In the Shadow of Social Democracy: Right-Wing Challenges and Left Alternatives
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- Published on Sunday, 23 April 2017 22:15
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1400 .... April 24, 2017
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In the Shadow of Social Democracy:
Right-Wing Challenges and Left Alternatives
Ingo Schmidt
We live in a paradoxical world. Much debate on the radical left revolves around multitudes of discontented groups -- sometimes lumped together as the 99%, sometimes rebranded as precariat -- struggling against an abstract empire and its 1% rulers. Capitalism and class -- once serving as a compass to navigate left politics through the apparently chaotic sees of everyday life -- have turned into subjects of theoretical debate with little to no connection to political praxis.
Vacated by the left, a new right adopted the language of class to appeal to those who were steamrolled and marginalized by economic globalization. Many of the policies advanced by the new right could have... been taken out of social democratic programs of old but are now loaded with claims to racial and national superiority. Some on the left, and pretty much everybody in the political centre, takes the new right ideology at face value and concludes that working class politics, even if originally meant as harbinger of universal human liberation, invariably lead to nationalism and racism. Such reasoning ignores that much of the discontent on which the new right thrives is produced by neoliberal globalization, the very project that appropriates left aspirations of human liberation in the pursuit of profit.
It also ignores the fact that most of the support for the new right does not come from people with low incomes and little educational attainment but from the middle-brackets of Western societies. People at the low-end rather opt out of casting their votes. The franchise for which socialists fought so hard at various points in history is increasingly abandoned by the have-nots whose ancestors still thought the sheer number of their votes might counterbalance the power of concentrated capital.
