The best of times, the worst of times
US in the spring of the pandemic

Covid-19 brought economic chaos to the US, and with that a possibility for huge political policy changes. But if Joe Biden wins the presidential election, he’s promised nothing will change.

by Thomas Frank   June 2020

Musical diversion: Jodi Beder helps neighbours cope with lockdown in Mount Rainer, Maryland, March 2020 Andrew Caballero-Reynolds · AFP · Getty

It is the worst of times in America. The pandemic that disaster-preparation types have been warning about for decades is finally here, and of course we haven’t prepared very well. Our leviathan government, the subject of so much feigned rightwing terror in ordinary times, turned out to be unable to rise from its easy chair when the crisis came. Our president, the former TV star Donald Trump, has proved himself incompetent if not positively injurious to public health with his stupid rambling remarks, which, until recently, he addressed daily to the cameras. And now, almost the entire country is in quarantine lockdown. New York City, where the virus has had its deadliest run, was a few weeks ago burying stacks of coffins in mass graves dug by bulldozers.

Quarantine has meant deliberately smothering the economy, which just a few months ago was running at maximum capacity. In America we have no mechanism for putting the economy on hold — people just lose their jobs or close their doors — and overnight we went from one of the fastest-running economies of my lifetime to Great Depression II, skipping all the intermediate steps and going straight to massive unemployment and a vast extinction of businesses large and small.

Here in the land of the individual, the individual is utterly overwhelmed, swept anonymously along on the tides of disease and economic collapse. Beloved family members are dying alone in some hospital; yesterday’s trendy restaurants are shuttered and forgotten, their ambitious young chefs filling out unemployment forms along with millions of others.
Here we are, suffering dire shortages of masks and testing equipment and even hand sanitiser, and our punditburo is unable to persuade our former trading partners to agree with us that the world is flat and they need to ship us the goods immediately

All this is happening during what might well be the best of times for America. Here in my little corner of the country we have been enjoying the most spectacularly beautiful springtime I have ever seen. For the comfortable, white-collar people around me, this pandemic has played out in a landscape that looks like a Fragonard painting: as the first fears came, the daffodils were blooming and then the tulips; the magnolia trees and the cherry blossoms; the azaleas and the rhododendrons; and now the dogwood blossoms arch pale overhead as I jog the peaceful, traffic-free roads of Bethesda, Maryland. That ironic contrast holds true everywhere you look.

Their beliefs confirmed

Just about everyone with a voice in America claims these days that the pandemic confirms their prior beliefs in some resounding way. Say the media types, this reinforces what we have been telling you all along about President Trump’s ignorance and folly. Say the conservatives, this proves what we have been telling you all along about soft-hearted liberals and their suicidal desire to let anyone into the country. For them the pandemic has been a carnival of smugness.

It is growing clear, however, that instead of reinforcing the cherished beliefs of the American consensus this episode has shattered them. For decades this country has offshored our manufacturing capacity because duh, that’s what everyone agreed the info-age called for. We were going to be a white-collar nation that made innovative things like prescription drugs and legal textbooks; things of the mind that weighed so very little. And now here we are, suffering dire shortages of masks and testing equipment and even hand sanitiser, and our plummy punditburo is unable to persuade our former trading partners to agree with us that the world is flat and they need to ship us the goods immediately. Death laughs in our stupid neoliberal faces.

The American system of healthcare-for-profit, constructed over the decades with the enthusiastic input of both political parties, has shown itself incapable of rising to the pandemic challenge. For a simple reason: it wasn’t built for purposes of public health. In my lifetime, the underlying assumption of that system has always been that healthcare is a privilege; you get access to it by being a successful and prosperous person. It is a meritocratic system in the way it rewards high-achieving doctors and innovative pharma scientists, and in the way it parcels out care. Poor people with lousy or no insurance who want their broken bones and organ failure healed are routinely bankrupted by astonishing medical bills (1). The suggestion that we should stop bankrupting such people and instead give them free tests or treatment for Covid-19 is so contrary to the consensus view of healthcare in this country that it is difficult to see how this necessary step is to be taken. The psychological breach with how we have always thought about healthcare will be wrenching.

Perhaps Covid-19’s most healthful effect is what it has done to our understanding of social class. A short while ago, all right-thinking Americans agreed that work that didn’t require a college degree was second-class work, heavy and blundering and polluting; the people who did it were often Trump voters whose way of life was crumbling because it deserved to. Only a few years back, billionaire Democratic politician Michael Bloomberg thrilled students at Oxford University with heady theories of how the information age prioritises ‘how to think and analyse’ over the simplistic skills of farmers and industrial workers (2).
Here in the land of the individual, the individual is utterly overwhelmed, swept anonymously along on the tides of disease and economic collapse

Today only those farmers and industrial workers stand between us and the abyss. Many of them are out there risking their lives in the virus-sphere every day. Others are being ordered back to work at their low-wage jobs regardless of their vulnerability to Covid-related death. They are falling ill in the grocery stores and the meat-packing plants while the white-collar, information-age types who order them to work sit safely at home, working by email and Internet conference, and enjoy a miraculously rising stock market, courtesy of Congress and the Federal Reserve.

If you guessed that this is a situation in which working people might decide they’ve had enough, you are correct. Although it’s hard to know for sure since local labour reporting is virtually dead in America, there are signs that worker militance might have revived itself. One of America’s most famous anti-union lobbyists recently warned his clients of the possibility of a ‘partial workforce rebellion’ (3), and there appear to be unauthorised wildcat strikes here and there (4).
Anything could happen

Each of these items points to the same thing: the sudden, vivid extinction of the comfortable worldview that American leaders adopted and forced on the world in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. The situation in America is pregnant with possibility. Anything could happen.

Here, however, we come to the dark, pathological irony of American liberalism. The institution that ought to be moving us past the deathly old mode of thought is the Democratic party — indeed, it is just about the only institution that might conceivably do such a thing nowadays — and yet just a few weeks before the coronavirus exploded in America, that same Democratic party succeeded, with joyful public celebration, in stamping out any possibility that American political thinking would in fact change. Its leaders are determined that this crisis will go to waste.

