Is the West Experiencing a Right-Wing Drift?

A Danish writer Rune Møller Stahl wrote that we're in what Gramsci called an 'interregnum', a 'nonhegemonic time'. The neoliberal consensus has broken down, but it's still unknown what the way forward is going to be longterm. A resurgence of neoliberalism? Right-wing populism? Left wing neo-keynesian socialism? Nobody really has enough power to do what they want to do yet, so it's all just a frustrating slog. Socialism is going to win out in the end, though, imo. The tools of neo-liberalist economics fundamentally don't seem to work anymore, and the right-wing populist movememt is extremely dangerous, but in the end self-defeating.

It also occurs to me that our new visions of society are for the most part reruns of previous attempts. The big alternative offered by the left (socialism, or communism even) are projects now centuries old. I go between two possibilities for this - one is a sort of political philosophy low hanging fruit. Maybe there are only so many ways to organize society and so we're rehearsing these old debates. The other possibility is just a failure of imagination to think of something new.

The imagination is there. Most of the practicalities have been worked out. The problem is the getting of power off those whose present state of living depends on us not having it.

The imagination is there. Most of the practicalities have been worked out.

I don't think both of these things can be true.

In this sense the left has its own end of history problem (tho even worse since its biggest projects were the ones discredited by capitalism’s end of history). I don’t personally find “we know how to make a perfect society we just need to get the media on board / wait for old people to die” particularly compelling. The eco leftists also waiting for something else before they can enact utopia (the end of civilization) which gives them some sort of novelty but again there’s nothing really to inspire here just waiting for godot.

Yeah, the new left is obviously looking backwards, how can that even be up for discussion? Corbyn and Sanders are links to the past, warriors who have kept up the good fight since the seventies. And that might be enough, it might be that Mordy's first idea is the right one.

Power needs to be taken, not waited for - I agree!

The imagination is there. Most of the practicalities have been worked out.

I don't think both of these things can be true.

Why not? Borrowing has been low for a decade. We have fully costed plans for radical social transformation from a number of policy research groups, and even a couple of real political parties. Imagination isn't the problem. Practicalities aren't even the problem. But being right, as we appear to be discovering again and again, ISN'T ENOUGH!

I don’t personally find “we know how to make a perfect society we just need to get the media on board / wait for old people to die” particularly compelling.

same

but as ever to me it's clear that post-religious societies would move right, and I know that I'm just pissing in the wind saying this on ILX

TH, what Mordy is saying is that the imagination of the left only amounts to rehashing ideas from ca 1870-1979. What Mordy isn't really saying is that this is necessarily a bad thing.

Mostly young people are floating the ideas and doing the work. Sanders and Corbyn providing periods of leadership doesn't mask that.

Well, that's postmodernism for you

Though I don't think Mordy's really giving fully automated gay luxury communism the credit that's due to it. A few costings still to be worked out there tbf

xpost

Lol. The fully automated gay parts of it are kinda new, yeah. I think if someone from the thirties travelled to this day, they would instinctually understand a lot of the political debates. But show them a picture of the new Finnish cabinet, and they would lose their minds.

Just ignore the dishonest fascist, btw. He has nothing to offer.

Lol Fred how many power naps till the new Star Wars. Looking forward to the Baby Yoda review.

There are new ideas on the left that haven't been tried yet. They're not as well known to the general public, but they have some currency within the new left's discourse. I'm thinking mainly of Murray Bookchin's theory of Communalism, and Abdullah Öcalan's related vision of Democratic Confederalism (currently practiced successfully in Rojava, despite their many enemies). These two visions of society mix ideas from anarchism and socialism to create a "commune of communes", a decentralized, confederated system of local direct democracies.

Others on the left are interested in instituting workplace democracy, another idea that was never tried in past attempts at socialism. This is a popular idea within the DSA.

There is a distinctly libertarian (in the sense of anti-authoritarian) character to the new left that differs from past leftist formulations.

For more info on that workplace democracy bit, see this great Richard Wolff video, Three Basic Kinds of Socialism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7x7oVwhHok

'Communalism' sounds like fourierism to me. It sounds more like proto-communism than post-communism.

Anti-authoritarian socialism is... anarchism? It sounds like a return to before the dictatorship of the proletariat became dogma. You're right, onesecondbefore, that it's a road not taken, but I'm not sure I find it 'new'.

Sounds like a fucking nightmare tbh. Any political ideology that doesn’t fully account for the possibility of withdrawal and solitude, silence and marginality, can only become totalitarian in the long run. Every community needs an other.

