Challenges for the left in the twilight of neoliberalism

Mike Phipps reviews The Long Retreat: Strategies to Reverse the Decline of the Left, by  Boris Kagarlitsky. published by Pluto.

Boris Kagarlitsky should be no stranger to socialists here, having published nearly 20 books in the English language. His activism in Russia has frequently brought him into conflict with its different regimes. Most recently, the Putin apparatus designated him a ‘foreign agent’ and in February 2024 he was sentenced to five years detention in a prison colony. Jeremy Corbyn MP is one of the leading figures in the subsequently-created Kagarlitsky Solidarity Committee.

A pessimistic premise

The premise of Kagarlitsky’s new book, published just as he began his jail term, is pessimistic. The author warns: “Unfortunately, at the same time as public dissatisfaction with capitalism around the planet has reached an unprecedented scale, the left movement has finished up at the lowest point in its entire history. If this is not true on the organisational plane, then it is certainly the case on the ideological and moral level.”

That weakness allows not only right-wing populist forces to fuse economic grievances and culturally reactionary politics, but also helps corporate elites “to curtail, and if possible to end altogether, the participation of the masses in politics while preserving the formal institutions of parliamentarism, free elections and other conquests of liberal democracy.”

Kagarlitsky’s diagnosis of the state of the left is especially severe. He attacks a “culture and psychology in which belief in the possibility of major political successes is almost absent (and when such successes suddenly occur, the left is completely unready to take advantage of them). Meanwhile, enticing utopias have taken the place of realistic programmes for changing society and the economy. The combination of morally exalted utopianism with an absolutely mundane pragmatism, which preoccupies itself not just with ‘minor matters’ but with the pursuit of petty short-term gains, has ensured a fatal inability to devise any kind of strategy.”

The retreat is not just political, but intellectual too. Kagarlitsky is disapproving of the growing volume of literature that advocates ‘solutions’ – technocratic fixes – to society’s problems while remaining agnostic about the structural economic changes needed. He writes: “From the sphere of the possible and necessary, socialism is shifting once again to the sphere of the ideal and desirable, transforming itself into an ideological myth or moral principle while failing completely to provide leadership in the development of practical programmes and strategies.”

Kagarlitsky criticises the new utopianism for substituting what is desirable for a materialist analysis of what is objectively necessary and possible, based on an understanding of the current tendencies in the economic system. He singles out Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists as an example of the new vogue for socialist dreaming and polemicises particularly against the idea of a universal basic income (UBI) as entirely compatible with the individualist philosophy of neoliberalism.

To be fair to Bregman, if he doesn’t discuss systemic transformation and political agency much, it’s because a lot of his ideas are indeed reformist and achievable within an overall capitalist framework. This does not make them inherently invalid, however, and the same applies to UBI.

Kagarlitsky’s excoriation of the left goes further, however. Referencing the 2022 truckers’ protest in Canada against compulsory vaccination, he says that “most members of the left intellectual and political elite also remained silent or uncritically repeated the discourse of the state propaganda” which sought to demonize the protestors as uneducated separatists. He accuses leftists of “snobbery and opportunism”, preferring to “socialise with refined members of the capital-city bourgeois establishment rather than to work with tough, harsh drivers, timber-cutters, steelworkers or farmers.”

I can’t comment specifically on the state of the Canadian left, but the broader allegation that the left generally is supposedly focused on cultural or identity issues that are of little interest to most working class people and that this has isolated them feels rather stale. Furthermore, to see mobilisations of people around far right talking points as an authentic expression of the working class is quite a slur on that class itself – especially given the sacrifice made by health workers in the pandemic. In any case, as the author admits, in France, the engagement of Melenchon’s movement with the ‘gilets jaunes’ protestors actually helped the left grow into a powerful electoral force.

It is true that neoliberalism fragments society for its own purposes, but the left’s espousal of minority rights is not an adaptation to this process, especially when combined with a mass orientation. The need for inclusivity and collectivism against racial division and supremacism is underlined by the rise of far right activism today, in the UK and elsewhere.

Kagarlitsky’s snipes at intersectionality supposedly undermining class solidarity do not really advance this discussion. His references to the “stigmatising of ‘white males’, which has become a key element in the culture wars” essentially accepts the terms of debate as framed by our enemies.

Has the left made a terrible mess of things? It’s not a picture I recognise but I suppose the validity or otherwise of this argument depends on how widely you define the left. Kagarlitsky casts the net pretty widely to include much of Latin America’s ‘pink tide’. Yet the ultimate failures of Venezuela’s Chavismo, Nicaragua’s Sandinismo, the left governments of Brazil, Peru and many other countries have complex causes that cannot easily be swept up in a blanket appraisal.

What happened in Russia?

Much of Kagarlitsky’s critique of the degeneration of the post-1917 Soviet political system is fairly orthodox. More interesting is his understanding of the imposition from the late 1980s on of a market economy, which he sees as growing organically from what had gone before – the collapse of planning into a series of internal lobbies.

He dismisses the “idealist illusion that it had been the rejection of ideological dogmas that caused the collapse of the system.” In fact, “the reality was the complete reverse. The evolution of the system created the need for the ruling circles to rid themselves of the fetters of ideology.”  In any case, the nomenklatura needed no encouragement to transform itself into a bourgeoisie.