Let me explain. For much of the last year, the Democratic party held debates among would-be candidates for the presidency. At first, in an accurate reflection of the thinking of the left, many of the Democrats on the national stage appeared to have broken decisively and even creatively with the shibboleths of the past.

But after the institutional favourite, former vice-president Joe Biden, won the South Carolina primary at the end of February, most of the remaining candidates abruptly quit and endorsed him. The one candidate who persisted, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the leading reformer of our era and a beloved figure of the young, held on a little longer but also eventually bowed to the overwhelming odds.

The candidate who emerged from this jumble of discontent was the man who promised to do the least. His party is now preparing to give us a national election that will be little more than a referendum on the hated Donald Trump. Finally we have a climate in which the American public would unquestionably choose dramatic change were it offered to them, and the party of change has contrived to ensure that it will not be offered. Instead our choice is between two elderly and conservative white men, both with a history of stretching the truth, both with sexual harassment accusations hanging over them, and neither representing any possibility of energetic democratic reform. The old order has been miraculously rescued once again.

Such is the climate of opinion in America that, with the right leader, remarkable things would be possible. Instead we are presented with Joe Biden, an affable DC veteran with a hand in many of the defining disasters of the last 30 years: worker-crushing trade agreements, the Iraq war, cruel bankruptcy legislation, mass incarceration, the infamous attack on civil liberties known as the Patriot Act. The man even boasts of having been chummy with segregationists back in the day.

There’s a good chance he will win. Despite his views, Biden is a familiar and well-liked politician in the classical tradition, while Donald Trump, in his pathological narcissism, oozes resentment and always finds new ways to make himself despicable. Plus, it’s hard to see how someone can bungle an economic and public health crisis as badly as Trump has with Covid-19 and be asked by voters to repeat the performance.

‘Nothing would fundamentally change’ if Biden becomes president, he told his wealthy donors (5). It’s a hell of a slogan for a moment like this.

My leftwing friends all tell me they are depressed. With their hero Bernie Sanders, who looked so strong in January, beaten, they find themselves locked indoors, watching people be rude to each other on Twitter.

I share the mood, but I think there’s more to it. The prospect of no positive reforms in the wake of this catastrophe is bad enough, but each day’s news informs us that the old order is not sitting still. Every day there is some new scheme for bailing out corporations, or a power-grab by Silicon Valley. The Democratic governor of New York Andrew Cuomo is taking the opportunity of quarantine to bring in tech billionaires to re-engineer the future (6).

The gnawing anger beneath the pandemic is that democracy itself is being rewired in our absence. The system has failed us, the system is guaranteed to go on failing us, but while we the people are out of the picture, others are making grand, world-altering decisions. The powerful are rewriting the social contract while we watch TV and console ourselves with booze and simple chores.


Thomas Frank
Thomas Frank is the author of Listen, Liberal, or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, Metropolitan Books, 2016.

Original text in English

(1) See Kaiser Health News’s ‘Bill of the month’.

(2) ‘Bloomberg attacks farmers and industrial workers’, talk at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, 17 November 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=aATHavwhosY/.

(3) Lee Fang and Nick Surgey, ‘Anti-union operative warns business of historic rise in labor activism’, The Intercept, 1 May 2020.

(4) ‘Covid-19 strike wave interactive map’.

(5) Jennifer Epstein, ‘Biden tells elite donors he doesn’t want to “demonize” the rich’, Bloomberg, 19 June 2019.

(6) Naomi Klein, ‘Screen New Deal: under cover of mass death, Andrew Cuomo calls in the billionaires to build a high-tech dystopia’, The Intercept, 8 May 2020.

Trump and Netanyahu’s Palestine sell-out

Trump’s Palestine plan: enshrining occupation

Cécile Marin, February 2020 

Sources: www.peacenow.org; ‘Peace to prosperity’, January 2020

https://mondediplo.com/maps/trump-peace-plan

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=PALESTINIANS

The impact of the slave trade on Africa

Monday 8 June 2020. Yesterday, protesters in Bristol tore down a statue of British slave trader Edward Colston (1636-1721) and threw it into the harbour. 

Elikia M'bokolo, April 1998

https://mondediplo.com/1998/04/02africa

Monday 8 June 2020. Yesterday, protesters in Bristol tore down a statue of British slave trader Edward Colston (1636-1721) and threw it into the harbour. Colston was a member of the Royal African Company, which between 1672 and 1689 transported roughly 100,000 men, women and children from west Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas, where they were sold as slaves. As Elikia M'Bokolo wrote back in 1998, 'The figures, even where hotly disputed, make your head spin. Four million slaves exported via the Red Sea, another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean

• 

• Bolivia's coup

  Renaud Lambert
  
  Wednesday 10 June 2020. The New York Times has finally refuted the hypothesis that Evo Morales committed electoral fraud, which served to justify Bolivia's coup d'état last November. This was a theory that the NYT itself was happy to propagate only months ago. Few media outlets have continued to follow the developments in Bolivia, as Latin America only exists for the Western press when it can be used as a weapon of domestic policy. Earlier this year, a study from the Massachusett s Institute of Technology found that Bolivia's right-wing coup was based on faulty data from the Organisation of American States (OAS). As Renaud Lambert wrote in our December issue, when Morales was declared the winner of October's election the OAS, 'the US's strong arm in the region, entered the frame and soon became a key actor in a crisis it claimed to be just observing.'
• https://mondediplo.com/2019/12/02bolivia

Political Cynicism and the Polish Presidential Elections

THE POLES WENT TO THE POLLS THIS WEEKEND 

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/06/andrzej-duda-polish-president-loyal-to.html

HERE IS A BACKGROUNDER

Following surprising increases in voter turnout in 2019, sociologists Przemysław Sadura and Sławomir Sierakowski conducted research on the attitudes of the rural and semi-rural voters in Poland. Their findings reveal that voters remain rational actors with a good grasp of politics but that cynicism permeates their choices and perspectives. Ahead of the now postponed presidential elections, that were controversially set to go ahead this May despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Przemysław Sadura asks where next for the opposition.

