Forging a Union of the Party Left and the Social Left

Forging a Union of the Party Left and the Social Left
Martha Harnecker
TNI Website, January 2002

Introduction

The globalization model imposed on Latin America has proved itself unable to solve the most pressing problems in our countries and its rejection has become ever more intense. This rejection is expressed through many different resistance practices and struggles.

Left fronts or political processes of the left constructed in opposition to neo-liberalism are consolidating in several Latin American countries. In others, powerful social movements that have become major political actors are now on the front lines of the combat against neo-liberal globalization.

The analysis of the most relevant Latin American experiences considered in a forthcoming book, suggests that if the opposition to the neo-liberal model is to be successful, it will have to link a wide range of the militant groups found on the left, gathering into a single great column the dispersed but growing social opposition.

To simplify I have included the diverse expressions of the left under what I call the left organized in parties, or party left, and the social left.

1. Favorable Objective Conditions

The depth of the crisis, the breadth and variety of the affected sectors, the sheer multiplicity of the societal demands that remain unattended to [...], result in a highly favorable setting for initiatives aimed at the creation of an alternative social block - a block characterized by a great breadth of composition.

Those suffering the economic consequences of neo-liberalism include: the poor and excluded, an impoverished middle class, a constellation of small- and middle-rank managers and merchants, the informal sector, medium- and small-size rural producers, most professionals, the legions of the unemployed, workers in cooperatives, pensioners, the subordinate cadres of the police and the army. But we should keep in mind not only the economically affected sectors, but also all those who are discriminated against and oppressed by the system: women, youth, children, the elderly, indigenous peoples, blacks, certain religious creeds, homosexuals, etc. We are talking, as Helio Gallardo says, not only about those impoverished in the socioeconomic sense, but also of those impoverished in their subjectivity, that is to say, of the immense majority of the population of our countries.

Some of the above have become powerful movements that differ in many ways from the classic labor movement. Their platforms, imbued with a strong thematic focus, are different; they have a multi-class and multigenerational calling, a vocation that involves them in concrete action, and their organizations are structured in less hierarchical, more networked and interconnected ways than any organization of an earlier time. These new-style organizations include the women's movement, the indigenous, environmental, and consumer movements, and those who fight for human rights.

Sometimes key actions are initiated by new social actors. The rejection of the currently fashionable globalization, and the resistance to the application of new measures of a neo-liberal nature, have produced surprising examples as has been the capacity for mobilization manifested by young people relying fundamentally on electronic networking,. Unfortunately, these militant expressions in favor of a different world usually vanish once the episode or event which called them into being has passed due to the lack of entities able to link them and help them overcome their heterogeneity.

2. Subjective Difficulties

But, alongside these favorable objective conditions for the construction of a wide-ranging alternative social block, there are the very complicated subjective conditions which recall a basic problem: the dispersion of the left itself. I will focus on some of the elements that explain this situation.

1. The Crisis of Politics and the Politicians

   We live in a period in which specifically political participation has diminished, and in some cases reoriented itself in other directions and toward other forms of action. On the other hand, there is a growing popular distrust of politics and politicians in general. This has to do with the great constraints placed today on the functioning of our democratic regimes. We are governed, as Franz Hinkelammert says, by aggressive democracies, representing no consensus, made and unmade by media controlled by concentrated economic interests, where sovereignty resides not in civil governments but in the defense establishment, and beyond, in the international financial organisms that speak and act on behalf of the governments of the more developed countries. Other elements that explain the growing popular distrust of politics and politicians include, on the one hand, the unscrupulous appropriation on the part of the right of the language and discourse of the left and, on the other hand, the quite frequent adoption on the part of the parties of the left of political practices that hardly differ from the habitual practices of the traditional parties. Increasingly, people reject those party practices that show evidence of favoritism, that are not transparent but corrupt,7 that reach out to people only at election time, that waste energy in factional fighting and in the satisfaction of mean ambitions; that involve decision-making at the top without a genuine consultation of the base, and where the unipersonal leadership outranks a collective on. People increasingly reject messages that are never translated into action. Ordinary people are fed up with the traditional political system and want renewal, positive change, a new approach to the political process; they want healthy politics, transparency and participation, they want to recover trust. The distrust of politics and politicians is growing daily and it also permeates the social left. In the political arena, where political parties are active, it poses no danger to the political right but a great danger for the left. The right can operate perfectly well without political parties, as it has amply demonstrated during dictatorial periods, but the left [...] cannot do without a political instrument, be it a party, a political front or some other instrument. For political action to be effective, in order for protest and resistance activities of the popular movements to achieve their objectives, entities are required which will be able to guide and to unify the multiple efforts that arise spontaneously, and to promote still others.

