. This refers, of course, to the later Soviet period and not to the time of Stalin, when workers were liable to be provided with “housing” in camp barracks. International Socialism, Autumn 2015, no. 148, p. 169. Socialist Review, Feb. 2016, no. 410, p. 10. Ibid., p. 11. An opposite example is provided by the situation with the “Syrian refugees” in 2016, when a stream of people poured into Europe from a long list of countries in no way affected by the war. A substantial proportion of the Syrians who arrived in Europe had come from regions that had not suffered as a result of military actions. One of the

The logic of fragmentation 63

20 21 22 23

consequences was a gradually unfolding conflict between “genuine” and “non-genuine” Syrians. A refusal on principle to subject the newly arrived refugees to “filtration” had the result that funds were expended on people who had no grounds for requesting help, while others who actually needed it did not receive support on a sufficient scale. A. Koryakovtsev and S. Viskunov, Marksizm i polifoniya razumov [Marxism and the polyphony of minds]. Yekaterinburg: Kabinetnyy Uchenyy, 2016, p. 29. Ibid., pp. 29–30. D. Jayatilleka, “The great Gramsci: Imagining an alt-left project”. Global-e, 2 Mar. 2017, vol. 10, no. 14. www.21global.uscb.edu/global-e/march-2017/great-gramsciimagining-alt-left-project. A.O. Tselintsev, “Germanskaya sotsial-demokratiya i mirovoy ekonomicheskiy krizis 1929–33gg” [German Social Democracy and the world economic crisis of 1929–1933]. In: B.Yu. Kagarlitsky, A.V. Ochkina and I.V. Frolova (eds.), Antikrizisnaya politika i opyt levykh sil [Anticrisis policy and the experience of the left]. Ufa: BAGSU, 2015, p. 112.

2

Europe versus the European Union

In the spring of 2016 the German political scientist, Heinz Kleger, describing the growing alienation of European citizens from the institutions of the “united Europe”, noted that such a result followed naturally from the very essence of the integration process. The European Union, founded under the Maastricht agreement, was an openly elitist project at whose basis lay a transfer of power from democratically organised society to “civil servants, experts and technocrats” who were “alienated from the citizens”.1 It was entirely natural that the reaction to this alienation would be the growth of a populist opposition. The attractiveness of right-wing populist movements was to be explained not least by the fact that they combined “anti-elitism with criticism of the European Union”.2 The propaganda of right-wing populism has shown its effectiveness against a background of the mass disillusionment of ordinary citizens whose interests and opinions have been demonstratively ignored by the liberal elite, including its left wing. The members of the left intelligentsia have unfailingly repeated critical mantras concerning the neoliberal policies implemented by the institutions of the European Union, have complained about the dismantling of the welfare state and have inveighed against the “financialisation” of the economy. But on each occasion when they have needed to make a real choice between the angry plebeian masses and the bourgeois elite, their choice has alighted naturally and logically on the latter. The lower orders of the population, insufficiently cultured, inclined to nationalist prejudices and showing little interest in the subtleties of post-modernist philosophy or the latest trends in post-structuralist post-Marxism, have aroused neither understanding nor sympathy in the intelligentsia, not to speak of any desire to meet with them and take account of their views. Of course, a general rhetoric concerning the social interests of the masses and the oppression they suffer has remained an indispensable item on the ideological menu and in the ritual lexicon of left-wing politicians and intellectuals. Practical work aimed at defending mass interests, however, is another matter entirely, and dialogue with the masses themselves is still less to be contemplated. If the lower orders of society have shown insufficient political correctness and have not been ready to assimilate the corresponding discourse, then so much the worse for them. At best, the intellectuals have been prepared to acknowledge that the incorrect views of working people result from their inadequate education or from

Europe versus the European Union 65 the general destructive logic of neoliberalism. But even while expatiating on these themes, the bearers of “left culture” have categorically refused to engage in everyday practical education at the grass-roots level while becoming an organic part of the masses in the fashion of earlier generations of socialists, Marxists and anarchists. Even to conceive of the idea that the prejudices of the masses might flow from their everyday experience, reflecting real problems even if in a distorted manner, has been inadmissible. The fact that prejudices reflect a situation inadequately does not signify in the least that particular experiences, in and of themselves, have no objective meaning. But the left intellectuals have denied the very existence of the experiences concerned, the very existence of objective reality, of the conflicts and problems that are the source of particular ideas and views. The result of thinking in this fashion has been a whole series of failures, with the members of the left managing to transform into political catastrophes even processes that were clearly playing into their hands. Lack of trust in the masses has turned into paralysis of the will, an inability to devise a strategy for struggle and an unreadiness for the kind of decisive actions that inevitably involve a considerable degree of risk but that offer a real chance of altering the situation. The desire to act exclusively within the framework of existing institutions, whatever the circumstances, has finished up in a directly proportionate growth of social mistrust of these institutions and in a growing potential for popular revolt against them. The moderation, timidity and lack of resolve of the left, however, has done nothing to avert a crisis of the “united Europe” project or of the other structures born of three decades of neoliberalism. The behaviour of the left has merely deepened this crisis.

The comfortable catastrophe of Syriza One of the first countries of Western Europe in which the financial and economic crisis took on the scale of a catastrophe turned out to be Greece. The problem of the Greek debt had agitated all of Europe from as early as 2010. Initially, the amounts owing had been relatively modest sums of between 15 and 20 billion euros, though at that point the country found even those debts unsustainable. Instead of simply writing off the debt, the “troika” made up of creditor representatives from the staffs of the Eurocommission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the international Monetary Fund (IMF) offered Greece a program of financial aid in exchange for implementing “urgent reforms”. The results of this program speak for themselves: the Greek economy contracted by 27 per cent, while the debt rose to $320 billion, despite a partial write-off.3 From its original 60 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), the debt thus reached 175 per cent. Neither the troika nor successive Greek governments recognised the obvious failure. The troika not only insisted on continuing and even radicalising its openly pointless actions but also suggested applying the Greek “medicine” to other economies of the eurozone, including Italy, Spain and Portugal, that were experiencing similar difficulties.

66 Europe versus the European Union Savage and humiliating conditions for agreement with creditors were again and again imposed on Greece, but these agreements did not solve the problem, instead merely exacerbating it. The country sank ever deeper into debt crisis, with the total sum owed increasing both in absolute terms and in relation to GDP as the latter shrank beneath the impact of the economic crisis. In completely predictable fashion, any new agreement thus predetermined the outbreak of a new crisis within a few months. Each time, the effects were more destructive. Nevertheless, the actions of the troika appear far less absurd if we reflect that billions of euros aimed at saving Greece never reached that ill-fated country but accumulated in German and French banks. In other words, a vast financial pyramid was created under the pretext of servicing the Greek debt. Each restructuring of the debt successively increased it, along with the profits of the financial institutions. A portion of the money that flowed into the banks was extracted directly from Greece, while a further part came from the pockets of taxpayers in Western Europe. The costs of decisions that had been taken in Berlin and Brussels, with the approval of Paris, were forcibly charged to citizens of other eurozone countries, including Spain and Italy as well as to Austrians and Finns who had nothing to do with the situation. In essence, the Greek crisis led to the creation of an all-European financial siphon used to direct state funds into private hands and serving the accumulation needs of German and French financial capital. Northern European taxpayers who were unhappy with this situation blamed “lazy Greeks” or their own governments for what was happening but did not think to accuse the banks and corporations that were the real beneficiaries of the aid programs. In Greece itself, an understanding of the scale and causes of the crisis dawned significantly earlier than in other countries. Since the organisations of the traditional left (the Communist Party, and the social democrats of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) party) proved ineffectual, the hopes of the population came to rest increasingly with a new political project: the radical left coalition Syriza. After winning the parliamentary elections of 2015, Syriza formed a government headed by the popular young politician Alexis Tsipras. The government’s economic functions were overseen by the well-known economist Giannis Varoufakis, who had made an academic career for himself in British and American universities. Hopes grew among Greek citizens that the unending series of great and small economic, social and moral catastrophes that the country had been experiencing since 2008 would finally end. If things did not improve, then at least they would play out differently. Syriza was elected with a clear mandate to end the policies of economic austerity and of the privatisation and commercialisation of the public sector. Most importantly, Syriza was expected to win Greeks back their self-respect through tough, principled negotiations with the country’s creditors, who in recent years had been behaving towards Greece in the manner of an occupation administration. But the very first agreements concluded with the creditors by the new Greek government revealed that everything was turning out quite differently in practice. The representatives of Athens made threatening declarations, and then, after winning only minimal amendments, signed the latest agreement that the creditors had

Europe versus the European Union 67 dictated. In part, this resulted from the contradictions of the mandate that Tsipras and his comrades had obtained. They had, indeed, promised to put an end to the austerity that was killing demand and production. But they had also promised to keep the country in the eurozone and in the European Union and accordingly stressed that a default on foreign debts had to be avoided. This contradiction was not simply the result of ideological inconsistency on the part of the left-wing politicians. It reflected the contradictory nature of mass thinking within Greek society itself; while striving to free themselves from debt servitude, Greeks were scared for their savings. So long as significant numbers of the population retained at least some funds accumulated in euros, they were paralysed by the fear of their money being lost or devalued. It was one thing to take part in demonstrations demanding that the creditors respect the country, but something else entirely to be ready, in the here and now, for definite sacrifices in the name of preserving dignity or for accepting risks in order to determine one’s own future. The refusal to pose the question of the country leaving the eurozone, however, put the Greeks from the first at the mercy of the creditors. In one way or another, the contradiction had to be resolved; sooner or later, a choice would need to be made. To carry out Syriza’s promise of relaunching the economy without breaching the harsh rules of the European Central Bank, and to bring about a quick rise in competitiveness without lowering the exchange rate of the currency, proved a simple technical impossibility. Since it was clear in advance that the European Central Bank would not agree to a dramatic lowering of the euro exchange rate solely in order to save Greece, in technical terms not the slightest chance remained of a happy outcome unless the country left the eurozone and returned to the drachma. If the government had really embraced the goal of overcoming the consequences of austerity policies, the only real question would have been whether this departure would be organised, planned and prepared or would be chaotic and disastrous.4 In many ways, the situation was reminiscent of what Argentina had experienced in 2001, when after a default the national currency, the peso, had to be decoupled from the dollar in order for economic growth to resume. Nevertheless, this sole realistic scenario was banned from being discussed in government circles since it presupposed a fierce confrontation with the structures of the European Union. The Greek government thus found itself in the situation of a doctor who was obliged to treat a cancer without infringing on the “legitimate interests” of the tumour and without impeding its growth. With its verbal attempts to satisfy everyone, the Tsipras government drove itself into a trap. While lacking the resolve to openly defy the leaders of the European Union, Alexis Tsipras and his finance minister Giannis Varoufakis could not have failed to understand that entering into an agreement with the troika also threatened them with catastrophe. Only two years earlier, following just such a capitulation, the powerful social democratic PASOK party had been transformed before their eyes from the country’s leading political force into an outsider. Tsipras attempted to manoeuvre, seeking to please everyone: he reassured the creditors, indulged the petty-bourgeois illusions of the voters and delivered radical speeches to gatherings of left activists. At the same time, his government tried in practice to sabotage

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some of the agreements that had been signed with the troika, especially in cases where the signatures had been affixed by previous governments. But they lacked the resolve even to mention the possibility of refusing openly to fulfil these agreements or of abrogating them. A notable example of the diplomatic techniques employed by the Greek government was its position on the question of sanctions against Russia. Under the rules of the European Union, Greece could simply have blocked these sanctions in the summer of 2015. Among those demanding this were the Syriza members who had voted unanimously in the European Parliament to oppose anti-Russian resolutions. But when the next negotiations between the troika and the Greeks were in full swing, and when Tsipras himself was in St Petersburg explaining to his Russian colleagues the prospects for developing special relations with Athens, his representatives in the EU supported the sanctions. Then, when addressing the public, the Greek diplomats reported that they had fought like lions for the interests of Russia and that it was solely due to their principles and persistence that the sanctions were extended for only six months instead of the twelve months for which the Germans had been pressing. After six months, naturally, the sanctions were again extended with the consent of the Greeks. Tsipras’s policy of collaboration may be explained in part by a desire to gain time while awaiting the Spanish elections in which the left coalition headed by the Podemos party, Syriza’s political twin, had a serious chance of success. A far more influential country than Greece, with a much larger economy, Spain was experiencing a very similar crisis, though not as acute. The rise of Podemos to power would allow Athens to escape its international isolation, especially since the Left Bloc in Portugal also had definite chances. In other words, an opportunity had arisen to create an international coalition of Mediterranean countries jointly opposing Berlin and Brussels. But Tsipras’s actions, together with his weakness, put in question the trust placed in the left alternative by the Spanish and Portuguese public, and as a result weakened hopes for the success of the left. The European left milieu nevertheless retained its sympathy for Syriza as a party that was in extremely difficult circumstances. Against a background of defeats over many years for the left in Europe, Tsipras’s initial successes had inspired hopes that people were reluctant to abandon. The Greek prime minister’s operating principle, of delivering radical speeches and then surrendering to the superior strength of the enemy, seemed to have justified itself. Not only in Europe, but in Greece as well, the popularity of his government had grown. Not only was Tsipras spared censure, but he was pitied as the hostage of vampires against whom he had again and again proven powerless to struggle. Unfortunately, while it might have been possible to hoodwink left activists and provincial petty bourgeois in this fashion, financial corporations were not susceptible to such ploys. The sabotage aroused righteous indignation in the creditors, who kept stepping up their pressure. The agreements with the creditors that were signed by the Greeks after Syriza had come to power were no better than those signed by the previous governments and had the same results. In June, as the next round of payments was about to fall due, it was explained that there was no money in the budget.

Europe versus the European Union 69 A further restructuring of the debt was indispensable, and in exchange the troika demanded the acceptance of a new package of reforms alongside which all the previous austerity measures seemed like a mere warm-up. Wages and pensions were to be cut simultaneously, taxes were to be raised and concessions to the tourist sector, which amid the destruction of industry and the decline of agriculture remained the only relatively stable area of the economy, were to be ended. The country would inevitably plunge into a new spiral of recession. For Syriza, this would mean not only breaking all its pre-election promises but also submitting to public humiliation and accepting the obvious prospect of defeat at the next elections. This, indeed, was what the creditors were seeking. On 22 June Greece effectively capitulated. The government agreed to increase its revenues from Value Added Tax by the equivalent of 0.93 per cent of GDP and to raise the taxes on shipping companies (in other words, to make trips between the Greek islands and the mainland more expensive). Also promised was a cut to pension payments, though the Athens authorities requested permission to introduce the corresponding changes gradually rather than all at once. The sole point on which the Greek negotiators had insisted, in order to save face, was that VAT should not be raised by 1 per cent of GDP; their resistance, in other words, amounted to 0.07 per cent. The Greek side also agreed that company tax would be levied at a rate of 28 per cent instead of 29 per cent, its original suggestion to the troika. In addition, Greeks requested permission to keep defence spending at its previous level, in line with the general demands of the NATO bloc of which Greece was part. The game, it might have seemed, was over. The world financial press rejoiced, and share prices rose on the stock exchanges. In Athens, members of right-wing parties even staged a demonstration in support of the creditors! Well-dressed ladies and gentlemen gathered on Syntagma Square in the centre of the city, demanding that payments to pensioners be cut. It is true that this gathering was not large, numbering about one and a half thousand, but the television reports managed to present so impressive a picture that it might have seemed as though Greeks, en masse, had become masochists. Then the unexpected happened. The German representatives declared that they were unhappy at the speed with which the European Commission had welcomed the new proposals from Athens. Under pressure from Berlin, Tsipras’s proposals were rejected. The Greeks had surrendered, but it had been made clear that the Germans would not take prisoners. Not only did the eurocrats refuse to make even the symbolic concessions required for Tsipras and Varoufakis to save face, but they also began advancing new demands. Driven into a corner, the Greek government suddenly displayed the courage of despair. Alexis Tsipras delivered a fiery speech to the people and announced a referendum. The Greeks themselves were to determine whether the demands of the creditors would be agreed to or not. The last prime minister from the PASOK party, George Papandreou, had also been about to do something of the kind, but under pressure from the creditors renounced his plan, after which he lost his reputation, his post as prime minister and even his leadership position in

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his own party. Aware of the fate of his predecessor, Tsipras showed an unexpected resolve. This may also have been due to the fact that even before the eurocrats rejected the compromise Tsipras had offered them, a revolt had broken out in the Syriza ranks. It became evident that if the agreement with the troika was to go through the parliament, it would be exclusively on the votes of the right. The government declared the referendum. Deputies from the conservative New Democracy party tried to prevent the vote from going ahead but eventually returned to the parliamentary chamber, and the decision was adopted. On 5 July Greeks were to decide whether to agree to the conditions imposed by the creditors. The troika regarded the use by the Greeks of a democratic procedure as equivalent to refusal, broke off the talks and announced that “aid” to Greece would end on 30 June. This meant that regardless of the outcome of the referendum, a technical default on 1 July would be inevitable. The chances, dim in any case, that the supporters of austerity would win the referendum now sank to zero. The vote announced by Tsipras dramatically altered the psychological state of affairs not only in Athens but throughout Europe. Whether voluntarily or under compulsion, Syriza had raised the flag of resistance. The outcome of the referendum was completely unequivocal: 61.31 per cent of the votes were to reject the demands of the troika creditors. The predominance of the supporters of the “no” vote was unmistakeable. Not only did they receive the backing of an overwhelming majority of the population in the country as a whole, but they also emerged victorious in every province. There was not a single region in the territory of Greece where defenders of the policies of the European Union came out on top. Of course, the European Union had forever been losing referendums, even in countries such as France and the Netherlands where the destructive consequences of its policies were not so evident. In 2005 the populations of those countries had thrown out the draft for a European constitution proposed by the Brussels bureaucrats; this document would have turned the economic principles of neoliberalism into an institutional norm, giving them the force of an irreversible law. At that time, the ruling classes of the European Union ignored the outcome of the referendum, implementing the same decisions using a different procedure – not in the form of a constitution but as the Treaty of Lisbon. This time, the leaders of the European Union turned the referendum on whether Greeks agreed with the conditions proposed by the creditors (that is, involving a continuation of austerity policies) into a vote of confidence in the institutions of the EU. The result they obtained showed a clear, complete, general lack of confidence. The powerful propaganda machine that had been built up over three decades had obviously broken down. All of the leading mass media of the continent had agitated for a “yes” vote, openly sacrificing their reputations and breaching all the rules of journalistic honesty and objectivity. The Greek press and private television stations had run a similar campaign, again violating not only the ethical norms of journalism but even their country’s laws (on the Saturday before the voting, on the so-called day of silence, the airwaves were filled with agitation by supporters of the EU). The ill-attended demonstrations “for Europe” were shown from different angles in an effort to make them appear as massive as possible, while the

Europe versus the European Union 71 marches of many thousands of people carrying placards declaring “okhi” (“no”) were in some cases not shown as all. An exception was the Greek state television, earlier shut down as an economy measure but resurrected by the Tsipras government. Even the state television, however, did not agitate for a “no” vote, instead simply informing the public more or less adequately about what was happening. The lesson of the Greek referendum was obvious: propaganda is not all-powerful. The superior numbers of the “no” supporters were not just unmistakeable but were also a constant factor throughout the entire campaign that preceded the vote. During this time, nevertheless, the weakness and lack of conviction of the Tsipras government’s agitation were apparent to all. Syriza did almost nothing to mobilise its supporters; the demonstrations in its favour were largely spontaneous or had been organised by grass-roots party activists. The mandate that the Tsipras government had received in the elections was sufficient for it to have refused the troika without resorting to a referendum. But putting the question to a vote required actively explaining the situation, finding arguments and travelling about the country talking with people. Instead, we heard a faint mumbling and promises to resign if the people returned a “yes” vote, together with statements about future negotiations with creditors and a readiness for new concessions to Brussels and Berlin. It is hard to imagine behaviour that would be more demoralising and demotivating. Some people even suspected that the government was setting out to lose. Most likely, however, Tsipras’s “cunning plan” was to have the “no” supporters receive a marginal preponderance of 1 or 2 per cent. The Syriza leadership was quite well informed and would not have doubted that the “no” case would prevail in the referendum. It sought to ensure, however, that this victory was not spectacular, but to the contrary, that it was as unconvincing as possible. For Tsipras and his colleagues, such an outcome would have opened up the broadest possible field for manoeuvre. On the one hand, the Syriza leaders would have remained in power and confirmed their legitimacy (including before the troika), while on the other, they would have been able, through referring to the views of the “other half of the Greeks”, to make sizeable concessions to the EU. Unfortunately, this adroit subterfuge, like all such plans, was doomed to failure; society responded not to the actions of the authorities but to the objective situation. In the upshot, Tsipras, after attempting to use the referendum as a way of setting up further political schemes and manoeuvres, became the hostage of a straightforward, uncompromising decision by society. Greece said “okhi” too loudly and clearly for this result to be ignored. Nevertheless, what ensued contradicted all the laws of democracy, political ethics and logic. Immediately after the referendum, the government of Greece capitulated to the creditors. On the eve of the decisive parliamentary vote Tsipras addressed the people, declaring that it was pointless to try to resist a superior force. To critics from the ranks of his own party, he displayed a ruthlessness of which he showed no trace in his negotiations with the creditors who imposed a ruinous agreement on the country. There have been many acts of treachery in the history of the left movement. But it would be hard to find so shameful and grotesque a case as the treachery

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of Alexis Tsipras, who had personally organised the referendum and personally called on citizens to say “no” to the demands of the creditors, but who on the day after the victory refused to carry out the decision of the people, and who in negotiations with the creditors agreed to conditions many times more severe and destructive for the country than had initially been proposed. The speed with which Tsipras switched his positions to their direct opposite is literally staggering. If Themistocles when faced with a Persian invasion in 480 BC had reasoned in the same fashion as Tsipras, the European civilisation that we know today would most likely never have come into being. Tsipras’s capitulation, however, was the product not just of his cowardice and lack of principle, or even of the previous behaviour of his government, which was completely disinclined to wage a serious struggle. It also arose from the whole logic of the political thinking of the members of the radical left in the early twenty-first century. The very fact that people such as Tsipras had finished up in leading posts in one of the most successful and dynamic parties in Europe speaks to the profound cultural and moral degradation not only of the left but of society as a whole. The eventual “compromise” accepted by Tsipras when he met with his eurozone colleagues was not only worse than the initial proposals that the Greek government had rejected, but also represented a set of austerity measures far worse than anything to which the preceding bourgeois governments had agreed. In the initial negotiations, Finance Minister Giannis Varoufakis had argued very properly that accepting such conditions would not only be criminal but also stupid. It was not just that the measures would be extremely painful but that they would not solve a single one of the problems but merely exacerbate them. The stubbornness of the analytical-minded Varoufakis was overcome in the simplest possible manner ‒ he was dismissed as soon as it became clear that the overwhelming majority of the Greek people thought as he did. It should not be assumed that Varoufakis was especially inclined to fight for the interests of ordinary Greeks. After leaving his post, he published an article in which he maintained, citing the experience of the Labour Party in Britain, that attempts to put forward an alternative to neoliberal policies would be useless. What good did we achieve in Britain in the early 1980s by promoting an agenda of socialist change that British society scorned while falling headlong into Thatcher’s neoliberal trap? Precisely none. What good will it do today to call for a dismantling of the Eurozone, of the European Union itself, when European capitalism is doing its utmost to undermine the Eurozone, the European Union, indeed itself?5 In the view of the Greek economist, only moderate and cautious reforms within the framework of existing institutions, and as far as possible with the agreement of the ruling class and its political leaders, could bring an improvement in the situation. What Varoufakis did not understand (or more accurately, stubbornly pretended not to understand) was the fundamental difference between the situation in the early 1980s and the Great Crisis that had broken out in 2008. In the

Europe versus the European Union 73 late twentieth century, neoliberalism was in the ascendant, and for its political and social triumph was able to mobilise numerous resources, not just of an economic, technological and political character but also including the cultural and psychological advantage ensured by the stagnation and subsequent decline of the countries of the “communist camp”. By contrast, the crisis of the twenty-first century was predetermined precisely by the exhaustion of these resources and possibilities. The system began falling into ruin due to completely objective causes. Since the mid-2010s its collapse has increasingly taken on the character of a natural process that will go ahead regardless of whether Mr Varoufakis is prepared to wage a fight against neoliberalism or not. The collapse of the neoliberal order, however, does not mean the triumph of a left-wing or democratic alternative or of any thought-out alternative whatsoever. Precisely for this reason, a radical strategy is not simply possible but vitally necessary; otherwise, the collapse of the neoliberal system will draw after it the destruction of the conditions required for the steady reproduction of society and civilisation as such – as witnessed in Greece amid the austerity measures implemented by the Tsipras government. Varoufakis sought to moderate the appetites of the creditors and to find a mutually acceptable compromise between the social organism and a cancerous tumour. At best, the outcome could only have been to render the course of the disease slower and less catastrophic. Even this attempt, however, was rejected ‒ not so much by the creditors as by the leadership of a ruling left party. With the departure of Varoufakis, the Greek government lost both the remnants of its conscience and its last signs of good sense. Tsipras forced the capitulation to the EU through the parliament, relying on the votes of the right-wing bourgeois parties and waging war on his own erstwhile supporters, the people who had brought him to power and backed him throughout the preceding months. Meanwhile the price of the deal, on 27 July, less than $10 billion, had by this time grown to $90 billion, increasing by a factor of nine. Paradoxically, the country’s position would have been less wretched if the government had surrendered immediately and had not made a show of resistance. The only party in the Athens parliament to speak out consistently and resolutely against the capitulation was the neofascist Golden Dawn. The tragic themes of European history of the 1930s were thus replicated: Hitler had come to power in Germany not because he was an irresponsible demagogue but because he was ready to pose ‒ and using his own methods, to solve ‒ the questions (reparations, the Rhineland) that objectively confronted his country and that not one of the democratic parties, including the Social Democrats, had been prepared even to raise. As the Tsipras government guided the decision to capitulate to the creditors through parliament, it unleashed a campaign of persecution against its opponents on the left. The main targets were the prime minister’s former supporters – all those who only a few months earlier had aided his rise to power. Since the Central Committee of the Syriza party and even its Executive Bureau had voted against the agreement, the leading organs were no longer being convened, and the demand for an extraordinary congress, which a majority of the Central Committee supported, was ignored.

74 Europe versus the European Union Tsipras eventually agreed to call a party conference, but only in September, when agreements on all the questions relating to the creditors would have been struck and the latest package of austerity measures would have gone into effect. The party’s grass-roots cells, even more hostile to the government than the members of the Central Committee, were effectively paralysed. In essence, the party had been crushed. Tsipras ruled in its name but without any connection to it and without even taking the trouble to force his line through the party structures. His parliamentary majority was now firmly guaranteed by the votes of the deputies from the right-wing parties, rejected by Greeks at the previous elections and in the referendum. Lacking the political backing of his own former supporters, and completely dependent on right-wingers who despised him, Tsipras remained at his post only because it suited the ruling elites to have the policy of destroying Greek society carried out by a “left-wing” prime minister. Added to the rout of the economy would be the demoralisation and political bankruptcy of the left. The results of the political coup carried out by Tsipras and his closest associates were confirmed by the parliamentary elections of 20 September 2015. In the course of these elections, the prime minister succeeded not only in smashing his people psychologically but also in politically annihilating the Greek left. In other words, he managed to achieve what had eluded the German occupiers during the years of the Second World War; Winston Churchill in 1944 and 1945; the “black colonels”; and also the right-wing governments, democratic and notso-democratic, that had succeeded one another in the years that followed. Greek democracy would be doomed to suffer the consequences of these events for decades since in such a situation it would be impossible to count on the effective work of state or even social institutions. In essence, the country had been struck by a collective paralysis of the will that blocked the successful implementation of any policies, including even those of neoliberalism. Syriza achieved success in September 2015 in a context marked by mass abstention from voting. This was especially true of the electoral base of Tsipras himself; substantial numbers of these people had no wish to give their votes to other parties but did not turn out to the polling stations. As a result, and despite shedding approximately 320,000 votes, Tsipras’s “renewed” Syriza managed to retain its status as the largest parliamentary party and once again to head the government. Syriza, as the French political scientist Baptiste Dericquebourg noted, had come to power as a force that permitted hope for a better future but had been “transformed into a lesser evil, providing a guarantee that the hated old leaders would not return to power”.6 This relief, however, was quickly dissipated since the longer Tsipras’s party remained in power, the more its actions provoked the anger and hostility of citizens. Supporters of Syriza’s original policies, taking the name “Popular Unity”, ran in the elections against their own party. But confused and demoralised, and with neither the time nor the resources to organise effective campaigning, they suffered a crushing defeat. The victory of neoliberalism turned out to be general and comprehensive. The results of the summer’s referendum, in which the country had said “no” to the demands of the creditors, were effaced by the September

Europe versus the European Union 75 elections. From then on, however much the left might refer to the referendum vote as an expression of the people’s will, this amounted to no more than empty rhetoric in a situation that had changed fundamentally. The same applied to any talk of popular sovereignty, civil rights and observance of the constitution. The Paris Le Monde triumphantly summed up the results of the voting: “Greeks have validated the policies of reform and austerity that Tsipras has put into effect”.7 The president of France, the socialist François Hollande, and his Prime Minister Manuel Valls did not hide the fact that the results of the elections in Greece were an additional argument in favour of the neoliberal policies they themselves were enacting. This was a victory for the kind of leftists who “have the boldness to accept reality”.8 Or, in other words, to renounce trying to implement left-wing policies. The “realistic” leftists had proven their loyalty to the European Union and to financial capital, demonstrating that in destroying the welfare state and crushing resistance from the workers they could not only equal the rightists but outdo them. The Syriza apparatchiks in their turn rejoiced at the defeat of Popular Unity that had dared to condemn the agreement with the creditors and to defend the result of the referendum: “Now the malcontents will think twice before they protest”.9 The defeat of Popular Unity was, indeed, more than symptomatic. One might, of course, cite the lack of time needed to construct a new party (as Tsipras had calculated from the beginning) and list the numerous errors made by the opposition leaders. One might also point to the ambivalent mood of the Greek population, which, while dreaming of liberation from debt servitude, hoped as in the past to remain within the eurozone, lacking the resolve to recognise that the two were incompatible. None of these arguments, however, helps to explain the defeat of Popular Unity, only its catastrophic scale. The fundamentally important point is that Popular Unity merely called for defending the program on which the majority of Greeks had put Syriza in office eight months earlier, and demanded that the referendum decision be respected. Unfortunately, the situation had changed since then; it was the admission by the people of their own powerlessness that had made the defeat of the left coalition inevitable. The question was how the people’s belief in themselves might be restored. As a question, this was essentially cultural-psychological and ethical, and the politicians from Popular Unity had no answers to it. Both during and after the referendum, the Communist Party of Greece effectively ignored the main issues under discussion. The party’s sectarian position drove it once and for all into a ghetto, not only in electoral terms but above all, politically. People who cannot be told anything will never be listened to. In circumstances in which virtually all the parties that had won seats in the parliament either approved of the agreement with the troika, or pretended that the question did not concern them, the only one to speak in the name of the majority that had voted “no” in the referendum was the extreme right-wing Golden Dawn, now transformed into the third-largest party in Greece. Meanwhile, the experience of Syriza shows how easily, in conditions of institutional crisis, an opposition can rise from third place to first.

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The inevitable consequence of the September elections in Greece was the degrading of democracy in the country that regards itself as democracy’s historical homeland. Nevertheless, how was it that the Greeks who had decided to vote permitted Tsipras and his minions to hold onto office? How was it that Syriza, after losing practically all of its grass-roots activists who had borne on their shoulders the burden of the January election campaign, this time had no need either of party members or of supporters or even of popular sympathy in order to win the elections? The answer is simple: a demoralised society, after losing its self-belief, reconciled itself to torture and hoped to choose for itself a more humane executioner who, in torturing the population, might at any rate not experience sadistic pleasure. But here, too, they were mistaken. When put into effect, Tsipras’s austerity, privatisation and other antisocial and anti-national measures did not prove to be any less painful, but to the contrary, were exceedingly harsh since the job of implementing them was undertaken by people who had lost any shred of conscience and selfrespect. The Tsipras government had no principles, even conservative ones, and no morality, even of the bourgeois variety. A direct and natural consequence of the Greek catastrophe was the failure of its Spanish analogue, the Podemos party, whose popularity from 2015 began declining noticeably. While a year earlier the Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias had been viewed as on the brink of becoming prime minister of Spain, in 2015 and 2016 the party not only began to lose votes but also sank into acute internal crisis. For the other European countries and their left movements, the consequences of the Greek catastrophe were to make their effects felt over a longer period – precisely as much time as was needed for activists and politicians in those countries to work out the lessons of the Greek experience. In essence, these lessons were very simple. First, there could not be any compromise or reconciliation with the political elite of the European Union or with its neoliberal institutions. The people who sought to defend the policies of this elite on the basis of “left” positions, making openly illusory promises that the structures concerned would undergo positive changes in the indeterminate future, were in no sense naïve utopians but thoroughly conscious and dangerous enemies. Second, the breach with the circles involved needed to be completely consistent and “Leninist”, that is, irreconcilable and irrevocable. The point here is not that compromises are wrong as such but that any compromise was impossible in the specific circumstances that applied in this case, that is, under conditions of systemic crisis. A very important and meaningful political experiment was carried out in Greece. A party that embodied the hopes, ideas and approaches that were dominant on the European left had come to power, gaining the chance not simply to expatiate on the many wonderful alternatives to people’s grim existence under neoliberalism but also to try to bring at least something of these ideas into being. Unfortunately, the experiment not only failed but also yielded completely obvious and convincing results. As a party mobilising social discontent, Syriza proved to be a thoroughly effective and reliable tool. But after uniting activists with society in a struggle for

Europe versus the European Union 77 a change of regime, it displayed complete impotence as soon as it became that regime. From the first, it was clear that the new government had neither a strategy nor a realistic program. Although it uttered radical phrases, its actual capabilities amounted only to directing moderate requests to its political opponents. All the hopes of the radical left were reduced to making use of the very same European institutions that Syriza’s own election campaign propaganda had unmasked. It became apparent that the Syriza leaders were not simply ignorant of how to wage a struggle once they came to power and were wielding the tools of office but that they had no understanding whatsoever of the purpose of this struggle. The results of the September 2015 Greek elections proved to be important for a much wider group of countries than Greece itself. Tsipras’s “success” did nothing whatsoever to help overcome the crisis of the left movement in Greece and in Europe as a whole, but aided its further degradation. Tsipras showed convincingly that treachery and a lack of principles were the only things that worked, the only things the left possessed that for the time being would turn out well for it and that would yield at least tactical successes. This was an example that many were prepared to follow with enthusiasm. By contrast, Popular Unity showed that principled behaviour, honesty and truth to one’s promises were a sure path to misfortune. This result was achieved through the common efforts of the Syriza leaders and of their ideological opponents who did not wish to become traitors but who did not become politicians either. Like most members of the modern left, the Syriza leaders avoided publicly repudiating the principles of class solidarity. But these principles bore no relation to the practical activity of these people or to the process through which they took decisions. For the Syriza leaders, class rhetoric had long since replaced class politics. Power comes with obligations. Clear priorities are needed, along with unambiguous decisions, precise formulations and then the tough, consistent implementation of an agenda that rests on concrete interests within society. There is a need for the grass-roots mobilisation of extra-systemic forces to overcome the resistance of hostile institutions. The Syriza leaders could do none of this because all of it lay not simply outside their concept of politics but also outside their world-view. Worse still, it became apparent that neither a “movement” structure, a network organisation, or other delights of the information epoch provided any guarantee against the leaders usurping powers within the organisation. Nor did these organisational forms present any obstacle to intrigue and manipulation. Resting on informal procedures or, on the other hand, requiring the kind of unlimited democracy that cannot be realised in real political time, when decisions have to be made extremely quickly, such structures are in essence not more but less democratic than the old bureaucratised, clearly formalised hierarchies and procedures of traditional worker and left organisations. In conditions of acute crisis, it became clear that three or four people could have no difficulty deciding everything on behalf of the party. Both the treachery of Tsipras and the helplessness of Varoufakis were the logical results of a particular approach to politics – of an approach resting on ideological and cultural principles that had triumphed after the traditions of the “old left”,

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both social democratic and communist, had vanished into the past. The place of the unity of organisation and program that had lain at the basis of the old left politics had now been taken by the ideology of a “multitude of alternatives”. But this ideology could work only in the heads of intellectuals with beautiful souls and of naïve students who were not burdened with responsibility for decisionmaking. The essence of real politics lies in the fact that whatever alternative we choose automatically cancels out all other alternatives while also giving rise to its own logic that determines the course of subsequent events and influences later decisions. If real change is desired, then a single alternative on whose realisation all one’s efforts are concentrated has to be thought out and chosen from the very beginning. Further, it is essential to discard in advance all other variants and “alternatives” while recognising that in particular circumstances it may even be necessary to fight against them. The law of political struggle, like the law of war, has at its heart the concentrating of forces. This does not in the least signify that in politics there cannot be variants that one holds in reserve ‒ the notorious “plan B”, the obvious lack of which always dramatically exacerbated the helplessness of Tsipras and his associates. Such a plan, however, can only be effective as part of an overall strategy within which the goals and priorities remain unchanged even if the situation requires that tactics be reconsidered. Paradoxically, it was for lack of anything even faintly resembling a “plan B” that the Syriza ideologues and leaders finished up utterly dependent on external circumstances and were reduced to passively serving the will and executing the plans of others. After starting out from the ideology of “a multitude of alternatives”, they arrived quite naturally in the space of a few months at a de facto acceptance of Margaret Thatcher’s formula, “There is no alternative”. It was this, in essence, that Varoufakis embraced when he declared that in the existing situation, he could see no alternative to submitting to the logic of the system. This ideological capitulation occurred long before the political capitulation, and ultimately, it was predetermined by the illusions of the “radical left” that it was possible to struggle bit by bit, to change society without seeking to take power, and then to take power while failing to take responsibility on oneself. But for such lessons to have any effect, a political will was required. Without it, there was no knowledge and no experience that would be of benefit. If this tragic situation had been unique to Greece, that would have been lamentable but not catastrophic. It is significant, however, that Tsipras’s treachery did not turn him into a pariah among the left. To the contrary, important numbers of European leftists were inclined to try to justify Syriza’s actions, or even with hindsight to suggest a “plan B”, of which the Greek prime minister, now acting beneath the dictates of the Brussels bureaucrats, had no need whatsoever. These members of the European left still considered Tsipras and his “genetically modified Syriza” (the expression is that of the Greek journalist Dimitris Konstantakopoulos) to be part of the left movement. The reason for what seems at first glance to have been a strange reaction was that the political views of many of the people who were inclined to justify and

Europe versus the European Union 79 support Tsipras did not differ substantially from Tsipras’s own. To fully recognise the bankruptcy of such policies means either to acknowledge the worthlessness of one’s approach or to make a choice in favour of fundamentally different methods of struggle, making inevitable a dramatic breach with the accustomed formulae whose repetition allows people to operate comfortably within the neoliberal system. The active support that Tsipras’s treachery gained from prominent parties and leaders testified to the fact that the practical agenda followed by these party leaderships had nothing in common with their anticapitalist and anti-liberal rhetoric. Of course, the approval of Tsipras’s actions was not universal. While Podemos Chief Pablo Iglesias, the right wing of the German Die Linke party, and the leader of the French Communists Pierre Laurent, supported Tsipras enthusiastically, JeanLuc Mélanchon and Die Linke’s Oskar Lafontaine spoke out against his policies. A section of the left movement in Britain and the US sharply condemned Syriza for “capitulation on the anti-austerity and anti-debt struggles”10 without taking the time to seriously analyse the reasons for this turn of events. It is indicative, however, that even Tsipras’s critics studiously avoided harsh expressions, where possible seeking not to mention the Greek prime minister personally and trying to focus attention on the negative aspects of his policies. As usual in such situations, the left wing of the movement feared a split and showed restraint to the point of completely renouncing struggle for their own principles. Meanwhile, the right wing spoke and acted in a completely irresponsible fashion, dooming the movement as a whole to catastrophe. The failure to understand that decisive action represented the only path to salvation, even if the cost included splits, plagued the radical sector of the European left. The movement’s history had been marked by numerous schisms which had occurred for trifling reasons. The result of this experience, however, had been an inability to make principled demarcations in situations where the matter really was one of life or death, not only for the members of the left but also for society in general. The comfortable circumstances in which Tsipras and his associates managed to survive the political catastrophe bore witness to the fact that it was not only Greek society that had suffered a moral and political collapse but the European left as well.

