The Long Downturn
The twentieth century was the century of the historically unprecedented and unparalleled presence, assertion (dynamic or passive), and institutionalization of a large popular space, which was powerfully structured and highly robust. This space was simultaneously popular ‘movement’, popular ‘public opinion’, and popular ‘political organization’. Its organization (political and associative) conferred on workers and disadvantaged groups a power to define their own identity and a strategic capacity rarely attained in the history of subaltern classes. The working class was more involved in politics – a novel politics – and became more visible than any previous dominated class, with the possible exception of the Enlightenment bourgeoisie, which preceded it in the Revolution.1 The twentieth century was the ‘moment’ – but was it only a moment? – of the assertion and institutionalization of the common people (versus the ‘people-as-ethnic group’ or the ‘people-as-nation’) as the central actor of modernity (see Chapter 1). The working class not only ‘devised’ its own political autonomy – ‘a case already rare in the history of oppressed classes’ – but was able ‘to propose – and this really was a first in that history – to translate it into a hegemonic political position’.2
Today, what was won politically and ideologically at the end of the nineteenth century, and especially during the twentieth – autonomous working-class representation – is in the process of disappearing – in large measure, at least. We are witnessing a slow and progressive increase in the distance, almost the dissociation, or what Leo Panitch calls a ‘disarticulation’ – organizational, sociological, cultural, and in part electoral – between left-wing parties (especially the social-democratic parties) and popular milieux. As for the autonomous political organization and representation of the working class and disadvantaged groups, the last twenty years have been those of the ‘long downturn’. This is a development no one envisaged in the aftermath of the Second World War. The political link between the left and the ‘people’ has certainly not been broken. But conceived as a ‘connection with mutual impact’ (see Chapters 7 and 10), it has been doubly loosened: on the part of the ‘representatives’ (social democracy conceives and presents itself less and less as an instance of working-class and popular representation); and on the part of the ‘represented’ (the working class and disadvantaged groups identify less and less with social democracy, while they do not recognize any other political force as their privileged representative – which would offer a solution to the problem of representation). Given the constitution of the new social democracy (in most cases) as an extremely and aggressively inclusive force, claiming to represent the demands of the whole of society, the result is a representative deficit coupled with a deficit of political autonomy for the ‘common’ people. In reality, what is at issue is the end of the political form of the ‘working-class party’, in both its moderate, social-democratic version and its radical, communist version. A major political issue at the beginning of the last century, working-class political autonomy is again in question.
This deficit is, among other things, the combined result of two complementary and convergent developments.
Rather than exercising, as in the past, a positive formative influence on the construction of working-class people’s identity, social democracy exerts an adverse influence through the ‘catch-all’ strategy, and the ‘minimalist’ ideology underpinning it: it dis-organizes the working class, contributing to the construction of a fragmented identity – in short, a non-identity. This minimalist attitude is not peculiar to the ‘new’ social democracy, as Adam Przeworski and John Sprague have shown so well.3 What is new is the degree of ‘minimalism’ harboured and conveyed by the current ‘minimalist’ ideology. With the new social democracy, we have graduated from the semi-working-class, semi-catch-all strategy of the 1950s, and particularly the 1960s and 1970s, to the aggressively and directly trans-border strategy of the 1990s. Thus, contemporary social democracy seeks to accommodate in its broad church highly diverse social groups, with opposed interests and values: capitalists and workers, ‘excluded’ and ‘excluders’, smart, snobbish districts and council estates; but also left-wing intellectuals with a ‘universalist’ culture, the traditional middle classes, and popular strata prey to xenophobia and ‘law-and-order’ appeals. In this variegated scenario, the working class and the ‘common’ people are no longer the ‘subject’ that social democracy is principally supposed to represent; and the bourgeoisie is no longer the ‘adversary’ social democracy is supposed to combat. The image of friend/enemy is dimming, inevitably aggravating the problem of representation. We pass from a strategy that included – albeit partially – a popular dynamic in its calculations and objectives to a strategy confined to the much more modest goal of ‘not losing contact’ (i.e. electoral contact) with disadvantaged groups and the organized working class. Thus, subaltern classes, ‘popular’ strata, ‘ordinary people’ – in short, the ‘people’ – are not only no longer invited to conceive themselves as a ‘subject’ and act as a historical ‘subject’ – there is nothing really new about that – but their specificity is more than ever diluted in the interclassist, all-encompassing discourse of contemporary social democracy.
Eustache Kouvélakis has written that since the French Revolution, ‘reform’ has followed ‘revolution’ like its shadow, and is to be understood as an internal moment of its accomplishment.4 Since the emergence – and especially the consolidation – of the working-class movement, the ‘reformist’ road and the ‘revolutionary’ or ‘radical’ road have tracked one another, each the shadow of the other – each defined, in a complex game of enmity and reconciliation, by opposition and reference to the other. We should perhaps note here that the historical crisis of communism – the century’s most ambitious project – has contributed substantially to putting a question mark against the ‘project of politicization’ which sprang from working-class and popular culture. The fact that the two political poles derived from the working-class matrix – social-democratic and communist – entered into crisis almost simultaneously has widely precipitated the end of what remained of a political form: the ‘working-class party’.5 In this simultaneous crisis, what has actually been discredited is not so much one of the two poles to the advantage of the other as the ‘working-class’ alternative both represented in rival forms. In particular, the historical defeat of the communist pole, and the working-class alternative embodied by it, has not only not favoured the social-democratic, reformist road; it has ‘liberated’ social democracy from its own working-class and popular commitment, and its own ‘interventionist’ engagement. The ‘Red Atlantis’ has thus been doubly lost. The defeat of communism has legitimated and encouraged both the neoliberal option and the ‘interclassist’ option in social democracy, while reducing the ideological and electoral cost of both. In a sense, therefore, in this historical game ‘for two players’ dating back at least to the October Revolution, the ‘complementary enemies’ of the twentieth century remained complementary to the very end.
However, the belief that the deficit in political autonomy of popular strata results exclusively from the ‘turn’ – why not betrayal? – of the new (and old) social-democratic elites, or the failure of ‘real socialism’, requires qualification.
According to Robert Castel, the constitution of a force of protest and social transformation:
requires at least three conditions to be met: an organization structured around a common condition; preparation of an alternative project for society; and a sense of being indispensable to the operation of the social machinery. If social history gravitated around the question of the working class for more than a century, it is because the working-class movement achieved the synthesis of these three conditions.6
Today, the various components of the popular space do not constitute a sociologically, psychologically and organizationally ‘cohesive’ whole.7 They are not characterized by the ‘common condition’ to which Castel refers and they are not organized around it. More particularly, working-class confidence is – as Michel Verret put it so eloquently – ‘triply impaired’: in its numerical confidence, its productive confidence, and lastly, its solidaristic confidence.8 In the first instance it was ‘overtaken’ within the wage-earning classes by the promotion of more up-market categories; then it was struck head-on by technological development, unemployment and job insecurity, encouraging a certain de-collectivization of the working-class condition.9
Today’s workers (internally divided and socially weakened), junior employees, insecure labourers, the unemployed, young people in search of their first job, people who have taken early retirement, single-parent families, the inhabitants of deprived neighbourhoods, minorities of every sort (principally immigrant workers), the ‘have-nots’ more generally – these people represent a heterogeneous set of situations, not a more or less ‘compact’, self-confident social force.10
The working class unquestionably retains a significant ‘capacity for anti-capitalist nuisance’.11 And as Hout et al. have written: ‘moving to more complex, multidimensional models of class does not imply that classes are dying’.12 Even so, the working-class movement ‘has lost the sociological and symbolic centrality of the Fordist epoch’.13 And classical, bipolar class conflict – with two highly inclusive collective actors – has receded, leaving behind it a battlefield of greater complexity and fragmentation. There the economic condition of the subaltern classes, at least in their most peripheral echelons, has clearly deteriorated. But at the same time, everything suggests that their political condition – their impact as a social force, their capacity for collective mobilization and action – has deteriorated even more sharply. Hence the loss of the ‘proud and jealous sense’ of working-class and popular independence. In reality, for all their numerical importance, popular groups and categories do not ‘add up’ politically and culturally, or exert sufficient influence on social-democratic policy, or the policy of any party with a majority and a governmental vocation. The popular space has waned. Labour movements are ‘down but not out’, Andrew Richards has written.14 Hence the deficit in political autonomy is a largely indirect effect (neither automatic nor inevitable) of that waning.
The ‘crisis’ in the representation of the popular classes is thus a two-edged phenomenon. Moreover, it would be incoherent to attribute an electoralist character to social democracy, and a capacity for ‘recuperating’ themes from below (‘civil society’ or the margins of the ‘official’ system), and at the same time argue – or rather, give it to be understood – that this social democracy is ‘oblivious’ of any popular dynamic! Any force with an ‘entrepreneurial’ culture – and certainly social democracy (which has frequently demonstrated its capacity for adaptation) – almost never ignores (at least, not completely) a social dynamic that could ‘benefit’ it – that is, bring in some votes. If social democracy has ‘abandoned’ ‘its’ people, this is because the trends affecting these people are significant enough to reduce their importance as a ‘collective actor’ and as a reservoir of reliable left-wing voters that cannot be ignored.
