How Rulers Rule: Three Types of Regime

Political regimes keep themselves in power by one of three methods: repression, wining the propaganda war against their opponents or by having no serious opponents.

States have repressive and ideological mechanisms at their disposal, all of which serve to put the brakes on radical social change. Indeed, given the massive discrepancies of income, wealth, status and power within all societies - and assuming people not to be inherently masochistic - one can assume radical distributional change would occur, if it were not for these mechanism of control that hold back both revolution and radical reform. In the last hundred years or so, the main threat to the ruling elites in capitalist countries was the demand for some form of socialist society, and indeed socialist writers used up an enormous amount of ink attempting to fathom out how socialism could come about. While socialism was by far the most powerful challenge both politically and ideologically to capitalist rule, opposition has also come from various forms of fascism and, more recently, from fundamentalist Islam.

In the developed world only two types of regime have existed until now: one is the capitalist system, often but not always, operating in a democratic or semi-democratic polity. The other was the rule of communist parties in Europe, Asia and a few other outposts; historical communism constituted a significant global force during what Eric Hobsbawm called the short century 1917-89. Under both capitalism and state socialism, however, there has always been a strata or class of people who possessed disproportionate wealth and power, though inequality was greatest in capitalist countries, most of which most of the time were, ironically, democracies.

Much traditional Marxist writing has sought to identify and clarify the capitalist state per se. While such an approach is not incorrect, I think it fails to capture what can be seen as three specific forms of elite rule and state formation over the last century or so.

The first is repressive rule through the authoritarian state. The elites maintain their rule by using the military and police to restrict civic rights (freedom of speech, assembly, etc) and these regimes either have no elections or else corrupt the electoral process. We can assume that the majority of the people, if they had the choice, would vote the existing political elite out of office and vote in politicians who would attempt to bring about fundamental regime change. Regimes of this kind have been present in Europe: fascist Germany and Italy until the end of the end of the Second World War, or Spain, Portugal and Greece until the 1970s are examples. All the former communist countries had political regimes of this type.

The second is ideological rule, which historically has only occurred in capitalist countries. All of these regimes have had a large measure of civil liberty and competitive elections, though of course behind the state there is still a repressive arm. The ruling elites maintain their privileges in several ways. First, they are able to convince the majority of people that they are better rulers than the leaders of left wing parties, a goal which is achieved though their dominance in the media and often by means of approving concessions, such as social welfare. Second, the leaders of left-wing parties are co-opted into the political elite and/or end up compromising their social democratic goals to acquire or keep office. Third, the power of capital as a ‘pressure group’ is so huge it can usually force left-wing governments to compromise. In Western Europe until recently this has been the pattern of politics: political elites seeing off, co-opting or compromising moderate social democracy. In every case the majority of people have been convinced not to back parties seriously contemplating radical social change.

The third is post-ideological rule. In western Europe the long-term trend in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century was for the left to grow in strength and for ideological rule to replace repressive rule. However since the 1980s, and after 1989 in particular, the left – social democratic, communist, or liberal – has collapsed as a political force. The reasons for this are several, but the result is to create a society where capitalist power, and the groups which benefit from it, face no serious organised challenge at all. Working people shun politics altogether. Everyone who suffers economically individualises his or her pain; they filter their alienation through music, drugs and on-line virtual contacts. Community and shared meaning evaporate and are replaced with cults, mysticism or sheer isolation. Logic, argument and intellectual debate disappear in favour of the soundbite or the fatuous. Political competition in democracies comes more and more to focus on spin and trivia (e.g. bald leaders are never elected, etc) as the fundamental assumption of the system are increasingly unquestioned.

Of course this trichotomy is only a rough and ready one. Particular states at particular times are likely to combine elements from all three ideal types. The model is problematic in dealing with situations where ‘ideological rule’ is maintained by and within one ethnic group while another faces a repressive rule; e.g. Palestinians in Israel, or indeed the social underclass in the US or Britain today. Nonetheless I believe the trichotomy is very clear in describing the overall political model in Western Europe as regards the movement from ‘repressive’ to ‘ideological’ and then to ‘post-ideological’ rule.

The trichotomy can be clarified by mean of a joke. The devil is showing a newcomer around Hell. In the first room there are a group of people sitting in a barrel of shit. The man asks, ‘Why don’t they get out?’ ‘Ah,’ says the devil, ‘they can’t because there is a soldier there with a gun waiting to shoot anyone who tries.’ They go into the second room where there are another group sitting in a barrel of shit. The man notices, though, that the soldier is asleep, so he asks ‘why don’t they get out?’ ‘Well,’ says the devil, ‘look, there’s a TV screen telling them how nice and warm it is in barrel compared with outside.’ They go into a third room and the man again sees a group of people sitting in a barrel of shit, once again the soldier is asleep, but this time the TV is just showing pop videos. ‘So why don’t they get out?’ asks the man. ‘Well,’ says the devil, ‘they’re busy watching the videos and they don’t know that there’s life outside the barrel.’