A minor shock in Germany While European left intellectuals and activists were discussing the sad outcome of the Greek events, a new wave of bad news swept over them, this time from Germany. The Die Linke party, which had long been considered the standard-bearer of the European left, began losing votes. Particularly alarming was the fact that these votes were going to the new radical right-wing party Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland ‒ AfD). The turning-point was the elections for the governing assemblies in three German states – Rheinland-Pfalz, BadenWürttemberg and Sachsen-Anhalt. The results of the voting were a widely anticipated sensation. Everyone knew in advance that the Christian Democratic Union of Chancellor Angela Merkel would lose votes as a consequence of the growing

80 Europe versus the European Union dissatisfaction of Germans with her immigration policy. Everyone also predicted successes for AfD. Few, however, foresaw that defeat lay ahead not only for the party of the current chancellor but also for the entire political system of the Federal Republic. The three states that had elected their assemblies in March 2016 represented in essence a model of all of German society. Two of the states were part of western Germany – Rheinland-Pfalz, where the Social Democrats had traditionally been dominant, and the more conservative Baden-Württemberg, where Merkel’s Christian Democrats were in office, though they had been obliged since 2011 to govern in an unusual coalition with the Greens. The third state, Sachsen-Anhalt, was a depressed territory in eastern Germany where the main contest for votes had long been between the Christian Democrats and the left. In the previous elections, the left had become the second most influential current, forcing the Social Democrats into third place. While in Rheinland-Pfalz and Baden-Württemberg, Die Linke had never been able from year to year to overcome the 5-per cent barrier, remaining on a level of less than 3 per cent, in Sachsen-Anhalt it had always been the liberals (Free Democrats) and Greens that were threatened with marginalisation. The Greens were represented in the assembly but had achieved this only with great difficulty. Later, in May 2017, the trend to increase support for AfD was confirmed by elections in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where the ultrarightists obtained almost 7.4 per cent of the votes; meanwhile, the left fell short by one-tenth of 1 per cent of the share needed for representation. The main losers on this occasion were the Social Democrats, who lost about 7 per cent of the votes and were deprived of their assembly majority. The success of AfD in the state elections was significant because the extreme right made dramatic gains in all three states irrespective of the differences between them. Of course, the vote for AfD was not as large in the more prosperous states as it was in Sachsen-Anhalt (24.2 per cent), but in the west it was also impressive. In Baden-Württemberg AfD polled 15.1 per cent, and in Rhineland-Pfalz 12.6 per cent. Even in traditionally Social Democratic Westphalia, the AfD vote reached 7.4 per cent. More important still, the ultra-rightists immediately took a prominent place on the political scene, something that parties breaking through the 5-per cent barrier had never before managed – both the Greens and the left had “run on the spot” at a level of about 5 per cent for lengthy periods before acquiring the weight of national political forces. By contrast, the “new” AfD at its first electoral outing became a conspicuous presence in the political struggle. Following the regional elections, AfD was already the second-largest party in Sachsen-Anhalt, and in the western states, the third. The Greens, liberals and the left remained far behind, while the Social Democrats took substantial losses. The gains for AfD were scored not only at the expense of the Christian Democratic Union but to an equal degree at that of all other parties. The Social Democrats not only shed votes in three states out of four, but in particular cases also lost their leading-party status, being relegated to a humiliating fourth place. The left suffered a serious loss of votes only in Sachsen-Anhalt; in the west they “broke even”, while in Westphalia their following even increased slightly. This, however,

Europe versus the European Union 81 was only a modest consolation, since in those states their position was in any case marginal. The failures of the left seemed especially galling in light of their previous successes. At the beginning of the decade, it had been Die Linke that had attracted a protest vote, not only in the east of the country but also in the west. A significant proportion of the votes that went to AfD might, in other circumstances, have gone to the left. To a great degree, the people who were to blame were the Die Linke leaders and ideologues. From being critics of the government, they had turned in essence into its defenders and allies on migration policy. When two leading left politicians, Oskar Lafontaine and Sahra Wagenknecht, decided to criticise the actions of Angela Merkel, their own supporters heaped indignation on them. Instead of suggesting an alternative analysis of the situation, criticising government policy and pointing out the adverse consequences of Merkel’s decisions while at the same time denouncing racist interpretations of the crisis, the members of the left simply remained silent or supported the chancellor. The ideological struggle against the extreme right was reduced to marching through the streets with placards declaring “No to racism” and “Refugees welcome”. This, naturally, did more to antagonise ordinary people than to convince them of the need for a more balanced attitude to the question of immigration. While ordinary Germans see specific problems caused by the influx of refugees, the members of the left stubbornly try to convince them that these problems do not exist and that anyone who mentions them is a Nazi and a racist. It is not surprising that people lose their trust and interest in the left. The gains for AfD in the state elections rendered German politics more fragmentary, creating a need for odd coalitions and alliances. During the heyday of the Federal Republic in the years from the 1950s to the 1970s, the West German political system consisted of three parties (the conservatives, Social Democrats and liberals), to which the Greens and later the left were added. Now the picture was more like a mosaic. Things became still worse for the leftists and Social Democrats when in September 2017 Germans took part in new elections to the Bundestag. The main winner in the parliamentary elections was again AfD, which received almost 13 per cent of the votes. The right-wing populist party became the country’s third-largest parliamentary force. Overcoming at its second attempt the 5-per cent barrier needed for representation in the Bundestag, the AfD had ascended like a rocket. The subsequent elections to the state assemblies merely confirmed the trend. While Die Linke was expanding its voter base, these successes were insignificant compared to the advances made by AfD. A significant number of voters had crossed over to AfD from the Christian Democrats. Nevertheless, the greatest political losses were borne by the Social Democrats, who were rapidly declining in popularity. Not only had the German Social Democratic Party lost forty seats in the Bundestag but also the chance to become the country’s leading party. In turn, the electoral collapse of the Social Democrats deepened the crisis of the left, whose strategy ultimately amounted not to trying to replace the Social Democrats as the main party of hired workers but

82 Europe versus the European Union merely to entering the government through forming a coalition with the Christian Democrats. An answer to the strategic crisis of Die Linke was provided by the Aufstehen (“Rise Up”) movement, organised by Sahra Wagenknecht. Although Wagenknecht was one of the party leaders, her views on the situation diverged sharply from what the leadership majority was saying and doing. The supporters of Aufstehen criticised Merkel’s migration policy, pointing out the problems of ordinary citizens, and called for the party to concentrate not on politically correct discourse but on social problems. In effect, an attempt was being made to mobilise, under left-wing slogans, the mass discontent that had resulted in AfD’s success. Numerous party comrades, however, reacted to this initiative in an extremely nervous fashion. Many were quick to declare that the Aufstehen activists were employing terminology “that belongs to the right”.11 A number of Wagenknecht’s colleagues in the Die Linke fraction in the Bundestag accused her of fomenting a split and of renouncing the party’s proclaimed values. The migration crisis that began after the Merkel government opened the country’s borders to many thousands of refugees from the Middle East shifted the political discussion abruptly. While the prime place had earlier been held by questions of the economy and social policy, it was now the topic of migration that came to the forefront, and discontent that had been building up for many years burst onto the surface. It was perfectly natural that in Germany, where the trauma of the Nazi regime had not yet been forgotten, political correctness should have blocked public discussion of such matters for many years, and meanwhile, the policy of integrating new migrants had by no means been a failure. Several generations of people arriving from Turkey and other Asiatic countries had been actively integrated into German society where they held a respected place. Germany in the first years of the twenty-first century remained one of the few countries in Europe where industry was continuing to develop as it had earlier done. This meant that considerable numbers of the new arrivals would find places for themselves in the industrial system, which for many years had successfully transformed Turkish peasants into German proletarians (among second-generation migrants, it had given birth to a German-speaking technical and humanitarian intelligentsia). The problem lay in the fact that in the early twenty-first century, the pace of industrial development was slowing, while the flow of immigrants was continuing to expand. Accordingly, competition for jobs was increasing as well. The situation was exacerbated by the crisis that began in 2008. Industry survived the downturn by making substantial cuts to wage levels, but this brought with it a sharpening of the competition between the native-born population and workers from abroad. The result was that considerable numbers of the new arrivals finished up on the sidelines, forming immigrant ghettos and finding themselves effectively excluded from the life of society. Under the conditions of falling wages and declining social standards, it was, paradoxically, the native population that began taking potential jobs from the immigrants, who had nowhere they could find work. Various niches that earlier had been assigned to low-paid migrant workers now became attractive to many local residents. Losing out in this

Europe versus the European Union 83 competition, the immigrants were increasingly forced onto the social margins, living on welfare benefits, finding earnings for themselves in the informal sector or engaging in openly criminal activity. It was in this fashion that behavioural patterns viewed as antisocial by respectable German “burgers” developed and reproduced themselves. The influx of Middle Eastern refugees that began during the war in Syria would not have been as serious a problem if it had not been superimposed on contradictions that had long been accumulating but that were not seriously understood within society. In 2016, it was as though the dam had burst. Everyone realised that there were no jobs for the newly arrived refugees and that the burden on the social welfare system was growing dramatically, but the people kept coming. Worse still, everyone could see that significant numbers of the people heading for Germany were completely unlike the victims of war. They were coming not only from Syria but also from other countries in the hope of receiving welfare benefits and somehow of being able to settle in Europe. But in order for their hopes to be realised, a dynamic growth of industry was required. This, unfortunately, the German economy could no longer manage. The situation was heading into an impasse: the native-born Germans were annoyed, while the refugees, who had expected something quite different, were disillusioned as well. The two groups confronted one another in an increasingly aggressive stand-off. Most importantly, German citizens blamed the chancellor for having allowed the crisis to arise. This was in complete accord with the logic of toleration – those who deserved the blame were not the new arrivals but the government that had invited them without taking account of what these people would do in the country. It should be recognised that Merkel’s calculation was not in the least humanitarian. The influx of migrants weighed on the labour market, forcing Germans to agree to lower wages and less agreeable work. Ultimately, encouraging immigration is one of the mechanisms available for destroying the welfare state. Moreover, it is an extremely effective one, since leftists, social democrats and greens, who protest sharply against almost any antisocial measures by governments, are disinclined to speak out against immigration; they are too devoted to the principles of political correctness to recognise that the flow of new people from the poor countries of the South deepens the social problems of society. It is thus unsurprising that discussion of the immigration question became a monopoly of the extreme right. Since other parties substantially ignored this matter, either dismissing it with a few general, politically correct phrases or else maintaining that the problem did not exist at all, the ultra-right enjoyed complete freedom in interpreting events. Naturally, none of the “serious” politicians agreed with them, but neither did these politicians argue in depth with the ultra-right on the issue, since any such argument would automatically have amounted to a recognition that a problem existed. From being a social question, immigration was transformed into an ethno-cultural one, and rational discussion was replaced by emotions. The results were not long in coming, and the organisation that drew the main benefit from the situation was AfD.

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In its own way, the story of this party is instructive. AfD was founded by relatively moderate people, who were trying to lend German nationalism a respectable face by distancing themselves as much as possible from the Nazi past. Their main focus, as they saw it, was not immigration at all but criticism of the European Union, which they considered was undermining German sovereignty. Their pitch did not involve xenophobia or talk of “blood and nation” but merely appeals to the great culture of Goethe, Schiller and Hegel. Under the impact of the growing crisis, however, the situation within the party changed drastically. Extreme right-wingers began joining AfD in crowds, supplanting the moderates, who were forced to abandon the organisation. The effect of the radical takeover of the leadership was not to weaken the party but to spur a rapid gain in its popularity. The cultural and generational shift that had occurred in Germany over the previous twenty years had made it possible to violate a whole series of unspoken taboos that had governed the behaviour of all German politicians. As before, appealing directly to the heritage of the Third Reich was forbidden, but it was now acceptable to be inspired by the ideas of German nationalism and to ponder the “defence of the race”. The main outcome for Germany of the 2017 elections was a sharp change in the disposition of political forces. In essence, the political stability and predictability that had earlier distinguished the country, which for half a century had provided a model of both, now came to an end. For many years, despite the growing problems of European capitalism, Germany had retained an apparent immunity to crisis. This had been made possible by the dominant position that German capital had seized within the framework of the international process and that in turn had underlain the relative moderation of the German bourgeoisie in its attacks on workers’ rights. But the renewed wave of global crisis that struck in 2016 put an end to this good fortune. Without regard for the preferences of the German ruling class, the situation flew out of control, making bitter social and political conflicts inevitable. Unfortunately, it was not the left who benefited from the crisis of German capitalism but the extreme right. For German political culture and for the democratic tradition that had been constructed since 1945, this turn of events was a genuine catastrophe, a political earthquake that shattered the moral foundations that had been established within society and that had maintained its equilibrium over seventy-odd years. Those responsible for this development, however, were the left intelligentsia and its political leaders, who had transformed themselves from opponents of the system into hostages of its ideology. While criticising the Social Democrats for renouncing the struggle against capital, they themselves had not risked taking anti-systemic initiatives. Without exception, the parties of the left had pronounced the slogan of radical social and economic reform dead and buried, only not in the name of revolution but simply of politically correct discourse. Refusing to call for changes that went beyond everyday commonplaces and petty reformism, and without a strategy or a program of transition, they finished up incapable not only of taking advantage of the tectonic shifts that were occurring in European society and in the economy, but even of perceiving them.

Europe versus the European Union 85 Fear that the situation will grow worse blocks the struggle for change since no serious reform, let alone a revolution, ever passes off without conditions temporarily deteriorating in one respect or another, or without the risks and the numerous drawbacks that are the inevitable cost of progress in a bourgeois society. A refusal to recognise the inevitability of such costs, and to accept the ineluctable logic of the risk that accompanies any transition from a predictable, well-understood present to a future that is desired but not guaranteed, is tantamount to rejecting progress itself. Whatever eloquent words are used to conceal such a refusal, it represents a shift to conservative positions.

Brexit The next shock suffered by the European Union was the result of the referendum held in Great Britain on 23 June 2016. Placed before the inhabitants of the United Kingdom was the question of whether they wished to remain in the EU or to leave it. Even before the voting occurred, the expression Brexit – British exit – had entered popular usage. During the lead-up to the referendum, the English, Scots, Welsh and northern Irish were deluged by a wave of propaganda. Arguing against Brexit were fashionable writers, actors and singers, at the same time as almost all the mass media campaigned for the retention of the status quo. The political class closed ranks, united by their passion for defending the established order. The agitation by supporters of keeping Britain within the EU centred on eloquent discourses about “European unity” and attempts to scare the population. The inhabitants of the United Kingdom were threatened with the collapse of the state as opponents of Brexit assured their audiences that Scotland and Northern Ireland, where most of the population would presumably vote to retain membership in the EU, would split off in the event of an “incorrect” referendum outcome. Scottish nationalists, leaders of the Irish republicans and even the official Labour Party joined with the ruling Tories in arguing that if the people voted the wrong way, the country would face catastrophe. All the familiar figures on the television screens, it appeared, had merged into one, and this single, indistinct personality sought in diverse ways to persuade, frighten, flatter and lie to the voter. Lamentably, this chorus was joined at the last moment, albeit with reservations, by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Faced with the threat of a split in the party, he yielded to its right wing and issued another muted appeal to remain in the EU in order to reform it from within. Unfortunately, leftists had been repeating the mantra of reforming the EU for a quarter-century already, at the same time as the EU had not only implemented increasingly harsh neoliberal policies but had incorporated them into its institutional make-up. It was within the framework of this logic that the structures of the EU had been established, and on its basis that the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties had been concluded. Under conditions in which the slogan of a “united Europe” had become a synonym for enacting measures dictated by transnational corporations, by financial capital and by an authoritarian bureaucracy, the embodiment of European values

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was no longer to be found in Voltaire, Diderot or Garibaldi, or even in de Gaulle, but in the functionaries of the European Central Bank. It was precisely in this institutional consolidation of neoliberal reforms that the sole content of practical integration consisted. Ordinary Europeans understood this far better and much earlier than the left-wing politicians, and unlike the intellectuals, thus became inured to talk of “European values”. The supporters of the EU impressed on people that terrible economic calamities would ensue if anyone dared speak out against the established order, but they could suggest nothing apart from maintaining the existing state of affairs. Meanwhile, people were becoming less enamoured of this state of affairs with every day that passed. The situation was accumulating problems while demonstratively refusing to solve them. The arguments for a “united Europe” were always shallow and discursive. Instead of discussing with citizens the specific, practical implications of agreements that undermined the traditions and bases of the European way of life, and that did away with the achievements of several centuries of collective struggle, the supporters of the “remain” case told people they were required to make a choice either “for Europe” or “against Europe”. Accordingly, the choice “in favour of Europe” was not founded on rational arguments but was justified in discursive fashion; the very name of the continent, associated with that of the multi-state union, was supposed to evoke positive emotions. This had worked well enough in the mid-1990s, but two decades later the situation had changed. The public had realised that concealed behind the discourse of “support for Europe” was the obligation to put up with any decision by the Brussels bureaucracy, even the most absurd. Naturally, the left-wing supporters of the EU spoke constantly of the need to accept the European institutions in order to reform them at some future point. But this argument, too, was specious and demagogic; the institutions had been constructed, deliberately and from the very first, in order to be unreformable. The purpose of European integration was to construct a system that would block any attempt at implementing unsanctioned policies on the national level and to deny the possibility of democratic processes influencing decisions adopted within the framework of the common European structures. The key idea motivating neoliberal reformers, from Margaret Thatcher to Anatoly Chubais, has been to render irreversible the policies they set in place. Whether or not we like what has happened to us, and whether the newly established institutions function successfully or everything falls in a heap, is of no significance whatsoever. Once taken, the decisions cannot be undone, the institutions that have been set up cannot be abolished and any political, social, economic or even personal strategy has to be drawn up exclusively within this framework without encroaching on the changes introduced. The EU structures that were established on the basis of the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties made neoliberalism the institutional basis of continental integration. This political order was deliberately constructed in such a manner that rejecting neoliberal economic rules was impossible without undermining the integration process itself. The consequences of these policies included the degrading of national labour markets, the destruction of jobs in industry, and later, an extremely

Europe versus the European Union 87 acute financial crisis capable of overturning the economies of whole countries, not only of Greece but also prospectively of Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy. An indispensable element of such a social order was the manipulation of mass consciousness through a system of propaganda. For all the sharpness of the debates that occurred, the genuinely important questions remained outside the realm of public discussion. It was possible to talk about trifles, such as whether Muslims should be allowed to bathe at beaches in head-to-foot swimsuits, but conversing about weighty economic, social or political changes (except, of course, for those that were being imposed from above in the context of the neoliberal integration project) immediately marked one as unserious, a dreamer, a marginal, a nationalist or an admirer of long-departed epochs. The supporters of the EU could suggest nothing apart from preserving the current state of affairs, and this state of affairs was pleasing people less with each day that passed. The system was accumulating problems while refusing demonstratively to solve them since any serious attempt to set something right would, by altering the vector of development, create a precedent for changes of real substance and overturn the logic of irreversibility. A particular role in disseminating the ideology of irreversibility was played by left intellectuals, who stressed assiduously that the workers, farmers and radical youth who were dissatisfied with the EU made up a backward mass of people who had not reached the stage of development where they could appreciate modern European values. Accordingly, the supporters of Brexit were depicted as provincials, as racists and nationalists whose views found expression in the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). The fact that most of the people who opposed the EU had no relationship to the UKIP, and that many of them had decided to vote for Brexit only after the Brussels bureaucracy had ruined and humiliated Greece, was studiously ignored. In other words, opposition to the EU in at least half of all cases was not motivated by nationalism, but to the contrary, by internationalism. Readers of the Guardian were reminded of this on the eve of the vote by one of the leading specialists on the EU legal system, Christopher Bickerton. Recalling the earlier referendum on British membership in the EU, held in 1975, Bickerton noted that the internationalist left was far more solidly against the Common Market than the typically more chauvinistic and nationalistic right. Middle-class intellectuals who believed in socialism happily voted to leave, with no sense of being social pariahs. This is a pretty accurate description of my neighbours in Cambridge, who voted to leave in 1975 and will vote to remain tomorrow.12 EU supporters on the left of the political spectrum accused their opponents of racism and of nostalgia for British imperialism, refusing categorically to discuss the social and economic problems or to put forward any rational arguments. The representatives of financial capital joined in calling for Britain to remain in the bloc. Comparing the panic of the financiers at the prospect of Brexit to their relative indifference to the threat of national disintegration that had accompanied the

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referendum on Scottish independence, the British Marxist Alex Callinicos stated: “From the perspective of the ruling class, Brexit would be even more damaging than the Scottish secession”.13 There was a section of the Scottish left that during the referendum on independence had called for Scotland to leave the United Kingdom and that now came out in enthusiastic support of the EU. Others, while declaring that the “break-up of the British state” was a good idea, simultaneously called for a vote against the EU since “austerity policies, so brutally imposed on Greece, could just as well be imposed on independent Scotland”. Consequently, the idea that an independent and progressive Scotland could exist within the context of a neoliberal Europe was “a fiction”.14 This thesis seemed completely well-founded and convincing. But why had it not entered the heads of the same people a year earlier, when frothing at the mouth, they had agitated for separation from England? And why, even with hindsight, had they not only failed to notice the contradiction but also had not understood that through their behaviour during the referendum on independence they had turned themselves into hostages of the Scottish National Party, which was closely linked to the EU bureaucracy? Nevertheless, the fundamentally important element here is not the logical or ideological contradictions but the absence even of an attempt at class analysis or of analysis of the particular social and economic interests affected by the questions posed in the two referendums. The discussion on the left boiled down to questions of political tactics: if a conservative government held office in London, then in order to spite it one should vote for the destruction of the state, regardless of the consequences for the working class. The choice before the population was simple: either to reject the welfare state and democracy or to sacrifice the few conveniences of daily life associated with the functioning of the EU. In conditions of growing social and economic crisis, the majority of voters chose the latter. In the upshot, 52 per cent voted to leave the EU, with a record turnout of 72 per cent of the eligible population, the highest level of participation since the elections of 1992. In the words of the London Socialist Review, neoliberalism was dealt its “greatest blow to date”.15 Even the majority of those who had agitated for Britain to leave the EU had not expected this victory. The result came as a shock not only to the ruling circles in the UK and EU but also to the analysts who a few days before the voting had predicted a convincing victory for the supporters of the existing order. The bankruptcy of the sociological forecasts proceeded naturally enough from the general collapse of the dominant ideology. The methodologies developed for use in the society of the mid-twentieth century had long since ceased to work, and both the organisers of the surveys and the authors of the survey forms, as members of the academic elite, were so remote from society that they could not even understand why the questions and choices that they had devised, and that reflected their system of values and concepts concerning the structure of society, made it impossible to obtain credible results. The unsoundness of the predictions was guaranteed by the fact that the possibility of any country leaving the EU had been deliberately excluded from the

Europe versus the European Union 89 list of “serious” variants. The mass media had studiously promulgated these ideas and images, transforming their interpretation of the socio-political process into something that was considered self-evident. The decision by the British reverberated throughout the continent. The elites were in a state of confusion, the markets in panic. The value of the euro and the pound fell sharply, as did the price of oil. The rug was pulled from beneath the feet of the stock market speculators, who had gambled on a rise. The Greeks, humiliated and robbed by the EU, felt themselves to have been avenged. People in neighbouring countries discussed their chances of repeating the British experience. A crisis arose in mass consciousness; something that had appeared inconceivable, that had been deliberately excluded from the sphere of real possibilities, had now become a reality. Confusion reigned in the leadership of the EU. The Brussels bureaucrats did everything they could to draw out the transition process, and, where possible, to sabotage it. A transition period was announced of three years, which some suggested extending to seven years in the hope that during this time a new referendum might be organised and the result recorded on 23 June overturned. In the referendum, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn may have let slip a unique chance to strengthen his authority in society when he decided not to openly support an exit from the EU. Even if he had lost, this would have been to a far lesser degree than his rivals in the Conservative and Liberal Democratic parties. A government crisis broke out, and Prime Minister David Cameron, in line with the traditional British code of honour, announced his resignation. At first glance, the outcome of the voting did not seem like a convincing victory; the margin of support for Brexit was just 4 per cent. But taking into account the actual relationship of forces and the funds available to the contending sides, even such a result was a miracle. It confirmed once again that the people had ceased believing the intellectuals, the political class and the press. The majority had voted against the official thinking of the leaderships of all the main parties, from the Tories to the Scottish Nationalists, and against the views of all the main bourgeois institutions, from the Bank of England to the International Monetary Fund. Brexit became a turning-point, signifying the destruction of the cultural and psychological barriers that had guaranteed the inviolability of the neoliberal order. It was impossible any longer to reject critical approaches and alternatives as notoriously marginal and unserious. Something that for many years had been declared “mainstream” had, to the contrary, been rejected by society. The vote by the British majority turned out to be a challenge that society threw in the faces not just of the ruling elites, the mass media and official ideology but also of the left-wing intelligentsia that had become integrated into the system. The claims of these intellectuals to be defenders of the oppressed lower classes had been revealed as groundless, and the right wing did not fail to make use of this situation. Speaking at a Conservative conference in the autumn of 2016, newly elected party leader Theresa May unexpectedly heaped sharp criticism on financial capital and on the egoistical elite that ruled in Britain. The lower strata of society, who had voted for the country to leave the EU, had not only rejected the policies of Brussels but had also showed, as May recognised, that the existing social order

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categorically did not suit them. Solidarising with them, the prime minister of the United Kingdom declared that from then on, the government’s task would be to defend the rights of workers and to keep in check the greed of the corporations. At the same time, she stressed her firm intention to implement the decision of the majority of the British people to leave the EU, despite the obvious hopes of a section of the ruling class that the result of the referendum could be “spun” and the process drawn out so that later, after public opinion had been worked over in the appropriate fashion, the decision could be revisited in a second vote. The choice in favour of Brexit, as May put it, represented a “quiet revolution” in which the British had rejected a system that seemed to work “well for a privileged few and not for them”.16 The government, the Tory leader declared, should intervene more actively in the economy, should reject the dictates of transnational companies and should pursue policies aimed at raising wages, improving the living conditions of the population and creating more humane labour relations. In short, the speech by the leader of the Conservatives would more normally and logically have been delivered at a congress of the Labour opposition or at a gathering of leftists and antiglobalists. The conservative Telegraph explained the utterances of the prime minister as the result of a desire to win over wavering Labour supporters, but reported that business leaders had expressed alarm at her rhetoric amid fears she would “help to demonise enterprise”.17 Although the political conjuncture, at a time when the Labour Party was in crisis, had undoubtedly forced the leader of the Conservatives to deliver speeches oriented towards winning over “alien” voters, something far more serious lay behind this turnabout. The Tory leader had correctly interpreted the results of the voting and recognised that inevitable changes were looming. Resolving the crisis was objectively possible only through a strengthening of state regulation, through overcoming the “extremes of the market” and through strengthening the effective demand exercised by the working population. Like Trump in America, the British prime minister grasped that defending one’s own production was not simply an ideological slogan voiced by antiglobalists but an indispensable element of economic stabilisation. Here, however, other questions became unavoidable. How far might politicians who headed bourgeois parties proceed along this path? To what degree might such a course be implemented without affecting the fundamental interests of the classes and groups that these parties represented? To what extent would financial capital, and the conservative figures linked to it not only by class but also by ideological ties, permit such a turn? The fact that the policy speeches of Corbyn and May turned out to be strikingly in tune with one another testified to the dramatic shifts that were occurring in British society. On an organisational level both May and Corbyn held their posts as a result of new leadership election rules under which the decisive role was no longer played by parliamentarians and party officials, as earlier, but by rank and file party members. It was this mass of Britons, dissatisfied and disillusioned with neoliberalism, who first brought Corbyn to victory and then allowed May to prevail over the liberal wing of the Tories.

Europe versus the European Union 91 The liberal elites, however, were not only unprepared to surrender but were also unready to yield even an inch of the conquests they had made over the previous thirty years. Meanwhile, it was far from obvious that even the person who held the leading post in Downing Street would be capable of turning her rhetoric into a series of concrete reforms that altered the logic of the development of society unless she had the support of a mass movement of the lower classes. The Tory government, however, could not organise such a movement without destroying its own party. The internal struggle within the Conservative Party thus created new opportunities for the Labourites, while the propaganda of change issued by the Conservative leader legitimised the ideological position of her left-wing opponents, transforming Corbyn’s slogans into a new mainstream. It might, of course, be supposed that society and its moods had changed, but this was not quite true. The moods and interests that prevailed in Britain in the referendum of 23 June had been mass phenomena throughout the entire period of euro integration but had simply been denied the opportunity to express themselves. They had been ignored, had been paid no attention or had been suppressed. These were “merely” the moods and interests of the majority – of workers, of white-collar employees, of small business owners, of farmers, of the very plebeians, disdain for whom had long since become a principle for intellectuals and politicians, regardless of their ideological hue. As Chris Bickerton noted venomously, left-liberal intellectuals did not conceal the fact that in their view, “around 50 per cent of Britons” were “foreigner-hating hooligans”.18 As admitted by the London journal International Socialism, significant numbers of the left intelligentsia characterised the masses who voted against the EU as “stupid, reactionary and racist”.19 It is not hard to see that such a characterisation of the mass of the population gives us a very precise idea of the intellectuals themselves and of how alien they were not only to respect for the views of others but also for the principles of democracy as such. This way of thinking is itself a typical example of a racist stereotype. In voting for Brexit, the masses had shown that they could not be endlessly manipulated and that ignoring them would not work. The outcome of the voting not only shook the political and media elites, showing them the limits of their influence, but also forced the left throughout Europe to start thinking about the perspectives for their further activity. In effect, Brexit signified a historic split in the left movement, no less profound and fundamental than the one that had occurred in Europe a hundred years earlier, during the years of the First World War. While a section of the left intelligentsia in Britain and beyond its borders was heaping curses on the workers who had dared to vote against the will of the ruling class, others welcomed the voters’ decision as beginning the rescue of the continent from the oligarchic order. Evaluating the result of the referendum, Jeremy Corbyn quite justifiably declared that in 2016 a point of no return had been passed and that hoping to maintain the status quo was “no longer an option”.20 He linked the defeat for the EU, correctly, to the failure of neoliberal policies: “This is the failure of an entire economic model to provide the chances and opportunities to a generation of our people”.21

92 Europe versus the European Union The vote against the EU, the Norwegian social activist, Asbjørn Wahl, noted, reflected society’s understanding that reforming that system was fundamentally impossible: It is therefore important that the current authoritarian and neoliberal EU does not gain more power and influence in Europe. From a left-wing perspective therefore, it was encouraging that the British went Brexit, despite the fact that right wing xenophobia got such a big place. Of course, the latter phenomenon provides the left with an even bigger challenge. It is now imperative that left forces take the opportunity Brexit has given them to go on the offensive, confront capitalist interests, strengthen democracy and develop real popular unity across borders in Europe. The real existing EU constitutes a barrier to such a united Europe today.22 An analogous view was expressed by Chris Bickerton, writing in the Guardian: I believe we can make this into the basis for a new internationalism in Europe, one that gives Europe a political meaning far more profound than the shallow cosmopolitanism that comes with the economic integration of the single market. A vote for Brexit is also a universal message to all other Europeans that politics can be about change and not just about defending the status quo.23 The ideology of “irreversibility” and the psychology of fear-mongering had ceased to work. A significant part of the European population not only welcomed the decision by the British but also began wanting to repeat it. The Union created by the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties had been transformed into a “prisonhouse of nations”, and Brexit had shown people that there existed both a practical mechanism and a real possibility for escaping from it. Massive numbers of people in Europe now understood that the path to a real unity and integration in the continent lay through dismantling the structures of the EU that were aimed not at a gathering of peoples into a united family but at consolidating the dictatorship over them of the financial markets. As always happens in such cases, the system was working against itself. The obvious impossibility of reforming the EU, and the ruthless forcing through of policies agreed between the bureaucrats and financial elites despite the will of the population, had undermined the system’s stability. The meaning of what was taking place had become clear to the average voter much earlier than to the intellectuals and analysts. Even if the public did not understand everything, its members sensed what was occurring. The majority of Britons had showed that they trusted their collective experience more than the images on their television screens. Democracy had triumphed over the “society of the spectacle”. When the balance sheet of the voting was drawn up, Lexit, the coalition of left groups campaigning against the EU, published a declaration that stated: “This could have been a great Labour crusade if it had put itself at the head of the working-class revolt, but the Blairites forced Jeremy Corbyn to abandon his

Europe versus the European Union 93 long-held opposition to the EU”.24 The vote for Brexit could be presented as a success for the nationalists, as the revenge of British provincialism or as an attempt by Britons to turn their backs on Europe. Or, the fact could be cited that the only party to give its concerted support to the “leave” option had been the right-wing conservative United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). But among the people who had voted for Brexit, UKIP by the most optimistic calculations had the support of no more than a quarter. Moreover, once departure from the EU had become a reality, UKIP would find itself without an agenda, program or slogans. In addition, the fact was studiously ignored that many of the people who opposed the EU had decided to vote for Brexit after the Brussels bureaucracy had ruined and humiliated Greece. Such people came out against the EU because they understood that liquidating that neoliberal monster represented the only chance of returning Europe to the road of social progress and democracy. The question at issue, however, was not only of how many people on the left had supported Brexit and of the proportion who remained hostage to the establishment. Far more important was the fact that ordinary people, who were far from being guided by left-wing ideas, had demonstrated a class consciousness that the intellectuals for the most part found impossible to attain. Strange as it might seem, the supporters of Brexit were, on the whole, surprisingly similar to the supporters of Novorossiya. In both cases we see an odd mingling of patriotism, local interests and a consciously recognised need for the rebirth of the welfare state that needed to be defended both against local elites and an external threat. In both cases, people were more inclined to feel than to understand; they could not always find adequate words and often fell victim to absurd prejudices. But for these failings to be overcome, the popular movement needed intellectuals in its ranks, where they could help people overcome these prejudices, and to make the transition from intuitively sensing their interests to consciously understanding them. Meanwhile, in Britain as in the case of Novorossiya, a substantial part of the left preferred to turn away resentfully from the “incorrect” common people and not join in action with them. To be sure, the bourgeoisie and the liberal elites have a better way with words, are far more educated and have a much better command of the subtleties of politically correct discourse than do the workers, farmers and petty entrepreneurs who struggle to survive under the conditions of market reform. But sooner or later, the choice must be made. The British referendum marked the beginning of a new politics in Europe – of a politics in which the masses are beginning to play an independent role and in which new opportunities are opening up. Until very recently, the very idea of any country leaving the EU was deliberately excluded from the list of “serious” possibilities, and its supporters were presented as ridiculous marginals. The fact that these “marginals”, as explained, enjoy the support of the public is forcing a rethink of all ideas of what is possible and impossible, conceivable and inconceivable in the modern world. The vote by the British majority signified the collapse of the cultural and psychological barriers guaranteeing that the neoliberal order would be unshakeable,

94 Europe versus the European Union and marked the beginning of changes not only for Britain but also for the entire continent. It was now impossible to reject critical approaches and alternatives as notoriously marginal and unserious. And vice versa, it was discovered that approaches regarded for many years as “mainstream” were in fact being rejected by society. Internationalism does not consist in giving one’s devoted support to integration policies enacted in the interests of global capital but in mounting solidary, coordinated resistance to these policies on the international level. The treachery of the intellectuals became a general European phenomenon after class criteria were replaced by cultural ones, and theory was replaced with refined discourses of all possible varieties, whose reproduction became the main criterion allowing “one’s own” to be distinguished from “foreign”. Betrayed and forgotten by the left, the masses were not only left to themselves, retaining and nurturing their prejudices and political superstitions, but also became more receptive than earlier to nationalist ideology. If the practical embodiment of internationalism turns out to be the activity of bankers and transnational corporations, while democratic rights are curtailed to the advantage of eurobureaucrats whom no one has elected and who answer to no one (except to the same bankers), it is not surprising that simple people begin to pin their hopes of salvation on the national state. It is curious that European intellectuals are fully prepared to recognise the justice of such feelings among residents of Latin America but no longer among people in Russia. And when such protests have begun breaking out in the countries of the “centre”, where changes of global significance might be achieved, the ideologues of the liberal left still have been more ready to unite in defence of the existing political order and dominant ideology. The lower social orders in the countries of Europe have been declared “backward”, “inadequate” and “savage”, just as a century and a half ago native peoples subjected to colonisation were declared backward and savage. It is noteworthy that in this regard the Russian liberal public has once again acted as the pioneer of antidemocratic ideological reaction. Its philippics aimed at its own wrong-thinking population have anticipated, in surprising fashion, the images, ideas and stereotypes that would only later spread among intellectuals in the West. The fact that “natives”, regardless of their level of culture and education, nevertheless have interests and rights is discovered only when the “uncivilised” and previously ignored masses cease to be silent. Certainly, their speech is often clumsy and even bigoted. But it expresses the truth and determination of people to whom, for many years, no one has wanted to listen. People’s readiness to repeat inadequate and old-fashioned formulae does not signify in any way that they are oblivious to their own direct interests. They will begin to act on the basis of their own needs but will be compelled to formulate these needs, which are real and genuine, in inadequate form. Those who are to blame for this in the first instance are the members of the left, who both in Britain and on the continent have either yielded hegemony in the mass protest movement or have never managed to win it. The self-intoxication of the left intelligentsia with fashionable liberal ideas has played a fateful role, not only for mass

Europe versus the European Union 95 protest, but in the first instance, for the intelligentsia itself, whose ideology has been rejected by the population.

The revolt against the institutions The inability of the Western left not just to lead but even to correctly evaluate the revolt against the neoliberal institutions of the EU ‒ a revolt now unfolding throughout the whole continent ‒ testifies to the profound structural crisis of the left movement and to the fact that to one degree or another it has itself become hostage to these institutions. To demand the progressive reform of the Brussels bureaucracy in the mid-2010s meant approximately the same thing as calling in 1848 for the reform of the Holy Alliance in the interests of democracy. This does not by any means signify that in abstract and theoretical terms such a possibility never existed. Politics, however, is determined not by abstract ideas but by practical possibilities, by the relationship of forces and by strategies that allow that relationship to be used for pursuing one’s goals or that permit it to be changed. In this sense, the struggle to bring about the democratic evolution of the EU had already been decisively and irretrievably lost by the mid-1990s. Meanwhile the leftists themselves, in the course of the period that followed, underwent a very substantial evolution, renouncing not only the practical struggle against neoliberal institutions, but also politics as the work of making practical changes to society. The underlying methodological basis of this ideological crisis was the adoption by a significant section of the Western left (and by its Russian imitators) of libertarian (that is, neoliberal) logic, at the same time as this logic was being rejected by the public at large. “There is no such thing as society”, Mrs Thatcher declared. Of course, the members of the left disputed this indignantly. But just as in the case of Thatcher’s aphorism concerning the non-existence of alternatives, the social methodology of a significant section of the left in the 1990s, and especially in the 2000s, proceeded from the very same logic, while not admitting this publicly. With only rare exceptions, society as a whole and, especially, any conception of the prospects for its integral development, ceased to be referred to even rhetorically, not to speak of its figuring in the programs and propaganda of left organisations. The idea of society as a totality of “multitudes”, argued in the fashionable books of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt,25 spread de facto even among those accustomed to treating this thesis with irony. The defence of minorities, the list of which lengthened constantly, occupied a central place in the agenda, ultimately driving out the concept of integral social development that had been the cornerstone of the “old” left in both its communist and social democratic variants. Meanwhile, the interests of society are not to be reduced to the sum of the interests of its members, and still less, of its minorities. This point, an understanding of which is absolutely fundamental to all the radical movements of classical politics, from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks, was now completely ignored. The concept of progress as development reflecting the general social interest was forgotten or quietly rejected. For Marx, bringing about social progress was the main task of

96 Europe versus the European Union the movement, and he did not reduce this even to the interests of the “progressive class”. To the contrary, one class or another is declared to be progressive precisely for the reason that at a given stage of history its interests coincide to the greatest degree with the interests of the development of society. It is possible to argue about the tasks of development. The problem, however, is not that the members of today’s left give insufficiently full or precise answers but that they are not prepared to pose the question. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the left had a reference-point of social progress, set in place as far back as the Enlightenment. At its basis lay the idea of social integration, of unity of the population (in this sense, equality is a means and not an end). It is necessary to acknowledge, honestly and openly: the attempt to divide up society as much as possible into specific groups, into minorities competing among themselves, to splinter the overall strategy of complex social transformation into a multitude of disconnected tasks and an “endless multitude of alternatives” means rejecting any practical possibility of escaping the bounds not just of capitalism but even of neoliberalism. This, meanwhile, is what Giannis Varoufakis understood when he called for developing a strategy for change that would not lead to confrontation with the ruling circles that were systematically blocking the transformations required. Neoliberalism, through splitting and fragmenting bourgeois society even more than the usual capitalist classes; through placing private, personal and group interest above the common tasks of development that flow from the nature of bourgeois society itself; and through denying solidarity even in the degree to which it was recognised by the classics of liberalism from Smith to Schumpeter, has turned itself into the extreme embodiment of an antisocial reaction capable of destroying any society, even a capitalist one. For this reason, the politics urged by the supporters of fashionable radical theories has proven bankrupt even in the capacity of moderate reformism. It has provided no answer to the main question – how to stop the degradation and decay of society, processes that have grown stronger as the crisis of neoliberalism has deepened. A strategy of conscious struggle for progress can be replaced either with inaction and helpless disorientation or with a transition to the side of reaction. The Syriza government passed successively through both stages. First, it proved unable to counterpose anything to neoliberalism; then, it began putting the neoliberal agenda into effect. The elemental destruction of society, a process born of the implementation of the neoliberal agenda, makes it impossible for European democracy to continue existing in the form it assumed following the victory over fascism in the Second World War. The long road through the institutions to which the ideologues of the “new left” summoned people in the late 1960s led nowhere since as events unfolded the institutions themselves changed radically, becoming dysfunctional, simulative and powerless, or transforming themselves into their opposites. Further, neoliberalism succeeded in dismantling precisely those institutions of the welfare state through which the “long road” of the left was being constructed.