From a rather more macro-historical vantage point, the elaborations of contemporary social democracy are merely the expression of a profound strategic pessimism. At the sophisticated level of partisan strategies, they register recognition of the significant social and political waning of the popular space. At the same time, they further this process.
Thus, the revisions inspired by neoliberalism are the latest in a long process distancing social democrats from the plebeian people and popular cultures. In conscious, aggressive fashion – sometimes even with the euphoria and zeal of the neophyte – contemporary, ‘post-pessimist’ social democracy draws extreme ideological, programmatic and organizational consequences from a ‘pessimistic’ strategic situation – a situation it considers adverse to any political force that is too closely identified with the working class and disadvantaged groups. The ‘new’ social democracy encourages, accelerates and furthers – but certainly does not trigger – a political (and simultaneously sociological and cultural) process which, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, gradually called into question the autonomous political representation of the working class and popular strata. With the new social democracy, the ‘project of politicization’ spawned by working-class culture is actually, as well as rhetorically, being exhausted.
An Epoch-Making Shift?
Politics always involves an interpretation of social existence. It also foregrounds a concrete conception of the ‘public interest’. The challenge to the political autonomy of the popular arena, indissociable from the new social-democratic identity, confirms – and creates – a novel ‘interpretative order’. In this new order – the ‘interpretative’ order of the new century – the weight, presence, interests, expectations, and ideas (however confused, vague, or underdeveloped) of popular strata are only marginally represented in the political system. The predictable result is that popular strata are gradually deserting the public arena, and the public arena is distancing itself from popular spaces and milieux. This desertion is an important, often underestimated, aspect of the phenomenon of ‘depoliticization’: the crisis of the political bond as one of the principal social bonds.
Obviously, ‘pure’ working-class or popular representation has never been the rule. While social democracy was constituted as a pole of attraction for the popular classes, as well as a pole attracted by them, it has also – at least since Bernstein – always been attracted by the middle classes. Social democracy has always sought to combine social groups that are very different, and have distinct – even opposed – interests and values. Moreover, the social history of the twentieth century demonstrates that ‘reform can best be made effective and durable, when tactics are able to link the interests and fate of the poor with the fortunes of the better-off’. And as Peter Baldwin has likewise explained: ‘not ethics, but politics explains it’.15
If ‘pure’ class strategies were not realistic in the past, they are still less so today. But in posing so clearly, openly and aggressively as an inclusive political force for the first time, contemporary social democracy has made more than a stylistic innovation. And it has undergone more than a refit, in line with current tastes, of its working-class/popular profile at the beginning of the twentieth century, or its semi-catch-all/semi-working-class profile in the immediate postwar period. With any highly developed catch-all strategy, the real question concerns ‘how’: how to combine contradictory, even opposed, interests today? How to link ‘the interests and fate of the poor with the fortunes of the better-off’. And, consequently, how to represent, and whom to represent?
Now, despite some worthy but inadequate efforts, current economic and social conditions confirm social democrats’ incapacity to implement policies of ‘positive discrimination’16 in favour of workers and disadvantaged sections of the population. This necessarily leads to the subordination of their interests to the ‘fortunes of the better-off’. And today – exactly as in the past – ‘not ethics, but politics explains it’.
So, thanks to the convergent developments described above (waning of the ‘working-class people’ as a collective actor, abandonment by social democracy of its role as organizer and representative of popular milieux, renunciation of its redistributive policies), it is as if the ‘short twentieth century’ was, from the viewpoint of the political organization – and representation – of the lower classes, only an exceptional ‘moment’, merely the great parenthesis, in the history of human society.
A parenthesis? Obviously, it is too soon and too easy to say that. But the trends of recent years are undoubtedly a new and important step in a regressive process. If this process deepens and expands, the great historical window that was spectacularly opened with the twentieth century will begin to be closed.
