I am glad that the Austrians did not swing to the far right. Before the
next cliffhanger happens, let's think together about what to do in the
future. It seems to me that the European left has to face at least two
things. The first is the ongoing collapse of the classical Marxist
analysis based on the agency of proletarians. Forget it, those are not
the right terms, and what they ignore and cover up are the integration
of much of the former industrial working classes and peasantry into a
persistent system of state guarantees and subsidies, along with the
preponderance of highly precarious service jobs among very diverse
populations, for whom race matters because it is inextricably part of
class (even for poor whites, btw). The second, equally important thing
to be faced is the de facto support of much of the middle-class left for
neoliberalism and its free-trade imperatives incarnated by the really
existing European Union, with its vast supply of technocratic jobs in
the service of globalizing capital. Can the left be pro-European without
supporting the neoliberal EU? If so, how? It's an existential question.
In the US we had a corporate hard right political bloc that used
nationalism and covert racism to assemble majority votes for elite ends
(the Reagan-Bush formula). They were so powerful and so convincing to
the technocratic middle classes that the center-left followed their
economic and social policies (Clintonian globalization). The result was
war, authoritarianism, the unleashing of the oil-extraction gang all
over the national territory, and such an improverishment and
disempowerment of working and lower- (or former) middle-class strata
that we got not one but two populisms: on the right (Trump) and the left
(Bernie). Trump is horrible and depressing but Bernie's really
interesting. The left populism that Chantal Mouffe calls for has at
least begun to articulate itself in the US. Comparable things are going
on in Greece, Spain, Portugal and the UK, so all is not lost. But the
Clinton-Blair-Hollande style faux-left is still in the ascendancy.
To go deeper into this, check out the following (from the New School
"Public Seminar" blog in NYC), which calls upon but also interrogates
Mouffe and Laclau's positions:
"The role of populism is precisely, in Laclau's view, to unify a myriad
of unsatisfied popular demands in an 'equivalential chain' constructed
around one of them, which becomes hegemonic without deleting the
particularity of the other demands. In so doing, populism can overcome
the main difficulty of standard theories about democratic
representation: their tendency to consider "the will of the 'people' as
something that was constituted before representation."
"This is precisely what Bernie Sanders is trying to do these days: his
constant appeal to economic equality contains a lot more than a single
request to raise taxes on top income percentiles. Functioning as a
synecdoche, as a part referring to the whole, it also encompasses
serious concerns for racial and gender justice, questions relating to
environmental and intergeneration fairness, proposals for increasing the
political participation and influence of ordinary Americans, the refusal
of a neoimperialistic geopolitics, and much more.
[btw, check it out: https://berniesanders.com/issues]
"Sanders is clearly a populist, but in a way that challenges both
Mueller's and Laclau's understandings of the notion. Indeed, as the
former maintains, Sanders has a moral understanding of politics, partly
based on an opposition between the pure and the corrupt. At the same
time, similar to several other populist figures on the left (e.g., Pablo
Iglesias), he encourages extended confrontation and deliberation as well
as "the actual input and continuous influence by citizens divided
amongst themselves." Just to make an example, and even if he has still a
lot of things to learn about minority rights, he let activists of Black
Lives Matter interrupt some of his political meetings and listened to
their opinions and demands. His entire campaign in based on a sort of
grassroots movement raising notable amounts of funds by collecting a
number of small donations.
"... To use the jargon of political theorists, Sanders is creating a
political dichotomy without defining the other side as enemy by nature:
his communicative style implicitly questions the assumption Chantal
Mouffe presented in The Return of the Political (1993) that "to
construct a 'we' it must be distinguished from the 'them', and that
means establishing a frontier, defining an 'enemy'" (p. 69) — an idea
that has clearly affected Laclau's own position. The senator from
Vermont is a populist who talks about issues and constantly avoids
getting personal even in television debates. His strenuous opposition to
privilege and oligarchy is inspired not by a generic hatred, but by a
realistic understanding of the actual political situation. We have a
desperate need of a populism such as this if we want American democracy
to be rescued."
***
I gotta say I agree with the last line. I suspect it applies to Europe
as much as the US. The word "desperate" is serious. All of this can end
very badly if a new, racially diverse, inclusive, non-polarizing
populism is not coupled to a serious rethink of the rights, privilegess
and responsibilities of the middle classes.
anyway, bravo Austria!
--Brian
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