How Class Disappeared from Western Politics

...Through this myth the right took over cultural politics from the New Left as its primary line of attack and the key to its continuing success...

...They have abandoned labor unionists, human rights activists, democrats, and feminists in Islamic countries, as well as in their own, in deference to their jihadist confederates...

...First, much of what remains of the radical left has aligned itself with extreme Islamic political movements that promote the establishment of religious regimes in Asia and Africa, with the ultimate objective of a global caliphate...

...Although this explanation is correct for the distance that it covers, it does not account for the fact that rather than using Islamic militants as a vehicle for progressive politics many left-wing participants in this alliance DISSENT / Winter 2006 73 have effectively become advocates of the Islamists' agenda...

...London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, pursues a Gallowaylite strategy of courting the MAB and welcoming Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an influential cleric supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood, who was expelled from Egypt for militant political activity (he is now based in Qatar...

...Rather than abolishing the market, social democrats seek to socialize it by harnessing its creative energy to serve the public good rather than the exclusive interests of a small corporate and financial elite...

...At no point does he mention the dispossession of aboriginal populations at the hands of the colonial power...

...Toward a New Social Democracy The antiglobalization movement has responded to integrated markets and expanding free trade by seeking to reverse these processes...

...The result is downward pressure on wages, elimination of job security, and reduction in social investment...

...He sees this as the mechanism for the exportation of capitalism from the mother country to its possessions...

...Instead of seeking to dismantle the public sectors and regulatory regimes of target countries through rampant privatization, international free trade bodies could be endowed with a positive social role...

...He dismantles what little remains of their social protections, encourages the destruction of their environment, and serves as an advocate for business interests that ship their jobs to low-wage countries...

...The European Union provides a precedent for achieving positive results of this kind when it expanded to include post-communist countries in Eastern Europe and induced Turkey to undertake significant political reforms to qualify for membership...

...Although using the rhetoric of a workers' revolution, most of the New Left made no serious attempt to connect with organized labor, which was politically powerful at the time...

...It did not try to wean working-class voters away from support of the Vietnam War while functioning within the Democratic social and civil rights consensus...

...It established the economic basis for the independence of these countries in the context of a socialist revolution...

...We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan...

...It was launched under cover of a gross misrepresentation of the facts, it was incompetently planned, and it is severely under-resourced...

...We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all...

...This period saw a serious increase in the economic and political power of organized labor and a massive expansion of working-class income, accompanied by a significant reduction in poverty throughout the western world...

...George Galloway, expelled from the British Labour Party for urging British troops in Iraq to disobey orders, established the Respect Party...

...In so doing it will reduce the wage gap between the developing world and the West, and promote eventual convergence of working conditions...

...It markets itself as a populist opposition to an illusory liberal power structure that seeks to destroy the basic social fabric of American life and betray the country to dangerous foreign interests...

...By launching a cultural war on the basis of opposition to Vietnam the New Left in the United States opened the way for a counterDISSENT / Winter 2006 75 assault from the right that has dominated American politics for most of the past thirtyfive years...

...Two complementary strategies suggest themselves...

...and corporate contributions to the social infrastructure of member countries, where these are specified as requirements of free trade...

...In order for such governments to achieve power, social democratic and left liberal parties must refocus their politics on a renewed understanding of the role of class, organized labor, and social investment in a globalized economy...

...For the second strategy to succeed, freetrade agreements must be negotiated not by the corporate lawyers of conservative administrations but by new progressive governments committed to policies of this kind...

...Unfortunately, it was the New Left that first made the move from class to cultural conflict, and this proved to be the undoing of the left in general...

...In a globalized economy, where capital is able to move freely across national boundaries to maximize profit and minimize wages, unions and governments have lost much of their leverage to constrain its power...

...He promotes homophobia and the subordination of women...

...Cultural Politics and the Success of the Right in America The rise of cultural politics as an alternative to class politics for the radical left dates back to the 1960s...

...Anxious memories of the chaos and divisions of the Vietnam era were carefully nurtured to give substance to this shadow drama...