Politics has always been a dirty business. Even the most idealistic and well-briefed ministers and MPs lied, cheated, took bribes, or stole. When caught, they committed suicide, retired, went into temporary hiding, or solemnly repented for their sins. They may have been seen as hypocrites, but their stances never put the meta-rules of the democratic system into question. The voters would simply put their faith in different politicians at the next elections. But what happens when the situation repeats itself again and again? What happens when even the elites give up on meeting the expectations of citizens?

According to critical philosophers such as Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Žižek, democratic ideology turns into political cynicism in such a scenario. The cynical subject is aware of the distance between the ideological mask and social reality, but, nonetheless, insists upon the mask. It is well expressed by Sloterdijk’s formula: “They know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it”. Cynical reason is no longer naïve or hypocritical but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it.

It can be neatly summed up by an anecdote on political honesty that I heard years ago from a former minister from the post-Solidarity camp:

“First, you have people that are personally honest and do not take anything for themselves or their party. The second level of honesty is when a person is completely honest but says that a “big haul” is necessary to pay for political work, and that everything will be done honestly afterwards. The third level consists of people who take part of the money for themselves. The fourth level… well, these are crooks that go into politics just to make money.”

My interlocutor declared himself as a proponent of the second option and argued that the worst people for any party are the total crooks and the radical idealists (sic!). Of course, he was so candid under the condition of anonymity. Today, cynicism among mainstream politicians is common. It is not at all shocking for large parts of the electorate. Trump, Johnson, Salvini, Kaczyński, Orbán, and Bolsanaro – each of them could credibly rebut the accusation of lying with the claim: “I never promised to be honest, just effective.” Their brazenness resembles that of the janitor in the often referenced 1980 cult film Miś (Teddy Bear). When challenged by a client whose coat has gone missing, the janitor stares right into his eyes and replies: “I don’t have your coat – whatcha gonna do about it?”
Cynical voters?

What is the source of such a stance and how does the electorate respond? Years of research on Polish voters have revealed a certain paradox. The less favourable opinion Poles have about politics, the more politically engaged they become. It is most easily observed in the rise of the turnout during elections. Turnout in Poland has climbed from one of the lowest in Europe to a more average level compared to elsewhere in the EU. Turnouts between 20-24 per cent in European elections in the first decade of the 2000s rose to 45 per cent in 2019. Turnouts in national parliamentary elections rose from between 40-50 per cent in earlier years to almost 62 per cent in 2019.


Politics is a reality show. Updates on new swindles do not influence their views but are part of the spectacle like boxers insulting each other before a fight.

Focus group participants tend to explode when asked about their associations with politics. But, at the same time, year after year their language regarding politics became less engaged. They see politics akin mud wrestling, something to be actively observed but not to get drawn into. They have their favourite candidates and, as if watching football, they identify with their team. However, when asked if they ever would join a political party, they treat it as a personal insult. Politics is a reality show. Updates on new swindles do not influence their views but are part of the spectacle like boxers insulting each other before a fight. Someone offered a bribe? Great, the show will be even better!

A long, long time ago, when the Earth was still inhabited by neoliberal dinosaurs, there was a theory called “trickle-down economics”. It argued that economic and fiscal policies that help the richest in society make poorer people better off too. The welfare of the rich would trickle down to the poor. The metaphor did not turn out well in economics, but it may still have some potential in describing political processes. Cynicism that was first limited to politicians has spilled over to voters. Some voters became disenchanted and began to treat politics in a similar way to the politicians, thinking, unapologetically, about ways to “play” and win.

Sławomir Sierakowski and I encountered such voters in focus groups organised in the run-up to the 2019 Polish parliamentary elections. Our report, Political Cynicism: The Case of Poland, was widely discussed by Polish media ahead of the election that saw the Law and Justice Party (PiS) retain its majority in the Sejm lower house but lose its majority in the Senate. Ahead of the presidential election now postponed from May to some point in the summer, it is time to reconsider those election results from the point of view of our findings.
The case of Poland

Our conversations with voters showed that growing part of the electorate has a cynical view of politicians. Their vices and pathological behaviour are plain to see but are deemed acceptable as long as the supported party is working for their interests. The PiS voters are willing to turn a blind eye towards corruption and political scandals. Before the 2019 election, the head of the audit office nominated by PiS was found to have links to organised crime. But PiS voters overlook such matters in exchange for social transfers and official disdain towards an urban elite seen as hostile to “the people”. Sympathisers of the opposition, led by the Civic Platform (PO), are also able to ignore cases of individual corruption and unethical behaviour in exchange for dynamic economic growth and private freedoms. Casting a vote is less a proof of trust towards politicians from the preferred side and more a reflection of hostility towards the other side’s party machinery and voters. Such polarisation drives the paradox mentioned above: the worse the opinion of Poles regarding politics, the higher the turnout come election day.

What is interesting is that PiS voters did not want a constitutional majority for the party. They see a strong opposition as a positive force that guarantees that PiS will not shed its social policy credentials. They are not passive victims of state media propaganda – almost half of them consider Polish public radio and television to be biased. They are, in fact, more likely to state that they watch news from different broadcasters than PO voters, who tend to be more faithful to the private station TVN.


Casting a vote is less a proof of trust towards politicians from the preferred side and more a reflection of hostility towards the other side’s party machinery and voters.

Our research also shows that the voting blocs of different parties are by no means monolithic. PiS, along with its dominant group of loyal, conservative voters, now has a smaller (but still significant) group of new voters drawn to the party thanks to social transfers. In July 2019, more than a third of all voters declared that they would definitely vote for Jarosław Kaczyński’s PiS. A further 20 per cent stated that they would consider doing so. The numbers of potential voters observed were even larger in the case of the opposition blocs: Civic Coalition and the Left bloc. The main problem for the opposition was that the large overlap between their electorates meant fighting for the same votes. Such a phenomenon was noticed by the opposition voters themselves. They portrayed PO (the dominant force in the Civic Coalition [KO]) as an unlikeable yet strong “anti-PiS” party. When asked to draw a person that could represent the Left, focus group participants drew liberal PO’s younger brother.
Who won the 2019 elections?

