councilor.org
| Source | Louis Proyect |
| Date | 02/11/08/12:24 |
| Mike Friedman wrote:
> The democratic party has been shifting to the right for three decades, > now... that's not news. But, some analysis of how current hegemonic > political culture played itself out in these elections would be useful. It is important to recognized that bourgeois politics in general has been shifting to the right. If a Republican Party candidate now ran for president with the same platform as Richard Nixon's in 1970, he'd be denounced as a traitor to the party. Back in the early 1960s, nobody like Reagan would have been taken seriously as a national leader but every Republican President since Reagan has followed in his footsteps. The only possible explanation for this phenomenon is that the capitalist system requires a meaner and stingier regime both domestically and internationally. What's driving this is fundamental changes in the capitalist economy that have been explained in great detail by Robert Brenner and Harry Shutt, whose Zed book "The Trouble With Capitalism" is indispensable. Basically you have intense competition between big blocs of capital for a dwindling market. Under these circumstances, you will find the ruling classes of the key countries whipping their country into spartan, competitive machines armed to the teeth with little room for niceties such as universal health care or a guaranteed job. The opening salvo in this war on the working class was--in my opinion--the coup against Allende in 1973. The regime that was imposed on the Chilean people became a model for the 3rd world and for the USSR as well. In short order, it also became the model for advanced capitalist countries as Thatcherism and Reaganism became the standard. The decline of manufacturing jobs--hence leading to an erosion of its traditional progressive base--and the shift to the right from its corporate benefactors transformed both the Democratic Party in the USA and European social democracies, especially the British Labor Party, into lite versions of the Thatcher-Reagan system. This dynamic is virtually identical to the one that took place in Europe during the rise of fascism. The party of the right becomes more extremist, more self-confident, more ambitious. The party of the left cowers in the presence of its opponent and urges voters to choose the lesser evil. Of course, faced with desperate conditions the voter will often choose the party that seems resolved to provide a systemic answer, especially when it is framed in populist demagoguery. We are nowhere near that level of crisis today, but we are certainly moving in that direction. We also have our lesser-evil parties and individuals today who are frozen like deer in the headlights of the reactionary car barrelling down the highway. The left intelligentsia is pathetic. With the ultraright intelligentsia becoming more and more emboldened by each victory at the ballot box, we find our "spokesmen" lashing out at the radical movement for being "anti-American" in a version of hard cop and soft cop. This is the price we have to pay for the postmodernist victory in the left academy. Desperately afraid of putting forward "oppressive" metanarratives, it avoids putting forward the one solution that can solve the intractable economic and social crisis of the 21st century: socialism. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho