The peculiarity of the historical period we’re now in is that the moment has arrived for such a change of tack. But due to the complexity of economics and politics, and the way in which they’ve become multidimensional, it’s become very difficult to determine which way we need to change – from the right to the left, or from the left to the right. At times of such uncertainty, temporary leaders appear, with vague ideological profiles; people such as Trump, Boris Johnson, Matteo Salvini, or Vladimir Putin. At one moment they seem left-wing, at the next, right-wing. No one can be absolutely sure in which direction their political course is heading. Quite possibly this is their aim, because they want to appeal to as broad a section of the public as possible (and so far they’ve succeeded in this). But they can’t go on like this forever. At any given moment politicians will appear on the scene with a clear programme.
Who’s standing on the threshold today and knocking on the door of global politics? The left or the right? The answer to this question is not as obvious as it might seem. At first glance it looks as if Europe – and not only Europe – is waiting for a long-expected victory for the so-called far right forces. We have Marie Le Pen in France; the Alternative für Deutschland (the Alternative for Germany, the AfD ); the Lega Nord (Northern League) in Italy, and others. It’s clear that the new-found “Russian Tsar” decided to use these forces to build a “Holy Alliance” to defend traditional European values. But I think there’s a serious question as to what extent these forces that have positioned themselves as being on the right are actually dedicated to right-wing ideas. Most of these parties of the right hold a hidden left-wing agenda up their sleeve. The reason that they’ve had some success in the game of political poker is that the genuine left has temporarily dropped out of the race, having got lost in the mess of migration policy, thus leaving their original place open for the right.
What is it that’s so confusing the traditional left and even forcing them to huddle together, giving up their place on the pedestal to the right, who are promoting leftist ideas? The answer lies on the surface. The traditional left-wing programme turned out to be smeared with a migration agenda that had been superimposed on top of it. This is all rooted in the split at the traditional base of left-wing ideas and the separation from the base of the “new poor” and the “uninvited poor”.
The “new poor” are those who are “relatively poor”; that is, although their standard of living is incomparably higher than genuinely poor people in the past, they nevertheless consider themselves poor compared to the growing wealth of the “new rich”, which gives them a sense of poverty.
The “uninvited poor” are genuinely poor people, mainly immigrants, who are temporarily and illegally employed, and who are not protected by the law. There are huge numbers of such people in the developed economies of the world.
So the problem for the left with their traditional agenda is that their social base is disappearing before their very eyes. The poor are rapidly turning into the “new poor”, and are ready to fight on two fronts: both against the “new rich” and the “uninvited poor”. And since (as is well known) the fiercest competition always erupts on your own doorstep, the war against the “uninvited” occupies the minds of the new poor even more than the war against the rich.
All of this was brilliantly demonstrated by the “Jeremy Corbyn case” in Britain. Even the Labour Party’s ultra-radical programme could not conquer the topic of Brexit in the eyes of their traditional electorate, which led to the failure of the Party (along with the Conservatives) in the election for the European Parliament.
The right poured into this gap. Seizing the pseudo-left’s programme as a weapon, they took advantage of the confusion of the traditional left, who were undecided on the issue of immigration, and achieved significant success. There are reasons to believe, however, that this success could be temporary. This is certainly not because the ideas of the left have some special sacred power. It’s just that now the left agenda is once again in demand. After a few decades dominated by the policies of the right, there’s been a sharp growth in inequality and social stratification. The next long cycle will be dedicated to the battle against inequality, not the other way round. This will be followed by something else, and someone will raise the banner of this “just cause”, whatever it may be. But here and now in the West we can most likely expect a global “turn to the left”, which I’ve been talking about in various formats for the last fifteen years.
This is the general background picture. So what about Russia? How does all this reflect on the country’s prospects? As always, Russia is also taken up by this trend, but here it’s rather more confused, because where the left and the right align there’s not so much a dislike of immigrants as there is, firstly, a nostalgia for socialism, that’s confused with the idea of a welfare state; and secondly, some real remnants of socialism, that are burnt into the class nature of Russian society.
Society holds that the USSR represented a country in which there was no inequality. This is so; but also, not so. If you look at the overall figures, then they show that the difference between an ordinary worker and a member of the Politburo wasn’t so great, particularly if you compare it to today’s situation. But in relative terms, the differences in the strata of Soviet society were enormous and constantly grew. For ideological reasons, this growth was hidden by a lack of conspicuous consumption or publicity, and wasn’t apparent right up until the last moment. But when Communism died, the situation got out of hand, and Russia looked like a country with one of the highest levels of inequality. But it’s wrong to say that inequality arose in the ’nineties. Because it was handled badly, the issue of inequality came into the open only in the ’nineties and destroyed the truce that then existed in society.
In the twenty-first century, Russia has been shown to be a country with one of the highest inequality indices in the world (similar to the USA). The gap in earnings and the standard of living of the different strata of society became even more unacceptable when compared to the long-established Soviet habit where people thought of themselves as equal – outwardly, at least. This meant that at the start of the century it was virtually impossible for right-wing ideas to be promoted in any democratic way in Russia. Against the background of the increasingly sharp stratification of society and with nostalgia for the Soviet past clearly growing, any idea that justified the further stratification of society directly or indirectly would simply have been rejected.
People were presented with a difficult choice: accept either the ideas of the right, under which banner the post-Soviet economic reforms were carried out, including the return of the right to private property; or go for the introduction of democracy, which was the purpose of the political reforms. At that particular moment of Russia’s historical development, the ideas of the right and democracy couldn’t be linked together.
It was at that point, finding ourselves in a position where we could re-think many of the old stereotypes, and unexpectedly realising that we were able to look at things from a different point of view, that I suggested to the reformers and the democrats – basically, all those who were ready to look to the future rather than the past, and who could see Russia as a contemporary, modernised state – to make an unambiguous choice in favour of democracy, and to change the banner. My point was that society would no longer accept the ideas of the right (even though the idea hadn’t been discredited in Russia, and the work that was worth doing under this banner was far from completed), and that this had led me to call for “the turn to the left”.