Confronting our findings with election results prompts different conclusions than those of other analysts. 43.6 per cent for PiS was not a surprising or low result. The party gained both in terms of vote share (in 2015, it was 37 per cent) and the total number of votes (up by 2 million). Our July surveys showed the ceiling for PiS support was 55 per cent, of which 35 per cent was solid and a further 20 per cent that could be swayed.[1] PiS therefore mobilised almost half of its potential voters – much more than its competitors. The Left (with 8 per cent solid support and a ceiling of 20 per cent) managed 12.5 per cent, so just 4.5 percentage points out of a possible 12. KO only managed to convince a tenth of its potential voters.

The reactions of party leaders betray quite a different view of the elections. KO that, together with the rest of the opposition, barely won the elections in the Senate and yet was cheering as if it won the entire election. Similar euphoria could be spotted in the Left camp. The centre-right Polish Coalition (PSL) and far-right Confederacy, which had even smaller shares of the votes, were even more ecstatic. The only politicians that looked displeased were on the side of the ruling party. Why was not PiS satisfied with the election result? Was it because they had fallen for their own propaganda and were expecting a constitutional majority? Or maybe they were thinking that luck would come to their side once more? In 2015, a few parties did not pass the electoral threshold and Kaczyński obtained an outright majority in the Sejm with a 37.6 per cent score. This time, PiS needed 43.6 per cent to win basically the same number of seats.
Who lives by the sword…

Is the depression of the winners and the enthusiasm of the losers justified? Both seem premature. PiS gained a lower score than expected and lost control of the upper house in part due to the calculations of its electorate. Its voters, asked about a two-thirds constitutional majority for Jarosław Kaczyński, impulsively replied that they do not want such a scenario to occur. They said that they would feel better in a country in which the opposition can keep the government on its toes. In our research conducted just after the election, PiS voters confirmed that a check on PiS power was no bad thing.

PiS voters that turned to the party the past four years – less ideological and more oriented towards social transfers – had a key role in determining the final result. They may have their doubts over whether or not PiS will keep its long list of promises – especially if it dominates parliament. Poles want PiS rule, but do not want Orbán’s Budapest in Warsaw and did not want to give the party full control over events in Poland.
The future of the opposition and the opposition of the future

The opposition has two problems. The first one is finding an answer to the question of how to beat the incumbent in the upcoming presidential election. The second one is about using the four years until the next parliamentary election to regain PiS voters.

In terms of the first issue, there are few reasons for optimism. In our post-election interviews on possible presidential candidates, the verdict was clear. PiS voters are convinced that the re-election of Andrzej Duda will be swift – and most of the opposition seems to concur. Duda is seen by the media and engaged participants of anti-government demonstrations as subordinate to the will of Jarosław Kaczyński. But he is more commonly perceived as an independent statesman. The presidency confers a “halo effect”, in which the features of the presidency as an institution are transferred onto the person holding the office.


The Left needs to propose a social programme that can attract voters beyond urban elites. The liberal PO needs generational change at its helm to regain an energetic and efficient face.

For the opposition to reclaim parts of the PiS electorate, it should start by trying. Up until now PO and the Left have struggled over liberal voters. Only two parties pose a threat to PiS: PSL, very active in rural areas, and the far-right Confederacy. The Left is good at winning liberal voters in large cities but has no sway over the working classes in the countryside and smaller towns. Almost half of its electorate consists of people with a university degree, while the share of people with vocational education is three times larger in PiS than in the Left (25 compared to 8 per cent). This is a worse result even than the liberal PO. The Left is currently the most elitist formation in the Polish parliament. On a brighter note, it is also the freshest. If the Civic Platform continues to be largely inactive, the Left will be able to rise in the opinion polls, and – further down the road – also in parliamentary representation. But, without changes, the democratic bloc will not grow as a whole.

When, and provided, the presidential elections take place, it is likely that the opposition will lose and Poland will have three years without elections. If the opposition does not want to squander this time, three requirements need to be fulfilled. The Left needs to propose a social programme that can attract voters beyond urban elites. The liberal PO needs generational change at its helm to regain an energetic and efficient face. Both of these forces should play the cards PiS finds difficult to respond to. Decarbonisation may be one such topic. Poland under PiS rule seems to be at loggerheads with EU policy, stronger pressure from the European Union on this matter may also help the opposition.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Based on our survey, we estimated the current and potential size of the electorates of the three largest political camps in Poland. The core electorate of a given party consists of those who declare their intention to vote for that party in the upcoming elections. The potential electorate consists of those people who have not declared an intention to vote for the given party but have supported it in the past, or designate it as their second choice, while also expressing full or partial confidence in that party.

https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/political-cynicism-and-the-polish-presidential-elections/

The Greens in a New Ireland

THE ELECTION IN IRELAND WAS THIS WEEKEND AND IT SAW THE GREEN PARTY ALIGN WITH TWO RIGHT WING PARTIES AGAINST THE POSSIBILITY OF A SINN FEIN GOVERNMENT OF THE LEFT 

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-enemy-of-my-enemy.html

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/02/sinn-fein-irish-election-surge-leaves.html


The 2019 European elections saw Green parties achieve their best ever result. Their new weight in a fractured European Parliament is an opportunity for progress on climate, democracy and the rule of law, and social justice. Green parties often perform better at European elections but this time the success is sustained elsewhere. Local elections in the UK, national elections in Portugal, government coalitions in Finland, Sweden, and Luxembourg – the Greens are advancing at all levels. The major caveat is that the “green wave” is absent from much of southern and eastern Europe. Part of our latest edition looks at where political ecology made electoral gains, bringing together analyses of five Green parties to see where they are and to assess their prospects for the years to come. In Ireland, major advances at the European elections in 2019 were carried through to a strong general election result in early 2020. With government negotiations still up in the air, Dan Boyle explains how the Irish Greens bounced back.

