Left wing is dead, and here is why
How one could ever describe a political leader like Massimo D’Alema, one of the main people accountable for the persistence of that villain named Silvio Berlusconi in the Italian political life of the last 15 years, one that doesn’t know the importance of voting in Parliament when there is the chance to knock out the Government and its majority but doesn’t miss any occasion to demonstrate to the media dictator that he is always ready to reach agreements for promoting their mutual political survival?
The left wing, in Italy and elsewhere, is dead and the former communist D’Alema is the perfect example of the zombified condition that such political parties are into without being fully aware of it. Here below I report an article by Paolo Flores d’Arcais taken from the newspaper il Fatto Quotidiano published on September 29, 2009 which explains why the left wing is dead, an explanation I endorse and that doesn’t need any further comment.
The lost Left-wing by Paolo Flores d’Arcais
On Sunday the German Social Democratic Party suffered a true collapse. Commentators and politicians pretend to question themselves on the “why?”, and they thoughtfully extend the horizon to the decline of “left-wing” parties happening since in the entire Europe. They fake, because there never was a more obvious and well-known explanation. The “left” loses in Europe, regularly and systematically, because it stopped being left for a long time now.
For a long time now the left stopped making equality its own flag, its compass, its strategy. And to say that economic and social reality can’t help but giving nourishment to an increasingly rightful battle for any least civil person: a generation ago the distance, in the same company, between the income of a worker or an employee and the one of the super-manager could be 1 to 30, 1 to 40 (an exaggeration). Today it easily reaches the amount, exorbitant and monstrous, of 1 to three hundred or four hundred. But there are not so uncommon cases where you can pass the ratio of 1 to 1,000.
The left, meant as Social Democracy, is twisting itself in a fast and running decline because it’s more and more indistinct from the right, this is the obvious truth. And having to choose between two rights, one certified and coherent and proud of its “values”, the other one hesitant and hypocrite, that says and retracts it at the same time, the reactionary voter or the legendary “moderate” one which dreams of a privileged future, will obviously select the first one, while the democratic voter will end up staying at home - after two or three “last times” in which he willingly voted by plugging his nose.
And yet the comments of all (Italian) Democratic Party leaders to the results of the German elections simply repeat the ordinary mantra: beware of listening to the radical hooters (that would be Lafontaine!), we must not give up on the “government culture”, the only thing that rather will let us win in the long run (”in the long run we will be all dead” the great Keynes warned. He too a radical, clearly).
It’s a masochist mantra, with which the “left” will never win any more, but an obliged mantra, because it wraps up into nobleness (”government culture”) the mean and often sordid reality of a (national and local) nomenclature that is totally dominated by the establishment and ready to defend its interests, guarantee its privileges and even satisfy its moods - and above all its illegalities - rather than radically rebalancing its revenues and powers by benefiting the poorest.
Because it isn’t true at all that in Europe the left is beaten, and it wasn’t true even in Germany the last Sunday. The polls of Spd, Die Linke, Green party and “Pirates” equal and maybe pass the sum of Christian Democratic and Liberal suffrages. Voters for an alternative to Mrs. Merkel would be there, all things considered. And in France it was enough that Dany Cohn-Bendit invented a new and reliable ecologist party to obtain a result that’s equivalent to the one of the waning Socialist Party in the European elections.
So why social democratic parties persist in the devilish politics that is driving them toward extinction, instead of putting themselves at disposal of the demands of “justice and freedom” that are massively going through civil societies of the old Europe? Why they don’t profit by the occasion of a dramatic crisis, guiltily produced by finances lords and their partnering government, to guide the masses in imposing a very fair redde rationem to the uncontrolled and inefficient greed of the ruling classes?
Because they stopped “representing” popular forces, and criticizing instances against the (more and more enormous) privileges and the establishment long ago. Because they are integral part of that establishment, although subordinate, because they aspire to sharing just the cake of those privileges, rather than replacing them with a more fraternal dinner. Because they are caste, self-referential partyism, so they are structurally unable to point out their own enemies in the equality enemies.
But without pointing them out, without proposing actions against the speculation financiers, and the entrepreneurs that “delocalize” (ie fire in homeland to hyper-exploit with hyperbolic profits in poorer countries), and the spreading of the corruptive-political-criminal interlacement (mafias are everywhere, from the Ural Mountains to the Iberian peninsula), without relaunching the welfare by taxing the richest, Social Democracy not only doesn’t do politics anymore but it is dead for good.
It’s just a matter of burying it as soon as possible in the electors awareness, because the zombie of what once was a left politics is now the major obstacle to the rising of new organizations of “justice and freedom”. Attempting to reform Social Democracies is a waste of time. Trying to “overcome” them in a synthesis with “centrist” impulses and illusions is even worse, a dissipation of democratic energies and civil passion.
The repeated and convergent lesson coming from the European ballot boxes for years now conversely says that it’s finally time to give the political bricolage of opinion movements an organized form, independent from political parties, capable of not repeating their defects and drifts toward conformism. All the more in Italy, where ecologist sides “die Linke” alike have been definitively erased by the reckless nothingness of their leadership.
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