introduction
A time-honoured instrument of political analysis is the notion of party families. These are groupings of political parties across countries, sharing common features and often connected through transnational political networks. A number of indicators are used to capture the perimeters of party families, including ideology and policy, origins, labels and international affiliations. Out of these indicators, the most important one is the first concerning parties’ links, and by extension parties’ links to cleavages, which often albeit not always capture the other three indicators as well.1 Party system studies based on cleavage theory probe the idea that the structuration of political conflict is a function of the number, nature and dynamics between distinct social divides based on class, religion, ethnicity, geographical periphery and values.2 Although, in terms of cleavage and party system alignment patterns, European countries show considerable variation, political conflict is considered to be cross-nationally structured and charac-terised by similar divides across western Europe.3
It would of course be restrictive to consider parties as the only available medium of being or becoming a political subject and actor on the Radical Left, or otherwise enacting a political identity or rit-ualising a power struggle. Particularly at a time of a historical low in party membership, deidentification with parties and widespread disaffection with institutional politics, being political is not only nor mainly being partisan. Taking as a hint that party ideologies are the most commonly used tool of deciding which parties belong to one or another family, normative political ideas as a source of antagonism are the starting point for elucidating the separating lines between
* Parts of the argument in sections 2 and 4 of Chapter 2 were initially elaborated in Giorgos Charalambous and Gregoris Ioannou, Introducing the Topic and the Contents, in G. Charalambous and G. Ioannou (eds) Left Radicalism and Populism in Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 1–30.
political spaces. Given that political actors are of diverse ideologi-cal types, one can speak more broadly of politiideologi-cal families occupying a range of space on the political spectrum and its axes of conflict, and within them families of parties, trade unions, social movement organisations and other sectional and value groups.
political families: how to study them?
Taking one step back on the conceptual ladder towards higher levels of abstraction allows us to obtain a larger selection of political actor types than that permitted by the notion of the party family. It is there-fore a more appropriate theoretical format for understanding how political ideas are channelled into activity, in parallel and intersecting processes of human interaction, which include but are not limited to party systems. In turn, our investigation must be broader than what politics is often taken to mean, as the study of the Radical Left, like that of any other actors or families of actors in social and political space, is a phenomenon at the crossroads of political science, sociol-ogy and anthropolsociol-ogy. It is an inherently multi-disciplinary subject of study and its routinisation by human beings is an individual and social as well as political praxis.4
A political family is a group of actors with common ideological ref-erences and policy prefref-erences engaged in social and political conflict within and also outside of state institutions. Enacting a system of ideas in everyday society and politics, a political family draws from proximate historical ideologies or ideological traditions, in essence combining them in envisioning a series of goals. The word as used in this book assumes the possibility of different organisational types and ideological mixes coexisting within the same broad arrange-ment of ideas, which has existed as a historical social force since the French Revolution. The Left is in a sense a constituent part of organising around a systemic contradiction between oppressors and oppressed. Political families denote political activity that is often diverse in nature and purpose, driven and inspired from within the same system of thought. Their function is the embodiment and per-formance of systematised values, principles and beliefs that defend popular grievances. These ideas denote a political space, which
15
becomes a family when it is collectively engaged in social and politi-cal conflict; theoretipoliti-cally speaking this collective engagement ranges from full fragmentation to organic unity. Strictly speaking, politi-cal families are spaces qua families because to constitute themselves as a family with common denominators and little internal conflict is itself variable across country and historical contexts. After all, in party family theory, because the concept is deductively derived, fragmentation within historical, political groupings can be low or high, at the national or the transnational level, affecting the family’s cohesion but not the very notion of family as reflective of the social origins of issue conflict. But we can still broadly transpose the con-figurations of European party families onto their broader, political space. We can thus continue to speak of the Radical Left and (also extreme) Right, the mainstream or centre-left and its historical or contemporary variants (social democrats, most Greens/liberal envi-ronmentalists and others) and the mainstream or centre-right and its variants (Christian Democrats, Conservatives and Liberals).5
On the whole, political families denote the ideational proximities and concrete relations between distinct types of mobilisers within a political space. Figure 2.1 illustrates the conceptual architecture of political families. They are composed of actors connected through a
1 Figure 2.1 Delimiting the study of political families
Historical processes of social life … across two arenas of conflict … in which political families are engaged
Non-Figure 2.1 Delimiting the study of political families
network-like structure, which engage in institutional and non-insti-tutional mobilisation. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the Radical Left specifically, has mobilised through trade unions or trade union fractions; anti-fascist militia groups in 1920s Italy; political clubs during the period of the French Revolution; ethical socialist charities in the UK; agrarian associations in late nineteenth-century Russia;
freedom or independence movements in Latin America, Africa and Asia; social bandits, indigenous populations and local churches in various Latin American countries and elsewhere; or academics, public intellectuals and artists.