After the elections in February 2020, three parties are near identical in their parliamentary numbers. Comhaontas Glas (the Green Party) is now the fourth largest party. The biggest winners were left-wing Sinn Féin. The most likely scenario is a government with a Fianna Fáil (most seats) — Sinn Féin (most votes) nexus. Though it could depend on independents, a third party would give the coalition greater stability and the Greens will be first approached. At the time of writing, the outcome is uncertain.

Today seems a long way from March 2011 when, as a member of the Seanad (the upper house), I witnessed a new government elected in the Dáil (the lower house). Some weeks earlier the Greens had left government, precipitating a general election in which the party lost all of its seats. The Greens’ first experience of government coincided with the global downturn of 2008. There would be no Green participation in the following parliament. We had been told that government participation had thrown back environmental politics in Ireland by a generation.


Eamon Ryan made himself available to lead the party back from the wilderness. The party returned to its volunteer roots to reorganise. The commitment of these volunteers, especially a newer, younger cohort, proved crucial to the party’s revitalisation.

The first electoral tests were local and European elections in 2014. The party won an additional 10 seats in local councils, steady if not spectacular. Green parliamentary representation was restored in the general election of 2016, giving the party access to state funding again. With this support, the party began to professionalise in many areas, including the better management of membership databases, improving social media messaging, and engaging in greater outreach, especially outside of Dublin.

Ireland, whose politics had never been that ideological, was becoming more liberal. Public votes on same-sex marriage in 2015 and abortion rights in 2018 saw a new Ireland emerge. This liberalism helped the electorate see the Green Party in a positive light. In the local and European elections of 2019, the party quadrupled local government representation and elected two MEPs.

What the recent successes will mean for the Green political agenda remains to be seen. The main issues on which the election was fought, housing and health, can easily be accommodated between the parties. It is on environmental policy where agreement will be difficult. While Sinn Féin talks approvingly about sustainability, it is committed to infrastructure spending biased towards roads and against public transport and even talks of reducing Ireland’s small carbon tax. A 7 per cent yearly reduction in emissions will be Comhaontas Glas’s priority for any programme for government.

https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/the-greens-in-a-new-ireland/

This article is part of our latest edition, “A World Alive: Green Politics in Europe and Beyond”.

From the Street Up: Founding a New Politics in Spain

https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/from-the-street-up-founding-a-new-politics-in-spain/

Spain is a country with an elevated awareness of environmental issues and its youth has mobilised en masse to save the planet. However, Green political parties enjoy little electoral support. Esteban Hernández discussed the contradictions in Spain with Green politician and activist Florent Marcellesi and University of Zaragoza sociologist Cristina Monge. With a political space for ecology opening up for contestation, whether or not a green hegemony can be built will depend on political ecology’s ability to push for real transformation and to offer a convincing narrative that transcends class lines.

Esteban Hernández: According to studies by the Centre for Sociological Research of Spanish people’s main concerns, the environment is not a chief worry. It has risen up the list, moving from 0.7 to 3.2 per cent in a year,1 but it’s still far from being a real priority. Why is that?

Florent Marcellesi: We’re at the start of a new historical cycle. We mustn’t only look at the evolution of survey figures from one month to the next but also the long term, starting with Spain’s transition to democracy in the 1970s, which left ecology in a secondary position compared to France or Germany since the dictatorial regime did not permit Green (or any other independent) parties. The difficulties continued with the rise of the anti-austerity 15-M and Indignados street movements in 2011 in the wake of the economic crisis, which also don’t see the environment as a priority.

But now we are living through a period of profound evolution, the birth of a green hegemony. The 15-M Movement began in 2011 but had been a long time coming, and the same is true of ecology, which, through new movements like Juventud por el clima (Youth for climate), is laying the cultural foundations for a green hegemony. Europe also has great influence and the groundswell taking place in the EU has reached Spain. What is yet to happen is for this cultural hegemony to transform into political hegemony.

Cristina Monge: 15-M doesn’t influence the “what” so much as the “how”. It massively and categorically marks the beginning of a new model of mobilisation that first rejects and then transcends classical forms of organisation such as trade unions or political parties. 15-M goes beyond traditional structures and generates a wave with a discourse that is perhaps disorganised but still very powerful. Youth for climate takes on these characteristics, as do the 8M (International Women’s Day) mass mobilisations. It’s spontaneous, there’s no political positioning, but it is possible for the movement to evolve into a meta-narrative.

Florent Marcellesi: This is why I say that we are in a moment of hegemonic construction, that there’s a groundswell that perhaps doesn’t have a clear theoretical corpus, but it will come. This moment, as a real inflection point, is completely unpredictable. Even if ecology in Spain has been relegated to the macro level, and especially since the Catalan bid for independence since 2012 has taken on so much weight in the Spanish community, it has been very present in recent years in municipalism. Cities like Barcelona or Madrid have been pioneers on ecological issues at the European level. The question with this “climate 15-M” is how to unite the micro and the macro levels. That is the challenge for the coming years.


The problem that we face isn’t denialism, but climate hypocrisy – the use of climate change so that nothing changes.

The green vote in Spain is split between the centre-left PSOE, left-wing populist Podemos, green-left Más País, and animal rights party PACMA. To what extent do left-wing and centre-left parties complicate the existence of a Green party in Spain?

Cristina Monge: I’m not sure that there will ever be a strong Green party in Spain, similar to the ones in Germany or France, under current conditions, but there is definitely a political space. The problem is already recognised, including amongst conservatives, and the battle is going to be around what to do about it. Everyone knows that there will be a green transition but there are different discourses about how to tackle it, some more neoliberal, others more social democratic or communist. It’s here that there will be an ideological fight, and a political space that is distinctly green will be important for pushing the debate in one direction or another.

Florent Marcellesi: We Greens are an instrument, so the ideological absorption of our ideas by all parties is welcome if that’s how we achieve change. But there is still a long way to go – we’ve seen that in COP25. The problem that we face isn’t denialism, but climate hypocrisy – the use of climate change so that nothing changes. We need clear voices that remind us that change must be profound, not cosmetic. Second, we must accept that an economic system based on growth cannot work, and need to think about justice from the perspective of post-growth, beyond the dominant economic models.

