Jeremy Cronin: CROSSFIRE
Jonathan Steinberg’s ”The ‘mysterious’ decline of the left” (May 8 to 14) is a useful antidote to some of the recent excesses of John Pilger.
What Steinberg dwells upon, what Pilger neglected, is that the South African transition is occurring in a world very different from the first two-and-half decades after World War II. A sustainable left project in South Africa, or anywhere else, needs to understand that.
An excessively pessimistic Steinberg, however, does not help us to grasp the dynamics of the new global terrain. He can only psychologise: ”It is no longer fashionable to be nice.” And:”Could it be that the left has died because half-a-century of peace and stability in the West has dampened empathy?”
But what is it to be ”left”? For me, essentially, it is a struggle to move from societies based on private wealth and profit to societies based on social need. Left is, of course, a spatial metaphor. One is left, or not, relative to some benchmark. For Steinberg there is a single benchmark of leftness: Western social democracy. It is exemplified by Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, in the midst of the Great Depression, and William Beveridge’s post-war welfarism. This is what defines ”left”, and the conditions for its existence seem to be some kind of national state of ruin.
The ”sad truth”, writes Steinberg, is that things have been too good in the West for the past 20 years. ”It will take another catastrophe” to provoke a consensus on being nice in the West. And it is only when they get around to being nice in the West that the rest of us will have any prospect of moving leftwards.
This is all gravely Eurocentric. I do not underrate the difficulties of reviving left projects. It is, however, important to get a slightly more accurate fix on the past 50 years.
The defeat of fascism in 1945 established a balance of forces that was relatively more favourable to working-class and poor people worldwide. This more favourable balance created space for rapid advances to be made by three (not one) left projects: the social- democratic welfare state; the Soviet-style socialist systems; and progressive post- independence societies in the South.
The advances made by these projects also created space for one other (although not left) Third World developmental project – the Asian Tiger; state-led industrialisation. In the midst of a Cold War, societies like South Korea and Taiwan were cut some slack.
The nearly three decades between 1945 and 1973 were golden years for the advanced capitalist countries. But major social and developmental gains were also made in the East and South. In the West these gains were due less to some epochal sentiment of empathy, and more related to the relative vulnerability of post-war West European capitalist classes. They needed working class (and state) co-operation for a return to profitability.
In these circumstances, electorally powerful labour movements were able to impose social accords (explicit or implicit) and make significant advances in terms of public housing, transport, education, health-care and levels of employment.
For nearly 30 years the virtuous cycle of redistributive welfarism – expanding taxation, leading to more public social investment, leading to greater productivity, leading to a larger taxable gross domestic product — seemed to be working like a perpetual-motion machine. But capitalism in the early 1970s hit a major long-cycle downturn, and there was suddenly less growth to tax.
This was to be the cue for a renewed right-wing offensive. Thatcherism sought to reverse the cycle – less tax would stimulate private sector growth, which would create individual wealth, and more private wealth would, supposedly, create millions of relatively affluent middle-class clients for privatised housing, health-care, and the rest.
The Thatcherist reversed cycle did stimulate growth for a while. But its failure to resource human development has resulted in large-scale de-industrialisation in those societies applying it most rigorously. The shredding of the welfare net has also left millions in dire poverty.
A core reason for the crisis of welfarism in the early 1970s was the decreased dependency of European capitalists on their domestic markets. They began to walk out of their national equivalents of South Africa’s National Economic, Development and Labour Council. Who needed to worry about public transport in London, when a now more globally footloose capital could find cheap labour in Indonesia?
While welfare gains have to be (and are being)defended, there is no simple return to the old social democracy. Instead of wistfully awaiting an empathy-producing catastrophe in the West – remember that the Great Depression produced Adolf Hitler along with the New Deal – we should actively define a left project for the coming millennium.
That project is emerging. It involves, in the first place, new forms of internationalism. If in 1965 you told West German workers they had nothing to lose but their chains, most would have laughed. If you told South African black workers that a patient, largely electoral struggle of reforms was the way forward, they would have been nonplussed.
Nowadays, in the conditions of transnational production, Volkswagen workers in Wolfsburg, Sao Paulo and Uitenhage are developing networks of solidarity. Here, the renewing left project is surpassing the social-democratic/communist divide that tended for a century to demarcate the workers of the First from the workers of the Third World.
If a simple return to social democracy is unlikely in the West (it was hardly on the agenda in the East and South), then clearly a return to socialist isolationism is equally unlikely, and undesirable. Fortress socialism often ended up as a prison for the very peoples it hoped to liberate. As Cubans understand well, the defence of their substantial socialist gains has to be made on the terrain of a capitalist world. There is no other.
This relates to another dimension of a renewing left project. There is a struggle by many countries, international bodies and social movements to redefine the international trade and investment regime. It is not an easy struggle, but nor is it a hopeless or lonely one. You will see the South African government engaging in this struggle this weekend at the World Trade Organisation, just as we engaged in it during United States President Bill Clinton’s (”trade-not-aid”) Africa trip.
On the domestic front, a renewing left agenda has to move away from a narrow focus on redistributive welfarism, towards emphasising the need for a state that is economically active in productive activity, notably in catalysing industrial growth around infrastructural development. The left agenda needs also to place a premium on active popular participation in transformation – something that the clients of welfarism, still less the press-ganged workers of the Soviet Union, seldom enjoyed.
The left did not disappear, it is being transformed.