“We” – not as communists or left-wing people, but as humans. Why do we not think about our actions all the way to the end / about the causes and all the results of our actions? The European – thus, including the local – elections have once more, but more than before, pushed us to wonder how is that a so unique being because thinking does think so scarce.
The media filling analysts emphasise the facts: the turnout, the percentage taken by the parties, evolution of this percentage, the probable hierarchy of the future leadership, the alliances; and – this is the dominant ardent goal, represented by the single “authorised”, “true” voice allowed in the public space – if the militarist politics squeezing the natural resources and the human endeavour in order to destroy the alternative to the Western imperialism’s extortion of nature and human labour, would be somehow threatened: however, militarism is not discussed as such, it is softened as much as possible, everything being reduced to “the internal enemies are the pro-Russia”, and, in a weaker tone, “pro-China””. And perhaps if the “sovereignists” would really threaten the European Union as such. Great Britain is a precedence, but seriously the parties which bark at the European structures of Union do not want its destruction, but only more “freedom” – i. e. opportunities and privileges – for the national capitals and also for the states.
Well, the analysts emphasize only “facts” – this or that party is “pro” etc. – and, first and foremost, the dominant ideological messages. But where are those who could deconstruct these messages and show how fake the “facts” are, or at least some “facts”?
Let’s see some facts, and problems, as the Romanian elections have revealed.
1) The turnout: 49,9% for the local elections, and 52,32% for the European elections (https://www.g4media.ro/prezenta-la-vot-cum-se-mobilizeaza-romanii-pentru...).
Problem 1: the (huge) absence. Not compared to other European countries, neither to previous elections: but to the logic of elections, thus to the reason-to-be of the presence of citizens in elections. Why were they absent? Not because of their laziness in a warm summer Sunday, neither because they anyway would be the beneficiaries of the results / of whoever would have been the winner and whatever party would have won (we remember Mancur Olson’s “free ticket” theory): but because of the indistinctness of the presumed difference between the parties and their candidates. “All are thieves” is the popular slogan, and thus people reject all of them, at the same time expressing their powerlessness: they can refuse/being passive, but this passivity does not change their condition, does not better it, and on the contrary, deepens it.
Problem 2: why to vote at all? Let’s imagine that the turnout would be 25% (according to repeated polls inquiring the degree of confidence in the governing elites and policies, 70,1%-70,4% answered in February 2024 that both the country and the world “are heading in a wrong direction”; but obviously, these polls are never interested in shedding light on the causes that people consider to be driving the wrong direction). Letting aside if the elections were considered valid – and that this situation would be prevented by different measures – would they have legitimacy? Harder. Thus, a weapon people can use passively in “democracy” is just to not vote, or to annul their own votes if the presence is mandatory. But why to not vote? Well, if no party has led to a good direction, would the pleasure to punish the personages who are more hateful and to vote the more sympathetic ones exceed the reasonable thinking that to not vote all of these parties is only the first step to change things and to contribute to a different politics?
2) The collation of elections – this time for the local administrations and councils and for the European Parliament – has once more proved the official intentional pattern of inducing confusion between personages, emotionally treated, and politics, that requires and involves rational evaluation: but specifically, because most of personages were related to administration, between administration and politics. More: the official policy is to use administration and administrators as driving forces of the preservation of the parties of capitalist and imperialist politics.
