The future of the left is no more difficult to predict than any other social fact.
By Boaventura de Sousa Santos
The future of
the left is no more difficult to predict than any other social fact. The best
way to address it is by way of what I term the sociology of emergences, which
consists in paying special attention to signs from the present that can be read
as trends or the harbinger of whatever will be decisive in the future.
Image Attribute: Arshile Gorky's Abstract Art
At present I
propose to draw special attention to a fact that, given its uncommon nature,
could portend something new and important. I allude to recent pacts signed by
various parties on the left.
The Pacts
Pacts do not
have a strong tradition in the “left family”. Historically some branches of the
family have established more pacts with the right than with other family
members. Judging from their persistence over the last two hundred years, one
might say that the differences within the left are part of its DNA. For obvious
reasons, those differences have been either more pronounced or more noticeable
in democracy. Sometimes the polarisation is such that one branch of the family
does not even acknowledge the other branch as part of the same family.
Conversely, in times of dictatorship such agreements are a lot more common,
although they tend to end as soon as the dictatorship comes to an end. In light
of this history, it is worth reflecting on the fact that of late we have
witnessed a pactist movement on the part of various branches of the left in
democratic countries. Southern Europe is the perfect illustration of what I’m
referring to: see the unity around Syriza in Greece, all vicissitudes and
difficulties notwithstanding; Portugal’s new government formed in the aftermath
of the 4 October elections in 2015, under the leadership of the Socialist Party
and supported by the Communist Party and the Left Bloc; a number of autonomous
governments resulting from the 2015 elections in Spain, and, at the time of
writing, the discussion of the possibility of a nationwide pact between the
Socialist Party, Podemos and other left- wing parties in the wake of the
Spanish parliamentary elections of 6 December 2015. There are signs that
similar pacts could come into being in the near future in other parts of Europe
and Latin America. Two questions are in order. How do we account for this
pactist drive in a democratic context? How sustainable is it?
There is a
plausible answer to the first question. As far as Southern Europe is concerned,
the aggressiveness of the ruling right (both the domestic right and the one in
“European institutions” trappings) in these last five years was so devastating
to citizenship rights and to the credibility of the democratic regime that the
forces on the left are now becoming convinced that the new dictatorships of the
twenty-first century will come as very low-intensity democracies. In fact,
these dictatorships will take the shape of political hybrids of
democracy/dictatorship — i.e., governability in the alleged imminence of chaos
in these “difficult times” of ours; or the technical outcome of market
imperatives and of the crisis that explains everything while seeming to need no
explanation itself. The pact is the result of a political reading that says
that what is at stake is the very survival of a democracy worthy of the name,
and that the differences about what this means are now less pressing than to
salvage that which the right has not yet been able to destroy.
The second
question is harder to answer. According to Spinoza, people (and I should add,
societies as well) are governed by two basic emotions: fear and hope. There is
a complex balance between the two, but we need them both if we wish to survive.
Fear is the dominant emotion when one’s expectations about the future are
negative (“this is bad, but the future could be worse”); in turn, hope has the
upper hand when future expectations are positive or, in any event, when refusal
of the alleged inevitability of negative expectations is widely shared. Thirty
years after the global assault on workers’ rights; after all the proclamations
of social inequality and egotism as the ultimate social virtues; after the
unprecedented plunder of natural resources and the expulsion of whole
populations from their land, as well as the environmental destruction caused by
it; after the fostering of war and terrorism to create failed states and make
societies defenseless in the face of spoliation; after the more or less
negotiated imposition of free trade agreements that are entirely controlled by
the interests of multinational companies; after the absolute supremacy of
finance capital over productive capital and the lives of peoples and
communities — after all this, in combination with the hypocritical defense of
liberal democracy, it is plausible to conclude that neoliberalism is a huge
machine for producing negative expectations aimed at keeping the popular
classes from finding out about the true reasons for their suffering and thus
make them not only conform with what little they still have but also remain
paralysed by the fear of losing even that.
The pactist
movement currently under way within the lefts is the product of a time — our
time — marked by the absolute predominance of fear over hope. Does this mean
that the governments resulting from the pacts will be victims of their own
success? The success of the governments derived from agreements on the part of
the left will lead to less fear and to a little more hope being restored to the
popular classes, as it will prove, through pragmatic and intelligent
government, that the right to have rights is an irreversible civilisational
achievement. Can it be that just when there is a new glimmer of hope,
disagreement will resurface and the pacts will be thrown overboard? Were that
to happen, it would be fatal to the popular classes, who will promptly return
to their muted hopelessness in the face of cruel fatalism, a fatalism,
moreover, that is as violent for the vast majorities as it is generous to the
tiny minorities. But that would also be fatal to the lefts as a whole, because
for decades to come it would show that the lefts are good at mending the past
but not at building the future. To prevent that from happening, two types of
measures will have to be taken while the pacts are in force. The two measures I
speak of are not dictated by the urgency of everyday government, but rather
must emanate from a sharply focused political will. I term these two measures
“Constitution” and “hegemony”.
