Elections and political change: Reflections on the Soundings manifesto and the elections

For almost the first time since the financial crisis of 2007–8, there seem now to be signs of an awakening of popular opposition from the left to the power of the market and the doctrines of austerity. This can be seen in the electoral success of Syriza in Greece, and in the rise of Podemos in Spain. Both of these movements have given effective political expression to a large population -especially a younger generation - whose lives have suffered serious damage from the imposition of neoliberal ‘solutions’ to a crisis which originated in neoliberalism itself.

In Spain and Greece the established social democratic parties have been paying the price for allowing themselves to become absorbed into the dominant system, and to function as its instruments, just as happened to a significant degree with New Labour in Britain (and as we have frequently argued in Soundings).

Intellectually too, there have been indications of a change in the climate of opinion, with the widespread recognition that levels of inequality within modern capitalist societies are not only morally unacceptable, but are also destructive of the equilibrium of the system itself. And there is a growing recognition that action must be taken on climate change, in particular to reduce the use of fossil fuels, even though this will entail substantial limits being imposed on energy markets, and on the corporations which dominate them.

All this poses questions for our analysis in the Kilburn Manifesto. Part of what provoked this project was the fact that, while there had with the financial crisis been a catastrophic collapse within the economic functioning of neoliberalism, its ideological and political hegemony had been preserved intact. It was this lack of crisis within the ideological and political spheres that provided the conditions of existence for the reestablishment, after the crisis, of neoliberal hegemony within the economic. There was no serious challenge; it continued to be assumed that there was no alternative; that there could be a return, with the odd concession and adjustment here and there, to ‘business as usual’. The Manifesto project sought to analyse the reasons for this continued dominance. (It is worth pointing out here that the Labour leadership itself has contributed to the persistence of financial orthodoxy in the UK, through its failure to challenge the view that the previous Labour government’s budgetary extravagance was in large measure responsible for the crisis - even though all can see that its origins were in the irresponsibility of the financial system, not in excessive public expenditure.)

By the time we came to write the concluding chapter of the Manifesto, the ideological and political underpinnings of the business-as-usual model were beginning to look a little less assured.¹ Even within the UK, popular unease and dissatisfaction was beginning to make itself felt. And across Europe questions were being asked about the long-term sustainability of an economic model so committed to austerity. Popular disenchantment with the old political establishment was showing itself, not merely in a disinclination to vote, but - much more threateningly - in the rise of challenges from political parties to the right and to the left. This led us to ask whether there is now, finally, an emerging crisis of the political.

Gramsci’s words from the 1930s are relevant to neoliberalism today: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’. Among these symptoms we might include the rise of the radical right, the stagnation of Europe, the impoverishment of Greece, and the counterproductive blunders of Western interventions in the Middle East and the Ukraine, which are combining to instigate a period of dangerous instability.

Since we wrote that concluding chapter to the Manifesto things have changed further. Syriza has won the national elections in Greece; and establishment politicians and the media are now also paying rapt attention to the burgeoning popularity of Podemos in Spain. Whatever the final outcome of negotiations in the Eurozone may be (we write in...