Europe versus the European Union 97 The tragic paradox underlying the political processes of the early twenty-first century is that the crisis that has undermined the economic and social bases for reproducing the neoliberal model of capitalism has at the same time strengthened this model politically. This situation has become possible thanks to a combination of mutually related factors: the institutional consolidation of neoliberalism within the framework of the European Union has occurred against a background of the systematic degradation of the forces of the left that have refused to struggle against these institutions. This is the situation that has caused events to proceed in line with the most dramatic of possible scenarios, one in which inevitable changes must be accompanied by destruction and conflict. A comparison suggests itself between the crisis that unfolded in the European Union in late 2016 and the one that twenty-five years earlier led to the disintegration of the USSR. For a quarter of a century, the policies of the European Union have replicated the approach that was typical of the Soviet leadership under Leonid Brezhnev – to pursue a chosen line regardless of the contradictions it accumulated and to make up for increasing difficulties by expending ever-greater resources. Not surprisingly, this approach has not only failed to solve existing problems but has prepared the way for a crisis that sooner or later must break out in extremely destructive fashion. In a relative instant, a system that seemed indestructible has suddenly begun to collapse. The psychological turning-point is of fundamental importance. The point is not that the system earlier was particularly strong and then suddenly became weaker, but that people came to perceive it differently and hence also to act according to a new logic. This new logic of behaviour has in turn proved thoroughly disorganising to institutions completely unprepared for operating in such circumstances. So long as the Soviet Union remained intact, the maximum that the intrasystemic critics of the existing order were prepared to endorse consisted of appeals for moderate reforms which the bureaucracy then ignored or sabotaged. Even the most zealous nationalists in the Baltic republics only spoke publicly of expanding socio-economic independence within their boundaries. The ideas of dissidents, however attractive they may have been for various groups within society, remained beyond the bounds of serious discussion. Even the dissidents themselves were not merely unconvinced that they could succeed but on the whole did not strive for success through real social activism, limiting themselves to moral resistance to the system. Then, literally in the space of one or two years, the situation was not only transformed but turned into its direct opposite. The moderate variants of reform went untested or were merely announced without being implemented. Ideas that had been considered dissident and marginal were transformed into the mainstream, after which politicians and bureaucrats began changing their views on the run, setting completely new goals that had nothing in common with the past. On the psychological level, the coincidences were obvious. Initially, the borders of the possible had seemed very strictly drawn. Suddenly, however, it was discovered that these borders had existed merely in people’s consciousness (or more precisely, in the official ideology that was dominant in society). From the

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moment when the bankruptcy of the ideology became evident, the concept of the borders of the possible collapsed as well. No one knew precisely as yet where the new borders lay or what was objectively possible and what was not. The banal slogans and ready-made formulae through which the old ideology had reproduced itself had ceased to work. Everyone began testing the boundaries. A sense arose that everything was now possible. On the institutional level, the blow fell on the very structure in which maximum authority had been concentrated. Just as in the USSR the leading role of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had begun to be openly disputed, so too the control over the economies of the EU countries by the European Central Bank, the organ that within the system of neoliberal institutions had played the same role in essence as the Politburo within Soviet society, came under question. Other rules of political and social conduct also became subject to doubt, and, ultimately, this meant the increasing destruction of the socio-economic model that these institutions had supported. There is nothing surprising, for example, in the fact that in less than six months the elites of Central Asia switched from being consistent defenders of the Soviet Union into enthusiastic fighters for independence. They had simply recognised that the rules had changed, and acting now by the new rules, began seeking the maximum gains for themselves. Similarly, no one should be surprised that the blows against the EU are beginning to be struck by the ruling circles of the very countries on which Brussels could until recently count for unconditional loyalty. This is not treason but a realistic assessment of a changed situation. There are, of course, substantial differences between the disintegration of the USSR and the processes under way within the EU. However paradoxical it might seem, the policies of the European elite were, on the level of their content, far more authoritarian than the methods of the Soviet bureaucracy in the 1980s. A recognition of the growing crisis impelled the Soviet ruling stratum to attempt reforms and dialogue with society, something not to be observed in the EU. Even the British vote to leave the EU has not forced the elites on the continent to consider any serious change to the system, and still less to enter into open and serious dialogue with the system’s critics. It should be noted that for many years the ideological monopoly of the European elites was far more effective and total than that of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev. In the Soviet Union of those years, ideological formalism was combined with complete indifference to genuine public opinion, which no one even tried to control – citizens were allowed to think what they liked, provided that in public they said what was expected of them.26 In the EU, by contrast, the ideological control exercised within the framework of Western democracy through the substantial consensus of the main parties assumed the presence of a formal diversity of views but with the sum total of the conclusions uniform and binding upon all. Paradoxically, even sharp criticism of neoliberal capitalism was part of this ideological consensus, on the condition that no practical conclusions aimed against the EU institutions that embody this order should be drawn. The result of these differences was that the EU moved to a situation of institutional crisis while bypassing the phase of perestroika experienced by the USSR

Europe versus the European Union 99 under Mikhail Gorbachev. The psychological effects of the transition were thus even more harsh and traumatic. Everything began to collapse “immediately” rather than “rapidly”, leaving people in total consternation. Over two decades, a prominent and influential minority had become established in the EU, consisting of people who profited from the clientelistic programs of the Brussels bureaucracy. Resources from the real sector of the economy were redistributed to the advantage of various groups and sectors that often finished up incapable of existing without constant infusions of support from the EU bureaucrats. A multitude of people and organisations became dependent on receiving a share of the profits of financial capital in the form of participation in the creative economy, in non-government organisations, in regional projects and so forth. This minority, to a significant degree parasitic, lived with the comforting assurance that it was not simply the majority but the core and foundation of society, while people holding other views were a marginal minority that could be ignored. Suddenly there was an awakening, revealing a stern reality that had nothing in common with the exquisite dreams. The sharpness and harshness of this awakening predetermined the reaction: instead of attempts to find a solution, we witnessed panic and attempts to defend established positions against an aggressive majority to which all conceivable vices were attributed. In emotional terms, the defence of personal privileges came to be perceived as an attempt to preserve progressive culture against an onslaught of barbarism. The only problem was that in this case, the “barbarism” equated to democracy. In order to preserve the system, it would be necessary to propose reforms that forestalled the development of the crisis and that were more radical than the demands advanced by at least a proportion of the discontented. The list of such measures might include the dissolving of the European Central Bank; the replacing of the single currency, the euro, with several regional currencies interlinked with one another; a sharp curtailing of the powers of the European Commission; a review of the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties; a change in the rules of the Schengen zone and so forth. In its totality, this would amount to returning sovereign rights to democratically elected national governments while retaining those structures and institutions of a united Europe that did not contradict democratic principles. The attempts by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 and 1991 to save the USSR were based precisely on this approach. Unfortunately, they came at least three years too late. The leaders of the EU in 2016 and 2017, however, proved incapable even of attempting such a course. It was not simply that no one advanced a program of reform; no one even proposed discussing such a move on a general European level. Another fundamental difference with the expiry of the Soviet Union was that in the years from 1989 to 1991, when the USSR was collapsing, an ideological alternative to the old order existed in the form of liberal capitalism. This alternative revealed itself in all its glory over the quarter-century that followed. But irrespective of how dramatic the social consequences of the neoliberal transformations proved to be, the presence of a clear ideological perspective made it possible to bring a certain order to the process of change. In 2014, the West was in a position to devise a reformist alternative to the policies and institutions of the EU. A certain number of left politicians were prepared

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to suggest such a solution, which would make it possible to avoid a more dramatic course of events. The political scientist Ruslan Kostyuk, in characterising the positions espoused by left critics of the EU, stressed that they called for “a qualitatively different European integration”, going on to note: “Whether or not this is possible, given the present-day logic of neoliberalism, is another matter”.27 In politics, however, the practical possibility of one or another solution is not a secondary question to be pondered at leisure, but the principal topic, the essence and content. Advancing a slogan that is not backed up by a practical mechanism for its implementation is at best to lie to oneself and to the people, and at worst to employ one’s eloquence to conceal policies that have a quite different and often directly counterposed meaning. It is difficult to say whether there is more of naïveté or of cynicism in evidence here, but the actual politics of the leaders of the European left have combined both of these qualities. The sole, unique chance at least to pose the question of reforming the EU came with the advent of Syriza to power in Greece. After this breakthrough, others might logically have been expected to follow. But the chance of putting into practice a reformist alternative was squandered by the left itself, first through the shameful capitulation of Syriza and then through the unprincipled support that other radical parties showed for this capitulation. What occurred was the moral collapse of the European left in the form it had assumed by the early twenty-first century. For Europe, the summer of 2014 became a tragic turning-point whose significance no one wanted to acknowledge. All that now remained was the path of spontaneous institutional collapse and of political turmoil, while the only critics of an objectively outmoded order who inspired any belief were the extreme right. In essence, the prospect had emerged of an all-European civil war. At first, fortunately, this incipient conflict proved to be a cold war, though the roar of explosions in the Donbass testified to the fact that it was quite capable of turning hot, at least in particular localities. Following the collapse of Syriza and the splitting of Ukraine, the refounding of the left movement on new ideological and organisational bases became a question of life or death, not only for the left itself but also for societies in the grip of crisis.28 In the new conditions, different people, different organisations and different politics were required. It was time to put aside the fashionable books of Foucault, Negri and Žižek in order to test in practice how well we had assimilated the lessons of Lenin, Keynes and Machiavelli.

Notes 1 Welt Trends, Mar. 2016, no. 113, p. 44. 2 Ibid., p. 43. 3 See: Shveytsarskaya delovaya, 28 Jan. 2015. http://business-swiss.ch/2015/01/naskolko-velik-suverenny-j-dolg-gretsii-nachalo-2015-goda/. 4 Technically, it would have been quite possible to find a solution that allowed Greeks to preserve their euro savings while also guaranteeing the country the right to return to the Eurozone. But a successful resolution of the crisis was impossible without ending the exploitation of Greece by Franco-German financial capital. Meanwhile, unless the Greek

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government displayed an iron will, there would be no grounds for hoping that the European Union would sacrifice the interests of the banks. The Guardian, 15 Feb. 2015. Nueva Sociedad, Jan.–Feb. 2016, no. 261, p. 100. Le Monde, 22 Sept. 2015. Libération, 22 Sept. 2015. Le Monde, 22 Sept. 2015. New Politics, Summer 2016, no. 61 (vol. XVI, no. 1), p. 55. Die Welt, 24 Oct. 2018. The Guardian, 22 June 2016. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/22/brexitproperty-right-left-eu-expert. International Socialism, Summer 2016, no. 151, p. 41. Socialist Review, Mar. 2016, no. 411, p. 5. Socialist Review, July/Aug. 2016, no. 415, p. 4. Financial Times, 6 Oct. 2016. The Telegraph, 5 Oct. 2016. The Guardian, 22 June 2016. International Socialism, Autumn 2016, no. 152, p. 26. Quoted in: International Socialism, Autumn 2016, no. 152, p. 16. Ibid. A. Wahl, Brexit and the Crisis of the Left. www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/1315.php# continue. Asbjørn Wahl is Director of the broad Campaign for the Welfare State in Norway. The Guardian, 22 June 2016. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/22/brexitproperty-right-left-eu-expert. #Lexit statement on the vote to leave the European Union, 24 June 2016. www. leftleave.org/lexit-statement-on-the-vote-to-leave-the-european-union/. See: M. Hardt and A. Negri, Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. See also: “Boris Kagarlitskiy vs. Oleg Kil’dyushov: Maykl Khardt, Antonio Negri. Imperiya”. Kriticheskaya massa, 2004, no. 3. Electronic version: http://magazines. russ.ru/km/2004/3/bo39.html. A more detailed account of the functioning of ideology in the later years of the USSR may be found in: A. Yurchak, Eto bylo navsegda, poka ne konchilos’. Poslednee sovetskoe pokolenie [That was forever, until it ended. The last Soviet generation]. Moscow: NLO, 2016. R. Kostyuk. “Evropeyskie levye: sozdavat’ al’yansy s novym predsedatelem” [European leftists: Forging alliances with a new chairperson]. Rabkor, 31 Dec. 2016. http:// rabkor.ru/columns/left/2016/12/31/the-european-left/. As a sign of the incipient process of reconfiguration of the left movement, we may take the Delphi Conference that took place during the very days when the government in Athens was choosing, in panicked fashion, between various scenarios for capitulation. The conference organisers managed not only to recognise the link between the crises in Russia and Greece but also to pose the question of the need to fight to save Europe from the EU. In this respect we might recall the Zimmerwald conference, which was not only a response by left-wing socialists to the imperialist war but also an attempt to decide on new political reference-points following the collapse of the Second International. The socialists who gathered in Zimmerwald had behind them neither mass organisations nor a political apparatus nor resources, but after two or three years, the situation changed radically in their favour. Zimmerwald, however, was important not just in itself, as a successful conference, but because it was followed by the Russian events of 1917, which opened the way for the practical realisation of the ideas and principles that the participants in the conference had been attempting to grasp.

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In the writings of political analysts on events in Western Europe and the US, the term “populism” began appearing with increasing frequency during the decade of the 2010s. The word was used to denote virtually all new movements, whether left or right, that had risen swiftly to the surface of public life. Left populism, already well known in Latin America, began appearing first on the pages of newspapers in Southern Europe, then in Britain and the US, before gradually penetrating Eastern European countries. In the US and Britain, the currents concerned were represented by such political leaders as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. In Spain and Greece, the new Podemos and Syriza parties began exerting pressure on the traditional left organisations, and in France the popular movement Nuit Debout (“Up all Night”) arose and began campaigning against reforms to labour legislation. On the right flank as well, we see movements that have received the label of populist; it is enough to recall the National Front in France, the Northern League in Italy, and in Finland, the Finns Party. Still further to the right are organisations that force one to speak seriously of a rebirth of fascism. Meanwhile, the Italian “Five Stars” movement is hard to allocate to any wing of European politics. It is curious that time and again, we find movements emerging on both right and left that seem the shadows or mirror images of one another. In the US, Donald Trump has emerged as the antithesis of Bernie Sanders. In Spain, the shadow of Podemos has been the Citizens Movement. While right populism has been consistently hostile to political correctness, multiculturalism, the cult of minorities and so forth, left populism has at a minimum been indifferent to these phenomena. More precisely, left populism has been successful to the degree to which it has addressed traditional social interests and needs but has lost ground whenever it has given way to the temptation to come out with politically correct discourse. Regardless of their ideological differences, populist parties and groups not only began growing rapidly during the 2010s but – and this is especially important – grew to a significant degree on identical social soil.

The return of mass politics Describing the economic crisis that broke out in Europe in 2008, the Russian political scientist Ruslan Kostyuk observed:

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Millions of jobs were lost, while thousands of industrial enterprises and agricultural producers went out of business. Many people suffered from property speculation, losing their houses or apartments, or were stripped of their savings. In the majority of EU countries, the numbers of people who were dissatisfied with their lives came clearly to exceed the figures for those who were content with the socio-economic conditions. In recent years average wages in most countries of the EU have not increased. In most cases the governments in power, whether of the right or centreleft, responded to the crisis phenomena by continuing to implement austerity policies, cutting social spending, liberalising labour markets, and privatising public enterprises and social services. Ordinary citizens and voters were being troubled by other challenges as well. Problems with social security were being perceived as directly connected with mass immigration to the EU by people from poor developing countries, a phenomenon viewed by great numbers of inhabitants of the Old World as a direct threat to their jobs and accustomed way of life. Should we be surprised that in so difficult a socio-economic situation traditional political forces have begun rapidly losing their popularity and influence? Today, no-one speaks any longer of Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy or Spain retaining a de facto two-party (or two-pole) political system. The hegemony of the old “elite” players (right-centrists and social democrats) has begun to be seriously threatened by people whom public figures from the European political elite describe contemptuously (though in many ways justifiably) as populists.1 But what does the term “populism”, used so frequently in the press but left unexplained, actually mean? Journalists write of populist leaders, focusing mainly on their personal qualities, oratorical abilities or knowledge of how to work with a mass audience. These characteristics, however, are not the essence of populism. It would be easy to accuse the journalists and political scientists of superficiality and of trying to reduce complex and many-sided phenomena to a simplistic formula. But the point is that we are actually observing a new global trend that requires investigation and analysis. The organisational and political instability that is typical of populist movements, along with the dependence on the personality of the leader or on a leading group, makes each case specific in character and unique in its own way. But this does not by any means make it impossible to draw general conclusions concerning the nature and prospects of such movements. For liberal commentators, populism is anything they dislike but that for some reason is liked by the population. “While lacking a common ideology, populists throughout the world nevertheless resemble one another. Above all, they are politicians who describe themselves as opponents of elites that are remote from the people”, the Moscow newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta explains to its readers. Populists “offer absurdly simplified solutions to social and economic problems, but this does not usually scare off their supporters – populists appeal to feelings of patriotism and nationalism, to the emotions of rage, resentment and pride, but not

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to reason”. They have no respect for institutions. They see it as “important to find some enemy, against whom voters can be united”.2 Since neoliberal reforms are unpopular; calls for raising wages or creating new jobs evoke a more positive response from citizens than the actions of governments that cut spending on education and health care, shut down public transport or abolish child support allowances. According to the logic of liberal experts, however, criticism of such policies and calls for changing them are wilful absurdities, especially if accompanied by the demand to return to the people the right to make socially important decisions. This last idea directly contradicts the dominant ideology, according to which only members of the liberal elite possess full, definitive and unerring knowledge; governments are compelled to implement unpopular measures, but measures that enjoy the support of the majority of people and are aimed at improving their lives are deliberately harmful. The fact that policies implemented by the liberal elites regularly fail in practice cannot serve as an argument since, within the framework of this logic, attempts to rely on practical experience, or to refer to facts that are obvious to the public on the basis of their own experience, amount to “populism”. And populism, we are told, offers only “simplistic” solutions. Of course, facts that are well known and obvious to the masses do not always, by any means, provide definitive proof. In the history of science, common sense has been disgraced more than once, and the science of economics is no exception here. But where society is concerned, we cannot have any experimental data apart from those provided by the collective experience of the people. In other words, if various socio-economic strategies when applied again and again by numerous governments and parties invariably bring the masses only inconvenience and disappointment, that means there is something wrong with the strategies. The authors of the strategies, who portray themselves as neutral experts and technocrats, are in fact ideologues of a particular class or group whose interests are radically opposed to the needs and interests of the majority. The point of the ideology in this case is to present measures that correspond to the interests of an insignificant minority (and often, not even to the interests of the ruling class as a whole) as being absolutely unavoidable, technologically neutral and indispensable to a society that stubbornly refuses to understand its own good fortune. By contrast, those who appeal openly to the social needs of the masses and propose changes that would disturb the dominance of the elite are acting as irresponsible populists. Two things here are left unmentioned. On the one hand, the fact is ignored that populist measures have often, though not always, had beneficial effects (increased market demand, stimulus to the economy, rises in economic growth rates) that have made them especially attractive against a background of the systematic failure of the policies defended by the neoliberal experts. The global crisis that began in 2008 was so deep and prolonged because all of the world’s main countries joined in enacting “unpopular but essential reforms” that were supposed to bring about a dramatic acceleration in world economic growth but that in practice led to a further slowdown. The liberal ideologues, on the other hand, while condemning

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the population for being reluctant to approve measures that reduced its living standards and quality of life, forget to mention the real beneficiaries of these measures – financial capital and the transnational corporations, among whose agents all these measures enjoy unfailing popularity. The point of departure for liberal economists is that there exists a certain set of decisions that are always and everywhere correct, irrespective of whose interests they serve and even without regard for the practical results that flow from their application. Paradoxically, this contradicts the political theory of these same liberal thinkers, who argue that freedom and democracy have their basis in a diversity of competing interests. This contradiction is softened to a degree by the fact that for the most part, liberal authors are conscious only of private and personal interests, ignoring the interests of social groups. Does it, however, follow from this that populism is a myth constructed by liberal publicists? By no means. It is simply that the real content and meaning of populism, and what its critics say about it, have very little in common. If this phenomenon is to be understood, the need is not to unmask and mock it but to examine the causes and social nature of what is occurring. Summarising the demands of populist movements in Western Europe, Ruslan Kostyuk distinguishes a number of shared ideas and trends that make it possible to combine all these forces into a general category. First and foremost, there is anti-elitism, a pronounced dislike felt by populists for the political systems that exist in their countries and for the elites that embody these systems. The parties belonging to this current frequently call for support to be given to “direct democracy”. Often taking a sceptical attitude to parliamentarism, they devote great attention to “direct forms of democracy”, for example, plebiscites and referenda. There is, however, a curious detail: while committed democrats in their protestations, populist formations as a rule feature strictly personalist structures in their intra-party life, with their leaders exercising very extensive powers. The socio-economic proposals and initiatives of the “europopulists” appear quite schematic and contradictory. It is true that slogans of social justice and solidarity play a considerable role in the discourse of these people. But to cite a number of examples, Northern European populists and the Austrian and French ultra-right call openly for reducing welfare spending and raising the pension age. The crisis being suffered by modern welfare states, however, means that these slogans find support among a significant section of the population. Nevertheless, the factors that score most points for today’s populists, in the most diverse parts of Europe, are their intense dislike for the ideas on immigration that hold sway in the EU, and their demands, that win support among voters in various layers of the population, for strengthening national security policy. Plus, of course, their dislike of European integration in the form in which it is occurring at present.3

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A meaningful characterisation of populism can be provided only through analysing its social nature. The ideological positions embraced by populist forces may be diffuse and contradictory and may also differ sharply depending on the immediate political environment. But in themselves, the instability, lack of definition and syncretic character of the ideology of such movements may be an important sign indicating the particular nature of their origins and mass base. Populism emerges where clear-cut divisions between classes are broken down, where institutions are weakened, society is atomised and social solidarity is not ensured by everyday practice. The traditional ideologies of class solidarity, proclaimed by social democrats since the mid-nineteenth century, rested on a definite mode of organisation of production and society, but simultaneously, on the conscious work of thousands of activists and organisers who, to use Marx’s expression, transformed the “class in itself” into the “class for itself”. Class unity was maintained through a mass of horizontal ties that in the course of time were consolidated, institutionalised and regulated and that took on a symbolic significance even while they did not cease to operate in practical fashion to the benefit of the people who were included within this system of bonds. Unfortunately, the situation that characterised the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries has vanished into the past. Populism as a political movement arises when the class organisation and class consciousness of working people are either still at the stage of formation or when they are already experiencing crisis and decay. It was for this reason that the return of populism was a general phenomenon during the years after the First World War and during the Great Depression. An element within it was the rise of right-wing populism, out of which German Nazism was ultimately to emerge. Also apparent was left populism, as represented by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the US. To understand present-day populism, it is essential to recall the history of General Juan Domingo Perón and the movement of his supporters, which radically altered the traditional political order in Argentina. The reforms implemented in the country during his presidency laid the basis for a welfare state and dramatically improved the position of the working class, in essence becoming a Latin American analogue of Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Perón administration rested on the support of the trade unions and of mass popular movements. Ideologically, however, Perón was no leftist and to a significant degree opposed the left. He preached nationalism and corporatist class collaboration, even creating a basis for suspicions that he was sympathetic to fascism. Peronism originally represented a contradictory mix of right- and left-wing tendencies, a coalition of heterogeneous forces with a stake in the country’s independent economic development. It is for this reason that the figure of the leader has enormous significance for populist movements ‒ not because the leader unites people through his or her charismatic personality but because such politicians are capable of finding solutions and capable of preserving the unity of the socially and culturally heterogeneous mass of their supporters. At a certain stage, such movements must inevitably disintegrate into their right and left components, or evolve in one or the other direction, but this occurs only

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after they have carried out their minimum program, aimed at overcoming the crisis that has given rise to them. While Perón was still alive, the movement he headed repeatedly changed its course, inclining now to the right and now to the left, while becoming differentiated into contrary tendencies. After his death, Peronism split not just into different tendencies but into opposing ones. The movement gave birth both to the neoliberal administration of Carlos Saúl Menem and to two leftreformist administrations – those of Néstor Carlos Kirchner and of Cristina Elisabet Fernández de Kirchner.

The experience of Latin America During the 1990s Latin America became the arena for extensive liberal experiments in which total privatisation of all possible enterprises and resources was accompanied by a rapid increase in inequality, while the formation of a local middle class occurred against a background of the impoverishment of the rest of the population. The response by society to these changes was general protest. In the first years of the twenty-first century, the attention of the left throughout the world became fixed on events in Latin America where, in essence, a general continental uprising against neoliberalism took place. Through their practice, the mass movements of the poor that became the motive force of this revolt confirmed the theses, fashionable in the West, concerning the superiority of spontaneity over centralisation and demonstrated the possibility of direct participation by the masses in politics while also restoring the values of class solidarity since they had not been infected with the cultural trends of political correctness and multiculturalism that were dominant in Europe and the US. This did not mean that the Latin American left ignored the interests of women and ethnic minorities or that it was “homophobic”. To the contrary, the interests of minorities did not in this case act as an absolute value, instead being incorporated into the general context of class solidarity and of the democracy of the majority. It was for this reason that the revolutionary processes in Bolivia and Venezuela, whose ideology was quite alien to European multiculturalism, brought about a real improvement in the social situation of the non-white majority of the population in those countries. Also contrary to the appeals, fashionable in the West during the first years of the new century, to “change the world without trying to take power”, the Latin American movements set up their own political organisations, oriented precisely towards waging a struggle for power. In Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, forces were victorious that characterised their projects as revolutionary. Completing the picture was the success of the Party of Workers in Brazil. Although this party, after coming to power, evolved away from Marxism towards moderate social democratic positions, its leaders constantly stressed, if only verbally, their solidarity with the more radical leftists who held the reins of government in neighbouring countries. In Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, left-wing presidents, who promised more moderate reforms, were elected. Shifts to the left also occurred in Peru and Paraguay, though in the latter case the left-wing administration was quickly removed from power. By the mid-2000s, however, the only reliable

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bastion of conservatism in South America remained Colombia, where a civil war was continuing. The main result of these changes was the introduction of redistributive policies that brought about a lessening of inequality. Significant sections of the population managed to raise themselves out of extreme or relative poverty. This process was also very extensive in the geographical sense, and in its initial period reinforced mass support for the left-wing governments. By the end of the decade, however, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the new left governments in South America faced major difficulties. Despite the differences in rhetoric, the distance between the radical and moderate governments proved not to be so great as it appeared. It was determined more by the level of development of the countries where changes were under way than by the ideologies of the politicians. Even in Venezuela, where the theme of revolution held a central place in government rhetoric, it was quickly discovered that once the populists had come to power, they would not pose more ambitious goals for themselves. The economic restructuring carried out by the left-wing governments in Latin America turned out to be minimal, with the main stress placed on redistributing resources in favour of the poorer layers of the population. Despite rhetorical declarations about transforming society and creating “Bolivarian socialism”, the changes to the social order were in practice insignificant. The leadership of the republic had no wish to radically alter economic policy, to establish industry or to invest funds in developing scientific and technological research. The construction of housing on a mass scale was not even attempted. Another specific characteristic of Latin American left populism was its readiness to consistently observe the rules of the democratic process and to preserve the corresponding institutions on the state level while at the same time developing authoritarian decision-making processes within its own coalitions or parties. Left-wing governments in Latin America invariably respected fundamental democratic principles – freedom of expression and of the press, political pluralism and the rules of free elections. In one place after another, opposition parties regularly prevailed at the polling booths, winning referendums and forming regional administrations, including in capital cities. The governments did not try to prevent this. Far less tolerance was shown by the populist leaders for dissidence among the ranks of their supporters. Paradoxically, and unlike the case with left-wing regimes in the past, authoritarian methods this time were directed mostly against the governments’ own activists and allies. In other words, the leaders used harsh, dictatorial methods to control their own political camp while providing complete freedom of action to their opponents. In the short term such an approach may even yield certain advantages since the political advantage always lies in the hands of the popular leader. The oppositionists, with their ties to the traditional representative institutions, constantly lag behind, wasting time on procedural questions while lacking grounds for accusing the authorities of denying civil rights and freedoms, which are scrupulously observed. But the longer a populist party stays in power, the more noticeable the drawbacks of this model become, especially since the question at issue is the

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concentration of power in the hands of one or a few key leaders. The power of a charismatic leader is completely unlike, for example, the power of the Soviet rulers, who even during the Stalin era relied on a developed system of political and social institutions that presupposed the participation of a significant number of people in making decisions at various levels. The German researcher, Günter Maihold, notes that the rule of all the leftwing leaders in Latin America in the 2000s was marked by the personalisation of power: The personal influence (Hinsicht) of all the left presidents who succeeded in mobilising the masses in this fashion had to be secured through constitutional amendments that allowed them to be elected again and again, so that by maintaining their personal power they could ensure the continuation of their political project.4 Left-wing populism in Latin America retained its power through a surprising combination of the personal power regime of the presidents, resting on loyal and disciplined mass organisations, with liberal democratic institutions that continued to function, effectively defending the interests of the opposition. This political configuration gradually alienated the masses from the decision-making process and weakened lower-class backing for the changes. At the same time, it allowed regime figures to preserve the illusion of popular support, a support that was ensured through their administrative control over their supporters. Popular initiative died out. The real leaders at the local level were replaced by officials who were diligent and loyal but did not enjoy authority. The quality of the political cadres declined rapidly, and the vital strength of the movements that had arisen out of the Latin American “left turn” of the early 2000s gradually dwindled to nothing. In such circumstances the intellectual level of the leadership team, from which independent, critical-minded people had been excluded, inevitably declined. At the lower levels as at the top, intellectuals and activists were replaced by functionaries and bureaucrats. The spontaneous democracy and energy of the mass social movements were in any case doomed to expire with the passing of time. Phenomena of this kind have a sort of life cycle that inevitably involves periodic rises and declines. These inevitable fluctuations in movement life cycles, however, can and must be counteracted through the formation of democratic organisations, through the training of capable, independent-minded middle-level cadres and through the emergence of new leaders reliant on the corresponding institutions. The authoritarian-populist model hindered this substitution of institutional practice for the “movement impulse”. Consequently, it not only failed to make up for the natural and inevitable crisis of the movement but exacerbated it. Authoritarianism and personalist leadership are by no means insurmountable obstacles to democratisation. In movements that have taken shape from the beginning around particular leaders, or that have arisen under the conditions of an authoritarian political culture, democratic processes and mechanisms may at

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times have to be set going “in manual mode”.5 Significantly, the leaders of the Latin American left in the 2000s were by no means strangers to democratic principles. But these principles were interpreted solely on the level of respect for the formal rights and freedoms of citizens as guaranteed by liberal constitutions. In other words, democracy was perceived as a set of juridical norms and procedures and not as the process of drawing the people into participating in the tasks of administration. The United Socialist Party founded in Venezuela by Hugo Chávez turned out to be a clumsy bureaucratic structure with only weak ties to the working class and, moreover, completely dependent on initiatives from the leadership. Its relations with the labour movement, which had initially supported Chávez, became increasingly difficult. After replacing the old corrupt trade unions with new ones infused with class consciousness, the Bolivarian leadership proved quite unprepared for the prospect that these structures would set out to advance their own demands and put forward their own vision of the country’s further development. The Venezuelan bureaucracy systematically resisted all attempts at serious changes. This was perfectly understandable; an acceleration of socio-economic development would have led to the emergence in society of new needs and interests and, within the ruling bloc, of new cadres and structures that could have laid claim to their share of power. It was far simpler to make regular concessions to the residents of poor urban districts in order to buy their loyalty. The trouble was that the moods of these popular masses, who to a significant degree were declassed, could easily change. After the flow of oil revenues diminished, the scale of the redistribution declined and the situation deteriorated, with the majority of the Venezuelan poor turning away from the government. The significance of Venezuela’s oil revenues for Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian revolution” is well known. In the words of the German researcher, Stefan Peters, oil for the revolution was simultaneously “a condition of success and an Achilles’ heel”.6 The redistribution of the proceeds of resource extraction was also of central importance in Bolivia and Ecuador. In Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, the governments tried to stimulate the growth of industry while at the same time being careful to ensure that more funds were allocated to social programs and the development of infrastructure. Nothing revolutionary occurred in the area of economic development, and the left-wing administrations did not even seek to consistently apply the precepts of J.M. Keynes on the socialisation of investment and the systematic stimulation of demand. Subsequent events revealed first the social and then also the political limitations of moderate reformism. Since the “horizon” of the reforms was extremely low, and the declared program, regardless of the rhetoric employed, amounted only to an aggregate of not-especially-radical changes that did not alter the structure of society, the program before long was substantially exhausted. From the moment when the reforms that had initially been announced were implemented, the left-wing governments lost their perspectives and were transformed into ordinary bureaucratic machines engaged in administering (and not even reforming) bourgeois society. The basis for their presence in power became not so much the transformation of social and economic structures as the preservation and defence

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of what had been achieved. In other words, their political motivations had been transformed from radical-reformist to conservative. The lack of structural reforms brought about a situation in society in which the new motivations and collective interests that might have formed the basis for a new cycle of development failed to arise. The organisation of life and the logic of social reproduction remained as they had been, and the relationship between the sectors of the economy did not change. The earlier way of life, and the earlier bonds and relationships, were all preserved; it was simply that the gap between rich and poor was smaller, and in some cases, that the population was better educated. Of course, this represented serious progress compared to what had existed in the countries concerned before the left came to power, but it did not presuppose a qualitative break with the previous order or the rise of a new logic and stimuli for development. Not only were the members of the left unable to transcend the bounds of capitalism, but they also proved incapable of reforming the system within their local settings. The consequences of these failures appeared in full measure during 2015 and 2016, when an economic crisis sharply reduced the quantities of resources available for welfare redistribution, and all the structural weaknesses of the “left model” emerged at once. But despite these difficulties, the main problem as before was not economic but political. In itself, the crisis did not yet by any means signify the collapse of the left project, especially since the right-wing opposition nowhere offered any new ideas or approaches and at times had no unifying political project whatsoever. The weakness of the new governments appeared in their inability to adapt to the new conditions, to reformulate their project and to suggest new, more radical solutions that corresponded to the depth and acuteness of the looming crisis – in other words, to transcend the framework of the redistributive model. This political weakness was predetermined not so much by the limitations of the initial project as by the authoritarian character of the internal political practice demonstrated by the left in power. One can only agree with Günter Maihold, who stated: “Those who were to blame for the defeat of the left were not its enemies, but the members of the left itself”.7 A pointer to the crisis that Chávez’s populist politics encountered was his loss in the 2007 referendum on changing the constitution. The problem was not only that the people refused their leader the right to be re-elected for a further presidential term (Chávez later secured this right) but also that the very ploy of seeking to review the constitution contradicted the entire previous logic of Chávez’s actions and declarations. The Bolivarian constitution had been adopted earlier on his own initiative, had been proclaimed by him to be the quintessential ideology of the Venezuelan revolution and consistently affirmed the democratic norms thanks to which the people had been able to participate in governing the country. To declare publicly that after only a few years, it was necessary to introduce substantial amendments to this constitution meant to recognise that something was not right with the revolutionary process in Venezuela. Chávez’s policy of redistribution, which involved using the oil revenues to ensure improved living standards and social opportunities for the poorest section

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of the population, did not fail because oil prices declined. This fall simply revealed its strategic bankruptcy. The crisis of left populism that had begun under Chávez, however, was not to be compared with the catastrophe that broke out after Nicolás Maduro came to power. The death of the popular and charismatic Chávez and his replacement by the inexpressive and incompetent Maduro guaranteed that the system of rule would be doomed to collapse. It would be hard to imagine a less fortunate choice as the leader of the Bolivarian revolution. Meanwhile, the question of who would head the country in the future had been decided personally by the dying Chávez, not only without any intra-party discussion or voting but even without taking account of the views of his associates. All the weak elements of populism were exacerbated, while its positive potential was reduced to a minimum. The sociologist Nelly Arenas characterised the politics of the Venezuelan government after the death of Hugo Chávez as “populism without charisma”.8 Maduro had stood out among the other Chavistas only for having never voiced objections to the leader; he was “a passive agent of the will of the president”, who “never spoke, only listened”.9 The reaction from activists to Chávez’s decision to name Maduro as his successor was described by Arenas as “a mixture of confusion, discontent and unconditional loyalty to the leader”.10 The elevation of such a figure to post of president testified to the fact that Chávez’s personnel policy, constructed on a basis of strict subordination and unquestioning submission to the chief, had ended in disaster. Not surprisingly, Maduro’s time as president was marked by defeats on all fronts. Trying to back up his authority with constant references to the dead Chávez, Maduro simply worsened the problem since, by reminding society of his predecessor, he prompted comparisons that were clearly not to his advantage. As the political crisis deepened, Maduro’s helplessness and incompetence increasingly posed a threat both to the Bolivarian project, which was still popular among important numbers of the Venezuelan population, and also to those of the country’s political institutions that had been established under the previous president. Colonel Chávez had been inclined to observe the constitution just as a military officer observes regulations. Maduro, who had begun his working life as a bus driver, behaved like a chauffeur with no particular regard for the traffic rules. The Supreme Court, which had been filled with his supporters, blocked a decision of parliament, and the holding of a referendum on whether to dismiss the president was postponed to the point where it could not have legal force since the two-year time-frame during which, according to the constitution, the people could replace the leader by way of a plebiscite had expired. In clinging to power, Maduro not only deprived the opposition of legal means for a struggle, thus provoking violent conflict, but also demoralised the Bolivarian movement. The main reason for the defeats that the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela had begun to suffer, however, was not Maduro’s personality or even the decline in the oil revenues but the lack of the ability and desire to establish new institutions that, as the process of change developed, would be able to replace the charismatic will of the leader with an organised decision-making process and with effective representation of mass interests.

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Against the background of the growing crisis of the Bolivarian project in Venezuela, left populism was also in decline in other countries of Latin America. The Party of Workers lost power in Brazil, and the left was defeated in elections in Argentina. The authorities in Bolivia and Ecuador encountered serious problems. In the latter case, however, the policies of institutionalising the revolution brought success. Following the departure from power of President Rafael Correa, his follower, Lenín Moreno, won office in free elections.

The Corbyn phenomenon The election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the British Labour Party was the main, if not the only, success of which the Western European left was able to boast in the mid-2010s. The rise of the “Corbyn phenomenon” had not been expected either by Corbyn himself and all who knew him or by numerous journalists and analysts, both on the continent and in Great Britain itself. A few weeks before his election as leader of the parliamentary opposition, the modest backbencher had not drawn much attention to himself. More accurately, he was known as one of the few people in British politics who were uninterested in money or in their careers, and as a result, he had remained in the shade since first being elected to parliament in the early 1980s. Of all the MPs in Westminster, he cost the British taxpayer the least since he spent public money very sparingly and did not make use of privileges. Nevertheless, he renewed his mandate again and again, simply because his constituents knew for a fact that Corbyn would stand up for their interests and occupy himself with solving their minor problems, using his status and influence to this end. Corbyn’s strong position in his constituency gave him a degree of independence from the party apparatus and the press, and allowed him to win elections without spending a great deal of money. This independence of the leadership little by little made him the best-known dissident within the parliamentary party, if not the only one. This was despite the fact that Corbyn did not preach anything heretical; he simply remained faithful to the principles of social democracy at a time when all of the high-placed politicians had betrayed them, transforming themselves into neoliberals. Neither his program not his activity transgressed the bounds of what in the 1970s and 1980s would have been considered a normal social democratic agenda – a left-wing social democratic agenda rather than a right-wing one, of course, but no more than that. The charge of extreme radicalism brought constantly against Corbyn by the British press speaks more tellingly of how far the “axis” of European and British politics had shifted to the right than of the views of the parliamentarian himself and his supporters. While the Labour Party remained silent about the war in Iraq, or supported it, Corbyn delivered speeches at anti-war demonstrations. He did not exult over the feats of American special forces troops in Afghanistan. In 2014 he told his listeners about the arson attack on the House of Trade Unions in Odessa, while the British press either maintained its silence or repeated the version from the Kyiv propagandists about people who had burned themselves to death. He spoke about

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the shelling of the Donbass at a time when people were supposedly surviving thanks only to the Charlie-Hebdo journalists who had been killed by terrorists in Paris. All this allowed the press to brand him as a “pro-Russian politician”, though ultimately, Corbyn’s motivations did not have to do with Russia but with the responsibility of the West for the growing chaos in the world. Corbyn time and again outraged the official leaders of public opinion and was proven correct. Both when he spoke of the crisis of financial capitalism, that could not be overcome through austerity measures, and when he predicted that privatisation of the railways would not only make them less efficient but also more expensive. In the British parliament, he gradually acquired the reputation of an interesting interlocutor, with whom one was not allowed to agree, but who had to be listened to. This, too, helped predetermine an unexpected turnabout in his political career. In 2015, after the Labourites had suffered their latest defeat at the hands of the Conservatives led by David Cameron (though everyone had predicted inevitable defeat for the Tory party on the basis of appalling poll figures), it became clear that changes in the party were inevitable. In line with British traditions, Labour leader Ed Miliband resigned after losing the elections. But to the party’s activists and supporters, it was clear that the responsibility for another failure lay not with Miliband but with the entire Labour hierarchy that cleaved stubbornly to a political strategy that time after time had led to defeat. The claimants to the post of Labour leader included the usual array of representatives of the party elite – anonymous functionaries who differed little from one another or from their Conservative opponents. The election threatened to become a deadly dull and openly pointless spectacle. Many of Corbyn’s fellow Labour parliamentarians thus supported his candidacy since it seemed likely to inject some life into a dreary process. No one imagined – including, it seems, Corbyn himself – that he was capable not only of enlivening intra-party discussions but also of laying claim to victory. He had neither influential supporters, nor money, nor even the backing of sympathetic publications that might establish and promote his image. But once his name was on the list, he set about campaigning for the leadership with the conscientiousness that was characteristic of him. He began travelling about the cities of the United Kingdom, delivering speeches and discussing the country’s position. These meetings began attracting crowds numbered in the thousands. Then, many thousands of people began joining the Labour Party in order to take part in the election. The procedure through which Labour Party leaders are elected has always been relatively complex, but by the beginning of the twenty-first century, it had been extensively democratised. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the leader of the party had been chosen by the Labour parliamentarians at Westminster in consultation with the heads of the largest trade unions. This situation was altered, paradoxically, by the right wing, which had taken control of the party in the 1990s. Trying to reduce the influence of the trade unions and backbenchers, the members of the right wing put their stake on the party rank and file and undermined the organisational structure in whatever way they could.

