Not for Workers (2020)

Book Review from the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

For the People: Left Populism in Spain and the US by Jorge Tamames (Lawrence and Wishart, £17)

Most populist movements and parties are right wing: Fidesz in Hungary, Law and Justice in Poland, Trump supporters in the US, the Bolsonaro government in Brazil. At the same time, some left-wing organisations are described as populist, such as Syriza in Greece and the former Chávez government in Venezuela. Here Jorge Tamames examines two particular cases of left-wing populism, Podemos in Spain and the support for Bernie Sanders in the US.

Unfortunately it is not entirely clear what he means by ‘populist’. He claims to follow the view of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, according to which it involves people going beyond addressing individual problems such as racism, unemployment and evictions, and joining together as a movement. In Tamames’ words ‘The result is a community mobilising to protest against an entire status quo, not merely asking for a few policy tweaks’. But it is not spelled out just how this is supposed to apply to the movements he discusses or how it relates to the features usually claimed to distinguish populism, the distinction drawn between the elite and the people, and the opposition to pluralism and separation of powers.

Podemos, of which Tamames is a member, means ‘we can’. It was formed in 2014 and received over a million votes in the European Parliament elections in May of that year. Despite its supposed populist objections to an elite, on the ballot papers it was not the Podemos logo that was used but the face of its leader Pablo Iglesias, who had become a well-known contributor to TV discussion shows. Since earlier this year, it has been a junior partner in the government run by the PSOE, which is roughly the equivalent of the Labour Party. Podemos’ programme has included increasing the minimum wage and raising taxation for the rich, so it is hard to see how they are protesting ‘against an entire status quo’, as suggested above.

Sanders, who has a fairly positive view of Pope Francis, has said that he wishes to stand up to ‘the billionaire class’. His policies included implementing universal health care, raising the minimum wage and breaking up the largest banks. In 2019 he extended this to the Green New Deal and abolishing student debt. All this is probably fairly radical in terms of US politics, and he had more support in 2016 from those under forty-five than Hillary Clinton did, but it obviously remains within the limits of capitalism, and he has twice failed to win the Presidential nomination.

As the author says, ‘I refer to Podemos and the Sanders movement as “left” populists because their agenda, while more ambitious that that of contemporary centre-left parties, is nevertheless reformist and not vastly different from that of a Western European social-democratic party in the early 1970s’. So all the fuss about left populism boils down to it being more or less the same as the Labour Party under Harold Wilson! The book gives some useful background on the impact of austerity and rising inequality, but it unsurprisingly fails to show that populism of whichever brand has anything to offer workers.

Paul Bennett

Editorial: Seven Lean Years (2015)

Editorial from the August 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is now seven years since the global economic crisis erupted that led to what is known euphemistically as the Great Recession. Overinvestment had brought about a crash in the housing market, in which poorer homeowners were unable to pay their home loans and newly-built houses could not be sold. The downturn spread to the rest of the economy, and with the sharp fall in production and employment that ensued, governments suffered a fall in tax revenue. Banks that had been lending heavily in this market found themselves laden with toxic loans that were not going to be repaid and were in danger of becoming insolvent. To avoid this, governments have had to step in and bail them out.

Governments had come to incur substantial budget deficits and to be saddled with large amounts of debt. Hence, the so-called era of austerity was ushered in, where governments introduced policies of mainly cutting expenditure on public and welfare services and raising some taxes. The impact of this austerity has largely fallen on the working class. Indeed, in the last few years, many capitalists have increased their wealth.

In the Eurozone, countries such as Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece had to seek bail outs from the Troika (The European Commission, The European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund). In return for cash, these countries have had to follow tough austerity policies. Greece has been particularly badly affected. Its people have had to endure five years of sharp falls in their living standards.

Of course, governments won't admit that the need for austerity measures arise from a crisis in the market system. They usually blame their predecessors or the fecklessness of the working class. The last coalition government in the UK, for instance, blamed overspending and financial mismanagement by the previous Labour government.

Some have argued that if the rich were made to pay more taxes, we could avoid austerity. This misses the point that austerity measures are not just about improving the government's finances. It is hoped that by reducing the cost of running the state, and along with the fall in real wages that occur during a recession, the prospect of higher profits will encourage capitalists to invest more in production.

Movements have arisen which seek to challenge austerity. The Podemos movement in Spain, the People's Assembly in the UK and the Syriza coalition of different parties in Greece. In January of this year, Syriza were elected to office on a platform of rejecting Greece's bailout terms, opposing further cuts in public services and pensions and calling for debt relief. In response, Greece's creditors set out new bailout terms which offered no debt relief and would entail further cuts in public expenditure and reductions in pensions. On 5 July, 61 percent of those voting rejected these terms in a referendum called by the government. Despite this, Greece's creditors imposed tougher terms and after strong pressure from the ECB and other Eurozone finance ministers, the Greek government caved in and the new terms were ratified by the Greek Parliament.

In the UK, aside from the Scottish Nationalist Party, the Green Party, Sinn Fein and other smaller parties, Jeremy Corbyn, MP for Islington North and a contender in the current Labour leadership contest, has pledged to oppose austerity. Were he, in the unlikely event, to become Prime Minister and try to put his policies into practice, he would find resistance from the markets. Investors would require a higher rate of interest before lending to the Government and there would probably be a run on the pound. He would be forced to make a climb down.

What this era of austerity has clearly shown, particularly in the case of Greece, is that in capitalism human welfare does not only come second place to profits, but it sometimes has to be sacrificed to it.

Syriza: The return of left-wing reformism? (2015)

From the February 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Syriza emerged from the recent Greek elections as the party with the most votes. But what is it? And what does it stand for?