Post-ideological rule came into full bloom in the mid 2000s both in Europe and North America. It was reinforced by the myth of eternal economic growth financed on credit; a boom in which all but the poorest would find fulfilment in ever-expanding private consumption. Yet, the economic base of that society shattered in the financial crisis which exploded in the autumn of 2008, leading to soaring unemployment, bankruptcy and economic despair. One feels writing today (July 2009) that the car has gone over the cliff, but not yet hit the rocks. We are seeing the end of a political era without being able to find the birth of a new one. The whole society remains limp in inactive anticipation. Politically not much has happened, even if fascist parties have won some electoral backing across Europe. We are in phoney war where the post-ideological model, in it present form at any rate, has come to an end but failed to disappear.


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The German Left Party - a model for elsewhere?

This short article was prompted by two facts: first, the near disappearance of the socialist left in Britain; and second, the emergence and electoral growth of the socialist left in Germany.

The credit crisis which hit the advanced capitalist economies in the autumn of 2008 destroyed at a stroke the key tenet of the market fundamentalism which had held sway over ruling economic thought in the last three decades. Suddenly gone was the notion that markets were self-regulating. In both the US and Britain, the leading proponents of unbridled capitalism, government opened the public purse and poured public money into private banks to prevent financial collapse.

The financial crisis could have provided opportunities for the left, but decades of ideological assault on socialism and social democracy across Europe had utterly disabled the left as a political force. Social democracy (e.g. New Labour in Britain, SPD in Germany and the PS in France) had aligned itself to neo-economic liberalism to such a degree that these parties were identified in their policies and in the public mind with market fundamentalism, rather than the reform or abolition of it. And across most of Europe forces to the left of these once social democratic parties were weak or non-existent.

In Britain for instance the extreme weakness of the left was revealed in the June 2009 Euro-Elections. New Labour (scarcely in any meaningful sense left-wing) slumped to a historic low with under 16% of the vote. The two left-of-Labour parties (Socialist Labour Party, and the ad hoc No2EU) scraped up around 1% each. The Greens achieved a healthier 9%, but the parties to the right of the Tories did well: UKIP 17% and the fascist BNP 6%. The British political landscape is bleak: there is next no left-wing political force in Britain while right-wing parties are advancing.

The major European country in which a party to the left of social democracy not only exists but is advancing is Germany. In the September 2009 national elections a coalition of the centre-right Christian parties and the free market FDP managed to scrape into office by a narrow 49/46 margin over the left. (In Europe in the late 2000s a 46 percent combined vote for social democrats, socialists and Greens is a good result.) Yet it is the constitution of the Germany’s left vote which is interesting: the rounded up percentages are: SPD 23 (down from 34 in 2005), Die Linke 12 (up from 9), Greens 11 (up from 8). Compared with the previous 2005 elections, the SPD was down massively (Cf. New Labour in Britain), the Greens were up, but the biggest advance was made by Die Linke, a party firmly to the left of the SPD. Though now firmly an all-German party, the roots of Die Linke lie in the East.

The collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1989 allowed a strong hitherto suppressed democratic left to come to fore and take control of East Germany’s former ruling communist party (SED), They got rid of the former leadership, changed its policies to progressive socialist ones, and rebranded the party as the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism).

In the first all-German Bundestag elections in 1990, the PDS won only 2.4% of the nationwide vote, but because the 5% electoral threshold for this election was not applied across the whole united country, but separately in the East and West, the PDS entered the Bundestag with 17 deputies. In the 1994 election, in spite of an aggressive campaign organised against the party by the then-ruling Christian Democrats, the PDS managed to increase its share to 4.4 percent, winning four single member constituencies (winning three such seats is an alternative to surpassing the 5%), and re-entered the Bundestag with an enlarged caucus of 30 deputies. In 1998, the party secured 37 deputies with 5.1% of the national vote, thus surpassing the 5% threshold required for guaranteed representation and full parliamentary status in the Bundestag.

However in 2000, the resignation of Gregor Gysi, the intellectual and charismatic leader of the PDS, after losing a policy debate with leftist factions brought disaster. In the 2002 national elections, the party's share of the vote declined to 4.0%. For the next four years, the PDS was represented in the Bundestag by only two deputies elected directly from their single member constituencies in Eastern Berlin, Petra Pau and Gesine Lötzsch.