In this historical sense we can speak of several types of mobilis-ers or components of a political space, acting (not merely thinking about how to act) to achieve certain objectives on the basis of shared principles. This can happen either in an organised or unorganised fashion, collectively or individually, to different degrees of inten-sity and antagonism. The transposition of ideas into discourse and behaviour presupposes a cognitive process of ideological thinking whose starting place is the human mind. The mobilisers of any polit-ical family are at the most basic level individual agents, who then join organisations and coordinate and mobilise through them to the extent that collective political identities are both shaped by and affect individual ones.
In this book, we focus primarily on RLPs and radical social move-ments and activism because they are the most diachronic and global agents of mobilisation and resistance. At the most basic level, ‘a social movement is a collectivity of actors who want to achieve their goal or goals by influencing the decisions of a target’.6 These collectivities are commonly seen as having a network structure, using ‘unconven-tional’, that is, non-institutional or not only institutional, means of political action, espousing shared beliefs, practising solidarity and pursuing conflictual aims.7 Networks translate into loose associations, which involve informal interactions between individuals, groups and organisations.8 Social movements as understood here are engaged in
‘sequences of contentious politics’,9 have change-oriented goals and a degree of organisation and exhibit more or less temporal continuity, even when they mutate compositionally or adapt organisationally.10
The term social movement encompasses both what has come to be called social movement organisations (SMOs)11 and relatively unor-ganised turmoil or protest activity expressing discontent without clearly defined proposals and a prescribed structure. The distinc-tion between the individual and the collective level is a crucial one in mobilisation studies.12 Given that any political family entails agents acting in an organised fashion, or individual or informal group action without regular affiliation to a larger crowd, it must also encompass the mass trends through and around organised forces which channel themselves in activity, agitation and protest. These are wider than the range of participants identifying with specific organised groups.
Here there is also a role for intellectuals (high-skilled opinion leaders, experts or other personas) intervening in the public sphere, who link movements as audiences and are recruited for electoral purposes by parties, sign petitions, organise nationally and transnationally, but are foremost defined by their individual capacities, actions, scholarly work or militancy.
The social and political arenas of mobilisation host different actors, endowed with distinctive capacities in relation to political power strictly defined as lying within the ambit of the institutions of gov-ernance. Parties are stable political entities that have regular access to the media, the state and political institutions, and they are legally bound to follow electoral rules that in turn shape the nature of party competition. The fact that parliamentary parties have a formal role in organising legislation impacts on their strategic calculus, organisa-tional structure and programmatic positions in ways which, unlike in social movements, concern the ‘uneasy relationship between partici-pation, competition and representation’.13 Co-optation in institutional arenas, such as the party system or government, is of course more likely than in extra-institutional or less formal and binding settings, which are further away from the corridors of public decision-mak-ing power. On the other hand, proximity to power may fuel partisan life, something which remains a void in social movements, especially loose and prefigurative ones that are almost never exposed to power motives.
What are regularly referred to as movement cycles with synco-pated mobilisation waves do not always coincide with the electoral
cycles of their ideologically proximate parties, especially if transna-tional mobilisation is taken under consideration. Movements, after all, emerge partly to claim social space that lies unoccupied by parties and perform functions that parties do not pursue to the fullest.14 When parties are busy remaking themselves into electoral machines, movements (and interest groups) fill the role previously and par-tially played by the mass party on the ground.15 As social movements and parties are not substitutable, on the Left, especially where extra-institutional action was the way into politics, movements (starting with trade unions) have often injected party systems with dynamism, innovation and debate. Systematically, as we will see, party formation on the Left and electoral realignment towards the Left have been the outcome of mobilisation by organised actors outside or against the state.
Mobilisation is a historical process employed as a means to resist, among other things, securing interests, defending dominant prac-tices, creating art, feeling good or accumulating social capital.
