Demoradical vs Demoliberal Regulation

By Alex Foti

Never a decline of the west has been more apparent. The US and its
European major ally, the UK, supported by minor bushist partners such
as Berlusconi's Italy and Aznar's Spain, have been inflicting
barbarism and spreading ethnic strife in Irak and elsewhere. The
continuous, structural human rights violations inflicted by the US and
its allies, from kidnappings and secret prisons in Europe, down to
Guantanamo, Abu Grahib and Haditha, are a crying shame for all
enlightened westerners: progressives have failed at stopping the
totalitarian forces – namely the salafi brand of sunni fundamentalism,
the neoliberal interpretation of evangelical protestantism, and shia
integralism supported by the islamic republic of Iran – that are
plunging the world in a clash of civilizations, where reactionary and
defensive identities prevail over transnational movements and global
issues of environmental balance and social justice.

Of course, the early XXI-century twilight of American neoliberal
hegemony and its European ramifications, as framed by the monetarist
and pro-corporate philosophy of the EU single currency and market, is
not without geopolitical consequences. On one side, Indian and
Bolivarian America have possibly dealt a lethal blow to the Monroe
Doctrine of unlimited US power on the Southern Hemisphere. On the
other side, China and India are rising giants beating the westerners
at their own game of globalization. Liberalziation of world markets
was set in motion in 1971-1973, when the end of international
Keynesism was officially proclaimed, and incipient energy crises and
financial deregulations started undermining Fordism and the
progressive forces that had developed under its wings. The 1980s and
1990s opened the gates to a new, more turbulent world, the world of
neoliberal regulation. This was an explicit conservative
counteroffensive against the unintended social (and anti-imperialist)
effects of postkeynesian regulation, reasserting the right to manage
and the economic privileges of financial elites in the new digital,
networked, flexible, postindustrial economy. The world of high
profits, high rents and low wages, of massive labor market and
financial deregulations, of large-scale privatization of public
assets, outsourcing and offshoring of manufacturing and services, and
widespread tightening of social spending. My contention is that
neoliberal regulation is now over: the 1999-2003 international cycle
of struggle, 9/11 and 7-7, the bushist rise to power and the invasions
of Afghanistan and Irak, repeated financial instability and
environmental disaster, have all undermined the political bases of the
Washington Consensus that constituted the essence of western policy
and geopolitical projection in the 1980s and 1990s. Globalization is
yielding to global regionalism, neoliberal multiculturalism is leaving
the place to bushist occidentalism, free trade is becoming managed
protectionism, while the professed multilateral internationalism of
the Clinton era has turned into a one-sided and naked (but failed)
attempt to unrivalled world hegemomy.The European bifurcation

The European Peninsula has been shaken like never before by the age of
high neoliberalism. The Fall of the Wall, the implosion of
Soviet-imposed state communism, the resurgence of American militarism
in the Middle East, have all reshaped the politics of the Continent
like anything that had been seen since Versailles, or possibly even
Westphalia. Today, after the French-Dutch no, Europe is larger and
weaker than it's ever been. Pro-market forces of Anglo-American
inspiration did push for EU enlargement in 2004. But welfare cuts and
workfare reforms had already soured public opinion against the EU and
its main institutions, Council, Commission, Bank, Parliament (in order
of decreasing importance), so by the time the Constitution – which was
supposed to provide a new internal and external governance for the
Union of 25 members, grant fundamental European rights of citizenship,
but also freeze the neoliberal status quo in Europe for ever – was put
to vote in France and Holland, it was resoundingly rejected. To the
first serious, possibly crippling, crisis of the European project, as
developed over half a century by its Christian-Democrat founders,
Social-Democrat adepts, and Liberal-Democrat deregulators,
institutional responses have been startlingly ineffective. Basically
the whole thing will be kept frozen until 2007, when the French
presidential elections will have completed the present European
political realignment in Old Europe, started with Zapatero in Spain,
then Merkel in Germany, now Prodi in Italy. In the meantime major
social upheavals have shaken France and Denmark, while social protest
against welfare contraction and labor precarization has been on the
increase in every major country of the old Union of 15 countries.
Most Old European élites want to keep the enlarged EU as it is, but
put the UK and most of Eastern Europe at the margins of the more
political, as opposed to the economic, component of European
integration. Political integration would instead proceed in so-called
Core Europe, basically something like a political Eurozone, give or
take a few countries, governed through a federation or confederation
of nation-states with unified fiscal, monetary, social policies, and a
common foreign policy.

