From the Seattle protests over a decade ago, to the Occupy movement more recently, the left has been grappling with the same crisis. But the anxieties themselves are well-founded. The responses to these anxieties have been racially problematic. For their appeal lies in a far broader set of anxieties about the degree to which our politics and economics are shaped by forces accountable to none and controlled by a few: a drift towards cosmopolitanism in which citizens, once relatively secure in their national identity and financial wellbeing, are excluded from the polity. The problem with describing these parties as racist is not that the description is inaccurate but that, by itself, it is inadequate. Over the past 30 years, fascism – and its 57 varieties of fellow travellers in denial – has shifted as a political current from marginal to mainstream to central in Europe's political culture. Ukip won just 9% of the eligible electorate, the Front National 10.6% and the Danish People's party 15%. These victories, election to a parliament with little real power, on a very low turnout, can be overstated. Nationalist and openly xenophobic parties topped the polls in three countries – Denmark, France and the UK – and won more than 10% in another five. The recent success of the far right in the European parliamentary elections revealed just how morbid those symptoms have become. "In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born," argued the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Indeed, it is precisely because it has continued, challenged but virtually unchecked, for more than a generation, that political cynicism has intensified. For they abjure the very idea of nations or any other parochialism that limits them in time or space." "We call them multinational but they are more accurately understood as postnational, transnational or even anti-national. "By many measures, corporations are more central players in global affairs than nations," writes Benjamin Barber in Jihad vs McWorld. But given the scale of neoliberal globalisation it is clearly no longer up to that task. The nation state is the primary democratic entity that remains. The limited ability of national governments to pursue any agenda that has not first been endorsed by international capital and its proxies is no longer simply the cross they have to bear it is the cross to which we have all been nailed. "Power today is global power, the power of the big companies, the power of financial capital." "We are in government but not in power," said Lula's close aide, Dominican friar Frei Betto. In the three months between his winning and being sworn in, the currency plummeted by 30%, $6bn in hot money left the country, and some agencies gave Brazil the highest debt-risk ratings in the world.
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In a section entitled "The Necessary Rupture", it argued: "Regarding the foreign debt, now predominantly private, it will be necessary to denounce the agreement with the IMF, in order to free the economic policy from the restrictions imposed on growth and on the defence of Brazilian commercial interests."īut on the way to Lula's inauguration the invisible hand of the market tore up his electoral promises and boxed the country around the ears for its reckless democratic choice.
A year earlier, the party had produced a document, Another Brazil is Possible, laying out its electoral programme. As head of the leftwing Workers' party he was elected on a platform of fighting poverty and redistributing wealth. The hard part begins now." He wasn't wrong. T he night in 2002 when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won his landslide victory in Brazil's presidential elections, he warned supporters: "So far, it has been easy.
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