Scottish superlatives

The Guardian is calling an SNP majority in Holyrood - a result that under the STV+ system is supposed to be basically impossible. Iain Macwherter writes that "seasoned political hacks were lost for superlatives in their efforts to encapsulate the scale of the Liberal Democrat defeat. Their vote didn't just collapse, it was vaporised." Areas with centuries-long histories of Liberalism have gone a lighter shade of yellow. Labour has been obliterated as well - and the Tories in Scotland have been nothing more than a rump for some time. The wonder of the whole thing is summed up best for my wonkish brain with this: "In the north-east, another Liberal hunting ground, the SNP won all 10 constituency seats, and then went on to win yet another seat on the top-up regional list vote, which is also supposed to be impossible with the d'Hondt method of calculating the top-up list." (emphasis mine)

Macwherter notes, correctly, that the crushing SNP victory doesn't indicate widespread support for independence in Scotland, which has stood at around 30% for some time. But this is a very exciting development for lefties like me. Scotland is in many respects Labour's base, and the SNP is challenging them from the left. There are serious problems with the SNP (they're big fans of spending money they don't have, for one), but this should put some of the fear of God into Labour. Ed Miliband has already said that Labour needs to "reasses" its policies and position in Scotland - and, frankly, there's nowhere for them to go but Left.

A more serious social democracy than the SNP is offering is exactly where I would like Labour to go - one less focused on throwing money at problems and huge government handouts, and more focused on creative, dynamic, market-inclusive (but not market-based) solutions for increasing social mobility and addressing poverty, deprivation and unemployment.

But this is a very exciting time for Scottish politics. Brian Taylor, BBC Scotland's political editor, wraps up an excellent blog post with these prescient words:

People were voting for a government. A government whose record they found acceptable.
They were not voting directly for independence. Mr Salmond openly acknowledges that.
But a referendum there will be.
I can just hear Alex Salmond now.
They told us, he will say, there would never be a Scottish Parliament.
Then never an SNP Government.
Then never an SNP majority.
Now they will tell us, he will add, that Scots will never vote for independence.

Perhaps, perhaps. That referendum campaign has yet to be called, let alone decided.

But right now Mr Salmond is entitled - fully entitled - to bask in the delight of a simply stunning victory.

Remains of the Polish Left

The Polish journalist, philosopher, publicist and noted conservative Robert Krasowski has a piece in Polityka about the state of the Polish Left, and the failure of the Democratic Left Alliance (or SLD, the coalition of small, disparate parties that represents the Left in parliament) and its leader, Grzegorz Napieralski, to be a real competitor for power. Krasowski's a pretty conservative guy, so I'm disinclined to trust him, but he makes a few good points. He runs through the rupture on the Left between on the one hand the moderate old guard of former President Aleksander Kwaśniewski and former Prime Minister Leszek Miller and on the other the more radical younger leadership of Grzegorz Napieralski.

Grzegorz Napieralski (Left) and Aleksander Kwaśniewski (Right). Photo © PAP / Leszek Szymański

He goes through the Left's brief romance with the radical "Political Critique" youth movement, the fightback from the old guard and the current position that the SLD finds itself in: that of being a slightly more humanitarian alternative to the ruling center-right Civic Platform (PO) - in other words, Capitalism with a human face.

The Alliance has wasted more than half a decade only now to realize in the last few months that it does not want to be the principled left, but rather a better Civic Platform. An intellectually discrete, post-ideological, liberal organization. [...] They need leftism in homeopathic portions, just enough to differentiate themselves from the opposition.

Not until being on the verge of a general election campaign, when the campaign strategy should have been ready long ago, has the left has that it does not want to go into power as the left, but as an organization of professionals, as a party of power.

Krasowski, of course, views this as a good thing. He's echoing an old story that we've heard before about parties on the left and the right. Call it the "wilderness" theory - that whenever a party pulls away from the center there is a rupture between the radicals and centrists, leading self-destructive infighting and lost elections, until the party comes to its senses and returns to the moderate center and so starts winning elections again.

But are we not really looking at a post hoc ergo propter hoc rationalization of the Neoliberal ideological narrative? Can one plausibly say, for example, that the kind of infighting that tore the Labour party apart as it radicalized in the 90s was not comparable to the infighting as it moderated during the Blair years? As Polly Toynbee is fond of pointing out, during the Blair years, in spite of winning 3 elections, Labour also lost 5 million voters. Is it then not equally plausible to say that the electoral success of Neoliberal politicians stems not from the genuine popularity of their ideas, but rather from the alignment of powerful interests behind them - in Blair's case, the City and its public-relations wing, the Murdoch press?