Constitution and
Hegemony
The Constitution
is the set of constitutional or sub-constitutional reforms for restructuring
the political system and the institutions in order to prepare them for any
confrontations with the hybrid democracy/dictatorship and with the very
low-intensity type of democracy it entails. The reforms and the mechanisms to
attain them will vary from one country to another. Thus while in some cases it
is possible to reform the Constitution on the basis of existing parliaments, in
others it will be necessary to convene new Constituent Assemblies, as
parliaments would eventually prove the most serious barrier to constitutional
reform. It may also happen that, in a given context, “reform” is the most
important active defence of the existing Constitution, exerted through a
renewed constitutional pedagogy in all areas of government. But all reforms
should share one common concern: to make the electoral system both more
representative and more transparent; to strengthen representative democracy
through participatory democracy. The most influential liberal theoreticians of
representative democracy have recognised (and recommended) the ambiguous
coexistence of two (contradictory) ideas for ensuring democratic stability: on
the one hand the belief, on the part of citizens, in their own capacity
and competence to actively intervene and participate in politics; on the other
hand, a passive exercise of this competence and capacity through trust in the
ruling elites. In recent times — as shown by the protests that shook so many
countries after 2011 — trust in the elites has been undermined, even if the
political system (either by design or through its own practice) has not allowed
citizens to regain the capacity and competence to actively intervene and
participate in political life. Biased electoral systems, partidocracia,
corruption, manipulated financial crises — these are some of the reasons for
the double crisis of representation (“they do not represent us“) and
participation (“it is not worth voting, they are all the same and no one ever
delivers on their promises”). The constitutional reforms have two separate
objectives: to make representative democracy more representative, and to
supplement representative democracy with participatory democracy. As a result
of such reforms, the definition of the political agenda and the control over
public policy performance cease to be a monopoly of the political parties and
begin to be shared by the parties and by independent citizens who organise
democratically for that purpose.
The second set
of reforms is what I term hegemony. Hegemony is the set of ideas about society
as well as interpretations of the world and life that, by reason of being
widely shared — including by those very social groups who are harmed by them —,
make it possible for political elites, through their use of such ideas and
interpretations, to rule by consensus rather than by coercion, even when their
rule goes against the objective interests of majority social groups. The idea
that the poor happen to be poor through their own fault is a hegemonic idea
whenever it is advocated not just by the rich but also by the poor and the
popular classes in general. When that happens, the political costs of the
measures for abolishing or drastically reducing income support allowance, for
example, are lower. The struggle for the hegemony of the ideas of society
underlying the pact established by the lefts is crucial to the survival and
consistency of the pact. The struggle in question is being waged both in formal
education and in the promotion of popular education, in the media and in the
support to the alternative media, in scientific research and in the changes to
the university curriculum, in the social networks and in cultural activities,
in social movements and organisations, and in public as well as published
opinion. That struggle leads to new meanings and to criteria for assessing
social life and political action (to expose the immorality inherent in
privilege, in the concentration of wealth, and in racial and sexual
discrimination; to promote solidarity, the common goods, as well as
cultural, social and economic diversity; to uphold sovereignty and the
coherence of political alliances; to protect nature) that curtail the chances
of a counter-reform on the part of the reactionary branches of the right,
surely the first to sprout in the pact’s first moment of weakness. For the
struggle to succeed one has to press for policies that may seem less urgent and
rewarding to the naked eye. If that fails to happen, hope shall not outlive
fear.
Global Lessons
If there is one
thing that can be said with a degree of certainty about the difficulties
currently experienced by the progressive forces in Latin America, it is that
those difficulties stem from the fact that their governments have tackled
neither the Constitution issue nor the hegemony issue. This fact is especially
striking in the case of Brazil. To a certain extent, it explains why the huge
social progress achieved by the governments of the Lula era are now being
easily reduced to nothing but populist, opportunistic schemes, including by
those who benefited from it. It also explains why many of the mistakes made
during that time (there were many such mistakes, starting with the shelving of
political reform measures and media regulation, which left open wounds among
such important and diverse social groups as peasants deprived of land and land
reform, young blacks being victims of racist police brutality, indigenous
peoples illegally expelled from their ancestral territories, indigenous peoples
and quilombolos whose reservations remain shelved long after being formally
approved, whole sections under militarized rule in the peripheries of big
cities, rural populations poisoned by pesticides, etc.) not only are not seen
as mistakes but actually go unnoticed and are even turned into political
virtues, or at least accepted as the inevitable outcome of realist,
developmental governance. Those two unfulfilled tasks, the Constitution and
hegemony, also help explain why the condemnation of capitalism by left-wing
governments tends to focus on corruption, and therefore on the immorality and
illegality of capitalism, rather than on the systematic injustice of a system
of domination that is perfectly capable of functioning in strict adherence to
capitalism’s legality and morality.
An analysis of
the consequences of not addressing the issues of the Constitution and hegemony
is in order if one is to predict and prevent what lies ahead in the coming
decades, not only in Latin America but also in Europe and other world regions.
A number of important channels of communication still awaiting to be analysed
in all their multiple dimensions have been established over the last
twenty years between the lefts of Latin America and Southern Europe. Since the
start of Porto Alegre’s participatory budget in 1989, several left-wing parties
and organisations in Europe, Canada and India (that I know of) began to pay
great attention to the political innovations originating in the left in various
countries of Latin America. Since the late 1990s and with the upsurge of social
struggles, the rise to power of progressive governments and the struggles for
the establishment of Constituent Assemblies, particularly in Ecuador and Bolivia,
it became clear that a profound renewal of the left was underway, from which
much was to be learned. The renovation was characterized by the following main
traits: a mutually reinforcing combination of participatory democracy and
representative democracy; the eminent role played by the social movements, as
eloquently illustrated by the 2001 World Social Forum; a whole new relationship
between parties and social movements; the bursting onto the political scene of
social groups hitherto regarded as residual, namely the landless peasants, the
indigenous peoples, and the Afro-descendant populations; the celebration of
cultural diversity, the acknowledgment of the plurinational nature of countries
and the determination to stand up against the insidious, ever-present colonial
legacies. The above list should suffice to show the extent to which the two
struggles I have been referring to (the Constitution and hegemony) were a
factor in this vast movement that appeared forever to re-found both the
thinking and practice of the left, not just in Latin America but in the world
at large.
The financial
and political crisis — especially after 2011 — and the indignados movement were
the triggers for new, left-wing political emergences in Southern Europe, in
which the lessons from Latin America were very much present. That was
especially the case with regard to the new party-movement relationship, the new
connection between representative democracy and participatory democracy,
constitutional reform and, in the Spanish case, the issue of plurinationality.
More than any other party, Spain’s Podemos is the embodyment of this lesson,
although all along its leaders have been well aware of the substantial
differences between the political and geopolitical contexts of Europe and Latin
America.
There is no way
of knowing what shape the new political cycle that is now emerging in Southern
Europe will take, but this much we can speculate at this point: While it is
true that the European lefts have learned from the many innovations of the
Latin American lefts, it is no less true (and tragic) that the latter have
“forgotten” about their own innovations and thus somehow fallen into the
traps of the old politics-as- usual, where, given their long-accumulated
experience, right-wing forces have no difficulty in displaying their
superiority.
If the lines of
communication remain in operation these days, perhaps it is time — always with
due regard to existing differences — for the Latin American lefts to learn from
the innovations now emerging among the lefts of Southern Europe, of which I
would single out the following: The need to keep participatory democracy alive
within the left-wing parties themselves as a precondition for its adoption by
the national political system, in close connection with representative
democracy; pacts between the forces (not necessarily parties alone) on the
left, but never with those on the right; pragmatic pacts that are neither
clientelistic (where government policies and measures, rather than individual
names and cabinet posts, are discussed) nor surrendering pacts (where
uncrossable red lines have to be balanced with the notion of priorities — i.e.,
where you have to tell primary from secondary struggles, as one used to say); a
greater emphasis on constitutional reform so as to shield social rights and
bring more transparency to the political system as well as bring the system
closer to citizens and make it more dependent on their decisions without having
to wait for new elections every four years (a strengthening of the referendum);
and, in the Spanish case, to address the issue of plurinationality in a
democratic manner.
Neoliberalism’s
deadly machine keeps on producing fear on a massive scale. And whenever it runs
short of raw materials, it hacks off whatever hope it can find in the innermost
recesses of the popular classes’ political and social life, grinding it,
processing it and turning it into fear of fear. The lefts are the grain of sand
that alone can stop these gigantic wheels, making space for the sociology of
emergences to do its work of formulating and amplifying the trends, the “not
yets” that portend a decent future for the vast majorities of people. It is
therefore imperative that the lefts know how to feel fear, but not fear of
fear. It is imperative that they know how to poach seeds of hope from the
neoliberal grind and plant them in fertile soil where more and more citizens
feel that they can live well, protected both from the hell of impending chaos
and the sirenic heaven of obsessive consumption. The basic precondition for
that to happen is that the lefts remain steadfast in their two crucial
struggles, the Constitution and hegemony.
About The Author:
Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University
of Coimbra (Portugal), Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison Law School and Global Legal Scholar at the University of
Warwick.
Publication Details:
This article was originally published at Critical
Legal Thinking under Creative Commons License 4.0
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