...The concern of antiglobalists to address the severe social and environmental dislocations generated by globalizing economic patterns is certainly understandable...

...This will leave a large underclass of sweatshop laborers and subsistence farmers in the developing world, with a working and middle class struggling against declining wages, ever-increasing job insecurity, and diminishing public services in the West...

...In Europe a not insignificant part of what currently passes for the liberal left also expresses sympathy for these movements...

...It adopted a reformist program based on strong unions, market regulation, and the development of a comprehensive welfare state through mainstream democratic processes...

...If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution...

...Finally, they could be used to promote democratization in the developing world, where basic standards of human rights and democratic government would be conditions for membership in the free trade association...

...As we know, Marx envisioned a workers' revolution in the advanced industrialized coun74 DISSENT / Winter 2006 tries of western Europe, but he misjudged the capacity of these societies to accommodate social change...

...In an article of June 25, 1853, referring to the breakup of Indian village life, he says, These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade...

...Anticolonialism and anti-imperialism have exhausted its content to the point that it has become ripe for merger and acquisition by militant Islamic jihadists posing as the representatives of the third world poor struggling against Western domination...

...These governments are forced to dismantle the institutions of the welfare state by reducing the corporate taxes that fund them in order to compete with low-wage, business-friendly economies...

...The communist left in western Europe and America continued to court organized labor as the instrument of revolution throughout the first half of the twentieth century, but without success...

...But if the emerging global market is not constrained and directed to maximize social benefit, the new wealth will continue to be concentrated in the hands of a small elite...

...Although these phenomena seem to be unrelated, it is possible to discern a connection between them when one looks at the more general historical context within which they have emerged...

...Instead, it promoted identification with third world revolutionary movements and dabbled in the counterculture, setting itself against mainstream America...

...He calls for the imposition of Sharia law throughout the Middle East and for the eventual creation of a universal Islamic regime...

...Unfortunately western social democracy has been in accelerating decline over the past thirty years...

...This pattern seriously discredited left-wing politics in the eyes of many workingclass voters, who felt the cohesion of their social order under assault in this turbulent period...

...While the radical left scorned the social democrats as collaborators with capitalism and imperialism, it was the reformers rather than the revolutionaries who played a leading role in liberating the working class from poverty and powerlessness...

...It is the only agent that can eradicate poverty there...

...This strategy achieved impressive results in western Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in the postwar era of 1945-1975...

...In the three volumes of Capital he devotes only a brief, ten-page chapter (33) at the end of Volume 1 to it...

...One of the most effective weapons that the conservative juggernaut has deployed in this assault is the myth of a permanent liberal elite that dominates the media and controls power...

...Marx himself was not particularly interested in colonialism...

...In addition to empowering workers across the developmental divide of the third world and the West, successful unionization will contribute to general economic growth by increasing consumer power in the developing world, and so expanding markets for Western and local producers...

...The terrible tragedy that Hurricane Katrina inflicted on New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf coast this past summer exposed the realities of severe class difference and social dysfunction in a way that could not be concealed through the distraction of conservative cultural crusades...

...Largescale unionization can significantly improve the living standards and distribution of wealth in these countries...

...THE ROOTS of this phenomenon lie deep in the history of the Marxist left...

...Liberal fellow travelers compounded the problem by indulging the belligerent posturing of the New Left, frequently adopting it as a fashion statement...

...The second strategy involves using freetrade agreements not simply to open up markets to international competition, but to construct a network of social investment and environmental protection that defines the conditions for foreign companies to enter a market...

...Much of the radical left moved away from a politics of class conflict within a society and embraced a global morality play in which the dialectic of progressive and reactionary forces is transposed into a competition between cultures and geopolitical regions...

...That they did so is testimony to the success of conservatives in defining the landscape of American political discourse through cultural politics in a way that suppresses the realities of class interests...

...It is tempting to see the alliance of people who claim to be secular socialists with religious extremists pursuing a totalitarian theocratic vision as a temporary marriage of convenience based on a common opposition to Western imperialism...

...It has generally supported protectionist measures to defend local markets from the intrusion of multinational companies...