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During the 2000s political decisions finished up in practice a monopoly of the party apparatus that legitimised them by referring to the will of a supposed mass membership that existed only on paper. The primary organisations had fallen apart, and the formal support for the leadership was being provided by individual citizens whose political activity consisted of transferring a fixed sum to the party accounts once every few months. Meanwhile, workers’ movement activists and left-wing youth were abandoning the Labourites, seeing no point in what the latter were doing. Moreover, the number of members who were industrial workers, that is, who were from the stratum that had once made up the social democratic support base, was in steady decline. Their place in the party was being taken by members of the moderately liberal middle layers, people who were interested in politics but not to the point where they would actively take part. It was on this middle class that Tony Blair had relied in the late 1990s, when he turned the party sharply to the right. But neither Blair nor those who followed him had taken account of the fact that as the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism developed, the moods of the middle class would change, that a stratification would occur among its members and that a recognition of their own objective interests would sooner or later impel a significant number of those concerned to the left. The mechanism that the Blair team had established, while extremely suited to political manipulations, turned out to be completely defenceless against penetration from outside. It had never entered anyone’s head that a further attempt might be made to revive the party’s grass-roots organisations and restore them to an active political role. In the 1960s and 1970s, such attempts had been mounted constantly, and the apparatus had shown no quarter in opposing them. The earlier, openly undemocratic procedure for electing the party leader had been devised especially in order to suppress efforts by the rank and file to influence leadership policy. But from the time of Tony Blair, such extremes had been so thoroughly forgotten that precautionary measures had ceased to be taken. By mid-August 2015, Corbyn already had a strong lead in the race, and party membership was growing by leaps and bounds. Veterans disillusioned after many years of treachery by the right-wing leaders returned, while young people streamed into the ranks along with individuals who only shortly before had considered parliamentary politics hopeless. Paradoxical as it might seem, the financial situation of the Labourites improved dramatically. Suddenly recognising its dilemma, the party elite began taking counter-measures, calling on the help of the mass media. A campaign against Corbyn was unleashed by the British press. The attacks came from three directions. First, Corbyn was said to lack a serious program, instead urging populist measures such as nationalisation of the railways and improvements in the functioning of the ambulance service (in the view of the journalists, any sane-minded person would understand that such a thing was simply impossible). Second, it was declared that with such a program and leader, the Labour Party would be incapable of winning at the polls – no one would vote for candidates who called for implementing economic and social policies in the interests of the majority of the population. Third, Corbyn’s indignation at the shelling by the Ukrainian army of hospitals and schools

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in Donetsk was straightforward proof, in the opinion of the press, that he was an agent of Putin.11 To the bewilderment of politicians and journalists, this campaign had the reverse effect. The more such articles appeared, the more rapidly the candidate’s ratings grew. Several dozen well-known economists, including the Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman, published a joint letter in which they expressed solidarity with Corbyn’s program. Public opinion surveys also yielded results that had not been anticipated in ruling circles. More than 80 per cent of those surveyed declared that only with a leader such as Corbyn could the Labourites return to power. Worse still, the surveys showed that if any other candidate were elected, the party would face electoral collapse. If the earlier trend were to be maintained, with the Labourites year by year becoming increasingly like the Conservatives, citizens would have no motive whatsoever to vote for them. When Labour front-benchers declared that they would not work with Corbyn and would resign from their posts if he were elected, the news aroused a new outburst of delight among party supporters who had long dreamt of ridding themselves of the people who were responsible for year after year of defeats. The enthusiasm shown by ordinary party members was so stormy that it aroused panic among members of the shadow cabinet. One by one they began to surrender, declaring that they had had second thoughts and were reconsidering the possibility of constructive work within the team of the victor, on the condition, of course, that he became a serious politician, started seeing reason and corrected his views. On 12 September 2015, a historic day for British politics, Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party, having gained 59.5 per cent of the votes and far outstripping his closest rivals. Corbyn’s success also revealed the moral bankruptcy of the British political class and of its establishment intellectuals. Austerity policies and the neoliberal program of dismantling the welfare state had exhausted themselves not only objectively but also on the level of mass consciousness. A cultural and psychological breach had occurred, and a new majority had begun to take shape, one inclined not only to embrace change but also to make a radical break with the existing politics and with the institutions formed in the old setting. If the political class, intellectuals and the mass media had enjoyed the same trust and respect in society as before, the Corbyn phenomenon would have been impossible as a matter of principle. Accordingly, it was open confrontation with the above forces that had provided Corbyn and his allies with their recipe for success. But this new reality was not yet understood by the participants in events, including many supporters of change and even the Labour leader himself, who was prepared to resort to compromises with his enemies inside the party. At first glance, it might seem possible to compare Corbyn’s success with the rapid rise of Syriza and Tsipras in Greece. Indeed, both political phenomena reflected the growth of mass discontent with the neoliberal policies pursued by the ruling classes of the EU. A fundamental difference between them, however, was that Corbyn’s success was not based on charisma or on a fashionable image or even on people’s disappointment with the old-style politics. His campaign rested on the mass movements that in the course of the previous two decades had

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grown and become stronger but that had not been allowed access to the general national political agenda. The emergence of Corbyn stimulated self-organisation by the lower strata of society, by all those whom the liberal minority had for so many years excluded from the decision-making process. Those who were now asserting themselves were the people who had been thrust into the background and ignored not only by the ruling establishment but also by the fashionable left intellectuals, by the bearers of “advanced ideas” and by the heroes of the mass media. This change could not be reduced to the processes that were under way in public opinion and that bore witness to profound structural shifts in British and Western European society. Corbyn himself was soon to feel the effects of these shifts, when having submitted to pressure from the moderate wing of the party, he refused to speak out in favour of Britain’s exit from the European Union. Corbyn’s victory, unexpected even by many of his supporters, spurred sharp discussion among British Marxists, forcing them to reformulate their views on many familiar questions. “Corbyn is not of course a revolutionary”, complained Mark L. Thomas in the pages of International Socialism. “He is committed to change through parliamentary means, the classic hallmark of reformism”.12 Nevertheless, Thomas, like most members of the British left, still called for Corbyn to be given critical support at the same time as the left preserved its independent organisations and kept its distance from the Labour leader’s reformism. Meanwhile, the real theoretical and practical problem did not have to do with the tactical decisions that revolutionary leftists needed to make in relation to reformism, but with the content of their overall strategy for social change and with the question of how, within this strategy, they saw their own place and that of the reformists. It was these questions that remained unanswered. Critical support, if it failed to extend beyond voicing that formula, was doomed to ineffectiveness. Instead of discussing actions that would strengthen Corbyn’s position while simultaneously impelling him to adopt more radical stances, the Marxist theoreticians spoke from the position of a teacher who assesses the work of practical activists and comments on their mistakes. This approach is revealing of the psychology of the radical left, a psychology formed over decades of estrangement from serious political decision-making and from the practical struggle for power. Such an approach automatically transformed the members of the left into hostages of the reformist leaders, placing them in absolute dependency on the results of actions and decisions decided upon by the despised reformists since it was only the latter who held the political initiative and drew up the concrete agenda. In turn, the appraisals presented to various politicians had practical significance only in the degree to which those who made these evaluations represented a practical or at least moral force that could not be ignored. Thinkers who were estranged from practice could not constitute such a force. They might be irreproachable in terms of their abstract positions and conclusions but would never be able to influence current events. The more they strove for ideological perfection, the less chance they had of ever witnessing the practical realisation of their ideology, which despite their constant references to universal truths, was transformed into the worst kind of false consciousness.

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The criticism of Corbyn’s reformist positions that was mounted constantly by the British left was in many respects precisely correct, but it left out the main thing since it did not rest on an analysis of the social processes that had given rise to the new version of radical Labourism or of the links between this phenomenon and the general wave of populist protest that had arisen throughout the world. The fundamentally important differences that distinguished the British protests from those in neighbouring countries were the clear dominance of leftover right-wing populism and the fact that thanks to the traditions of the organised labour movement, the prospect had emerged of the structural consolidation of a reformist bloc. However small the circle of politicians and experts from among whom Corbyn assembled his team, the team itself was an expression not simply of popular moods but also of more or less structured mass interests. This is why Corbyn, despite all his vacillations, failures and errors, proved again and again to be unsinkable, continuing to receive the support of the popular movement. The early parliamentary elections called by the Conservatives for the spring of 2017 confirmed that it was consistent class politics that brought success. The Tories began the race with a 20-per cent advantage in opinion polls and with almost monopoly dominance in the mass media, including in left-liberal publications that were persistently predicting a Labour defeat. But after the publication by Corbyn supporters of an election manifesto headlined, “For the many, not the few”, the gap began diminishing with each day that passed. The outcome of the 8 June elections was a “hung parliament” in which neither of the main parties had a majority. But the moral victor, it was generally recognised, was Corbyn. “Some sceptics on the liberal left are at last coming round to Labour”, the internet journal Counterfire noted ironically. “The Guardian’s endorsement of Labour is welcome, even if it follows months of attacks on Labour’s leader. But even the announcement of its last minute conversion displays little understanding of what is actually going on”.13 Corbyn’s reformism, and even his vacillations, proved an adequate response to a changing social reality, despite the fact that he and his team of reformers did not always understand their prospects and opportunities, and hence constantly missed chances to strengthen their positions. Since the system could not be changed instantly and in its entirety, any advances might, strictly speaking, be interpreted as reformist, inconsistent and insufficiently radical. The revolutionary process is not to be distinguished from reform on the basis of its rhetoric or of the radicalism of its slogans, and still less on the basis of the political histories and personal biographies of its participants. The criteria may include the scale, depth and often speed of the changes, as well as the pressure from below and the participation of the masses in shaping the agenda. But for this very reason, the revolutionary or reformist character of one or another process can only be evaluated according to the outcome of events. No assessment can be made in advance, in isolation from concrete historical practice, of one or another politician on the basis of his or her slogans or even initial program, especially since these will inevitably change as the social struggle develops. Further, it is precisely the ability to deepen, concretise and radicalise his or her program in the

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course of events that is the distinguishing mark of an authentically revolutionary politician. The changes that had their beginnings in relatively moderate reforms initiated by Louis XVI in France in 1789 turned into the most impressive revolution that Western Europe has ever experienced. France to that point had not had an organised revolutionary party or popular leaders capable of heading a movement. These leaders, like the Jacobin party, appeared in the course of the struggle. The Bolsheviks, too, proved to be more revolutionary than the Socialist Revolutionaries, who had even inscribed the word in the name of their party. This was not because they shouted louder or gave more radical speeches but because it was Lenin and his comrades who found practical solutions in a situation of crisis. In 1917, the superiority of the Bolsheviks over other socialists on the level of theory played a huge role. But this was due to the fact that for Lenin, theory was not a sum total of abstract truths from whose heights of erudition he might criticise and judge an insufficiently correct reality, and still less was it a discourse, adherence to which was more important than any consideration of practice. Theory for Lenin was a tool for analysing reality, a tool that in the course of the struggle for power aided in the making of decisions that did not always conform to the dogmas of orthodox Marxism but that were supported by the worker masses. By contrast, the activity of numerous communist and left-radical parties that talk constantly of making a break with capitalism has not only failed to bring about such a break, but with rare exceptions, has had no significant results whatsoever. The few practical achievements of which they can boast fit mostly into the category of limited and extremely moderate reforms. Does this mean that as conscious activity, revolutionary politics has no point whatsoever or that it is impossible at least under the conditions of late capitalism? By no means. What is lacking in this case is not a revolutionary perspective as such but an understanding by the left of the dialectics of reform and revolution, a recognition of the obvious historical fact that between reform and revolution there is no insurmountable barrier. The one becomes transformed into the other depending on the overall course of the political process, on the state of mass consciousness and on the changing relationships of class forces. Revolutionary politics has thus to consist not in critical support for the process of reform – and still less in passive estrangement from it – but in participating in this process in a conscious and organised way, influencing its agenda and orienting one’s tactics, not according to abstract theories and slogans but on the basis of the changing circumstances, desires and needs of the masses and of the concrete changes that are occurring round about. The key characteristic of the new, politically correct Western left is its consistent and principled anti-reformism, for which, however, it fails to compensate with either the ability or the desire to make revolution since it has no need either to search for or to consolidate a social base for revolutionary action. History shows that it is transitional demands, along with the struggle for immediate reforms and for measures that working people understand and find necessary in their daily lives, that have won mass support for revolutionary movements. To reject politics that the masses find interesting, comprehensible and to their advantage means

120 The era of populism also to reject any transformational actions whatsoever. In other words, revolutionary rhetoric acts as a cover and a justification for positions that in essence are profoundly conservative, and as a means for members of the left to adapt to the neoliberal regime, within whose frameworks the left acts as a supplier of news and intellectual entertainments to the advanced sector of the bourgeoisie.

The strengths and weaknesses of populism While in Latin America the economic downturn of the years between 2015 and 2017 made the positions of left-wing governments more difficult, in the West it spawned a whole series of new populist movements setting forward programs of progressive reform. Latin America witnessed the decay of the populist bloc, which had never been able to consolidate itself and had been transformed, to use the expression of Antonio Gramsci, into a historical bloc. In Western Europe the opposite tendency could be observed. It is significant that of all the leaders of the Latin American “left wave”, the most politically successful in the long term proved to be Rafael Correa, who was also the least charismatic. A successful populist leader is not the one who promises everything to everyone, but the one who is able to unify and consolidate different interests. This, however, is possible only in the short term. To the degree that the populist coalition deals with the immediate tasks around which its various groups and social layers joined forces, new problems arise. At this stage the populist movement must reconstruct itself, acquiring a definite political and ideological shape through transforming itself into a consolidated force that rests on a particular class (or strategic coalition of classes). Otherwise, it will be doomed to gradual disintegration. If active work is performed with a view to cultivating new social and political forces on the basis of the populist movement, the coalition of protest and resistance gives way to a new bloc, founded on a long-term strategic perspective. Its formation cannot simply result from the development of a spontaneous movement or from an equally spontaneous concentration of public hopes on one or another popular politician. Conscious political work is required here, including the formation of a new hegemony within the transitional populist bloc. Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks formulated the goals of this work as follows: To direct one’s will toward the creation of a new equilibrium of actually existing and functioning forces, resting on that particular force that is considered progressive, and creating the conditions for its victory. All this means, of course, operating on the soil of genuine reality, but operating in such a way as to be able to exercise hegemony over it and to transcend it (or to assist in this).14 For a populist movement to achieve such a transition means to overcome or transcend itself. The popularity of the leader creates, in him and his entourage, the illusion that more serious measures to formulate a political program and draw up a strategy are unnecessary. In this sense, the charisma of a populist leader may

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play a malicious joke on him and his organisation. However authoritative and well loved one or another political figure may be, the objective contradictions of the movement will sooner or later make their effects felt. If the work of reorganising the movement and carrying out the structural transformation of society is not carried out, the loyalty of the masses to the personality of the leader may for a certain time hold off the process of collapse but cannot prevent it. Meanwhile, the ideological heterogeneity of populism will not only lead inevitably to the elements that comprise its social base splitting off from one another but will also bring about an ideological schism, as these elements divide into right and left wings, democrats and authoritarians, moderates and radicals. For many years populism was viewed as a specific and paradoxical phenomenon of Latin American politics, difficult to understand for European experts used to logical, classical definitions and scenarios. But events in Europe and the US in the early twenty-first century show that similar coalitions, violating conventional notions of ideological and political logic, may take shape in developed Western countries. Such processes can occur in Russia as well, as demonstrated by the rapid growth in the popularity of Aleksey Navalny, who in the space of a few weeks in the spring of 2017 was transformed from a near-marginal figure into the leader of a mass opposition. The erosion of ideological boundaries is a perfectly natural consequence of the social processes unleashed by neoliberalism throughout the world. The current situation is one in which a crisis of the capitalist system (at least in the variant that has triumphed during the years of globalisation) is growing in intensity, at the same time as the working class along with its institutions and organisations is profoundly weakened, society is atomised and declassed and the traditional forces of the left have proven politically and ideologically bankrupt. Latin America has always differed from the European West in the respect that, while embracing European ideological concepts and seeking to create the corresponding political institutions, it has been a quite different world on the socioeconomic level, a world in which the organised working class has remained only a minority amid a vast mass of workers and the poor. The changes called forth on a structural level by neoliberal reforms in the West and in the former communist countries have created a similar, but not identical, situation in those parts of the world. The Latin Americanisation of European societies was bound sooner or later to be reflected in the field of politics, and this occurred in the mid-2010s. In Europe in the twenty-first century, we are observing a crisis of social organisation whose causes are not limited solely to a decline of production and consumption. New technologies and the new global division of labour have destroyed the traditional organisation of industry, shifted many occupational categories into the background and altered people’s way of life, their motivations and the form and content of their labour. Society has by no means become classless, but just the opposite, and its contradictions are growing more acute to the degree that, along with the old labour movement and the old left parties, the welfare state too is growing weaker. Nevertheless, it is the previous boundaries between social groups that have been eroded and the earlier bonds that have been destroyed. Society has

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finished up atomised, alienated and disorganised. The programmer and the freelancer may work in their own apartments, consoling themselves with the illusion that they are working for themselves and not for their clients. Skilled workers see nothing in common between them and the migrant who sweeps the streets, while the left intellectual, grieving day and night over the fate of the migrants, shows not the slightest interest in the problems of workers or even of his or her university colleagues who are on a lower level of the academic hierarchy. In earlier times, a society as alienated and demoralised as this would have been very easy to govern. The ruling elites were almost the only stable and relatively consolidated social groups, able not only to recognise their interests but also to work systematically to realise these interests in practice – including through supporting groups of liberal intellectuals, of both the left and right, who possessed influential reputations. In their turn, the old institutions, founded in order to support class solidarity, grew weaker or hung in mid-air. Meanwhile, the trade unions and lower-level social organisations retained a substantial part of their social base, even as this base had shrunk. In sum, they had not so much changed as lost their influence (after which they could be presented, with some justification, as holdovers from a departed industrial era). By contrast, the intellectual and political institutions (parties, academic centres, the press, literary society) that had once been considered supporters of the left had lost their ties to the organised masses, from which they were now remote, and had crossed over to serving the elites. The defeat suffered by Labour in the early elections held in December 2019 may be seen as evidence of the limitations of the left populism that between 2015 and 2017 had brought Jeremy Corbyn and his team to leadership posts in the party. It is significant, however, that the failure of the Labourites was linked not to the populist character of their campaign, but on the contrary, to the fact that the new party leadership, with an eye to opponents in their own ranks, had sought to demonstrate the seriousness, responsibility and balanced nature of their proposals at the very same moment as the Tories under their new leader Boris Johnson were unleashing a massive populist campaign in which they presented themselves as the only force calling for a departure from the European Union. It must be recognised that after their failure in 2017, a section of the British ruling class had learnt a lesson from what had occurred. Johnson’s populism was a supremely effective response to the populism of Corbyn since it appealed to the same dispossessed elements in society who had earlier voted in the referendum to reject British membership in the EU. The people concerned, who at first glance might have seemed a natural base for the left, had in fact long considered themselves betrayed. When Corbyn had renounced his own hostile position towards the EU, he lost the trust of these layers for good. Analysing the reasons behind Corbyn’s defeat, the journalist Zarah Sultana wrote: Twenty-nine of thirty voting areas in the West Midlands voted for Brexit, and countless politicians missed the point. After years of a consensus that rejected the possibility of economic transformation, this was the opportunity

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to register dissatisfaction with distant and complacent power. Chickens came home to roost.15 It should nevertheless be remembered that Corbyn’s change of position was not only related to pressure from the right wing of the party (which he had always managed to resist) but was the result to a much greater degree of pressure from a section of the left that preferred comfortable dialogue with French or Belgian intellectuals to honest discussion with impoverished workers from England’s northern counties. The left-liberal intellectuals accused rank and file voters of xenophobia and racism, attributing their behaviour exclusively to hatred of foreigners, while the real question concerned the natural reaction of ordinary people to unresponsive political elites, including intellectual circles and left-wing currents. Sultana captured this situation precisely: Labour didn’t lose because our policies were too radical. Instead, Brexit undermined our electoral coalition and left us tied up in parliamentary manoeuvres – making us seem like just another establishment party. Our narrative wasn’t clear enough, and our messaging wasn’t sharp enough. But the irony now is that endless commentators are calling for Labour to abandon transformational politics at the moment we can least afford it.16 The left-liberal wing of the party, which supported Corbyn on most questions but spoke out firmly in support of the EU, bore a significant share of the responsibility for what happened. But in discussing the reasons for Labour’s failure, no one from this section of the left was prepared to sprinkle their head with ashes and acknowledge their guilt. Meanwhile, the increasing decay of the neoliberal economic model both in Europe and in the world as a whole would inevitably lead not to a reformist consolidation around liberal international institutions but to a polarisation of society. In this respect the policies of Boris Johnson, who resolved to carry through the process of taking the United Kingdom out of the EU, were objectively creating the preconditions for a return of the left agenda. Despite proclaiming a break with a “united Europe” that was an institutional embodiment of neoliberalism, the Tories were incapable of offering an alternative path of social and economic development that would allow an escape from that model. Still less were they able to put forward a new internationalist program that was not oriented towards the liberal institutions of the EU but towards the real needs of working people on a European and global scale. Unfortunately for the ruling groups, the world-wide crisis had revealed the other side of the existing social order: it was extremely unstable, and the institutions, people and organisations that financial capital had suborned, spending extraordinary sums on bribing and taming them, had all proven unfit for their tasks. The members of an atomised society, abandoned to their fate by elites of every political hue but feeling the blows of the crisis, had begun quitting their assigned paths in large numbers. A charismatic leader might come to the forefront, but this figure would turn out to be quite unlike the models recalled from the history

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of the twentieth century. What was needed was not an orator with a thunderous voice but someone able to sense the public interest, to come up with formulae that would at the same time unify large masses and be comprehensible to them ‒ someone who could divine the point where the objective and subjective, needs and passions, interests and desires all coincided, and who could show that solving dilemmas was possible and simple. Initially, people groped their way towards the assembly point intuitively rather than finding it with the help of conscious logic. The problem was, however, that amid a constantly changing situation the balance that was essential for maintaining the unity of a populist coalition was shifting as events unfolded. In order to develop without losing its unity, the coalition needed constant offensives, constant successes. But success, too, if it altered the situation, threatened to bring the coalition to the point of disintegration since, as it moved forward, new interests, tasks and contradictions would arise, changing its internal balance of forces and tendencies. Contrary to the arguments of liberal publicists, the strength of today’s new populism lies in the fact that its promises are obviously and quite genuinely capable of being turned into reality. Just who is promising what is a separate question. The left promises to redistribute funds in favour of education and health care, to build roads, and through this, to create demand and jobs. The right promises to close the borders to migrants and to step up the fight against crime. Despite what liberal intellectuals might say, both sets of goals are attainable in practice. Moreover, some movements, such as the National Front in France and the “Five Stars” in Italy, have promised society both packages simultaneously. The weakness of populist movements, like their strength, lies in their lack of a clear structure, in their spontaneism and dependence on a leader. The example of Greece showed how helpless a populist party can be once it comes to power. This, however, may not be because its program is impossible to implement but because its leaders turn out to be weak, irresolute and devoid of serious ambitions. But where a movement rests on the remains of old class structures and organisations – as, for example, in Britain – the result may be completely different: the leaders, maintaining their links to mass protest, derive strength from it, while the participants in the events learn the lessons of struggle.

Notes 1 R. Kostyuk, “Prizrak populizma brodit po Evrope” [The spectre of populism is haunting Europe]. Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, 11 Nov. 2016. 2 A. Krotkina, “Ot ravnodushiya – k radushiyu” [From indifference to cordiality]. NGStsenarii, 31 May 2016. 3 Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, 11 Nov. 2016. 4 Welt Trends, May 2016, no. 115, p. 29. 5 The concept of “setting the democratic process going in manual mode” belongs to Anna Ochkina and was formulated during an internal discussion in the Institute of Globalisation and Social Movements. 6 Welt Trends, May 2016, no. 115, p. 43. 7 Ibid., p. 31. 8 Nueva Sociedad, Jan.–Feb. 2016, no. 261, p. 13.

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9 Ibid., p. 15. 10 Ibid. 11 In their search for proof of ties between Putin and Corbyn, journalists even found malefactors who were coordinating this interaction. Among those identified as such were the leader of the Stop the War Coalition John Rees, and the author of this book. See: Andrew Gilligan, “Stop the War linked to Putin puppets”. The Sunday Times, 16 Oct. 2016. 12 International Socialism, winter 2016, no. 149, p. 48. 13 C. Nineham, “Some people still don’t get it–labour’s surge is because of Corbyn”. Counterfire, 6 June 2017. www.counterfire.org/articles/opinion/19016-some-peoplestill-don-t-get-it-labour-s-surge-is-because-of-corbyn-2. 14 A. Gramshi, Izbrannye proizvedeniya [Selected works], vol. 3, p. 160. 15 Tribune, 15 Feb. 2020. 16 Ibid.

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The US elections of 2016 were expected to be the most boring in many decades. Everyone knew in advance that the vote would see Jeb Bush for the Republicans pitted against Hillary Clinton for the Democrats. Two oligarchic clans readied themselves for the next fight over power in Washington. Things, however, worked out differently. It was as though the very fact of the expectedness, the predictability of the outcome, aroused protest among the voters of both parties. Weighing against Hillary in the camp of the Democrats was a situation that might have seemed to favour her – the fact that she was regarded as almost the only conceivable victor in the coming elections. This appeared to be her obvious advantage in the eyes of the party apparatus, but among voters it was a source of irritation. People do not like it when everything is decided in advance without them. The subsequent course of events showed that the calculations of the functionaries and political analysts were completely mistaken. Among the Republicans, the billionaire populist Donald Trump surged ahead, while in the Democratic race, the senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, began rapidly gathering momentum.

The Sanders phenomenon The history of the Sanders candidacy requires particular analysis. The politician who burst into national prominence during the Democratic primaries was no longer young and not especially like the socialist radical whom people remembered in New York, where in the early 1970s he had first tested out his gifts as a public orator. His Brooklyn accent, to be sure, remained with him, but his political views had become more moderate. From a Trotskyist revolutionary Sanders had transformed himself into a social democrat, extolling the Scandinavian experience. But the times, too, had changed. By the standards of American politics in the early twenty-first century, the social democratic views of the ageing Sanders were perceived as thoroughly revolutionary. In Vermont, Sanders had for some years held the post of Mayor of Burlington, a modest-sized city but the largest in the state. He had then been elected to the US House of Representatives as an independent deputy. Later, he was elected to represent the state in the Senate. When he first emerged as a candidate in the presidential primaries, many compared him to Jeremy Corbyn, who by that time

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had already succeeded in being elected as leader of the British Labour Party. Few, however, believed that the American politician would be able to emulate that success. The calculation was not that he would be able to defeat Hillary Clinton but that he would shift the discussion to the left through raising a whole series of questions about which the political establishment preferred to remain silent. The situation changed when with the help of crowd-funding. Sanders, who had refused on principle to accept campaign contributions from large corporations, raised more money than any other would-be Democratic candidate, including Hillary, who was sponsored by giant American banks. This not only meant that the Vermont socialist now had sufficient funds to mount a campaign but that millions of ordinary Americans had donated small sums of between $30 and $100 to him, expressing their support for his program. On this level, the Sanders campaign was continuing the trend seen in Barack Obama’s first campaign in 2008 but was gathering speed even more rapidly. Although at the preparatory stage numerous politicians had declared their readiness to take part in the primaries, by the spring of 2016, when the direct voting began, Sanders and Clinton were the only remaining candidates, something that was already a sensation. No less sensational was the success scored by Sanders in Iowa. This state, in which the primaries begin, is extremely provincial and conservative, and it was therefore difficult to anticipate that Sanders, most of whose supporters were in large cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, could figure among the leaders there. But the voting tallies showed differently. Hillary and Bernie were going head-to-head, winning roughly equal numbers of delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Then Sanders won in New Hampshire and Kansas. A superstition of American politics holds that the person who wins in New Hampshire wins the primary ballot. Meanwhile, over the preceding decades the residents of Kansas had always correctly guessed the eventual Democratic Party candidate. On public squares in large cities, people gathered in rallies of many thousands, such as America had not seen since the time of the war in Vietnam. This was a genuine mass mobilisation. It is enough to glance at photographs of the huge crowd of Sanders supporters on New York’s Union Square to understand how much the psychological situation in the country had changed. The candidacy of “socialist Bernie” enjoyed an overwhelming edge among youth. The younger the electors, the more inclined they were to vote for him. By contrast, Hillary held the lead among elderly people and pensioners, but this was far from always reflecting their political sympathies. More likely, older people simply did not believe that a candidate such as Sanders could win the primaries, and still less become US president. But with every new success, Bernie gained more supporters. The mobilisational and organisational techniques developed in the course of “colour revolutions” in which activist movements, employing the latest technologies, created their own information streams and defeated the cumbersome machines of government propaganda operating through the traditional press and television, were now being used in America itself, to far greater effect than in other countries. The main difference between the supporters of Bernie Sanders

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and the organisations founded to advance democracy in “backward” countries lay in the fact that this movement was genuine. It had in fact arisen spontaneously from below, changing and developing as events unfolded, and did not merely simulate popular initiatives as the people directing the “colour revolutions” had done. The Sanders campaign, waged under the conditions of a strict information blockade imposed by the television stations and the large press organs, demonstrated the possibility of social networks and spontaneous grass-roots creativity triumphing over the traditional mass media. The majority of the Sanders activists were members of the generation whose culture had been shaped by Hollywood films such as the “Matrix” series and “The Hunger Games”, in which a group of courageous fighters resist the system and defeat it. This was the generation whose information space had been formed by social networks and the internet. Hence the inventiveness and diversity of the visual material that was created at diverse points in the US by a multitude of people who took account of local peculiarities and of changing moods and situations while combining enthusiasm and humour and making use of familiar images from mass culture. Bernie Sanders would appear now in the form of a Pokémon from the famous cartoon film, and now in the image of Walter White from the cult serial “Breaking Bad”. Now he held a cat in his arms, and now the cat held Sanders in its paws. . . . Calls to struggle and photos of demonstrations were mixed with amusing graphics, such as a kitten asking: “Would you have a minute to talk about Bernie Sanders?” It is significant that as with Jeremy Corbyn, the actual political struggle also demonstrated the worthlessness of media stereotypes that had been considered self-evident. Neither Corbyn nor Sanders found their age a hindrance, and they had no need to appear sportive or elegant, or to feign dynamism – the important thing was what they stood for and how decisively, consistently and energetically they were prepared to fight. A president is not required to show sporting prowess, does not have to go skin-diving or to pump away on workout machines. He or she needs quite different qualities – honesty, consistency, a capacity for strategic thinking, a clear vision of the future and the ability to share it with supporters. Unlike people such as Blair and Putin, whose images had been studiously shaped by the mass media and public relations agencies, Sanders had no need to create his own visual image; he offered the country a new image of itself while becoming inseparable from that image. Politicians during the decade of the 2000s had assiduously simulated charisma, seeking the help of the best experts on advertising and propaganda. It became clear, however, that charisma – and especially the artificial, inflated variety – could not replace ideas and principles. Meanwhile, charisma was created by a combination of decisiveness with principled politics. In a certain sense, Sanders was retracing the path followed by Barack Obama in 2008. Outstripping Hillary Clinton in the primaries, Obama had showed that it was possible to defeat the party bureaucracy. The apparatchiks, in their turn, had not fully assimilated the lessons of that year. They had easily tamed Obama, making him one of their own, and the episode thus seemed closed. The Black politician from Illinois was a newcomer to the federal structures, lacking his own team,

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his own advisers and his own candidates for key posts within the administration. He finished up the hostage of the party bureaucracy, which decided all these matters on his behalf. With Bernie Sanders everything was far more serious. He, too, lacked a strong apparatus, but unlike Obama, he had a program and possessed knowledge and contacts both in the middle echelons of the Democratic Party and among the left and progressive intelligentsia, especially in New York. People were tired of the traditional politicians, who were completely divorced from society. Voters were beginning to revolt against the traditional political elites, against the political class, and as always in such situations, those who gained from this revolt were the people who, though part of the political class, were located on its margins. These were people who, despite being in politics, had never been regarded as claimants to anything serious, especially to power. They were people sufficiently professional and well known to play the role of leaders but who were so clearly outside the system, outside of the establishment and the traditional political deal-making, as to be perceived as mounting a public revolt against the old politicians. In this sense, Trump and Sanders reflected the same trend, only from its different ends, from right and left. Unfortunately, by no means did all of Sanders’s successes evoke enthusiasm. A significant section of the left intelligentsia, even while approving the speeches by the senator from Vermont, continued tying their hopes to the official leadership of the Democratic Party, which, according to the traditional recipes, had to be pushed leftward, as American progressive activists had been trying to do for more than a half-century. Throughout all this time, the party had moved steadily to the right, but this found no reflection either in the theoretical analysis of the situation or in the practical activity of the liberal left. During the initial stages of the campaign, a whole series of prominent leftwing intellectuals, including the philosopher Noam Chomsky and the economist Paul Krugman, ignored or criticised the Sanders presidential campaign, calling on Americans to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 as a lesser-evil candidate who might defeat Donald Trump. Krugman published a regular column in The New York Times, where from day to day he heaped criticism on Sanders, arguing that only success for Hillary would open the way for progressive change. According to Chomsky, a Trump victory would turn the Republican Party into the “most dangerous organisation in world history”;1 consequently, support for Hillary was completely justified on a moral and political level, even though she was the candidate of financial capital and was openly preparing to start new wars. This choice revealed a fundamental breach between the political behaviour of the intellectuals and the moods of the mass of ordinary Americans. While politicised left intellectuals justified voting for Hillary with the slogan “Anybody but Trump!”, the choice of huge numbers of ordinary people was determined by the principle “Anyone but Hillary!”. This was quite logical since the question was not one of abstract ideological principles but was centred on the fact that Hillary embodied a conservative, corrupt, antidemocratic system that citizens dreamt of changing. This popular yearning for unpredictable change stirred far more horror

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in the privileged intelligentsia than the practical program of Donald Trump. In their opposition to the right and to national populism, the members of the liberal left came out decisively as a conservative force, defenders of the existing order, guardians of the discourse. In essence, the Trump voters and the supporters of Sanders were in revolt against the same oligarchic order. But unlike Trump, Sanders represented an uprising not only against the old political elites but also against neoliberalism, against economic austerity. This was not yet an uprising against bourgeois society as such but a protest against the capitalist practice that had become established by the early twenty-first century. While the ruling class was trying to dismantle the remnants of the welfare state and raze to the ground everything that had been constructed during the epoch of social democracy, the contrary demand was ripening in society: for expanding welfare provisions, for the redistribution of resources in favour of working people and for a strengthening of trade unions and the positions of hired labour. Moreover, this was not just the mood among the unemployed and wage workers but also reflected the thinking in small and medium business circles, where entrepreneurs had begun to recognise that with the dismantling of the welfare state, their customers were vanishing as well. In sum, the main obstacle to developing Sanders’s success further was not the conservative prejudices of the population that were readily being overcome by the propaganda of struggle for people’s authentic social interests, but the left-liberal norms that had been cultivated throughout the preceding thirty years. Hillary’s campaign appealed to such themes as feminism, positive discrimination in favour of people of colour, the rights of sexual minorities and so forth. Here, a remark by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is particularly significant: she declared that for women who refused to support the Clinton candidacy, there was “a special place in hell”. The British Marxist journal Socialist Review described this as “an attempt to blackmail women voters along superficial feminist lines”.2 The problem, however, was that precisely this “superficial feminism” had been implanted by the left itself in the US and Great Britain over several decades. When Sanders joked about the madness that was spreading in American society, he was promptly accused of insulting the mentally ill, and after he asked Hillary to observe the rules of discussion and not interrupt when he was speaking, he was accused of sexism and of belittling women. On this level the Sanders campaign exposed in exquisite fashion the repressive essence of politically correct discourse, aimed above all at repressing any meaningful discussion or show of individual opinion just as it sought to banish class content from public utterances. The popularity of Sanders among young people was linked precisely to the fact that, while not openly challenging political correctness, he gradually shifted discussion in the direction of addressing real problems. This was explained particularly well on Instagram by one of his admirers. The senator from Vermont did not repeat the usual mantras of left intellectuals and did not show excessive agitation over the questions of minorities and multiculturalism. “He gets it that most young people don’t care about immigration, guns, gay people; we care about education,

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and the welfare and equality of the United States’ citizens”.3 In short, Sanders was restoring the old social democratic class agenda. In itself this agenda was relatively moderate, but it was perceived as extremely radical. This was not only because it was put forward in the context of the threedecade-long dismantling of the welfare state but also because it broke out of the framework of the usual politically correct discourse. The success of the left populists was predetermined by the fact that they shifted to one side, even if they did not reject publicly all the innovations of left-liberal radicalism, all the neurotic preoccupation with “identities”, “minorities”, politically correct language and so forth. The reason why Sanders’s popularity was able to grow so rapidly was that as the campaign unfolded, he was more and more successful in actively smashing the stereotypes of political correctness, even while avoiding, from tactical considerations, any open violation of political correctness in his public statements. This approach brought about a gradual erosion of the left-liberal discourse and laid the basis (but for the moment, only the basis) for a different ideological hegemony, one that proposed making a priority of such concrete and practical social needs as education, health care, jobs, infrastructure development and so on. The appeal to these down-to-earth, pragmatic topics that were of real interest to the masses caused an explosion of ideological enthusiasm and of altruistic, collectivist behaviour. To embrace practical goals is not in contradiction to idealism and selflessness. To the contrary, these practical goals do far more to stimulate idealism and selflessness than do philosophical and theoretical abstractions – provided that these goals are linked with the realisation of the rights and interests of the majority and that the struggle for them reveals and affirms the principle of democracy. Meanwhile, Sanders was subjected to a deluge of criticism not only from politically moderate intellectuals but also from the left. He was abused for failing to devote sufficient attention to the rights of sexual minorities, for being insufficiently radical in his condemnation of capitalism and for repeating the traditional slogans of the “old” anti-bourgeois left. In the eyes of the orthodox left, Sanders was guilty of three crimes. He had not prioritised choosing a set of abstract slogans that a few dozen ideologues would judge as correct, but had opted for others that would allow him to mobilise the support of millions of ordinary Americans. Further, he had not proclaimed the goal of swiftly transforming America into a consistently socialist society and had refrained from simultaneously putting forward a multitude of mutually exclusive “alternatives”, instead advancing a program of specific reforms that were capable of being put into practice and the need for which was recognised to one degree or another by the majority of the population. Finally, he had set about waging a serious struggle for power, one that had begun achieving practical successes. A particularly frequent criticism of Sanders was that he had put himself forward as a Democrat “rather than as an independent or third party candidate”.4 His defenders objected that if he had not run as a Democrat, he would not have been winning over large numbers of Americans since “he would not have been able to introduce himself to millions who knew little or nothing of him via the

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Democratic presidential candidates’ debate”.5 Nevertheless, it is significant that all of the participants in the discussion, regardless of their differences, viewed the Sanders campaign exclusively as an opportunity to exert a propagandist or educational influence on American society and not as an attempt at a practical struggle for power. The question of the struggle for power, which had been central to the Leninist or even social democratic Marxism of the twentieth century, had completely disappeared from the discussions among Western leftists, even when the debate centred on evaluating the actions of politicians and parties who formed governments or participated in ruling coalitions. In relation to Sanders, of course, it may be assumed that the practical possibility of a little-known provincial politician becoming a serious pretender to the post of leader of the US was simply not viewed as something real. Lying at the basis of this thinking, however, was not an analysis of society or of its political processes but the traumatic experience of the uninterrupted failures and defeats for which the members of the left, naturally, blamed anyone at all apart from themselves. The effect of their attempts at analytical rationalisation of this irrational psychological complex was that the possibility of practical success was either ignored altogether, as a matter of principle, or was associated from the start with something negative – opportunism, unprincipled behaviour, improper coalitions and so forth. By contrast, the millions of young Americans who were flocking to the Sanders campaign had not suffered from this traumatic experience, knew nothing of it and in general had never had it occur to them that in the US a left-wing candidate, by definition, had no chance of success. Oblivious to this supposed fact, they gave Sanders a degree of mass support that no American politician had received since the 1960s. The rapidly growing strength of the Sanders campaign led to serious political shifts in American society, showing that someone who openly called himself or herself a socialist, and who put forward a relatively radical, though not revolutionary program, could win a far greater degree of popular backing than candidates from the establishment. For several months Hillary’s associates repeated that Sanders, if nominated, had no chance of winning in a general national vote. The subsequent failure of Hillary Clinton herself did nothing to vindicate this thesis, especially since all the opinion polls had indicated that Sanders, if he had been the party’s official candidate, would have defeated Trump. The successes achieved by Sanders had been predetermined by important processes that were under way in American society, and especially in the middle class. The crisis that broke out in 2007 had shown just how vulnerable were the positions of those strata of society who earlier had received certain benefits from neoliberal policies. In conditions where demand had been sustained mainly through credit, the debt burden of the middle class had become unbearable, while the costs of education and medical care rose without let-up. Adding to this was disillusionment with the administration of Barack Obama, on whom many had pinned their hopes of substantial, if not radical, changes. Against this background of the changed moods of the middle class, politicians would inevitably emerge who would raise the topic of the welfare state. Unlike the case in earlier periods of US history, this agenda was supported not only by

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members of the left who were seriously prepared to work for social change, but also by vast numbers of people who not long before had sincerely considered themselves conservatives.

The price of vacillation Unfortunately, the development of Sanders’s campaign demonstrated that for success in the struggle for power, it was not enough to have correct ideas. Also necessary was an effective strategy and, most important of all, political will. In moments of crisis, political leaders need to show not just consistency, decisiveness and honesty but also a readiness to take risks. Meanwhile, they must accept responsibility for the results of their decisions, results that will rarely be uniformly positive and of which not all of their supporters, by any means, will approve. In June 2016 Corbyn and Sanders simultaneously encountered strategic crises that revealed the problems and limitations of the models of behaviour they were putting into effect. Corbyn lacked the resolve to call openly for Britain to leave the EU, with the result that he not only let slip the chance, after the referendum, to appear as the victor in the eyes of the population, but also provoked a new resistance within the party. The right wing of the party demanded his resignation, while the parliamentary caucus, where his supporters made up an insignificant minority, passed a vote of no confidence in him. Corbyn managed to emerge victorious from this confrontation partly thanks to support from the rank and file members, but mainly due to the fact that his vacillations had been replaced by decisiveness. The Labour leader refused to submit to the parliamentary caucus, did not resign and triumphed once again in an election for his post as leader. Ultimately, however, the position that Corbyn adopted during the referendum was to be the cause of his defeat in the elections of 2019, when the new Tory leader Boris Johnson, consolidating his control over the Conservative Party, unleashed a populist campaign in which he presented himself as the sole supporter of Brexit. The crisis encountered by Sanders was linked to the scandalous culmination of the primaries. The numerous violations and manipulations in favour of Clinton did not meet with a sharp rebuff from the Vermont senator, even though they aroused fury among his supporters. The result was that the leadership of the Democratic Party, which had openly taken the side of Hillary, gained a sense of impunity and behaved more and more irresponsibly. After the voting in California, at a time when the votes had not yet even been tallied, Clinton was officially declared the winner. So long as the primaries continued, the Sanders campaign kept to the beaten track, regardless of the reporting in the press and however great Sanders’s chances of beating an opponent who was behaving with an obvious lack of scruple. Now, however, a strategic choice had to be made. Should the results of the primaries, which in the view of most activists had been blatantly rigged, be disputed? Should the struggle continue? Should Sanders be nominated as an independent candidate? Should a bloc be formed with the Green Party, which had suggested Sanders act in its name? Should the Democratic Party be formally split?

