In the 1995 French presidential election, there was a situation that could be called an earthquake today, although it only caused a momentary commentary storm. The National Front candidate, Jean Marie Le Pen, placed fourth, with 15% support. However, he had the highest support among the workers' class voters. It amounted to 30%, which allowed Le Pen to overtake socialist organization candidates, the "traditional" communist organization and, rather strong in this country, the Trotsky mainstream. This happened in a country with very strong leftist traditions, where the support of the working class for socialists and communists was strong for decades, and “antifascism” is an almost authoritative ideology. Finally, this occurred erstwhile the Le Pena organization presented its conventional programme, then to a tiny degree concerning the social problems of workers, being alternatively an offer for lower classes of mediate class and tiny holders (trades, services, agriculture, crafts etc.).
An unexpected folk phrase
The then elections should be considered a turning point. Since then we have been faced with an increasingly strong turn of the working class and various segments of the "people's class" towards the populist right. At the same time, there is the expression of the “anti-system” right towards the plebeic environment – gathering their social, identity, dignity and others problems. In the following years, right-wing populism not only increasingly and increasingly received workers' lefts, workers' and plebeian voters. He besides had an attractive offer for them, moving distant from the "Korvinian" populism to strengthen social communication.
Today, they are various populisms, usually right-wing or at least "old-fashioned" (and thus rejecting part of the message of the modern left, mainly in cultural-identical-citizen matters), are a haven for those social environments that erstwhile were the facilities of the left. The cursed people of the earth no longer march under the red flag today. Its flag is increasingly populist flags.
Across Europe we see triumphs or crucial support for populists, mainly right-wing. This is mostly due to the voices of industrial workers, poorer paid workers, environments called precarriage (close in many matters to what is referred to as the lumpenproletariat in conventional Marxian phraseology) etc. This is even the case in countries where the political establishment tries to discipline voters by massive means to alienate them to “populists”, “the utmost right”, “anti-system groups”, etc. However, this is even the case in the countries that have been the bastions of the left for decades, including the social democratic one, which did not lose its image on the collapse of the russian bloc. fewer cases of countries where the conventional left has defended itself as expressors of interests and emotions of the lower social strata are those in which social democracy took over any of the populists' slogans. The case of the Danish Social Democracy, which has powerfully tightened the course on migration, is eloquent of the fact that it is mainly hitting the plebeic strata: deteriorating employment standards, reduced availability of social benefits and public services, competing for limited goods (e.g. inexpensive housing), the expansion of the reserve labour army, not to mention cultural differences.
Also in post-communist countries, populists discounted folk anger over the course of the "transformation" and further events, specified as incorporating these areas into the planet economy on neocolonial and (half)peripheral rights. This shows not only class-layer distribution, but besides regional distribution. In Poland, quite a few support for specified groups is for poorer regions, overruled by "restructuring", but besides portrayed as culturally backward. The key thing here is not that the Liberals like "dark-garden" and the social-economic aspect. This can be seen, for example, in the Czech Republic, which are the subject of ignorance from Polish liberal and progressive environments. Not only do the populists accomplish considerable support there, but in addition, the best results are achieved in the erstwhile developed and now post-industrial, devastated northern regions, including the 3rd largest city of the country, Ostrava.
Left without workers
The left is in reverse, and if somewhere else triumphs or maintains strong influences, it is usually not thanks to the support of the working class and the plebeic environments, but against it. Real proletariat is ‘exchanged’ into ‘substitution proletariats’: sexual and cultural minorities, ‘progressive’ middle-class divisions, large-town electorate, various subcultures defined on the basis of lifestyle and consumer attitudes, etc. This does not mean strengthening the left, as was imagined in the strategies that envisaged extending the erstwhile electoral base to fresh groups and themes. Much more frequently the left saves the skin (although usually only half) but at the same time progresses its disintegration with the planet of workers. Especially in a disadvantaged position: from national peripheries, from "obsolete" industries; from professional groups with lower wages and lower prestige, from little educated and little skilled, with the hardest jobs to do, to work under unstable conditions.
This is clearly seen in our part of the planet – in little prosperous societies and little able to apply effective individual promotion strategies or economical self-defence, and at the same time more culturally conservative than Western Contractual States. PiS, Fidesz, Smer and Ano are groups much more frequently supported by "lost" than "winners", both in economical and class terms and in regional or cultural terms. It can be almost blindly assumed that parties of this kind will have greater support among workers, unemployed people, precarceration, farmers, rencists, in poorer and/or “restructured” regions, in Poland (Slovakia, etc.) B, with lower incomes. Conversely, the left is increasingly a group with above-average support in large cities, prosperous regions, management, highly skilled and well-paid professionals, education, prestige, social capital and wealth in another "assets".
