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(From the Socialist Workers network in Ireland.)
Limits of Left Reformism
The context for this growth is twofold. First, the workers’ movement has
experienced many defeats at the hands of a resurgent capitalist class.
The older methods of adhering to the rules of ‘ industrial relations’
and seeking to use the state apparatus to pressurise capitalists to
abide by legal obligations has been no match for employer strategies.
The result is that workers feel they have little ability to effect
change on their own—but want a left government to do it for them.
Second, the networks of politicised working class activists that were
shaped by communist or social democratic parties have weakened. The
collapse of the USSR and the embrace of austerity by the social
democrats have disorientated them. While such networks often exerted
conservative restraints over working class radicalism, they also served
as a ballast for more stable leftist attitudes. With the ballast
removed, there is a greater volatility in working class outlooks.
Electorally, this volatility can lead to a withdrawal of support for
parties that embrace neoliberalism and in a swing to the radical left.
While shifts to the left can start with the politics described above,
they cannot achieve their aims within this framework. Some of the
leaders who articulate broad working class discontent with austerity are
trapped within parties that brought about that austerity. Bernie Sanders
was a voice for ‘socialism’ during the US Presidential elections but
afterwards he mounted a unity tour to heal divisions in the Democratic
Party with Tom Perez, a labour secretary under Obama. Jeremy Corbyn is a
stronger advocate for left politics—and the British Labour party he
leads has considerably deeper links to the organised working class than
the US Democrats—but he is being held hostage by a parliamentary party
that has systematically disappointed its working class supporters. More
generally, the articulation of leftist sentiment occurs largely on the
terrain of electoral politics. A failure to mobilise and encourage a
sense of empowerment amongst workers limits its possibilities. The
reason is that a key element in right wing ideologies today is a
promotion of a fatalism which both recognises discontent but dissolves
it in a rhetoric that ‘we are where we are’. A purely electoral
strategy—or even a strategy that subordinates mobilisation to electoral
considerations—will therefore only lead to limited advances.
More broadly, attempts to capture state power to manage late capitalism
run into a number of contradictions. The installation of a left
government can increase the aspirations of working people but the very
structures of the state hinder any attempts to fulfil them. Bourgeois
democracy separates the political from the economic so that a political
move to encroach on capital will be met with sustained economic
sabotage. In this context, elected governments find that they are unable
to control the unelected officials inside the state apparatus. None of
this is to suggest that reforms should not be attempted or that certain
gains may not be won. It is rather to claim that the contradictions that
arise from the establishment of a left government can only be resolved
by breaking the power of capital. As the state machinery is structured
to prop up the rule of capital it cannot be the vehicle for uprooting it.
full:
http://www.rebelnews.ie/2018/07/27/the-radical-left-a-strategy-for-growth/
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