2. The Absence of an Alternative Social Project to Capitalism
   

   A great obstacle to the unity of the left is the absence, after the defeat of Soviet socialism and after the crisis of the welfare state so lovingly fostered by the European social democracies and the Latin American populist-developmentalists, of an alternative to capitalisms be it socialist or under any other name, that is rigorous and believable as a proposal, and that would be able to face the new world reality. Capitalism has revealed its great capacity to re-invent itself, to use the technological revolution for its own ends, to fragment the working class, to limit the negotiating power of this class, to create the panic which accompanies the fear of unemployment. Meanwhile, much of the left has stayed anchored in the past. There is an excess of diagnosis and an absence of therapy. We navigate without a political compass.

3. Difficulties Faced by the Left Organized in Parties
   

   A large segment of the party left has in recent decades found much difficulty in working with social movements and in developing ties to the new social actors. This has been due, in my understanding, to several factors.

   • Reduction of political activity to something merely institutional
     The right has demonstrated great political initiative and uses it to control the institutions of the state and impose the neo-liberal model. It elaborates and puts into practice, simultaneously both a skillful strategy of social fragmentation that disproportionately promotes certain social movements, and the development of anti-party sentiment. The party left, on the other hand, is usually on the defensive. It usually employs for its political work almost exclusively the current institutions. It tends to adapt itself to the rules of the game imposed by the enemy, and hardly ever takes the enemy by surprise. The level of absurdity is such that the agenda of the left is set by the right. It has been maintained by some, perhaps with reason, that the cult of the institution has been the Trojan horse introduced into the fortress of the transforming left by the dominant system; thus attacking the left from inside. The work of the militants has been progressively delegated to people that hold public and administrative positions. The high-priority effort stopped being collective action and became parliamentary action or a mediating presence. Militant action has reduced its scope to election day, to the putting-up of propaganda posters and other such trivial public acts. And, what is worse still: increasingly, party financing comes from the participation of party cadres in state institutions, the parliament, local government, election boards, etc., with all that this entails in terms of dependence and of undue pressures. On the other hand, the bringing-together of the party left and the social left would be facilitated if the narrow traditional conceptualization of politics, which tends to reduce the latter to the fight for control of politico-juridical institutions and to exaggerate the role of the state, were replaced by the idea that politics is the art of building a social force that can change the current correlation of forces. Simply put: you cannot build a political force without building a social force.
   • The Tendency to 'party-ize' the movements
     The party left tends to 'party-ize' the initiatives and movements that struggle for emancipation, instead of making the effort to bring together their practices into a single political project.
   • Conceptual frameworks that work as blinders
     The left has had a hard time opening up to the new realities. Often, when it should have been welcoming, it has instead stayed firmly locked into the rigid conceptual frameworks that prevent it from appreciating the potential of the new social subjects.
   • The tendency to homogenize
     The party left has a problem working with difference. The tendency, especially of the class parties, was always to homogenize their particular social base. If, given the identity and homogeneity of the working class from which these parties primarily drew their strength, that was at one time justified, today, in the face of such a wide range of social actors, it is an anachronism. Today, the emphasis is or should be on unity in diversity, on respect for ethnic, cultural, and gender differences, and on the feeling which comes from membership in any specific collective. It has become advisable to make the effort to channel militant commitments, starting with the potentials that are characteristic of each sector or individual, and without looking to homogenize the actors. It is important to have a special sensitivity, and to perceive all those points of contact that can set the stage for a platform of common struggle that begins with and continues a respect for difference.
   • Authoritarian style
     If there is something that seriously hinders the relationship of the party left with popular movements and, in general, with the new social actors, it is the authoritarian style of most of their cadres. These are usually habituated to directing the masses with orders. But social movements and, most specifically, the new actors don't allow themselves to be directed, they need to be convinced and to freely and consciously adhere to the proposals that arise from outside their own movements. For this reason political cadres today should be, fundamentally, popular educators, capable of potentiating all the wisdom that exists in the people and of fomenting creative initiative, a search for answers by the actors themselves. It should be kept in mind that the experiences of struggle are greatly educational in themselves. The new actors are particularly sensitive to the topic of democracy. Their struggles have generally had as a starting point the struggle against oppression and discrimination. Small wonder therefore that they reject being manipulated and that they demand democratic participation in the decision-making process. In their organizations, they promote consensus and when it is unattainable, hold that decisions should be adopted by a very wide majority. They avoid using narrow majorities to impose their will on those in the minority. They believe that if the great mass is unconvinced, it makes no sense to impose a measure adopted by a narrow majority. They hold that it is preferable to hope that people will gradually mature, and come around by themselves to seeing the rightness of a given measure [...]. This approach prevents the disastrous internal divisions that usually plague the movements and parties of the left and it prevents the making of errors of great magnitude.
     In order that the party left may approach the social left, for a synthesis to emerge, the party left must renew itself ideologically, change its political culture and method of working. The party left must incorporate into its arsenal the forms of struggle and resistance pioneered and developed by the social left.

