An exit poll says the far-right and anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders is heading for a massive parliamentary election victory. It's one of the biggest political upsets in Dutch politics since World War II and one that is bound to send shockwaves through Europe.
But we all know this already. How do we stop people taking the easy answer (blame immigration) and engaging with the hard answer (economic system/ class war)
By building strong, left-wing alternatives. Right now, if you want to vote “against the system”, the hegemonic idea is that you vote for the radical right, because that’s the only alternative to the neoliberal, centrist parties that exists in the minds of the majority of the population. Ireland and the Francophone part of Belgium are good examples of regions where the left managed to become the alternative, instead of the extreme-right. In both those places the “against the system”-vote is left-wing because they out-organised the right, and they’re universally seen as the alternative to the neoliberal, centrist parties.
That does not mean that there’s no racism, sexism… in Ireland and the Francophone part of Belgium, just as it doesn’t mean that in the rest of the West there is no desire for redistribution of wealth, it only means that another type of political force became the hegemonic “anti-vote” because they were better organised, and by taking up that position, they’ve taken away the oxygen for the extreme-right to become a relevant political player: both Ireland and the Francophone part of Belgium are the only places in the EU without a non-marginal extreme right political party.
(Slight nuance: it is known that the French Rasseblement National and The extreme-right party from the Dutchophone part of Belgium - Vlaams belang - are financing their counterparts in Francophone Belgium, in the hope of them making a breaktrough in 2024. Perhaps that will be succesfull, I don’t know, but it should be noted that they can’t force a breaktrough without outside help.)
sometimes I think the left needs to say where they went wrong, because we are going wrong somewhere when stuff like this is happening, and say what we’re going to do differently
I think the answer to that question is pretty straightforward: the traditional left in Western-Europe used to consist of two groups:
people who need redistribution
people who feel sympathy for people who need redistribution.
The first group is the working class (in a narrow sense) and the poor, the second group consists of progressive intellectuals with a comfortable life. Left parties used to have organic connections to the first group trough their mass-organisations, which had tentacles deep into ordinary people’s lives, which enabled people from the trade-unions and so forth to grow in to their parties and be a main element in the cadre of theose political parties. But since the 1970’s those organisations slowly crumbled and/or lost their connection with the political parties, which became dominated by highly educated intellectuals. As a result, the left parties reflected the interests and priorities of that social group, and over time that thus remained the only social group which supported those parties. This is the situation in which we now find ourselves: the core constituency of the traditional left parties in Western-Europe is the progressive intellectuals - the people who feel sympathy for people who need redistribution. It is no longer the people who need redistribution.
That’s a relatively easy thing to say, but only trough building new left parties and organisations can this problem be solved.
By building strong, left-wing alternatives. Right now, if you want to vote “against the system”, the hegemonic idea is that you vote for the radical right, because that’s the only alternative to the neoliberal, centrist parties that exists in the minds of the majority of the population. Ireland and the Francophone part of Belgium are good examples of regions where the left managed to become the alternative, instead of the extreme-right. In both those places the “against the system”-vote is left-wing because they out-organised the right, and they’re universally seen as the alternative to the neoliberal, centrist parties.
That does not mean that there’s no racism, sexism… in Ireland and the Francophone part of Belgium, just as it doesn’t mean that in the rest of the West there is no desire for redistribution of wealth, it only means that another type of political force became the hegemonic “anti-vote” because they were better organised, and by taking up that position, they’ve taken away the oxygen for the extreme-right to become a relevant political player: both Ireland and the Francophone part of Belgium are the only places in the EU without a non-marginal extreme right political party.
(Slight nuance: it is known that the French Rasseblement National and The extreme-right party from the Dutchophone part of Belgium - Vlaams belang - are financing their counterparts in Francophone Belgium, in the hope of them making a breaktrough in 2024. Perhaps that will be succesfull, I don’t know, but it should be noted that they can’t force a breaktrough without outside help.)
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I think the answer to that question is pretty straightforward: the traditional left in Western-Europe used to consist of two groups:
The first group is the working class (in a narrow sense) and the poor, the second group consists of progressive intellectuals with a comfortable life. Left parties used to have organic connections to the first group trough their mass-organisations, which had tentacles deep into ordinary people’s lives, which enabled people from the trade-unions and so forth to grow in to their parties and be a main element in the cadre of theose political parties. But since the 1970’s those organisations slowly crumbled and/or lost their connection with the political parties, which became dominated by highly educated intellectuals. As a result, the left parties reflected the interests and priorities of that social group, and over time that thus remained the only social group which supported those parties. This is the situation in which we now find ourselves: the core constituency of the traditional left parties in Western-Europe is the progressive intellectuals - the people who feel sympathy for people who need redistribution. It is no longer the people who need redistribution.
That’s a relatively easy thing to say, but only trough building new left parties and organisations can this problem be solved.
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