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At the party convention that was to be held in Philadelphia, Sanders would have to make a choice. But the candidate maintained his silence, avoiding any coherent declarations or characterisations. The left-liberal intelligentsia did everything it could to convince the Sanders supporters at the convention to support the very policies against which they had risen in revolt. The commentator for the British Guardian, Owen Jones, while expressing delight at the outstanding successes of the senator from Vermont, argued that the main task of the movement now was to ensure the defeat of Trump. Preventing a Republican victory was necessary because “the election of Trump would represent one of the greatest calamities to befall the West since the end of the Second World War”.6 The stress placed on the “calamities” was highly significant; fear of change in this case acted as an ideological principle, while preserving the current state of affairs was the main political goal. Tactically, Sanders had an interest in drawing the process out and postponing a decision until the convention in Philadelphia, where he could not only take the fight to Hillary but also had reason to count on the support of delegates if the continuing FBI investigation into the actions of the former First Lady were to lead to serious accusations, likely to undermine her chances of being elected. It was true that the accusations were not especially serious – while secretary of state, Clinton had contrived to transfer a large quantity of secret information onto an unsecured home server, from which it could easily have been stolen. The policy of waiting and manoeuvring chosen by Sanders at a time when the situation was growing more acute proved fatal. As a politician, he could not simply remain silent. Trying to avoid the need to take a premature decision, he began giving ambiguous interviews, sending contradictory signals not only to the press but also to his supporters. He would first declare that his main goal was to defeat Trump (thus hinting at a readiness to work with Clinton), then refuse outright to support her, and then state that of two evils Madam Hillary was the lesser and that he was prepared to choose her in this capacity. The effect was to demoralise activists at the very moment when it was necessary to mobilise them for the struggle in Philadelphia. The leader of the British Labour Party and the senator from Vermont were acting according to the principle of minimising risk. This principle was quite rational in “normal” situations. The point, however, was that the very appearance in leading political roles of people such as Corbyn and Sanders testified to the fact that bourgeois “normality” had collapsed and that society was undergoing a systemic crisis. Only radical ideas and actions could bring success in such a situation. The principle of minimising risk would at best result in lost chances, and at worst, in defeat. Understanding the need for decisive actions, Corbyn managed to correct the situation. He mobilised his supporters and won. Sanders, lacking the resolve to break with his opponents within the Democratic Party, exacerbated his difficulties and lost.

After Philadelphia At the convention in Philadelphia, everything went more or less according to plan. The leadership of the US Democratic Party set itself the goal of winning, at any

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price, the nomination of Hillary Clinton for the post of president, and this goal was achieved. But as was to be expected, the price turned out not simply to be excessively high but catastrophic. Against the background of numerous disclosures, and in circumstances where the results of the voting had not been finally determined in California, New York and several other states where court suits and administrative proceedings were still under way, the confrontation between the supporters of Clinton and Sanders did not die away. The delegates supporting the senator from Vermont were under administrative pressure but were not prepared to reconcile themselves to victory for the former First Lady. Indeed, their mood was far more aggressive now than it had been at the beginning of the campaign. Pouring oil on the flames was the latest round of revelations appearing on the Wikileaks site. Revealed to the public this time was correspondence between functionaries of the Democratic Party showing unambiguously that in their support for Hillary, they had deliberately breached the rules governing the holding of primaries. The chairperson of the party’s national council, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was forced to resign, immediately landing a job as one of the directors of the Clinton campaign. The convention in Philadelphia culminated in a huge schism. This occurred not so much between the supporters of Hillary Clinton and her opponents as between Bernie Sanders and the movement that a few days earlier he had headed and symbolised. In Philadelphia the senator from Vermont, who had gathered crowds of many thousands throughout America and set them afire with his brilliant speeches, appeared absurd and helpless. When he called on his supporters to give their backing to Hillary, within a few seconds he was literally transformed from a charismatic leader embodying the hopes of millions of people into a second-rank political figure, incapable of influencing the course of events. With a confused smile, he repeated that Hillary would make an excellent president, argued that the party had adopted a wonderful progressive platform, and sought to persuade his indignant followers to “live in the real world”, thus clearly demonstrating a complete lack of any connection to the new political reality outside of which he could never have become a well-known national politician. It is not surprising that these developments multiplied the tensions at the convention. The senator’s speech was repeatedly interrupted by outraged shouts from his own supporters, effectively turning his performance into a fiasco. Even more fell to the lot of Senator Elizabeth Warren, who earlier had been considered the leader of the left wing of the party. When she refused to support Sanders, she undermined significantly his chances of enlisting even limited support among the party elite, and it is not out of the question that she played a considerable role in preparing his reconciliation with Hillary. Although the press had predicted that out of gratitude for these services Warren would be declared the candidate for vice-president, this did not happen. As her running-mate, the former First Lady proposed Virginia senator Tim Kaine, an unpopular nonentity, rejecting the recommendations of those who called upon her to choose someone from the left wing of the party in order to calm the supporters of Sanders.

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As expected, the voting culminated in victory for the former First Lady, who was supported not only by the delegates chosen in the course of the primaries but also by the “super-delegates” assembled earlier by the party leadership. These were congress members and mayors who were able to participate in the convention despite not having been elected in the course of the primaries. Outraged Sanders supporters quickly left the meeting hall. Almost 1900 people, or 48 per cent of the delegates who had been elected at the local level, left the convention. The historical meaning of what had happened was that an unprecedented split had occurred in the Democratic Party, signifying an acute crisis of the American two-party system. The members of the left, however, not only failed to exploit the opportunities that were opening up, but did not even recognise them. Of course, discussion of the idea of a third party had occurred earlier, was conducted during the elections and continued after them. But the essence of the question was not whether it would be possible in the US to register and elect candidates who did not belong to one of the two bourgeois parties, but what policies the left should pursue. Without a decisive political break with liberalism, and without a consistent defence by the left of its own fundamentally different positions, discussions of a third party had no point. Meanwhile, neither Sanders nor any of his leading supporters were resolved to make such a break. Technically speaking, an alternative to the Democrats existed in the form of the Green Party, which had nominated Jill Stein in the presidential elections. To a significant degree her campaign repeated the Sanders slogans, but without the participation of Bernie himself and his supporters, it could not alter the course of the elections. The main victor in the next phase of the political race was the billionaire Donald Trump, who won the Republican primaries. This was not simply because his ratings had risen after the scandalous Democratic convention in Philadelphia. The capitulation of Sanders before the liberal establishment had transformed the eccentric Trump into the sole alternative candidate resisting the liberal Washington elite. Trump, unlike Sanders, displayed fighting qualities and did not retreat when the party apparatus tried to block his victory. He struggled fiercely for his interests and won. Trump’s statements, made without any regard for the rules of political correctness, evoked hysteria among the intellectuals of the national capital, but they won him the interest and attention of millions of ordinary Americans for whose views the intellectuals showed no concern whatsoever. The propaganda of the mass media, which sought to present Hillary as the “lesser evil” compared to the “appalling” Trump, had the opposite effect. The unpopularity of both official candidates turned out to be unprecedented. The scandals surrounding the former First Lady were incessant. Her campaign, directed exclusively at trying to frighten voters, the streams of empty media rhetoric, the vanity of the candidate and her insulting attacks on members of her party who had opposed her nomination inevitably undermined faith in her. Later, after Trump had been elected president, the leading American left intellectuals, Tom Frank and Michael Moore, declared that it was the Democrats

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themselves, and the liberal politicians who headed the party, who bore responsibility for what had occurred.7 This, however, was only part of the truth, and the least substantial. In calling on people to support Hillary Clinton in the name of the struggle against Trump, Senator Sanders, without realising it, brought about a rupture in public consciousness that ensured the victory of the Republicans. If there was no one in the Democratic camp who could be trusted, if even the best and most honest of them were liable to give way, and if the struggle against the vices of the system culminated in support for a woman who in mass consciousness had become the embodiment of all those vices, then voting for the Democrats would signify an identical, personal moral capitulation on the part of each individual voter. The young generation of Americans who had risen in revolt during the 2016 primaries would not come at that. The left-liberal intellectuals might call as much as they liked on people to support the “lesser evil”, but in doing so, they simply undermined their own authority, cancelling out their prior services and achievements. The capitulation by Sanders in Philadelphia had been prepared throughout almost the entire election campaign by the left-wing intellectuals among his immediate associates and the more extensive range of his supporters. All of them, from Noam Chomsky to Michael Moore, joined in repeating that the main danger was the troublemaker and homophobe Donald Trump, that support for Hillary remained the sole means of avoiding a catastrophe that would surely occur if the Republican candidate won the election. In sum, it was intellectuals such as Moore and politicians such as Sanders and Warren who, by crossing over to the Clinton camp, made Trump’s victory inevitable. Their capitulations aroused such powerful revulsion among younger electors that for the latter, casting a vote against Clinton became a matter of principle. Naturally enough, Clinton’s victory within the Democratic Party turned out to be pyrrhic. After becoming aware of the electoral machinations, the corruption of the Democratic Party apparatus, the fraud and lies, millions of people quite reasonably concluded that it was not Trump who represented the “greater evil” in American politics. Those who brought Trump to power were not the people who had divided the Democratic Party by speaking out against Hillary Clinton but those who in the name of struggle against the right-wing threat had supported neoliberal policies that objectively created the conditions for the inevitable victory of right-wing populism. The capitulation by Sanders pulled out the last moral props from beneath the political rhetoric of the Democrats. In declaring his support for Clinton, Senator Sanders betrayed not only his supporters, the voters and his own political positions but also American democracy. The histories of Sanders and Tsipras show in equal degree that in politics there is no such thing as “honourable capitulation”. Compromises are necessary and unavoidable but not at the price of renouncing one’s own strategic goals and the principles for the sake of which the struggle, properly speaking, has been conducted. In such circumstances, politicians become the hostages of the very forces against which they were fighting shortly before.

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In the thinking of most Americans, Clinton embodied everything they disliked in their country. Revulsion outweighed fear, and Trump became president. The capitulation by Sanders made it possible to conduct a sort of political experiment. The senator from Vermont justified his refusal to continue the struggle on the basis of the need to unite all available forces in order to stop Trump. The result of this tactic was that Trump won the presidential election, to a significant degree through the votes of offended and disillusioned supporters of Sanders himself in liberal northern states. If Sanders had taken the risk of going into the election as an independent or as a candidate of the “Greens”, as was demanded by activists outraged by the rigging of the primaries, he would at the very least not have made the situation of the Democrats worse. Even discounting a scenario that had him winning a three-cornered race against Trump and Clinton simultaneously, it was quite obvious from voter surveys that he was guaranteed of emerging in first place in several states, something that would automatically have led to radical changes in the US political system and that against the background of a relative balance between Republicans and Democrats would have allowed representatives of a third party to become the decisive force in the electoral college, and hence to decide the next occupant of the White House. Despite the thoroughly convincing sociological data, Sanders could not know everything in advance. But it is precisely a readiness to accept responsibility for difficult decisions, and to take risks, that distinguishes a real politician from a party functionary or bureaucrat. A refusal to accept risks is tantamount to ceasing to strive for radical change or for large-scale victories. In the circumstances of the 2016 election, Bernie Sanders revealed himself not as a politician but as a functionary. The defeat of left-wing populism, resulting to a significant degree from the indecisiveness of its leaders and their lack of readiness to make a consistent break with the liberals, guaranteed that the force that would succeed in mobilising mass resistance to the system and smashing through the obstacles would be the populism of the right. Such a turn of events, however, would in no way resolve the issue of the need for a left alternative. Creating such an alternative was only possible in practice if the members of the left were to break decisively with the liberals. Instead of acting as defenders of the system against attack by populist forces, the left had to learn to exploit the situation, conscious that it was the collapse of the neoliberal order that would open new opportunities for them.

The cruel revenge of the American working class On the evening of 8 November 2016, American liberal circles began to be seized by panic when despite all the forecasts it was becoming clear that Donald Trump, whom the sociologists and political analysts had written off as doomed to defeat, was polling unexpectedly well. The panic deepened after it was reported that the Republican candidate was ahead in decisive states. The Canadian Embassy site on which electronic immigration applications could be filled out went down because of the unprecedented number of inquiries. The US segment of the internet exploded on the one hand in calls for Americans to “bail out of the country”,

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and on the other, in cheerful farewell messages; workers and provincial residents wanted liberal intellectuals, Hollywood identities and financial analysts to take their leave as quickly as possible from the country they had tortured for so long. Leaving out of account the open lies in which Trump was reported as saying things he had not, the accusations against the new president were based on a few statements pertaining to Muslims and on his call to put an end to illegal immigration. The trouble was that it was precisely this appeal that was responsible for Trump’s popularity among the poorest categories of citizens, including AfricanAmericans and people of Latin American origin, who were suffering most from the competition provided by illegal immigrants. Trump’s attacks on political correctness were in no way manifestations of his personal feelings, of his boorishness and lack of restraint, but represented a thoroughly conscious strategy of consolidating his support among the social groups that were suffering from the dictatorship of political correctness. They were indeed suffering, in concrete material terms, after losing their jobs and incomes. Trump’s propaganda was completely rational and effective precisely because it did not resonate with people’s feelings and prejudices, as the intellectuals considered, but with their real interests, even though these were often perceived in distorted form. This was a sort of marker that immediately encouraged millions of offended representatives of the lower orders of American society to identify the candidate immediately as one of their own, as an enemy of the liberal elite. To a significant degree, the panic of the liberals was a result of their own propaganda. Creating the image of Trump the monster, the journalists and intellectuals began to believe in the absolute evil they themselves had constructed. To criticise Trump proved in essence to be impossible. All that remained was to concentrate on a few unfortunate statements, while ascribing to him all conceivable vices – racism, homophobia, hatred for women and so forth. And although the Republican candidate had indeed repeatedly allowed himself to utter statements that were not politically correct, the main reason behind these accusations was not Trump’s words or actions but what his opponents attributed to him, citing and alluding to one another for lack of other facts. While Hillary was readily forgiven for thoroughly dubious statements and for actual discrimination against women in organisations she headed (however people searched, not a single such example was found in the Trump companies), Donald Trump was depicted not only as a racist and homophobe, but even as a fascist. These accusations had nothing in common with reality. Tom Frank noted ironically: If Trump is a fascist, as liberals often said, Democrats should have put in their strongest player to stop him, not a party hack they’d chosen because it was her turn. Choosing her indicated either that Democrats didn’t mean what they said about Trump’s riskiness, that their opportunism took precedence over the country’s well-being, or maybe both.8 The mass of ordinary Americans never pondered the question of how politically correct this or that candidate was. These people no longer trusted propaganda, and

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the more aggressively the organs of the mass media behaved, the less they were listened to. The criticism aimed at an eccentric billionaire proved insufficient to compensate for the far stronger feelings that the former First Lady aroused in millions of Americans. Whatever the intellectuals said, Trump could be mocked but Hillary was hated. To the last, liberal journalists continued arguing that a Trump victory was impossible since the only people who supported him were conservative white males pining for the days when they had dominated America. White males had long since ceased to be the majority either among the population or among voters. But substantial proportions of those very minorities who in the opinion of journalists should have feared and hated Trump were in fact voting for him. Many Black and Latino Americans went to the polling stations with one thought: to punish the Democrats for many years of betrayal, for the fact that for many years the Democrats had used minorities as an electoral resource, ignoring their real needs and interests. The privileged white men and no less privileged women from well-off bourgeois families who acted as the self-proclaimed defenders of minorities had never shown any interest in what the inhabitants of Black and Hispanic ghettos thought or wanted. They were certain that by buying off community leaders, and by distributing gifts of targeted assistance, they could guarantee their control over the votes of a mass of silent creatures, devoid of their own will and opinions. This strategy worked for many years, but in 2016 things turned out differently. The policy of counterposing numerous minorities to the “white” working class failed because the class differences within ethno-religious groups proved more important than the vertical solidarity proclaimed by the liberals and their allies on the left. The minorities had always been divided along class lines and could represent a united whole only in the imagination of ideologues. But so long as it was possible to control the electoral behaviour of minorities through ethnic elites and corrupt community leaders, this reality could be ignored. Trump’s victory was ensured not least by the fact that a significant sector of the “non-white” lower orders preferred solidarity with the traditional “white” working class. Statistics gathered after the election showed how false the ideas of American liberals (and of their left allies) about themselves and about American society actually were. Hillary, despite all her feminist declarations, received fewer votes from women than had Barack Obama. Among African-Americans and Latinos, of course, the Democrats were still ahead in statistical terms. But Trump, who was accused of racism, won more votes from non-white Americans than had any Republican candidate for many years. The voting was determined not by skin colour or by the identities invented by liberal ideologues, but by social interests. The Republicans were victorious not only in their accustomed citadels in the South but also in traditionally liberal states such as Wisconsin. It was these votes that in many cases were decisive in tipping the scales to Trump’s advantage. Supporters of Bernie Sanders, in significant numbers, also gave their votes to the Republican candidate, even though their leader himself was campaigning desperately for Hillary Clinton, whom he had been criticising only shortly before. Muslims who were US citizens also gave active support to Trump despite his

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statements. People’s social position influenced their choices far more than their membership in one or another ethnic group. Workers who voted for Trump acted quite consciously on the basis of their class interests. Unregulated immigration was an essential part and organic element of the same open market and part of the general process of deregulation, which all left-wing economists were criticising with such persistence and conviction. It is logically impossible to imagine regulation of the markets for goods and capital without the simultaneous regulation of the market for labour, and consequently of immigration as well. The position of the Trump voters who supported his call to limit immigration was dictated by the harsh logic of competition in the labour market, a logic exacerbated by neoliberal reforms. But this logic had nothing in common with racism or xenophobia since it reflected the workers’ current class interests. Lenin termed this a “bourgeois policy of the working class”.9 Under capitalism such a situation is quite natural for the working class, which not only has common social interests but is also incorporated into a system of occupational and sectoral ties that in particular circumstances forces it to support certain groups of the bourgeoisie that by virtue of corporative-productive and market logic appear to workers as “their own”. From the point of view of left ideology, such manifestations of corporative solidarity are reactionary. But they appear no less dangerous to the representatives of financial capital. After all, what is involved here is the blocking of multi-billiondollar monetary flows that allow banks and the politicians suborned by them to lead a parasitic existence at the expense of the real sector of the economy. The white liberal elite, which actively exploits the cheap labour of illegal immigrants, has had a quite conscious interest in preserving the existing state of affairs. This elite has not concealed its contemptuous attitude to conservative provincial toilers, to “rednecks” subsisting on their own physical labour. The latter are even blamed for the fact that the greater part of them (though by no means all) had the misfortune, like the Washington intellectuals themselves, to be born white, and half of them, male as well. Meanwhile, in the mid-twentieth century just such white provincial workers voted for progressive candidates while supporting trade unions and the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By the early twenty-first century, they had become conservative – not because their own needs and interests had changed but because they had been pitilessly betrayed by capital-city leftists who preferred the game of “discourses” and “identities” to the struggle for workers’ rights. Describing the residents of working-class towns in the Midwest, Tom Frank states: “Nearly everyone has a conversion story they can tell: how their dad had been a union steelworker and a stalwart Democrat but how all their brothers and sisters started voting Republican”.10 Donald Trump, however, turned out not just to be a representative of the conservative camp for whom frustrated workers voted. He became the first protest candidate ever to have been given the chance to break through into the White House. In this capacity, he was no longer so much a conservative as a mouthpiece for a plebeian rage that did not fit into the usual framework of “right” and “left” politics.

142 The lessons of America Trump’s election campaign, as Tom Frank recognised, repeated ideas and slogans from the left.11 The Republican candidate was supported by farmers, petty office employees and the provincial intelligentsia. In reality, this was a revolt by the forgotten and aggrieved provincial America against the pampered residents of California, who had grown rich on the labour of immigrants; against cosmopolitan bureaucrats in Washington; and against liberal elites who had long since turned their backs on their own country. Frank observed that the appeals Trump addressed to the Sanders constituency were not simply an attempt to attract votes. They reflected a radical change in the position of the Republicans, whose candidate now stood not to the right of the Democrats but to their left: Donald Trump’s many overtures to supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders were just the beginning. He also deliberately echoed the language of Franklin Roosevelt, he denounced “big business” (not once but several times), and certain of his less bloodthirsty foreign policy proposals almost remind one of George McGovern’s campaign theme: “Come home, America.”12 The British journalist, Megan Trudell, writing for International Socialism, also stated that the social bases of Sanders and Trump were in many ways similar and that the massive shift of workers to the camp of the Republicans was not, in the final instance, to be explained by the “betrayal of political elites”.13 It was protest against the existing system, protest that had built up over many years and that finally burst through to the surface, that determined the behaviour of the lower orders of society during the 2016 elections. It was simply that this plebeian rage found two variants for its political expression: “Depending on geography, individual experience, levels of racism, political affiliation and a host of other identifications, some are being pulled behind Sanders and some behind Trump”.14 The similarity between the supporters of Trump and Sanders was defined very aptly by one of those ordinary Americans: “The people who like Trump and the people who like Sanders share one thing: they are angry at our corrupt government”.15 The syncretic populist movements of the early twenty-first century are not only an expression of spontaneous popular anger against the elites but also a quite rational response by the socially oppressed to the consistent, systematic and, most important, completely conscious betrayal of their interests by left-wing populist and intellectual circles. These movements are in no way left wing, but it would be profoundly mistaken to characterise them in all cases as right-wing or uniformly reactionary. What in fact exists is a single wave of populist protest, whose politico-ideological form oscillates from left to right radicalism depending on the specific conditions in various countries and on the positions taken by charismatic leaders. Meanwhile, the majority of the participants in the movements are indifferent to both ideologies. Where members of the left are faithful to their class approach, their task is to pursue the struggle for ideological hegemony within the populist protests, but the left liberals have chosen a directly contrary path – defending their discourse against the challenges of popular common sense, and struggling against the movement

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of the lower classes, in the interests of the bourgeois elite. Commenting on the panicked articles appearing in the American press, the left-liberal Russian blogger, Kirill Martynov, did not hold back from sharply criticising his American colleagues, noting: I find repellent the rhetoric according to which the ‘old, poor and stupid’ voted to ‘do away with the future of the young and clever’. Democracy is for everyone, and old people too have the right to think about the future and how they want to see it, so go to the devil.16 In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn and his associates detected the same trend to some degree when they noted that despite all the values-related differences there were “some similarities” between the moods among Trump supporters and among their own. Of course, “some of Trump’s answers to the big questions facing America, and the divisive rhetoric around them” were clearly wrong, but it was possible to welcome the results of the American elections as a “rejection of the political establishment”.17 The left-wing Labourites, despite their extremely hostile attitude to Trump himself, were quite correct in assessing the election outcome as the result of a spontaneous revolt from below. Meanwhile the Russian business newspaper Kommersant, in an article on the 2017 elections in Britain, described Corbyn disapprovingly as a “red Trump”.18 Unfortunately for the Labourites, they did not manage to draw sufficiently consistent conclusions from what had happened in America and paid for this with their defeat in 2019. Meanwhile, the American left, recovering from defeat, found the strength to generate a new wave of mass struggle for change.

The left against the workers The inauguration of Donald Trump was accompanied by impressive protest actions. The forty-fifth president of the United States had not been in his post a single day when massive demonstrations took place in Washington and other major American cities. The public were not protesting against any particular decision by the head of state or against his politics in general but against his individual personality. The participants in the actions had been unable to formulate a single political claim to put to the new resident of the White House. The essence of what was taking place was expressed far better by the ideologue of Russian privatisation Anatoly Chubais, when he related his impressions of the World Economic Forum that was under way in Davos literally during the same days. According to Chubais, Trump’s victory aroused a sense of horror among the representatives of the global elite gathered at the forum. The sole comforting moment was a speech by the Chinese leader: Davos was opened by the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Xi Jinping with a simply marvellous speech, an ode to the market economy full of striking appeals concerning the need to do away with trade barriers

144 The lessons of America between countries and to reduce tariffs. It ended with a declaration that China was opening up a whole series of markets that had previously been closed. It was a super-liberal speech, in the best traditions of the Chicago school. The attitude of the Davos participants to Trump, as Chubais put it, could be expressed in a simple formula: “If he doesn’t renounce everything he’s said until now, he’s going to lead us all to catastrophe”.19 The assessment of these events provided by left-liberal circles in the US differed little from the views expressed by neoliberal ideologues. Intellectuals in leading cities were prepared to blame anyone for what had happened except for themselves. As in the aftermath of Brexit, the statements by the intellectuals were full of open hatred and contempt for their own “uneducated” and “incorrect” populations. In the view of the left-liberal intelligentsia, Trump’s success was part of a general “racist right-wing resurgence” paralleling what was taking place in Europe.20 Joan Welsh lamented on the pages of the Nation, “It feels like everything we know about politics is wrong”, then immediately blamed everything that had happened on “white men”, who had begun to “see themselves as a minority, and to act as a self-conscious minority group”.21 But why had such movements arisen just in the mid-2010s, why had they been the only serious challenge to neoliberalism, why had they received mass support, and why, in the struggle against them, had the left finished up in the same boat with the ruling class? On these questions, the analysts were silent. From the articles that littered “progressive” American publications after the elections, it was clear that these people understood nothing and had learnt nothing. In a fit of despair and panic, they had begun to say and write things that until shortly before they had concealed, meanwhile interpreting the defeat suffered by Clinton and the US establishment as their own. Tom Frank had recognised that many of Trump’s proposals coincided with the ideas of the left, but even he was not prepared to support the new president, who had been elected by the lower orders of American society, in implementing the corresponding parts of his program. To the contrary, Frank expressed solidarity with the liberal mainstream that was ready to struggle against any initiative put forward by the new occupant of the White House.22 In this respect the left flank of the American establishment was in complete solidarity with the official policies of the Republican and Democratic parties. Among those who expressed such moods was the well-known film producer Michael Moore, who on the day after the elections posted on the internet what amounted to a declaration of principles for the anti-Trump resistance, a “morning after to-do list” for how to save America. The key idea underlying his program was that through active resistance to Trump it would be possible to “take over the Democratic Party and return it to the people”.23 Unfortunately, an uncompromising struggle against the new administration would not only fail to move the Democratic Party to the left, but to the contrary, would deprive the left of an independent voice in American politics, annulling the achievements of the Bernie Sanders campaign and definitively transforming radical critics of the system into hostages of the right-liberal camp who were leading a struggle for its preservation.

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Against this background, the positions of Sanders himself were extremely considered and reasonable. The senator from Vermont recognised that Trump’s victory reflected the anger of American workers and of an increasingly impoverished middle class at the outcomes of neoliberal politics, and thus declared: “To the degree that Mr Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him”.24 Later, when the new president announced that the US was quitting the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that talks on the founding of an analogous Transatlantic Partnership would be halted and that the North American Free Trade Agreement would be reviewed, Sanders expressed support for him. Sanders refused to boycott Trump’s inauguration and repeatedly appealed to the president to fulfil the progressive promises that Trump had made during his election campaign. At the same time, Sanders attended protest demonstrations and addressed opponents of Trump but in each case avoided playing a leading role. This delicate tactical manoeuvring, however, had one important drawback. Behind the tactics there was no strategy, and without a strategy it was impossible to take the fateful decisions that would determine the role of the left in solving the huge institutional crisis that had seized not only the US but the entire world. The US elections of 2016 had done more to reveal the weakness of the left than any other political event in the previous two decades. The successes of Trump and Sanders demonstrated to an equal degree that a struggle for political and social change in the countries of the capitalist centre was perfectly possible but that the members of the left themselves were unwilling and unable to wage it, preferring abstract campaigns of solidarity with the inhabitants of exotic countries to performing concrete work to improve life in their own countries and to defending the interests of “white” workers. Love for the oppressed inhabitants of the “Third World” was among the gentlemanly attributes that were obligatory for the liberal left. But the fate of the countries of the periphery depends not least on the state of political development in the countries of the centre. Solidarity campaigns around specific issues, even when successful, do not ensure real changes that can only be guaranteed by dismantling the neoliberal economic order. How this dismantling will proceed, and who will ultimately benefit from it, are questions to be dealt with through political struggle. But it is the destruction of the system of global institutions established in the late twentieth century that opens up for the people of the Global South the practical possibility of taking their fates in their own hands and of independently formulating new strategies for development. In itself, Trump’s victory does not signify the triumph of any enlightened ideas and will not lead to the return of the welfare state. But it is an important and indispensable step on the road to the destruction of the neoliberal system. So long as the negative, destructive work has not been done, carrying out any positive agenda will be impossible. Without destruction there is no creation. Meanwhile, fear of the destruction of the existing order is transforming sympathetic idealists and former left-radical intellectuals into bitter, despairing conservatives, as has already happened repeatedly in history.

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The contradictions of Trump In its economic sections, Trump’s election program was the most left wing that can be imagined within the context of American politics in the 2010s. It called for reform of the banking sector and for restoring the Glass-Steagall Act; introduced by F.D. Roosevelt and imposing regulations on the financial markets, this act had been repealed in 1999. Later, it should be noted, these ideas were not developed further either in the activity of the new administration or in its rhetoric. Trump was more active in insisting on a broadening of accessible medical care and of the network of child care centres. Later, he proposed introducing unpaid maternity leave for American women. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, America remained the sole developed country without such a provision – none of the Democratic administrations, despite priding themselves on their ties to feminists, had tried to win anything of the kind. Tom Frank remarked with amazement that Trump was behaving in a manner quite unbecoming a Republican. “The party’s maximum leader has adopted the left critique of ‘free trade’ almost in its entirety, a critique that I have spent much of my adult life making”.25 Trump, unlike Frank, is in no way an opponent of capitalism. The threat he poses is not to the bourgeois order as such but to its neoliberal version, which became consolidated on a world scale after the fall of the USSR. The forty-fifth president of the US is a firm adherent of the principles of protectionism, setting himself the goal of defending American markets and jobs. Especially important is the fact that he has called on other countries to do the same, without even considering the interests of the transnational corporations based in the US. The alarm of the members of the transnational financial elite who had gathered in Davos was understandable. The trade agreements that Trump had set out to destroy were by no means devoted solely to trade. Their content included limiting the sovereignty of governments and curtailing the democratic and social rights of citizens, along with providing numerous privileges to huge international firms. The question arises: why did the American billionaire Donald Trump oppose these pacts? Trump and his associates, despite being fabulously wealthy people, are not part of the transnational corporate-financial elite that took shape and established its dominance during the quarter-century that followed the collapse of the USSR and the triumph of the neoliberal order on a world scale. The capital holdings of the group to which Trump belongs within the US bourgeoisie are in the range of three to four billion dollars. On the scale of the capitalism of the early twenty-first century, these are no longer vast fortunes. The transnational companies control resources tens of times greater, often amounting to hundreds of billions. Trump is thus a quite typical representative of middle business, oriented towards the local market and the development of the real sector. This sector of the bourgeoisie has naturally revolted against the transnational corporations, which after uniting with the largest banks and the liberal political elite (of which politically correct leftists are an organic part) has spent a quarter of a century exploiting its dominant position in Washington to alter the rules of the game to its advantage and

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to redistribute resources, undermining not only the position of workers and the middle class but also of significant numbers of entrepreneurs. In rebelling against the transnational oligarchy, middle business has been forced to seek allies. The lower orders of society, who for decades have suffered from neoliberal policies, joined the revolt with enthusiasm. Such an alliance cannot be durable, but it is not accidental. For the labour movement to restore itself and gather strength requires the development of industry and the internal market. It requires social policies that bolster the position of workers and that give them confidence. In short, it requires protectionism. Historically, both German social democracy and the Russian working class on which the Bolsheviks were able to rely grew up against a background of protectionist policy. Without industrial development and the formation of an internal market, there would not have been a 1917 revolution either.26 While workers need jobs and decent wages, business entrepreneurs operating in the domestic marketplace need customers with purchasing power, and these customers need to be the same workers. Henry Ford in his time came up with the well-known principle: my workers have to be able to buy the cars they make. The political embodiment of this principle was the New Deal of Roosevelt in the 1930s. It was of those times of “American greatness” that Trump reminded his voters. The New Deal years, however, were not only a time of social transformation and of the strengthening of national industry but also the golden age of the American labour movement. Halting the rise in the US of the left and of the trade unions proved possible as a result of the Cold War, of anticommunist purges and of the McCarthyite persecution of the radical intelligentsia, which after losing its ties to the workers, hid itself in comfortable academic ghettos. In the mid-twentieth century, the strategists of the Western left had argued at length over the need for an alliance between the working class and middle business against large monopoly capital. Paradoxically, such an alliance formed spontaneously around the figure of Trump, who was supported by workers, farmers, small entrepreneurs and the provincial intelligentsia. Hegemonic within this bloc, however, were not progressive left intellectuals but a vulgar and politically incorrect bourgeois from Manhattan. For this outcome, the intellectuals did not have Trump to blame but themselves – since it was they who had contemptuously rejected class politics as “outdated”. In essence, Trump set about implementing everything about which the Western left had talked a quarter-century earlier, but at the same time rested on ideological concepts that not only contradicted his own program but that also blocked its realisation. The ideology of the forty-fifth president of the United States was a patchwork of contradictions. This was no accident; his program, like the coalition of social forces that had assembled around him, was transitional in character, aimed at carrying out one single task, but an absolutely fundamental one – undermining the dominance of the transnational financial oligarchy. The vacillations of Bernie Sanders, who first expressed approval of the decisions of the White House, then poured furious criticism on its occupant, in turn reflected the objective contradiction embodied in the Trump administration. In fact, a number of Trump’s actions

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and declarations place him in the same rank with the antiglobalists who protested in Seattle in 1999. But other decisions and statements by the president marked him immediately, and in straightforward fashion, not just as a conservative but as a supporter of the free market and of liberal economic doctrines. From Trump’s own point of view, of course, there was no contradiction at all. The president, like most of those who voted for him, did not believe in global warming but believed in the free market and low taxes. The American internal market needed to be defended against unscrupulous foreign competitors. Simply put, the recipe required liberalism for local business and protectionism for “foreigners”. After all, it was on precisely this basis that American capitalism had developed in the first third of the twentieth century! Nevertheless, transnational capital as it became consolidated in the late twentieth century had changed the rules not only in the global but also in the domestic market. It was these new rules that had brought the world to systemic crisis from 2008. The collapse of the neoliberal world order was a natural and spontaneous process, born of its own self-destructive logic, and not at all of the ideological concepts of the antiglobalists or of Trump. This process of disintegration had begun before the advent to power of the forty-fifth US president, and indeed, Trump’s victory itself was a result of the crisis that had already developed fully and penetrated all the pores of society. In 2016, politics had become synchronised with the economy. The principal difference between the forty-fifth president of the US and his liberal rivals was not that he lacked faith in globalisation but that he took account of its crash and thus attempted not to save the collapsing system but to construct new policies starting from a new reality. Mobilising the votes of workers, industrial capital in 2016 scored a historic victory over financial capital. Meanwhile the workers, in voting for Trump, had the chance to exact their revenge, dealing out cruel punishment to the people who for many decades had exploited and deceived them. Trump’s success was not the outcome of a particular confluence of circumstances, unpleasant for the liberals, but of the development of a systemic socio-economic crisis caused by the complete exhaustion of the existing model of development of capitalism. It was not that the system would meet its downfall because of the success of Trump but that Trump’s success was a result of the fact that the system had begun to collapse. The disintegration of the old system was to a certain extent a spontaneous process, at least on the economic level. Nevertheless, the formation of a new social order would not by any means go ahead automatically; aiming to reconfigure the rules of the game, Trump faced the need to enact his own positive program. Here, he was doomed to run up against the objective contradictions between the interests of the various social and economic groups that had a stake in change. While describing Trump as a “neofascist”, the American commentator, Barry Finger, unexpectedly recognised that the measures the president was implementing might set off a “state-led investment boom”, that would allow a sharp improvement in the position of workers if the Trump nationalist coalition could “thwart attempts by the Republican establishment to pay for this massive stimulus through offsets defunding social welfare programs that benefit Trump’s base”.27

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Meanwhile, this question would also predetermine the character and content of the class struggle in the US in the new epoch. The consistent implementation of protectionist policies aimed at restoring and dominating the domestic market could not be effective without measures aimed at the regulation and social reconstruction of the US economy. Whatever calls might be made for re-industrialising the US on the basis of market principles, these principles were objectively useless for carrying out this task. If the situation were different, then not only would the task already have been performed more or less, but Trump would scarcely have had the chance to occupy the Oval Office. Attempts to replenish the budget through import tariffs while simultaneously cutting taxes, to stimulate production without reducing the profits of financial corporations and to raise workers’ wages without affecting the interests of entrepreneurs inevitably led the economic policies of the forty-fifth president of the US into a logical dead-end. Escaping from this impasse was impossible without making a political choice in favour of one side or the other. Any choice, however, would have the effect of splitting the coalition. It was this that made unavoidable the political paralysis that began to afflict the new administration soon after Trump’s enthronement in the White House. After making a number of important and controversial decisions, the president was forced to sharply curtail his activity. An indissoluble alliance of financial capital, the Washington political establishment and the corrupt left-liberal intelligentsia then set about blocking his protectionist agenda. The political influence of this alliance rested on the fragmentation of society that the US ruling class had brought about over the previous thirty years, with the enthusiastic support of the left. Trump’s initiatives, reactionary and progressive alike, were blocked by Congress; meanwhile, the president refrained from mobilising his supporters among the lower classes, preferring to take cover behind foreign policy activity about which he understood nothing. The weakness of Trump’s practical politics reflected the contradictions of the broad cross-class coalition that had brought him to the White House. All of the groups and social layers that had supported the new president were equally offended and humiliated by the policies that the Washington liberals had pursued, and all these people had an interest in seeing these policies reviewed. All of them needed protectionism. Beyond this point, however, their unity dissipated; on the positive aspects of the program, their interests did not coincide in the least. The main source of the strength of populist movements has always been their ability to unite a broad cross-class coalition around a single leader. Their stumbling-block, however, has invariably been the objective contradictions that exist between class interests. In the longer term, the success of populist leaders, and often their physical survival, has always depended on whether, through altering configurations and through manoeuvring, they have been able to keep the blocs they lead from disintegrating. Will they be able to refashion these blocs as they go, making a choice in favour of the forces on which they need to rely at a given moment? Sooner or later they will need not only to support one section of their supporters against others but also to sacrifice many of their political friends and at times even the interests of their class.

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Donald Trump, too, was doomed to have to make such a choice. A consistent realisation of the hopes that Trump’s campaign had inspired, often unjustifiably, in the American masses would have been possible only through a radical break not just with free trade but also with the principles of market liberalism within the US. Trump, needless to say, could never embrace such a thing, and hence the policies of his administration finished up riddled with contradictions. To the degree that the US loses its position as a world hegemon, the need will inevitably grow within American society for development of the welfare state (just as occurred in Britain a century earlier). This objective need for social modernisation does not by any means signify a rejection of the basic foundations of American capitalism, but paradoxically, it is proving to be incompatible with the present structure of interests of the ruling class; with its political culture; and also with its ideological hegemony in the form in which this has functioned in the US over the past fifty years. The contradiction here between the objectively mature needs of the development of capitalism and the interests of the topmost levels of the bourgeois class has created a kind of revolutionary situation, of which Bernie Sanders took advantage during his second campaign in 2020. The spontaneous outburst of solidarity sparked by the Sanders campaign in 2016 did not end after the senator from Vermont capitulated. The elections of that year marked the collapse of the politics of political correctness, creating the preconditions for its replacement by the politics of social solidarity. The hysterical reaction by liberal circles in the US confirms that even if they have failed to apprehend the scale and significance of the process now under way, they sense intuitively that the ground is slipping from beneath their feet. They may for some time to come frighten one another and try to frighten minority groups with talk of the repressions that the new administration is supposedly about to unleash against them. But they themselves understand perfectly that they are not telling the truth. By contrast, the history of the return to politics of the American working class as a conscious, independent formation is still only beginning. For the left, the institutional crisis that is undermining the two-party system and the dominance of the Washington establishment has created the prospect of serious participation in the life of society. Evidence of this is provided not only by the sudden success of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries but also the general shift of public discussion in the direction of social and economic matters of practical significance. In 2020 the next set of presidential primaries in the US Democratic Party featured a sharp rise in the popularity of Sanders, despite the fact that this time, the party establishment took steps to divide the progressive electorate. Elizabeth Warren and a number of other left-liberal politicians ran against Sanders, while centrists delivered speeches meant to suggest that they, too, should be regarded as members of the left. None of this, however, could prevent a swift rise by Sanders in the opening phase of the primaries. The reason had to do not only with an objective demand for his ideas but also with a radical change in the movement itself. While in 2016 the senator from Vermont had possessed a following of thousands of politically inexperienced young people, the movement by 2020 had reached maturity.

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Meanwhile, success for Sanders would depend to a significant extent on the ability of his campaign to win back the trust of a working class that had been betrayed by the Democratic Party and by left-liberal intellectuals. As the voting in Nevada demonstrated, this had been achieved to a considerable degree. The older generation of the white working class, demoralised by the betrayals, were ready as before to support Trump, but in the course of the Sanders campaign, immigrants and younger workers had acquired the first elements of class consciousness. The journalists for the British Tribune, Dustin Guastella and Connor Kilpatrick, wrote: Like the New Deal coalition before him, Sanders’s success has been based largely on his ability to pull in immigrant workers, who are often new voters, in big numbers. And these voters are looking more and more loyal to the political revolution”.28 While right-wing commentators in Europe, the US and Russia were united in pointing to the “radicalism” of Sanders, arguing that it would stop him from achieving electoral victory, members of the left stressed the moderation of his practical demands and their thoroughly reformist character. Both sides missed the main point: the contradiction between the moderate nature of the demands, on the one hand, and the official ideology that depicted them as super-radical on the other, was revealing a profound systemic crisis of American capitalism. At the same time, this contradiction bore witness to the ripening of a political revolution that was seeing the rise of a new hegemony, of a new ideology and, most important, of a new class consciousness together with the forms of organisation corresponding to it. The lack of an institutionalised social democratic party, a political lacuna that for many decades had been regarded as an impediment to class solidarity in the US, was proving to be an unexpected plus for the movement. There were no old institutions within whose frameworks activists would be compelled to conduct their work; there was no outmoded ideology and no party bureaucracy to be taken into account. It would be possible to begin virtually from a blank sheet. In unexpected fashion, the US, which for many years had lagged behind Europe in this respect, was proving capable not only of providing an impulse to left radicalism but also of furnishing a model for a new class mobilisation.