Europe is today facing a fundamental bifurcation for the future of its
political economy. The crisis of the neoliberal agenda, unpopular in
Europe everywhere, is evident also to European elites. They have
responded by tracing what I call a DEMOLIBERAL regulation. Basically
it's neoliberalism lite: it is a bit less pro-American, because US-EU
interests are no longer coinciding in geoeconomic and geopolitical
terms (for instance, Europeans have only to lose from clashing
head-front with Islam) but retains a strong commitment to NATO; it
invests a little more in public infrastructure and possibly spends on
welfare to cushion workers from the vagaries of the labor market, but
only as long as people remain under the control of workfare provisions
aiming at increasing the productivity of so-called human capital and
guarantee social obedience among welfare recipients. This top-down
project, to which social movements and radical subjectivities must
respond with a grassroots mobilization to shape political Europe as
they see fit, has one only, but crucial, merit. It would constitute
antibushist counterbalancing for Europe, and would put Atlantic
relations on a more equal footing, should bushism be electorally
defeated. And muted European neoliberalism could be still preferable
to returning to the nation-state with its nationalist and militarist
pretensions. Demoliberal regulation not only seeks a new
business-friendly social consensus, it opposes the dangerous
xenophobic forces that have become a major factor in European
politics.

A political answer to European moderates which would take an
explicitly multiethnic, egalitarian and ecological road is what I call
DEMORADICAL regulation, i.e. a dramatic change in socioeconomic policy
thanks to a progressive social bargain imposed from the bottom up
(rather than top-down, as in demoliberal regulation) through labor
protest, social conflict, participatory democracy. A progressive front
that would link leftist/democratic organizations, unions, movements in
their common opposition to technocrats, corporations, financial
markets and the liberal regulation these would like to re-assert, in
order to protect the unequal economic status quo they have gained so
much from. But most of all, demoradicalism would be a clarion call to
all emancipatory forces in Europe to mobilize against populist
xenophobia, anti-immigration hysteria, clerical interference.

Movements, with their faith in street-based and conflict-based
democracy, are obvious candidates to be prime actors of demoradical
regulation. Unfortunately, the most effective movements have developed
in Europe at the nation-state level (look at the French mass
mobilization against juvenile precarity), that is, in the national
space of politics with its peculiar political traditions and
identities. For all the efforts of the Mayday Network or the European
Social Forum, both the traditional marxist and/or anarchist left as
well as post-Seattle heretic left are deeply hostile to Europe, in
whatever political incarnation, past, present or future. Communist
parties, now united in the European Left, had traditionally seen the
European Community as a bastion of American dominance on the
Continent. Anarchists of all sorts repudiate all forms of
institutional power with supranational organizations being prime
targets for protest and direct confrontation (the more remote, the
worse they are). Trotskyites, still blooming in spite of (or maybe
because of) their rigid orthodoxy, are committed internationalists,
rejecting political Europe and supporting whoever they consider to be
an anti-imperialist government (such as Chavez's Venezuela).

On the other hand, Syndicalists, Feminists, Environmentalists, Queers,
Precarious have yet to develop a coherent European discourse capable
of rendering obsolete more traditional political references on the
left. At the institutional level, Greens have almost invariably kept a
pro-federal, pro-secular Europe position, but this has been decisively
defeated in the French and Dutch referenda. They have contributed to
their ineffectiveness by being too friendly with business interests
and liberal élites, too much caught into their environmental PR stunts
– something they share with green transnational NGOs – to worry about
mounting social inequality, so they have often lost ground to
neo-old-left parties such as Die Linke in Germany.

Demoradicalism: neither party nor union; then what?

How should a radical European discourse look like? In three words, it
should be green, wobbly, pink, in order to be effective. It should lay
out a cogent ecological program to reform society, a creative wobbly
strategy to organize and unionize the weak and the excluded, a pink
emphasis on non-violent action and gender equality, so to project a
queer outlook on the world. It would have to speak to the young,
women, immigrants. It would have to address the grievances of the
service class, and put to good use the networking talents of the
creative class. It would be transnationalist in orientation and
multiethnic in composition, for a truly mongrel and mulatto Europe. It
would be defiant with (but tolerant of) all forms of organized
religion. It would be an obvious antagonist of the securitarian state
favored by bushist tendencies. And it would challenge and confront
without timidity, but also with cold-mindedness, either fascist,
nationalist, xenophobic forces that are resurfacing in many corners of
Europe.

But if these are widespread aspirations, antiprecarity/noborder
movements lack a strong political identity to reroute the existing
European left (with small "l") and provide fresh radical political
perspectives to Europe's dissenting youth, precarized by fat
corporations, regulated by ineffective technocracies, and burdened by
the Continent's rentier gerontocracy that has plunged us in an acute
condition of Eurosclerosis. More to point, the mayday network lacks a
strong strategy to talk to the flexibilized and the unorganized. The
post-cold war generation of the Left shall overcome the twin stale
institutions of the XX century's left: union and party. But can you
down two old pigeons with one stone? I mean, can a networked movement
be an effective substitute for both the two traditional labor and
political functions? I think not. We need a substitute for a political
party, in order to produce new political identity and ideological
discourse, which are at the moment sorely lacking as intellectual
confusion and political sectarianism. And we need a complement for the
most militant and innovative sections of labor unionism, so that we
can work and organize conflicts together while advancing the specific
demands of Europe's precarious generation.

