Values And Opposites: Crisis Of European Leftists

All leftists, especially in Europe, are children of the October Revolution in a geopolitical and ideological sense. It catalyzed what Eric Hobsbawm called the “short 20th century,” which gave rise to communist parties, often splintering from socialist parties, and this gave birth to the world of geopolitics, in which the USSR and the communist movement produced the weapon of fear that shaped fascism. Fascism was no historical exception; it became a viable and organized alternative to the modern lack of enlightenment and essentially provided the conditions for the emergence of popular front politics and the resistance movement that fueled the social anti-fascism present in post-war European constitutionalism.

To belong to the left in Western Europe essentially meant to be a communist or social democrat. The latter trend, driven primarily by the existence of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, achieved such political success in Western Europe that some of the most significant communist parties in Western Europe tried to build their own social democratic and geopolitically pragmatic policies through such a strange artifact as Eurocommunism , which arose in Italy on the wreckage of Chilean planes in the Moneda Palace, where the last social democrat who strived to build socialism died: Salvador Allende.

Debates of those times, when Berlinguer felt safe under the NATO umbrella, Carrillo traveled to the USA, or Jean-Paul Sartre made amends to the French Communist Party over the Algerian question by writing the prologue to “The Wretched of the Earth” by Frantz Fanon (one of the inspirations for the fight against colonialism), today are a thing of the distant past.

While the post-communist left have not yet recovered from the experience of Tsipras in Greece, having failed to even slightly subjugate the forces of the European Union, which ultimately led the party in an unclear direction, transferring the helm of Syriza into the hands of a liberal businessman advocating surrogacy, the war in Ukraine, and Israel’s intention, courtesy of the USA, to end the Palestinian issue through ethnic cleansing, the European left found themselves at the point of no return. The post-communist left have already found themselves outside of parliament in Italy and may soon find themselves in the same situation in Germany, where Sarah Wagenknecht’s departure from Die Linke (The Left) could see her former party sidelined from the institutions of power. Wagenknecht presents a strange German nationalist project that combines the defense of the Russian deal with an anti-immigration discourse and rejection of feminism and LGBTI rights as “purely cultural issues,” which distance the working class from real issues. In Spain, Sumar’s attempt to replace Podemos as the left wing of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) is leading to a drift towards the German “greens” model, which is no longer understood as a commitment to criticizing the consequences of the climate crisis, but as the most innocuous way of challenging the place of social democracy within its own boundaries; the “greens” have no problems neither with neoliberalism, nor with NATO, nor with the main directions of European foreign policy, including migration, and often turn out to be to the right of social democracy itself. In France, the electoral support of Mélenchon, who managed to organize all the left under his hegemony, is unlikely to be easily inherited by his party, and the situation of other parties of the post-communist left family in Europe is not encouraging. Indulging in pessimism, one could say that the place for such left in Europe is running out, largely due to transformations in the world that have little to do with the ideological and political foundations of the “short 20th century” that made possible the emergence of the left in the form which we know.

This brings to conclusion that in Europe there is only room left for progressivism, such as that represented by Pedro Sánchez, the PD (Italian Democratic Party), or the German Social Democrats. Despite the great electoral viability of these spaces, it is nonetheless clear that the process of right-wing liberalization taking place on the continent against the hostilities in the heart of Europe and the Middle East puts European social democracy in an extremely weak position from the moment when even some ultra-right are beginning to challenge the protection of (domestic) workers’ rights and the revival of certain institutions of the historic European welfare state.

All of the above is nothing new and, with some nuances, can be supported by many of those leaders, who have been reflecting on the problems, and prospects of the European left movement in recent years. However, let me express an idea that, due to its rarity, seems to me more original. In my view, the fundamental problem with the various traditions of the European left is related not so much to geopolitical conditions of the environment but to their sluggishness in terms of ideological strength. The lack of activity in this regard contrasts with the enormous vitality of the right as a cultural project.

Re-reading Enzo Traverso’s monumental work on the Marxist treatment of the Jewish Question, I was struck by the bitter irony, with which the author points out the enormous arrogance of the Marxists in viewing Zionist nationalism as an outdated artifact of the 19th century, which must be overcome by the cosmopolitanism and socialist universalism that go hand in hand with the global development of capitalism itself.

Most of the problems of the European left lie in their stupid confidence that the very development of the productive forces will prove the correctness of Marxism, and nationalism and deviations from Enlightenment principles will be left behind. The claim that history is governed by laws that inexorably lead to the improvement of the human condition is simply a lie. On the contrary, as the great Tronti taught, only politics as an action aimed at correcting history itself can protect us from horror. The Holocaust was not a historical deviation, but one of the likely outcomes, as we see today, when climate collapse and World War III seem to be very real and possible scenarios for humanity.

Given this context, in order to wage political struggle in a reality that, in terms of degree of horror, can hardly envy the world of the First World War, the left must proceed from the fact that the main platform of political struggle is ideology. As we can see, the peculiarity of the situation in Gaza is not so much in the horrific death toll as a result of Israeli bombing, but in the interpretation of these victims. As long as the prevailing viewpoint is that Israel’s right to self-defense should allow it to kill as many Palestinian children as necessary to destroy Hamas, there is little remaining for the left to do. And now the statements of the social democratic sectors that Israel has the right to self-defense but should bomb Gaza less look simply ridiculous. On the contrary, the left must explain, without mincing words, that occupation, apartheid, and colonialism are the main crimes of the conflict, and that defending democracy means defending the Palestinian side. Only leftists who accept culture and ideology as the main media territories of political struggle will have a chance to survive in the modern world.