Tariq Ali on the political impact of the crisis in Europe

From a recent interview:

'[The economic crisis] is a big crisis of perspective for the capitalist and neoliberal parties of Europe. And all the social-democratic parties of Europe, which had become neoliberal parties and defended the Washington consensus quite openly, are now in severe crisis. The British Labour Party, "New Labour," to begin with is completely bankrupt, like the economy it’s been promoting for the past 12 years.

Labour’s first response to the financial meltdown was to blame the United States, saying "it’s all Wall Street’s fault" — but people responded, "what about the City of London?" My colleague Peter Gowan had a very funny response: The City of London was the Guantanamo of Wall Street capitalism, because every kind of abuse was permitted.

The problem we face in terms of the Labour Party is that there was such a clean sweep by (Tony) Blair and (Gordon) Brown that they effectively destroyed it as a political party. They changed its structure, so that everything is top-down almost like a Stalinist sect. There’s no internal life, they’ve lost tens of thousands of members, the trade unions have put up no serious fight. It’s a big mess, and the only people who have benefited are the Conservatives, who are positioning themselves as more human than Labour, sometimes even attacking from the left.

The left as a whole in Britain is incredibly weak. In the rest of Europe it’s somewhat uneven. In France the unions weren’t defeated or smashed, the public sector unions put up a big fight, and Sarkozy couldn’t put through all the neoliberal reforms he wanted. When asked about it, he said "I don’t forget what country I’m living in. The people who smile today at me and my beautiful wife can set up street barricades tomorrow."

In France the largest far-left group (Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire, LCR) has set up a new anti-capitalist party. It hasn’t yet attracted many other groups, but in many towns quite a number of people have joined from the anti-globalization movement and from the Communist Party. The new party’s leader Olivier Besancenot has a higher popularity rating than the official leader of the Socialist Party. This is an interesting phenomenon.

In Germany you have the most significant party to the left of social democracy, Die Linke. It’s now doing well in the west (i.e. beyond the eastern base of the former PDS) — it got a good vote in Hamburg and other cities. It has a major leader from the Social Democrats, Oskar Lafontaine, a left socialist who’s given the party enormous credibility in western Germany. This party strongly opposes the U.S. war in Iraq and Afghanistan; they demand an independent foreign policy.

The biggest German bank, Deutschebank, was heavily entangled in the whole subprime mess; but the state banks are severely regulated and reasonably healthy, so the Germans haven’t suffered to the same degree as others. Even Angela Merkel said, thank god we didn’t go down the Anglo-Saxon road. So there’s a lot of support in Europe for state control. But the biggest problem is the weakness of the left on a Continental level, despite the better situations in France and Germany.'

Tariq Ali is speaking on 'The American Empire in Crisis' at Marxism 2009 in London in July.