Syriza is the acronym of the Greek for ‘Coalition of the Radical Left’ and is made up of various left-wing and Green groups, including a part of the old Communist Party and some Trotskyists. It is a bit like Left Unity in this country which in fact aspires to be like them. Set up in 2004, it already emerged from the May 2012 elections as the main opposition party and topped the poll in Greece in last year’s Euro elections.

At the beginning of the campaign Counterfire (one of the SWP fragments) claimed that ‘Greece could be about to elect the most radical government of the left in Europe since the 1930s.’ This is presumably a reference to the Popular Front government that came to power in France in 1936 but the claim is open to question. If you examine Syriza’s programme it is far less radical than that of the government in Portugal that ruled immediately after the overthrow of the dictatorship there in 1974, than the ‘common programme’ of the PS/PCF government that came to power under Mitterrand in France in 1981, and arguably even than the British Labour Party’s 1945 election manifesto.

What is different is that some of the people who might end up as ministers and their top advisers are not the usual professional politicians and careerists but leftwing intellectuals like those behind Counterfire. Not that that will make any difference as to what they will be able to do in office.

One of them, John Milios, described as ‘chief economist of Syriza’ and one of their MPs, interviewed in the Guardian (23 December), declared ‘I am a Marxist … The majority [in Syriza] are.’ He himself is a Marx-scholar who has written extensively about Marx’s views, including his theory of crises. Presumably, then, he must have some idea of what’s involved in taking responsibility for governing within capitalism. In any event, the programme his interviewer recorded him as outlining accepted that a Syriza government would have to govern in the context of capitalism, and capitalism in a period of economic crisis and austerity:

‘Milios rolls off the party’s priorities one by one. It would make concerted efforts to help those hardest hit by the crisis – free electricity for Greeks who have had supplies cut off, food stamps distributed in schools, healthcare for those who need it, rents covered for the homeless, the restoration of the minimum wage to pre-crisis levels of €750 a month and a moratorium on private debt repayments to banks above 30% of disposable income.’

And, more generally, as he put it in another interview:

‘”We are going to boost growth and combat the humanitarian disaster.” Syriza’s recipe for boosting growth is through a fiscal stimulus, targeted at lower incomes in order to boost their spending power’(http://news.yahoo.com/greek-leftists-wont-run-deficits-policymaker-says-193856885.html).

Syriza is not even promising to run a budget deficit to ‘boost spending power’, only not to run a surplus as the outgoing government was planning. But it’s still based on Keynes’s discredited theory of ‘demand management’ which says that the problem in a slump is not enough spending rather than not enough prospects for profit-making.

A Syriza government might, by taking some of the measures outlined above by Milios, be able to mitigate a little the ‘humanitarian disaster’ in Greece where there’s been a massive increase in destitution leading to, among other things,  an increase in mental ill-health, suicides and the infant mortality rate. But it won’t be able to boost the accumulation of capital.

No Podeis
Meanwhile in Spain a similar party, Podemos (‘We Can’) has gone up in the opinion polls. Its policy is the same as Syriza’s, if perhaps a little bolder as it envisages some nationalisations. What they mainly have in common is a commitment to ‘boost growth’ by government action to boost consumer spending, as described in Left Flank (another SWP fragment):

‘Its analysis is that the crisis is fundamentally one of “under-consumption” (which [Podemos leader] Iglesias agrees is “the problem”) caused by mushrooming socio-economic inequalities under neoliberalism (including a sharp decline in wages’ share of GDP) – a view that overlaps with those of Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. The solution is thus to increase consumer demand through expansionist public spending (àla Keynes). They then neatly tot up how exactly this can be funded though measures such as combating relatively high levels of tax fraud (mostly carried out by the rich), reintroducing inheritance and property taxes, and debt restructuring.’

It is not as if this has not been tried before. The PS/PCF government in France tried to ‘relaunch’ the economy in 1981 by increasing ‘popular consumption’, putting up the minimum wage and other benefits. It didn’t work. In fact it failed miserably, leading to three devaluations in two years and ending in a U-turn to a policy of austerity.

The reason why it failed – and why a Syriza and Podemos government would fail too – is that capitalism is not a system geared to meeting people’s needs, not even those they can pay for. It is a profit-driven system in which priority has to be given to profits and profit-making. Since the government cannot just magic into existence the resources to increase ‘popular consumption’, and that in the end these have to come one way or the other (taxation, borrowing, currency inflation) from profits, such a policy undermines the driving force of the capitalist system, provoking an economic crisis. Which was what happened in France.

There is another aspect to the breakthroughs achieved by Syriza and Podemos. They represent a revival of the old Social Democratic tradition of a reformist party using some Marxist terminology, at least in the two countries concerned. The equivalent of the Labour Party in Spain, the PSOE, is still called, believe it or not, the ‘Socialist Workers Party’ but, like the Labour Party and similar parties in other countries, has long since given up any idea of replacing capitalism and has settled for offering itself as an alternative team for managing capitalism in Spain.

That millions of people in Spain and Greece are prepared to vote again for parties that say they are against capitalism must mean something. Of course these are not explicit and deliberate votes for socialism but only for the parties voted for to do something about the effects of capitalism. This, however, is not something these parties will be able to deliver because it is not in their power to do so. They have been set the impossible task of trying to reform capitalism so as to make it work other than as a system that has to put making profits before meeting people’s needs and which periodically plunges the economy into crisis and depression.

There is no alternative under capitalism. The only way out is to get rid of it altogether and replace it with a system based on productive resources being commonly owned and democratically controlled, so they can be used to provide what people need in accordance with the principle ‘from each according to ability, to each according to needs.’

Adam Buick