- The deepening economic crises in Europe and the United
States are provoking contrasting socio-political responses from the working
and middle classes. In Europe, especially among the Mediterranean countries
(Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy) unemployed youth, workers and lower
middle class public employees have organized a series of general strikes,
occupations of public plazas and other forms of direct action.
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- At the same time, the middle class, private-sector
employees and small business people have turned to the "hard right"
and elected, or are on the verge of electing, reactionary prime ministers
in Portugal, Spain, Greece and perhaps even in Italy. In other words,
the deepening crises has polarized Southern Europe: strengthening the
institutional power of the hard right while increasing the strength of
the extra-parliamentary left in mobilizing 'street power'.
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- In contrast, in Northern and Central Europe
the hard right and neo-fascist movements have made significant inroads
among workers and the lower middle class at the expense of the traditional
center-left and center-right parties [1]. The relative stability, affluence
and stable employment of the Nordic working class has been accompanied
by increasing support for racist, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic parties.2]
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- In the case of the United States, with a
few notable exceptions, the working class has remained a passive spectator
in the face of the right turn of the Democratic Party and the hard right's
capture of the Republican Party. There are no left wing street politics
in the US, unlike Southern Europe, and only a passive rejection and repudiation
of the hard right policies of Congress and the White House.
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- Rather than solidarity, the economic crisis
highlights working class fragmentation, disunity and internal polarization.
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- The Right/Left Polarizations
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- One of the key reasons for the growth of
right wing appeals to Northern European workers is the demise of working
class-based ideology, parties and leaders. The Labor and Social Democratic
Parties have initiated and administered neoliberal programs while promoting
multi-national corporation-led export strategies. They have embraced regressive
tax 'breaks' for big business; they have participated in imperialist wars
of aggression (Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya); they have embraced the so-called
"war on terror" mostly against Moslem countries while tolerating
the growth of the neo-fascist, far-right Islamophobes who practice "direct
action" to expel immigrants in Europe.
-
-
- The European governing parties of the center-left
(social democratic and labor) and the center-right(Sarkozy, Cameron and
Merkle) have been outspoken in their assault on "multiculturalism"
code-word for Moslim immigrant rights. Their tolerance and exploitation
of Islamophobia serves as a cheap vote getter among their xenophobic electorate
and as a justification for their involvement in US-Israeli wars of aggression
in the Middle East and South Asia. As a result the "mainstream"
regimes have weakened working class solidarity with immigrant workers and
undermined any concerted effort by the state and civil society to actively
counteract the neo-fascist racists who ply a more virulent version of Islamophobia
embracing the Zionist ideologues' vision of ethnic cleansing.
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- The trade unions have lost membership due
especially to the growth of 'contingent or temporary workers' who are especially
susceptible to far-right appeals. Equally important, trade unions no longer
engage in political education aimed at strengthening class solidarity among
all workers. While in Northern Europe wages may increase, the trade unions'
collaboration with the corporate elite has left workers vulnerable to anti-immigrant
and Islamophobic propaganda.
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- In this context, a perverse "class struggle"
pits the unorganized workers against those "below", the immigrants.
The neo-fascists gain by promoting and exploiting cultural and chauvinist
beliefs which trade unions and social democratic parties no longer actively
combat through worker education and class struggle. In other words, the
neo-liberal practice and ideology of the "center-left" parties
and unions undermine class political identities and open the door for right
wing penetration and influence. This is especially evident when center-left
and trade union leaders no longer bother to consult or debate policies
with their members: They impose policies from above, providing the 'far
right' with a formidable weapon to attack the 'elitist nature' of the center-left
political system.
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- In contrast, in Southern Europe the profound
economic crisis, due in large part to the harsh conditions imposed by
Northern and Western European bankers and their local center-left and right-wing
politicians, has strengthened and sharpened class consciousness and politics.
Right-wing appeals to anti-immigrant and anti-Moslem politics has little
resonance among Southern European workers in the face of skyrocketing unemployment
and brutal wage and pension cuts.
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- Northern European workers have allied with
the right, and their own politicians and bankers, in demanding the imposition
of greater austerity measures against Southern European countries, buying
into the racist ideology that Mediterranean workers are lazy, irresponsible
and on permanent vacation. In fact, Greek, Portuguese and Spanish workers
work a more days per year, enjoy less vacation time and much less secure
pensions. The same racist sentiments pitting Northern workers against
immigrants also promote chauvinist stereotypes against militant Southern
European workers and fuel right-wing sympathies.
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-
Creditor Northern European bankers and political leaders squeeze their
own working and middle class taxpayers in order to bail-out their counterparts
among the Southern European debtor elites, who, in turn, agree to squeeze
their workers and public employees to meet the debt payment demands of
the North. The Northern workers in the imperial countries have been convinced
that their living standards are threatened by the irresponsible and indebted
South, and not by the speculative activity and irresponsible lending of
their own bankers. In the South, the workers have to shoulder the double
exploitation of the Northern European creditors as well as their own local
elites; hence they have greater class awareness of the injustice of the
imperial and local capitalist system.
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- To the degree that Northern workers make
common cause with their own creditor ruling class and shift their resentments
toward workers abroad and immigrants below, they become vulnerable to right
wing appeals. They openly express resentment against striking Greek, Spanish
or Portuguese workers', whose militant struggles might disrupt their planned
vacations to the Mediterranean islands and seashore resorts. The ideological
battle which should pit the workers of Northern Europe against their own
state creditors and speculator financial elite is transformed into hostility
toward Southern European workers and immigrants. Overseas bailouts, imperial
wars and cuts in social programs lead to greater competition over shrinking
social expenditures and conflict between employed and unemployed, 'native'
and 'immigrant' workers'.
