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The state of supposedly "leftist" politics today, espcially in Europe -- "New Labour" in the UK, the "Neu SPD" in Germany, etc. -- is a predictable result of the decision of many old socialist elements to work for incremental reform back in the early part of the 20th century. In abandoning the revolutionary element of orthodox Marxism, they abandoned the materialist dialectic that lay at the heart of their philosophy. In order to embrace the idea of gradualist reform, they were forced to accept many of the assumptions regarding society and government held by their capitalist opponents.
The current "new" incarnations of these parties, including the increasingly moribund Democratic Party in the United States, is simply the culmination of decades of succumbing to the perceptions and frameworks advanced by the traditional bourgeois elements controlling conservative parties. As the SPD, Labour, and the Democrats embraced the basic system under which politics was conducted in their home countries, they gradually took on the general outlook of their opponents in terms of economics and social stratification.
Of course, while the major economies were still primarily focused on heavy industry, and the culture industry was still in relative infancy, the "leftist" parties maintained some sort of real tie to their roots, because leftist rhetoric was still able to find resonance among the working classes for whom the great labor struggles were still a thing of recent memory. However, as the major western nations began to transform into economies of advanced capitalism, and emphasis began to move away from heavy industry and toward mass media and high finance, the "leftist" parties began to lose resonance.
The reasons for this were many, but Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse did a good job in explaining them. The overall thrust of their argument is that bourgeois elements in Western society stopped fighting with the working classes and gradually assimilated them into bourgeoise culture. Advanced capitalism required a massive expansion of technical know-how to properly function, and university systems went to work educating more and more people to fulfill the roles of technocrats and managers in the economic system. This new educated class was particularly susceptible to the bourgeoise culture, and sought to emulate it in every way (typified in American suburban development post WWII).
As the society became more stratified, with everyone having their pre-assigned roles, the mass media machine exerted considerable influence, reinforcing the bourgeoise value system on the majority of the population. The test of good citizenship was to simply fulfill one's role to the best of one's ability, and to consume in order to fit in with the rest of society. Thinking about broader questions such as why society was functioning in this way, and if there really was a better alternative, was strictly forbidden. The genius in this system is really quite extraordinary. It does not explicitly forbid the discussion of alternatives -- but the media mostly shuts them out. For example, the only place where you can be exposed to an honest discussion of Marxism, socialism and communism anymore is in a university history class -- certainly not on a major television network. Furthermore, issues of class in society are erased away, as people from the working and professional classes are led to believe that they all vacation at the same destinations such as Disneyworld, and what could be more egalitarian than that? Finally, as people become more atomized and specialized in their daily existences, they are encouraged not to think about substantive issues, but instead to leave such things to designated "experts". The end result is a sort of Potemkin Democracy in which people have really very little say over their daily lives outside of fitting within a narrow, pre-determined role. Hell, we even now have an entire "culture industry" dedicated to dictating to us how we should spend our free time.
The rise of the New Left in the 1960's was an attempt to counter this vision of society by the first generation to really be brought up in its flowering stage. In essence, the New Left was a recoiling in horror by the young people of that time from a regimented, corporatized society that offered them little more than a life as nameless, faceless cogs in a corporate machine. The problem was that all they could offer was a vague criticism without any viable alternatives. That is why the New Left largely was engulfed and commoditized itself by the corporate juggernaught. Just think of the way that the 1960's are used as a marketing ploy to this day for a variety of products, without any real analysis of the deeper aspects of the rebellion against accepted norms that took place in that time.
The author of this article, sadly, is engaging in pipe dreams in expecting a massive grassroots movement to overthrow the corporate beast. It is now all-pervasive and all-consuming. Its reach is so insidious that most people don't even realize it's there, so convincing them to counter it is a fool's errand. The recent "no" vote in the EU by France and Holland was not necessarily a vote against corporate power, as much as it was about subordinating their national identities to corporate culture. The only thing that is sure in this exercise is that the corporate juggernaught will not go away, but will simply set about retooling its message to convince these malcontents that their identities will be safe in integration, only to then turn around and dismantle them in pursuit of the same bland homogenization that exists here in the US.
The only way that the corporate juggernaught will be stopped is when it collapses under its own gargantuan weight. I say "when" rather than "if", because I believe that it is inevitable, that the current order is unsustainable. The best bet for those opposed to it is to simply carve out places free of it in our daily lives and living arrangements, and do the best that we can in the meantime....
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