A people's assembly in Sarajevo. Demotix/Aurore Belot. All rights reserved.

In a recent article
for the Washington Post Sheri Berman worries whether democratic socialists,
who are now advancing on the left, believe in democracy. Looking back into twentieth
century history, she reminds us that the difference between democratic socialists
and social democrats lay in the fact that the former were unwilling to compromise
over entering governmental coalitions with bourgeois parties – in that way
inadvertently helping along the advent of fascist regimes.

However
interesting in terms of a lesson in history, the problem we are facing today is
completely different. It is the mainstream left, the Social Democrats, who have
for decades now been sacrificing democracy at the altar of the unassailable
forces of the global market. In contrast to this, from the democratic socialist
perspective today, democratization is the
political project of the left. Rebuilding the left and reversing the democratic
erosion which we are currently witnessing across Europe and the US are one and
the same project.

Left and Right

Another fallacy
upheld by many contemporary analyses of democratic erosion is that concern over
democracy, and the commitment to protecting it, are shared by mainstream
political elites of the Left and Right (see for instance Levitsky
and Ziblatt 2018, Zielonka
2018). However, in her analysis of two waves of democratic collapse in
interwar Europe and in 1970s Latin America, Nancy Bermeo has shown
that at the pivotal moment party elites of mainstream Left and Right did not
stand together against extremists and populists. In most cases, the breakdown
of democracy followed a sequence in which Centre-Right and Right elected
governments were replaced by Right-wing dictatorships. In contrast to
democratic breakdown, democratic advances have historically been linked with
the growth of workers’ movements and socialist parties. At the pivotal moment party elites of mainstream Left and Right did
not stand together against extremists and populists.

If this is true,
then the decline of the Left and the current democratic malaise are two sides
of the same coin. Party competition is re-aligning on the transnational
cleavage fuelled by the popular reaction to economic integration – a
cleavage which the mainstream left has failed miserably to address. The
mainstream left is stuck, the supposed irreversibility of economic
globalisation posing the imperative it cannot overcome. In the meantime, new right-wing
parties with distinct positions on Europe and immigration are addressing
people’s concerns and articulating them into portfolios of nationalism,
xenophobia and so forth.

“Democracy’s fickle friends”?

Another common
weakness of contemporary analysis is that in explaining the rise of new right
parties, it focuses on describing the ‘enemy
within’ and adjudicating between economic distress and cultural prejudice
as key drivers of the authoritarian-populist vote. Analysing the
populist explosion, the resurgence
of illiberalism and the death
of democracy, analysts evoke the image of the ordinary citizen walking over
to the ‘Dark side’: voting for populists, mobilizing around bigoted referendum
votes, reading and distributing vitriolic content online. Though the literature
offers some variance as to why this happens – ranging from the old-school
dislike of the mob to benevolent interpretations that aim to show the rationality
of this political behaviour – ordinary people, as Nancy Bermeo has
argued, invariably turn out as ‘democracy’s fickle friends’. Populism signals the breakdown in the mutual learning
between the mainstream left and ‘ordinary people’.

But if it is
true that the future of democracy and the rebuilding the left are one and the
same project, then this position is untenable. Instead, we need to assert that
populism signals the breakdown in the mutual learning between the mainstream left
and ‘ordinary people’. The mainstream left has become distrustful of mass
popular engagement with politics. How did this happen to the political force
that historically emerged from popular struggles against injustice and
relations of domination?

In Kriesi’s et
al landmark
study of post-1968 social movements, the crucial pivot around which social
movements manoeuvred was the configuration of power on the left and the
presence or absence of the left in government. In a complete reversal of
fortunes, with the left in Europe structurally weak and ideationally disoriented,
ours is a time when progressive social movements and civic initiatives represent
the anchor for rebuilding left political parties.

The main
question therefore becomes – how can organizational experiences and discursive
struggles of movements such as the People Against Evictions in Spain, the Rosia
Montana movement in Romania or the Right to the City movement in Croatia be
harnessed to re-build left political forces?

European peripheries offer crucial lessons

Crucial lessons
about both the future of the Left, and of democracy, are to be learned by
analysing European peripheries as spaces in which the contradictions of ‘democratic
capitalism’ are particularly pronounced.

Contrary to the
convergence thesis that was embedded in the project of European integration, peripheral
economies never caught up with the core, and the economic crisis of 2008
made this disparity wider. Economic divisions into creditor and debtor nations
acquired their political equivalent between rule makers and rule takers. Since 2008 we have witnessed the emergence of Syriza in
Greece and Podemos in Spain, as well as mass pro-democracy mobilizations across
Macedonia, Romania, Bulgaria all the way to Slovenia.

Though economic
integration has created winners and losers everywhere in Europe, in Europe’s southern
and eastern peripheries economic austerity and the ‘hollowing out’ of politics
created stronger pressures on democracy. And yet, despite such circumstances,
since 2008 we have witnessed the emergence of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in
Spain, as well as mass pro-democracy mobilizations across Macedonia, Romania,
Bulgaria all the way to Slovenia. Submitting these experiences to systematic
comparative scrutiny should yield valuable lessons both for democracy and for
rebuilding the left.

Perhaps it would
be useful to conceptualize mass mobilizations and progressive social movements as
episodes of democratic learning which
lay the foundations of an organizational and ideational renewal of the left.

Civic roles for the future

Much democratic
theory understands democratic learning as the slow process through which
populations acquire democratic value orientations that support and stabilize
democratic institutions (remember Dahrendorf’s quip about constitutional reform
taking 6 months, economic reform 6 years, and cultural change 60 years).

In contrast, I understand
democratic learning as happening when people are mobilized into forms of
democratic political participation; when they mobilize to oppose
environmentally destructive projects or city re-developments which enclose
public spaces. Such spatial-environmental struggles set in motion dynamics of
incorporation and contestation that Robert Dahl described as fundamental for
democratic development. Democratic socialists
should place tools for mobilizing populations into civic roles, from the
municipal level upwards, at the centre of their strategy.

Drawing on such episodes,
democratic socialists should place tools for mobilizing populations into civic
roles, from the municipal level upwards, at the centre of their strategy. This is
a way to unleash pluridimensional democratic learning, ranging from transformative
biographic effects on people engaging in politics, across rebuilding capacity for
political mobilization, to a programmatic renewal that should help left forces
weave a convincing narrative focused on the future, rather than on lamenting
the past.

Madrid, Spain, March 3, 2018. Hundreds take to the street of Madrid to demand fair and accessible housing for all, an end to speculation on banking and real estate, and for the inalienable right of every citizen. Mario Roldan/Press Association. All rights reserved.