4. Limitations of the Social Left
   

   We have referred to the factors that hinder the party left from approaching the social left. On the other hand, in some cases, it is attitudes adopted by the social left which prevent attainment of the goal. In the face of the crisis of distrust in politics and politicians, and the original and combative action of some movements and new social actors, there has been a tendency to disqualify the political parties and to magnify social movements and resistance groups in general. A tendency, as we have said, welcome and stimulated by the right itself, especially through the media that it controls. And there are those on the social left who think, and even propose, that in the current stage of the struggle, we can do without parties. What they forget is that the countless individual and collective members of the non-party left, due to their own characteristics do not have the means to link up their many different demands, to channel and to express in an organized fashion the dissatisfaction of the countless individual and collective members of the non-party left, and at the same time generate a social opposition whose plural manifestations of resistance puts it in a position to really pose a danger to the reproduction of the system. I share Eric Hobsbawm´s concern, who maintains, against current trends, that the sum of minorities does not make a majority. Social movements, due to the sectoral or corporate character of the objectives that they pursue have, on the other hand, problems in coming up with and proposing national solutions, and even bigger problems when it comes to thinking in terms of trans-national processes. Often, too, the social left succumbs to the same bad habits that plague the political parties: 'caudillismo', verticalism, manipulation of the base, careerism, co-optation.

3. Moving Forward by the Creation of New Forms of Political Expression

The relations of the social movements and the parties should be marked by constructive tension. Social movements should not lose their autonomy or renounce their roots, because from these they derive their authenticity and their strength; and the parties, be they new-type left parties or organic entities, should not try to represent or to drown out the social movements. Rather, their fundamental task should be that of elaborating a national project designed to bring the party left and the social left together.

I think that to be able to put into practice these ideas it is necessary to advance in the creation of new forms of political expression, be it by the renewal of existing parties, which ought to be done wherever possible, be it by the creation of new political instruments.

'To politicize' is not to create parties but to transform those who suffer injustice and oppression into subjects who are resolved to participate in changing their situation. In the same way, to think of the need to build a political instrument or a political organization is not to think of the traditional formula for a left party.

Many of those who refuse to consider the necessity of possessing political instruments do so because they identify political instruments with the image that they have in their mind's eye of the antidemocratic, authoritarian, and bureaucratic single party which, with eminent reason, they reject. I believe that it is fundamental to overcome this subjective block because I am convinced, as I have said earlier, that there will not be an effective fight against the current dominant system, nor the construction of an alternative socialist society, without the existence of an entity able to bring together all the actors and to focus their will for action upon common goals.

4. A New Strategy that Facilitates Convergence

No matter how vitally important the convergence of the different sectors of the left may be, I do not believe that it is an objective that can be achieved in a voluntaristic way, by creating from above coalitions doomed in the end to being only the sum of various acronyms. It is necessary also to overcome the top-down relationship between the vanguard and the masses. I think, on the other hand, that if we evolve and put into practice a new strategy of anti-capitalist struggle, better conditions would be created for such coalition. But what would this strategy be like?

It would be a strategy which takes into account the important social, political, economic and cultural transformations that have taken place in the world recently, which takes into account the fact that the new forms of dominance evolved by the capitalist system go far beyond the economic and state arenas, and that they infiltrate all the interstices of society, changing the conditions of the struggle.

We have not only to see clearly the coercive power exercised by the state, its legislative and repressive activities, but also the mechanisms and institutions present in current civil society, and which generate popular acceptance of the capitalist social order. Propaganda is to bourgeois democracy what the night stick is to the totalitarian state.

Mere propaganda on behalf of an alternative society is not enough. The complexities of the current situation demand of the left that it practice what it preaches. It must develop alternatives to capitalist construction that break with the logic of profit and the relationships which the profit system imposes; it must try to install a logic of humanism and solidarity in the territories and spaces which it holds, and wherever it can, advance struggles that are not reducible to simple market demands. The goal must always be the development of an alternative, non-capitalist social project that fosters authentic degrees of power and of popular democracy that is tangibly superior to bourgeois democracy. The struggle for a new type of democracy should be from below, for those below.

Rather than offer a propagandistic utopia, introduced into the passive popular mind as an illuministic teaching without a concomitant guide to its construction, we propose the building of popular democratic initiatives in universities, local governments, rural communities, labor fronts and neighborhood fronts, which, by reflecting a different style of political practice, would tend to appeal to new sectors.

This new strategy, centered, if you will, on the development of a new rallying cry, would significantly foster the coming-together of party militants and social militants, in other words, the coming-together of all sections of the left. In order to militate, it is not necessary to adhere to a party, front or movement; one can militate simply by contributing to the project of alternative construction: for example, by involvement in the diverse participatory entities which comprise a local government committed to an urban project marked by humanism and solidarity; by participation, if a student, in a project aimed at the democratization of a student federation, by participation, if a peasant, in the construction of a home for squatters or a complex of homes according to a model which foreshadows the new society.

In conclusion, I am convinced that the best way to develop power today is by demonstrating in each of the many activities in which the left is involved, that another world is possible.