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SOCIAL Democracy in CRISIS PIERRE mARSHALL PASOkIFICATION: SOCIAL DEmOCRACY IN CRISIS 2019 SUmmER REVIEW 10 COmmUNIST HIS ARTICLE discusses the electoral prospects of social disputes between community activists and the Labour council democratic parties in Europe since the crisis of 2008. It in Barking & Dagenham caused three sitting Labour Tidentifies the concept of pasokification as a diagnosis for councillors to join the Socialist Labour Party. These outbreaks declining vote share and party collapse. It argues that the crisis of dissent were small and isolated, but they all emerged from has created a demographic which does not respond positively contradictions within Labour. to neoliberal solutions. Lastly, it highlights the left alternatives The programme of intensified class dominance pushed by emergent in a renewed social democracy. the 2010-15 coalition government was met by a broad anti- austerity movement. This had the political support of major Origins trade unions, yet it was not fully reflected in the Labour Party, The concept of pasokification was first coined by Labour which pointedly refused to support union mobilisation around activist James Doran, in the aftermath of the 2012 general pay and pensions.5 Labour’s position on austerity was vague elections in Greece.1 Doran highlighted the electoral collapse then, and at best the party sought only to dampen the ferocity of PASOK (the Panhellenic Socialist Movement) as a cause of of the class offensive, not to repel it. concern for the British Labour Party. He also offered some In the run-up to the 2015 general election, discussion of remedies so as to help Labour avoid repeating PASOK’s Labour’s impending collapse continued. Michael Meacher,6 experience. The concept worked on two levels: firstly, it Aditya Chakrabortty,7 and Doran himself8 all returned to the explained a general trend occurring across Europe, and theme, animated by Labour’s difficulties in Scotland. Richard secondly, it acted as a plea for Labour to not make the same Seymour also predicted Labour’s collapse on the same lines as errors as its Greek sister party. the French Socialist Party: Doran’s earliest reference to pasokification identifies a situation where “a Labour government is elected on a wave of “If it wins, Labour will be forced to implement an hope which the leadership of its parliamentary party is austerity agenda which, while not enough to satisfy unwilling to meet.”2 Following Doran’s example this would Conservative voters, will turn its own remaining voters off trigger the collapse of the party and open up the way for an in droves. That would be a defeat of a different order. For alternative left force in the form of a “British Syriza”. a vision of that future, one need only look across the From the very beginning, the concept is grounded in the Channel, at François Hollande sinking and sinking in the relationship of the Labour Party to the workers’ movement. polls, and the Front National on the rise.”9 This can be clearly seen in the conditions Labour was in, prior to the resurgence of the left within the party. The political Labour did not win in 2015; it lost a further 26 seats and landscape before the 2015 general election was dotted with left the Conservatives with a slim majority in Parliament. The hopeful left-wing alternatives to Labour; among them the Green Scottish National Party took 56 of Scotland’s 59 seats, most of Party, Left Unity, and TUSC. The Campaign for Labour Party which had belonged to Labour. In one of Labour’s safe Democracy was also floating the possibility of setting up a constituencies in Glasgow, the vote share dropped by almost 35 separate ‘trade union party’ which would be affiliated to percentage points.10 The Green Party and UKIP only won one Labour.3 However, the ‘trade union party’ proposal was never seat each, but they both managed to quadruple their votes. 2019 followed through and none of the national left-wing alternatives These results were enough to shock Labour out of made any significant electoral intrusions. complacency. Seymour’s post-election analysis identified it as George Galloway’s victory in the 2012 Bradford West by- the collapse of Labour,11 and Steve Topple warned that the party 12 election took Labour by surprise, and suggested that its was “completely disenfranchised from its voting base.” SUmmER electoral base could not be taken for granted. Aside from the Seymour and Mark Perryman13 in particular referred to a loss of one seat in Parliament, the importance of the ‘Bradford narrative that Labour had been “saved by First-Past-the-Post” Spring’ was that some voters idealised Galloway as a more – ie that the Labour result was propped up by tactical voting REVIEW authentic expression of ‘true’ Labour values, set against the behaviour, rather than a sense of genuine parteinost or party Labour Party itself.4 This theme reoccurred in Tower Hamlets, loyalty from Labour supporters. where Labour lost ground to a new independent group called The election