The death of politics- part 1

With the end of the phase of mass-industrialisation in the west, which occurred between the mid-60s and 80s, and the rise of globalisation, the upper classes believed that they could restore their previous socio-political power. This effort began in the Anglo-American core, and was led by two significant neo-conservatives, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. These two were described as neo-liberals because they supposedly harked back to the golden age of 19th century liberalism, but their strategies were very much based in the revolutionary impact of new technologies.

Reagan taking on the air traffic controllers and Thatcher breaking the coal miners in the early 1980s clearly signified that neo-liberal governments would no longer compromise with left-labour forces. Instead, the constant upheaval within the workplace due to new technology and globalisation would discipline labour while intensive use of the now docile mass media would constrain popular debate.

The neo-liberal interests, who recombined the reactionary and progressive sections of the upper classes, succeeded in asserting a narrow form of economics as the only viable form of social program. Real power to affect national events was increasingly handed to independent central banks or global commercial entities, such as the global finance markets. Once national governments lost control over the broad economic conditions, they essentially lost their main reason for existing. This weakening of the power of the once all-powerful nation-state has been a core effect of the transformation known as globalisation. It has also been a body blow to the labour-left.

Politics, then, was gutted of actual content, and so it became focused on process, abetted in this shift by the ever more concentrated mass media. Personalities became more important than policies, resulting in the utterly contrived images of men like Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Increasingly, such men were not political leaders in the traditional sense but archetypes designed to portray such leaders. This is why they were so confounding to progressives who were dismayed at their transparent dishonesty. They stood as figureheads, as lightning rods to attract attention and diffuse dissent, while behind the scenes pragmatic technocrats managed the actual governing process.

So politics as a process of sustained information exchange and rational debate is finished. No political party can put forward genuine alternatives and survive the negative media scrutiny and the reaction by global finance markets. No genuine leader can arise in such parties - only extreme crisis, when the usual lines of power are disrupted, can there be real leaders like Nelson Mandela.

The harsh truth is that established political parties in the developed world are now irrelevant to the purpose of substantial progressive change. Politics, as we have known it, is dead.

Read part two here.