My point here is not to say that this second narrative is correct. My point is to demonstrate that it is narrative we are dealing with: the "wilderness" theory is not a rational, scientific conclusion drawn from an examination of historical facts, it (like the second narrative) is an ideological construction. But this is Neoliberalism's game: it presents itself as a scientific, pragmatic truth, devoid of ideology. But this masks what it really is - an ideological justification for the political settlement of Late Capitalism.

Leftist demagogue watch

Amy Wilentz on the op-ed page of The New York Times today profiles Haiti's first democratically-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who is returning from exile in South Africa:

The Haitians one meets on the street or in their little shops or in the market or on the byways of the countryside and in the shantytowns of the provincial capitals are for the most part pleased at the prospect of former President Aristide’s return this week from seven years’ exile in South Africa. But when members of Haiti’s tiny elite, small middle class and growing international community here discuss Mr. Aristide, they look over their shoulders, shake their heads, raise their eyebrows. They speak in whispers or in great gulps of nervousness.

Aristide has a reputation on the Left akin to that of Salvador Allende or Patrice Lumumba - a democratically-elected Socialist leader unfairly removed from power by a conspiracy of American and business interests, and thus denied from ever bringing about the true revolution they promised. In my (inexpert) mind Aristide is more akin to Hugo Chávez - a Leftist demagogue who, if he counts as a step in the right direction, is definitely a small step. Aristide, like Chávez, in the end proved more interested in his own power than in revolution. But still a fascinating guy.

The Left's big idea?

Another good op-ed in The Guardian today comes from Cem Özdemir, co-leader of the German Green Party, writing about the sudden upswing in support that the Greens have seen since the financial crisis. It is not the best-written piece on the face of the earth, but he makes a number of good points, including noting progressives' disillusionment with the Third Way politics adopted by the Social Democratic Party under Gerhard Schröder - a politician very much of the same mold as Bill Clinton or Tony Blair. But what I find really interesting about the article is his discussion of how the Green Party has moved beyond being a single-issue party focused on energy policy:

Green has become a conscious lifestyle choice – eating organic food, using public transport, buying energy from renewables, consuming from small shops, ethical banking in ethical banks.
Last year, the German Greens celebrated their 30th birthday. It is worth reminding people of the extent to which the party has influenced public opinion in those three decades. Founded above all as an anti-nuclear party, the Greens have helped to generate a new consensus about gender balance, party democracy, renewable energy, genetically modified food, consumer rights and new family models.

He also notes that it helps that the Greens have been able to prove their mettle in coalition governments thanks to Germany's proportional representation system (providing an interesting contrast to my general perspective on PR - see my previous post).

The really interesting point to me here, though,is the range of issues that he highlights as being part of the Green movement in Germany - not just environmental issues, but "ethical banks", "gender balance", "party democracy", "consumer rights" and "new family models". Caroline Lucas has done a great job of this with the Greens in the UK, too - she fought the last election not really on an environmentalist platform, but mainly by opposing cuts as a means of balancing the budget.

I have written before about how I think the new challenge for the Left is coming up with a new Big Idea to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Socialism in the late 80s and early 90s - and how in my view the Third Way was really just Neoliberalism with a gloss of social concern. It has been on my mind lately that the Green movement could fill this gap: Sustainability as an abstract concept helps cover a lot of the ground that the Left talks about, and Slavoj Žižek, among others, has cited the environmental crisis as a prime example of the kind of problem that markets alone cannot solve. This is why Özdemir's mention of "ethical banks" caught my attention - if the Green movement can provide a viable, alternative economic model, it might be just the thing to put the "late" back in Late Capitalism.

That said I have serious concerns about the Green movement. It's clearly a bourgeois movement at this stage, and I have concerns that "localism" and "anti-globalization" could be proxies for what amounts to a reactionary nationalism, especially given the bourgeois nature of the movement. It's important to make sure that the Greens have a properly Socialist attitude towards the poor and excluded - that it's not just all about buying shiny, expensive (but environmentally friendly!) consumer goods. Özdemir's article, in that respect, is slightly heartening.

The philsophical failure of the Left

Peter Hallward's pseudo-obituary of Neoliberalism in light of what he calls the Arab Spring of 2011 is a classic example of the Left completely failing to take the argument anywhere past banalities about people power and capitalist corruption. The points he makes are good:

We have always been told that we cannot afford to pursue utopian projects that might reduce social inequalities, or prevent the millions of avoidable deaths that take place each year as a result of disease or starvation. Our governments and central banks, however, have now spent many trillions of dollars – thousands of times more money than what is required to end global hunger – to bail out some of the most blatantly corrupt institutions the world has ever seen.

