Left Radicalism and Populism in Europe

Giorgos Charalambous, Gregoris Ioannou, Giorgos Charalambous, Gregoris Ioannou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351133616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Radicalisme

While there has been much focus in recent times on the rise of right-wing populism in Europe, there has been surprisingly little material on the phenomenon of left-wing populism. This edited collection seeks to fill that gap with an investigation of the relationship between the radical left and populism. Featuring a broad range of historical and contemporary case studies from across Europe, this is a much-needed empirical account of this phenomenon.

This book will be of considerable interest to researchers, scholars and students of left radicalism, European politics and the politics of social movements. It will also appeal to appeal to non-academic audiences, especially party and social movement activists because of its politically salient topic and its historical and comparative focus.

1

INTRODUCING THE TOPIC AND THE CONCEPTS

Giorgos Charalambous and Gregoris Ioannou

This edited volume investigates the relationship between left radicalism and populism through time and across space in Europe. In the absence of a systematic study of this relationship, there arises a most fundamental research question: What has been the relationship between radical left ideologies and populist rhetoric across different types of actors throughout time and in respect to specific contexts, both historical and contemporary? This question responds to a recent trend, which has increasingly associated instances of and actors embodying left radicalism with a populist logic. These are new developments, especially in the academic literature. Populism was not commonly observed as a main trait of the international communist movement throughout the 20^th century.¹ Neither is it to be found in communist publications and Marxist theory as a central question of concern or as a salient potential strategy for the left.²

Largely it has been the Latin American left that drew the attention of students of populist politics from the 1950s until today. Hugo Chavez and the ‘Bolivarian revolution’ he led have been considered an interesting blend of left-wing radicalism and the more traditional Latin American populism of the mid-20^th century of which Argentinian Peronism constituted the most paradigmatic example (Hawkins 2010). After the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the triumph of neoliberalism in Europe, by the turn of the century, Latin America was seen as a space where the ideas of the left were still strong and capable of being diffused to broader social and political formations, building on both revolutionary and populist traditions of previous eras and re-invigorating classic demands of social justice and popular democracy.

A substantive empirical association between European left radicalism and populism began (loosely) after the 2000s.³ This was not very long after populism was first applied to the far right party family in Europe.⁴ Apparently, the frequency of association between left radicalism and populism in Europe has increased since the onset of the 2008 global economic crisis.⁵

Recently, Aslanidis (2017; see also Aslanidis 2016) identified the most recent wave of anti-austerity and other social movements in the space of the left in Europe, as well as in America, as populist, based on the contradistinction between a homogeneous ‘People’ and a minority of ‘elites’. Such rhetoric was employed to incite mobilisation by promising the restoration of popular sovereignty into the hands of its rightful owners, it allowed grass roots mobilisers to frame social grievances in a way that binds (seemingly) heterogeneous positions together and projected an inclusive but anti-elitist language. While not an easy solution to all problems faced by the left, left(-wing) populism among social movements is seen as combining radical democracy and personal leadership; invoking civic patriotism; constituting a response to post-industrial class fragmentation; suited especially as a response to organic crisis; centring on the reclaiming of popular sovereignty; and pitting the People against the Oligarchy (Gerbaudo 2017). Again, these are new arguments in the corresponding literature on left-wing or left-inspired social movements, such as those of the 1960s or the wave of activism in the Global Justice Movement (GJM) that peaked in the late 1990s and early 2000s (see Gerbaudo 2017; Flesher Fominaya 2014).

Populism is generally understood to be ideology-dependent but is also seen as cross-ideological. In other words, populism especially in its discursive sense can manifest itself across the political spectrum. The underpinning logic here is that with populism involving an antagonistic discursive articulation of citizens’ demands against a certain power bloc that is seen as frustrating them, there is no predetermination of ‘the political belonging, the institutional status or the (religious, cultural, sexual, or other) identity of the leaders or groups and parties claiming to represent “the people” against the power bloc. It is thus perfectly possible to have politically antithetical articulations of populism’ (Stavrakakis 2016: 4).

