Why the ruling classes afraid the Left populism of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders more than the Right populism of Donald Trump
Leo
Panitch, Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar at York University in
Toronto, explains to Gregory Wilpert and the Real
News, the huge difference between Left populism
and Right populism and why, at the moment, the global neoliberal
regime afraid the Left one much more:
Populism
in general needs to be understood as an appeal to the masses, to the
working classes, to farmers, to peasants, etc., of a kind which
targets the existing political and economic establishment, derides
them, denigrates them, engages in promises to make those people's
lives better, but does nothing to organize and mobilize them as
powerful social forces from below. It's an attempt to ride on the
discontent of the great mass of people in a way that doesn't increase
their power vis-a-vis either the populace or the existing
establishment. And to some extent, it may actually involve decreasing
their power, insofar as it disorganizes their organizations, whether
it's trade unions or farmers' movements or what have you.
That
type of populism is very different from left populism, of the kind
that the Davos people would identify Jeremy Corbyn as representing,
or Bernie Sanders as representing, which is explicitly oriented to
motivating, educating, and organizing forces from below. So it's a
very different type of populism, and I think the ruling classes in
Davos are as worried about the right-wing version as the left at the
moment. But in the long run, they will always be much, much more
worried by the left, because it may be oriented, and often is
oriented, at taking away their private property, taking away their
capital, taking away their means of production, distribution, and
exchange, which they use to exploit people.
That's
not the case with right-wing populists, for the most part, as Trump
obviously shows. That said, the danger is that they're playing with
nationalist fire. Since globalization doesn't involve bypassing
nation-states, all of the ruling classes, political establishments in
each nation-state who have bought into neoliberal globalization have
had to coexist with a reproduction of national identity, a
legitimation of the notion of the national interest, even as they've
opened up their economies, their societies to the free movement of
capital, to treating foreign capitalists the same as domestic ones,
etc.
By
reproducing that national consciousness, they have, in the wake of
the delegitimation of neoliberal globalization, they have left the
door open for a nationalist populist type of rhetoric and politics
that we've seen in the United States, in Germany, in France, in
Eastern Europe most explicitly, etc.
You
know, they're afraid of that, because the danger is that they will
not be able to control some of the figures who may indeed turn out to
be the kinds of nationalists who would turn inwards. We have no
evidence that that is happening yet. We don't even have evidence that
in Hungary and Poland that is happening. What they are doing, of
course, is behaving in an extremely ugly manner vis-a-vis the human
rights of refugees, of migrants, and indeed of minorities who have
been in their societies as significant elements for millennia, not
least the Roma and so on.
This is
something that's distasteful to them. This is something they look at
carefully, but I don't think that they think it's over either.
They're probably more afraid now by what Corbyn represents than
the danger that Le Pen appeared to represent, but I don't think
they think it's over.
As has
been described in previous
article, it is quite evident that the far-right in
the West managed to gain significant power, not only because it
grabbed the role of the central anti-establishment force, but because
it has stolen all the basic positions of the leftist ideology and
transformed them into easily-consumed slogans for the masses.
The
far-right leaders frequently attack on bankers and the
political-economic elites, yet they direct their main rhetoric
firepower against the usual victims: vulnerable parts of the
population, like immigrants.
The
fact that the far-right has stolen the positions of the left and put
them into its own framework, permitted the establishment apparatus to
put under the sign of 'populism', almost anything that resides
between, say, neo-nazi formations, up to the non-parliamentary
far-left, except of course the traditional political powers that
faithfully serve neoliberalism to date. However, this broad range of
ideological shades includes numerous and often opponent ideologies.
Furthermore,
the concept of 'populism' itself had to be changed. The establishment
apparatus had to 'relocate' some basic features of populism, away from the new conditions that the elites want to impose.
Therefore,
it is 'unrealistic', for example, to believe that healthcare should
be provided by the state for everyone (which is something taken for
granted less than two or three decades ago), simply because the rich
want to pay less and less taxes in order to gain more and more. It is
'irresponsible' to support people in just keeping their benefits
under the pretext of economic instability. The economic chaos of
course always comes from this system that propagates this perception.
As
a result of all these, people who are coming from the left and speak
about pro-people policies, are stigmatized by the establishment
apparatus as 'populists' who try to manipulate the masses. They have
been placed next to far-right politicians who have totally different
agenda and actually do the dirty job for the elites. In reality,
these leftist politicians are just trying to defend what has been
conquered with struggles and blood by the people in previous eras,
against this new brutal onslaught of neoliberalism.
The
ultimate goal of the establishment is simple: drive the electorate
away from the 'dangerous' and 'radical' left, back to the neoliberal
center, which is promoted as the only 'serious' and 'realistic'
political regime capable of running societies efficiently.
The
conclusion here is that the neoliberal regime has to deal with the
Left populism first, exactly because it represents a direct threat to
current status quo by supporting, mainly, a radical wealth
distribution from top to bottom.
Comments
Post a Comment