Revolution in Jasnagrod
Since Le Pen, mentioned at the outset, was a turning point in the process, it is worth returning to France. besides due to the fact that in relation to it it is hard to apply shallow and missed explanations of what left-liberal environments effort to mention to Polish or post-communist realities. France is not a ‘backward’ country, there are no serious ‘creature influences’ there, it was not in a ‘cultural freezer’, it is not ‘traditionally anti-left’, it cannot be said ‘not following’. On the contrary, everything there was to any point according to left-wing recipes and recommendations. Modern capitalism, authoritative secularism, doctrinal anti-racism, strong left, openness to immigrants, celebrated cultural student revolt, moral liberalism, libertian pop culture, etc. And here the French individual voted massively for Le Pen and now for Le Pen.
But France is worth referring to for another reason. We have late had the Polish edition of a fundamental dissertation on the super-Sekvan working class and its political evolution. Back to Work Stéphane Beaud and Michel Pialoux, originally released in distant 1999, shows us the roots of the current phenomena, as well as their universalism, incapable to bring the problem to “dark and conservative” Poland or post-communist realities.
Effects of exploitation
I will immediately say, bearing in head the place of publication of this text, that the phrase described in the book is more liable for substance than culture, and if cultural factors are crucial here, it is alternatively different than those which the right likes to see in the function of the origin cause of the "fall of civilization". It is only on this basis that tensions that the right can play politically, specified as immigration and "multiculturalism".
Dynamic capitalism is crucial in destroying “the good old days”. The book Beaud and Pialoux is simply a precise description of how emphasizing the profits from the exploitation of the employed causes the disintegration of working communities, their culture, a sense of stability, dignity, value and meaning of specified a lifestyle. Step by step technological changes in the service of hypercapitalism, besides driven by globalisation (competition from nipponese brands and the car industry), service to increasingly screw-up the hired. Constantly raising performance standards, expanding control, soulless methods of labour management, "sterilizing" jobs from all forms of labour autonomy and working community, the withdrawal of the automotive company from activities for the local community – all this undermines the position of workers, not only economic, but besides symbolic, as well as purely physical. People with well-paid, respected, many-year-old, causative and dignified employees of a well-known company become semi-automated, followed, taught, disciplined, alienated. This is not an ideological manifesto, but a hard, concrete sociological work, based on many insightful, repeated over time, interviews with employees, their families, union activists, etc.
This involves structural change. Peugeot arranges fresh mill halls so that they do not favour working household and solidarity. Releases or suspends the admissions of young workers. alternatively of a plant producing everything from A to Z (which had many meanings from the point of view of employees, from the sense of versatility and pride of workers, through their greater number and combat-steering performance, and ending with various forms of professional promotions), a large part of the component manufacturing is shifted to external companies, and the production of cars takes place in the just in time model. It is increasingly hard to get unchangeable contracts and professional promotions, to win the position of a skilled individual who erstwhile belonged to an worker "aristocracy", was employed until retirement, had good earnings and prestige.
The effects are not just a continuous and increasing exploitation. This is besides a breakdown of the ethos of the working group and its associated local community. erstwhile a Peugeot worker, it sounded proud. It meant unchangeable work, good income, social respect, a sense of individual dignity and a collective arrogant identity. specified a individual was a function model. Children imitated their parents, their sons wanted to be like fathers, they had a planned and decently guaranteed professional future from the beginning of advanced school.
Rebellion of the “off-off”
Prof. Małgorzata Jacino, in the introduction to the Polish edition of this book, perfectly synthesizes this process: “What the workers have so far prided themselves on – solidarity, their own culture, pride, charismatic leaders, persistence in opposition and effectiveness – clashes with another image, namely the image of miserable, grim life and social sadness. The worker's identity created in the 1960s loses all the qualities that gave the right to pride, and becomes the subject of social phobia. The elimination of vocational schools and the promotion of general education and matrimony, even without the possible of a concrete professional future, have thus come upon a susceptible background of compulsive escapes, if not from mill work, from working identity, from “prolo”. For this reason, after the 1968 revolution, youths coming from working families effort to get free of all signs of this fear and fear of identity and aesthetics of working culture. possibly this is the biggest defeat of the 1968 revolution: the essential condition for emancipation became to reject the identity of the worker. From then on, the constant, reliable justice of tastes, saving from shame due to his father in the suit at the tape or cleaning office of his parent was to be the marketplace alternatively than household culture. Although the marketplace did not promise young people anything in peculiar about the future, it offered them symbols in the years of triumphant neoliberalism confirming their belonging to the planet of unprecedented progress, consumption, liberation and seemingly and at most for a decade, and made invisible their shameful origins – origin from “social pits”. The cosmopolitan clothing brands have mercifully obscured by the force of their symbolic persuasion the stigma of the uncouth, convoluted and aggressive bodies of the kid workers.”