"Soviet Union" itself m/l meant "union of local workers' councils" tbh.

Please trust me that the one-sentence summaries in my comment are not the totality of these proposed systems. Bookchin wrote several books on Communalism that get into the gritty details. Democratic Confederalism has a several volume set written on it AND a society currently practicing it. Both of these systems are based on the theory of Social Ecology, which is quite robust.

Here's a pamphlet that introduces all of this in a little more detail, if you're interested: https://libcom.org/files/Social%20Ecology%20Pamphlet%20Emily%20McGuire.pdf

Worth mentioning also that one of the reasons Social Ecology is gaining traction in the new left is that it is specifically concerned with averting ecological catastrophe and incorporating ecological thinking into a new kind of society.

For some reason, Post-Scarcity Anarchism was on my Dad's bookshelf so I did read that one as a teenager, at the least.xp

Oh hey, on the last page of that pamphlet it talks about reclaiming Utopian Socialism like Fourierism from Marx. I was kinda right :)

I'm not saying it's bad, OSB, I'm just saying I don't find it particularly new! And I still don't after reading the pamphlet. It says: “I find myself very much in agreement with a past anarchist, Murray Bookchin, who kinda said ‘I think that the future of the left depends crucially on putting together the best of anarchism and the best of Marxism, and unless those two anti-capitalist perspectives can be put together in a political process, the left is doomed to failure.’ He severed himself from the anarchist tradition because he couldn’t stand the dogmatic anarchists. I’ve had a hard time in the Marxist tradition with the dogmatic Marxists. The dogmatic Marxists and the dogmatic anarchists should go to Hell”

I agree with pom, though. I'm not convinced that it sounds appealing to me as a large-scale basis for society; I also think people are underselling the extent to which a number of the 'bad' historical examples of national-level socialism were initially motivated by similar ideals.

The imagination is there. Most of the practicalities have been worked out. The problem is the getting of power off those whose present state of living depends on us not having it.

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand)

actually getting power seems like a pretty pivotal practicality to be worked out. also, there are implicit costs in most of the possible methods of obtaining power that need to be worked out.

i do also note that governance seems a lot easier to people who aren't in a position to do it... maybe indeed "most of the practicalities have been worked out" but i'd need to see that hypothesis tested before i can sign on to that

personally my interest is more in process than in policy, in form rather than in substance, and i can't make any decisions on what that form would look like until i see how far people are willing to go, in practice, in the pursuit of power.

I meant the practicalities of the policies i.e. single-payer health insurance, nationalising the rail system, etc. A lot of the heavy lifting has been done in terms of thinking through what can be done to address society's problems. But yes of course being in position to actually implement these changes is what won't be given up without a very difficult and asymmetrical fight.

There are new ideas on the left that haven't been tried yet. They're not as well known to the general public, but they have some currency within the new left's discourse. I'm thinking mainly of Murray Bookchin's theory of Communalism, and Abdullah Öcalan's related vision of Democratic Confederalism (currently practiced successfully in Rojava, despite their many enemies). These two visions of society mix ideas from anarchism and socialism to create a "commune of communes", a decentralized, confederated system of local direct democracies.

although i am not that well-versed about what's going on in "rojava" i don't really buy öcalan's conversion from being the leader of a classic vanguardist, "democratic" centralist marxist-leninist organization in the 20th century style to now being the prophet/theoretician of some anarcho-communal system, seems sus as fuck.

("rojava" has a lot of the hallmarks of a kurdish ethno-state for starters - in an area with large ethnic diversity)

I think this interview has some applicability outside Israel as well in terms of thinking through questions like false consciousness, group identity and failures of the left: https://www.haaretz.com/amp/israel-news/elections/.premium.MAGAZINE-the-real-reason-mizrahim-vote-for-netanyahu-and-why-the-left-can-t-win-them-over-1.8378189

Spain bucking the trend: https://www.democracynow.org/2020/1/8/headlines/spain_poised_to_form_first_progressive_coalition_government_since_1930s

Mizrachi's position is that leftist universalism is just another identity politics, not a meta-politics, and one that isn't being bought by enough Israeli voters to topple Netanyahu.

that is not what i got from the interview -- but yes he does challenge the inevitability with which universalist liberalism understands itself. but i understand it more as he's critiquing universalist liberalism that tries to use tokenism to win votes from mizrahim who are concerned primarily about the ways in which a universalist ideology undermines their own self-conceptions of identity (thru prisms of religion + nationalism).

iow liberalism senses that identity politics is a thing but cynically doesn't understand what makes it a potent force. it's not merely representationism.

right, that seems right. I was trying to think about how to apply the position outside of Israel, where identity is even more multidimensional than in other western places.

