The World Wants to Advance to Socialism

Vijay Prashad

The refashioned liberals and social democrats are back. They have positioned themselves as the saviours of the world; they act as Reason to the unreasonableness of neo-fascism. This is possible because their forbearers have collapsed in the puddle of neoliberalism and technocracy, and because their adversaries now present themselves as the howling wolves of the extreme right. The refashioned liberals and social democrats are like zombies, the reanimated corpse of a dead liberalism. These refashioned liberals and social democrats have a point. Their immediate predecessors had taken their liberal tradition and exhausted it in the fires of austerity and debt.

As the old liberals tied themselves openly to the austerity-debt agenda of neoliberal policy, they refashioned themselves as technocrats and began to style themselves as the sole arbiters of what in popular opinion was acceptable to their technocratic vision. This acceptance by liberals of the gripping pain of austerity and the rejection of its critique allowed the extreme right to cloak itself as the people’s representatives and strike a populist tone through the ugly rhetoric of anti-immigration and “anti-woke,” but marrying it with their incoherent criticisms of the economic system. The extreme right emerged largely on the coattails of liberal surrender to neoliberalism. But the extreme right has not broken with the general outlines of neoliberal policy. It replicates it alongside a harsh social agenda. Despite all the talk of economic nationalism, the extreme right does not have an original economic agenda.

It is not as if refashioned liberals and social democrats are so eager to build mass movements and to abjure state power. They believe that state power can be won through the ballot box in liberal democracies and that this can be done by disassociating themselves fundamentally from the aim of socialism, from the history of socialism, and from the actual experience of socialist state projects. But that would be a hollow state power, because it would mean taking office without power, without building the movements and political organisations that come with a mass base that is gripped with clarity, confidence, and an appetite to realise full human dignity. The class struggle remains the central battlefront to

The world wants to advance to socialism.

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