As the European Parliament elections loom, with the populists rising, progressives need a liberal-left narrative.
Socialist and social-democratic politics have had a hard time for decades. At their peak in the late 1980s, alone or in coalition with others they governed 12 of the then 15 European Union member states. The situation nowadays is very different and in the coming elections to the European Parliament populist and right-wing parties are, according to the polls, going to be the winners.
It is thus worth rethinking which socialist policy has been successful and which has failed during the roughly 100 years socialist parties have been serious contenders for political power. Is there a common denominator?
Universalism and liberalism
Successful politics creates a majority in the electorate and leads to demonstratively positive improvements in the living conditions of most of the population. Here one can point to universal welfare states based on social reforms addressing all, or very broad sections, of the public: a general child allowance, a national pensions system, free health and elderly care, tuition-free education and so on. Another great success for the left has been policies to enhance gender equality, based on the liberal principle that men and women should enjoy equal opportunities in common social locations—be that the family, civil society, government organisations or the workplace.
Defeats for socialist or social-democratic politics have however not been rare. In Sweden, one can point to the wage-earner funds, which were introduced in the 1980s but abolished by a conservative government in 1994 and never heard of again in political debate. In the United States, there was the defeat in the 2016 presidential election of the Democrat candidate, Hillary Clinton, by the right-wing populist Donald Trump. In Latin America, the implosion of Venezuela under the authorian, purportedly ‘left’, presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro should be added to this sad list.
Further back in time, we had the trouncing of the British miners’ union by the conservative prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, in 1984-85. Even further back was the defeat of the republican side in the Spanish civil war launched in 1936, the crushing by Nazism of the German labour movement in 1932, the victory of fascism in Italy in the 20s and the defeat of the red side in the Finnish civil war in 1918. For those in western Europe who throughout believed in the blessings of the planned economy, the eventual collapse of the Soviet system in 1989-91 must of course be added too.
What distinguishes successful left politics is the union of the liberal principle of individual rights and the socialist idea of social justice—in short, liberal socialism. Successful social reforms and gender-equality policies have been based on individual rights to pensions, health care and education, as well as equal rights for men and women—not group or family-based rights. It is when the left has disrespected liberal democracy and individual rights that it has lost.
‘Class enemies’
In February 1918, the later-legendary Swedish social democrat Gustav Möller went to Finland. His mission was to try to mediate in the then-raging civil war and to persuade the Finnish social democrats to refrain from following the violent path of Bolshevik violence under Vladimir Lenin’s leadership in neighbouring Russia. In Helsinki, the so-called Red Guard had taken power, engaging in arbitrary detentions, extensive beatings of ‘class enemies’ and a large number of executions of those perceived as ‘bourgeois’.
Möller did not mince his words when he met his Finnish party colleagues. He argued that if they tried to win political power by violent means, the ‘moral force’ which was foundational for left-wing politics would be squandered—and the ‘white forces’ could very well win. But the Finnish socialists refused to listen, claiming they could prevail in the ‘class war’ by military force. An appalling price was paid in human suffering for the red side: more lives were lost during this short war in 1918, as a proportion of the population, than in the Spanish civil war of 1936-39.
The defeat of the Italian socialists by Benito Mussolini’s fascism followed a similar pattern. In the ‘two red years’ of 1919 and 1920 the country came close to a full-scale civil war. Supported by parts of the Socialist Party, a lot of violence was initiated from the left. A wave of factory occupations by militants envisaged the companies being controlled by workers’ councils, according to the Soviet model, but in this chaotic context the outcome was not a success. A large part of the Italian Socialist Party simply wanted to copy the Bolshevik revolution but the strategy failed. And in failing to stand up for the principles of liberal democracy, it paved the way for the rise of fascism and Mussolini (himself once a leading party figure).
Fascism’s victory in the Spanish civil war followed a similar pattern. Usually, this war is described as a democratically elected government being defeated by Francisco Franco’s fascist forces. But this is only part of the truth. What distinguished the Spanish socialists under the leadership of Largo Caballero (who dreamed of becoming a Spanish Lenin) was a politics of violent confrontation, under the battle-cry ‘Harmony? No! Class War! Hatred of the Criminal Bourgeois to the Death’.
The policy of the Spanish socialists in power included thousands of illegal and arbitrary arrests, with acts of violence going unpunished and unlawful confiscations of property. That the democratically elected Popular Front government so clearly violated the principles of liberal democracy drove large parts of the Spanish population to support Franco’s fascism.
As for the victory of Nazism, the ‘class against class’ policy of the German communists refused any distinction between the exploitation of the working class under ‘bourgeois democracy’ and under fascist dictatorship. They thus refused to support the German social democrats (‘social fascists’) and the liberal bourgeoisie‘s defence of democracy. Such support would probably have had a good chance of stopping the advance of Adolf Hitler.
Crushing defeat
In more modern times, the extensive British mining strike of 1984-85 ended in crushing defeat. The aim of the strike by the National Union of Mineworkers, under the leadership of Arthur Scargill, was not primarily to improve the position of the miners but to overthrow the democratically elected government led by Thatcher. Such a manoeuvre had been successful a decade earlier, when a miners’ strike had forced the resignation of the conservative administration led by Edward Heath.
Despite internal division, Scargill refused to countenance a ballot on the strike, which could have legitimised the action among its members and the wider public, and which it was obliged by law and its own rules to activate. The miners’ union deployed ‘mass pickets’ against the large group of miners who chose not to join the strike but its members were humiliatingly forced back to work.
For Sweden, the abolition of the union-controlled wage-earner funds represented a major political defeat for the left—a defeat so painful that it effectively led to a taboo within the labour movement on discussing economic democracy at all. Unlike the many successful policies pursued by the Swedish social democrats, this betrayed a complete lack of connection to the work situation and economic conditions of the individual employee.
There was nothing in the proposal about how companies—it was not clear which—in which the funds had shares would act differently, nor what it would mean for wage-earners (again unclear which) who worked there. The weakness of the scheme facilitated an extensive and successful neo-liberal ideological mobilisation of the Swedish business community.
Finally, consider Clinton’s defeat by Trump. One explanation presented for this is that the left in the US has come to be associated with group rights for minorities collectively defined by identity politics. Many of the ‘losers’ within the white working class have come to blame their difficulties on the existence of various forms of quotas purportedly favouring members of minorities. Criticism of identity-based group rights became a successful theme for Trump’s Republicans.
Clear pattern
There is thus a clear pattern in terms of the success and failure of left-wing politics. Policies which combine reforms for social and economic justice with central liberal principles such as respect for individual autonomy, individual rights and the rule of law—liberal socialism—have been successful and enduring. Approaches which have trampled on these principles have led to severe and widespread defeats.
Recognition of this should inform the future strategy of the political left.
An earlier version of this article was published in Swedish by Aftonbladet
Bo Rothstein is Senior Professor of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg.