Explaining Far Right Success & Left Wing Failures

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Explaining Far Right Success & Left Wing Failures

ronya: Nov 8, 2010; I'm the normal one.

You hate ridden fucks will regret your words when you eventually grow up.

Peace.

V. Illych L. posted:

it's an unfortunate fact of life that we in the global centre tend to benefit from global capitalism. a lot of people recognise this while also recognising that for effective, anti-liberal government to be a Thing, we cannot respect all people's rights all the time. what the populist right offer is a credible alliance between mostly rural people in the local periphery with the forces of capital; this is more attractive to people than a long-term death struggle against a world order which mostly still seems to work, especially after being massaged a bit by compliant press.

de facto, most 'left' coalitions have allowed themselves to become dependent on a set of urbane, educated types whose interests are increasingly being credibly represented over those of the local periphery. see brexit for a very clear example of this; when the most serious and credible mobilisation came against a specific neoliberal institution, the left pretty much all sided with the local centre in trying to preserve it, to the point of refusing to take the mandate of the referendum seriously. to be clear, i'm not sure that going the other way would've worked out either - they really are dependent on those urbane educated types as well - but in this point of friction do you get right-wing populism

populist right forces look a lot more credible in these cases than anyone on the left. we're too preoccupied with grander environmental issues to look like we're serious about toll roads or petrol taxes, and our proposed solutions to people's problems are often not relevant (unionisation takes an awful lot of work, is risky amd has relatively low rewards). to join the western left is pretty much an act of masochism, so one can understand why people are reluctant before it's their own arse on the line

this is true, but at the same time:

- the old vanguardist left rose to prominence in a period where the industrialized nations imposed substantial net tax burdens on lower-to-middle income households (mainly via indirect taxes); ww1 was very effective at forcing participating nations to dispel the impression of a "rich man's war" and since then income taxes have become a significant share of revenue in most large countries; unlike earlier continental wars there has been little reversion since then
- mass conscription imposing a serious burden on lifetime incomes, and its general abolition in most industrialized nations mitigating that burden
- mass secondary education being very effective at distilling ambitious, driven members of the working classes into the professions, and removing them from factory floors, worksites, and other social spaces where they might have otherwise become organised labour leaders
- recession of the prominence of means of production where social relations are predominantly 1) male, 2) hierarchical, 3) highly physical, 4) where team cohesion is continually enforced by physically dangerous working conditions - hence labour-intensive metalworking, longshore/stevedore dock work, mining, etc. - and instead replacement amongst organised labour with relatively educated, female, public-sector roles: teachers, nurses, civil servants

this is a predominantly American forum where the New Left breakup of the vanguardist old Left coalition was well in evidence by the 1960s (in particular with women moving from the conservative to liberal tent). These took several more decades to make itself felt in Western Europe but the trend was already there, albeit slower; it was already in well in hand when Enoch Powell's dockworkers were marching in the 1968.

"When I joined the Labor Party, it contained the cream of the working class. But as I look about me now all I see are the dregs of the middle class. And what I want to know is when you middle class perverts are going to stop using the Labor Party as a spiritual spittoon." - remark in 1970 by an Australian Labor Party politician

quote:

The division within the party was not merely about who made party policy. It was also about who was listened to. [UK] Labour's MPs had a dual mandate: they had obligations to their electors and to their party. This caused little difficulty until the late 1970s when differences between the ideas of the average elector and the party workers who controlled the CLPs opened up. The electorate had been moving away from the socialist ideas which Labour implemented in 1945-5, while the party workers moved on to more socialist positions. Most MPs were ill at ease with their constituency activists' new-found radicalism and tried to keep in touch with their images of their electors.

The difficulty was exacerbated by an apparent drop in the number of individual members. Official figures are of little help here. No party's central office really knows what its individual membership is, and most take steps to hide what they do know. From 1963 to 1979 Labour used an artificial method of calculating which, in 1978, credited them with 675,000 members: the real number was probably nearer 250,000 of whom about 55,000 were active. On the other hand, Labour can also count on the energy of very large numbers of the four million trade unionists who are affiliated members of whom perhaps one million help at elections. The best available estimates of the numbers of individual members in the British parties are shown in Table 3. 1. There is some reason to think that the drop in Labour Party membership results from a disproportionate loss of working-class members. In other words, constituency parties, like the PLP, have become increasingly middle class (Whiteley, 1982, p. 115). This is confirmed by other research which shows that Annual Conference delegates in the late 1970s were disproportionately male, middle class and militant (Whiteley and Gordon, 1980).