After the 2002 debacle, the PDS adopted a new programme and re-elected long-time Gysi ally, Lothar Bisky, as chairman. In the 2004 elections to the European Parliament, the PDS won 6.1% of the vote nationwide, its highest share to date in a federal election. Its electoral base in the eastern German states continued to grow, making it, with the CDU and SPD, one of the big three in the eastern states. However, low membership and voter support in Germany's western states continued to plague the party until 2005.

Gerhard Schroeder’s Red/Green government (1998-2005), particularly after the 2002 election, decided to deal with Germany’s economic difficulties by adopting market fundamentalist policies which heavily disadvantaged working people and alienated socialist support. In early 2005 the WASG (Arbeit und soziale Gerechtigkeit – Die Wahlalternative,) was formed by left-wing trade unionists and disillusioned social democratic politicians, most prominent among them was left-wing former SPD Chairman and finance minister, Oskar Lafontaine. The immediate focus of the group was to contest from the left the election in Germany’s biggest state, North Rhine Westphalia. In the early national election of 2005, an electoral alliance was formed between WASG and the PDS, which won 8.7% of the national vote. In 2007 the two parties formally merged.

The new Left Party, Die Linke, thus achieved a base in the western federal states; it surpassed the 5% threshold and entered several state parliaments: Hamburg, Bremen, Lower Saxony, Hesse, Saarland, Schleswig Holstein. The party is also represented in European Parliament and in many municipalities.

The programme of the Left Party emphasises social solidarity though extensive public investment across the economy, greater self-determination for workers, redistribution of wealth through different means including tax increases for corporations, big businesses and wealthy individuals, the rejection of privatisation and the introduction of a minimum wage. The party also promotes feminist policies.

Concerning foreign policy, Die Linke welcomes the European process of integration, while opposing all forms of militarism; it opposes the market-oriented policies of the European Union. The party strives for the democratisation of the EU institutions and a stronger role of the United Nations in international politics. It opposes the war in Afghanistan.

In its internal politics the party is far from monolithic having a number of internal caucuses, most often referred to as platforms or forums. These include:

Antikapitalistische Linke, (The Anti-capitalist Left) which represents those critical of participation in coalition governments. They believe that government participation should be dependent on a set of minimum criteria (including no privatisations, no war involvement, and no cuts in social welfare spending).

Sozialistische Linke, (The Socialist Left) includes Keynesian economics-leftists and reform communists. The group seeks to orient the party toward the labour movement. Many leaders of the Socialist Left were former members of the WASG.

Emanzipatorische Linke, (The Emancipatory Left) is a current that endorses libertarian socialist principles. It backs a decentralised society and supports progressive social movements.

Netzwerk Reformlinke, (The Reform Left Network) promotes social democratic positions and supports cooperation with the SPD and the Greens. A prominent member of the network is the long serving Bundestag deputy, Petra Pau.

Kommunistische Plattform, (Communist Platform) was originally formed as a tendency of the PDS. It is less critical of German Democratic Republic than other groupings, and it upholds orthodox Marxist positions. A "strategic goal" of the KPF is "building a new socialist society, using the positive experiences of real socialism and to learn from mistakes" The Platform had around 850 members in 2007, around 1% of the party's national membership.

CONCLUSION

The success of the Left Party in Germany is the result of a combination of five factors which are not present in Britain – or indeed in other European states. First, the inheritance of a Stalinist party structure from the German Democratic Republic; second a movement within East German communism, which wanted to move towards progressive and democratic socialism and which did so after 1989. Third, in the West the willingness of the trade unionist and left wing social democrats to break with the SPD. Fourth a willingness of socialists from different backgrounds to work together in a single party, and finally the Left Party possessing two talented politicians: Grygor Gysi and Oskar Lafontaine.

Historically the aspirations of the left in Britain were channelled into the reform of the Labour Party. The party, however, was taken over by New Labour in the mid-90s and no longer functions as an instrument of progressive, let alone social democratic or socialist, politics. New Labour is devoid of both activists and internal democracy; at the top its MPs and leadership have long accommodated themselves to market fundamentalism and state authoritarianism. Socialists must either capitulate or else try to build a new socialist party. British socialists cannot, nor should they try to, build a carbon copy of Die Linke, but just as British socialists had much to learn from Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century, so, I believe, they have again at the beginning of the twenty-first. The stakes are high: in 2009 in most of Europe the centre right and far right did well. If the Left cannot offer the working class an alternative to the failed market fundamentalism, the right moves in.

