The 21st century is witnessing a gradual demise of traditional conservatism. With the disintegration of the USSR, free-market capitalism and internationalist interventionism have lost their appeal.
The current conservatism, says Philipps O’Brien of University of St Andrews, is essentially nationalistic, populist, evangelical and anti-science. Leader veneration is also an important trait of conservative parties in the US, Britain, India and elsewhere. The radical right doesn’t seem to care a tuppence for democracy’s basic norms and practices, besides rejecting cultural pluralism and minority rights. Donald Trump has made the fringe central to Republican Party politics.
The demarcation between the right and the far-right has become fuzzier not only in the US and Europe but also in India. Globally, the traditional left or the institutionalized left too is constantly on decline showing signs of senescence. The death of socialism has been pronounced many times over. Socialism as a currency of political discourse too faded long ago.
On the surface, Kristian Niemietz’s book Socialism: The Failed Idea that Never Fails sums up the zig-zag journey of socialism. However, with the rise of the right’s lunatic fringe, the broad left and socialist ideas are getting attractive again even though the centre-left remains bitterly divided. Some commentators believe socialism has become a young people’s movement, hip and trendy.
According to a 2019 YouGov poll, 70 per cent of millennials now say they would vote for a socialist. John Roemer of Yale University argues in his book, A Future for Socialism that “socialism is not dead but merely in need of modernising.” Egalitarianism, to Roemer, is socialism’s calling card. Socialism is a term of abuse for Trumpist Republicans. For them, Obama and Biden are socialists. Small mercies that they have not been branded Commies.
Nevertheless, calling oneself socialist is no more a political death sentence in the US. As Nathan J Robinson writes in his book, Why You Should be a Socialist, that when Senator Bernie Sanders began his presidential campaign in 2016, “only a fringe dared to use the label..… (now) many are wearing ‘socialism’ as a badge of pride.” Socialism is a fuzzy term as it has been used to label an extraordinarily wide array of political and economic beliefs.
Socialism and communism have been used interchangeably by many which has done a lot of harm to the socialist movement the world over including in India. After the SPDled coalition in Germany and the centre-left in Norway have taken power, the millennial left seems to be stirring again in Europe and elsewhere. Centre-left governments are also in power in Greece, Slovakia, Malta, Portugal and Spain.
In Latin America, the new left has made impressive gains. French economist Thomas Picketty says that it is for history to decide whether the word “socialism” is definitively dead or not. For him, it “remains the most appropriate term to describe the idea of an alternative economic system to capitalism.” Picketty believes that the world needs “a socialism that is decentralized, federal and democratic, ecological, multiracial and feminist.” Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin magazine, says that socialism should be understood both as a redistributive and an emancipatory ideology and a “radical extension of democracy.” However, he concedes that Marxism has become a “super academic hobby that has lost its political urgency.”
The centre-left or all other avatars of the left are bitterly divided. The discredited evangelists in the party have done far greater damage than all those who left or fell for the blandishments of the dominant governing parties. The Leftist orthodoxies are another problem. Many on the traditional left remain reluctant to admit they now have more in common with the right.
Most socialist leaders in India have been co-opted by BJP and other centrist parties. Some of course chose political irrelevance and remained loyal to their all-encompassing ideological home. Today, socialists have practically no representation in parliament and state legislatures. Even in the US, two socialists have been elected to the House of Representatives and in New York, there is one socialist in the state legislature. The socialists are not part of any political discourse in India. The protagonists are no more found in university faculty or curricula; they are sometimes found in university libraries.
According to a Gallup poll, 60 per cent of Americans hold a favourable view of capitalism while 38 per cent are well-disposed towards socialism. Franklin Roosevelt was frequently called a socialist thanks to his New Deal programme. The traditional left in Europe has lost much of its moorings as the blue colour support for it has evaporated. The old working class doesn’t exist and hence the leftist parties have lost their traditional base. As Leonid Bershydsky argues, “the old proletariat has been replaced at the bottom of the class hierarchy by a new precariat, people working in the service economy with few chances and little desire to organise.”
In Europe what has emerged is the broad left that includes the Greens, pro-Europe and antiEurope, pro-nuclear and antinuclear left. For instance, as John Lichfield explains, the French left faces three options, staying at home, voting for candidates they abhor and voting for someone they merely hate. The Jilets Jaunes movement in France apparently refuses to accept anyone as its leader. Its supporters simply refuse to work together. Given the slow decay, the socialist party in France is now a shadow of its former self.
According to Le Monde, the party has barely 22,000 members. The Socialist party presidential candidate, Anne Hidalgo, is continuing her election campaign despite indications she has no chance of getting through to the second round of the contest in April. As Le Monde says, candidates of the socialist party are swimming “in their own lane and none of them wants to budge an inch.” The French left has lost its “compass.” It is perhaps premature to see socialism’s fluorescence. Oldstyle socialism with a heavy dose of extensive government control is buried forever. However, the rise of techno-capitalism, inequality and a growing trend towards oligarchy and authoritarianism have opened up avenues for the centre-left. Its future depends on how persuasive and feasible an alternative to capitalism the left provides.
Even conservative commentator Robert Heilbroner has conceded in his column in the Commentary magazine that some form of socialism will be the predominant economic system in most parts of the world “during our lifetimes.” In Europe and America too, socialism “will constitute the image of a society against which capitalism will be measured by its critics.” The alternative offered thus far by the millennial socialists remains utopian. They must convince the world that it is they who know how to get there.
(The writer is director, Institute of Social Sciences, Delhi)