...As the radical left in the West gradually despaired of a workers' revolution in its home countries, it substituted the anticolonialist movements of the third world for the industrial proletariat as the primary engine of historical change...

...It is also the direct result of the continuing inability of the liberal left to reintroduce class issues as a decisive factor in the electoral process...

...To renew the social democratic project as a viable political alternative to the neoliberal onslaught, we must reformulate it in international terms to deal with a global market economy...

...One is the obvious move of supporting the development of effective labor unions in the new industries of the developing world...

...Variants of this coalition between dominant parts of the left and militant Islamic groups operate within the antiwar and antiglobalization movements throughout Western Europe...

...Communist revolutions took place in Russia and then in China, each of which suffered from economic underdevelopment...

...For Marx, then, colonialism was an unpleasant, if blind, instrument of historical development that destroyed oppressive social forms of what he regarded as primitive societies...

...He has led them into a misconceived war in Iraq that looks to be unwinnable...

...In the wake of the London bombings in July, putatively progressive newspapers such as the Guardian and the Independent, as well as news and public affairs programs on the BBC ran a steady stream of apologetics and appeasement on behalf of the bombers...

...Another important task of such expanded freetrade agreements would be the elimination of business tax havens...

...The expansion of free trade is a necessary engine for development in the third world...

...There is also continuing corrosion of regulatory regimes for consumer and environmental protection...

...It also suggests that the rapid rise of extreme Islamic groups is, at least to some extent, a result of the failure of postcolonial nationalist governments in the Islamic world to solve the problems of development and to cope with the opportunities and the disruptions of globalizing trends...

...This involves moving beyond the traditional instruments of management offered by the individual nation-state, as these are increasingly limited in their ability to respond to capital mobility...

...we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies...

...The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia...

...With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the transformation of China into a super-animated, market-driven country, and the disintegration of secular third world nationalist movements in Africa and Asia, militant political Islam emerged as the most potent antiWestern ideology around...

...Galloway appears regularly on Islamic and Arab television stations singing the praises of the Sunni insurgents in Iraq and calling on the Arab world to rise up against the American, British, and Israeli occupiers...

...Al-Qaradawi endorses Palestinian suicide bombing on the grounds that he does not see a distinction between Israeli soldiers and civilians...

...But that is not the question...

...Commentators identified "Muslim anger" at Western aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the marginalization of Muslim youth in British cities as the "root causes" of the attacks...

...It has opposed freetrade agreements in the name of local interests and environmental safety...

...How did we arrive at this state of affairs...

...The rise of integrated world financial markets and the rapid development of digital communication and production technology have combined with expanding free-trade 76 DISSENT / Winter 2006 agreements to undermine the traditional elements of social democratic power...

...The assumptions of this school of thought provide the antithesis of the nineteenthcentury European notions of modernity and social progress to which Marx was so deeply committed...

...Conservatives have propagated it to devastating effect, even while they have been securing a virtual hegemony on all major institutions of American public life...

...Second, in the United States, working-class voters consistently and consciously vote against their class interests by supporting conservative Republican politicians whose plutocratic economic policies they reject...

...In the course of this move, the radical left exchanged working-class politics for the politics of culture and identity...

...It remains to be seen whether the reawakening of large parts of American public opinion to these issues was a passing response to a terrible natural disaster or the beginning of a significant change in prevailing political perceptions...

...Labor does not enjoy the new mobility of finance nor does it receive the protection accorded to capital under free-trade agreements...

...SHALOM LAPPIN is professor of computational linguistics at King's College, London...

...However, its protests resemble the efforts of agrarianists and romantics to resist the industrial revolution...

...Faced with the choice of redefining their ideas in light of current realities or sustaining anti-imperialism as their focus, much of the radical left opted to embrace jihadism as the new incarnation of third world revolution, even while muttering formulaic misgivings over the religio-political project of the jihadists...

...In addition to protecting market access and fair competition, they could enforce decent employment practices...

...Such convergence will facilitate the creation of genuinely international DISSENT / Winter 2006 77 unions that can represent the interests of workers in an entire sector of the global market in a way that can restore their capacity to bargain with multinational employers...

