Is the world veering away rapidly from anything that smacks of socialism, or is socialism moving away from itself?
Socialism or plain old politics of the Left is morphing into right-wing jingoism in the U.K. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the world has been veering to the right so dangerously, that it now looks every bit a car crash.
Now, Governments are transforming into something more than mere welfare-slashing juggernauts. They have become right-wing extremist xenophobic movements. This is happening in the U.K where Kier Starmer’s Labour Party is battling with the gaining popularity of former fringe politician Nigel Farage.
Starmer, they say, doesn’t have much control over what’s happening with his party that’s rapidly losing ground to opponents, but powerful elements within Labour are taking the party far-rightward, with the attempt being to mimic the agenda of Farage’s Reform Party.
“They are becoming more reformed than Reform,” someone quipped. But countries have veered right in droves. In Germany, the far-right is being collectively staved off, but barely, and so is it in France.
The subject of this article, however, is to question this relentless slide to the right since the collapse of Communism with the fall of the Soviet Union, while raising the twin poser, where would it all end? Countries are fast becoming xenophobic and isolationist.
The people have themselves grown more inured to leftist ideas. That is the great upshot of the decades since the Soviet Union collapsed. People have seen China transform from a practising Communist state, into an economic powerhouse, and a very rich country. They have seen the former Soviet Republics becoming Balkanised into a myriad of separate nations, yet thriving.
The upshot of all this is that the control of the world has been ceded almost completely to the capital owning classes, with workers willingly receding to the background, and keeping Unionist and organised-labour impulses to a minimum.
Moreover, voters have started equating left of centre governments with being weak. People are comfortable enough to want security, and not a revolution.
They want to protect their homes, and safeguard whatever they have earned, with no commotion and unrest. They feel increasingly that it is the right-wing — in Europe, the xenophobic right-wing — that can do this job. This is happening in the South American continent as well. In El Salvador, President Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez is so wildly popular that he is said to be the most idolised leader in the entire continent.
How so? Not only has he created prisons in a lawless country and put all the drug-runners and gangsters behind bars, he has also now teamed up with the new Trump administration in the U.S. to accept prisoners from other countries — and yes, you read that right.
But people value this leadership because they have regained their sense of security, and what is a Government if it cannot guarantee the basic safety of the people? The problem is not this shift to more secure times. It is the fact that the Left is being obliterated in most parts of the world.
demonised
The Left is not merely being obliterated, but is being demonised. This caricaturisation — or alternately the steady demonisation of the Left — is being propelled forward most of the time by the voters themselves. But it is probably because there is no space any more for labour movements, or genuine unionisation of any sort.
That era is long gone. Workers cannot organise anymore as they were used to, because people do not like their comfortable realities to be disrupted. People are relatively well off these days in most parts of the world, compared to what obtained in the early 70s and before that, during the era of the Cold War.
As long as the capitalist ownership provides essentials and needs — by way of jobs and consumer goods — the workers are content. Small wonder then that the Left has receded to the background. But then why is right-wing politics and right-wing extremism on the rise? That can’t be a concomitant to the demise of the Left?
The problem is that though people are more content now than in the 70s, there are still discontents. Now, the discontents are about disparities, about why there is a rich class that is getting richer, and about aspiration for a better life. When it comes to that, it seems the workers of the world don’t unite, they divide.
It seems they divide on the basis of immigrant workers and domestic workers, for instance. Workers cannot rally and rail against the capitalist owning-classes these days, because those are the potentates that provide for them. They are the job creators and the producers of consumables that keep the middle class dream alive.
Since the minions cannot possibly rally against these demi-gods without hurting themselves, they are turning on each other singling out foreign workers who are ‘taking our jobs.’ But it’s not the taking of jobs or any other encroachment that is the problem, but the fact that the working classes have no outlet to act out their discontents upon.
So, they choose the path of bedlam, or anarchy, choosing to riot against immigrants and generally being in a sense more right-wing than their capital owning class bosses. This is supremely ironic because being more right-wing is not about to solve their problems that are caused for the most part by the avarice of right-wing owners of business, and the so-called entrepreneurs.
But as stated at the outset of this article, the world is becoming more right-wing by the minute and socialist or leftist tendencies are increasingly suspect in such a world. At this rate, would the giants of industry — or as things stand — the tech-giants run the world by direct fiat as it were?
Would that be the new form of capitalism, where politicians would be thought of as intermediaries, and tech-giants would hope to govern countries by edict, on their own and without the help of politicians?
IDLE
Though most would scoff at such a prediction, others would watch Elon Musk and the U.S.A. and say that there is a new form of capitalism in the making where uber-rich capitalist business tycoons such as Musk get directly involved in the administration of the State apparatus.
The trend in the emasculation of socialism and left politics, and the apotheosis of hard right-wing, has been that what’s thought of as impossible or outlandish today, fast becomes normalised tomorrow.
Parties of those such as Farage — far-right to the point of being xenophobic — were thought of as pesky outliers that are a source of amusement a few years back. But then, movements with such political leanings have become the norm in the U.K. and Europe today.
It is a further sign that the Left has been progressively weakened to the point it is essentially non-existent in some countries. Where the Left exists it is only nominally Left as in the U.K., for instance, where already the people seem to have got tired of both the Conservatives and Labour, and are seeking an alternative in the far-right.
Even the holdouts so called or the last bastions of leftism in South America, in Bolivia, for instance, are now tired of infighting within the Left Movement and the Latin American brand of resurgent Leftism is no more, and has evolved into a form of non-aligned triangulated Leftism, which is, of course, right-wing politics by other means.
But the lurch to the far-right may mean that there would be more shocking outcomes in the decades to come. Who knows? Labour, or the worker himself, though he would never be redundant, may increasingly be seen as redundant. Due to artificial intelligence and robotics, this tendency of worker-marginalisation would perhaps get a shot in the arm. The worker may live an idle existence in the future, subsidised by the State.
