That the Starmer leadership is more bent on crushing the left in its own party than taking on the Tories and Liberal Democrats is barely discussed. The analogy would be the Scottish Nationalists offering the party leadership to fervent unionists. Yet the absence of a debate on the strategic lessons to be learned is not something the left can afford. Corbynism did not represent the beginnings of a revivification of the Labour Party as a progressive force.
Instead it was both a last-gasp attempt to wrest the party away from the neoliberal trajectory it has been pursuing with ever greater velocity since the rise of Blair in the s and a definitive historical experiment, designed to answer the burning question: can the left win inside the Labour Party?
Could the party be transformed into a vehicle for socialist advance, having elected its most left-wing leader since George Lansbury in the early s? The answer is now in, and it is flatly, I think, a resounding No. There is unlikely to be a next time, but even if there were, the same fundamental weakness in any such project would reappear as abundantly and as fatally as it did for the Corbyn experiment: the left cannot fight and win against the political establishment and the media establishment, still less the concentrated power of capital beyond those guardians of the social order, while it is also fighting the right-wing majority in the upper ranks of its own party.
Thus electoral sabotage, to engineer a shift back to power for the right following defeat, is a default strategy that will eventually succeed against a traumatized party membership. And the willingness to force it through will never change because a breach with the social-democratic past is baked in.
A leader such as Corbyn can never launch the honest conversation about the past history of the party that is required or articulate a thoroughgoing critique of present party practices, such as the role of Labour-controlled councils in austerity or gentrification of the cities. Something has to give. He refers to this approach in his discussion of the formation and development of a political party.
A conceptual model that can give us some analytical and strategic orientation towards the dynamics and flux of political contestation is required. Blue Labour , economic liberalism, social liberalism, labourism, social democracy, even socialism. A political party is defined not by the exclusive ownership of political philosophies, which in fact are shared with others, but by the proportions and relations of these political cultures within the party structures, and by the hierarchy of resources of power and prestige that agents identifying with these political cultures can mobilize.
Socialism obviously is the most residual in numbers, power and prestige within the Labour Party; in practice even those who would self-describe as socialists in their personal beliefs, espouse at the level of policy essentially social-democratic proposals, understandably, given forty years of defeat.
Judging by the way the plp has effectively declared war on the members—with individuals being expelled for absurd reasons and constituency parties suspended—social democracy appeals to only a minority of Labour mp s. In June , in the wake of the Brexit Referendum, Labour mp s voted in favour of a motion of no confidence in Corbyn; only 40 mp s voted against. Social liberalism is a historically variable philosophy.
In its more heroic earlier period it emerged as a break with economic liberalism, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Green, D. Ritchie and L. Hobhouse, which undertook the work of rehabilitating the state in liberal thought as the necessary co-ordinating force without which the good society, once expected to emerge naturally from the market, would remain still-born. For Gramsci, a historic bloc refers to the intra-ruling-class compromise that, when successful, is projected downward to include large enough sections of the subaltern classes to guarantee effective social peace.
Hegemony ensues when that social peace is governed more by consent and persuasion than by coercion and violence. Yet by the s, in order to secure its rule, economic liberalism had to tilt from brute coercion and start to reproduce itself with a greater role for consent.
Social liberalism was to become a key ideological resource in this, fashioning a rapprochement with economic liberalism after decoupling from social democracy.
Thus social liberalism offers economic liberalism an alternative partner in the battle for political power. Its role is to guarantee a level playing field of competition, not impose social obligations on capital.
Two liberal optics in particular come to the fore and define the political terrain going into the new century. First, the atomization of community and society is embraced and, contra conservatism, is understood as the dismantling of hierarchies and barriers that prevent fairness and social mobility.
The element of meritocracy that was mobilized by Thatcher ism came into contradiction with its regressive nationalistic cultural inclinations; but in social liberalism, meritocracy found a more credible champion.
Hence under Blairism the ideology of meritocracy swept across the policy discourse of institutions, not just in politics but in education and the cultural industries as well. Hence photo ops of Tory mp s beaming with pride at their local foodbank. Second, and more difficult for the left to gain a critical purchase on, the international dimension of the capitalist market was celebrated for its cosmopolitanism. The key political debate on this question was of course around the European Union which became, following the shock defeat in the referendum, the totemic governance structure of Reason itself for much of the liberal middle class.