Why has there emerged this new ‘empirical reality’ in the literature? Not so much the understanding of populism as something which can influence both the left and the right, but the increasing association of radical left discourses, movements and parties in Europe with populism. As various definitions (concerning the basic structure of the term), conceptualisations (concerning the ascription of specific properties and boundaries to the term) and operationalisations (concerning methods for its measurement) have been applied to the study of populism, a number of questions arise out of the claims that the European radical left is populist.

Has ‘the literature’ changed or has left radicalism changed? Is populism a trait of the more recent concrete manifestations of left radicalism – at the party as well as at the movement level? Has the frequent use of the term ‘left-wing populism’ included plenty of misuse as well? Has there been an increasing use of populism by European radical left actors? Can we find populist communists or trade unionists, today not really associated with populism, if we search into the left’s history? Has populism always characterised the radical left, if at all and if yes, in what particular ways? These are the questions we pursue through this edited collection and they concern both the fashion in which populism is expressed by European radical left actors and (at a more macro level) the degree to which these actors embody populism throughout several historical episodes.

In the rest of this chapter we proceed with outlining a broad framework of discussion and investigation concerning the relationship between left radicalism and populism in Europe.We then outline the various chapters indicating the main research questions and analytical approaches utilised by the contributors.

Left radicalism across time and space

Left radicalism underwent multiple transformations and shifts during the 19^th century, during the time that the transition into political modernity was concluded in Europe. By the end of the 19^th century there were two main political currents each with its own theoretical premises and conceptual tools and both connected with the emerging labour movement (Hobsbawm 1987). Social Democracy was stronger in northern and central Europe, especially Germany, whereas anarchism was stronger in Southern Europe and Russia. Both of these political currents advocated revolution and both asserted that the overthrow of the capitalist system was to be achieved by the subaltern working class taking over the means of production and reorganising the social relations of production and exchange. Both rejected the bourgeois state and nationalism as its main ideological force and supported internationalism and working-class solidarity across borders.

Although Social Democracy was the bigger of the two currents, already by the first decade of the 20^th century and amidst its continuing growth and entry into the emerging European parliamentary party systems, left radicalism in the sense of clashing with the national state and overthrowing the bourgeois system was pushed to its margins. Reformism had become the dominant ideology within trade unionism and Social Democracy, resulting in the collapse of the Second International with the onset of the Great War in 1914 (Geary 1989). The Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik victory in 1917 facilitated the final split of Social Democracy and the creation of the international communist movement, which became the dominant trend within left radicalism from the inter-war years until the end of the 20^th century, and the axis upon which all other left radical currents had to compare and contrast themselves with.

The march of European socialist and social democratic parties towards the centre, or the middle, has been gradual, but in this trajectory there have been several milestones leading up to the late 1980s, when the party family as a whole began to be typified by a strong internal trend towards neoliberal paradigms (see Moschonas 2002; Berman 2006; Lavelle 2008). Communist parties remained the main force in the left but, originally because of the fascist threat and the needs of the anti-fascist struggle as well as the Soviet Union’s geopolitical interests before and during the cold war, also followed Social Democracy in gradually becoming accommodated within the political system (Hobsbawm 1996). During the golden era of welfare capitalism after the Second World War in Western Europe the communist parties were busy consolidating their position and expanding their influence in society amidst generally rising living standards.

Nevertheless, in various countries, especially but not exclusively in northern Europe, in terms of both ideas as well as participants, no clear distinction could be made in the decades before the 1970s and 1980s depending on the country, between a centrist and a radical left. Three points are worth highlighting here. First, that in terms of economic and social policy positions only a handful of communist parties were revolutionary after the 1920s, in the sense of arguing for the subversion of the state or excluding on principle participation in the executive branch of government. Second, that communist and social democratic parties converged somewhere around Keynesianism on economic policy, often making their actual disagreements when negotiating alliances a matter of the degree of state intervention. Third, that both the communists and the social democrats had, and some of them still have, ‘orthodox’ and ‘reformist’ sections. Until today most of the social democratic parties host a number of left-wing tendencies or dissenters, ‘the usual suspects’, who are significantly more radical than the party’s politics, advocate a more radical labourism, are more involved with social movements and who have been gradually leaving their parties to join or lead other initiatives on the left.⁶ On the basis of constantly shifting compositional dynamics on the left of party systems, recent scholarly titles on social democracy imply that several decades into neo-liberalisation one can still allow for the possibility of re-radicalisation– as exemplified for many by the case of the Labour Party in the UK under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn (e.g. Bailey et al. 2014; Hickson 2016).

