Events | 2009.09.01
In the new revolution, progressives fight against, not with, the poor | David Edgar
The old, transformative alliance between the intelligentsia and the poor has been broken by the intelligentsia itself
The year 2009 is not only the anniversary of many great events but also the anniversary of the many misjudgments that were made about them. So, not just the 1979 Iranian revolution and Margaret Thatcher but the delusion that the first was an aberration and the second a blip. Not just the 1984 miners\' strike but also the conviction that the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) would win, as it had so decisively in 1972 and 1974. And in 1989, not just a series of uprisings in an obscure corner of Europe but also the failure to notice the new political fault lines they drew throughout Europe and beyond.
In 1989, I was one of two non-communist members of the editorial board of the magazine Marxism Today (the iconoclasm of whose politics led to it being described by some on the left as the most inaptly titled periodical in Britain). Under its editor, Martin Jacques, the magazine had been right to see Thatcherism as representing a fundamental political sea change: this year also marks the 30th anniversary of Stuart Hall\'s coining of the term . However, in the autumn of 1989, as the dominoes fell across eastern Europe, our cover subjects were the Greens, the end of Thatcherism, the soaraway Sun and Shere Hite .
We weren\'t alone. Many people underestimated or misread the significance of what was happening in eastern Europe in 1989. For all the American triumphalism, the revolutions gave the lie to the neocon theory – used to justify American support for brutal military dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere – that rightwing "authoritarian" regimes would peaceably morph into democracies while leftwing "totalitarian" systems couldn\'t. Optimistic leftwingers thought eastern Europe had risen up for social democracy, not realising that the enticing Swedish (and West German) model was also in deep trouble. Reading backwards off the last east European insurgency (against Ceausescu in Romania), cynics argued that the whole thing was a fake, cooked up by Gorbachev\'s KGB. Others thought it wasn\'t so much a revolution as a restoration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
What most people missed – because it wasn\'t immediately clear – was that the 1989 revolutions presaged a new kind of political movement.
For all its religious fervour, Iran in 1979 was a recognisable, 20th- century, third-world revolution, in which the progressive middle class allied with the rural masses to overthrow a hated, foreign-backed autocracy. It\'s easy to see 1989, too, as a variation on that theme. Its seeds lay in the 1980 workers\' occupation of the Gdansk shipyard in Poland. Its political mechanisms were borrowed from the 1960s anti-war movement.
But in retrospect, rather than being the last of the 20th-century revolutions, 1989 looks more like an anticipation of the colour/flower-coded revolutions of the 21st: from Georgia\'s 2003 rose revolution via Ukraine\'s 2004-05 orange revolution to Kyrgyzstan\'s initially pink or lemon but finally tulip revolution against another crooked post-communist government, later the same year.
Despite considerable, covert American backing for the insurgencies and the highly dubious character and record of the successor governments, the rose, orange and tulip revolutionaries had right on their side. But their side was much narrower than that of the 1979 Iranian revolution, narrower even than most of the anti-communist uprisings 10 years later.
Most clearly in Thailand – where the airport-occupying yellow-shirted People\'s Alliance for Democracy actually wants to limit democracy, and openly expresses scorn for its "uneducated", red-clad opponents – there is a new divide running through world politics.
The 21st-century revolution pits the educated, western-oriented, socially liberal, economically neoliberal urban middle class against the economically egalitarian, socially traditionalist rural poor. The green armbanded protesters – again, on the right side – against Ahmadinejad\'s election "victory" in Iran were urban and liberal, the president\'s supporters rural and conservative. As the BBC\'s John Simpson noted in the streets of Tehran, the two big differences between the 1979 and 2009 uprisings were the presence of women and the absence of beards.
The sedimentation of this new fault line would be a disaster for the left. Like the Russian revolution, all of the great progressive campaigns of reform in the 20th century – from the international campaign for the Spanish Republic via the American New Deal and the European postwar welfare state to the American civil rights movement and women\'s liberation – grew out of an alliance between the progressive intelligentsia and the poor. That alliance was betrayed in Russia when Stalin turned on the intelligentsia in the Great Purge of the 1930s, as Mao Zedong did in the Cultural Revolution of the late 60s.
But today, the alliance is being undermined by the intelligentsia itself, here as well as elsewhere. Proclaiming old left-right divisions as out of date, progressive thinkers posit a raft of new fault lines – liberty versus authority, secularism versus religion, free speech versus censorship, universalism versus multiculturalism, feminism versus the family – all of which are cast in forms that put the progressive middle class on one side and significant sections of the poor on the other. The pro-war belligerati wrap themselves in borrowed progressive banners and set about cementing a new barrier between freedom and equality. Abandoned and berated, sections of the non-white poor turn to religious fundamentalism and parts of the white poor to the BNP.
In addition to its naming of Thatcherism, Marxism Today was noted for its analysis of the decline of traditional working-class politics. Judged as a prediction, Eric Hobsbawm\'s series of articles identifying Labour\'s Lost Millions were better read as a warning, which New Labour heeded, reminting the political alliance that elected Labour in 1945 and created the welfare state.
Since 1997, however, New Labour has cracked that alliance apart. It has presided over a growing economic divide between its two constituencies, abandoning its working-class supporters. Its social policies have sought to depoliticise and disarm movements built around gender, sexuality and identity, reducing them to lifestyle choices. It has done nothing to reverse – indeed, it has continued to encourage – the emasculation of those institutions that working people built and through which they created a political alliance that created the welfare state, abolished hanging, liberalised the divorce and abortion laws and legalised homosexuality while combating racism, seeing off the National Front, campaigning for disarmament and building the women\'s and gay liberation movements.
One of the striking things about visiting eastern Europe during the 80s and 90s was finding people who shared western liberal values on sex, drugs and rock\'n\'roll but who regarded Thatcher as a heroine and her politics as a model. Those of us who fervently believe in liberty, secularism, free speech, gay rights, civil liberties, enlightenment values and feminism, but also in social diversity, religious tolerance and economic equality, need to set about dismantling the barriers that people who believe in only some of those things want to erect.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/24/revolution-1989-1979