The referendum crystallized long germinating trends. The trendy new language of multiculturalism, and the actual policies and political commitments that underpinned it, marginalized the very communities that during the 20th century had enabled the country to grow to become a genuine force on the world stage. The white working class were now dismissed as idiotic, slovenly and atavistic barbarians. Nor is this a peculiarly English or British phenomenon, since the forces shaping politics are cross-national and international.
Christophe Guilluy finds a similar cleavage and need to get beyond the terms of the debate of the main conservative-liberal interlocutors at work in France. French society is not divided between enlightened partisans of progress and their uncultivated and blinkered adversaries. The true divide is between those who stand to gain from globalization, or at least have the means to protect themselves against occasional misfortune, and those who stand to lose from globalization, who are powerless to withstand its merciless onslaught.
Hence the genius of the Leave campaign slogan: Take Back Control. That could have been contested from the left in both the and elections with something like a promise for a constitutional convocation of the kind that has been successful in Venezuela and Bolivia, and a step towards a genuine popular sovereignty, a genuine taking back control. But such a vision would have required a more sweeping counter-hegemonic strategy than the left in Labour could manage.
The question of immigration, linked to cosmopolitanism of course, posed a particular problem for the left, given its historic commitment to proletarian internationalism and support for those fleeing poverty, state terror and war. Although Corbyn tried to re-frame the question in terms of reining in the business propensity to use migrants as a means of acquiring cheap labour, this was a minority discourse, and certainly not supported by most Labour mp s, for whom the thought of curtailing the freedom of private property to buy labour at the price it could find it, was frankly undesirable.
Moving up a level of abstraction to capture this more schematically, we can understand recent political history in terms of a model built around the dynamics of competition, alliances, contradictions and, potentially, fissures. The principal players are economic liberalism, conservatism and social liberalism, all three cutting across party-political entities. As Figure 1, below, indicates, the vectors of competition and alliance structure the relationship between conservatism and liberalism as they vie for moral-political leadership of economic liberalism.
While they compete electorally through their party-entities, they are allied by their shared support for economic liberalism. Conservatism and social liberalism are to be understood primarily as political cultures and cultural politics, or as state and civil-society agents.
Economic liberalism essentially entails capitalist market dynamics, with minimal social obligations imposed. But conservatism and liberalism—in the uk context—represent differential interpretations of the institutional frameworks within which the buying and selling of commodities is to take place.
Those differences are theoretically explicable when we classify the relation between the political cultures and economic liberalism in terms of contradictions. This means that economic liberalism has the potential to negate the moral-cultural and political preferences of the respective political cultures. Such negations in turn channel back up into the competition-alliance dynamic and introduce the potential for fissures and fractures in the alliances.
The competition starts to move outside the boundaries of the hitherto existing policy consensus. While social liberalism has promoted economic liberalism since the s, economic liberalism generates consequences that threaten to liquidate the moral-cultural universe of social liberalism.
While conservatism also promotes economic liberalism, it too faces contradictions. As with liberalism, deepening economic inequality threatens core conservative values and institutions.
In the present case, the supranational British state is in danger of breaking up as subaltern nations, and their state complexes particularly Scotland and Northern Ireland posit independence as a means or an end that will resolve these contradictions.
However, there are important differences between the way this plays out with conservatism and with liberalism, stemming in turn from their different relations to economic liberalism. By being in contradiction with key dynamics of capitalism, conservatism is powerfully mobilized as a compensatory culture. It works typically through the Freudian mechanisms of displacement and condensation, which explains why it has such affective power.
By contrast, liberalism is a more isomorphic extension into political and cultural discourse of at least the phenomenal life of capitalism—rationalism, equal exchange, the individual as free-floating atom, contractual relations, competition, internationally extended value chains, etc.
This gives conservatism something of an edge in abnormal times. Still, the contradictions can be enabling and disabling for both political cultures in their competition with one another, depending on what use they and their adversaries can make of them.