The appearance of the New Left (Harman, 1998), the student and the civil rights movements which partly drew their inspiration from the anti-colonial struggles in Third World countries in the long 1960s, reshaped yet again the ideological contours of left radicalism and opened up the space for the development of the new social movements of the last quarter of the 20^th century, most of which advocated a series of small revolutions rather than the Revolution that had guided the socialists for more than a hundred years. The environmental movement, second wave feminism, gay and lesbian rights movement, nuclear disarmament and the cultural and communal rights of minorities were the new forces within the field of left radicalism and most importantly beyond it (Kriesi et al. 1995).

According to Meiksins-Wood (1995:30) the major and long-lasting theme that emerged in the movements of the 1960s and their manifestations during the 1970s was ‘an emphasis on the autonomy of ideological struggle and the leading role of intellectuals, in default of the working class’. Activists, intellectuals, academics and students have been more prominent actors in the initial demonstrations and more symbolically representative of the ‘new left’; in Herbert Marcuse’s (2005:146) line of thinking, they have been revolutionary subjects as ‘arising from the struggle itself’. Still, from a more orthodox perspective which drove several of the communist parties to distance themselves from or navigate carefully their relationship with the ‘new left’, class struggle by ideological proxy meant that the emancipation of the working class should not necessarily be its own act and most importantly not necessarily led by its vanguard party.

This was the post-modern universe of political fragmentation, ideological pluralism, and theoretical implosion as well as of the more serious political attempts to revise the Marxist-Leninist position giving rise to Eurocommunism (Miliband 1978; Meiksins-Wood 1983). The three main Eurocommunist parties – the Italian PCI, the French PCF and the Spanish PCE – were forced to make numerous compromises, most seen as more or less ‘historical’, depending on the case (Balampanidis 2018: 59–78). In all cases, the Eurocommunists had to enter political pacts or pact-driven governments. Cooperation with the socialists and others, especially within the context of government participation or support, made it important but also difficult for the Eurocommunists to preserve their distinctive ‘communist’ non-social democratic identity and this created tension between the parties and their base. Within the context of such tensions, ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’ tendencies developed within the Eurocommunist current, with the latter applying a more liberal analysis and thus friendly approach to capitalist political institutions and other political forces. This tendency was most evidently expressed in the Italian case (Escalona 2017: 9–11). The Eurocommunists’ fate was sealed by the early 1980s. Although they emphasised the goal of electoral victory and chose strategies targeted at winning over non-communist votes, the result was far from grand electoral victories in the medium term.

Shortly afterwards came the era of defeat as China shifted to a state capitalist system and the Soviet bloc collapsed. This was not only a defeat for the communist parties, who acknowledged it as such, but with hindsight we can now say that this was a defeat for left radicalism as a whole, as neoliberalism developed as a hegemonic ideology not only co-opting Social Democracy but also restraining both the euro-communist parties and the major social movements in terms of their ideological orientation and actual existing forms, resulting in both their ‘decline’ and ‘mutation’ (March and Mudde 2005). The post-1991 period has been for the radical left an epoch of high levels of fragmentation, paths of refoundation, renewal, recomposition and even transformation (Botella and Ramiro 2003; Bull and Heywood 1994; Bull 1995).

Although there was a resurgence of left-wing radicalism by the early 21^st century in the context of the extension of the anti-globalisation mobilisations from the global south to the global north, the contemporary radical left of the 1990s and early 2000s found it increasingly difficult to articulate a coherent and convincing discourse that went beyond the confines of the existing and often found itself blending with reformist forces that sought in various different ways a sort of return to the Keynesian good old days of the golden era. Or it focused on the politics of recognition and prioritised...