This is not just a description of the reality in Peugeot in Sochaux – this is simply a description of the decay of industrial civilization. And then it was only worse, in France and in the full Western world. besides here – Polish desindustrialization after the fall of the Polish People's Republic is so much foolishness, thoughtlessness and crime in the performance of liberal elites, as much as joining the same process that was already going on in the West. Not for natural reasons, but in the name of another capital offensive and maximising profits.
Red reiterade
Left couldn't find the answers. During the period erstwhile the capital went on to attack the limited captures of the wellare states, in most cases it capitulated before the neoliberal "spirit of history", she accepted as her narration-propaganda, which claimed that the change was natural, obvious, inevitable, etc. These were times erstwhile the Left advocated soft-neoliberalism in the form of "third roads". These were besides times of gradual abandonment of the working class and the search for "substitution proletariats" in the form of cultural or sexual minorities, subculture, mediate class, non-classical perceptions of women (as if the cleaning female had the same problems and interests as the businesswoman) etc. The workers became unfashionable, old-fashioned, but they were besides seen by the leftist as a breeding ground in the march towards the market-cultural “progress”. Even in France, where the left retains quite a few the old ethos, the division between her and the workers grew.
The book Beaud and Pialoux shows the course of this process. Initially, the French working class remained faithful to the left. She voted for “proven” politicians, for older activists, for those who inactive appealed to this group of voters, for those who, unlike the remainder of left-wingers, were inactive “in the field” (working communities, industrial towns, etc.). But specified a left was little and less. The media-cultural disregard of "robots" became hostages of another groups and attitudes, turned distant from the humiliated and broken and increasingly hard to clearly specify the working class.
“ Over the past 15 years, workers who were to be workers began to look at them with a mixture of compassion and sad resignation... The question may be asked whether the increasing popularity of the National Front among workers should be considered as a form of bitter or even desperate protest against the “moralism of the left”. For the majority of workers, who were frequently only temporarily recruited for the “idea” of the FN, there is no strong ideological position. On the contrary, the support given to the FN is accompanied by doubts and an unclean conscience, and it is the consequence of specified reasoning: since “we” (employees) are so “backward”, “unreformable”, specified “failees”, and you (leaders, “socialists”) are constantly repeating to us, or giving us the impression that we do not realize anything, that our children do not have “endurance”, are not “open” and so “we will not proceed to be impunityfully deceived, we will show you what we can, show in a different way, which is our only force, or force of numericalness, voting on Le Pen or constantly threatening to do so”. (...) This “reactive” aspect of the vote on Le Pen seems very crucial to us: it expresses deep social hatred, increasingly engrossing workers; it is besides a kind of retaliation, though bitter and not besides glorious, for how badly they have been treated in fresh years. For the workers who vote for the FN, the stake in the game is the dignity of people who have worked hard their full lives to gain their own home, rise children to decent people, gain respect for the environment, etc. Today, workers are threatened with the failure of this dignity, which may seem worthless to people who have no contact with the working environment. The causes may vary: not only the unemployment that affects the family, the declassification of the place of residence (...), but besides the ever-increasing competition to their strategy of values (e.g. disqualification of local traditions and “heres” for cosmopolitanism and mixing of cultures) and the questioning of conventional sex roles.’