But this is nothing new. He hits all the usual Leftist buttons about the decline of American power and the war of imperialism against democracy, also proffering the kind of sickening praise of Hugo Chávez that seems mandatory on much of the Left. But here his critique seems simply to stop. He celebrates the uprisings in the Arab world without saying a word about what should come afterward - he decries the bank bailout without so much as hinting at an alternative.

Hallward is a political philosopher and one of Alain Badiou's protégés. He is part of the contemporary Leftist intellectual establishment. And he, like Badiou, like Žižek, has nothing positive to offer.

In my view this is the greatest challenge that the Left faces today. The collapse of the Soviet Union obliterated the philosophical argument for Socialism as a practical political-economic system, and the Third Way politics of the Blair and Clinton school only offered palliative care for those ground up in the gears of global Capitalism, rather than offering a challenge and an alternative to the existing economic and political order. We on the left have still not gotten past that. I believe task no. 1 for intellectuals like Hallward, Badiou and Žižek is to construct a program, a manifesto of concrete proposals that can be implemented to create a more just political-economic system. If the political theorists of the Left cannot do that, then what exactly are they there for?

On Egypt (and Tunisia and Libya)

Kai Bird has a good piece in Slate today on Obama's stance regarding the Egyptian protests. He makes (admittedly in passing) a point that I think is an important one:

This must be the Obama administration's fear: that after Mubarak an anti-Western, Islamist regime will come to power, most probably through the popular election of the Muslim Brotherhood. If elections are held, this outcome is not merely a probability; it is a near certainty. After decades of repressing the secular opposition, the Brotherhood remains the only political movement with an organized membership capable of providing nongovernmental charitable services. This gives it a reliable political base in the slums of Cairo and Alexandria.

This is the same point that Slavoj Žižek has made numerous times: that the Capitalist world's fear of the secular Left (which is probably what Bird means) outweighs their fear of the religious Right (in the form of the Muslim brotherhood). There has therefore for many decades been a concerted attempt to suppress the secular Left in, just to cite one example, the Arab world, leaving the Islamists as the only opposition movement with the organizational capacity to actually effectively oppose. In this sense we, the Capitalist West, have made our bed and now must lie in it.

But there is a broader point to be made here about the importance of civil society in the fostering of effective political opposition. Bird attributes the Brotherhood's power to being "the only political movement with an organized membership capable of providing nongovernmental charitable services." In other words, he's talking about the Muslim Brotherhood basically in terms of a civil society group. The admirable Anne Applebaum (incidentally the wife of Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski) makes the point in her own piece in Slate this week:

The benign dictators we have supported, or anyway tolerated—the Zine al-Abidine Ben Alis, the Hosni Mubaraks, the various kings and princes—have stayed in power by preventing economic development, clamping down on free speech, keeping tight control of education, and above all by stamping down hard on anything resembling civil society. Every year, more books are translated into Greek—a language spoken by 11 million people—than into Arabic, a language spoken by more than 220 million. Independent organizations of all kinds, from political parties and private businesses to women's groups and academic societies have been watched, harassed, or banned altogether.

Civil society can play a role as an alternate power structure to the political hierarchy in any given country - in dictatorships, then, civil society can be a potentially large threat to the government. The effective repression of civil society in a country like North Korea, for example, is the reason why any kind of opposition movement in that country is not only nonexistent, but practically unthinkable.

Curiously, this is one thing that Applebaum gets rather wrong. Hisham Matar, writing ten days ago in The Guardian, discussed the probability of the Tunisian uprising spreading to his native Libya. He notes that Tunisia's elite had long been pro-civil society, while Libya's has been anti. He says, furthermore:

One of the main reasons Tunisians were able to rid themselves of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali [...] was less because of the claim, endlessly repeated in the western media, that Tunisia is more European in its thinking than its neighbours, and more because of the extent to which Tunisian civil society and state bureaucracy have been allowed to develop since independence.

We Libyans are just as hungry for a just and accountable government as our Tunisian brothers and sisters. The lack of resilient institutions will make our task more difficult.

The point that Applebaum misses is that the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were only possible because these are relatively well-developed countries with a fairly robust tradition of civil society. This is good, as it means the countries have a power structure to fall back on if and when the government falls. But Matar's distinction may become the relevant one when it comes to these uprisings spreading - organizing revolution in a country without an existing alternate power structure is likely much harder, and in some cases impossible.

"Leave the libraries alone. You don’t understand their value." by Philip Pullman

This is as good a starting point as any. Philip Pullman with wit and passion laying out the case against small(-minded) government and showing why precisely it is that markets are necessary but not sufficient, and are capable at once of great good and tremendous harm. The article really is a must-read for all, but especially those libertarians and small-government conservatives who think that the state is a mostly malignant force.