The Great Moving Right Show

No one seriously concerned with political strategies in the current situation can now afford to ignore the "swing to the Right". We may not yet understand its extent and its limits, its specific character, its causes and effects. We have so far—with one or two notable exceptions—failed to find strategies capable of mobilizing social forces strong enough in depth to turn its flank. But the tendency is hard to deny. It no longer looks like a temporary swing in the political fortunes, a short-term shift in the balance of forces. It has been well installed—a going concern—since the latter part of the 1960s. And, though it has developed through a series of different stages, its dynamic and momentum appears to be sustained. We need to discuss its parameters more fully and openly on the Left without inhibition or built-in guarantees. Certain aspects have won attention from the Left: the present Government's tough industrial and economic strategy in face of the recession and crisis in capital accumulation; the emergence of "Thatcherism" and the anti-Left campaigns; the rise of the National Front as an open political force. But the full dimensions of the precipitation to the Right continues to evade a proper analysis. This may be because the crisis continues to be "read" by the Left from within certain well-entrenched and respectable "common sense" positions. Many of these no longer provide an adequate analytic or theoretical framework: the politics which flow from them thus continue to fall far short of their aim. Thus there are some who would still argue that "worse means better"—i.e. a sharpening of the contradictions. Such a position is often based on a belief in the inevitable rising tempo of class struggle and the guaranteed victory of "progressive forces everywhere". Those who hold it have short political memories. They forget how frequently in recent history a sharpening of the contradictions has led to "settlements" and solutions which favoured capital and the Right, rather than the reverse. The commonest response on the Left is probably to interpret the "swing to the Right" as a simple expression of the economic crisis. Thus "Thatcherism" is—give or take one or two elements -the corresponding political bedfellow of a period of capitalist recession: the significant differences between this and other variants of Tory "philosophy" being conceived as without any specific pertinent political or ideological effects. And the National Front is the long-anticipated irrational face of capitalism—the class enemy in familiar Fascist disguise.