The particular mafia capitalism that resulted was a product of the “anti-democratic reaction that was unfolding in the West combined with the results of the degeneration of the Soviet nomenklatura.” The replacement of a society based on industrial production with one oriented towards consumerism also had social consequences. “While industrial production brought people together in large collectives, consumption atomised them, causing them to perceive themselves primarily as individuals.”

The impact on mass consciousness – from the standpoint of the left which had traditionally relied on the organised working class – has been catastrophic. Society is simply falling apart. Meanwhile the elite has seen and used power, including state power, principally as a means of enhancing its wealth. For Kagarlitsky, the key question is: how is it possible to reform such a society?

A culture of consumption, contributing to widespread commercial manipulation and alienation, has been a feature of Western societies for far longer. As technocratic centrism came to dominate once radical parties, leftist intellectuals lamented the suffocating effect of consumerism on the working class, yet missed the key point, increasingly clear in the 21st century: in the long term, such a culture could not remotely guarantee the well-being of that class.

If post-war redistribution and the welfare state created conditions for greater working class prosperity and economic growth, the more recent rise of inequality and the erosion of public services are having the opposite effect, driving people into poverty and debt. For many, consuming even the basic necessities of life requires credit. “Workers did not feel the exploitation they suffered in the workplace to be as painful as the financial obligations beneath which they now laboured; work for a boss was becoming simply a means to provide financial capital with the opportunity to exploit them.”

In this light, attempts to humanise capitalism and mitigate its contradictions and antagonisms have proved pretty short-lived.

The fact that this fundamental crisis of the economic system runs alongside other crises, most notably the climate emergency, causes considerable confusion among progressives, contends Kagarlitsky. It allows big capital to advance solutions that leave its power intact, with the global working class footing the bill. Currently oil and gas corporations are willing to make the transition only if subsidised by the state. “Hence the European Union Recovery Instrument, founded in 2020, set about financing investments of 750 billion euros, needed to ensure the energy transition, on the condition that the funds would be obtained through borrowings on the international financial markets.”

Kagarlitsky concludes: “Those who will have to pay back the loans will be the generation of Greta Thunberg, people who support this agenda enthusiastically but show no inclination to discuss its financial component.” Failure to do so will lead the left to fall in behind the agenda of capital, for whom the energy transition is simply a new cycle of creative destruction. This is already creating enemies for the environmental movement among those required to pay for the transition.

There’s an essential truth here, but posing the issue in this provocative way may not take the debate very far forward. It’s absolutely right that the just transition cannot be achieved without confronting the power of capital, but it is ultimatistic to suggest that failure to call for the overthrow of that power condemns large sections of the climate justice movement to apparently colluding in the heightened exploitation of the working class. Is it really the case that climate justice activists are unwilling to consider who should pay for the transition?

Ukraine

I also found Kagarlitsky’s chapter on the war between Russia and Ukraine unconvincing. Kagarlitsky is right to suggest the roots of the conflict were primarily economic rather than ideological, but to attribute the war to the crisis of neoliberalism in general doesn’t tell us much.

Nor can the war be seen as a “mistake” that “then took on the form of a catastrophe.” As I have suggested elsewhere, from Russia’s standpoint, the war represents “the collective interests of the Russian ruling class: expanding the sphere of influence in which oligarchic capitalism can operate and fending off the threat from the West, whose anti-corruption rhetoric resonates with a growing professional class.” In short, it feeds real material interests and is neither an accident nor merely the whim of a dictatorial Putin.

Kagarlitsky notes on both sides the growth of a state presence in the economy, while recognising that this involvement may not operate in the interests of society. For that, economic and social changes will be necessary, “which in turn require that new people and forces come to power. Consequently, the events of 2022 once again confirmed that the left has a chance of gaining power when the old elites have not only exhausted their potential, but have also brought matters to an obvious breakdown, when the question is no longer one of constructing a new world, but of restoring at least the minimum necessary conditions for social reproduction.”

Despite the presence of right wing nationalists on both side, Kagarlitsky distinguishes between the way, in Ukraine, the need to oppose the external threat has brought about a greater cohesion in society, while in Russia the opposite has occurred. Increasingly, people are indifferent to the regime’s attempts to whip up chauvinistic sentiment for what many see as a pointless conflict.

A fighting spirit

There’s a lot more in this book and some of its ideas are more original than others. A short review can engage only with some of them. Whatever one’s assessment of Boris Kagarlitsky’s politics, one cannot but admire his courage in publicly opposing Putin’s war. It’s a principled stand which surprised some on the left, given his earlier support for the so-called People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk established in the Donbass in May 2014. For this stand he is now paying a heavy price.

Yet he continues to maintain a remarkable fighting spirit, highlighted in Patrick Bond’s Foreword. On being re-arrested earlier this year, Kagarlitsky posted to Telegram: “I continue to collect data and materials for new books, including descriptions of prison life – now in Moscow institutions. Anyway, see you soon! I am sure that everything will be fine eventually. We will see each other again both on the channel and in person. We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country.”

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

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