If you can’t get into the City, try the Palace at Westminster!

parliament ignored the 2 million who marched against war on Iraq

Sophie Katz examines the crisis of representation in European politics. This is part one of a longer analysis by Sophie. The second part will be published next week.

What is the meaning of modern western politics and its apparent death wish? The left’s received wisdom is not false; that there is really nothing to chose between those in the mainstream that seek to represent us; that the scope of modern political representation has become so attenuated that its participants seem to start from the premise that there is nothing to be done to substantially change the management and control over the real power and wealth that dominates our world. These brutal global facts are truer today in the West than at any other time in the history of western political systems.

But what is new is the way that the various classes in society are reorganising – including politically – in the face of the decline of traditional representative politics.

At first sight the observer can only see an incoherent mess. Politics in the US is polarising as that society is polarising socially and economically. On the other hand, the mass parties in Europe grow closer to each other and more and more detached to their traditional bases. There appears no pattern in this kaleidoscope. Obama has constructed (albeit limited to entirely electoral purposes) the greatest social base since Roosevelt, while his right wing Republican opponents have driven deep roots into disaffected plebeian layers of whites at a more profound level since third party movements like Hue Long in the 1930s and 40s. Yet whatever the model, the tide of dissatisfaction with all mainstream politics and politicians continues what looks like it inexorable surge across the entire West. In most of Europe for example the traditional social bases of the maim parties have all but dissolved.

Spanish miners defending their jobs

A brief look at the Spanish condition begins to illuminate the new trends; the new mainstream politics of the west – and the route it is now taking towards self-destruction. We begin to see a political system that has lost any immanent purpose. The Spanish vox populi says and thinks alarming things about its political system (barely 38 years old) from the point of view of the establishment. As the Spanish economic crisis drives its way through every door, and is provoking one of the continent’s most severe social crises, a whole, vast, political class has emerged whose sole raison d’etre appears to be its own economic survival. 80% of Spaniards describe their political leadership as ‘poor or very poor.’ The behaviour of politicians is normally second only to unemployment when Spaniards list the things that disturb them most. Today politicians are top of the list. And Spanish unemployment is above 50% for those who are 25 or under. Why?

Estimates vary but some calculate that when you add up the 70 000 councillors, the deputies in the regional parliaments, the 1000’s of mayors and the legion of other political office holders then there are roughly 409 000 politicians in Spain. This makes a political office-holder for every 115 citizens. (In France there are 325 and in Germany 800, bout the ratios are declining.) There are 22 000 official cars in Spain. 1000 are used by the central government governments, 11 000 by local town halls and 10 000 by regional governments. This perk alone costs Spain 1.2 billion euros a year. On February 1st 2013 new allegations (there have been waves of them) and new evidence have emerged implicating the entire leadership of Spain’s party of government, including PM Rajoy, in massive personal corruption.

This is not some ‘Spanish disease’ as many European – even Spanish – commentators have called it. And despite local differences in ratios and perks, Spain is showing the west the future of its mainstream politics. This semi-secret west-wide process is the material basis for the popular (although it has sometimes been seen as irrational) reaction to all politicians and to mainstream political institutions as essentially self-serving. They are. Western politics and the politicians who work within it are being constructed by a parasitic and extractive motive.

But what is new? Italian, Irish, Greek, not to mention Belgian and French politics have seen endemic corruption for decades.What is new is the changed class framework for this development. Social and economic power in the west has never been so distant from its political institutions.  To take the example of the UK; – following the revolution of the 1640s Parliament applied its sovereign will over every aspect of the Kingdom’s wealth and appurtenances. By the early 19th century Parliament genuinely represented different factions of Britain’s ruling classes and was vital in imagining and applying the vital compromises ensuring the survival of the ruling class as a whole. By the late 19th century the British parliament played a vital role in absorbing the shock of the new working class representation and its incorporation into the capitalist system. Corruption continued throughout. But, despite its extent, it was always marginal in relation to the main political purposes and functions, including to the parties and the personalities who led them, corruption, however rank, was marginal to the essential class functions they performed in the sphere of national and imperial politics.

The Spirit of ’45

Just as the social and economic defeat of the post WW2 British working class movement has removed the main, integrative function within the political system of the British Labour Party (Labour MPs were well represented at the head of the queues for expenses) so the neutralisation of national ruling class power through and by the world wide network of global billionaires, has emptied Britain’s parliament of its previous significant purposes for the ruling class. Today it stands, like a toothless old sentry, handing over the last of the family silver in defence of the very bandwagon that has passed beyond its allegiance, defending ‘the market’, existing as an institution much the same as the Chelsea Pensioner’s Hospital, to provide a free lunch for its impotent participants.

What then has become the purpose within the new class alignments of these vacant political spaces? There are still various social, economic and psychological purposes for layers of middle and upper class people that ‘need’ to be served. And the economic wolf is howling at the middle class doors. Their children will not be able to buy houses.  The current political system provides access to key networks of influence and the prospect of future substantive economic security for those who get even a few feet up the ‘greasy pole.’ These ambitions may often start at the level of the individual would be MP, tinged by the experience of some campaign or even an injustice, but they are not any sort of expression of coherent class interest or framed by any sort of global or historical perspective. And they do not attach to any coherent, class-structured organisation, which might call account to any MP’s political direction. Instead Parliament and the mainstream parties have all become the machines for their own reproduction. The ‘representative’ parliament and the mainstream political parties have become less ‘representative’ than they have ever been.  In Spain a virtually anonymous party list system is what gets the vote. In Britain a boy who grew up in an academic family in North London, went to Oxford and became a political ‘advisor’ is now Labour MP for Doncaster and leader of the Labour Party.

The question is, if western parties and parliaments no longer have the purpose of representing the people of those countries then what shall we do with them?