Marco Vanzulli
Someone says that Brussels is the capital of administration and bureaucracy, and not of politics. Of course, Europe is a geopolitical context in which, despite the presence of some common trends, every nation has a veryits own specific political situation of its own. Nevertheless, a consistent UEEU policy exists and influences European countries (see, for instance, recent Greecek history). Beyond the Brexit case, aAn opinion cleverly fueledfuelled by new populist and far-right movements all over Europe then presents Brussels policy as prejudicial to most of the European nations. This opinion is not groundless, but the limits of EU cannot bring to renewed nationalisms and closures.
European Lef movements should grow together, making a common judgement on the economic model enactedexpressed by EUUE institutions. A process like that had begun once; but now has stopped. The European Lef is generally defeated andor on the self-defensivce (even though there are very specificcertain countertrends, such as theLef government in Portugal or Corbyin’s Labour Party in the UK), more closed than ever in its national boundaries, having lost even the primacy of protest.
On one hand, Tthe social-democratic model seems to have exhausted its long trajectory. Generally speaking – but keeping especially, but not only, in mind the Italian case and its recent history –, this model was favoredfavoured by the due to economic growth (the so called “thirty glorious years”) and by transversal alliances withbetween political parties, and which did not sustained popular forces. European social-democratic parties became so trans-class political organizations. When, in the Ninetynineties, the economic trends generally changed, the European Lefs had lost connection with the living forces of labour and were since longtime no morelonger prepared to stand up for the working classes. They emulated the TINA ideological discourse of ‘TINA’.
On the other hand, Oon the lef of the Lef, other parties rose,; in some cases they hadhaving a significant impact on civil and political life., bBut considered from theas a general historical trend, they ended up sharing the same destinyfate of the main social-democratic parties. This happened because these lefist parties had the relevant flaw of maintaininged the central axis of their action on thethrough electoral competition, so . With this in mind, their first problempriority was to make electoral agreements. This is why they failed, wrongly imagining they could keep on using the old social-political forces of the past and the old forms of political representation. It was difficult for them Lef to change the habit of branding as workerism the movements that stayed on the side of labour. Society and its forces had changed.
New political associations arose, on the right, or claiming to belong to an indistinct zone beyond Lef and Right (anti-establishment movements in Mediterranean Europe), the pure citizenship sphere.
The so-called populist movement and parties have increasing consensus, but also electoral abstention has reached unprecedented levels. The point at stake, in the so-called post-democratic epoch, is representative democracy. AntiestablishmentAnti-establishment movements claim to themselves the credit offor having put at the center of the stage direct citizenship at centre stage as a new form of democracy.
If there is a lesson tohat we can learn from the fall of Lef in Europe it is that real socialist democracy is a democracy from below, and . It has to differentiate itself from the “direct democracy” claimed by antiestablishmentanti-establishment movements. A future for the Lef depends on the formations of new, autonomous movements from below, movements of auto-organizations. Beyond the antiestablishmentanti-establishment ideology of pure citizenship and homogeneous (trans-class) civil society, the Lef have to look fordevise and carry out a new activityies and reflection focusing on
labour exploitation and its conditions, on society class composition, onand the ability to connecting national and European class differences in a world order that relegates entire peoples and countries to the sidelinesside-lines. A task that only a real Lef can take upon itself.
