The forces that have assembled behind Biden can end racism and exclusion everywhere
Anthony Barnett
LONG READ, PDF LINK AT BOTTOM
A new direction has opened up, which no one planned or foresaw.
After 1980, Stuart Hall foresaw the “reactionary modernisation” of market fundamentalism. It was to split the broad forces of the left in three. Social democrats – and in the US, the Democrats – collaborated in the evisceration of their working-class support, either actively or because they could not prevent it as they embraced ‘globalisation’. The traditional socialist left remained committed to confronting ‘the system’ from which their energies and idealism were now completely excluded, and held on to a Jacobin intransigence that had flourished in the 1960s.
In between were the greens, liberals, many single-issue campaigners and (for want of a better term) small-r republicans who later took advantage of the internet to encourage participation and active democracy. They sought a path between what they experienced as two forms of closure: neoliberalism and neo-Leninism. openDemocracy was part of this inventive but marginalised politics, which lent it distinction but little influence.
The core ideology of neoliberalism imploded with the great financial crash of 2008. The market, which was supposed to know best, had failed. Governments, which were supposed to be the problem, had to rescue the rich. The governing parties of the centre-left were blindsided by the crash. Having already abandoned socialism, they were capsized when capitalism abandoned them.
In the US, on the right, the Tea Party movement showed that anti-elite populism had support and energy. Trump was to wrap himself in the rage of these Republican voters and led a right-wing rising against politics itself. Only someone as utterly shameless as Trump, with his mastery of the media – a rentier plutocrat, whose residential towers were laundromats for international oligarchs – could lead such a movement.
An Occupy Wall Street march through New York's Times Square in 2011.
Anthony Pleva / Alamy Stock Photo
The response from the left has been slower, but deeper. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street demonstrated the popularity in the US of opposition to “the 1%”. Worldwide, it saw a new generation voice opposition to social and economic inequality and demand real democracy.
As these protests ebbed, the Jacobin tendency, with its unflinching critique of capitalism, gained a late reinvigoration. Yet on 6 January 2021, neo-Leninists were confronted with a real-time vision of their insurrectionist dream, as millions watched a live-streamed occupation of the Capitol.
It should have been us, wrote Alain Brossat and Alain Naze on the Verso Books blog, entranced by both the iconoclasm of the intrusion and the shocked reactions to it. With a salute to Lenin, they advised us to “urgently escape” what they describe as the “emotional contamination” of being appalled by what Trump’s mob did. (“We are not going to shed tears over the ransacking of Ms Pelosi’s office,” the authors wrote.) Instead, “people could and should […] reformulate the question on their own terms: storming of the Capitol, why not? – but rather by the Sioux or, say, a coalition of descendants of Sitting Bull, Geronimo, John Brown, Nat Turner, Malcolm X and Emma Goldman!”
The old answer to ‘why not?’ is that the capitalist order will hardly be shaken by an internationalist’s wet dream. The 21st-century reply is that a much more significant occupation of the Capitol actually took place in June 2020, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with other Democratic leaders, took the knee in its halls – for the 8 minutes and 46 seconds that police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd in Minneapolis as he slaughtered him.
The response from the left has been slower, but deeper. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street demonstrated the popularity in the US of opposition to “the 1%”. Worldwide, it saw a new generation voice opposition to social and economic inequality and demand real democracy.
As these protests ebbed, the Jacobin tendency, with its unflinching critique of capitalism, gained a late reinvigoration. Yet on 6 January 2021, neo-Leninists were confronted with a real-time vision of their insurrectionist dream, as millions watched a live-streamed occupation of the Capitol.
It should have been us, wrote Alain Brossat and Alain Naze on the Verso Books blog, entranced by both the iconoclasm of the intrusion and the shocked reactions to it. With a salute to Lenin, they advised us to “urgently escape” what they describe as the “emotional contamination” of being appalled by what Trump’s mob did. (“We are not going to shed tears over the ransacking of Ms Pelosi’s office,” the authors wrote.) Instead, “people could and should […] reformulate the question on their own terms: storming of the Capitol, why not? – but rather by the Sioux or, say, a coalition of descendants of Sitting Bull, Geronimo, John Brown, Nat Turner, Malcolm X and Emma Goldman!”