I'm interested in the belief in the inevitability of universalist leftism, a belief that I think is false and crippling to attempts to widen the appeal of leftism.

To each their own teleology.

one thing that struck me is the way that universalist liberalism denies critical components of ppl's identities by smoothing out particularism/difference - i think we do see this in discourses that ask why our children are more precious than someone else's. it's a logical approach but doesn't comport with ppl's intuitive experience where of course their children are the most important. and then tellingly this sort of particularist almost familial politics ends up spiraling outwards where the entire nation becomes conceived as a sort of family and so the failings of leaders are not contextualized as "the crimes of the self-interested and greedy right-wing" or whatever but rather the flaws of a parental figure trying to do the best for the family under trying circumstances etc. (nb i'm not giving credibility to this take just acknowledging that it seems to accurately describe the experiences of many ppl to whom i've chatted about politics who identify as being on the right.) so there's this one critical flaw i think which is in the sublimation or denial of particularism universalism appears like violence meant to destroy the only stability such ppl have. i've mentioned this before on ilx but even the soviets seemed to realize how critical nationalism is and tolerated it. and then this links with the other flaw he seems to be addressing which is the sort of arrogance of the left to think that we have all the answers and that if you deny our answers it must be because you've been lied to or brainwashed. there's a way forward here i think and while i did feel like this interview was broadly applicable to other places i think the state of the left in israel is much worse off than in other places (for these and other reasons cf the failure of Oslo, failure of Gaza withdrawal etc), but we can still see in them things that could be applicable to our movements where maybe these flaws aren't quite as glaring (i think there is a significant part of the Dem party that does embrace some of these things like religion, family, even nationalism, esp among POC!) but still hamper our ability to speak to the right cf "deplorables," or "clinging to their guns and bibles" types of language that definitely seems to meet this critique.

My problem with Mizrachi's article is that his diagnosis of why secular liberalism is in crisis in Israel (it purports to a kind of universal correctness and accuses people not on board of false consciousness) seems to apply pretty well to lots of other ideologies that are not at all in political crisis and are indeed thriving? Can you with a straight face say that Bibi's politics don't present his opponents as either a) deluded fools who vote against their own interests, or b) literal others who are enemies despite being nominal citizens?

In a US context, the idea that people don't like "the sort of arrogance ... to think that we have all the answers and that if you deny our answers it must be because you've been lied to or brainwashed" and thus... vote for Donald Trump? is kind of absurd.

the spiraling of entire nations as families either runs all the way to universalism, or it stops at a point where the_other is found. Israel's an interesting case because in many cultures the Jews have been the_other (cf. David Nirenberg's _Anti-Judaism_).

I agree, Mordy, that people bristle at that kind of arrogance, the condescension, the accusation of false consciousness, all of it. But they bristle at it SELECTIVELY. It's downstream from ideology. (Where ideology doesn't have to mean specifics of policy, it could just mean what kinds of people do you favor and what kinds do you disfavor.)

Totes-not-eugenics by this cool and normal Magyar patriot:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51061499

With an estimated birth rate of 1.48 per woman, Hungary is just one of many Eastern European countries facing demographic decline - due to both low birth rates and the emigration of working-age people to other EU nations.

Some of these countries have implemented their own policies to encourage birth rates to increase. Poland, for example, pays parents 500 zloty (£100) a month per child under its 500+ policy.

child support is normal in european countries but the polish policy is particularly generous (in real terms, obviously a $100 isn't a lot). contrasts with other conservative governments which ostensibly are "pro-family" etc. but incentive having kids less

incentivize

(the average salary in poland is something like 700 pound a month)

I mean we get close to 700 euros a month

I should be getting paid not to have kids, but I'm already doing that

Only if Attila the Hun's blood runs through your veins.

Fun fact: the 'H' in 'Hungary' was added to emphasize continuity with the Huns despite the tenuous historical connection.

*DOESN'T run through your veins

"France has long has natalist policies though."

there is a lot of material on the early 20th c history of this in the Julian Jackson Vichy book, France: The Dark Years. Even before the bloodletting of WW1 there was lots of consternation about low birth rates and so on, and lots of incentives for women to go through childbirth more times than you'd fancy if you wanted to live long in that era, under various regimes between the third republic and the Vichy.