“The referendum has laid bare the truth about globalisation . . . . That it has left people behind. That it has left a stratified and unequal society . . . . [I]t has broken the contract which said: if you work hard and throw everything you’ve got into building a better life, then that life can be built . . . . For millions the dream of home ownership is receding and wages are stagnating . . . . Privatisation . . . has become discredited . . . . Hired managers were paid huge sums as if they were successful . . . and then go on to lecture people on average and below average wages about the need for greater labour market flexibility . . . . These practices discredit the way the free market system currently operates.”
IF YOU, DEAR READER, assumed that the above quotation is taken from someone from the left, then my point is already made.
It comes from Michael Gove, one of the contenders for the leadership of the Conservative Party, and ultimately Prime Minister of Britain, in the ongoing internal party election that has been set in train by the resignation of Prime Minister David Cameron following the United Kingdom referendum.
Had those comments been made by someone from the left, they would have immediately been rejected by bourgeois apologists. However, when such a prognosis comes from someone who is integrally part of the ruling establishment, it should be treated as a clear symptom of elite rejection of its own ideology.
Such moments always signal that we are on the cusp of momentous change. Revolutions do not occur only from pressure from below. Often they occur when the ruling class itself realises that it is impossible to govern in the old way.
Slavery came to an end after the British who perfected it became ready for the more advanced industrial society which slavery itself had financed and given birth to. Similarly, British colonialism came to an end after World War II when a new global elite – North American capitalists – had no vested interest in its continuation.
Today, with the Brexit vote, the global neo-liberal elite is in deep ideological crisis. Globalisation, trade liberalisation, the unfettered spread of the market, the retreat of the state, the end of sovereignty, the inherent superiority of free markers – all the ideological shibboleths of neo-liberalism – have now been thrown asunder. One early consequence might be the re-assertion of fascism, which has always been an alliance between conservative elites and the poor.
More positively, however, it may signal the re-assertion of the left. The Brexit is proof that the left has won the argument. Michael Gove’s remarks above are proof of the correctness of the left’s position.
The past decades of retreat and self-doubt should be hastily shorn if we do not wish to concede the space which is opening up by the Brexit fallout to the forces of fascism and reaction which are never too far in the background.
•Tennyson Joseph is a political scientist at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, specialising in regional affairs. Email: [email protected]