Notes 1 Quoted in: T. Reifer, “The Senator from Wall Street”. Review 31. http://review31. co.uk/article/view/406/the-senator-from-wall-street. 2 Socialist Review, Mar. 2016, no. 411, p. 6. 3 One of sanders supporters wrote. 4 New Politics, Winter 2016, vol. XV, no. 4, p. 15. 5 Ibid., p. 10. 6 The Guardian, 26 July 2016. 7 See: “Michael Moore’s five-step program for Dems to get over the election”. Washington Examiner, 9 Nov. 2016. www.washingtonexaminer.com/michael-moores-five-

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step-program-for-dems-to-get-over-the-election/article/2606997. See also: Tom Frank, “Donald Trump is moving to the White House, and liberals put him there”. The Guardian, 9 Nov. 2016. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/donaldtrump-white-house-hillary-clinton-liberals. T. Frank. “Donald Trump is moving to the White House, and liberals put him there”. See V.I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochineniy [Complete works]. Moscow: Politizdat, 1979, vol. 6, p. 96. See: T. Frank, What’s the matter with Kansas? How conservatives won the heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2004, p. 3. See: T. Frank, “The Republicans and Democrats failed blue-collar America: The left behind are now having their say”. The Guardian, 6 Nov. 2016. www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2016/nov/06/republicans-and-democrats-fail-blue-collar-america. The Guardian, 28 July 2016. Megan Trudell, “Sanders, Trump and the US working class”. International Socialism, Spring 2016, No. 150, p. 27. Ibid., p. 28. Written by one of Sanders supporters in an online debate. Facebook page of Kirill Martynov: www.facebook.com/kmartynov/posts/1361779543 855810. The Mirror, 10 Nov. 2016. www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/live-clinton-donaldtrump-election-9192209. Kommersant, 3 June 2017. “Chubais described the sense of horror at Davos at a global political catastrophe”. Rambler/finance: https://finance.rambler.ru/news/2017-01-20/chubays-rasskazal-oboschuschenii-uzhasa/?updated=text. New Politics, Summer 2016 (vol. XVI, no. 1), p. 1. The Nation, 9 Nov. 2016. J. Welsh. “Everything we thought we knew about politics was wrong”.www.thenation.com/article/everything-we-thought-we-knew-about-politicswas-wrong/. See: The Guardian, 9 Nov. 2016. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/ donald-trump-white-house-hillary-clinton-liberals. The Guardian, 10 Nov. 2016. Michael Moore, “Take over the Democratic party and return it to the people”. www.theguardian.com/film/2016/nov/09/michael-moore-donaldtrump-morning-after-to-do-list-facebook. See: Official site of Senator Bernie Sanders: www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/ press-releases/sanders-statement-on-trump. Ibid. See: M. Kolerov. Fikhte, List, Witte, Stalin: izolirovannoe gosudarstvo, protektsionizm, pervonachal’noe sotsialisticheskoe nakoplenie i “sotsializm v odnoy strane”. Velikoe russkaya revolyutsiya 1917 g. proekt al’ternativnogo istoricheskogo razvitiya. XII Plekhanovskie chteniya [Fichte, List, Witte, Stalin: the isolated state, protectionism, primary socialist accumulation and “socialism in one country”. The Great Russian Revolution of 2017 as a project of alternative historical development. XII Plekhanov readings]. St Petersburg: Kul’tInfrmPress, 2017. New Politics, vol. XVI, no. 2 (62), Winter 2017, p. 9. Tribune, 23 Feb. 2020.

5

France From republic to oligarchy

The May Day festivities in France in 2016 were clouded by massive disorders that contrasted sharply with the tradition of revolutionary celebrations which members of the country’s left movement valued so highly. At the centre of attention this time were not triumphant processions of trade unionists, cheerfully raising social slogans, but fierce clashes between young people and police. The participants in the street disorders differed strikingly not only from the trade union bureaucrats and progressive academics but also from the radical students who in 1968 had built barricades in the Sorbonne, making up stirring slogans and citing the philosophical works of Jean-Paul Sartre. This time, the demonstrations in Paris were different, sombre and malevolent, and more reminiscent of the actions staged by the “black bloc” anarchists in Germany. The young people who skirmished with police on the Bastille Square on May 1 had not read either Sartre or Michel Foucault. For the most part, they read very little. They were people who did not discuss philosophical novelties and did not study at the Sorbonne. In fact, they did not study or work anywhere.

Playing at resistance In 1968, the protests had turned into a jovial counter-cultural game. To the rebels of 2016 this was alien and incomprehensible. They were simply venting their accumulated feelings of resentment at society, at the politicians and at the intellectuals, including those of the left. Elegant abstractions and striking slogans meant nothing to them. They were members of the first generation in fifty years to live worse than their parents and knew perfectly well that society held out no prospects for them, that it was not providing them with any chance to improve their social status. The clashes between demonstrators and police that occurred in Paris in 2016 were no more than a prologue to the far more massive confrontations that erupted throughout the country in 2018, when members of the “yellow vests” protest movement poured onto the streets. The society and political culture of France had changed. The changes had been accumulating gradually over decades, but the intellectual and political elites had tried studiously to pretend that nothing had happened. In a touching unison, left

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and right ignored the process that had begun as early as 1995 and that was unfolding before their eyes. Everything had started with a strike by public sector workers against attempts to revoke benefits enjoyed by people in state employment. Unexpectedly for the authorities, the press and even the trade unionists themselves, the strikers were supported by vast numbers of people who were completely untouched by the issue at stake. Private sector workers stood side by side with those employed in state enterprises. A transport strike prompted a massive exodus of people into the streets. The authorities took fright and retreated, but no less a shock was experienced by the left intelligentsia, whose members had expatiated on the disappearance of the working class and had sought to show (with bitter sighs, of course) that such movements were doomed. The events of 1995 had revealed the growing cultural and psychological gap between the elites and the majority of the population. But none of the left-wing politicians had drawn the necessary conclusions from these developments; they had not discerned, in what was occurring, the beginning of a new resistance on a far greater scale than what had occurred earlier and, most important, was unfolding according to new rules. The disjuncture was not only one of politics and class but was also emotional and psychological. The elites were united in their support for euro integration, for the Maastricht treaty and for neoliberalism. They had joined forces to dismantle the state sector and the welfare state. In essence, the only difference between the two parts of the political spectrum was that some were attempting to implement neoliberal policies consistently and as a matter of urgency, while others called for a show of restraint and humanity. The members of the left, at first sight, were critical of this course, but their abstract-ideological rhetoric had nothing in common with practical resistance. Following the strikes of 1995, a left government was formed in France. This government not only maintained the policies of the right but deepened them, and so it continued on each occasion when the left returned to power. Formal responsibility for the neoliberal course was borne by the Socialists. More radical groups – the Communists, the Greens, the Left Front and the New Anticapitalist Party – joined in criticising them. But unfortunately, these same groups invariably supported the Socialists as soon as the discussion turned to elections and the question of power. In conditions where the Socialist Party was the most consistent transmission belt in France for the politics of the Brussels bureaucracy, only a decisive refusal to support the Socialists, leading to the party’s destruction, could act as a tool for altering the situation. But the practical activity of the radical left, irrespective of their public rhetoric, amounted to supporting the socialists as a “lesser evil”. The effect of this policy was that against the background of the steadily declining authority of the Socialists, the influence of other members of the left not only failed to rise but fell even more rapidly. Everyone understood that the Socialist Party could count on the loyalty and support of the rest of the left, however far it shifted to the right. The abstract deliberations of intellectuals on the vices

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of capitalism, like their appeals to “humanist utopias”, bore no relationship to real life; both sounded exquisite but served more to distract people from political struggle than to stimulate resistance. The Socialists, who had cultivated close ties to the EU bureaucracy in Brussels and to financial capital, acted as the main force dismantling the social conquests of the French population. Other large left organisations revealed themselves as no better than accomplices. Figuratively speaking, while the Socialists robbed the ordinary citizen, the members of the “anticapitalist left” stood watch. The gap between institutional politics and real public sentiment increased still further, to the point where it was impossible to overcome. Whatever declarations the politicians might make, ordinary people were quick to grasp two points: first, there was no fundamental difference between the socialists and the “anticapitalist left”. Second, there was no fundamental difference between the traditional “left” and typical members of the right. The only difference was that the “leftists” were more garrulous and lied more often. But if there were no faith in the left parties, who might organise and head the opposition? A new logic of social struggle spontaneously took shape, with the principal mobilising force of mass protest now the trade unions and various popular movements with only nominal ties to the left. Street protests and strikes became the principal mode of resistance. By the mid-2000s this struggle was yielding results. Again and again, the government was forced to retreat. In similar fashion, the 2005 referendum on a European Constitution also met with defeat. The draft document that had been approved in Brussels would have turned neoliberal principles of economic and social policy into constitutional norms for the entire continent. It is noteworthy that among those who urged the French population to accept these rules were not just the dreary apparatchiks from the Socialist Party but also the famous revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Tony Negri. In a book with the evocative title Goodbye, Mr. Socialism!, Negri with hindsight characterised the views of those who sought to preserve the welfare state in France as “utter stupidities”. The Dutch who had voted down the European Constitution were said to have done this because they were “against immigration and the mixing of races”, while in France, attempts to impede capitalist integration were being made by “blind forces, nationalist forces of the Left and the Right”.1 From the point of view of the former revolutionary, the processes of globalisation that were under way were uniformly progressive and by definition irreversible. In his view, the supplanting of organised classes by ill-defined and sociologically elusive “multitudes” was not a symptom of a growing social crisis that was undermining the processes of social reproduction (even in its bourgeois form) but was a positive phenomenon that created the basis for a new progressive politics. The reality that the declassed and oppressed “multitudes” were not only losing their ties to the traditional left ‒ which fashionable theory despised ‒ but were also disinclined even to listen to left-liberal apologists for globalisation such as Negri himself, who had so far remained beyond his ken. Consequently, Negri’s ideology did not provide a simplified theoretical model expediting the transition

156 France to practical action but amounted to a classic example of false consciousness in which causes and effects changed places. The lesson of 2005, when the French people had voted down the European Constitution in a referendum, had not been grasped either. Unfortunately, this was to be the last occasion on which the left parties found the resolve to oppose the Socialists. In the course of the referendum campaigning, it was found that the draft document was coming under criticism not only from the left but from the right as well. In calling for the defence of French independence, the National Front repeated many arguments of the Communists. At that time, nevertheless, ideological hegemony in the campaign remained with the left, which unexpectedly gained a chance to seize the political initiative and to lead a mass resistance movement. This chance, however, was allowed to slip. “The France of the majority”, the journalist, Alexandre Devecchio, wrote, “the France that was saying ‘No’ to the constitution, finished up not being represented by anyone, either by the left or the right, both of which supported the same economic policies”.2

Intellectual corruption Inevitably, the moral decay of the left also affected the state of the social movements, which were simply unable to prevail without effective political support. Among the rank and file members of these movements, sympathies began appearing for the National Front, to which frustrated activists of left organisations also began gradually crossing over. The last success of the popular resistance was the struggle against the “Law of first hire”, which abolished many social and labour rights of young people. In 2006 the draft law was abandoned in the face of mass protests that swept across the country. The members of the French population were prepared to tolerate institutionalised betrayal by intellectuals and political parties so long as society retained a sort of veto power – by taking to the streets or organising a referendum, the people could block decisions taken by the political elite. But events that occurred in 2010 once again altered the rules of the game. The administration of right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy enacted another pension reform. Not only was the age of eligibility for the pension increased, but pension accumulations that had been permitted by the government in order to support the financial sector were confiscated. Nominally, citizens were offered a choice of receiving the pension at the age of 62, 65 or 67 years, but the text of the law had been drawn up in such a way that the only people able in practice to go on the pension were those who had worked without interruption since the age of 12 years . . . in circumstances where other laws banned the hiring of young people of that age. The law on pension reform was not just antisocial but amounted to open mockery of the population of the republic. Not surprisingly, it evoked genuine rage and was opposed by some 80 per cent of the population. France was engulfed in strikes and demonstrations. Contrary to its usual practice, the government did not back down, thus demonstrating that public opinion meant nothing to it. Sarkozy understood perfectly that by acting in this fashion, he was forfeiting his chance

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of re-election, but offered himself up as a sacrifice to the common interests of the political establishment. The task he set himself was to humiliate and demoralise society, showing the French population that democracy was at an end and that their views would henceforth count for nothing. To serve this goal, the career of a not-especially-successful politician could be sacrificed. Sarkozy was duly punished by the voters, who at the following elections drove him from office. But his Socialist successor, François Hollande, left the reform in place. Indeed, the Socialists pressed ahead on the course Sarkozy had plotted, beginning a radical reform of the country’s labour legislation. No one took account any longer of public opinion. The protest movement had reached a deadend; the authorities had won, demonstrating to the French population that democracy and the republic, in the usual sense of these words, had been dispensed with. Right and left were now openly united, and in place of republican rule there was now oligarchy. It is not surprising that Hollande quickly became the most unpopular of French leaders, outstripping even the record set by Sarkozy. Under the conditions of the electoral deal between right and left, however, this was no longer important. The sole remaining alternative was Marine Le Pen’s National Front, which all the other parties joined in trying to keep from being elected to parliament and to municipal councils, even though the electors were giving it as many as 40 per cent of the votes. The rhetoric of the National Front became more and more reminiscent of the habitual propaganda of the Communist Party, which the Communists themselves, influenced by the new trends, had now renounced. The political origins of the National Front, however, could not fail to arouse fears. Everyone was conscious that the party had been founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, a reactionary and an antiSemite. His daughter Marine Le Pen had positioned herself as a spokesperson for the interests of working people, assiduously purging extreme rightists from the party ranks and not sparing even her own father. As in the past, however, many French people were mistrustful of her since politicians had deceived them so often. The discontent was not to surface in the polling booths but in the streets; all that was required was a pretext. Causing the cup of popular patience to spill over was the new Labour Code proposed by the Socialists. This document was even more provocative, and demonstratively antisocial, than Sarkozy’s pension reform. The eight-hour day was abolished, the working week could now be extended to 48 hours and the additional payments for overtime were reduced to 10 per cent. No right-wing government had ever been brave enough to demand such things. The members of the “anticapitalist left”, of course, criticised the draft. But even so, there was no mention of refusing to support the Socialist Party at the next elections. While the Socialists were preparing their draft for the Labour Code, their “neighbours to the left” were urging a vote for the party in regional elections, in the name of combating the threat from the National Front. Still less was there any talk of opposing the Socialists in the presidential elections. To the contrary, the discussion was of nominating a joint candidate in the first round. Despite the slogans of the leftists, their policy in practice consisted of supporting the thoroughly bourgeois leadership of the Socialist Party – in other words, of defending the

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existing system and its associated privileges, including the positions of the traditional parties in the municipalities, in parliament and in the mass media. It is not surprising that the usual model of political behaviour collapsed. Everything had converged: the discrediting of the left, the socio-economic crisis and the alienation of society from the political system. Most important, a generation had grown up and reached adulthood with a sense of injury and frustration, having learnt from their own experience that the existing institutions were hostile to them. The radical students of 1968, who had flaunted their militancy on the barricades in the Latin Quarter, had gone on to busy themselves with their own careers, proclaiming that the only possible strategy for changing society involved following “the long road through the institutions”. By the 2000s this road had led many of the former revolutionaries to eminent posts in the parliament and government, in banks, the mass media and universities. Society, however, had not changed as the rebels from the intelligentsia had promised – it had shifted radically to the right. There was not more democracy but less. The members of the “new left” had either been defeated or had been integrated into the system, becoming part of the neoliberal bloc. Neoliberalism, which combined the drive towards socioeconomic fragmentation within the framework of the free market with the striving for socio-cultural fragmentation via the politics of multiculturalism, owed its origins almost as much to the exertions of the now-matured members of the “new left” as it did to the efforts of the corporate hierarchy. Or to be more precise, the “new left”, while preserving its ideological autonomy, had inserted itself into the agenda of the capitalist hierarchs. In the US the privileged liberal elite concealed itself behind numerous minorities while implementing its own corporative-egoistical agenda, playing off minorities against one another and at the same time counterposing them to the working class, which the liberals referred to, in politically correct fashion, as “white males”. From the 2000s the same politics, in a somewhat different configuration, came to be played out in France, though not so openly or aggressively. Meanwhile, the place of the radical students had been taken by other rebels – by a generation of unemployed youth, poorly educated thanks to the crisis of education caused by the neoliberal reforms, and whose sole road ahead was the one being opened up by confrontation with the institutions. In 2012, when young people rose in revolt in the suburbs of Amiens, a number of the rebels set fire to a school. Caught by the police, they explained their act on the basis that in literature classes they had been subjected to sadistic mockery, being forced to learn the poetry of Racine by heart. The leader of the Left Front, Jean-Luc Mélanchon, described these young people as “Amiens cretins”. The problem, however, lay not in their intellectual level but in the altered social situation. Poetry and eloquent speech are useful in a society where citizens are given the chance to develop their talents and to rise up the career ladder. But what is a knowledge of the poetry of Racine worth to people whose public discourse, if they are very lucky, is reduced to the cry “Free cash register here!” The culture of violent protest was not introduced to France from abroad. It gradually ripened in the immigrant suburbs of large cities, where accumulated

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rage burst out periodically in pogroms and revolts. In the course of time the difference between “white” youth and the descendants of immigrants became effaced. It was Arab and African youth, ultimately, who created the model of behaviour for the new generation of angry young French people. Integration had occurred, only not through multiculturalism and political correctness but through embitterment and protest, uniting youth regardless of their skin colour or religious persuasion. The outburst of youth violence, earlier quite untypical of France (or at least of its “white” population) was a symptom of changes whose scale and significance only a few were prepared to acknowledge. Added to the conflict between society and the authorities was a conflict between generations; older people were still prepared to play by the rules despite knowing that these rules were constantly being broken by the authorities, while young people no longer felt the slightest respect for the political system. For many years almost all French citizens, irrespective of their political views, religion or ideology, had believed in republican values. These values, however, had been vulgarised and discredited by the elites themselves. The social struggle would now develop according to completely different rules. The alienation of society from the state, something thoroughly familiar to people in Eastern Europe, had become a fact in the homeland of Voltaire, Robespierre and Jaurès. The formal mention of republican values remained just as important a part of political rhetoric in France as references to the October Revolution in the Soviet Union during the epoch of Leonid Brezhnev. But the consistent implementation of these principles, not to speak of serious discussion of how they should be consistently interpreted and realised politically in the conditions of a changed socioeconomic reality, was of absolutely no interest to the political class. The republican form of politics was being filled, more and more openly, with an oligarchic content.

The rise of Marine Le Pen In the context of the failure of neoliberal policies and of the complete bankruptcy of the left, the only force gaining in popularity in French society was the National Front party headed by Marine Le Pen. The German sociologist, Sebastian Chwala, noting that Marine Le Pen had “strong working-class support”, comforted his readers by noting that this was the case “above all in the regions that had been untouched by the labour movement” and that did not “share the codex of leftwing values”.3 Unfortunately, this comfort was of thoroughly dubious worth. In the first place, this was because the shift of production from old to new industrial regions was a long-term tendency that had been under way for several decades, during which time the left had done almost nothing to organise, educate and support the new working-class layers that were coming into existence. Second, it was because the penetration by the National Front into the worker milieu, after beginning with groups that had no ties to the traditional left organisations, spread gradually to other groups as well. In precisely the same fashion, the mass support seen in the past for the communists had begun initially where social democratic organisations

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were weak and where a certain organisational-ideological vacuum thus existed; subsequently, the party’s influence had spread to other groups of workers. Chwala also stressed correctly that among the workers who supported the National Front, petty-bourgeois prejudices were strong, but again, the problem was that such prejudices and illusions were by no means alien to workers who had traditionally supported the left. The difference between the socialisation undergone by workers within the classical left movement and that occurring in the National Front was that in the former, petty-bourgeois prejudices had been consciously and consistently overcome through political education and the fostering of class consciousness, something, naturally, that never figured on the agenda of the National Front. But it was precisely the effective refusal by the members of the left to carry out the corresponding activity and their open reorientation to serving the cultural requirements of the prosperous sector of the middle class that drove the worker masses of France into the embrace of the nationalists. Left-wing researchers in Western Europe recognised that the “class consciousness of workers” was “declining” and identified a whole series of thoroughly convincing structural factors that explained why this was so. Sebastian Chwala noted that “competition for jobs” had “replaced class struggle”, as a result of which the consciousness of workers had become “petty bourgeois”.4 Competition for jobs, however, has existed for as long as capitalism and the labour market. Deindustrialisation and the changing structure of employment have substantially transformed Western societies, but the paradox is that the turn to the right has been most radical precisely in that sector of the population that has retained its industrial jobs. The point is that in the classical period of capitalism neither workers’ solidarity nor the class consciousness and “left” values of the proletariat arose of their own accord but were the result of constant interaction between the worker masses and political or trade union activists who shaped class consciousness through the organising of constant and effective collective actions aimed at defending the practical interests of working people. In the early twenty-first century, sporadic short-term campaigns around specific issues have at best compensated for the lack of such activity by the left. But this has been categorically insufficient even to maintain the class consciousness of the masses under changing social conditions. Moreover, the reference to “traditional left values” that workers are for some reason supposed to share is thoroughly anti-historical. If class consciousness does not develop and is not transformed, it dies out. The urge to accuse workers of losing their class consciousness merely demonstrates how impossible it is to bridge the abyss that separates intellectuals not only from the workers masses but also from their own past. Nor have the usual templates applied by sociologists and political scientists been capable of providing explanations. The workers who were voting in increasing numbers for the National Front characterised their views for the most part (though not always) as “rather right-wing”.5 From this, however, it does not in the least follow that they voted for the National Front because they held right-wing views. More likely, they came to the conclusion that their views were “right-wing”

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because they voted for Marine Le Pen, whom political scientists defined as a right-wing politician. The question, in other words, did not concern the views of the workers but above all the views of the sociologists and intellectuals who projected their own ideas, illusions and prejudices onto society as a whole. Do we not find here the standard sociological error in which cause and effect change places, and the researchers, instead of explaining what people in fact think and defining the structure of their interests and the logic of their views, superimpose on society their own fundamental conceptions, forcing all the richness and diversity of real opinions into this rigid, pre-formed mould? It was the ability of the National Front in the years from 2010 to 2017 to mobilise masses of workers and petty bourgeois who had been abandoned both by left and right that made possible the transformation of that party into the mouthpiece of a mass popular revolt. Without suggesting any class alternative, Marine Le Pen, in the classic fashion of a populist politician, claimed to act on behalf of the “people”, understood in the broad sense as the totality of different and often far-from-similar social layers, united in their suffering at the hands of a common oppressor. In their turn, workers, petty bourgeois, immigrants and less well-off members of the technical intelligentsia were not so much successful in finding a common language among themselves as in putting a shared stake on one and the same leader. Not even the obvious change in the social base of the National Front could force French intellectuals to start thinking seriously about what was happening. It is significant that in the 2010s weighty discussions on the reasons for the success of Marine Le Pen, and on its possible consequences, occurred in many parts of the world but not in France. There, intellectuals carried on repeating the mantras, learnt by heart, about the threat of racism and the offensive of the ultra-right while failing to notice that the National Front was transforming itself into an organisation that rested on the votes of immigrant electors and was simultaneously borrowing the program of the left. Not even the growing and increasingly massive vote for the National Front in the Arab quarters affected the course of the discussion. This fact was simply ignored by French political scientists, though it was highlighted in the international press. The members of the left stubbornly refused to see anything; they were unwilling to take account of a reality that would automatically have raised the question of whether they themselves bore a significant share of the blame for what was occurring. Meanwhile, and to the degree to which the middle class grew poorer and surrendered its positions, the influence of the National Front also began spreading to the social groups that the left, after rejecting reliance on the workers, had come to view as its main audience. The British Guardian wrote with alarm that the National Front had “expanded its traditional voter base to new groups, including senior public sector workers in the police, hospitals and schools”.6 Observing events on the other side of the Channel, the London Telegraph stated: “A growing number of French voters are starting to see Front National no longer as just a ‘protest party’ – but rather as a party they would be happy to be governed by, at least at the local level”.7

162 France In practice, the only reliable source of support for the left turned out to be the sector of the intelligentsia that was most bourgeois and most integrated into the neoliberal system. In France’s less and less homogeneous society, it was precisely the multiculturalist and tolerant left-liberal community that proved, paradoxically, to be the mouthpiece for the interests of the privileged white minority, whose members were equally hostile both to the increasingly impoverished white majority and also to immigrants. The collaboration by the socialists and the left with the rightists, apart from furthering the class positions that these groups held in common (despite painstaking efforts at concealment), also had a further goal. This was one that could be declared publicly: all of these parties were united in seeking to block the growth of the National Front. The broader the popular support for Marine Le Pen became, the more active and open was the cooperation between the parties of the political establishment. This tendency appeared in its full extent during the regional elections of 2015. Thanks to the combining of left and right against Marine Le Pen, the campaign that had begun with a sensational triumph for the National Front ended in thoroughly traditional fashion: all of the ruling posts were divided between the right-centrists and socialists. While the first round of the elections had seen the National Front leading in six regions out of thirteen, in the second round the party failed to gain a majority even in one. The Socialists unhesitatingly withdrew their candidates in favour of the right. For their part, the right-centrists showed no such generosity, refusing to support their Socialist rivals in regions where the latter held the lead. Nevertheless, the campaign, waged jointly by parties, politicians and the media against a single opponent, bore fruit. The votes gained by the National Front were insufficient, even in a single one of the regions, to consolidate the victory scored in the first round. Formally speaking, the main victors were the centre-right, the Republicans of Nicolas Sarkozy. The price paid by the left and the Socialists for keeping the National Front out of office in the regions was the loss of positions even in departments that had been considered part of their traditional support base. While in the previous regional elections the Socialists had been victorious in all regions apart from Alsace, they now retained only five of them. Accordingly, eight regions went over to the rightists. The heaviest defeat was borne by the forces to the left of the Socialists. While the Socialist Party of François Hollande merely confirmed that in essence it was another liberal party, the organisations that had sharply criticised Hollande before the elections, and had then withdrawn their candidates for his benefit, showed that there was no basis for taking their declarations seriously. In essence, they exposed themselves as loyal vassals of the Socialists, losing their own political niche. Not surprisingly, the membership of the National Front was regularly topped up by people who had left the Communist and Socialist parties out of disappointment with their leaders. Meanwhile, the programmatic positions of Marine Le Pen were largely copied from Communist Party documents. Demands that the Communists themselves had long since forgotten became characteristic parts of the political baggage of the nationalists, and the political strongholds of Marine Le Pen were for the most part traditional bastions of the left.

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The defeat borne by the National Front in the second round of the regional elections nevertheless gave the party a decisive moral advantage in its subsequent political struggles. In the course of 2016, Marine Le Pen’s organisation became effectively the country’s largest political force in terms of its popular support. The fact that the party that had gained the support of more French voters than any other was not only excluded from power at the regional level but was sidelined in general from participation in the country’s political institutions, testified to the profound crisis of French democracy. The unanimity with which the parties of the left and right applied their strength to blocking the National Front merely added to the latter’s weight. Through keeping the National Front from power, the establishment politicians created for it an aureole as the only party that had not been corrupted. Whatever the moral qualities of Marine Le Pen’s supporters, they simply had no chance of becoming corrupt since all the places at the trough were tightly occupied by Socialists and Republicans. The more the left- and right-wing establishment joined forces, the more society perceived Marine Le Pen as the only politician standing up to the existing system. The resistance she mounted had no basis whatsoever in class solidarity and in no way did it presuppose a socialist alternative. But in the context of the ideological and political capitulation of the left, it represented the only challenge issued to the oligarchic regime that was taking shape.

The crisis of the establishment parties The French political establishment justified the unification of all its parties against Marine Le Pen on the basis that it was essential to “defend democracy” against the danger from the “forces of the extreme right”. The problem, however, was that the real blows against democracy were being dealt by the forces that were ruling the country. It was the Socialists who in 2015 had declared a state of emergency, citing terrorist acts in Paris that the government’s security forces had been unable and, it seems, had not even tried to prevent. It was again the Socialists who, with the complete approval of the right-centrists, had called for imposing restrictions on civil rights and for making the corresponding amendments to the constitution. Meanwhile, the National Front in opposing them had called for the republican values and traditions of France to be respected. The strategy of the establishment parties and of their intellectual acolytes consisted of endlessly repeating the same message concerning the threat posed by the extreme right while simultaneously pursuing a course that involved the stage-bystage dismantling of the republican order. Meanwhile, the press systematically ignored the actual statements of Marine Le Pen and her team, often ascribing to them views directly contrary to their expressed positions. This state of affairs had become possible thanks to the fact that the National Front had for practical purposes been denied access to the “serious” press and television. In the age of the internet, however, such an information blockade had become counterproductive since reports on the real situation

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nevertheless seeped through into society, shaping a spontaneous mode of popular thinking that withstood the information and propaganda torrents pouring from above onto the French population. A commonplace of liberal propaganda is thus to accuse the National Front of racism, while it is precisely the National Front that has attracted onto its side large numbers of immigrants from Arab countries, something that none of the establishment parties have managed. It was the Arab districts of Marseilles that gave Le Pen’s party its majority in the first round, and it was these “new French” who ensured the rapid growth of the National Front vote in other regions. The politics of the establishment parties were beginning to work against these parties themselves. Suffering constant failures on all fronts, the Socialists presented an increasingly poor spectacle, while the right-centrists could propose nothing except a continuation of the same bankrupt policies. Politicians who billed themselves as left critics of neoliberalism babbled about the need to reduce the working day, while giving no thought to the question of how to create and preserve jobs in France. To the degree that the general discourse around the “nationalist threat” replaced discussion of practical issues – of unemployment, of immigration, of housing policy, of the relations between France and the EU and so forth ‒ the National Front was not only the party opposing all others but also the sole party discussing the topics that had the French population genuinely agitated. The Socialists and Republicans spoke about Marine Le Pen, while Marine Le Pen spoke about the problems of daily life, about the economy and about the social crisis. It was in this widening gap between what was being said about the National Front, and what the National Front was in fact saying, that one of the main reasons for its success consisted. The classic example was the discussion of immigration. The establishment politicians had convinced themselves that it was anti-immigrant propaganda that provided the basis for the successes the National Front had achieved. Accordingly, some tried to resist this propaganda, while others hoped to appropriate it and repeat it. While the members of the left appealed in the name of humanity for an unrestricted number of migrants to be admitted to the country, and for them to be provided with benefits unavailable either to “native” French people or to “new French” of Arab or African origin, the Republicans hoped to win over Le Pen’s voter base with tough declarations about limiting immigration. The trouble however, was that in this situation the National Front was the sole party offering practical solutions that could not be reduced either to bans or to abstract appeals for sympathy. Le Pen’s statements did not call for cutting off immigration altogether but proposed regulating the flow of migrants in line with the country’s possibilities and needs. Supporters of the National Front also stressed that it was the West that bore responsibility for the chaos that was creating massive flows of refugees. It was not hard to guess that if the policies followed by European countries did not change, then the chaos created by their actions would increase, as would the stream of immigrants. The way to alter this situation was not to open the borders but to change the policies, investing funds in developing the countries of the South and creating jobs there while ending military interventions and aggressive

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wars. This, in essence, was the position that the left had held in the past. But times had changed. The people who felt the real consequences of the EU’s migration policies ‒ unlike the privileged white intellectuals ‒ were the residents of the Arab quarters, which with each passing day became more crowded and where finding work or housing became more difficult. These residents voted for the National Front, paying no attention to the press when it argued that this was an “anti-immigrant” party. The joint efforts of the establishment parties were more or less successful in isolating Marine Le Pen’s National Front ideologically, driving it into a sort of ghetto and creating a situation in which the members of the left in France and other countries were resolved not to collaborate with that party even if they were advancing similar slogans. But as in the case of the information blockade, the borders began to be eroded at the grass-roots level. Le Pen’s strategy on being confronted with resistance from the united front of the political establishment was to attempt to draw over to her side disillusioned members and supporters of the Socialist and Communist parties while simultaneously trying to save the National Front from acquiring the reputation of an extreme right-wing formation. Instead, she presented her party as a new populist force, laying claim to a sort of “right-left synthesis”. To this end, she systematically purged members of the “old right” from the party ranks without sparing her own father or his closest supporters. Taking the place of such people were others who had quit the organisations of the left. From the point of view of academic theory, such a task appears intractable. But in the political practice of, for example, Latin America, such populist movements have repeatedly achieved success. The real choice before French voters in 2017 was no longer between socialist and liberal ideologies, or even between different variants of a particular political course, but between petty-bourgeois democracy as represented by the supporters of Marine Le Pen and the status quo of the neoliberal oligarchic regime, to which the left was giving critically important backing.

The revenge of the establishment The result of the 2017 elections in France was that Emmanuel Macron was installed as president. To say that he was “elected” would be somewhat out of place, since a substantial proportion of French citizens consciously refused to vote, while others voted not just without enthusiasm but without any sympathy for the candidate. The Socialist Party suffered a catastrophe, with its candidate Benoît Hamon finishing up an outsider. Leading the field for the left was JeanLuc Mélanchon, whose election program was suspiciously reminiscent of the demands of the National Front. The desire to block the road to success for populist candidates obliged all the forces of the establishment to unite around Emmanuel Macron, who forced aside the candidates both of the traditional right and of the moderate left.

166 France Macron’s victory, however, did not mean the end of the socio-political crisis in the EU. In fact, it marked only the beginning of a new and still more dramatic phase in this crisis. Something irreversible had occurred: the ruling groups had made an unequivocal choice in favour of pressing ahead on their existing course at any cost. No concessions would be made to the moods of society, and there would be no compromises. More and more new tactical moves would be proposed but only in order to leave everything as it had been in the past. The effect was to make inevitable still more acute struggles and harsher conflicts that could no longer be resolved within the framework of the normal institutions. In 2016 the neoliberal system had been challenged by a mass voter revolt, taking the form of populist movements both of the right and of the left. Although the right- and left-wing politicians who voiced these moods of protest were not prepared to join forces, or even to collaborate on a tactical level, their supporters at the grass-roots level reasoned differently. The moods of protest among the masses had not led to the formation of ideological blocs, and the result was that the people concerned were mobilised by whichever current was stronger tactically at a particular moment and would have greater chances of success. Unlike the left, the elites of Europe and the US drew lessons from these events. They recognised that a qualitatively new political situation had arisen and that it required a radical change of approach. Macron’s success had been achieved against a background of the obvious paralysis of the Trump administration in the US, when the radical changes it was expected to implement had become mired in a swamp of legislative sabotage, organised through the combined efforts of Democrats and Republicans. In the Congress, the majority Republicans continued to push through austerity measures while heaping responsibility on the administration, which lacked the resolve to make an open break with its own party. Since Trump did not have his own strategy, he was forced into a series of compromises, the result of which was the effective paralysis of his authority. The liberal Moscow political scientist Andrey Kolesnikov stated with satisfaction: “‘Checks and balances’ have succeeded in transforming Trump into a ‘normal’American president, with a degree of extravagance no greater than that of Nixon. Meanwhile in Europe, the populist wave has collided with an anti-populist one”.8 In France, an extremely important political experiment was under way. Faced with the powerful offensive of anti-liberal populism that found expression in the successes of Marine Le Pen’s National Front and in the sudden increase in the popularity of Jean-Luc Mélanchon, the ruling circles decided to sacrifice their traditional political organisations, both Socialist and Republican. In the course of the 2017 elections, France encountered something almost without precedent: liberal populism. Macron was a sort of Frankenstein’s monster, a political project constructed artificially for the mass media, with a program cut-and-pasted eclectically from the slogans and appeals of various parties and possessing a single goal and function – to win the elections at any cost. If populism is understood in the primitive sense as a readiness to make irresponsible promises of anything to anyone, Macron is its purest embodiment ‒ in the terms of Max Weber, almost the “ideal type”.

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In less than a year, the political phenomenon of Macron was put together literally in an empty space with the help of vast infusions of money and through a media campaign of unprecedented scale. The fact that earlier he had not been among the country’s best-known and most popular political figures was a positive factor in determining his fate – he had not been discredited as a part of the old political system against which Marine Le Pen was heading the revolt. To judge from the results of the voting, the experiment was successful. The only problem was that once the elections were over, neither the objectively occurring economic processes nor the social conflict came to an end. Although the goal of Macron and of the financial elites who were backing him was to prevent any changes from taking place, preserving the status quo was objectively impossible. In the circumstances of unresolved contradictions and continuing systemic crisis, austerity policies needed not only to be continued but to be deepened. The antisocial measures imposed by the government of François Hollande needed to be replaced by still more radical policies of the same variety. Macron’s government, which lacked a base either in influential mass parties or in social forces and movements, finished up hanging in mid-air. In June 2017 the presidential polls were followed by parliamentary elections in which supporters of Macron were victorious against a backdrop of mass abstention and obvious popular demoralisation. Participation in the voting was the lowest in the history of the Fifth Republic. In its structure and operating methods, the president’s hastily assembled party “La République en marche!”,9 which received an absolute majority in the parliament, was strikingly reminiscent of United Russia. Like the Russian “party of the authorities”, Macron’s party had neither a clear ideology nor a distinct program, amounting to a collection of functionaries and careerists selected on a formal basis and receiving their deputies’ mandates in exchange for obligatory loyalty to the president. In such an organisation there could be no internal discussion or genuine political life. This was not simply because differences of opinion would be crushed by the party apparatus, as in Stalinist organisations, but because its members were required from the first not to have any opinions. This was not a political structure, following its own collectively formulated line, but a technical apparatus of the government, ensuring it a guaranteed parliamentary majority on any and all questions. The support of finance capital and of the mass media might have been decisive for securing a one-off electoral victory, but it was not enough in itself to allow the government to pursue its objectives. The new administration was forced to rely on the remnants of the old political forces, now discredited in any case, while also resorting to increasingly authoritarian methods, gradually dismantling the republican and democratic institutions. The events of the spring of 2017, when Marine Le Pen lost the presidential elections in France and when Donald Trump was effectively blockaded in the White House, having lost the political initiative, may be viewed as a victory of the establishment over populism in key Western countries. This victory was achieved through an adaptation of ruling-class politics to meet new challenges. It was not,

168 France however, appropriate to speak of an end to populism in Europe and the US. As the political economist Fedor Lukyanov observed, Macron was “a populist figure, only not an anti-regime but pro-regime populist. He was the response by the establishment to the threat that had arisen, and this was completely rational”.10 The price of the political victory proved to be a deepening of the economic and social crisis. The populist alternatives proclaimed in 2016–2017 by rightists such as Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, and by such left-centrists as Bernie Sanders, were in no way radical. By blocking these alternatives, the establishment closed off any path for reformist alternatives, thus creating an objective need for more radical solutions. Marine Le Pen came close to overcoming the image of her candidacy and her party as marginal-nationalist phenomena, outside the bounds of serious politics and with no chance of succeeding in the struggle for power. She achieved a historic high, winning 11 million votes and as political scientists were forced to acknowledge, became a “pole of attraction for the opposition” and for all who were dissatisfied with Macron.11 Le Pen was unable, however, to consolidate the positions she had captured, due to the contradictions of her own ideology and of her social base. Instead of building on its success, her party became immersed in internal conflicts. This outcome, of course, was not accidental. Macron’s victory required the development of a new strategy and tactics, a task that for so ideologically loose and diverse a structure as the National Front proved unexpectedly difficult. Contrary to the notions of intellectuals and journalists, this party represented an amalgam, a weird mix of right- and left-wing elements. In the conditions of political uncertainty that set in after the elections, attempts to consolidate and bring order to its structure led naturally to dissension. Those who gained the upper hand in the intra-party struggle were the conservative groups, and people from the camp of the left began abandoning Le Pen and her organisation. With the exception of Mélanchon, the politicians of the left had discredited themselves through their backing of Macron. This support had not been extended only in the second round; throughout the 2017 electoral cycle, most of the prominent figures on the left had not hidden the fact that their only goal was to defend the existing order against the threat from the National Front. The calls by the leaders of the Communist and Socialist parties for full-hearted support to Macron in the elections, in order immediately afterwards to begin a decisive struggle against him, appeared ridiculous. The political project embodied in Macron appeared to have triumphed; the ruling class had not only managed to hold onto power but had also left the opposition in disarray. As often happens, however, the victory contained within it the seeds not just of a future defeat but of a full-scale catastrophe. The public discrediting of the old establishment parties, combined with the weak and divided state of the extra-systemic opposition (both “left” and “right”) created a political vacuum that was extremely favourable to the emergence and growth of new political initiatives. In November 2018 this vacuum was filled when the “yellow vests” movement appeared and began growing rapidly.

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Providing the formal grounds for the protests was an increase in the tax on petrol. People angered by this decision organised online and came onto the streets, donning the yellow vests that every vehicle owner in France is required to own. Banning a protest demonstration on the Champs Élysées, the authorities provoked an inevitable explosion of violence. In early December hundreds of thousands of people were taking part each Saturday in “yellow vest” actions throughout the country. Far more important was the fact that these actions were supported by around 80 per cent of French citizens. Those engaging in street skirmishes with the police were no longer only young people, and not only immigrants from poor urban districts; middle-aged people, native-born Frenchmen and women, were also taking part. Although the government repealed the hated fuel tax in early December, the protests not only failed to stop but grew in size. For citizens of the republic, the new tax had been only a pretext for expressing a discontent that had been building up for years. People were demanding the resignation of Macron, the restoration of the welfare state, the renationalising of privatised enterprises, measures to increase employment, and the exit of France from NATO and the EU. The press, naturally, immediately declared these demands unrealistic and impossible to fulfil, just like the idea of Brexit had been unrealistic two years earlier. But the admonitions of the experts now had no impact. After a few days of their street actions, the “yellow vests” had rendered void the entire culture of politically correct discourse, leaving the discussions of single-sex marriage or appropriate language completely pointless. Now, the alternative to the semantic games of the intellectuals was not a new left ideology but spontaneous plebeian solidarity. The participants in the protest actions clearly based themselves on the left-wing political tradition but associated themselves in the first instance with the popular masses who had made the French Revolution. This analogy was perfectly logical. The aristocracy that the masses had overthrown in 1789 was already far from feudal. It amounted to a bloc between the hereditary political class and the financial oligarchy; between them, these forces were stifling not only the lower orders of the population but also a significant section of the bourgeoisie. In its essence and structure, the neoliberal oligarchy represented by Macron was very similar to the aristocratic elite of the ancien régime. The plebeian uprising of 2018, in its turn, duplicated in many ways the configuration of the French revolutionary protest of the late eighteenth century, when the proletarian masses of the sans-culottes and the bourgeoisie that bore numerous grudges against the regime acted in unison. The logic of resistance to the antisocial policies of Macron dictated the need for collaboration between different social groups. At the same time, the anticapitalist vector of the movement was in this case visible to the naked eye. Both the rhetoric of the protests and the specific demands were taken for the most part (though not always) from the arsenal of the classical left – that is, the very arsenal from which the intellectual left public since 1968 had preferred to take its distance. In practice, the liberal intellectuals who together with the party bureaucrats controlled the political structures of the left were the most faithful and resolute defenders of the existing order; not only did they represent the interests of the bourgeoisie, but

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they also defended the course pursued by the most reactionary sector of the ruling class, the part that was most hostile to social progress. The social irresponsibility of the financiers and the haughty disdain of the intellectuals for the mass public complemented one another wonderfully. In essence, the movement of the “yellow vests” liberated French politics from the dictates of the party apparatuses and of the intellectuals linked to them, posing the question of relaunching democracy and creating new institutions of popular representation. Nevertheless, the “yellow vests” demonstrated the limitations of spontaneous protest as well as its possibilities. As in 1789–1791, the potential existed for spontaneous popular self-organisation to result in the overthrow of the ancien régime. But the installing of a new social order, and the creation of new political and economic institutions, requires conscious work that can no longer be brought to a successful conclusion without political organisation and theoretical knowledge. Intellectuals are needed, just as in the past. But they are not needed in the capacity of a self-satisfied caste of privileged “mandarins” or as servants of the political apparatuses of the ruling class. To use an expression of Gramsci, the popular movement needs its own organic intellectuals who are ready to work selflessly and with professional skill in order to turn popular needs and demands into a systematic project of social transformation.

