Like The 1930s In Slow Motion? By West Wales Chronicle’s Tim Evans

Like the 1930s in slow motion?

These are strange times to be living through. But the signs have been visible for a while. Marxist writer and revolutionary Tony Cliff commented some thirty years ago that:
“The 1990s are like the 1930s in slow motion.”

Looking back from 2018 we all know how that ended up, but fortunately for us, history never repeats itself exactly.

Nonetheless, as the philosopher George Santayana put it:
“Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat it.”

The rise of openly fascist movements across Europe and the USA is an alarm call, not just for the left, but for everybody. The economic crash of 2007-8, like that of 1929, and the austerity politics that followed it have plunged millions into poverty and despair. And two things are happening which are reminiscent of the 1930s: political polarisation, and the chilling scapegoating of a minority group. In the 30s it was the Jews. In the 21st century it’s Muslims.

By polarisation, I mean, in W.B.Yeats’s phrase:

“The centre cannot hold”. In Europe, the traditional parties both of left and right are in crisis. They are, in their embrace of the free market, more and more like each other anyhow. They have no answer to the problems facing working people except to screw down pressure ever harder on them. In this process, people can easily abandon the parties which they used to feel looked after their interests, and look for others. The others may be further right or further left.

It’s been the social democratic parties, European equivalents of the Labour Party in Britain, which have so far been most badly affected. I will look at the British Labour Party in next week’s column, as the dynamics of the changes here are different. Not least of which is the fact that, unlike in many other European social democratic parties, Labour’s membership has grown massively. In Greece, the equivalent of Labour, PASOK, which dominated Greek politics for decades, was unseated by the more left-wing Syriza.

Not only was it unseated, it went from being the largest party in the Greek parliament to being the smallest. Rapid collapses in support for social-democratic parties that pursued anti-working class policies have occurred in France, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Hungary and elsewhere.

In Greece, the left-wing Syriza initially benefited from PASOK’s collapse. Then after it, too, failed to resist the economic blackmail of the Troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund), its popularity also declined. The obvious danger is that, if the left does not deliver in Greece, then the far right will benefit.

The far right in this instance means openly fascist groups like Golden Dawn, which have coordinated attacks on immigrants and refugees, and who are known scarily enough, to have strong support among the Athens police.

In the USA, had the left-winger Bernie Sanders stood against Trump, instead of the Democrats putting up the warmonger Hillary Clinton, unpopular and tainted by several scandals, commentators now concede Sanders would probably have won.

Instead, we had the election of the vile Donald Trump, the only U.S. president who could make George Bush Jnr sound like Albert Einstein. Because of the bungling of the Democrat leadership, the revolt against establishment politicians broke to the right in the USA.

With Trump in the White House, white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan racists, Generation Identity fascist hipsters and far-right nut jobs of all descriptions were emboldened to go on the rampage. And on the rampage they went. Last year in Charlottesville, Virginia, they killed a young woman on a counter-protest against one of their armed marches as one of them drove a vehicle into the crowd, injuring dozens.

But it’s not all doom and gloom for the left in the US. The Black Lives Matter movement against police violence and injustice has grown rapidly, and, amazingly in a land where the McCarthyite witch hunts broke the socialist movement back in the 1950s, today members of the Democratic Socialists of America, until recently an almost unheard of group, have begun winning elections, most notably the 28 year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who won the Democratic primary against established Democrat bigwig Joe Crowley. In parts of North America, socialism is becoming popular again.
Next week, I’ll look at what’s happening in Britain.