The old answer to ‘why not?’ is that the capitalist order will hardly be shaken by an internationalist’s wet dream. The 21st-century reply is that a much more significant occupation of the Capitol actually took place in June 2020, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with other Democratic leaders, took the knee in its halls – for the 8 minutes and 46 seconds that police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd in Minneapolis as he slaughtered him.
George Floyd mural, Minneapolis, by Xena Goldman, Cadex Herrera, Greta McLain, Niko Alexan-der, Pablo Hernandez. | Wikicommons/ Lorie Shaull. Some rights reserved.
Like Trumpism, Black Lives Matter entered Congress in a novel fashion – but as rightfulness, not barbarism. Its activists went on to supercharge the mobilisation for Biden in November. The reward has been a flurry of anti-discrimination executive orders issued with determination by the new president.
This is not the ‘reformism’ we are used to, pushed through by a progressive elite that is proud of its paternalism while it excludes the dangerous from its councils. The moral imperative to repudiate structural racism has been so broad and so overwhelming that you no longer qualify to be a political leader unless you are willing to take the knee.
The absurdity of those seeking a vanguardist seizure of power connects to a deeper defeat for the Marxist left. In the 1960s, radicals in the West were trapped between Stalinism and a stifling, corporate labour movement. Attempting a breakout made sense and an astonishing variety of internationalist strategies were adopted, from the violent and sectarian to the academic and abstruse. Yet, as Tom Nairn began to show in the arguments he developed in the 1970s, seeking any solution in a revamped proletarian orthodoxy was flawed. Both capitalist development itself, as well as resistance to it, would always be shaped in a fundamental way by national differences that “cannot be glossed over or occluded”.
It is an argument that has been surely vindicated. For here we are in the third decade of the 21st century and the world’s defining contest is not, despite globalisation, an international class conflict. Instead it is between two nation states. An ex-communist nation seeks to reshape the world in its image with patriotic self-confidence, while the old hegemon is reaffirming its national predominance. Both are now seeking to conscript support across the world.
What is happening is too strong and autonomous to be fobbed off. The world of closed democracy is ending.
There is a Socialist International, a Progressive Alliance, a Fourth International and a Progressive International, but not a single influential ‘international’ capable of responding to the multiple crises of the global system. Yet simultaneously, questions of democratic self-determination, from Hong Kong to Belarus, Myanmar and Zimbabwe, not to speak of India, Turkey, Iran and Russia, show that the national question is taking on a new expression, as the young in particular demand free and fair elections and an end to corruption. In the US, this generational call has energised the Democratic Party and entered Congress.
These national movements for democracy are not nationalist in the sense of bellicose demands for competitive distinction. Quite the contrary, they take forward a worldwide shift in the nature of democracy itself. In my recent essay Out of the Belly of Hell, I showed how the response of governments around the world to COVID-19 reveals that a fundamental change has taken place. A combination of forces have developed across the last 50 years in a contraflow to the dominance of neoliberalism. None originated from socialist opposition to capitalism. Together they have altered the balance of expectations between people and government and generated a humanisation that resists the supremacy of market values.
The forces are material, in terms of the advances of science and its application to medical treatments. They are ideological, in terms of feminism, anti-racism, #MeToo and human rights. They are political, with the rise of ecological consciousness and the environmental movement. And they are even created by the market, in that consumers are empowered, most notably with respect to our bodies and our fitness – and, thanks to computerisation, our capacity to communicate. Social media is shaping these networked expressions of civil society.
I did not expect this combination of forces to help deliver a clear-cut political expression so rapidly as it has in the US. As we have seen, organisations from across civil society were crucial to Trump’s defeat. What is unprecedented is that they had sufficient influence to affect the outcome.
Corporate and financial capital still dominate, but politics no longer serves them alone, by putting the interests of the market first. Instead, power is having to listen to people everywhere. In these circumstances the legacy attitudes of traditional left politics, whether liberal, reformist or radical, have to change. What is happening is too strong and autonomous to be fobbed off. The world of closed democracy is ending.