Notes 1 T. Negri, Good bye, Mr. Socialism! New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008, pp. 244–245. 2 Robin Verner. Le printemps orwellien des intellectuels français. www.slate.fr/story/ 103135/printemps-orwellien-intellectuels-francais. 3 S. Chwala, “Wo und warum die französischen Arbeiter den ultrarechten Front National wählen” [Where and why French workers are voting for the ultra-right National Front]. Junge Welt, 27 Apr. 2015. www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/1230.php. 4 Junge Welt, 27 Oct. 2015. 5 Ibid. 6 The Guardian, 18 Sept. 2016. www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/18/nationstate-marine-le-pen-global-mood-france-brexit-trump-front-national. 7 The Telegraph, 7 Dec. 2015.www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/12037157/ Front-Nationals-historic-result-should-be-a-wake-up-call-to-the-EU.html. 8 Vedomosti, 10 May 2017. 9 In the Russian press Macron’s party “La République en march!” was given the name “Forward!”. 10 Rossiyskaya Gazeta, 10 May 2017. 11 Vedomosti, 10 May 2017.

6

Unreasonable rationality

Amid the changes that had engulfed Europe and the world, Russia with its ruling stratum of oil-industry oligarchs remained by 2017 one of the last bastions of political stability and economic liberalism. The positions of the ruling class in Russia, as elsewhere, were rapidly growing weaker under the impact of the new reality that had taken hold of world markets, but this had not led to political changes. The stability had been ensured through an increasingly rigid authoritarianism, clearly extending outside the framework of the regime of managed democracy proclaimed in the early 2000s. Meanwhile, the Russian population and the country’s business circles had endured the economic disorders as a sort of natural calamity that bore no relation to the course pursued by the government. Western politicians and the Russian liberal intelligentsia, it seemed, began to believe sincerely in the myth they had themselves conjured up of a serfdom that was universal and innate in the country. Viktor Shenderovich expressed this concept with all the literary brilliance characteristic of him. In Russia, according to Shenderovich, there are a certain number of people who “understanding the cost to human dignity, are capable of overcoming fear and melancholy”, while all the rest are “protoplasm”, the “ambient medium”.1 Shenderovich’s Facebook post spread quickly about the internet. After 1600 repostings and almost 6000 “likes”, it is clear that not all of us are “protoplasm” and that there is also a deserving public. The problem, of course, does not lie with Shenderovich. Commentators can write all sorts of things in the heat of the moment! Nor is it the problem that his views are shared by substantial numbers of people within the liberal intelligentsia (who to judge by the online commentaries, consider his position to be, if anything, insufficiently radical). The problem is not with the commentaries but with the politics, with the mechanism for taking decisions. The image of the mass of the population as passive, as a kind of “wadding”, has been fundamental to the entire strategy of Russian liberalism, both in opposition and in government.

Stability and protests The crisis that began in 2008 changed Russian society no less than that of Western Europe and the United States. Throughout this period Russia oscillated between outbursts of mass protest and periods of stabilisation, with each of these shifts in

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its own way reflecting the dynamic of the country’s social and economic development. These cycles, however, reflected not only the moods of the masses, changing under the influence of objective factors, but also a crisis of the elites that was gradually accumulating strength and that flared up or died down under the impact of the crisis. After the collapse of the stock markets in the West in 2007 and 2008, oil prices, which earlier had risen rapidly in response to speculative pressures, also fell sharply. Russia accordingly experienced a severe economic slump that outstripped the average rate of decline seen elsewhere in the world. The bail-out measures enacted by the US Federal Reserve System, which issued dollars to pump up the market, led to a new wave of stock market speculation that in 2012–2014 restored oil prices, before another serious decline in 2015–2017. It is not hard to conclude that after a certain delay, the dynamic of mass political protests was reproducing the shifts in the market. It would, however, be naïve to view the political events simply as a mechanical extension of the economic process. The key factors in the changes here were the growing disagreements within the ruling elites, which first intensified and then died down as the situation developed; the increasing foreign policy tensions; and the collapse of the consumer expectations that had been built up by the impressive growth in the living standards of the population during the early twenty-first century. The political model that had been constructed in Russia under Vladimir Putin represented a system of multi-sided compromises that included both the main groups within the oligarchy and also the most important strata within society. So long as oil revenues were growing steadily, keeping this system in balance was not especially difficult, even if particular failures occurred from time to time – as, for example, in January 2005, when an attempt to substitute money payments for various benefit entitlements of pensioners and some other groups (amounting, in reality, to eliminating these benefits) sparked massive protests, after which the government quickly made concessions. In 2009 the Global Financial Crisis struck its first blows against the Russian economy. Painful though these impacts were, the economy absorbed them relatively easily due to the significant reserves that had been accumulated not only by companies but also by households. The policies of the US Federal Reserve System, which tried to extinguish the crisis by throwing trillions of dollars onto the financial markets, caused a new speculative rise in oil prices, which immediately stabilised the Russian economy. Even the fact that whole sectors of Russian industry continued in effect to undergo liquidation did not change the situation fundamentally. The left-wing commentator, Alexandr Frolov, noted ironically in this connection that production may deteriorate, at the same time as the economy is flourishing. When a fox gets into the hen-house, a crisis naturally breaks out for the hens, but the same cannot be said of the fox. So it is in today’s Russia. Output has declined, but there is no economic crisis in the sense of a crisis of the

Unreasonable rationality 173 capitalist economy. To the contrary, capitalism is developing extremely vigorously. Hence also the paradoxical combination, recorded by all the public opinion surveys, of two simultaneous sensations: of stability, and of catastrophe. Of the strength of the existing system, and of its fragility.2 In reality, this “development” and “flourishing” not only suffers from being dependent on extremely limited and quickly depleted resources but also undermines its own basis. To extend Frolov’s metaphor, once a large proportion of the hens have been devoured, a crisis sets in for the fox as well. This is what happened in 2010–2012. A natural consequence of the economic crisis was the outbreak of a political crisis that set in after a certain delay. Although the immediate cause of the 2011 protests was the rigging of the elections to the State Duma, it is not hard to work out that the reasons for the discontent lay on a quite different level. Significantly, none of the official opposition parties from which votes had been stolen were active in the protest demonstrations. Moreover, once the protests had begun, the official opposition solidarised with the authorities, thus proving that they were part of the same political order against which people were demonstrating in the streets. Nevertheless, the protests, which at first had enjoyed active support in the provinces, quickly lost their strength everywhere outside the Moscow city limits (even in St Petersburg the movement went into rapid decline). The reason for this turn of events was that the people voicing the political program of the discontented were capital-city liberals, who at each of the demonstrations quickly privatised the speakers’ platform. The liberals possessed financial resources and had a certain legitimacy in the eyes of the authorities, who were prepared to hold discussions with them. But a no less destructive role in this process was played by a section of the left that in the name of movement unity tail-ended the liberals, accepting their hegemony without a murmur – and that, as a result, helped bring about the collapse of the very movement for the sake of whose success they were prepared to renounce their own ideas and principles. The vanguardism of a certain element of the left thus served to defend the elitism of the liberal intelligentsia. Regardless of what many ideologues say about classes and the masses, their concept of political change is built on the presumption that the people will remain passive ‒ that it is enough to replace the authorities in the capital, and the rest of the population will reconcile themselves to the change and do whatever the enlightened ladies and gentlemen (or comrades) might command. The only political overturns that are carried through in capital cities, however, are coups. There is no question that political coups often occur in the course of a revolution. But the difference between such coups and a revolution lies in the fact that in the case of the latter, many millions of people throughout the country are drawn into political struggle, and it is precisely they who decide the fate of the politicians who try to seize or hold onto power in the capital. In 2011–2012, when massive protests shook Moscow and to some degree St Petersburg, the authorities stood their ground and were even able to avoid making

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serious concessions for the reason that firmly fixed in public consciousness was an understanding that the opposition was many times worse than the regime of Vladimir Putin. The existing regime was, after all, based on compromise, including social compromise, while in the view of the opposition, this compromise needed to be shattered. It was, indeed, less than obvious to what extent the liberals, if they took power, might have been expected to observe the unspoken rules of social compromise. It was also completely understandable that the section of the left that had consciously joined the liberals beneath the banner of general democratic solidarity had not only ignored the fears of their social base but, through making this choice, had lost their own influence as well. With no possibility of winning support from any significant layer of society, these members of the left ceased to be of interest not only to the masses but also to their liberal allies. With good reason, the conviction strengthened in society that the liberals were demanding that everything the regime was doing cautiously and inconsistently should be done harshly, consistently and without compromise. Faced with a choice between the centrist schizophrenia of the Putin administration and the neoliberal paranoia of the opposition, the majority of citizens quite reasonably chose the former, perceiving the authorities as the lesser evil. For all its unquestionable rationality, this choice was nevertheless unwise. A lesser evil differs from a greater one in that it acts upon us in relatively small doses. In the long term, however, the total quantity of evil tends to be much the same ‒ with the only difference being that the large evil provokes resistance, while the small one promotes habituation. In other words, the lesser evil from the point of view of the end result may turn out to be even more dangerous. Ultimately, and thanks to the passivity of the masses, the neoliberal policies from which the Russian authorities were supposed (in the view of the majority) to protect the population were put into effect in any case ‒ by the “centrist” regime itself. The rational choice made by the masses in Russia was thus objectively unwise. Most important was the fact that the very structure of the economy and society that corresponded to the neoliberal strategy was preserved and reproduced. The gradual realisation of this contradiction slowly but unmistakeably altered the consciousness of the masses to the degree that the authorities, after coping with the challenge from the opposition in 2012, began implementing more deliberately the same harsh measures from which they had undertaken to protect the population. The emergence of a growing disillusionment of the masses with the regime was nevertheless interrupted for a time by events in Ukraine.

The Ukrainian shock World-system analysis, though viewed by intellectuals as an excuse for rummaging through the remote past in a diverting search for historical analogies, is in fact an indispensable method for understanding the current tasks of the class struggle in a globalised world. The events that transpired in Ukraine and Russia from 2014

Unreasonable rationality 175 onward were in no sense isolated phenomena that unfolded according to their own logic. To the contrary, they were a part of world-wide processes, reproducing the same dynamic that could be observed in other regions around the globe. The second wave of the crisis reached Russia only in 2014 and 2015, but by that time events had occurred in Europe that radically altered the geopolitical conjuncture. The fall in the demand for raw materials and energy that resulted from worldwide economic stagnation struck hard at Russian firms, but still more catastrophic were the effects of the crisis on neighbouring Ukraine, where the economic downturn led to the collapse of state institutions. The paradox of the Ukrainian political model lay in the fact that although an attempt was made to imitate the approach used in Russia, the Ukrainian ruling class lacked the necessary resources. This situation led to constant public conflicts between oligarchs. Clashes that had been avoided in Moscow were seen again and again in Kyiv. The situation was exacerbated by the policies of the European Union, which viewed Ukraine primarily as a sales market for its goods and as a source of cheap resources – above all, of labour power. The advance of the European Union into Southern and Eastern Europe became much more aggressive as the crisis of the neoliberal model grew more acute. The fact that the political crisis in Ukraine occurred simultaneously with the collapse in Greece was far from accidental. In essence, the two developments were different aspects of one and the same process. The outstanding British-born Marxist David Harvey defined the dynamic of neoliberalism as a “spatial fix”.3 The contradictions of the system, insoluble at any specific point in the economic space, are temporarily overcome through the steady expansion of this space, with the drawing into it of new resources, new markets and, most important, new masses of hired workers, each time at lower prices. Neoliberal capitalism, which has effectively blocked such mechanisms for raising economic effectiveness as development of the public sector, investments in science and education, applying labour-saving technology and redistributing resources to the benefit of the less well-off in society (that is, the measures that characterise the Keynesian “mixed economy”), has thus been forced to constantly broaden its boundaries. At a certain stage, this expansion of capital creates new zones of economic development on the periphery of the system. In these zones a rapid growth of productive capacity begins, oriented not towards local buyers but directly to the world market. The results of this growth might be presented quite justifiably as a success story of the neoliberal economy. But such expansion, unaccompanied by any broadening of the domestic market, quickly exhausts its possibilities. Although the growth of exports brings an influx of funds to the country, and although this is reflected indirectly in the internal market as well, development of this type simply creates a new contradiction: if the export-driven growth of the economy brings a rise in wages, the expansion of internal demand is accompanied by a fall in the competitiveness of the country’s exports, whose prices increase. If, however, the wages and incomes of the population are kept at a miserable level,

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then after a certain time the growth ceases since its markets are exhausted. After all, the world market rests ultimately on the totality of national markets and cannot exist without them. In principle, the process of liberalising markets and of privatisation cannot have any limits since its results at each given stage prove inevitably to be “insufficient”. To fix and stabilise them is impossible, just as it is impossible to keep a bicycle upright unless it is moving ahead. The contradictions begin immediately to tear the system apart. Every wave of territorial expansion is therefore followed by another, which to a significant degree wipes out the results of its predecessor. Hence, Southern Europe, which became a zone of expansion in the early 1980s, later experienced difficulties due to the shift of production to Eastern Europe, Latin America and North Africa. The “appropriation” by international capital of the countries of Eastern Europe became an important factor for overcoming the economic slump of 1990–1991; what was involved here was not only the formation of new markets but also the direct plunder of resources (beginning with the primitive extraction of money from these countries and extending to the exploitation of their scientific and technological potential, which was acquired by the victors in the Cold War almost free of charge). Later, the rise of industry in the countries of Asia dealt a blow to the new export sectors that had begun to develop in Latin America and North Africa. Then after a decade and a half, China’s dash to prosperity weakened economic growth in other countries of East Asia and brought a crisis to the region. Taking into account not only the cheapness of labour power in China but also the unprecedented scale of the Chinese economy, it can be stated with confidence that for neoliberalism China has proven to be a sort of “ultimate boundary” that cannot be overcome without qualitative changes to neoliberalism itself. But it is precisely such changes that the ruling groups in the West and their allies elsewhere in the world are trying to avoid at any cost. The only way out for these ruling groups is to forcibly demolish the existing markets and to reconstruct them so as to ensure both a sharp drop in the value of labour power and the extraction of resources that for one reason or another have remained inaccessible. This is like the return of miners to an abandoned pit, most of whose resources were extracted long ago. In the process, the degree of exploitation is not only increased to the maximum but also goes beyond the bounds that are minimally necessary if labour power, society and the natural environment are to be reproduced. Capital is violently breaking down the very division of labour that it created earlier. It is destroying existing markets so as to establish, in their place, new markets in which it can purchase its requirements more cheaply. It is shifting countries with middling levels of mass consumption back into the ranks of the poor; it is returning semi-peripheral states to the periphery. Properly speaking, it is precisely these tasks that the austerity policies enacted with catastrophic results in Spain, Portugal and Greece were designed to accomplish. The new wave of the offensive of capital effectively replicates the geography of the previous ones, starting from the same point where the whole cycle of territorial expansion began, with the sole difference that this time, capital is compelled to destroy, or reduce

Unreasonable rationality 177 to a minimum, its own previous achievements. Earlier it was possible, in line with the theories of J.A. Schumpeter, to speak of a dialectical process of “creative destruction” in which the positive and negative aspects of expansion were closely intertwined with one another, but this time what is involved is destruction as such, pure regression after which the stricken regions are left with no choice but to start again from a “blank page”. They are unable to raise themselves to a new level of development but only to attempt gradually to restore what has been lost. This was the process that in 2012 unfolded simultaneously in the countries of Southern Europe and in Ukraine (to some degree, in Moldavia as well). The principal difference, however, was that in Greece, Italy and Spain, which were within the framework of the political and legal system of the European Union itself, the state institutions were more or less protected and retained their stability, while in Ukraine, with its extremely young and weak state system, the crisis almost immediately took on the form of a political catastrophe, developing according to an “African” rather than a “European” scenario. The EU attempted to impose an Association Agreement on Kyiv at a time when the Ukrainian state was effectively bankrupt. Analogous to the deals contracted by Brussels with developing world countries, the agreement acted as a trigger mechanism for civil conflict. Ukraine promptly became the first failed state, a European analogue of Somalia, on a continent that had prided itself on its civilisation and stability. With the European ambitions of its ruling class and nationalist intelligentsia, Ukraine was the ideal object for a new neoliberal experiment, the ideal zone for an expansion of destruction. On the one hand, the country had long been part of the neoliberal world system, having been incorporated into the world market and the global division of labour. On the other hand, the actual integration of the Ukrainian economy into the structures of the EU was extremely weak; the country’s democratic institutions were not well developed, and the population lacked experience of civil self-organisation (the numerous Maidans, organised by particular groups of corrupt politicians for the purposes of struggling against similar groups, were nothing like genuine civil mobilisations). Accordingly, people’s understanding of their direct class interests remained on an extremely low level, lower even than in Russia, which had undergone the socio-political crisis of 1993 and had behind it the experience of the mass protests of 2005. The civil war that erupted in 2014 between supporters of a “united Ukraine” and the Donbass rebels, like the nationalist hysteria at “Russian aggression”, was needed by the Kyiv government to allow the implementation of the austerity program dictated by the EU. It was, however, the initial support by a significant part of the population of Kyiv and by residents of Western Ukraine for the policy of European integration that made the revolt and the subsequent war inevitable. For the industrial regions of the south-east, putting the EU Association Agreement into practice would have meant an economic catastrophe to dwarf any of the horrors of the war. A factor exacerbating both the disagreements and also the cultured illusions of the Kyiv intellectual public, was the objective division in Ukraine, a division so profound in economic and social terms that one part of the population was simply

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unable to imagine the way of life and mode of thinking of the other. Behind the frameworks of mass consciousness was also an understanding of the interdependence between the regions, and especially the fact that it was the industrial south-east with its mines, industrial plants and ports that to a significant degree maintained the other regions of the country. While the agrarian West, which had lost even the limited industrial base that had been created in Soviet times, could merely dream of a visa-free departure for Europe as the sole available solution to its problems, the Kyiv public that was existing quite satisfactorily on the redistribution of the resources produced in the south-east, continued to hope with complete seriousness that following integration into Europe, it would be able to retain and even strengthen its position. These hopes, with their roots in preceding social and cultural experience, were fundamentally illusory and were doomed to collapse even if the worker population of the Donbass had reconciled itself to its fate without a murmur. If the question had merely been one of the Kyiv intelligentsia and its ideological illusions, this would scarcely have caused a disaster on a European scale. Far worse was the fact that analogous illusions held sway over a significant part of the left, and not only in Ukraine. The consciousness of the worker masses of southeastern Ukraine, who had risen up in response to the armed seizure of power in Kyiv by Ukrainian nationalists in February 2014 and to the subsequent implementation of the EU’s “liquidationist” program for the Ukrainian economy, was just as badly infected with ideological illusions and inadequate concepts as was the thinking of the Kyiv intelligentsia. After proclaiming the foundation in the south-east of a new state, Novorossiya, the rebels proved completely incapable of defining the vector of its development, calling simultaneously for social liberation and for unification with Vladimir Putin’s Russia – a state no less oligarchic than the Ukraine against which they had risen up. The interference by the Kremlin in the events that were occurring, like the interference by the West, was completely real, but it was merely a reaction to Ukraine’s internal crisis. Kyiv in its turn responded to the revolt by the eastern Ukrainian masses with a large-scale mobilisation of army units, declaring the residents of Donetsk, Lugansk and other rebel cities to be terrorists. The civil war was transformed into an Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO), and the protest by political opponents was reduced to a case of intervention by Russia.

Ukraine and the split in the left European intellectuals, and the Russian left liberals who were close to them, were quite prepared to acknowledge that in certain circumstances a social liberation perspective might be combined with the defence of national sovereignty, provided the situation concerned was in Latin America. But not in the countries of the “centre”, and least of all in Russia. This was even though the changes that had occurred during the period of neoliberal hegemony in Europe had made the politics of the old continent increasingly “Latin American”, effacing the principal differences between the logic of class struggle in the “centre” and on the “periphery”. When

Unreasonable rationality 179 events began unfolding in European countries that did not fit the usual schemas, then the response by the ideologues was not analysis of what was occurring but furious condemnation of the processes they had failed to understand or anticipate. Meanwhile, it was precisely in the European countries that had been the victims of the “second coming” of neoliberalism that the decisive battles would inevitably be fought, and it was here that changes of global significance could be achieved. The choice of sides in these battles was determined by class interests and by the general logic of the process unfolding on a global and continental scale. But in this case, too, the ideologues of the liberal left joined in defending the existing political order and the dominant ideology. The lower orders of society, rebelling against neoliberalism in the semi-peripheral countries of Eastern Europe, were declared “backward”, “inadequate” and “barbaric”, just as a century and a half earlier the same labels had been applied to native peoples who were subject to colonisation. “If the analysis of social reality is to be limited by ‘discourses’”, the philosopher Andrey Koryakovtsev argued, and if it is to take as its points of reference phantoms with no links to practical reality (such as “independent” Euro-integration, a demonic, “imperialist” Putin, or fragments of the information field of Novorossiya itself), as is accepted practice among liberal or left progressives, then it is really very easy to reduce the Novorossiya movement to “Russian fascism”, in the process justifying the ATO and along with it the power of those conducting it. Other, “extra-discursive” causes of this conflict, causes lying in the historical context of the events and in the preceding historical period, are simply not taken into account by these people. This is not accidental; it reflects the general state both of the Ukrainian and of the Russian left movements. Just as in left theory when it is influenced by postmodernism the consideration of “discourses” has replaced historical analysis, so in the practice of the left roleplaying has long since replaced real political struggle. . . . It is not surprising that when the left is in this theoretical and practical state, its members have been unable to take the lead in a single mass movement. Nor is it surprising that their political rivals, for example, the representatives of radical rightwing currents (followers of Dugin, Prokhanov and so forth), have seized the initiative from them, as occurred in Novorossiya.4 The uprising that began in Donetsk, Kharkov, Odessa and Lugansk in the spring of 2014 may be described as a sort of prologue to a more massive socio-political crisis that gradually engulfed the entire post-Soviet expanse. Its history – tragic, as every history of revolutionary action is bound to be – did not achieve its goals and finished up doubly instructive for the fact that it revealed all the weaknesses of the Ukrainian, Russian and Western left movements, creating clear lines of political division at the very moment when concerted and well-thought-out initiatives might have changed a great deal. That division, of course, did not appear by chance since it replicated the same lines of demarcation that had appeared in relation to other matters, demonstrating the real abyss that existed between left-liberal

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discourse and meaningful politics, oriented towards class interests. No less significant, however, was the fact that the popular revolt was an uprising of a “class in itself” that had become conscious of its immediate interests but that remained catastrophically incapable of realising its political tasks and perspectives, right up until the moment when it was already too late and control over the situation had finished up in the hands of quite different forces. The Moscow journal Levaya Politika [Left Politics] stated: In the period of a little over a year between the beginning of the mass protests in the south-eastern regions of Ukraine and the murder of the “Lugansk Che Guevara” Aleksey Mozgovoy on 23 May 2015, the revolt followed a tragic course from oligarchic conspiracy and spontaneous mass action, through civil war and the formation of the rudiments of a new state, to its own local “Thermidor”, occurring not so much according to the logic of its own internal political development, as resulting from pressure applied by Moscow. From the very first, the tragedy of Novorossiya was predestined by the fact that there was no other way for the uprising by the masses against oligarchic capitalism and for a welfare state to develop except under the conditions of a geopolitical conflict between Russia and the West, stemming from the influence of the latter on the post-Soviet space. One way or another, the uprising would be subordinated to the logic of this conflict. It may be said that this logic subjected the development of the social process and of the revolution itself to a catastrophic deformation, but it must be remembered that just such a tragic inevitability also characterised the revolutions of the past to a significant degree, and will certainly characterise all the revolutions of the near future. A no less tragic and illustrative example is provided by the fate of the Arab Spring, which began with a wave of popular antisystemic protests, but which was stifled beneath the weight of contradictions of a global scale. The twentieth century showed that revolutions inevitably encounter interventions, and that it is by no means always the case that these interventions are carried out by enemies of revolution. In the second half of the century we saw already that Soviet intervention, while giving many peripheral revolutions a chance to survive, at the same time deformed them, undermining the liberating impulses of the popular movement, and substituting bureaucratic control and technocratic decision-making for the democratic initiative of the masses.5 The intervention by the Russian authorities on the side of the rebels ensured the technical survival of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics but at the same time robbed them of any prospect of independent development. It undermined the confidence felt by the participants in the movement not only in the solidarity of “fraternal Russia” and the “Russian world”, but worse, in their own strength as well. The significance of the revolt nevertheless extends well beyond this. For the intellectual and social life of Russia, the Ukrainian events of 2014 were the same as the French Revolution for German philosophers. They posed questions that

Unreasonable rationality 181 predetermined the whole course of subsequent discussions, along with the logic of demarcations and political conclusions. Most important, they demonstrated in obvious fashion that for the inhabitants of Russia, Ukraine was no more a “foreign country” than was Prussia in 1848 to the inhabitants of Hanover or Saxony. Whether we like it or not, the question of social liberation and of the progress of democracy on the territories of both states proved to be just as connected, organically and inextricably, to the question of the prospects for and forms of their future unification as in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century. The division of the left on the continent (and in Britain as well) in relation to Brexit is roughly similar to that in Russia and Ukraine with regard to the events in Novorossiya. In both cases, what we saw was a popular uprising that was supported by the radical wing of the left movement that retained its adherence to class ideology. In both cases, we saw that the demand for social rights and the protest against the neoliberal policies of the European Union and of a particular national government was expressed at times in inadequate slogans – “the Russian world” or “British distinctiveness”. In both cases the refined liberal intelligentsia has used the incorrectness of popular discourse as a pretext for refusing to solidarise with people who are genuinely struggling for social change. Nevertheless, it is precisely the developments involved here that have allowed the people who are trying to overcome the “dictatorship of discourse” to unite and consolidate their forces in order to formulate a new strategy of class politics. Russia is fortunate in that the spread of political correctness among the members of the left has been very limited. On the one hand, the left organisations and movements have been so weak that the bourgeoisie has not needed to tame and integrate them – with the exception of the “official” Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which has been incorporated into the system through the political mechanisms of “managed democracy” that have been set in place in the country since the beginning of the 2000s. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie itself has been weak, having to rely heavily on the state and hence being unable to establish its own ideological hegemony. Since the 2000s, liberal economic policies have not been backed up by the liberal propaganda that formally corresponds to them. Taking the place of this liberal propaganda has been patriotic rhetoric, whose task has been to show that the measures enacted in Russia have nothing in common with identical measures implemented in neighbouring countries. Undisguised ideological liberalism has found support among only a relatively small group of the Western-oriented intelligentsia, concentrated mainly in Moscow and St Petersburg. The Western-oriented section of the left has succeeded in integrating itself into the corresponding ideological space, assimilating the corresponding discourse through its international ties. It has more or less successfully imitated the ideas and language of its foreign comrades, displaying little interest in how this might be perceived in its own country. The rest of the left has continued its role-playing, with its members imagining themselves either to be Bolshevik commissars from the early 1920s or Stalinist apparatchiks. To some degree this has been combined with participation in various cultural projects initiated by the enlightened wing of the bourgeoisie, itself a rather marginal stratum within the

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mass of Russian property-owners. As a result, politically correct discourse has spread in Russia among artists, fashionable writers and foreign-educated academic intellectuals. But it has not become dominant in the activist milieu.

The Navalny effect The massive protests in Russia’s largest cities in 2011 and 2012 revealed the unexpectedly important influence of the left, without which not a single mass mobilisation would have come to anything. The columns of the Left Front, assembled beneath red flags, were as a rule the most important and radical parts of every anti-government demonstration right up until 6 May 2012, when a clash between demonstrators and police served as a pretext for unleashing repression against the protest organisers. This repression was aimed principally at the Left Front, which by 2014 had been completely smashed, both organisationally and politically. Adding to the effectiveness of the repression was the fact that the movement leaders who suffered from it did not provide their supporters with a clear strategic perspective. Collaboration with the liberals led to demoralisation and division. After the mass protests had gone into decline, the organisational structures of the left also fell into decay; by 2015–2016, when dissatisfaction with the government again brought people onto the streets, these structures were even weaker than before the first wave of political protests. The liberals, however, were in no better position, with the negligible political results of the social upsurge of 2011–2012 providing unequivocal proof of their helplessness. The provincial population categorically rejected their ideology. By taking the side of Kyiv during the Ukrainian conflict, the Russian liberals counterposed themselves not only, as they themselves thought, to the official state, but also to the overwhelming majority of citizens of Russia who identified themselves with the residents of Donetsk, Lugansk, Odessa and Kharkov. The pro-Western position of the liberals, and of the left-wing intelligentsia who were close to them, was by no means dictated solely by their dislike of the Kremlin or by the logic of political opposition (“the enemy of my enemy is my friend”) but also represented a perfectly natural social choice – in favour of the elites and against the rebellious masses. This was something that the masses, for their part, sensed exquisitely well. Finally, the leaders of the liberal opposition squabbled constantly among themselves. Some of them left the country, and Boris Nemtsov, whom many considered the most charismatic of the Russian liberals, was murdered in 2015 under mysterious circumstances. At the same time, the feeling of patriotic unity aroused by the Ukrainian crisis and the reincorporation of Crimea into Russia in 2014 gradually died away. Not only was it supplanted by everyday cares and by the trials of coping with the confusions and disorders of the economic crisis, but it was also undermined by the policies of the regime itself, which was unable to bring the conflict to a satisfactory close. In Donetsk and Lugansk, people continued to die, while the war of positions remained senseless, with no prospect of being resolved. The volunteers who had gone from Russia to fight in Novorossiya now felt themselves to have

Unreasonable rationality 183 been deceived and betrayed. They returned home in their thousands, bearing a weight of grudges and disappointments for which the Kremlin was directly to blame. In Crimea conflicts broke out, provoked by the fact that Moscow had put its stake on members of the local elite and bureaucracy who had remained in their posts since the time of Ukrainian power and who in some cases had even strengthened their positions. In circumstances where neither the authorities nor the liberal opposition were able to arouse mass sympathy, and when the members of the left found themselves once again on the political sidelines, the country needed a new political leader capable of quickly and easily unifying the heterogeneous protest forces while not adhering to any of them. Such a leader emerged in the person of Aleksey Navalny. With Navalny, populist politics arrived in Russia. The success of the Foundation for Struggle Against Corruption (FBK) that he founded was ensured primarily by his use of media and by his skill in advancing slogans that were popular among different groups of the population. In announcing a campaign against official corruption, Navalny was far from original; he followed in the footsteps of predecessors in other countries who had also made vigorous use of such slogans. In the short term, propaganda of this type was destined to succeed. As understood by different social layers, corruption had different meanings; for some, it was a natural result of imposing peripheral capitalism on the country, while for others it was a moral pathology that blocked the development of correct bourgeois practices. On one point, however, the views of left and right, of patriots and cosmopolitans coincided momentarily: it was necessary to do something about corruption so that the country could develop further. Despite his youth, Navalny was no political novice and managed to draw lessons from the failure of the 2011–2012 movement, of which he had also been one of the leaders. He succeeded in distancing himself from the liberals, who were unpopular in society, while not alienating them definitively. Shifting his stance to the moderate left, he revived hopes for social change among those who some years earlier had come to demonstrations under red flags. He conducted vigorous work in the regions, recalling how the earlier protests had been choked in their capital-city isolation. Objectively in need of changes, the country met Navalny’s anti-corruption campaign with growing enthusiasm. Tens of thousands of young people throughout the country took part in unsanctioned demonstrations and marches on 26 March and 12 June 2017. Their protests resonated with the growth of social movements spawned by the crisis. Society was waking up. The mobilisations initiated by Navalny replicated precisely the logic of other populist movements. Uniting the most diverse social forces in struggle against the authorities, who had lost their authority within society, these actions created a short-term political alternative. But this alternative was not backed up by a strategic project, and society had a fundamental need for such a project if it was to overcome a crisis that was not just economic but also social, institutional and even spiritual. Promising the left that he would implement vigorous social welfare policies while restoring science, education and health care, Navalny simultaneously

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called for a continuation of the same neoliberal economic policies that were being enacted by the existing government. He demanded that the oligarchs be punished but avoided any talk of nationalising their property and still less of carrying out structural reforms. While sharply and clearly criticising the authoritarianism that held sway in Russia, he said nothing of any limitation of presidential powers, clearly anticipating that at some point he would exercise these powers himself. Navalny’s deep social conservatism clearly failed to affect the political radicalism of the populist protests he led. Meanwhile, and like other leaders of a transitional type, Navalny, in raising questions to which he had no answers, opened up the possibility for the appearance on the scene of new political forces. Paradoxically, the small size of the Russian left may yet turn into a huge historic advantage for its forces. Because of this weakness, the work of cleaning out the Augean stables of ideological liberalism is proving to be relatively simple and small-scale. Among the tasks before the left, this challenge rates far less prominently than the weightier goals of constructing a social movement and of forming coalitions genuinely able to win substantial changes, to overcome neoliberal economic policies and to lay the bases for a new welfare state.

Notes 1 Facebook blog of V. Shenderovich: www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=825 020010900077&id=100001762579664&pnref=story. 2 A. Frolov, Novorusskiy kapitalizm. Ocherki ekonomiki i politiki [New Russian capitalism. Sketches of the economy and politics]. Moscow: Filin”, 2017, p. 490. 3 See: D. Kharvi, Kratkaya istoriya neoliberalizma [A short history of neoliberalism]. Moscow: Pokolenie, 2007. See also: D. Kharvi, “Geograficheskiy Marksizm”. Russkiy Reporter, 13 May 2008, no. 18 (48). 4 A. Koryakovtsev, “Zabludivshayasya revolyutsiya” [The revolution that lost its way]. Levaya Politika, 2015, no. 23, p. 44. 5 Levaya Politika [Left politics], 2015, no. 23, pp. 5–6.

7

Overcoming the crisis of thought, in order to begin to act

The problem common to most of the tactics proposed by modern Western leftists, and also by their followers in non-Western countries, lies not in the lack of a strategy but in a failure – or unwillingness – to understand two fundamental facts. In the first place, the destruction of the existing order is an irreversible process, and as a matter of principle, no return to the pre-crisis state of affairs is possible regardless of the political choices that one or another group might make. Second is the fact that a return is under way to policies of brutal class confrontation, in circumstances where the classes drawn into this struggle are to a significant degree decayed and disorganised, having lost their usual politico-organisational structure, their ideological basis of support. Not only the working class and the mass of hired workers, but to a significant degree the bourgeoisie as well, apart from the oligarchic elite, are in this situation of being “classes in themselves” rather than “classes for themselves”. Ideological and organisational construction will proceed afresh, under new conditions. The politico-organisational forms inherited from the past do not for the most part aid this process but hinder it. The response to social atomisation might turn out to be either a further disintegration of society, or its restructuring. The current state of the economy, the present global division of labour and today’s socio-professional roles are not definitive – the creation of structures better fitted to stable and predictable reproduction than those of the present is a task on whose solution not just the future of capitalism but also the survival of civilisation as such are dependent. In such an epoch political populism becomes a natural phenomenon shaping the inevitable process through which society undergoes a transition to a qualitatively new state. But depending on what type of populism prevails, this process will lead either to the formation of new social structures and of a new practical democracy or to an even more profound crisis of social relations, to the cultural and moral decomposition of society.

New policies for a changing economy The economic basis for the process occurring in the countries of the West and in the territory of the former Eastern bloc has been the destruction and then reconstruction of industry; the corresponding reconstruction of the scientific and educational community; and the breaking up and dismantling of networks of solidarity

186 Overcoming the crisis of thought and cooperation even on the professional and corporative level. On the social level this has turned into a general declassing of many millions of people. Unlike the situation in earlier times, this declassing has not taken the form of impoverishment, homelessness and unemployment, but on the contrary, has often occurred in a context of growing individual consumption. The declassing has taken the form of millions of people losing the awareness and certainty of their social status, of the disintegration of horizontal bonds and of the disappearance of the relationships and rules that, properly speaking, have made these and other social groups solidary and functional wholes. In other words, a degradation of social relations has occurred. To paraphrase Marx, it may be said that the “class for itself” has become not even a “class in itself” but a “class not in itself”; it has finished up as a mass of people capable of identifying itself with alien interests and ideologies that in many cases are directly inimical to its own objective needs. Unlike the “class in itself”, which is not aware of its real interests, today’s “class not in itself” actually understands alien and even hostile interests as being its own. Moreover, this is not the result of inadequate access to culture, as in the past, but of the fact that people are sinking in a stream of cultural sludge whose production is one of the prime functions of the “information society”. This may readily be observed in the “new wave proletarians” who sell not only their labour power but also their intellects and even their personal qualities on the labour market. Even though (and often because) exploitation and alienation have proceeded to a deeper, existential level, these people are not simply reluctant to recognise themselves as a proletariat but feel themselves as belonging to a variety of categories, “new urban strata”, “the creative class”, “the advanced intelligentsia”, “hipsters” and who knows what else, so long as they do not have to recognise what they in fact are. As events proceed, left ideology, too, is undergoing definite changes, dropping to the level of the old utopian socialism, which at times reflects the most contradictory, backward and destructive forms of unstable consciousness. The degradation is never complete or general, but the reaction is total, and from the point of view of the functioning of public ideology, this represents a problem rather than a cause for optimism. Since the processes of social degradation are intertwined with those of development, and since the latter retain their momentum, the one set of processes may successfully pass itself off as the other, creating a hopeless muddle both in people’s heads and in their practice. Meanwhile, the accumulated ideological and theoretical experience is reworked as reaction proceeds, becoming its very fabric, just as any and all stylistic, theoretical and philosophical conceptions from the past, stirred in the soup of postmodernism, become part of its eclectic constructs. The result is that the primitive forms of utopian socialism or, on the other hand, of bourgeois radicalism – in the struggle against which Marxism took shape – are successfully combined with the use of Marxist or post-Marxist vocabulary and are often proclaimed to us as the latest “left ideology”. Meanwhile, ideology in general, any ideology and any forms of supposedly “political” thought and “discourse”, finish up so remote from practice and, most important, from social needs that these ideas become obviously harmful to the socium, while their bearers are

Overcoming the crisis of thought 187 transformed into parasites who reproduce themselves through the destruction or degradation of their surrounding environment. General references to an adherence to socialism, or an abstract and banal critique of capitalism that has already been reiterated from text to text for decades, yield us precisely nothing in terms of the practical transformation of society. Socialism is not the embodiment of an abstract principle but the outcome of the development of capitalism and the resolution in practice of the contradictions to which capitalism has given rise. Accordingly, socialist politics (along with social transformation) is in no sense an attempt to bring into being a kind of timeless “justice” but the realisation of actual social needs that cannot be met without transgressing the bounds of the economic logic of capitalism (even if this politics is still conducted within the framework of capitalist society). Meanwhile, social interests and needs are far broader than the class interests and needs of the “proletariat” (however we might interpret this concept). But the social position of this class means objectively that its interests, among those of all other social classes, coincide to the greatest degree with the prospects for the development and liberation of human society as a whole. The social being of present-day workers, unfortunately, does not correspond either to the ready-made formulae of the theoretical ABC of classical Marxism nor to the ideas implanted by fashionable postmodernist and post-structuralist sociology, which in themselves are no more than a by-product of the intellectual crisis of the West. To make sense of what is happening, it is necessary to return to class sociology in the spirit of Marx and Weber, but this must be perceived not in the form of a ready-made set of truisms but as an analytical method that opens the way to the formulating of a political and social strategy. Reducing this matter to the usual ABC is impossible not because the ABC is untrue but precisely for the reason that with its help, it is necessary to learn afresh to read the complex and contradictory “text” of the social reality of the twenty-first century. And having read it, to begin to act, performing deeds in the proper sense, doing at least something for the practical organisation of the movement. This is because only participation in struggle provides a social class with the actual consciousness without which any theory remains a useless plaything for intellectuals. Left parties, their elites, their intellectuals and their discourse have become part of the neoliberal agenda. Neoliberalism and capitalist politics have thoroughly integrated the left, combining it with the right-wing establishment in the framework of a common liberal ideology that is reduced to the repetition of an earlierprepared set of common positions. The left intelligentsia has embodied the logic of neoliberalism to an even more radical degree even than the bourgeois right. It is precisely the left intelligentsia that has been most unswerving in its insistence on fragmenting society, on replacing the demand for nationalisation and the principles of class solidarity with “the struggle for the rights of minorities” and with “defence

188 Overcoming the crisis of thought of the interests of immigrants” (to the extent of counterposing these interests to those of all other workers). It is the left intelligentsia that has proposed “targeted assistance” and different quotas for this or that group instead of the universal practice of the welfare state, equal for all citizens. It is not surprising that this “leftism” has suited the bourgeois elites to perfection. The consensus of right and left has allowed the ruling class to block any and all civic and democratic initiatives. It is indicative that while sometimes haughtily and sometimes condescendingly evaluating the prejudices, mistakes and contradictions in the views and actions of ordinary people – of the “toilers” who, as we know, need to be combined together and presumably directed onto some course or another – the left intelligentsia fails completely to consider how it appears in the eyes of these same toilers. Left intellectuals imagine that workers who cross over to the side of the American Republicans, or who in France vote for the National Front, are lost to the cause of progressive change. But the people who are really lost – and have long been so – are the left intellectuals themselves. The intelligentsia considers itself entitled to attach labels and hand out assessments. But to deserve this right it needs, at a minimum, to constantly demonstrate its capacity for critical socio-economic analysis that has nothing in common with the repeating of tedious mantras. In essence, the liberal left has received its status and reputation by inheritance while doing nothing to maintain its reputation or justify its privileges. In this, it bears a grotesque resemblance to the aristocracy of the ancien régime in eighteenth-century France. Antonio Gramsci linked the success of the left movement to the appearance of the “organic intellectual” who is tied indissolubly to his or her class and who acts as a kind of medium through which the class expresses its needs, formulates its interests and advances its demands. The new type of self-sufficient and selfsatisfied intellectual is quite unlike the image depicted by the Italian thinker. But can the organic intellectual be formed anew under changed historical and social conditions? In order for this to happen, the vital need is for a radical, uncompromising self-criticism on the part of the left movement and its political intelligentsia.