The End of New Labour in Britain

Tony Blair’s greatest mark on history - aside from the stain of Iraq - was in twisting Britain’s historical Labour Party into New Labour. This glitzy top-down and supposedly ‘post-political’ political party was able with 43 percent of the vote to sweep the Tories out of office in 1997 and end eighteen years of Tory rule. And yet again in 2001with the same share of the vote, Blair’s triumph was repeated. Though the promotional image of New Labour differed from that of the Conservatives giving an illusion of difference, Blair’s politics in socio-economic matters at any rate were very much Thatcherism under new management. Ideologically anchored only in waffle about ‘third ways’ and nebulous concepts such as ‘responsibility,’ the electoral coalition which sustained New Labour was always precarious. In the 2005 election Blair secured a mere 35 percent of the national vote – and fewer votes than the Tories in England, - but was returned to office thanks only to Britain’s majoritarian electoral system. No post-war British government has ever been returned with less support.

By the early summer of 2008 New Labour was in tatters chalking up only 23 percent in opinion polls. The collapse can best be probed by looking at the two electoral groups that coalesced to propel Blair into office in 1997: Middle England and the mainstream working class.

Middle England

Middle England is a politically defined social group which comprises skilled and better paid manual workers, the self employed and middle-rank white-collar workers across the small towns and countryside of southern England and the Midlands. Between 1979 and 1992 this group was won over to the Thatcherite project. Two key factors explain its shift to New Labour in 1997, and its subsequent return to the Tory fold in the late 2000s.

The first is economics. The recession of the early 1990s culminating in the Black Wednesday debacle was attributed to Tory economic mismanagement, just as today the collapse in the housing market, the onset of recession and the surge in utility, fuel and food inflation is laid at new Labour’s door.

The second is image. The defeat of the Major government in 1997 was also the result of a shift in values and identification. New Labour emptied itself of ‘workerist’ imagery; the ex-public schoolboy Blair symbolised urbane bourgeois values, which were also manifest in such men of the age as Peter Mandelson. Imagery of this kind proved more attractive to Middle England than did the petty-minded nastiness of high Thatcherite Toryism symbolised in men like Norman Tebbit. Yet after Blair’s resignation in 2007, new Conservatives leaders such as David Cameron and Boris Johnson came to represent those urbane bourgeois values better than does Gordon Brown, Blair’s grey former deputy. (Much of motivation behind the move to replace Brown by David Miliband over the summer is the latter’s public image as a suave bourgeois.)

Middle England is thus extremely fickle in its political identification. Both the Conservatives and New Labour fight for this group which is the determining constituent in Britain’s first past the post elections. For Middle England, unlike the mainstream working class, it makes little difference to their economic interests which party runs British capitalism; hence the capriciousness of their voting preferences.

The mainstream working class

The core of the Labour voting working class is centred on the low paid particularly in the large cities, the older industrial areas of northern England, and in the Celtic countries of Scotland and Wales. Whereas Middle England is returning to the Conservatives, the working class vote is fragmenting over a wider spectrum.

With New Labour having designed itself to woo Middle England, the working class lost historic Labourism as its electoral home. In the economic upswing which lasted till the mid 2000s, a combination of apathy and voting New Labour prevailed. However, Brown’s bungled attempt at the beginning of the current recession to endear himself to Middle England through increasing tax on the very low paid to fund tax cuts for the better off raised the fundamental question in the working class: what is Labour for? That question was posed even more sharply in the late summer with double-digit increases in utility charges coupled with food inflation exceeding eight percent. Suddenly and obviously, the working class became poorer both in absolute and relative terms. Imposing a two percent pay ceiling on public workers has further rubbed salt into the wounds.

Such disorientation has led to a flight from Labour particularly within the white working class. In England and Wales the local elections in May 2008 and the Crew by-election saw, in addition to a move to the Conservatives, a small but growing attachment in certain localities (e.g. London, Stoke) to the fascism of the BNP. In places which were historically more solidly Labour (e.g. Sheffield) the Liberal Democrats have been the main beneficiaries. In Scotland New Labour’s collapse was even more dramatic with the SNP capturing Labour’s third safest seat Glasgow East in a by-election in July.

Conclusion

Blair’s New Labour was founded on replacing policy with spin, on portraying neo-economic liberalism as ‘cool’ and everybody’s friend and on believing you could win and win again by outflanking the Tories. With a long upswing in the trade cycle ‘Teflon Tony’ oiled his way though two general elections, and even after the Iraq war lies he scraped through in 2005. But now devoid of purpose and support the Labour Party stands at the precipice of electoral disaster. Everywhere, except perhaps in Scotland, the collapse of New Labour has led to a shift in electoral support rightwards. This is indeed the tragedy of the age.