The model therefore needs to be able to cope with complexity, dynamic change, structural contradictions and agency. The threat posed by the eu in terms of creating new bonds of identity and identification that bypass the national imaginary and its institutions, where conservatism has always been strong and liberalism has been relatively weak, is precisely why conservatism has the means and the motive to react with fury to such endeavours.
It was the conservative brand of Thatcherism Redux that proved best placed to marshal the various discontents of economic liberalism and, through the political arts of displacement, to find a way back from the wilderness years of — With the Cameron—Clegg social-liberal project rapidly compromised by harsh economic-liberal austerity, a revived attempt to combine an economy open to international capitalism but uncoupled from the eu with a political culture of nationalism has increasingly made the running—and gained rocket boosters after the Referendum.
Its party-political representatives were ukip and what became the European Research Group wing of the Conservative Party, the two working together in a tacit alliance. Liberalism cannot in fact compete with the discourse of nationalism when the chips are down, for what does it have to counter the tangible appeals to place and people, the mythological history or the institutional bulwarks of the British state, in which conservatism has profitably invested so much power?
For example, in its long moral-political struggle against the eu , conservatism grounded the discontents of an older generation of voters by mobilizing and reworking their version of the national imaginary around the Second World War, with the eu as the enemy without and the Germans once again trying to defeat Britain, this time through front institutions and without firing a shot. Fissures between former partners in a historic bloc vent deep down, producing crises between the political philosophies, the parties in which they are distributed and the social classes.
In England, though, working-class allegiances were much more up for grabs between parties and political cultures. But the cross-currents of Brexit in England and the recent break with New Labour in Scotland proved a barrier too high to surmount.
Elections offer a snapshot of the struggle for hegemony between the political cultures, as well as of the parties battling for the leadership of those political cultures, with their particular combinations of them.
The distinction is important. Would ukip or the Tories triumph as the party-political vehicle for nationalistic conservatism after ? Would Labour, the snp or Liberal Democrats triumph as the party-political vehicle of liberalism, or alternatively under Corbyn, could Labour redefine itself as a return to social democracy?
In the European Parliament elections, ukip topped the poll with 27 per cent of the vote, Labour came second with 25 per cent and the Conservatives came third with 23 per cent. In the general election of , ukip captured nearly 4 million votes, just under 13 per cent, eclipsing the Liberal Democrats as a third party.
Yet the first-past-the-post majoritarian system meant that ukip failed to win a single parliamentary seat. Of the two, the Tory Party was best placed to do so, since it had the Euro-sceptic European Research Group as a high-profile and increasingly powerful lobby within it. Labour won some Forty-five per cent of ukip voters from the general election voted for the Conservatives, and only 11 per cent went for Labour. In , the Conservatives had a net loss of 13 seats and Labour a net gain of 30 seats.
Of course, as the right within the party were keen to point out, although Labour did better than expected, much better, it did not win enough seats to achieve power. Instead, the vote share indicated deepening levels of support in constituencies already held by Labour, especially in the cities and university towns, but not a sufficiently broad appeal to overturn Conservative majorities. In mitigation, the line between success and second place was often incredibly tight.
Excluding Northern Ireland, there were 48 constituency seats where the winning majority in was less than 1, votes. Of these, Labour came second in 21 seats, losing Southampton, Itchen by only 30 votes Figure 2, below.
Had all 21 of those seats changed hands, the Conservatives would have been on seats and Labour on The total number of votes in play across those 21 seats was 8, I also agree to receive email newsletters, account updates, notifications and communications from other profiles, sent by germanydating.
A must-read for English-speaking expatriates and internationals across Europe, Expatica provides a tailored local news service and essential information on living, working, and moving to your country of choice.
With in-depth features, Expatica brings the international community closer together. Amongst other services, Expatica offers the best dating site for Expats in Germany since Finding love is a challenging quest even in your home country.
Dating in Germany will either make it more so or raise the chance to finally get the partner you've been looking for all along. Dating for expats info. Living in Germany is an incredible opportunity to rediscover and reinvent yourself, including the romantic side of your life. Transcending cultural differences and customs is just a small step to achieve that. Online Dating Guide. No matter who you ask, you will get the same answer: dating nowadays is hard.
For single expats in Germany, dating is even harder.
0コメント