In Spain, the government has created a vice presidency of ecological transition, but at the same time it tells us that we should keep on growing. That’s why we need a Green party, even if it’s not like those in other European countries given the history and situation in Spain. A sufficiently strong Green party would push others to follow through and not fall into climate hypocrisy, as well as raising structural questions that get to the root of the problem.

The conversation on the green transition always seems to come back to who will foot the bill. In Spain, even solutions like the Green New Deal haven’t managed to frame environmentalism as a solution.

Cristina Monge : We’re very much in an initial stage. Proposals like the Green New Deal are only really understood by those who dedicate themselves to this area. To gain wider acceptance, it’s important to ground these ideas with examples. We see this for instance in the mining communities of Teruel, León, and Asturias that have been dependent on coal and need to generate a different economic model. It’s in these places that we are going to see what the Green New Deal really is and what a just transition means. The move from coal to renewables will need investment, there will be workers who need retraining. When this happens and it becomes clear that at the end of the road jobs are created, the fear will disappear. The green pact isn’t about renewables, which are already here, but something different.


Political ecology in Spain has to bring together two different electorates if it wants to be hegemonic.

Florent Marcellesi : In the collective imaginary, ecology is perceived as the enemy of employment. We’ve got to turn this around so that ecology is seen as the friend of employment and the future. It’s a response to unemployment and to the pension problem, and it will bring security and stability. It has to be seen as something appealing.

Cristina Monge : Let me add that when we say ecology should be appealing, that it ought to be sexy and cool, we have to be very careful because it could become something associated with quality, health, bicycles, and clothes made from recycled plastics aimed at the medium-to-high end of the market. That can be attractive, but it doesn’t have transformational capability and generates social inequality.

Florent Marcellesi: I agree. Political ecology in Spain has to bring together two different electorates if it wants to be hegemonic: the Greens’ classic voter base, the educated urban classes with a medium-to-high income level (who have clearly been reached with the message of political ecology), and the popular classes who have different needs. With the latter, it should be inclusive and insist that the fight will be fair or it won’t happen. If the Greens in Germany can create a hegemony and overcome the Social Democrats, it will be because they have become a party that is popular beyond the middle classes.

This nuance is important, not because environmentalism can be considered fashionable among urban middle-to-upper classes, but because the Spanish right is underlining this aspect as a way to gain followers.

Cristina Monge : This is a difficult time for green politics. In the post-election surveys following the May 2019 elections in Madrid, we saw that the Madrid Central low-emission zone had been a decisive factor in former mayor Manuela Carmena losing votes in neighbourhoods on the outskirts where she had enjoyed strong support before.2 Madrid Central became a discourse similar to that of the gilets jaunes; while the rich could drive around the centre with their electric cars, those on the outskirts lacked adequate public transport and were forced to use older cars. These debates underline how, if the ecological transition is not done in an equitable way, its appeal will be limited to the middle and upper classes of Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Seville. Ultimately, this is what has happened to Más País, which has suffered as a result of this contradiction.3

Florent Marcellesi: The denialism of the far-right Vox party isn’t the main problem. Other right-wing movements, like in France, have incorporated environmentalism into their platform. But in Spain, as we see in Madrid, the Right has lost the battle because it will have to apply Madrid Central anyway.4 The Right has lost the battle for public opinion when it comes to environmentalism.

Cristina Monge With the Right, yes, but with the far-right I disagree with you there. So long as the transition isn’t just, the far right will have a hunting ground. Whenever taxes on petrol and diesel have been brought up, they have immediately responded asking why those with the least should have to pay. With this obrerismo (workerism) they can gain ground as it enables them to reach a sector of the population by opposing policies that address the climate emergency.

Territorial dynamics are important. In Europe, Green parties are more successful in the north than in the south, and something similar has happened in Spain. What’s more, in Spain there is also a territorial identity element because nationalisms, with the Catalan process, have kept environmentalism low on the political agenda.

Cristina Monge: The pattern within Spain is similar to that in Europe overall. The Basque Country in the north is leading the way with a transition plan that has received millions in investment with both public and private funds. This is related to their economic development but also to their political, social, and business culture. In the south, there is a sense of being less dependent on the environment than in the north. In regions like the Basque Country, the post-industrial transition is still fresh in people’s minds. Since it went well, they see the green transition as an opportunity and not a threat. In Castile and Andalusia, things played out differently, which is why in these regions it’s so important to emphasise the idea of a just transition.


Spain has been a pio­neer in its capacity for mobilisation and institutional presence on issues like feminism, in which Spain and Sweden are leaders.

Florent Marcellesi: The Catalan process has had a negative impact on both the social and ecological agenda. Political ecology should be brave and put the ideas of interdependence and co-dependence at the fore. But beyond this issue, there are two factors that will be important in developing a strong Green party. The government has confirmed that there will be an ecological transition and has a vice presidency for this area as well as a vice presidency for the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. If citizens’ demands are met in this regard, it will be difficult for a strong party to develop. If, on the other hand, the people are disappointed, the space will open up again. This already happened to PSOE when it failed to deliver on its promises, leading to EQUO’s establishment in 2011. The second factor is what is happening on a social level. If youth movements continue to develop and political identity is created beyond what the government does, then we will cement this cultural hegemony.

What can Europe learn from the Spanish experience? Is there something that could prove useful? Perhaps the 15-M?

Cristina Monge: While they’re not the same, 15-M was part of the same cycle as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and Nuit debout in France. They gave rise to this new wave of social mobilisation that brought with it Greta Thunberg and created a movement that is in its prime today. This isn’t something limited to Spain, and it has been very influential.

Spain provides various positive examples that demonstrate the importance of a just transition. Not just in the Basque Country, but in other regions too. What’s more, we have to cite experiences like those in Madrid with the subsidised retrofitting of rental housing for energy efficiency.

Florent Marcellesi: Spain has been a pio­neer in its capacity for mobilisation and institutional presence on issues like feminism, in which Spain and Sweden are leaders. The only country in the world that held a mass feminist strike for International Women’s Day 2019 was Spain. If we link this with ecology – and this can be done because the ecofeminist current is gaining traction – then it will have an impact in Europe, which in this respect is looking to Spain. The second important issue is municipalism, given how regions and cities are very relevant in the fight against climate change. Many cities have as much, if not more, weight than states and they will have an extremely important role to play in the future.