...In these circumstances governments run by social democratic parties have been reduced to cushioning the effects of rampant market liberalization on workers and the poor in a rearguard effort to offer a neoliberal economy with a human face...

...In his articles for the New York Daily Tribune on British rule in India, he characterizes British colonialism as brutal and self-interested, but progressive in its economic and social effects...

...During the cold war the focus of revolutionary politics shifted to anticolonialist movements in the third world, and it was in these postcolonial countries that both the Soviet Union and China increasingly sought to develop a domain of support for their respective conflicts with the West...

...We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow...

...The governments they produced relied heavily on peasant support, given the absence of a large organized industrial working class in these countries...

...The Radical Left and Anti-Imperialism The current state of left-wing politics today, particularly in Western Europe, offers a bizarre and counterintuitive sight...

...It was possible to put a progressive gloss on this view during the period that anticolonialist movements were secular and nationalist in character, paying at least lip service to socialist principles...

...As the New Left came increasingly to define itself in terms of opposition to Vietnam, it entered into conflict with working-class Americans, the majority of whom supported the Democratic government out of commitment to its social and labor policies, as well as traditional patriotism...

...Many of these voters supported Bush in full awareness of these circumstances, and without enthusiasm for his policies...

...England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them...

...They spoke piously of the need to address these issues as the only effective way to stop terrorism...

...For this part of the left, its peculiar notion of anti-imperialism does not so much take precedence over progressive political concerns as replace them...

...Marxist theoreticians migrated from political science and economics to cultural studies, where they took up the cause of postmodernist, postcolonial criticism...

...The Decline of the Welfare State Where the radical left abandoned class politics in order to pursue Marx's vision of revolution, the social democratic left gave up on revolution to sustain his commitment to the labor movement...

...Working- and middle-class Americans recently voted for a president who systematically enriches the top 1 percent of the income pyramid at their expense...

...Tragically, he destroyed these achievements through the drastic folly of the Vietnam War...

...environmentally responsible behavior...

...It put on stark display the role of poverty and racial exclusion in defining basic fault lines in American life...

...In this sense, it was the agent of capitalist industrialization in the non-Western world...

...The distribution of income across the population became more even, and social benefits expanded, providing greater access to health care and education...

...In attempting to adapt to this situation, social democratic and left liberal parties are being forced to discard their traditional concern with class politics and compete with conservative parties on terms defined by the latter...

...They endowed the third world with the same intrinsically "progressive" historical role that Marx had previously assigned to the working class, with the entire Western world assuming the role of the capitalist bourgeoisie...

...In this process class advocacy and social development inevitably give way to the promotion of competitiveness in the international marketplace...

...He is precipitating a budget and balance-of-payments crisis that threatens the basic stability of the American, and hence the international, economy...

...One of the basic insights of social democracy, which distinguishes it from radical socialism, is that the market is indispensable for generating wealth on a large scale, but bad at distributing it equitably or rationally...

...Lyndon Johnson's presidency represented the high point of the liberal welfare state and the civil rights movement in America...

...In this chapter he focuses entirely on the transformation of colonist free labor in America and Australia into hired wage earners by landowners from Britain...

...Given this view, it is reasonable to conjecture that Marx would have been less than thrilled by the specter of those who claim to be his political heirs serving as junior partners in a campaign to establish the sort of reactionary anti-Western social order whose demise he celebrated as the main achievement of colonialism...

...78 DISSENT / Winter 2006...

...This is an electoral coalition of the SWP and the MAB, for which he successfully contested a parliamentary seat in London's immigrant East End constituency of Bethnal Green in the election of last May...

...The Stop the War Coalition in Britain is led by an alliance of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), an Islamist organization closely associated with the Muslim Brotherhood...

...More recently, well-grounded anxiety over the terrorist threat of Islamic extremism has been skillfully enlisted to sustain it...

...It was also partially successful in America in strengthening the institutions of the New Deal during these years...

...The fact that Islamists who seek to re-create their version of a medieval caliphate have become an important element of this movement is a clear indication that not a small part of it is conditioned by deeply reactionary, antimodernist sentiments...