From populism to a new historic bloc It is quite understandable that philosophers or historians of philosophy are under no obligation to express political positions, but the trouble is precisely that reasoning of this type also defines what is usually taken sincerely as representing a political position. Meanwhile, for politicians, unlike historians, the question of the progressive or reactionary nature of a particular process may be formulated above all as the question of what can be done to make use of the events involved in the interests of progress or, on the other hand, to resist the onset of reaction. These are thoroughly practical questions, and it is in the context of this practice, proceeding from the tasks it poses and the opportunities it offers, that any appraisals have meaning. The assessments we make may be flawed, but that is for historians to judge. The correctness or incorrectness of a political position is determined by the practical consequences of the actions that flow from it. In precisely the same

Overcoming the crisis of thought 189 way, we need to recognise the limited nature of our possibilities and the smallness of our forces. But again, we need to recognise this limited nature not in order to abstain from acting but in order to act effectively, in line with the resources we have, and thus to achieve the maximum result possible. The political process does not proceed on its own, outside of and without us, but affects us in the most direct manner, and we are participants in it even if we do nothing. Whether we adopt the position of passive observers, giving ourselves up entirely to intellectual contemplation, or on the other hand, place ourselves in the position of judges whom no one has vested with authority, we not only fail to absolve ourselves of responsibility for what is happening, but on the contrary, commit a crime against history. How are we to arrive at a different position? Only by returning to a politics that expresses a specific class interest – not in the abstract philosophical sense but here and now. It is not workers who need to try to earn the recognition of intellectuals, by again and again demonstrating their political correctness, but intellectuals who need to regain at least the respect, if not the trust, of workers through openly and publicly sacrificing politically correct discourse in favour of the struggle for practical changes that are understood and approved by the majority. The initial entry into politics of masses of people who have been consistently and systematically declassed cannot possibly take any other form apart from populism. Any attempt to avoid populism on the part of the left is not just tantamount to rejecting mass politics but amounts ultimately to a rejection of the principles of democracy – and also means that the population that disagrees with neoliberal politics is handed over to the control of right-wing populism, since no third variant can exist. Just as obvious is the fact that the protesting masses themselves do not conceive of their actions and demands in the categories of right and left wing but simply formulate their more or less understood needs, along with their objections against the current state of affairs. Their statements, even when these appear to the participants in the events to be political in nature, are often internally contradictory and obviously confused. But the “left-wing” intellectuals who defend the liberal elites and the power of financial capital are no more adequate in these respects than the “right-wing” workers who rebel against the elites and against capital. It does not follow in any way from this that the concepts of “right” and “left”, as defining the relationship to the capitalist system and the existing social hierarchy, have lost their meaning. But in relation to a disorganised and fragmented reality, they are merely objective analytical categories that make it possible to draw up long-term strategies, not to formulate unambiguous assessments in the here and now. Consequently, the first conclusion dictated by the political reality that has emerged in the early twenty-first century is that the rebirth of a mass democratic politics will proceed by way of a rise of populism, while the reorganisation and success of the left will depend on the degree to which its members are able to work with these populist movements, building their own hegemony within them. The way forward in this case does not lie in fruitless criticism of the masses or in

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complaints about the contradictions of real life but in honest and open discussion with people within the framework of a broad front campaigning for change. A struggle for hegemony within populism is of course unavoidable. But before we attach labels, we need to define our criteria. Right-wing populism that is hostile to democracy and that spreads racist propaganda is not just a rival in the struggle to influence the masses but is an outright enemy. Nevertheless, the members of the left need to come up with an honest answer to the question of what they are actually dealing with: are various leaders and politicians in fact racists and enemies of democracy, or are the liberal elites merely sticking the corresponding labels on them in order to discredit the mass movement? The persistence with which significant numbers of left-wing commentators mimic and reproduce the catch-words of the bourgeois media testifies to the fact that we are not dealing with blunders but with a consistent political line that has to be overcome. In order to fight for hegemony within the mass movement, the left must first rid itself decisively of the hegemony of liberalism within its own milieu. Winning hegemony for the left requires mounting a struggle for a clear understanding by the masses of their class interests – above all, for an understanding of the need for institutional reforms aimed at restoring and further developing the welfare state based on collective consumption, full employment and high wages. Within the framework of this perspective, the enticements of all conceivable varieties of bourgeois philanthropy, such as a universal basic income, must be decisively rejected. Such ideas are a completely organic part of neoliberal ideology; they do not represent new achievements of radical thought but are simply another manifestation of the liberal hegemony within the left milieu. They are projects for class-neutral pseudo-reforms that offer the populations of Western countries a final rupture of the nexus between employment and wellbeing; they propose to introduce a quasi-market mechanism of social support that complements the destruction of free medical care, education and social services, as well as of the state sector in the field of production. Those who will be doomed to pay for these experiments will be working people in non-Western countries. Ultimately, the goal of left hegemony is to transform an unstable and inadequately thought-out populist coalition into a historic bloc that is conscious of its goals and perspectives and that is clear as to its principles, program and structures. When Antonio Gramsci introduced the term “historic bloc”, he understood perfectly the internal heterogeneity of such a formation. In essence, the task of politics consists precisely of transforming an “involved, contradictory, heterogeneous complex” of social groups and relations into a more or less organic whole.1 As the Italian thinker noted, even if the forces concerned are “similar” in their interests, they cannot converge into a united formation “except through a whole series of compromises”.2 Unlike a populist movement, which represents a collection of groups and interests that to a significant degree have come together by accident, and that in situational terms are united by a real problem or a common enemy, a historic bloc is constructed deliberately, allowing for the collective experience of the masses

Overcoming the crisis of thought 191 to be transformed through the critical work of politicians and intellectuals. The historical situation of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, however, leaves us no other path except to construct a historic bloc within spontaneous populist coalitions. Our task is to purposefully cultivate and shape class politics and class consciousness while working within the populist movement that has been born out of the logic of economic crisis and of the collapse of the neoliberal order. This does not mean that members of the left should accept and support every populist leader who comes along simply because he or she enjoys mass support. But it does mean that they should take careful account of the fact that without the people who make up the mass support for populism, organising a democratic movement for change is impossible.

The road to change Social changes can never be easy or painless. You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs, and if your most important ideological principle is a concern for the eggs, no omelette will ever be made. The problem is that the strivings of politically correct egg-protectors are useless under any circumstances. In the course of such people’s activity, eggs will in any case be broken one way or another – except that no omelette will result. The politics of the “lesser evil” amount to nothing but a road to disaster. In a period when principles are being shattered by crises on all sides, attempts to minimise risk not only fail to work but lead invariably to the worst of possible outcomes. Throughout Europe members of the left have moved rightward, transforming the slogan of European integration into a justification for their readiness to accept the existing order in practice, in exchange for the privilege of subjecting it to refined criticism in the realm of theory. From that point, and whatever radical terminology it might employ, the respectable left intelligentsia in every situation where it has faced a practical choice has sided with the neoliberal elites – against the “uneducated”, “backward” population. Contrary to the ideology proclaiming that the proletariat has no country, the oppressed part of the population has finished up having to hold fast to national institutions and traditions, defending them not against a “foreign enemy” but against its own “national” state, which acts as the main tool and transmission belt of neoliberal globalisation. Internationalism does not consist in supporting, with tender feelings, integration policies enacted in the interests of global capital but in resisting these policies, in coordinated and solidary fashion and on an international level. The betrayal by the intellectuals became a Europe-wide phenomenon after class criteria were replaced with other ones and after theory was replaced with a wide variety of elegant discourses whose reproduction became the principal marker allowing the “national” to be distinguished from the “foreign”. The betrayed and forgotten masses were not only left to their own devices, retaining and cultivating their prejudices and political superstitions, but also finished up more receptive than before to nationalist ideology.

192 Overcoming the crisis of thought The capitulations by the left, following one after another, were not accidental. Underlying all of them is a common cause – the rejection of the simple principles that, properly speaking, once comprised the identity of the left movement. A half-century ago these principles were self-evident, but now people need to be reminded of them. The first of them is class interests. No, not abstract demagogy about sympathy for the weak, inclusivity and minority rights, but the concrete interests of the real working class, including the very same “white males” whom liberals hold in such disdain. The second historical principle of the left has been the vision, the historical perspective, on the basis of which left-wing strategy was constructed. In the 1930s this common vision was shared by politicians as different as Roosevelt, Trotsky and Stalin. It rested on ideas of the objectively ripened tasks of development whose solution is also the essence of historical progress. It is significant that liberal leftists in the US continue to call themselves “progressives”, though they have long since ceased even to discuss what historical progress might now consist of – apart, of course, from isolated humanitarian measures. Meanwhile, the issue could hardly be clearer. Overcoming neoliberalism is now an urgent historic task – not because we dislike this system or because it does not correspond to our values but because it has exhausted its possibilities for development. Such a system can endure only by devouring resources that are essential for the basic reproduction of society. In other words, the longer it exists, the more it will destroy itself and undermine the conditions of life for us all. The connection between the historical perspective and class interests is determined by the answer to simple present-day questions. Will jobs be created that can ensure not just the survival of workers but also their cultural, professional and moral development? Will trade unions and other organisations of working people grow stronger? Over two and a half decades, the members of the left have joined in criticising neoliberalism, the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund for the fact that the free-market policies they have implemented have had the effect of weakening the working class and prejudicing its solidarity. For some reason, however, the left has stubbornly refused to recognise the truth of the reverse theorem: under the conditions of capitalism, only protectionism can strengthen the position of workers in the labour market while reinforcing the trade unions and the political organisations that rest on them. The Western European protectionism of the early twentieth century gave rise to the powerful German social democracy, while in Russia the support for industry provided by the governments of Witte and Stolypin established the critically important social preconditions for the revolution of 1917. Assessing the prospects for a rebirth of American liberalism after the Trump victory, Allan J. Lichtman called on Democrats to support Bernie Sanders but in no circumstances to follow him “down the rat-hole of protectionism”.3 Lichtman either honestly failed to understand or else pretended not to understand, the obvious fact that without a radical change in the economic conditions and rules, and without protectionist defence of the national market, stimulation of the “real sector” and the development of production, all these social programs would be

Overcoming the crisis of thought 193 transformed into a set of absurdly hopeful fantasies that would not only be impossible to finance in any stable fashion but that could not be effectively developed either. Just as the dismantling of the welfare state and of the developed forms of democracy that had arisen after the Second World War was linked indissolubly with the policies of the free market, the rebirth of the welfare state would inevitably require protectionist economic policies as its sine qua non. This would be an absolutely essential condition, though not a sufficient one. In other words, the question was not whether protectionism was needed or not but what forms it would take and in whose interests it would be enacted. Socialist politics requires not just support for the internal market but the use of controls over the country’s foreign trade as a tool for collective transformation and for the mobilisation of resources in order to bring about social development. Without a shift to protectionism in the old industrial states, a consolidation of the labour movement is also impossible in the countries of the Global South, which have no less need to defend their own markets and production. Without this, both democratic regulation and the welfare state are inconceivable. The Bernie Sanders campaign raised these topics, but when it came to the question of what was worse – Donald Trump’s protectionist program, laced with Islamophobic and anti-Mexican demagogy, or Hillary Clinton’s antisocial agenda, packaged in irreproachable politically correct language, the choice was made unambiguously in favour of the latter. Millions of American workers, regardless of the colour of their skin, gender or sexual orientation, made a quite different choice. In voting for Trump, they were responding not to his scandalous rhetoric, even if they liked it, but were making an informed decision based on their interests as hired workers under the conditions of capitalism. The Sanders campaign in 2020 made it possible to reformulate the questions involved here. What American workers had shown they believed in when they voted for Trump could be brought to pass only through radical social changes, the road to which would be opened through voting for Bernie. But transformations of this scope are not secured through the device of electoral ballots; they have to be won through social struggle. By advancing moderate, patently realistic socio-economic demands – which, however, are decisively rejected by the ruling class – members of the left are mobilising society around a transitional program that signifies an end to neoliberalism. Neoliberal politics has to be dismantled and the social model changed. If protectionism becomes a fact, the preconditions will have been created for a new welfare state, and along with it, the soil will have appeared for a new popular movement. The third principle that has always been fundamental to left politics is the struggle for power – and precisely for power, not for representation, for influence or for a presence in a dominant discourse. It is significant that the attempt by Sanders to engage in a real struggle for power aroused indignation among large numbers of left radicals who viewed such behaviour as quite unseemly. Conversely, when the senator from Vermont abandoned his positions, he consoled himself and his associates with the argument that the Democratic party had adopted the most progressive platform in its history, although everyone who was even remotely familiar

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with the mechanisms of the American state understood perfectly that this program was not worth the paper it was printed on. All the levers of real power (not only in the administration but in the party as well) were in the hands of people who would never allow such ideas to be put into practice. The struggle for power requires a corresponding organisation and a mobilisational apparatus far tougher than network structures. Above all it requires willpower and political independence. For precisely these reasons, and however frustrated and bitter the activists betrayed by the liberal left might feel, giving their support to right-wing populists cannot be a solution for them. Politicians such as Trump or Navalny may be able to awaken a social movement, but they cannot act constructively to satisfy the movement’s demands, something that involves going outside the framework of the existing order. The victory of such people may turn out to be an unavoidable stage in the process of overcoming neoliberalism and dismantling the corrupt political system, but it will not usher in the triumph of a positive social program. Only a consciously constructed organisation, one that is progressive in the real historical sense, can carry out this task. Political struggle requires patience and persistence. The turnabout being experienced by the modern world is altering the conditions of life and struggle for millions of people in all countries and is opening up new possibilities before them. Unfortunately, the opposite conclusion is just as obvious: the treachery of Syriza, the capitulation of Sanders and the vacillations of Corbyn are not internal questions of Greek, American or British politics. The return of Sanders in 2020 showed, however, that victories are not always definitive and defeats are not always hopeless. If vanquished armies learn from their mistakes, they can transform the course of the struggle. The paralysis of the will that has afflicted the left movement in the epoch of neoliberalism has to be overcome. An enormous global drama is beginning to be staged, one in which all of us will have to play our roles. We have to accept responsibility for taking risky and dangerous decisions. We need to understand that we cannot be kindly and agreeable to all, that victory is impossible without struggle and sacrifice.

Notes 1 A. Gramshi, Izbrannye proizvedeniya [Selected works], vol. 3, p. 59. 2 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere. A cura di Valentino Gerratana [Prison notebooks. Edited by Valentino Gerratana], vol. 3. Turin: Einaudi, 2007, p. 1612. This fragment is missing from the Russian edition of the Prison Notebooks and is thus cited from the Italian original. Meanwhile, it is noteworthy that Gramsci, following the logic of Machiavelli, does not exclude the possibility of a historic bloc being formed through compulsion. 3 The World Financial Review, Jan.–Feb. 2017, p. 7.

Conclusion

Observing how events in Western Europe and the US are unfolding, it is difficult to rid oneself of the feeling that the left is suffering setbacks everywhere, even where it might seem, at first glance, that gains are being made. Retreating, and shirking struggles, the members of the left are losing the confidence of society. Ideological capitulations are ending in, and being exacerbated by, political and electoral defeats and open betrayals such as in the case of Greece. But in reality, what people are rejecting is not the ideology of the left but liberalism – in all its variants, including left liberalism. The dissolving boundary between left-liberal discourse and right-liberal practice is rendering the differences concerned insignificant and of no interest whatsoever to the broad public. The infection of the European left with the “virus of liberalism” (to use the terminology of Samir Amin)1 has reached the scale of a real political pandemic whose victims are inevitably turning out to include not just many parties that have been influential in the recent past but also whole countries that have been robbed of the chance to choose a constructive alternative to the existing order. This situation, however, is not making the neoliberal order notably more stable, and even where a degree of stability might seem to have been achieved, it is not for long. What we find is simply that in conditions where there are no constructive alternatives, unconstructive approaches are winning out or else a spontaneous process of destruction is gaining ground. “The crisis”, Mark Tkachuk notes, “is weakening everyone who has taken part in the game previously. It is robbing them of the ability to show serious resistance to the new elements that are bound to arise”.2 In Tkachuk’s view, the answer to the crisis has to be a “modern left reformation”. Just as Luther’s reformation represented a response to the moral crisis of the late Middle Ages, a new reformation has to provide an answer to the ideological collapse of the liberal dogmas of late capitalism. Left ideas are far from having gained a mass following. As a political and spiritual force, the left movement has lagged critically in relation to the historic tasks that objectively stand before it. “But the dogmas and canons of the present-day world no longer evoke either trust or emotional attachment”, Tkachuk observes, and the sole question is whether a new, enlightened reformation will succeed in overturning these canons and dogmas before the people who are already

196 Conclusion descending into the dungeons of the past, and who have already raised their feudal banners and battle-standards, carry out the task instead.3 The events of the years from 2014 to 2017 inevitably provoked a wave of splits in the left movement, whose ideology and tactics proved unable to cope with the processes occurring in the world or with the needs of social development. The political forces that found themselves in this situation were doomed inescapably to collapse. But the catastrophe experienced by the left movement in one historical form simply opens up the prospect for the movement of being reborn in a different form. So long as capitalism exists, with its inherent social and economic contradictions, the objective need for a left alternative exists as well. Historically, this alternative is destined to change along with the changes in capitalism itself and with the development of class conflicts, the forms and manifestations of which are also inevitably changing. The crisis experienced by left organisations has been the natural result of the preceding developments and of the choice made again and again by the movement’s leaders, political and intellectual. In this respect the events of the early twenty-first century have continued the previous history of the evolution of the labour movement. The disintegration of the First International prepared the way for the rise of the Second International, whose crisis in turn gave birth to the communist movement. The stagnation of the “old left” (the Communist and Social Democratic parties) in the late 1960s made inevitable the appearance of the “new left”. In the early twenty-first century, we are observing how the intellectual and ideological evolution spurred by the youth revolt of the 1960s has led us into an impasse, from which an escape is being provided by a shift to a new class politics that reflects both the changed and fundamentally unchanged needs and interests of the majority of hired workers regardless of their skin colour, gender, religious persuasion or other marks of identity. There is nothing tragic, in itself, about this situation. The only thing lending it a catastrophic cast is the fact that the hegemony exercised in the left movement by politically correct liberal intellectuals has driven millions of workers into the arms of right-wing populists, to the point where it is now impossible to organise a mass popular bloc for social change without developing relations in some form with these political currents. Instead of organising their own broad movement, the members of the left are obliged to have dealings with a mass movement that has arisen not only without them but in opposition to them. Nevertheless, the objective needs of working people require political expression. In awakening the activity of the masses, populist leaders are forced in one way or another to react to ever-new manifestations of a spontaneous revolt that today has raised them to the summit of politics but that threatens to turn against them tomorrow. Ideologically amorphous populist movements are destined either to move to the left or to shatter. In either case, the outcome depends on whether the members of the left are capable of dialogue with the masses. Efforts to depict the new populism as an analogue of the Western European fascism of the early 1930s are unfounded simply because they fail to take account of

Conclusion

197

the difference between the state of society in the mid-twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. Identifying populism with fascism is of fundamental importance for the ideological self-justification of left liberals since it provides a basis for their collaboration with neoliberals and support for the existing order – in the name of avoiding something many times worse. The concept of fascism, of course, is stripped of any specific historico-political or social content, in essence signifying anything that is not to the liking of right- or left-wing liberals. The danger to freedom and progress in the new situation is not posed by right-wing populism as such, but by the political chaos that flows both from the inability of populist leaders to construct a systemic alternative to neoliberalism in conditions where it is undergoing spontaneous collapse, and also from the refusal of the left to join with masses of rebelling workers in a struggle against the liberal establishment. The breathing-space that the Western establishment, through political measures, won for itself in 2017 simultaneously created the opportunity for the formation of a new, more radical left-wing opposition and for a reorganising and restructuring of the left (or more accurately, for a reconstituting of the left movement, in significant measure, for its refounding). Also becoming possible was the rise of new protest movements in countries that, like Russia, had remained peaceful political quagmires up to that point. Inevitably, the shock of a renewed crisis will call to life new political forces, including in Eastern Europe, where the left movement has found itself until recently in a pitiful and depressed state. The political movements making up such a new wave will, however, only be able to play their role successfully if they draw the appropriate conclusions from the catastrophic experience of the liberal left. The epicentre of political crisis is shifting to new zones, including to Russia, where its development is aided by the authoritarianism and incompetence of the ruling class. Russia’s need for a new modernisation is in turn making revolutionary changes indispensable. These changes cannot be realised through the efforts of the local bourgeoisie, which is thoroughly provincial and steeped in corruption. In other words, the appearance of strong left forces is a question of national development, not only for Russia but also for many other countries that have finished up in a similar position. The preconditions for a new wave of progressive developments will not emerge in the US, Western Europe or Russia without a great deal of active work. If the left movement is to strive genuinely to play a role in real and not imagined politics, it must break decisively with liberal illusions and the discourse that accompanies them. Novorossiya, Brexit and the US elections of 2016 are all manifestations of one and the same global revolutionary situation. The series of revolts that have ensued logically and inevitably from the collapse of neoliberal economic policies, and also the inadequate form of these revolts, have been predetermined by the inability of the left to propose an alternative that is attractive to the masses. On both the global and national levels, the left is thus required to make a choice between the interests of the working class and the logic of comfortable discourse. Indeed, members of the left have been making this choice, taking their stance on

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different sides of the barricades, even if they are not yet fully aware of the significance of their decisions. This choice is not definitive for each individual member of the left movement, but for society, it is irrevocable in historical terms, just like the choice that the Social Democrats were forced to make in 1914 and 1917.

Notes 1 See: S. Amin, Virus liberalizma [The virus of liberalism]. Moscow: Evropa, 2007. 2 M. Tkachuk, Gryadushchee proshloe. Tri esse o rozhdenii, gibeli i nadezhde [The approaching past: Three essays on birth, death and hope], p. 249. 3 Ibid., p. 253.

Index

accumulation of capital 22–23 activism see authoritarianism 9; “colour revolutions” 127–128 adaptation, politics of 54 affirmative action 35 Africa 5 Albright, M. 130 alienation 122, 186; and right-wing populism 64 Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) 79–85 animal rights movement 33 anti-intellectualism 61 anti-racist propaganda 47, 48, 50 anti-reformism 119–120; see also reform(s) Arenas, N. 112 Argentina 30, 67; reforms 106 Aufstehen (‘Rise Up’) movement 82 authoritarianism 5, 9, 13, 49; in the European Union 98; Latin American 109–110 Bartsch, D. 47 Belarus 3 Beriya, L. 29 Bickerton, C. 87, 91, 92 Blair, T. 115, 128 Bolivia 30, 107 Bolshevik Revolution 119 bourgeoisie 1, 6, 7, 12, 15–16, 16, 17, 19, 24, 25, 26, 35, 41, 47, 53, 55, 58, 59, 120, 130, 141, 188; and feminism 39; see also elites Brazil 3, 30 Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) 4 Brexit 85–95, 123, 133, 144, 169, 197 Brezhnev, L. 97, 159 Bush, J. 126

Callinicos, A. 9, 88 Cameron, D. 89, 114 capital 21, 22, 25, 51, 148; accumulation 22–23; expansion of under neoliberalism 175–177; freedom of movement 20–21, 23, 30; and immigration 45 capitalism 4, 6, 10, 16, 21, 26, 28, 51, 150, 160, 196; American 150, 151; oppression of women 39; politics of adaptation 54 “centre” countries 5, 18–19, 94, 178; wages 22; see also peripheral countries Chávez, H. 110, 111 Chile 30, 107 China 3, 19, 22, 176; elites 28–29 Chomsky, N. 129, 137 Chubais, A. 86, 143 Chwala, S. 159, 160 class consciousness 160, 187, 191 class struggle 9, 16, 17, 24, 160, 178, 185, 187; and the fragmentation of society 51–52; in France 155; and globalisation 15; labour movement 11–12; and populism 106; and revolution 25; in the US 149; “white males” 56 clientelism 18, 40; in the European Union 99; United States 35–36 Clinton, H. 12, 35, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 144, 193 coalitions 58, 148, 149; Lexit 92–93; Syriza 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78 Cohn-Bendit, D. 155 Cold War 25, 147, 176 collapse of the Soviet Union, comparison with the European Union 97, 98, 99 “colour revolutions” 127–128 compassionate racism 47–48

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Index

competition, between minorities 54–55 conservatism 16; Donald Trump 141–142; and immigration 43 consumption 22–23, 42, 45 Corbyn, J. 7, 9, 85, 89, 90, 91, 92–93, 102, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 126, 127, 128, 133, 134, 143, 194; electoral defeat 122–123 Correa, R. 113, 120 corruption 5, 21, 183, 184; elections 8 creative class 19 “creative destruction” 177 crowd-funding, Sanders’ presidential campaign 127 Cuba 5 Debord, G. 7 debt crisis, Greece 65, 66, 67, 68, 69 declassing of social groups 185–186 democracy 7, 8, 25 Democratic Party 137, 138, 144, 151, 192; allegations of election rigging 133–134; national convention in Philadelphia 135–136, 136; see also Clinton, H.; Obama, B.; Sanders, B. demonstrations 8; May Day 153; see also protests Dericquebourg, B. 74 Devecchio, A. 156 development 15, 30, 50, 96 Die Linke party 79, 82 differences 33, 37; minority 40 discourse 37, 54, 59, 179, 181, 187; leftliberal 195; politically correct 41–42 discrimination 43 discursive struggle 31 divide and rule 33 economic liberalisation 28; of the Soviet Union 29 Ecuador 30, 107 elections 8 elites 8, 12, 13, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 35, 36, 41, 141, 187; Chinese 28–29; Latin American 30–31; nomenklatura 27–28; and populism 104; reaction to Trump’s election victory 143–144; vanguard 10, 54 employment policy 18; and globalisation 30 European Central Bank 3, 65, 67, 86, 98 European Union 2, 3, 5, 12, 64, 95, 174; authoritarianism 98; Brexit 85–95; clientelism 99; Greek debt crisis 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76;

institutional crisis 98–99; paternalism 18; propaganda 87; reforms 99, 100 europopulism 105 eurozone 2–3, 65 exclusion 38 fascism 60, 102, 197 feminism 37–38, 40; and gender bias 40–41; “glass ceiling” 38–39 feminist movement 26 Finger, B. 148 Finland 19 Ford, H. 147 fragmentation 158; institutional 55; of society 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 185 France 6, 8, 12, 46, 54, 165; Amiens protests 158; establishment party strategy against the National Front 163–165; immigration 164; Labour Code 157–158; Left Front 158; May Day protests 153; multiculturalism 162; National Front 156, 157; Nuit Debout (‘Up All Night’) 102; pension reform 156, 157; referendum on a European Constitution 155–156; republican politics 159; rise of Marie Le Pen 159–163; Socialist Party 154, 155, 156, 157, 162, 163; strikes of 1995 154; violent protests 158–159; “yellow vest” protests 153, 168–170 Frank, T. 136, 139, 141, 144, 146 French Revolution 16, 119, 169; see also revolution Frolov, A. 172–173 Gaddafi, M. 27 Gasset, J. 23 gender bias 40–41 Germany 69; Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) 79–85; Die Linke 79, 82; immigration 41–42, 47, 79–80, 82, 82–84; nationalism 84; “politics of the lesser evil” 57, 58 globalisation 2, 15, 30, 155, 191; and labour 20–21 Golden Dawn 73, 75 Gorbechev, M. 99 Gramsci, A. 10, 42–43, 170, 188, 190; Prison Notebooks 120 Great Britain 6, 12, 18, 24, 30; Corbyn phenomenon 116–118; Labour Party 7, 9, 113, 114, 115, 118, 122, 123; leftwing populism 102; see also Corbyn, J.; Scotland; Thatcher, M.

Index Great Crisis 6, 13, 72, 73 Great Recession 1, 3, 4, 103, 132 Greece 6, 87, 93, 176; debt crisis 65–66, 67, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75; Delphi Conference 101n28; referendum vote 69, 70, 71; Syriza 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 77, 78, 100, 102, 194 Guastella, D. 151 Hall, S. 31 Hamon, B. 165 Hardt, M. 95 Harvey, D. 174 Hedges, C. 35 historic bloc 190–191 Hobbes, T. 16 Hollande, F. 34, 157, 162, 167 homophobia 54–55 identities 32, 34, 37, 40; gender bias 40–41; migrant 44 ideology 186–187; political correctness 33; of populist movements 105–106 Iglesias, P. 76, 79 immigration 40, 42, 43, 49; anti-racist propaganda 47, 48, 50; compassionate racism 47–48; France 164; Germany 82–84; and Islamic radicalism 44; and labour 45–46, 47; left-wing stance on 46–47; and multiculturalism 44–45; populism 105; Soviet approach 49; xenophobia 47 inclusion 38 India 3, 19 individualism 39–40, 45 inequality 19, 29 institutions 51, 53; fragmentation 55 interests 32, 34, 37, 39, 190; animal 33; class 192; of the masses 64–65; social 187; of society 95 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 65 internationalism 87, 94, 191 Ireland 2, 5, 87 “irreversability” 86, 87, 88, 92 Islamic radicalism 44 Italy 87 Jayatilleka, D. 56 Johnson, B. 122, 123, 133 Jones, O. 134 Kaine, T. 135 Keynes, J. M. 110 Kilpatrick, C. 151

201

Kirchner, C. 107 Kirchner, N. C. 107 Kleger, H. 64 Klein, N. 37 Kolesnikov, A. 166 Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD) 58 Koryakovtsev, A. 52, 53, 179 Kostyuk, R. 100, 102–103 Krugman, P. 116, 129 Kruschev, N. 29 labour: China 28; collective 49–50; and the fragmentation of society 51–52; and globalisation 20–21; and immigration 45, 46, 47; in Marxist ideology 19–20; precariat 18; and universal basic income (UBI) 19; vertical mobility 21–22 labour movement, weakness of 11 Labour Party 9, 72, 90, 113, 114, 115, 116, 127 labour relations 18 Lafontaine, O. 79 Lasch, C. 23 late capitalism 16, 119, 195 Latin America 3, 11, 29–30, 102, 121; authoritarianism 109–110; left populism 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112; “machine of growth” 30–31; Peronism 106–107; personalisation of power 109; redistribution of wealth 108, 110; revolt against neoliberalism 107, 108 Laurent, P. 79 Le Pen, J.-M. 157 Le Pen, M. 157, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168 leadership, populist movements 120–121 Left Front 182 left hegemony 190 left intelligentsia 9, 10, 26, 35, 37, 129, 171, 187–188, 191; compassionate racism 47–48; discursive struggle 31–32; lack of trust in the masses 64–65; Latin American 109; position on immigration 46–47; postmodernism 16; reaction to Trump’s election victory 143–144; Russian 179; see also elites; vanguard left movement: and Brexit 91–92; Greece 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79; principles 192, 193–194; reformation 195–196; schisms 196 left populism 102, 131; and the Corbyn phenomenon 117–118; Latin American

202

Index

108–109; Peronism 106–107; Venezuela 109–113; see also populism Lenin, V. I. 53, 54, 119, 141 “lesser evil” 129, 136, 137, 154, 174; politics of 56–57, 58, 59, 60, 61 Lexit 92–93 liberal post-democracy 7 liberalism 195 Lichtman, A. J. 192 Lukyanov, F. 168 Luxemburg, R. 53 Macron, E. 12, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169 Maduro, N. 112 Maihold, G. 109, 111 Mao, Z. 28 market liberalisation 176 Martynov, K. 143 Marx, K. 52, 95, 186, 187 Marxist ideology 18; labour 19–20; vanguard 10; Zapatista movement 9–10 mass movements 13 masses, the 9–10, 12, 23, 24, 31; declassing 189; populism 104; prejudices 64–65; solidarity 13 May, T. 89, 90 Mélanchon, J.-L. 79, 158, 165 Menem, C. S. 107 Merkel, A. 39, 79, 80, 82 Mexico, Zapatista movement 9–10 middle business, alliance with the working class 146–147 middle class 19, 30, 39, 41, 55; and Sander’s presidential campaign 132–133 migration 43; see also immigration Miliband, E. 114 minorities 12, 16, 36–37, 95; affirmative action 35; differences 40; migrants 40; and political correctness 26, 27; positive discrimination 54–55; rights 32–33, 35; targeted assistance 37, 38, 188; see also positive discrimination Moldavia 3 Moore, M. 136, 137, 144 Moreno, L. 113 movements 26, 32, 37, 194; animal rights 33; Aufstehen (‘Rise Up’) 82; “colour revolutions” 127–128; and the Corbyn phenomenon 117–118; labour 32; Latin American 107, 108, 109–110; left populist 102; “new left” 52, 53, 96; Peronism 106–107; populist 103, 104, 105, 106, 142, 189–190, 196–197; right populist 59, 60, 61, 64, 106;

workers’ 33; “yellow vest” 153; see also populism multiculturalism 35, 37–38, 40, 56, 158; in France 162; and immigration 44–45 National Front 12, 46, 102, 156, 157, 164, 166; membership 162; position on immigration 164–165; rise of Marie Le Pen 159–163; see also Le Pen, M. nationalisation 1, 6–7 nationalism: German 84; see also Brexit Navalny, A. 121, 183, 194 Nazism, “politics of the lesser evil” 57–58 Negri, A. 95; Goodbye, Mr. Socialism! 155–156 Nemtsov, B. 182 neoliberalism 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 25, 28, 32, 35, 37, 42, 44, 51, 52, 53, 54, 73, 96, 121, 130, 138, 144, 145, 154, 158, 164, 174, 176, 187, 194; and Brexit 88–89; commercialisation 17; in the European Union 86–87; expansion of capital 175–177; globalisation 22–23; Greece 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76; and immigration 45–46; overcoming 192; reforms 104; revolt against 30–31, 107; targeted assistance 17, 18; welfare state 17 “new left” movements 16, 52, 53, 96, 158, 196 new opportunism 10–11 “new wave proletarians” 186 Nicaragua 30 nomenklatura 27–28 norms 35, 42; and immigration 45 North Korea 5 Nuit Debout (‘Up All Night’) 102 Obama, B. 128, 129, 132, 140 “old left” 52, 77, 196 “organic intellectual” 188 “other” 10 Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) party 66, 67, 69 Papandreou, G. 69 Paraguay 30 parasitism 17, 20, 141 Party Workers of Brazil 107 paternalism 17, 18, 37, 41 peripheral countries 2, 5, 18–19, 20, 27, 178 Perón, J. 106 personalisation of power 109 Peters, S. 110

Index Podemos 68, 76, 79, 102 political correctness 26, 27, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 52, 55, 119, 136, 139, 150, 189; compassionate racism 47–48; discourse 31–32; and feminism 41, 42; and immigration 42, 43; in Russia 181–182; Sanders’ presidential campaign 130 politics 78, 95, 188, 189, 190, 191; of adaptation 54; “of the lesser evil” 56–57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 191; revolutionary 119, 120; socialist 187, 193 Popular Unity 74, 75, 77 populism 103, 104, 105, 142, 167, 185, 189, 190, 196–197; Boris Johnson 122; Corbyn phenomenon 117–118, 122; euro 105; Foundation for Struggle Against Corruption (FBK) 183–184; ideology 105–106; Latin American 107–108, 109, 110, 120; left 102, 131; National Front 165; Peronism 106–107; right 59, 60, 61, 64, 106, 137, 190; strengths 124; successful leadership 120–121, 123–124; weaknesses 124; see also left populism; right populism Portugal 87, 176 positive discrimination 26–27, 34, 36–37, 54–55; in the US 35 postmodernism 16, 37–38, 51, 186, 187 post-Soviet states 27; nomenklatura 27–28 power 15, 27; personalisation of 109; struggle for 9, 193–194 precariat 18 prejudice, of the masses 64–65 privileges 35 production 20, 21, 42, 51 productivity, decline of 20, 21 progress 16, 26 progressive class 96 proletariat 11, 18, 19, 24, 42, 53–54, 160, 191; interests 187; “new wave” 186 propaganda 70, 71, 85, 87, 136, 139, 140, 181 property ownership 28 protectionism 23, 146, 147, 148, 149, 192, 193 protests 7–8, 13, 24, 37, 94; French strikes of 1995 154; May Day 153; “yellow vest” 153, 168–170 Putin, V. 128, 178, 179 racism 140, 164; compassionate 47–48; and immigration 47 radical left 13, 26; Latin American countries 30–31

203

radicalism 73, 151; Islamic 44 Reagan, R. 24 redistribution of wealth: Latin America 108, 110; Venezuela 111–112 reform(s) 9, 17, 18, 20, 23, 24, 26, 31, 35, 53–54, 55, 86, 104, 119, 156, 190; Argentina 106; and the Corbyn phenomenon 117–118; of the European Union 99–100; Greece 65, 72; Latin America 110–111; Soviet Union 97; universal basic income (UBI) 18–19 refugees 40, 45; compassionate racism 47–48; see also immigration Republican Party 137, 138, 142, 166; see also Democratic Party; Trump, D. resistance 9, 17, 43, 70 revolution(s) 5, 9, 10, 13, 20, 23, 24, 53–54, 60, 108, 120, 173; Bolivarian 108, 110, 111, 112, 113; “colour” 127–128; and the Corbyn phenomenon 117–118, 119; New Left 16; Zapatista movement 9–10 right populism 59, 60, 61, 64, 106, 137, 190, 197; see also populism rights 32–33; migrant 48; minority 35 risks, of social change 13, 56 Roosevelt, F.D. 141, 146; New Deal 147 ruling class 4, 5, 7, 51, 130, 171 Russia 3, 50, 171, 179, 197; Foundation for Struggle Against Corruption (FBK) 183–184; and the Global Financial Crisis 171–172; intervention in the Ukrainian civil war 178, 180, 182, 183; Left Front 182; left intelligentsia 179; politically correct discourse 181–182; protests of 2011–2012 173–174 Sanders, B. 7, 35, 102, 133, 137, 140, 142, 144, 147, 150, 151, 168, 192, 193; capitulation 137, 138, 194; criticisms of 131–132; popularity among young people 130–131, 132; presidential campaign 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134; reaction to Trump’s election victory 145 Sarkozy, N. 156, 157, 162 Schultz, D. W. 135 Schumpeter, J. A. 177 Scotland 18; and Brexit 88 Shenderovich, V. 171 single-sex marriage 34–35 social change 191 social democratic parties 25–26; “politics of the lesser evil” 57–58

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Index

social progress 95, 96 socialism 54, 186, 187 society 95, 104, 121–122; fragmentation 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 185 “society of the spectacle” 7–8, 92 solidarity 12, 13, 19, 22, 32, 34, 35, 37, 43, 49, 50, 56, 96, 141, 150, 192; and clientelism 36 Southern Europe 5 Soviet Union 6, 9, 11, 20, 29, 30; collapse of 24–25, 27, 56, 97–98; dissidents 97; economic liberalisation 29; immigration policy 49; see also Russia; Ukraine Spain 87, 176; Podemos 68, 76, 79, 102 Stalin, J. 29 Stein, J. 136 strikes 24 struggle for power 9, 193–194 Switzerland, referendum of UBI 19, 20 Syriza 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 96, 100, 102, 194 targeted assistance 17–18, 35, 37, 38, 188 Thatcher, M. 24, 39, 51, 55, 78, 86, 95 Thomas, M. L. 117 Tkachuk, M. 1, 2, 195, 196 trade unions 9, 15, 18, 20, 42, 122; Argentina 106; solidarity 19, 22; strikes 24, 154 troika 65, 66, 67, 68, 70 Trudell, M. 142 Trump, D. 12, 102, 126, 129, 130, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 146, 150, 151, 166, 168, 192, 193, 194; contradictions 147–148, 149; presidential campaign 142; support of the working class 147–148; wealth 146 Tselintsev, A. O. 57–58 Tsipras, A. 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79 Ukraine 3, 6, 100, 174; civil war 177–178, 179, 180–181; civl 182, 183; Novorossiya 93, 178, 197 unemployment, and globalisation 21–22, 30 United Kingdom, Brexit 85–95; see also Great Britain; Scotland United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) 87, 93

United States 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 12, 145, 166; class struggle 149; clientelism 35–36; Green Party 136, 138; leftwing populism 102, 138; positive discrimination 35; working class 150; see also Democratic Party universal basic income (UBI) 18–19, 190 Uruguay 30, 107 utopian thinking 60 vanguard 10, 54 Varoufakis, G. 66, 67, 72, 73, 77, 78, 96 Venezuela 30, 107, 108, 111; left populism 110, 111, 112; United Socialists Party 110 vertical mobility 21–22, 62n12 violence, Amiens protests 158 Visconti, L., Rocco and his Brothers 43 Visunov, S. 52, 53 Wagenknecht, S. 47, 82 wages 20–21 Wahl, A. 92 Walsh, J. 144 Warren, E. 135, 150 Weber, M. 19, 166, 187 welfare state 13, 16, 17, 35, 37, 45, 105, 130, 193; fragmentation 17; France 155; targeted assistance 17–18; United States 150; universal basic income (UBI) 18–19 Wells, H. G., The Time Machine 20 “white males” 35, 36, 56, 59, 140, 141, 158 working class 11–12, 16, 25, 36, 59, 150, 192; alliance with middle business 146–147; class consciousness 160; and the fragmentation of society 51–52; support for Donald Trump 139, 140, 141; support for the National Front 160–161; traditional left values 160; vertical mobility 62n12; see also proletariat xenophobia 47, 55, 84, 141 Xi, J. 143–144 “yellow vest” protests 153, 168–170 Zorin, A. 34