Let me start from the second task. Over the last two years, the mayday
network has progressed sufficiently to discuss the founding of a
Paneuropean organization federating all media, labor, social activists
against precarity that are now working together in the mayday network.
On MAYDAY 006, one single, huge yell was heard from Paris to Los
Angeles: "No borders! Stop persecution! Halt discrimination! Fuck
precarity! Beat inequality!" It is to me self-evident that MONDO
MAYDAY cannot wait any longer. Over the next year, the European mayday
will have to network more deeply with sisters and comrades in
Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los
Angeles, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, you name
it.

But if you go mondo on mayday, it does not mean that it is any less
urgent building a cross-european organization defending the rights of
the service class and attacking the privileges of the corporate class.
The mayday network has to found a wobbly-like european organization
federating all the exploited, recruiting from all gender/ethnic groups
and organizing all net/temp/flex workers in one big SYNDICATE OF
PRECARIOUS EUROPE. It would be a card-carrying organization with its
own funds and subsidized agitators, but a very flat structure, with
regional nodes and cross-national hubs. It would have an explicitly
formalized internal democracy, which would appoint (and remove) people
in executive functions. Yes, members would have to vote on important
issues and strategic decisions, with regular online and face2face
consultations. I believe global movements won't progress until they
adopt the democratic criteria of public discussion and majority
voting. If you say liberal democracy is a fraud, you have to show a
radical democracy can actually function. The first transeuropean
syndicate would be open to all jobs ranging from cleaners and
programmers, to documented and undocumented people, to the flexibly
employed and the permanently unemployed, to anybody believing that the
best form of social solidarity is supporting labor conflict and
opposing the interests of employers and the investing class. It would
be unashamedly syndicalist and anticapitalist in its orientation, by
supporting and organizing pickets, blockades, and wildcat strikes. The
recent huge social rebellions in France and Denmark against precarity
and workfare should remind the mayday network that the time to
establish a networked organization is now.

The syndicate would be open to all types of radical identities
provided they agree on the principle of active non-violence. The
syndicate would only endorse non-violent direct action, the kind, for
example, that Clown Army (participate in their July 14 revolutionary
parade in Paris!) and many pink collectives regularly practice across
Europe. Like internal democracy, this principle is crucial for
political effectiveness. Today, a time of pitiless war and subjugation
of the weak, violent protests either are byproducts of wider
non-violent movements or political dead-ends making state repression
and media manipulation easier. Violence against property can sometimes
be understood, although it tends too to boomerang against radical
movements. But violence against people, if it does not occur in
response to physical aggression, is not only morally untenable: it is
a one-way ticket to political suicide.

On the party front, the issue of producing a recognizable radical
political identity embodying a sense of historical urgency is a lot
more complex and still immature at the moment. But it cannot wait any
longer being discussed. As far as I am concerned, I see the need for
reaping a distinctive political fruit out of the Seattle-Genova tree.
My reasoning is this. If the radical left of 1968 and hippyism gave
rise to modern political environmentalism, then the 1999-2003
ebullience should similarly produce a brand-new political label in the
longer term. Greens were born out the turmoil of the 60s and 70s. And
what new political constellation will soon appear on the sky,
following the travails of the early XXI century? The PINK CONSPIRACY.
In a larger context, women's emancipation and the end of the
patriarchal family with its unequal gender roles, feminist movements,
gay mobilizations, queer politics, full civil rights for GLBTs, the
assertion of reproductive rights against papist reaction, and equality
of access to political representation for women represent an epochal
earthquake for western politics. In a movement context, the pink
carnival of rebellion was the major innovative form of political
expression emerging from the Prague-Goteborg-Genoa cauldron, next to,
but separate from, the white overalls and black blocs, the two other
distinctive youth expressions of the anti-globalization movement. Pink
collars are the present of social work and pink movements are the
future of social progress. Let's do a pink alliance of heretic
dissenters in Europe! Who knows? It could be the answer to the
generalized disaffection with existing political parties and the
institutional representation they're supposed to carry out. In
Copenhagen's municipal elections, a pink list got a percentage of
votes in the two digits. As early political test, it sure is
promising. Barroso and Trichet are in bad need of a pink slip: they
must be fired and their policies overhauled in the face of widespread
social opposition and unrest.