Problem: administration is, in principle, politically neutral, because it is a technical activity. It is the result of a substantiation made by specialists – in management, ecology, sociology, economy, psychology, architecture, history, geography, engineering – and its concrete aims are subordinated to the end of a good local organisation of the social environment for all. One of the causes of people’s accepting of the status quo is just the “administration of things”, if we borrow Engels’ formula. Of course, administration is mixed with politics, but: 1) people discern the unjust corrupted facts politically imposed and the general, relatively efficient administration; and 2) personages formally from right-wing parties can be very correct and good administrators (as Emil Boc, re-elected as mayor of the second biggest city of Romania, Cluj-Napoca; and who insisted already many years ago that all pensions must be according to the contributory principle, thus spoke against the privileges, something that the “left-wing”, the social-democrats, never approved), while personages formally from “the left”, the social-democrats – because no other left is allowed – proved to be aggressively reactionary. However, by voting good administrators who promote a party, people also vote this party when electing the political representatives of parties in the local councils; and now, they vote this party for the European Parliament; and thus, a continuous legitimating of the existing dominance of capitalist (and imperialist) politics takes place: because all of these parties converge to the same politics, irrespective of some secondary differences, and obviously, irrespective of the rhetorical differences. Consequently, would not be more useful to not vote administrators – as we do not vote the physicians and medical staff in a hospital – they being specialists recruited according to their competency/skills, but only parties’ representatives in the local legislative elections and European Parliament?
3) Because the word “imperialist” was used. The real stake of all the parties is the preservation of capitalism, namely, of the economic and political power of the private profit with all means (and also, of the ideological dominance, as sine qua non for this power). But in order to preserve the power of national local ruling strata, they must integrate within the international capitalism and assume its goals. This means: on the one hand, they feel the economic contradictions with the transnational (European and American) capital, tending to solve them by selling resources and eventually merging within the big business the exploitation of these resources involves and, on the other hand, they fully take over the political position of the states and forces of the transnational capital, namely, imperialism. Romania is not an imperialist state but it serves imperialism, perhaps hoping that it will profit – now from Ukraine’s “reconstruction” if not from “compensatory” territories in the future defeated Russia, as in the WWII it dreamed, too –: so, it is a devoted ally of the Western imperialism. “The state represents the people”, but is the people represented by the state? It’s clear-cut that the state represents the dominant strata, but why did the people vote for goals of these dominant strata, and especially for imperialism?
Problem 1: No party questions neither imperialism nor Romania’s stance. This fact once more shows that the appellatives they use for their political identity are mystifying: the “left” is not left, either used alone or with the “sweetening and realist” “centre”; it is an ordinary right-wing party, continuing the traditional convergence toward the right of conservatism and liberalism and of socialist/social-democrats with liberals. If so, we must not repeat the official appellatives of parties, and this repetition illustrates the weakness of the left as such, of its ability of theoretical innovation and practical consistent militancy. Letting the former history aside, the weakness originates from the incapacity to promote dialectical explanation after the collapse of the European socialist system and the taking over of the capitalist theory and agenda according to which the totalitarian political regime, interdependent on the system as such (its structural relations and legitimating values), would be the cause of the 1989/1991 breakdown; consequently, the solution for the left would have been the abandonment of communist values and ends and its transformation into a banal and reactionary “social-reformist” supporter of imperialism. And people are aware of the many clashes between its desires and social-democracy, but they call it, as the single name used by all forces, “the left”. Yes, the huge manipulation etc. But we also contributed to the official mystification.
Problem 2: The “extreme-right” winning a second place (6 mandates) between the Romanian future team of European parliamentarians. Actually, this extreme-right is promoted by two parties: AUR (Alliance for the Unity of Romanians) and SOS Romania, winning 3 more mandates. The latter, known because of Diana Șoșoacă, has a “Euro-realist” criticism, as it says, and an inevitably confused “pro-Russia” discourse, reclaiming former Romanian territories now in Ukraine, while AUR promoting the unification of Romania and Republic of Moldova. But people are not very attentive to the eventual differences between the two, generally voting the nationalist discourse, even though these parties, and especially AUR, mix this discourse with total neo-liberal (minimal state etc.) aims. However, even the dominant social-democrat-liberal alliance mixes nationalist and “European” elements and thus, the majority of the population has voted this alliance – where is “left” and where one could find a nationalist motivation; and obviously, because the loud and excessive discourse of the “nationalist” parties is less credible than that of the efficient social-democrat-liberal alliance already in power. Anyway, people voted the “sovereignist” discourse, not the radical right policies the “nationalist” parties represent. Nevertheless, the extreme-right – whose discourse is both anti-democratic and anti-establishment – will have, irrespective of its push on the alliance so as this one develops more decisive extreme-right economy and policies, and irrespective of its function to deepen the confusion and to attract people who reject capitalism and equate the extremist nationalist discourse with socialism, a role in the European Parliament: but will it strengthen the anti-militarist and anti-support of war against Russia? It depends on its gains if more “anti-Ukraine” parties will enter in the Parliament. So, I would not consider the Romanian “pro-Russia” extreme-right a win, but a warning: actually, the anti-militarist future of Europe exists neither on the basis of respectable “democratic” parties fighting for the preservation of “European” privileges, nor on unforeseeable fishermen in troubled waters.
4) The concrete public and publicly relevant moral behaviour of all types of politicians was never discussed by media. Neither before nor after the elections. For instance, the fact that many of them ran for local administrations but at the same time for the European Parliament. Consequently, the elected are considered as the inevitable “natural” phenomena, bad but “since the evil exists in the world, we cannot oppose”. And also, the social-democrat – liberal alliance, that is, “against nature” in principle, is once uglier: its different members fighting each other before and after the elections. The image of the entire political game is black and sad. But people are resigned, when they are not indignant against a concrete wrong from which they do not go farther. Or, a responsible political attitude asks a moral sensitivity, that was systematically destroyed: and substituted with an avalanche of scandals never decomposed all the way. And which, each of them, lasts “no longer than three days”.
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Therefore, the Romanian elections are only an example of the well-oiled political, actually, systemic mechanism of capitalism, and of the lagging of its understanding by those who are the only ones who can oppose it. It seems that we, humans, all of us, are much behind the processes and events which overwhelm us as if they were, again, inevitable natural phenomena. People are tired and want to live in peace, following the known social routine. Those who are optimistic highlight the contradictions of capitalism, secretly wishing their inherent power to implode capitalism as such: although the contradictions are integrated in capitalism and somehow used by it as if they would be functional. The pessimists are fatalist, as well as those who are indifferent, all putting their hope in the only thing that remains to them and does not shrink as a result of its sharing, the Almighty. But nothing happens without humans. Accordingly, the only way that may stop the barbaric development of worldwide war and irrational acceleration of decay of what is human is rational thinking all the way to the end, thus the education of rationally approaching – thus dialectically, in unity and in the flux of time – the causes, the facts, and the results. Any action that is not based on this rational thinking all the way to the end, anticipative and evaluating all the variants, is doomed to fail, to remain an adventure, in fact contributing to the stabilisation of capitalism.
Concretely, to think rationally all the way to the end means to critique both the regional union as such, like the European one, and the idea of national “sovereignties” – namely, isolation – which are an illusion in the present integrated situation of science and technology, productive forces and economy, human communities and values worldwide. National sovereignty is only the sovereignty of the people, and not of the rulers: and it requires socialism, the people is sovereign because it is socialist, and moreover, it is part of the world socialism. Neither the regional union nor the “national sovereignty” can fight fascism as antidemocratic and anti-humanist values and political regimes without fighting against capitalism and for world socialism.
The world is in a state of emergency, and the solving of risks implied by this state cannot take place through fragmented, isolated, and contradictory strategies. The fragmentation of the real left wing is part of these strategies. The taking over of the labels given by the dominant strata and of their agenda is another part, and another one is the forgetfulness of the international condition of the humans of the contemporary era started with the WWI. For us, internationalism as a fingerprint of the consistent left – the only one worthy of the name of left – is not an obligation after focusing on and solving the fragmented, national or regional, problems: on the contrary, it is their structural preliminary frame. For this reason, the whole game of “European elections” must be decomposed from the standpoint of internationalism.