On the fallacy of 'post-ideology'

Frank Turner caused a minor furore recently, when Michael Hann uncovered some anti-left comments Turner made a few years in an interview with Moon and Back Music. A lot of people had mistaken his ‘don’t tread on the little guy, but don’t try to help him either, everything will sort itself out’ as socialist rhetoric, for some reason. This has helped mould Turner into the Billy Bragg of his generation (my generation, sadly), a moniker which apparently applies to anyone with an acoustic guitar and a vague knowledge of current affairs.

Bragg and Turner are friends, you know. Bragg tells us this in a Guardian article, where he shares tales of him and Turner enjoying a few matey beers backstage before a gig at Wembley Arena, and, more to the point, blames Turner’s libertarian views on this post-ideological age.

As you might expect from a ‘socialist’ who owns a huge house in a part of the country dominated by Tory politics, Bragg’s arguments don’t quite hold up.

This ‘post-ideological’ age is a fallacy. The argument that society and politics have moved beyond the need for vastly differing points of view originates in Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book 'The End of History and The Last Man'. By disintegrating, the Soviet Union had dragged communism into irrelevance. Given the perceived influence of the USSR in far-left movements worldwide, they too were expected to fall apart at the feet of all-powerful Western capitalism.

 

The votes for communist and socialist parties around the world, especially in Europe, went into an even steeper decline than they already had (a decline which began after the Hungarian uprising of 1956 was quelled by Russian tanks and machine guns), and, as Bragg notes, British Labour removed Clause Four from its party legislation. Neo-liberalism had the upper hand, thanks to Thatcher, and Blair followed suit, shifting a once left-wing party into a different brand of Tory.

The idea of capitalism and democracy as intrinsically linked, and the latter not being able to exist without the former, also grew, as a reaction to the horror of Soviet autocracy. It mattered little that Marx never wrote a word that could be seen in being in favour of the persecution of the working class that Stalinism practised – as far as most people were concerned, Stalin could have went through the selected essays of Marx and Engels with Tippex and a biro, whiting out large passages and writing ‘all for me’ over the top.

So then – the twentieth century was battle between communist dictatorship and capitalist democracy, and capitalist democracy had won in the end. Fascism, of course, died in a bunker with Hitler, after a mortal wound sustained hanging off of a Milan petrol station.

This is a strikingly Atlantacist view to take, of course. In many parts of the world, communism still lives on. Whether China operates a communist country is debatable, but it still calls itself that. Cuba, resting under the nose of the Unites States, continues to follow the guidance of Castro, despite a growing flirtation with consumer capitalism. Elsewhere in South America, the ‘Pink Wave’ continues to gather speed – a series of democratic socialist governments have improved the lives of countless millions of people, from Brazil to Venezuela. The media in Europe and America is largely at a loss to explain why this has happened – as the countries modernised over the past decade, they no doubt expected them to follow the path set out by Europe in achieving short term prosperity.

Ideology did not end – it was stagnant, and the crisis of capitalism has reawakened it. Specifically, the austerity measures which have affected huge areas of Europe. Nowhere has felt the grip of austerity like Greece, and nowhere has seen such a resurgence in anti-capitalist politics either.

The Greek situation is a desperate one – as it drowns in the Mediterranean, the ECB stands on the shore with a fraying rope shouting ‘Swim harder! I’ll throw you the rope if you just swim harder!’ The centre-left party in power at the time, PASOK, has atrophied in the face of public anger, surviving only as a junior power in a rickety pro-austerity campaign headed by centre-right former rivals New Democracy. What was most surprising in the Greek election was not the collapse of the PASOK vote (any left-leaning party who commits itself to such austerity should expect their supporters to baulk) but who replaced them. The Eurocommunist/green activist coalition SYRIZA moved from a tiny share of the vote, pre-austerity, to becoming the official opposition. It flew past the PKK, the parliamentarian communist party who had retained a significant level of support in Greek elections over the past couple of decades.

                                                          SYRIZA election poster

More worryingly, the far-right also experienced a rise in support, as fascist movement Golden Dawn entered parliament for the first time. Its supporters act like the SA and are referred to by the party leadership as ‘stormtroopers’. It is no surprise that some people predict civil war in Greece, perhaps the natural progression from the breakdown that social order has already felt.  Anarchist squatters, who attend protests in black bloc mode, fight with Golden Dawn, who fight with immigrants, while the police attempt, and fail, to keep order.

The Greek situation signals the fallacy of the post-ideological belief in several ways. First, Greek politics sheltered a communist party which still achieved a good level of support in elections. The PKK’s role in Greek politics has added dimensions which are not present in other countries – the party’s role in the Greek revolution of the seventies, for example – but, in any case, there was clearly still an appetite in Greece for radical politics.  

Secondly, the rise of both SYRIZA and Golden Dawn has shown that a strong belief in centrist politics has evaporated. Elsewhere in Europe, both the far-right and the far-left have made gains over the past few years. Ultra-nationalist parties, claiming to counter what they termed a ‘worldwide Jihad’, operated on an Islamaphobic message to make electoral gains – in France, Marine Le Pen’s Front National finished third in the latest French elections. Also at these elections, the UMP of Sarkozy (who styled himself as the French Thatcher, dedicated to union breaking and individualistic pursuits of wealth, and failed) were replaced for the first time in years by the Socialist Party, while forth place was taken by a resurgent Left Front, led by Jean-Luc Melenchon, who planned to introduce a minimum wage. In the Netherlands, where the far-right’s European figurehead Geert Wilders was enjoying support, the formerly-Maoist Socialist Party has taken back votes.

Even in Britain, where the rise of neo-liberal anti-politics was, arguably, first heralded by the three election victories of Thatcher and the demise of working-class unionism, both radical sides of the political spectrum have began to grow in influence. The BNP, while enjoying success in the last decade, have collapsed in on themselves, suffocating under the weight of voter apathy and lack of funds, but clearing the ground for the EDL and various splinter factions to fight it out. And whatever you think of the man, the Respect Party has got someone who at least claims to be a socialist into Westminster.

The final argument against Fukuyama's optimistic but naive comment is not taken from votes polled or party membership, but from political philosophy:

"They do not know it, but they are doing it"
 

said Marx, originally in relation to false consciousness. Marxism concerns itself greatly with the way in which capitalist ideology worms its way into the mind of the people without them knowing (Gramsci's hegemony, for example). The End of History is not possible because the end of ideology is not possible. Ideology is inescapable, no matter what one you subscribe to - communism, capitalism, fascism etc. It is the way politics is structured, on every level, and, therefore, seeps into everyday life.