SEE ALSO:Scenes from French streets can be in Poland in 10-20 years – Adam Stara, Casper Kita
Workers Against “Tolerance”
The book besides addresses the very delicate issue of migration and the increasing anti-immigrant sentiments among workers for the modern left. The authors perfectly show a circumstantial Gordian node of this issue, including aspects that escape contemporary liberal-left moralists. On the 1 hand, they indicate that immigration is capitalistic. In times of economical boom it was on business initiative that migrant workers from Turkey and the Maghreb countries began to be brought in. During this period, the “core” workers first promoted socially and no longer wanted to do the hardest jobs. Then, in the face of the neoliberal offensive, their situation deteriorated, so the mill did not appear as the promised land, but as the burnt land from which to flee into various individualist endurance strategies. The structural deterioration of the working class and its media image has caused industrial workers to believe that they are not spoken of at all or are spoken ill, without compassion and concern, but much attention is paid to people from number cultural groups and their problems. In turn, cultural minorities, along with neoliberal "reforms", were in a worse situation than before. The young generation was not even offered the work their immigrant parents received. The marginalization and frustration associated with this resulted in both many asocial behaviours (not at least made up by the “outright right”) and the eruption of the popularity of Islam in the extremist version, which religion became for young people with immigrant families Marxian “opium of the people”: “the sigh of the oppressed creation, the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of soulless relations.” It's just taken them distant from most of society, just working.
Beaud and Pialoux perfectly show how workers' communities get aversion to (post)immigrants, not from right-wing positions. Laicism in contrariment to Islam or a modern lifestyle opposed to muslim conventional familiarity are involved. The authors of the book show that French workers are directing towards immigrant communities the sharpness of these “modern” values and strategies that neoliberal capitalism itself instilled. For example, the emphasis on good education, which is the only chance to escape the necessity of working in an increasingly inhuman and exploitative industry, leads to criticism that migrant children understate education levels, are forcefully and unfairly "pulled" into higher classes, affect disproportionately much effort and attention of teachers, sabotaging educational and educational processes, etc. The neoliberal situation in which “indigenous” French working families, “returned to malthusianism”, as the authors say, have reduced the number of offspring (in order for less children to be able to keep and educate at a “appropriate” level) is simply a trend contrary to the “multiple” and “hot” household life of the immigrant community. In addition, there is simply a general decline in the area – the poverty-stricken social problems, with yet another “core” French (but besides with better assimilation migrants) leaving it, etc. It continues, as the book's authors state, "competition in the usage of public space", resulting in the "indigenous" French feeling that "in their own neighborhoods they become themselves like immigrants."
Preachers Without Believers
The left has no answer. Although at the theoretical level he recognizes in the causative function these contradictions of neoliberal capitalism, at the level of everyday discourse he does not go beyond lamentations of racism, calls for tolerance, praise of multiculturalism, etc. The authors of the Return to the Worker's Issue show the attitude of workers towards left-wing intelligents ("those whose cultural capital protects them") – “who do not know how large their fear of the future is, always adopt a “moralist” attitude, and if they reason in terms of the ratio of forces, they believe that immigrants are always by definition “weaker” while a large proportion of workers are painfully experiencing their own material and symbolic degradation.” Moreover, workers are seen as being economically, financially and culturally “privileged” against immigrants, as a consequence of which “any mention to the problems of the working planet even on the left has become inappropriate, almost covered by taboos.”
On the another hand, the example of immigration and the attitude towards it shows a broader and almost universal pattern, according to which the discord of the left with the working class progresses. On 1 side there are: moralizing from a position of superiority, hastily cataloging all possible minorities and caring for them, portraying workers as privileged (white, heterosexual, men, etc.) and at the same time backward and small empathic, theoretical designation of the wickedness of capitalism and simultaneously complete their misunderstanding in the local circumstantial context of the plebeic life. On the another hand, there are people tired of increasingly exploitative work, ignored and marginalized in public debate, accounted for increasingly meticulously from almost everything (including the contents of the plate), surviving in decaying communities, alternatively disrupting their instructive left than, as once, praised by it.
Right march!
During this time, populists scope out to the working class hand – whether it is social offers or at least "understanding" theirs and dignity transmission, and sometimes both. In addition, they mention to the only inactive surviving Community emotions in the planet of increasing individualism and socio-cultural fragmentation: patriotism, nationalism, sometimes religiousism. And the left hand side of this group's problems on page 123 of the electoral program, but at all step of the way, it shows that its priorities and strongest emotions concern something or individual completely different.
When a individual chooses populists, he hears that he is dark, backward, stupid, naive or sold out for 500+. So in the next election he votes for populists even more willingly. And even more massively, he is condemned by people with whom nothing truly connects him, starting with lifestyles, attitudes and cultural values, and ending with ways of earning and social origin. It is no wonder that if the broken, broken, controlled, and taught “work force” inactive looks for hope, activates politically and trusts someone, it does so under the banner of populists. Not under red.