NOTES

1. The figure of 3.2 per cent dates from December 2019. See full results.

2. The 2019 Madrid local and city council elections saw Manuela Carmena of the left-wing Más Madrid replaced as mayor by centre-right Partido Popular’s José Luis Martínez-Almeida with the backing of a centre-right coalition. Carmena’s flagship Madrid Central project, which the Right actively campaigned against, sought to reduce air pollution by making the centre off-limits to non-residential cars.

3. The green-left Más País platform was formed by Íñigo Errejón around Más Madrid to contest the November 2019 general election. In some provinces, the party fielded candidates in coalition with the Green party EQUO. It won three seats, two of which with Más País–EQUO. The election saw the governing PSOE party win the most seats while the far-right Vox more than doubled in size to become the country’s third most powerful party.

4. Courts have blocked the right-wing bloc’s efforts to roll back the Madrid Central low-emissions area on grounds of the negative effects even a temporary suspension would have on health and the environment.


This interview is part of our latest edition, “A World Alive: Green Politics in Europe and Beyond”.

We Cannot Entrust Our Dreams to the Ballot Box

Colombian philosopher Omar Felipe Giraldo, a researcher in Mexico, paints a portrait of Latin American political ecology. The decision to safeguard the rights of nature in Ecuador and Bolivia in the early 2000s is often cited as an example elsewhere, but what were the effects? In this interview on eco-social struggle in Latin America, Giraldo highlights the importance of social movements and warns against the illusion of change from above.

Le Comptoir: In what context did Latin American political ecology emerge?

Omar Felipe Giraldo: The main feature of Latin American political ecology is its deep links to social movements: “en defensa de la vida y del territorio”, as we say in Spanish – “in defence of life and land”. With a few exceptions, the development of an abstract theory of political ecology did not precede these movements. Instead, intellectuals and academics have taken them as inspiration to rethink their political and philosophical categories.

To understand the reasons that led certain groups to mobilise, we need to be aware of the offensive of extractivism and the processes of accumulation by dispossession seen across Latin America since the beginning of the millennium. These followed the wave of neoliberal privatisation that began as early as the 1980s.

What exactly is extractivism? What has this extractivist offensive involved in practice?

Extractivism, as its name suggests, refers to the extraction of large quantities of resources and raw materials in order to fuel the accumulation of capital. Specifically, from the 2000s onwards, there has been an increase in investment in mining projects, largely due to the extremely high prices of resources such as gold, coal, platinum, phosphorus, copper, manganese, nickel, and coltan, not to mention the staggering oil prices in the early years of the 21st century. Numerous hydroelectric dams were also built.

Land grabbing is another important phenomenon in the region. To give just one example, the so-called “United Republic of Soybeans”, which straddles Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia, covers an area that increased from 17 million to 46 million hectares between 1990 and 2010. Within this area, 20 million hectares of forest were felled for agriculture between 2000 and 2010. These examples give an idea of the serious tensions convulsing the regions inhabited by indigenous peoples and small farmers. They also show why these groups have played such a fundamental role in Latin America’s socio-ecological struggles.

Mexican sociologist Armando Bartra argues that after the financial crisis of 2008, capital was forced to “come back down to earth” – to rediscover the materiality that is at the source of economic cycles – so as to avoid a new crisis. Has the extractivist offensive you just mentioned intensified in the past decade?

After the financial bubble burst in 2007-2008, speculative capital moved from “fictitious” money to the unbridled exploitation of oil, unconventional hydrocarbons, minerals, and monoculture agriculture and forestry in the countries of the Global South. Here in Chiapas, Mexico, where I live and teach, the area of the state allocated to mineral exploration increased from 3 per cent to 30 per cent between 2008 and 2013. In short, we might say that there was a share of capital that turned away from financial speculation and rediscovered the materiality on which economic cycles depend. It “came back down to earth”, to use the phrase coined by Armando Bartra that you mentioned, and it did so in many “megadiverse” regions where nature is particularly rich and abundant.

Latin America shows that neoliberalism does not mean the withdrawal or absence of the state, but rather a shift in its role from redistribution to repression.

In France, we still live largely with the myth of a protective, regulatory state. What role does the state play in the ecocide wrought by capital in Latin America? Are they trying to control or regulate it?

Almost without exception, the governments of Latin American countries, whether of Right or Left, have promoted these investments. They have allocated land, offered tax incentives, changed institutions and legal frameworks, built infrastructure, preserved low wages and, when necessary, used force – regular police and military, and irregular paramilitary groups (mainly in Mexico, Central America, and Colombia) – to bloodily put down resistance.

They have also pursued a “dark” strategy of co-opting the leaders of social movements and obtaining clientelist loyalties, particularly through the construction of infrastructure in health and education. Latin America shows that neoliberalism does not mean the withdrawal or absence of the state, but rather a shift in its role from redistribution to repression. The state plays an important role in the neoliberal phase of capitalism in that the conditions for capital accumulation depend on an alliance between governments and capital.

How have these policies affected the lives of people and the regions they live in?

The main effect has been land appropriation and forced displacement, typically through the purchase or grabbing of land for the construction of hydroelectric dams. The displaced are forced to migrate to cities, including ones abroad, in search of work. But there are also forms of land appropriation in situ, without physical displacement, in particular when people lose control of their means of livelihood to large corporations. Although the inhabitants continue to live in the same places, they are now often trapped by these mega-projects, condemned to survive amid the spoliation.

These dispossession phenomena sometimes adopt particularly perverse forms, especially when they take place within the framework of “sustainable development” projects such as wind farms, nature-based climate projects or eco-tourism sites. But, one way or another, there is a rupture in the material and symbolic conditions of people’s lives.

In France, there is a tenacious myth that ecology is a luxury for the middle classes, for the rich. On the contrary, the Latin American experience seems to prove the economist Joan Martinez Alier right, with his concept of the “environmentalism of the poor”. Can you explain this idea and tell us what forms resistance takes in Latin America?

