LAURENCE DAVIS - Only a bold and popular left radicalism can stop the rise of fascism
Two new worlds are now
struggling to be born amidst the crumbling ruins of neoliberalism and market
globalisation. The first is the waking nightmare now unfolding in the United
States in the glare of the international media. A reality show with a cast of
horrors, its politically successful mix of faux right-wing populism and
neo-fascism has inspired and emboldened autocrats everywhere and threatens in
the absence of an effective counter-power to become our new global reality.
The second, a just,
compassionate, ecologically sound and democratically self-managed
post-capitalist world, may be detected in what Colin Ward once described as
scattered ‘seeds beneath the snow’. Deeply rooted in a rich soil of ideas and
grounded utopian imagination nourished by countless counter-cultural critics of
capitalism, industrialism and grow-or-die economics from William Morris, Peter
Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus to Gandhi, Ivan Illich, Murray Bookchin and Ursula
Le Guin – as well as a long history of popular movements from below working
together to resist regimes of domination and develop progressive and
sustainable alternatives to them – the tender shoots of another world are
emerging all around us.
They are visible in a
wide range of grassroots practices, movements, and practical utopias, from Buen
Vivir in the Andes, Ubuntu in South Africa, Ecoswaraj in India, Zapatismo in
Mexico, and the budding degrowth movement in Europe to solidarity economies,
commoning activities, permaculture projects, re-localisation movements,
community currencies, transition towns, co-operatives, eco-communities, worker
occupied factories, indigenous people’s assemblies, alternative media and arts,
human-scale technologies, basic and maximum income experiments, debt audit
movements, radical democratic movements such as Occupy and democratic
confederalism in Rojava, and emerging anti-fascist fronts and coalitions
uniting immigrant solidarity groups, anti-racists, feminists, queers,
anarchists, libertarian socialists and many others.
The great danger we
now face is that newly empowered forces of reaction will use that power to
repress progressive alternatives before they are able to coalesce as an
effective counter-power, sowing seeds of hatred and intolerance instead. Many commentators of a
liberal democratic or centre-left political persuasion have dismissed such
warnings as scare-mongering, and suggested that the most effective antidote to
‘populist politics’ is a renewed commitment to social democracy and market
globalisation with a ‘human face’. Rather than seek to understand the complex
mix of reasons why American citizens voted for a demagogue like Trump, they
blame an undifferentiated ‘populism’ and advocate more elite democracy instead.
The breathtaking
naivety of this commentary is perhaps matched in recent memory only by Francis
Fukuyama’s equally naïve and now risible prediction in 1989 of an ‘end of
history’, i.e. an end to mankind’s ideological evolution with the
‘universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government’.
Now more than ever, it
is vital that we recognise and articulate careful ideological distinctions
between competing right and left wing varieties of populism, and that those of
us committed to values like equality, democracy and solidarity take urgent
action to oppose Trumpism and the rise of fascism not with more of the same
failed elite-led liberal democracy, but with a bold left egalitarian and
inclusive radicalism.
The Trump campaign
gave voice to the ugly authoritarian and reactionary face of popular opposition
to the political establishment. It castigated the elitism and corruption of the
system, emphasised its ineffectuality in the face of sinister threats to national
well-being posed by Muslims and illegal immigrants and other easily scapegoated
‘outsider’ groups, and maintained that Trump and Trump alone could ‘make
America great again’. It succeeded by peddling false solutions and scapegoats
for real social problems generated by the governance of interconnected
political and economic elites.
By contrast, a bold
and inclusive left populist radicalism would expose the real roots of festering
social problems by speaking plainly and directly to ordinary people’s needs,
without pandering to their worst prejudices and fears. It would offer a
generous vision of a better world, and a sweeping programme for revolutionary
social change that can be translated into everyday practice.
This will require a
reconnection with revolutionary roots. Historically, revolutionary ideas and
social movements have tended to emerge out of, and give ideological coherence
to, popular democratic social forms. However, in our time once revolutionary
ideologies and movements like socialism and anarchism have grown increasingly
detached from their radical democratic roots, leaving a political vacuum that
right-wing populists and demagogues have been quick to fill.
Walter Benjamin’s
observation that every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution
speaks poignantly to our current condition. It may be interpreted not only as
warning, but as a grimly realistic utopian hope that we still have a fleeting
historical opportunity to act before it is too late.
see also
Sheldon Wolin - Can capitalism and democracy co-exist?
End of nations: Is there an alternative to countries?
End of nations: Is there an alternative to countries?