17 March 2021
This essay is the third in a series of responses to the storming of the Capitol. The first was a short, quick defence of the nobility and necessity of insurrection, which contrasted the events in Washington, DC with recent protests in Hong Kong. The second looked at the way that Trump himself is a product of the 1960s. The fourth will be on the coming conflict between Washington and Beijing.
Like Trumpism, Black Lives Matter entered Congress in a novel fashion – but as rightfulness, not barbarism. Its activists went on to supercharge the mobilisation for Biden in November. The reward has been a flurry of anti-discrimination executive orders issued with determination by the new president.
This is not the ‘reformism’ we are used to, pushed through by a progressive elite that is proud of its paternalism while it excludes the dangerous from its councils. The moral imperative to repudiate structural racism has been so broad and so overwhelming that you no longer qualify to be a political leader unless you are willing to take the knee.
The absurdity of those seeking a vanguardist seizure of power connects to a deeper defeat for the Marxist left. In the 1960s, radicals in the West were trapped between Stalinism and a stifling, corporate labour movement. Attempting a breakout made sense and an astonishing variety of internationalist strategies were adopted, from the violent and sectarian to the academic and abstruse. Yet, as Tom Nairn began to show in the arguments he developed in the 1970s, seeking any solution in a revamped proletarian orthodoxy was flawed. Both capitalist development itself, as well as resistance to it, would always be shaped in a fundamental way by national differences that “cannot be glossed over or occluded”.
It is an argument that has been surely vindicated. For here we are in the third decade of the 21st century and the world’s defining contest is not, despite globalisation, an international class conflict. Instead it is between two nation states. An ex-communist nation seeks to reshape the world in its image with patriotic self-confidence, while the old hegemon is reaffirming its national predominance. Both are now seeking to conscript support across the world.
What is happening is too strong and autonomous to be fobbed off. The world of closed democracy is ending.
There is a Socialist International, a Progressive Alliance, a Fourth International and a Progressive International, but not a single influential ‘international’ capable of responding to the multiple crises of the global system. Yet simultaneously, questions of democratic self-determination, from Hong Kong to Belarus, Myanmar and Zimbabwe, not to speak of India, Turkey, Iran and Russia, show that the national question is taking on a new expression, as the young in particular demand free and fair elections and an end to corruption. In the US, this generational call has energised the Democratic Party and entered Congress.
These national movements for democracy are not nationalist in the sense of bellicose demands for competitive distinction. Quite the contrary, they take forward a worldwide shift in the nature of democracy itself. In my recent essay Out of the Belly of Hell, I showed how the response of governments around the world to COVID-19 reveals that a fundamental change has taken place. A combination of forces have developed across the last 50 years in a contraflow to the dominance of neoliberalism. None originated from socialist opposition to capitalism. Together they have altered the balance of expectations between people and government and generated a humanisation that resists the supremacy of market values.
The forces are material, in terms of the advances of science and its application to medical treatments. They are ideological, in terms of feminism, anti-racism, #MeToo and human rights. They are political, with the rise of ecological consciousness and the environmental movement. And they are even created by the market, in that consumers are empowered, most notably with respect to our bodies and our fitness – and, thanks to computerisation, our capacity to communicate. Social media is shaping these networked expressions of civil society.
I did not expect this combination of forces to help deliver a clear-cut political expression so rapidly as it has in the US. As we have seen, organisations from across civil society were crucial to Trump’s defeat. What is unprecedented is that they had sufficient influence to affect the outcome.
Corporate and financial capital still dominate, but politics no longer serves them alone, by putting the interests of the market first. Instead, power is having to listen to people everywhere. In these circumstances the legacy attitudes of traditional left politics, whether liberal, reformist or radical, have to change. What is happening is too strong and autonomous to be fobbed off. The world of closed democracy is ending.
17 March 2021
This essay is the third in a series of responses to the storming of the Capitol. The first was a short, quick defence of the nobility and necessity of insurrection, which contrasted the events in Washington, DC with recent protests in Hong Kong. The second looked at the way that Trump himself is a product of the 1960s. The fourth will be on the coming conflict between Washington and Beijing.
A PDF version is available here.
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