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this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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I translated the reaction of the general-secretary of the Belgian Workers Party to the Dutch election results. I think it makes a lot of sense.
"The election results in the Netherlands are tough but not unexpected.
The cocktail of decades of blind austerity, bureaucracy and frantic marketization had already exploded on March 15 this year (when the BBB [= right-wing farmers party] won the election).
No lessons were learned from that. On the contrary. The centre-right parties copied the rethoric of the extreme right that keeps on kicking downward, to the people who have the least. Perhaps it is better to look at those at the top?
Public utilities were privatized; public services stripped; education and health care came into the hands of professional managers; child care became a haven for private equity funds; the social rental sector became a shadow of what it had once been; and the Dutch labor market became the most flexible in the entire European Union: one in three workers has a flexible employment contract.
Wages remained static and profits went through the roof. Harrowing poverty increasingly came alongside obscene wealth. Over a million Dutch people sank below the poverty line. According to the latest counts, there are 32 thousand registered homeless people. Food banks that still had a meager six thousand clients in 2008 have seen that number increase to 120 thousand fourteen years later. Meanwhile, the number of millionaires reaches a record high: as many as 317 thousand citizens own assets of more than a million euros.
That is the policy of the last two decades. And those policies were pursued by the centrist parties, all of them. If we want to stop the extreme right, it can only be in breaking with those neoliberal policies, rather than now preaching headlong more of the same centrist policies.
And yes, it can be done. If we dare to look upwards instead of downwards."
To add one thing to this analysis: the collective profit of all non-financial companies in the Netherlands was higher than all the wages combined. Total wages were 330 bilion euros, total profits of non-financial corporations were 344 billion, and profits of financial corporations were 190 billion. That means 534 billion euros in profits for 330 billion in wages.
By building strong, left-wing alternatives. Right now, if you want to vote "against the system", the hegemonic idea is that you vote for the radical right, because that's the only alternative to the neoliberal, centrist parties that exists in the minds of the majority of the population. Ireland and the Francophone part of Belgium are good examples of regions where the left managed to become the alternative, instead of the extreme-right. In both those places the "against the system"-vote is left-wing because they out-organised the right, and they're universally seen as the alternative to the neoliberal, centrist parties.
That does not mean that there's no racism, sexism... in Ireland and the Francophone part of Belgium, just as it doesn't mean that in the rest of the West there is no desire for redistribution of wealth, it only means that another type of political force became the hegemonic "anti-vote" because they were better organised, and by taking up that position, they've taken away the oxygen for the extreme-right to become a relevant political player: both Ireland and the Francophone part of Belgium are the only places in the EU without a non-marginal extreme right political party.
(Slight nuance: it is known that the French Rasseblement National and The extreme-right party from the Dutchophone part of Belgium - Vlaams belang - are financing their counterparts in Francophone Belgium, in the hope of them making a breaktrough in 2024. Perhaps that will be succesfull, I don't know, but it should be noted that they can't force a breaktrough without outside help.)
I think the answer to that question is pretty straightforward: the traditional left in Western-Europe used to consist of two groups:
The first group is the working class (in a narrow sense) and the poor, the second group consists of progressive intellectuals with a comfortable life. Left parties used to have organic connections to the first group trough their mass-organisations, which had tentacles deep into ordinary people's lives, which enabled people from the trade-unions and so forth to grow in to their parties and be a main element in the cadre of theose political parties. But since the 1970's those organisations slowly crumbled and/or lost their connection with the political parties, which became dominated by highly educated intellectuals. As a result, the left parties reflected the interests and priorities of that social group, and over time that thus remained the only social group which supported those parties. This is the situation in which we now find ourselves: the core constituency of the traditional left parties in Western-Europe is the progressive intellectuals - the people who feel sympathy for people who need redistribution. It is no longer the people who need redistribution.
That's a relatively easy thing to say, but only trough building new left parties and organisations can this problem be solved.