In politics, one can see the world through another’s eyes, but one cannot become this ‘other’. Social democracy can play, cheat, juggle with neoliberal ideas, but it is not – and cannot become – neoliberal. If only for electoral reasons, contemporary social democracy, whose anchorage points in the popular space are noticeably less affirmed and solid, remains a pole attracted by the popular classes. It has not lost this vocation (at least, not completely). And the more poverty and inequalities spread, the more the resistance of society and the trade-union movement to the effects of current policies grows, the greater are the chances that the socialist parties will pursue a social course. This is certainly a matter of electoral calculation, and may become more so in the future. But it is also a question of sensibility and culture. At a time when the neoliberal project is proving incapable of keeping its promises, the self-assertion and mobilization (social, trade-union, electoral) of the popular classes – with, outside, or against social democracy – could reactivate a whole ‘egalitarian’ cultural core that exists somewhere in the soul of social democracy. For even in those socialist parties that are the most ardent defenders of the ‘economically correct’, a working-class/popular memory and egalitarian culture ‘inhabits some refuge of shadow and pride’, to borrow a phrase from Aimé Césaire. There is no need to point out that reactivating this culture will be easier if it rests on electoral calculation. Or – to put it better – if the electoral-entrepreneurial culture of contemporary social democracy ‘goes through’ an egalitarian calculation in order to be ‘vote-maximizing’.
Social democracy thus remains a force attracted by the popular classes. But today it is significantly more attracted by the middle classes and, in part, by the world of enterprise. If this trend grows in the future, it will mark ‘a profound, epoch-making shift’. It will represent the ‘closing’ of that window: the end of an epoch. We are not there yet, but we are not far off either. In this context, the real question (at once both political and scientific), the question of questions people often want to avoid, is this: what is the power of attraction exerted by the popular classes today, and what will it be tomorrow? The answer, which exceeds the scope of this book, will largely determine future social-democratic identity. For it will determine the ‘how’ of the ‘link’ – productive or fatal, but in any event necessary – between the ‘poor’ and the ‘better-off’.
In addition, it will determine whether the ‘short twentieth century’ was the great parenthesis in the history of human society or, alternatively, whether the ‘third way’ is the great parenthesis in the history of social democracies.
Notes
1.Michel Verret, ‘Classe ouvrière et politique’, in Guy-Patrick Azémar, ed. Ouvriers, ouvrières: un continent morcelé et silencieux, Éditions Autrement, série Mutations, no. 126, Paris 1992, p. 198.
2.Ibid., p. 200.
3.See Adam Przeworski and John Sprague, Paper Stones: A History of Electoral Socialism, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1986.
4.Eustache Kouvélakis, Philosophie et révolution de Kant à Marx, doctoral thesis, University of Paris VIII, 1998, p. 6; Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 2001.
5.The crisis of Keynesian social democracy, which became evident in the second half of the 1970s, roughly speaking coincided with the retreat of communism, and in particular Eurocommunism, which was apparent from the beginning of the 1980s, and in any event well before the fall of the Berlin Wall. A few years later, the historical defeat of the October Revolution, or what remained of it, did not open the way for the reformist left but, rather, for the cultural ‘counterrevolution’ of neoliberal reformism.
6.Robert Castel, Les Métamorphoses de la question sociale. Un chronique du salariat, Fayard, Paris 1995, p. 441.
7.Cohesion is conceived here only in the relative sense of the term. In reality, no social group is ‘cohesive’. One cannot treat the working class or, a fortiori, the multi-class popular space or, for that matter, any social class, ‘as if they were themselves unified rational subjects’ (Colin Hay, The Political Economy of New Labour: Labouring under False Pretences?, Manchester University Press, Manchester 1999, p. 79). A social ‘entity’ is cohesive only in a relation of comparison (relative to another entity or its own past).
8.Verret, ‘Classe ouvrière et politique’, p. 203.
9.Robert Castel, ‘Pourquoi la class ouvrière a-t-elle perdu la partie?’, Actuel Marx, no. 26, 1999, pp. 16–22.
10.One of the foremost historical contributions of the ‘old Marxism’ was that it imparted an unprecedented historical confidence to the ‘labouring classes’. Today, such a ‘Marxism’ (whether Marxist or not), able to unify the heteroclite categories where economic and social insecurity is concentrated, is dramatically lacking.
11.Michel Vakaloulis, ‘Antagonisme social et action collective’, in Vakaloulis, ed., Travail salarié et conflit social, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 1999, p. 245.
12.Mike Hout, Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza, ‘The Persistence of Classes in Post-Industrial Societies’, International Sociology, vol. 8, no. 3, 1993, p. 270.
13.Vakaloulis, ‘Antagonisme social et action collective’, p. 245.
14.Andrew Richards, Down But Not Out: Labour Movements in Late Industrial Societies, Instituto Juan March, Madrid 1995.
15.Peter Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1990, pp. 229, 299.
16.Castel, Les Métamorphoses de la question sociale, p. 375.