Ball, Alan R. 1981. British Political Parties: The emergence of a modern party system: pp67

quote:

In the social-democratic centralist age, large-scale rank and file opposition to the centre was mediated by a willingness, in the final resort, to accept its authority. Many might disagree with NEC decisions but, equally, they acknowledged its right to make them. This ability to exert a large measure of normative control was rooted in two crucial features of Labour's political culture in the 1950s and early 1960s - loyalist sentiment deriving from a widespread solidaristic attachment to the Party and a considerable measure of consensus which legitimated the structure and exercise of authority. Both these conditions of normative control suffered serious erosion from the early 1970s onwards. Major changes in membership composition (which proceeded at an uneven pace throughout the country) undercut loyalism. There was a steady inflow of educated, assertive, younger recruits, often employed in professional occupations. The working class members who deserted the Party in droves in the late 1960s were never replaced. As a result, the social complexion of Labour's membership (particularly its activist component) underwent a substantial alteration. The new cohorts of activists were considerably more likely to exhibit a purposive orientation than the older ones; they were often animated by a distinctively socialist matrix of ideas and values and entered the Party primarily to influence the policy process. In addition they tended to be radical in outlook and imbued with a participative ethos.

The educated, articulate activists of the 1980s possessed the self-confidence and the political skills which earlier generations of members bad often lacked to challenge authority figures at all levels of the Party. Given their social background and occupational experience they were less influenced by solidaristic sentiments, and - this reflected broader societal trends - they were far less likely than older members to exhibit a generalised deference towards authority. The status and esteem in which the NEC's key intermediaries - the regional officials were held fell (often dramatically) as they lost their monopoly of skills, expertise and information. Middle-class activists rapidly acquired a mastery of how to operate within the Party. New channels of communications, outside the formal Party structure, emerged with the rapid development, from the mid 1970s onwards of Party pressure groups. The 'aura of priestcraft' (in Ian Mikardo's phrase) in which Party officials once bathed all but vanished and they often found themselves confronted by activists who felt not the slightest inhibition about questioning their rulings or defying NEC directives.

Lacking any instinctive sense of loyalty or deference, the orientation to authority of purposive members tended to be conditional. In the social-democratic centralist era, authority bad been respected because it was regarded as legitimate. Legitimacy, in tum, rested on a large measure of consensus, both substantive and procedural. By the early 1980s, this had collapsed.

Shaw, Eric. 1988. Discipline and Discord in the Labour Party: The Politics of Managerial Control in the Labour Party, 1951-87. pp248-249

still, I daresay one should not walk away here with "the New Left and the permissive society was a mistake" but rather that the old left outlook rested on a social compact which was probably not sustainable anyway - the countries where counterculture and rock'n'roll underwent active state repression, or where the communist parties actively recognized and denounced it as a bourgeois threat, nonetheless did not succeed in putting the genie back in the bottle. And, you know, there were all the other genuinely liberatory aspects of social change - issues on which right-wing voters may elect right-wing government after government and yet find themselves equally unable to reverse, but only temporarily stymie

# ¿ Nov 22, 2020 15:53

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 05:32

ronya: Nov 8, 2010; I'm the normal one.

You hate ridden fucks will regret your words when you eventually grow up.

Peace.

it might be worth observing what the old left reckoned when the left was actually winning, when social democracy was going from strength to strength and apparently unstoppable in its grip on establishment wisdom for another two decades still at least:

Nye Bevan, that star of the old Labour left, acidly commenting on the young voters that failed to back Labour a second time in 1959

quote:

That is to say, among those who have grown to manhood and to womanhood during the last 10 years or so and whose material conditions leave them comparatively contented � or perhaps 'contented' is not the word. A more accurate description would be to say that they are politically unadventurous.

To the extent that the Labour Party meant anything to them, it was an invitation to attempt social and political experiments, and this they are disinclined to do.

The overwhelming majority of them are in debt, either buying their homes on heavy mortgages and/or buying domestic equipment and gadgets of all sorts on the hire-purchase system. Sometimes a motor-car is also being acquired on the 'never never'. [ed note: this refers to instalment plans]

Their psychology, therefore, is compounded of two contradictory elements - contentment and apprehension. Contentment because their material horizons have expanded and apprehension because they know their new-found improvement is precarious and fragile.

In short, this section of the population has become thoroughly Americanised. Its chief ingredients consist of a brash materialism shot through with fear.

It is, therefore, highly volatile, easily exploited, and it will continue to have important influence on the texture of British politics. It would be pleasant to believe that this influence will be wholesome, but that is most unlikely.

and his then-counterpart Gaitskell on the Labour right, commenting (as the right tends to do - this hasn't changed in the past half-century) that he concurs with his colleague in principle but sadly the electorate is forcing one's hand -

quote:

No doubt it has been stimulated by the end of post-war austerity, TV, new gadgets like refrigerators and washing machines, the glossy magazines with their special appeal to women, even the flood of new cars on the home markets. Call it if you like a growing Americanisation of outlook. I believe it's there, and it's no good moaning about it.

