End of the End of History, The by Alex Hochuli;George Hoare; & George Hoare & Philip Cunliffe

Author:Alex Hochuli;George Hoare; & George Hoare & Philip Cunliffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Book Network
Published: 2021-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

5.3 Revolutionism

Where the horizontalists mistrusted political authority to such a degree they failed to organize for power, the left-wing re-encounter with formal politics led to an embrace of electoralism and reformism. Of course, it was not the contesting of elections and fighting for reforms that doomed left-populism. Rather, it was the failure to break with political institutions (the EU in the case of Corbyn’s Labour and Syriza; the Democratic Party in Bernie Sanders’ movement).

In response to these conundrums, there is a strain of radical thought that eschews “politics” (in the sense of the formal institutions of the state) in favor of “the social” – especially social insurrection. Although marginal on the Left today, this tendency starts from the presupposition that all engagement in state structures – including trying to take state power – will lead to co-optation and moderation, whereby “the political” would come to dominate “the social.” This counter-position of the social to the political is based on a reading of Marx according to which, for example, the declarations of liberty, equality, fraternity are merely political masks to obscure the reality of exploitation at the social level. Rather than seek to realize those values within existing institutions (reformism), the point would be to overthrow those institutions and transform social relations, ushering in an era of true freedom.

What this perspective ignores is the ill-health of “the social” today. The trends already explored in this book – depoliticization, lack of trust in institutions, social disorganization and declining civic participation – afflict grassroots organizations too, be they trade unions, workers’ parties or social movements. The revolutionist desire for the overthrow of the political ends up being, in today’s conditions, an insurrectionary rather than a revolutionary proposal. We thus come full circle, back to anti-politics.

This tendency can be illustrated through the concrete example of Brexit. The radical argument for British exit from the EU was based on the idea of rupture from a post-political institution that sought to foreclose politics. The EU influences political relations within the nation-state, just as much as it manages relations between them. Rupture would, firstly, return power to national parliaments – more representative than EU institutions – and, secondly, provoke further democratizing reform within nation-states, once the buttress of the depoliticizing EU was removed.

For the revolutionists, the idea of a “more democratic” national parliament was just more reformist nonsense, an attempt to ennoble bourgeois institutions and encase politics in the defunct nation-state. In the presence of a militant and organized revolutionary working-class movement, such a position might be realistic and intensely political. In our circumstances, it can only be a disempowering dead-end which abandons the task of democratizing society and the state in favor of an eschatological final event that would emerge ex nihilo.18

The point here is not to dismiss revolution. Rather, it is that the low levels of even basic trade union militancy, let alone revolutionary movements, mean the horizon of revolution has drifted from view. The challenge today is to be neither naive nor cynical. Those

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