The brutality of neoliberal capitalism within the context of the recent extractivist offensive has certainly given strength to the struggles of popular movements to defend life in the face of these death-dealing projects. For these people, to fight for land is not only to fight for places of aesthetic, symbolic or scientific value; it is to fight for their lives and their livelihoods.

In the face of privatisation and monopolisation, resistance groups have regularly proposed the rehabilitation of community spaces and collective forms of regulating social life.

Accumulation through dispossession is an invasion not only of physical space but also of people’s ways of being and living. It is therefore not necessarily an “environmentalist” struggle, as if it were in the essence of these peoples to defend and protect nature, but rather often the only choice for survival. It is important to take into account that, as the hegemony of the neoliberal model gains strength, the crisis in the modern project of domination of nature and peoples becomes more visible. In this context, we are witnessing a reinvention of identities and a re-appropriation of the nature and culture of each people, as the Mexican environmentalist thinker Enrique Leff rightly points out. As for concrete strategies, the repertoire for collective action has numerous possibilities: direct action (such as blockades and confrontations), legal action, the creation of popular assemblies or community police forces, and so on.

Beyond mere resistance, what are the concrete alternatives? You often say that we need to relearn how to live in this world that we have “disinhabited”. What are these other forms of “living” and collective organisation that peoples in the Americas intend to defend and promote?

In the face of privatisation and monopolisation, resistance groups have regularly proposed the rehabilitation of community spaces and collective forms of regulating social life. This takes various forms: solidarity economies via peasant or indigenous organisations, based on principles of reciprocity and redistribution; community currencies and barter; the revitalisation of community assemblies and the creation of village police forces and sometimes militias; and the re-appropriation of previously abandoned vernacular languages, agricultural practices that had fallen into disuse, or local knowledge. There has also been an increase in the exchange of local seeds to escape the monopolies exercised on the seed market by large agribusiness firms. In short, threatened groups are seeking to defend the “commons”, or reinvent it.

All this has led to a renaissance in the thinking and practice of autonomy. Many communities have decided to organise themselves as much as possible on the margins of the state and its structures, focusing instead on directly transforming the social fabric outside established institutions.

The resistance of Latin American peoples has also been manifested in more conceptual ways, notably through the idea of “buen vivir” or “good living”. This found canonical expression in the Cochabamba Declaration and its recognition of the rights of Mother Earth, the Pachamama. Can you outline this idea and its origins?

Buen vivir is a patchwork heuristic concept, the ambition of which is to bring all these struggles together under the same banner. The idea came from various principles held by the indigenous peoples of Latin America, be they Andean, Mesoamerican or Amazonian. If I had to summarise it, I would say that buen vivir is the art of living a full life. For these peoples, this involves the understanding that it is only possible to live well if others live well too. The understanding that the community is not only composed of human beings – that it also includes animals, forests, rivers, mountains, and so on. Within this philosophy, there is no one-size-fits-all model that can be applied in all circumstances. It is, however, essential to have a spirituality that recognises the relationships that unite all the entities of the world. It is also necessary to have a large measure of creativity, allowing humans to find ways of living without harming ecosystems.

I would say that buen vivir is the art of living a full life. This involves the understanding that it is only possible to live well if others live well too.

Is this really a “traditional” idea or does it refer more to a phenomenon of invented tradition and strategic essentialism (peoples claiming that it is in their tradition to respect nature in order to assert their rights at the political level)?

Undeniably, this phenomenon exists – even if it is without common measure to any political project in the classical sense. We should not idealise the situation: these peoples, like all peoples, live with their virtues and their vices. In our age, the after-effects of capitalist “development” can be seen wherever it has taken place. There are no virgin cultures endowed with a “pure” identity, and indeed these population groups are particularly vulnerable and often exhibit the worst sides of modernity. Nevertheless, a difference exists. Activists have drawn inspiration from the wisdom of these peoples, but they have often done so excessively, thus creating the image of a “good green savage”. This must be avoided at all costs. Fictitious narratives have also been created to legitimise utopias that are alien to these peoples and their practices in order to identify an “outside” of modernity that no longer exists, for better or for worse. The practices and concepts of indigenous and rural populations depositaries can offer alternatives to the ecocidal trajectory of capitalist modernity, but they cannot be expected to hand us a neat package containing all the solutions we need.

Several governments, notably in Ecuador and Bolivia, have claimed this idea of buen vivir, to the point of constitutionalising the rights of Mother Earth. What is the real environmental balance sheet of these governments?

Various social movements, often of peasant and indigenous origin, supported the “progressive” governments of Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. Initially, this helped to bring about changes in these countries’ constitutions. Valuable elements were introduced, for example collective rights (which amplify the rights of the classic citizen-subject), including the right to autonomy and self-determination of peoples, recognition of the multicultural character of the nation, and so on. The new constitutions also made it possible to break with certain anthropocentric conceptions of law. For example, the human right to a healthy environment has been complemented by new rights granted to nature itself, now recognised as a subject in law.

Nevertheless, this constitutional and political reconfiguration quickly showed its limits – and its dark side. In practice, these major principles have almost always remained a dead letter, and they have sometimes even been denied by the governments that initially defended them. Governments have often implemented “neo-extractivist” practices, consisting of nationalising and profiting from oil and mining rents, in order to implement redistributive policies and finance social programmes, without ever calling into question the previous development model and its ecocidal trajectory. At times, the remedy has been worse than the disease, since the financing of such programmes is often based on an intensification of natural resource exploitation. The social movements subsequently distanced themselves from these governments, gradually realising that the state is part of the organisation of international capitalism, from which it is structurally incapable of escaping.

The hope raised by these governments was real, but the hangover that followed was grim. If there is one conclusion to be drawn from the political experiments carried out in Latin America over recent decades, it is that it is impossible to escape from capitalism “from above”, relying on the levers of state power. We cannot wait for alternatives to emerge from state institutions, much less entrust our dreams to the ballot box.

This interview was first published in Le Comptoir.

MAY 2020

https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/we-cannot-entrust-our-dreams-to-the-ballot-box/