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- International workers' solidarity has been
severely weakened and replaced, in some cases, by the proliferation of
international far-right networks propagating virulent anti- immigrant (and
anti-socialist) propaganda and, as in the case of the massacre of
almost 70 left-wing youth, mostly teenage, activists of the Norwegian Labor
Party, poses a direct murderous threat to progressive supporters
of immigrant rights. The extreme-right began its assault on immigrants
and Moslems and has now moved against the local left and progressive movements
which support them.
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-
- This has taken on an even more complex dimension
with the marriage of rabid pro-Israel, Zionist ideologues (mostly based
in the US) and the neo-fascist Islamophobes attacking supporters of Palestinian
rights, an issue repeatedly stressed by the Norwegian fascist mass murderer,
Anders Behring Breivik. The problem is that the 'respectable' liberal,
social democratic and conservative parties, in their electioneering, have
pandered to the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim appeals of the far-right in
order to attract workers rather than embarking on far-reaching class reforms
which would lessen inequalities, financing them via increases in progressive
taxes and greater public investments to unify all workers (local and immigrant)
against capital.
-
- Lacking working class solidarity, the sons
and daughters of immigrants, especially the disproportionately unemployed
young workers, engage in forms of direct action such as the pillage of
local business, confrontations with the police and general mayhem, as was
evident in the nationwide riots in England in the "hot August"
of 2011. The demise of working class politics thus has produced violent
right-wing extremism, racial-immigrant riots and pillage. The labor elite
are spectators, confined to condemning extremism and violence, calling
for investigations, but without any semblance of self-criticism or any
programs for changing the socio-economic structures that produce the right
turn and violence among workers and the unemployed.
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- The United States -The Rise of the Right
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- Unlike Europe, the extreme right is at home
within the US established order. Brutal anti-immigration policies have
led to the expulsion of nearly 1 million undocumented workers or family
members in the first three years of the Obama regime (a three-fold increase
over the George W. Bush years). The Tea Party has elected Congress members
in the Republican Party who promote massive cuts in the social safety net
with the collaboration of the White House.
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- The mass media, Congress, the White House, mass-
based Christian fundamentalist politicians and leading Zionist personalities
and organizations actively promote Islamophobia and lead virulent campaigns
against Moslems by fanning public insecurity. The US 'establishment' has
pre-empted the racist agenda of the far-right in Europe. The far-right
has turned its guns directly on the social programs of the poor, the working
class and public employees (especially school teachers).
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- Moreover, their assault on debt financing
and public expenditures has led to conflicts with sectors of the capitalist
class, who are dependent on the State. In the course of the recent Congressional
'debate' over raising the debt ceiling, Wall Street joined in a selective
struggle against the far-right: calling for "compromise" involving
social cuts and tax reforms while supporting their anti-public union offensive.
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- Unlike in Europe, the mass of the US working
class and poor are passive. They have been neutered: neither engaging in
the street riots of England, nor taking the sharp right turn of their Northern
European counterparts, nor participating in militant workers' strikes of
Southern Europe. The US trade unions, with the exception of the public
employees union in Wisconsin, have been totally absent from any of the
big confrontations. The American trade union bosses concentrate on lobbying
the corporate Democratic Party and are incapable of mobilizing their shrinking
membership.
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- The Tea Party, unlike its Northern European
counterparts, does not attract many workers because of their virulent attacks
on popular public programs, like Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance
and especially Social Security all of programs most likely to benefit
American workers and their families. On the other hand, the economic crisis
in the US has not led to Mediterranean-style mass action because American
trade unions either don't exist (93% of the private sector is not unionized)
or are compromised to the point of paralysis.
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- So far, the US working class is a spectator
to the rise of the extreme right, because its organized leaders have tied
their fortunes to the Democratic Party, which, in turn, has adopted significant
parts of the far right's agenda.
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- Conclusion
-
- The US, in contrast to Europe, is experiencing
a peaceful transition from neo-liberalism to far-right politics, where
the working and middle class are passive victims rather than active combatants
for either the left or the right. In Europe, the current crisis reveals
a deep polarization between the radical left turn of workers in the South
and the growing shift to the far right among workers in Northern Europe.
The ideal of international worker solidarity is being replaced, at best,
by regional solidarity among the workers of Southern Europe and,
at worst, by a network of rightist parties in the Northern European countries.
With the decline of international solidarity, chauvinist and racist tendencies
are rampant in the North, while in the South workers' movements are joining
with a broad range of social movements, including the unemployed, students,
small business people and pensioners.
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- While the electoral right is capitalizing
on the disenchantment with the center-left in Southern Europe, they still
face formidable resistance from the extra-parliamentary workers and social
movements. In contrast, in Northern Europe and the US, the far-right faces
no such conscious opposition - in the streets or in the workplace. In
these regions only the breakdown of the economic system or a prolonged
severe economic recession combined with devastating cuts of basic social
programs and protections may set in motion a revival of working class movements
and hopefully, it will be from the class-conscious left and not from the
far right.
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- [1] According to a study of workers support for far right
wing parties in Western Europe, "workers have become their core clientele".
See Daniel Oesch "Explaining Workers' Support for Right-wing Populist
Parties in Western Europe: Evidence from Austria, Belgium, France, Norway,
and Switzerland" International Political Science Review 2008: 29;
pp. 350 -373.
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- [2] While some of the motivations of the workers vary,
the far-right wing parties are the beneficiaries.
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