was a sign that the party had to change. This Tower Hamlets First. Again, several of the Tower Hamlets First desire for a new approach was channelled into the subsequent candidates were former Labour councillors, including the leadership contest, which set in motion the reorientation of the mayor – Luftur Rahman. Also in East London, a series of party to the left. 11 COmmUNIST Crisis of capitalism connection in Greece, writing that: Having explained how the concept of pasokification originated “The social, political and electoral fall of PASOK must in Britain, and was applied to the British Labour Party, we now be connected with the management and stewardship of the have to ask why it occurred. deep economic crisis befalling Greece and Europe.”22 Seymour identified pasokification in three steps, as related to Doran: Crisis is what exposes the contradiction of social democracy l the absorption of social democracy into neoliberalism, with and renders the negotiation of class compromise impossible. the resulting form known as ‘social liberalism’; When social-democratic politics can no longer enact l the resulting secular breakdown of the party-base redistributive measures through the welfare state, it has nothing relationship, the loss of party identity and the fragmentation of to offer the working class. In an extraordinary bid to prop up the class base; capital accumulation, social democracy uses its association with l incorporation of ‘social liberalism’ into an austerity the labour movement to “discipline the working class”.15,23 This consensus, with the dramatic acceleration of these trends, could be seen in the way the Miliband-led Labour Party pleaded culminating in a decisive breakdown of the party-base with its supporters to accept the austerity consensus. relationship and the effective end of the party as a party of Along with public austerity, the responses to crisis government.14 employed the standard neoliberal technologies of privatisation, The general corrosion of social-democratic values by deregulation, and enclosure of the public commons.24 These capitalist realism has been a feature of the left going back to are all features of “accumulation by dispossession”25 and would the very first social-democratic governments. So, of the above be familiar to the subjects of IMF structural adjustment steps, the emphasis on austerity is the most important for programmes in the Third World.26 The important point is that defining pasokification as a contemporary phenomenon. the state was unable or unwilling to chart a route out of crisis Austerity is a response to the economic crisis which social which depended on stimulating economic activity through democracy is unable to resolve. Doran clearly identified this expanded reproduction. There was no option for social contradiction: democracy to protect public services or welfare systems, because capital sought a route out of crisis which relied on “PASOK’s parliamentary leadership had no alternative expropriating these public goods. This solution was necessary to the austerity policies required to revive capitalist due to the special nature of the crisis itself; the maelstrom which accumulation. So PASOK followed the line of march set by revealed itself in 2007/08 was not just a temporary blip in the the previous conservative administration, and by the market. By the time Syriza finally replaced PASOK in 2015, it structures of the capitalist state in Greece ….”1 was clear that Europe had settled into a ‘long crisis.’27 Social democracy embodies a contradiction, sitting as it Crisis of legitimation does between labour and capital. During the moment of crisis, The crisis in Europe, which up to this point was limited to being this contradiction is brought to the surface and, according to only an economic problem, now presents itself as a political Stuart Hall, social-democratic governments are “committed to problem. It is normal for the advanced capitalist economies to finding solutions [to crisis] which are capable of winning support experience cyclical crashes, and usually they are able to absorb from key sections of capital.”15 the social fallout. However, the new conditions show that the In order to understand this, it is useful to reflect on the neutralising capacity of social democracy is broken. Neoliberal, period from the mid-1990s to 2008, when social-democratic market-oriented solutions were possible and popular in the past; parties were widely popular across Europe.16 Their popularity they are no longer applicable in the present. Richard Seymour coincided with a drift to the right, as these parties abandoned refers to the contradiction in the Labour Party according to the any pretence to a wider transformative project. For the most following logic: part they reoriented their efforts towards poverty-reduction and a social terrain defined by equality of opportunity,17 absent of “In so far as the Labour Party adopts neoliberalism, it must any genuine engagement with the labour movement.
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