ANTI-NEOLIBERAL COUNTER REACTIONS

This history is a reminder that there is an old pattern to these shaky modern times. In the 21st century, counter reactions to globalisation have also been taking radically different forms. Early in the century, Latin America’s leftist governments challenged the neoliberal order, rejecting the Washington Consensus and building regional solidarity.

Then, there were the Arab Spring uprisings of 2010 to 2013, which sought to deepen democracy in a region long dominated by dictators.

The former was crushed and the latter has largely waned. But the innovative ideas developed in the anti-austerity protests of Iceland Greece, Spain and Portugal following the start of the European debt crisis in 2009 are still very much alive.

What has everyone talking are developments on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum: Brexit, Trump, the extreme right, Islamic fundamentalism— neoliberal backlashes offering new solutions for global elites hoping to preserve their privileges in a turbulent international economy. It is early yet for an in-depth analysis of the current regressive phenomenon. But we can at least start asking the right questions.

First, did economic discontent really fuel the rise of the modern right, as many claim? Data from the UK and the US indicate exactly the opposite. Not only—not even mainly—blue collar workers supported Brexit and Donald Trump; the rich and the educated did too.

But it is misleading to blame the resentment of the declining middle class for the state of Western politics today.

Money played a crucial role in right-wing victories in the US. Big business and wellfunded think tanks, including the tobacco lobby and the billionaire Koch brothers, have funded the US Tea Party for years, and starting in 2015, they richly backed Trump.

To mobilise the traditional conservative base of the Republican Party, cash was injected into media blitzes that spread

IN TIMES OF ECONOMIC CRISIS, LEFT-WING ADVANCES HAVE BEEN MET WITH A POWERFUL, WELLFUNDED RESISTANCE

simple messages, often lies, appealing to American fear.

Money is not the whole story, but it is an important part of it and it has historic resonance. During Europe’s fascist and Nazi movements, regressive counter movements feigned solidarity with the 99 per cent while clearly enjoying the support of the 1 per cent. The market’s positive response to Trump’s victory may be a clear indication that this is happening again.

So far, the new regressive movements are adopting very different forms to their left-wing recent predecessors in Latin America and Europe. They diverge not only ideologically—with cosmopolitanism on the one side and xenophobia on the other—but also in their organisational models.

On the right, politics today is characterised by strong, personalised leadership: Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump being prime examples. Recent progressive antineoliberal movements, on the other hand, have been mostly been defined by citizen participation. There’s no evidence (yet) that regressive movements are necessarily more successful than their progressive counterparts. Rather, in times of economic crisis, left-wing advances such as workers’ rights have been met with a powerful, wellfunded resistance. The near-constant protests of Trump, Erdogan or Orban confirm progressive counter-reactions are very much alive indeed. But they seem unlikely to put regressive movements out of business any time soon.

ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK

The mainstream progressive response to this reactionary challenge has been, primarily, nostalgia for Keynesian economics: increase public spending to stimulate the economy, boost demand and create employment, redistribute wealth to grow the economy, among other things.

That’s a bad alternative. Keynes is dead and he’s not coming back. Everything about his era—from the post-second world war international relations system of Bretton Woods and the Soviet threat to the fast clip of economic expansion back then—is unthinkable today.

Only in a few places has the popular response to the failure of the selfregulating free-market been to push for greater freedom and deeper democracy, rather than to retrench or reminisce.

In addition to a timid normalisation of such activism around basic rights such as housing, a universal basic income, cooperativism and feminism, we have Portugal’s left-wing ruling coalition, Podemos in Spain and the Syriza government in Greece. Today, it is evident that Greece is not the European Union’s burden to bear but rather part of its salvation. Syriza has proposed an alternative to European financial metastasis by reclaiming fiscal sovereignty, battening down the markets, focusing on democratisation, and seeking continent-wide social solidarity. It’s noteworthy that virtually all rights-based anti-neoliberalism has come from peripheral or semi-peripheral nations: first Latin America a decade ago, and now southern Europe. All of them have faced fierce opposition from the rich West.

It may be time to start thinking about the Global South not as a problem but as a solution to the great regression.