[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about how the traditional Left has abandoned its core principles and has not stood-up forcefully enough to right-wing radicalization: democracy and HR the victims. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Note: You can easily translate the Readers to many languages. Use the app deepl.com and it is done instantaneously. It takes seconds to download the app into your computer or phone and translations are of high quality.
1. Since 1945 though Capitalism and democracy have worked together in the West. But without the political ‘threat of communism’, financial capitalism has no longer been compatible with democratic values and with the expectations of the majority of the population, who are losing their faith in democracy in terms of its ability to, in any way, improve their living conditions and deter the violations of human rights (HR) they live under. (Albino Gomez)
With or without having been several years in government, the traditional Left has lately not promoted a project of its own and is consumed in neoliberalism (Roberto Pizarro H.)
2. Today’s Left is only capable of delivering punctual answers to the great demands of the citizens –people’s rights included. It has ended up:
- accepting restricted democracy and a rent-seeking productive model of exploitation of natural resources;
- insisting in applying policies of social targeting,*
- renouncing the redistribution of wealth, as well as
- renouncing to commit itself to a radical economic opening, and
- renouncing to a world with much greater regulations.
The ideological confusion that has been dragging such a Left for decades, together with the weakened strength of workers, ultimately commits it to neoliberalism. This contrasts with the 1960s, when left-wing parties gave birth to global transformation programs, backed by a then powerful workers’ movement, together with growing peasant and middle-class trade union organizations.
*: Starting with targeting interventions as the central thrust to achieve equality is the wrong approach; it pursues what is rather a ‘mirage of equality’. It tacitly blames those rendered most vulnerable for being where they are and tends them a crumb of bread as a rescuing hand. Ergo, target not those rendered poor, but the process that, generation after generation, renders them poor!
3. None of those transformations of the 60s exists anymore. It is the challenge of a stark reality that now faces the Left. But it has not been able to recompose itself ideologically and politically to face the new world we live-in. The lack of a global ‘transforming’ proposal in the face of neoliberalism and HR violations galore has been present in all continents. It is mainly responsible for the failure of the self-styled ‘socialism of the 21st century governments’, as well as for the fragility of Center-Left governments. Almost all of these governments accommodated themselves to neoliberalism or made insufficient reforms, incapable of responding to economic and HR needs, as well as to galloping social inequalities. Even more serious has been the alliance of supposedly progressive governments and politicians with the (mostly transnational) business world and the acceptance of their corrupt practices.
4. As a result, the citizenry has ceased to distinguish the dividing line between left and right. This is the surprising fluidity of politics, typical of the contemporary world. Emancipatory identity movements are thus emerging with force, but they alone are insufficient to put an end to neoliberalism. Indeed, in order for environmental, feminist, sexual dissidence, pensioners, informal sector, homeless, indigenous and regionalist… demands to succeed in their identity demands, they need to be articulated in a global transforming strategy that, at the same time, must coincide with the demands of workers. (R. Pizarro).
The problem is not political polarization, it is right-wing radicalization (Aurelien Mondon and Evan Smith)
-The political language of the extreme right is made to make lies seem truthful and even murder respectable. (George Orwell)
5. The concept of polarization is increasingly used in mainstream circles to lament the current state of politics. This is nothing new, of course. It has long been central to liberalism and has served well to protect against too-radical-a-democratic-change (HR changes among them) that would challenge the interests bound to the status-quo. Polarization has been used by academics and commentators to talk about the hollowing out of the political center. We are told that we should not be scared of ideas we may disagree with: “if they are bad, but confronted in a public setting, they will be defeated, and reason will prevail”. (Hmm!) That seems superficially sensible –unless you have paid any attention to political developments in the past few decades and what is really at stake in modern politics. So, ‘sensible’ is reasonable only if we wrongly abstract ourselves from what politics is about, i.e., ignoring how deeply unequal and unjust our societies are and how the situation is in fact worsening. Social democratic and center-right parties have, for all practical purposes, collapsed.
6. The polarizers include the openly and violently racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, classist and climate-change skeptics… So, it is not just ethically and politically wrong to give much public space to such dangerous ideas since it falsely presupposes that these actors are actually genuinely interested in discussion rather than simply pushing/forcing their ideas into the mainstream. (A. Mondon and E. Smith)
Liberal elites still cling to the fantasy that liberalism is innately a bulwark against the far right and fascism
7. Yet this belief surely rests on a poor knowledge of the history of liberalism. Indeed, on many occasions, the liberal elite has found it possible and even preferable to side with oppression in defense of its own interests –and the liberal elite has used many HR arguments to convince the Left to support them. Voting rights, for example, were always limited and precarious and have been further curtailed recently in both the United States and the UK.
8. Liberalism has fed us the belief that only slow progress is possible, and anything beyond this would lead us down an authoritarian path. From this derives the current strength of the polarization discourse. Yet the many crises upon us demand more than incrementalism. With our very survival and that of HR under threat in the short to medium term, it is becoming clear that radical change is upon us, whether we like it or not. The Right is ready for it and has clear ideas what this could look like: whether it is a technocratic rule of corporations or full-fledged fascism. In this context, sitting on the fence between oppression and resistance is not reasonable, but amounts to complicity with oppression. (A. Mondon and E. Smith)
Be aware
9. In response to social movements’ demands, to struggles for people’s rights and the rights of nature, new right-wing organizations are still more interested in intermediate spaces of power, such as congress, municipalities and city councils –and they fight to conquer those spaces. Unlike the more traditional right, interested in governing against progressive policies, these new organizations are less severe, territorial, and willing to reach agreements ‘as long as it benefits them’. In short, it seems that the closest thesis to conquer the citizenship for them is to fulfill the promises in a measured way, not to commit so many radical changes, ‘because people no longer believe in promises’. (Primera Piedra)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com
Postscript/Marginalia
-Hegelians are like that: It occurred to me to quote to a Hegelian that Karl Marx said that practice determined consciousness, and he immediately answered me that it was consciousness that determined practice. (A. Gomez).