(this was the same year Khruschchev would point at a washing machine and denounce it as a unnecessary gadget with no purpose)

of course within ten years the old left would learn that in fact the young 'uns are extremely politically adventurous but all the adventuring they want to do is still the wrong kind of adventurism

the point, again, of going through all this history is to underscore that the coalitions that preceded the shift to social progressivism (first on the left, and - as pointed out in the OP - more recently on the right) are not all that appealing either. Austere Webbian traditional-values socialism existed once; it died.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2020 16:39

ronya: Nov 8, 2010; I'm the normal one.

You hate ridden fucks will regret your words when you eventually grow up.

Peace.

quote:

Female conservatism has also been, and in many cases continues to be, a feature of voting behaviour in other West European nations. It is strongly associated with the presence of an influential Roman Catholic church; one author in fact suggests that women's vote prevented the communists coming to power in France, West Germany and Italy (Devaud, 1968). But, up to the 1970s, women were apparently more inclined than men to vote for conservative parties in every country for which information is available including not only Greece, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands but also Sweden and Finland. This difference, the evidence suggests, is declining...

Randall, Vicky. 1982. Women and Politics. pp50

I would say that even in the Anglophone nations one would have (as soon as temperance got off the stage) a majority of women intellectuals and leaders hailing from the left (in a broad sense, including social democrats and social liberals). Nonetheless women continued pulling the lever for conservative parties by large, if declining, majorities.

Why this was so is matter of sociological speculation, to be sure - but the observation of a gender effect in the golden decades of social democracy doesn't seem disputed

There is certainly an element in machismo in the rhetoric of revolution, power, and coercion, whilst - entrenched sexism and all, this being the 1950s - women are unduly called upon to care for the broken people and families afterwards, whether or not the revolution fails or succeeds

It's probably also not coincidental that the newfangled consumer appliances - that left-wing leaders were denouncing as materialist frippery distracting the working class from true liberation - were appliances that mainly reduced the kind of household labour performed by women

ronya fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Nov 23, 2020

# ¿ Nov 23, 2020 02:10

ronya: Nov 8, 2010; I'm the normal one.

You hate ridden fucks will regret your words when you eventually grow up.

Peace.

I don't think people (who are not already class-conscious, anyway) really care about who receives the profit inasmuch as they care that some of the residual labour not completely eliminated by automation - e.g., scanning and bagging - is now offloaded to you, the customer. There's still a checkout machine that does most of the busywork of ringing up purchases. It's just that the customer operates it instead in lieu of a cashier.

If anything the disquiet is more similar to that when the shopping trolley was first introduced and now you, the customer, had to perform the manual labour of pulling items off the shelf yourself, instead of just having the shopkeeper fill your order (and incidentally share any bespoke advice on substitutes, today's weather, local gossip, etc).

Freeing up vast amounts of housewive's time tends to have transformative social effects. A memorable remark I encountered recently was that the most effective way of reducing women's labour in rural Mexico, even today, remains electrification - in particular to reduce the effort of grinding corn at the metate. This has real social imapcts:

quote:

A Mexican acquaintance who worked for DIF, the agency for women and children�s welfare, told me that the fastest way to reduce child abuse in remote villages was to install an electric mill so that mothers did not have to choose between caring for their children and preparing food for their children.

Still, neoliberalism is many, many more decades after the initial mere 'electrification-plumbing-literacy' trifecta impacts to social transformation. To return to the OP topic, the really weird part is the collapse of meaningful antiglobalization sentiment not only on the center-left but also the left since the 1990s. How much of that is just a one-off China trade shock really?

# ¿ Nov 24, 2020 05:40

ronya: Nov 8, 2010; I'm the normal one.

You hate ridden fucks will regret your words when you eventually grow up.

Peace.

I don't mean Extremely Online leftist discourse, but the arc of the 'left alternative' parties - SYRIZA, Podemos, etc. dashing themselves on the rocks of European integration, the short-lived Wagenknecht flirtation with immigration baiting, etc.

Lenin is not wrong in observing that liberal concerns have taken precedence, I think

# ¿ Nov 24, 2020 06:32

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 05:32

ronya: Nov 8, 2010; I'm the normal one.

You hate ridden fucks will regret your words when you eventually grow up.

Peace.

is there any actual enthusiasm for a return to tariffs or wage/price controls or protectionism a la the Alternative Economic Strategy, even (or rather especially) on the left?

between the arms of the Rodrik trilemma, today's left does not seem averse to economic integration - instead the chief demands are for greater individual process rights (as humans, or as citizens, or as workers, etc.). Universal programmes and universal services. The radically liberal individualism is inside the house.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2020 05:26

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Explaining Far Right Success & Left Wing Failures