Prediction 3 – Social-Democracy Continues To Disintegrate
Its hard to think of how events could any more have validated this prediction, over the last year. In the US, the same collapse of social-democracy, seen across the globe, manifest in the failure of the Biden regime, which created the conditions for a return of the petty-bourgeois nationalist Trump, is the same failure seen, across Europe, and the developed economies in Asia and Latin America, in which popular frontism, designed solely to form electoral blocs against the election of petty-bourgeois nationalists, inevitably offers nothing to workers, and delivers even less. They simply prepare the ground for the future victory of the reactionaries.
By emphasising electoralism and the formation of purely passive, electoral pacts, this popular frontism inevitably subordinates the interests of workers to the lowest common denominator of the politics of those they seek to include in the alliance. Across the globe, therefore, we saw failed conservative, social-democratic parties and politicians seeking to mobilise the votes of workers behind them, solely on the basis of a moralistic politics of “the lesser-evil”, and pleas to vote for them, or be damned by the election of an even worse alternative.
As I set out during the year, we saw sections of the supposed “Left” including those that ludicrously continue to label themselves “Trotskyists”, even as they have openly become mouthpieces for western imperialism, adopt this same approach, demanding that socialists advocate a passive vote for conservative, social-democrats such as Harris, and who, inevitably, therefore, not only demobilise the working-class from the real struggle against the threat from the forces of authoritarianism and Bonapartism, a struggle that requires not passive voting, but active fighting unity of the class – i.e. a workers united front in action, not a passive popular front in the ballot – but, they also, inevitably dirty their own hands, and must accept the responsibility for the subsequent disappointment of all those workers they misled into such a doomed venture. No amount of hand-wringing or attempts to claim that the alternative would have been worse, or dishonest claims about electing such governments so that they could be put on the spot, can rinse their hands clean.
When the reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalist Trump, regime returned, therefore, the ground had not only been prepared for it by the failure of the conservative, social-democratic regime of Biden-Harris, but, as elsewhere, the more it had failed, the more it sought to keep itself in office, simply by borrowing the clothes of Trump, simply to try to steal some of his less reactionary voters. The same happened in France, in Britain, in Germany and elsewhere, setting in place an inexorable ratcheting to the Right. And, when Trump won, despite that – or more correctly because of it, as a stupid strategy, in even bourgeois electoral terms – the conservative social-democrats in the US, and their associates, elsewhere, have been left with no response to it, even an electoral or parliamentary response.
Of course, they never could have provided any more of a credible response, precisely because the material conditions upon which conservative social-democracy has rested for the last 40 years – or more correctly rested up to the crash of 2008 – no longer exist. They certainly were not going to provide any alternative, and effective response to the likes of Trump – or similarly to Farage/Musk/Yaxley-Lennon in Britain, or Le Pen in France etc. - by mobilising workers in action, as Trotsky advised in the 1930's, because that would have posed the danger for them that those workers would take matters into their own hands, as the dynamic of that unfolded, and they began to assert their own independent class interest, as Marx and Engels and later Trotsky and Lenin noted, i.e. a process of permanent revolution.
But, when they have lost even on their own bourgeois electoralist terms, they have no response either, not even a bourgeois-democratic, parliamentarist response, for the same reasons that they failed in the first place, when in government. Trump has continued to dismantle the basic tenets and institutions of US bourgeois democracy, such as it was. He has had no real need to resort to the tactics and strategy of fascism, simply because the forces of bourgeois-democracy themselves, in the US, had already been so weakened by the bourgeois-democrats themselves. The necessary connections between the parliamentary representatives of bourgeois-democracy, and the social forces that they rest upon has been continuously eroded over the last 50 years, creating the conditions for a mass society, of the type in which Bonapartists and authoritarians thrive.
The bourgeois-democratic politicians, swallowed their own illusions, about politics and democracy being all about election to office, by whatever means, selling your wares like a Mars Bar salesman. The delusion was that presented in various political dramas such as Borgen. The picture is presented most classically in Europe that class based politics has come to an end, but the reality is quite different. It is not that even in the realm of voting that the role of class has ended. It is not the working-class that has abandoned the traditional social-democratic ideas and parties, for example, but that the traditional social-democratic parties, having increasingly cut their ties to the social forces upon which they rest, have then, also, abandoned the social-democratic ideas themselves. Workers have not broken from the ideology of social-democracy, but have found it impossible to vote for parties whose only connection to it, has been a legacy, an empty label of what they once represented. The increasing votes for Greens, etc., is not an indication that class based voting has ended, but simply that it is asserting itself, demanding that appearance and reality be aligned.