Resistance – literally the refusal to accept or comply with some-thing and the display of opposition to it – is endogenously a political concept as it relates directly to the contestation of power and signals dissent from a dominant narrative, an imposed series of ‘universal truths’, which in the times of neoliberalism have been summed up by TINA (‘There Is No Alternative’). Adam Roberts, referring to resist-ance, wrote of ‘activities against a particular power, force, policy or regime’.16 Vinthagen and Lilja suggested that ‘resistance is a subal-tern response to power; a practice that challenges and which might undermine power’.17 In this sense, an act of resistance is undertaken by someone subordinate, as a response and challenge to power, and
‘contains at least the possibility that power gets undermined by the act’.18 Paul Routledge defined resistance as ‘any action imbued with intent that attempts to challenge, change or retain particular circum-stances relating to societal relations, processes and/or institutions … [which] imply some form of contestation … [and] cannot be sepa-rated from practices of domination’.19 This last point of the de facto inseparability of resistance and domination is expressed by Michel Foucault’s analysis which transformed orthodox understandings of power, shifting concern from abolishing power altogether to ‘what
forms of power do we want to live with and which forms do we wish to limit or prevent?’20
Indeed, a common point in the above (as well as other) defini-tions is that although resistance constitutes a counterpoint to global power, it can theoretically be performed inside as well as outside of state institutions and it can be effective or co-opted. In other words, it can either reinforce or reverse the usual direction of co-optation by the magnetic forces of the power being challenged. The history of resistance is full of temporal and spatial variations. As a politics which predates democratic practice, it has been evolving on the basis of centuries-old elaborations of how to respond to oppression, ranging from being aggressive and transformative to being defensive and limited. The form of resistance is determined at the same time by the meaning and pervasiveness of the act of oppression itself.21
Focusing on the European continent, resistance is connected to the Radical Left as long as it translates into a vocal opposition to the reproduction or infusion of perceived socially unjust power rela-tions and structures. Resistance can theoretically be practised by all political and party families, yet the history of the Radical Left is more closely tied to the collective interests of the oppressed, subor-dinate and subaltern sections of society, and thus those most likely to resist systemic forces. Therefore, not all political families resist;
some rather dominate by pursuing or negotiating the interests of the dominators.
Yet resistance can be co-opted. Co-optation is equivalent to ‘the de-subjectification of a subjectivity initially fabricated under relations of domination’.22 It can include the process through which an anti-attitude towards the dominant practices, whose criticism renders resistance to what it is, becomes a pro-attitude in declaration and in practice. That is, when there is positional – ideological or pro-grammatic – change that clearly violates policy pledges or ideational principles that are employed in the critique of that notion of the good society, which is embodied by those exercising or attempting to exercise domination. Co-optation will thus naturally lead to deradi-calisation.23 Importantly, the history of the Left is full of instances of
‘compromise’, ‘moderation’ and ‘defeat’. A number of dilemmas have been pointed out between consistency and co-optation, which have
often constituted important sources of tensions within the Radical Left. These tensions were on many occasions resolved in favour of co-optation, as concerns, for example, the EU,24 the pursuit of executive office25 or electoralism.26
Co-optation can also concern the teleological dimension of ideology (the long-term vision of society by a particular family of political actors), generic rhetorical schemas which avoid reveal-ing one’s true credentials or organisational practice which diverges from ideological principles. For social movements, co-optation might mean a number of things: either inflow into parties compro-mising in parliament or being defeated electorally; or movement demobilisation, that is, social implications analogous to the elec-toral desubjectification of parties. For party leaderships, unlike for activists, electoral defeat, analogous to social movement demobili-sation, does not mean co-optation; often, electoral defeat might be the product of appearing ‘too radical’. Co-optation and resistance are temporal, dynamic, intermingled processes, which actors and collec-tivities navigate through crafting a more or less successful strategy on the basis of specific goals.
Any actor engaged in political conflict and in mobilisation thinks, speaks and organises, thus a collective action framework can both capture and compare movements and parties across their key func-tions. Analytically distinguishing between the ideational, the rhetorical and the organisational elements allows us to address all and any political actors in processes of mobilisation and resistance without narrowing down the scope of analysis appropriate at the level of political families to more specialist concepts. More field-specific conceptualisations will provide useful analytical tools in the book when it comes to examining each of the three dimensions of analysis consulted here. Indeed, the main point of scrutinising identities, rhetoric and organisation is not that more detailed tools of investi-gation cannot be employed depending on whether it is movements or parties or other actors under discussion. It is that one can also fall back on categories providing the possibility for generalisations across collective action types (and including individual agents) at the level of the political family: the European Radical Left.
identity, rhetoric, organisation
First, the Radical Left like any other political space is intrinsically connected to systems of thought. Accordingly, as we know from the work of Michael Freeden, ideational morphologies include central, adjacent and peripheral ideas.27 Studying the morphology of ideolo-gies allows one to consider each value, principle, theme or belief by itself as well as in relation to the others, to approach its content and significance, or put differently, its salience. This is what determines its relational weight within a political family. The salience of currents within a political family can change as there is no particular reason as to why one should exclude the presumption of a dynamic nature between the centre and the periphery of an ideational system.28 Ideas and often the visions to which these lead can be added, abandoned or modified. They can also move from the centre to the periphery and vice versa, in this way obtaining more or less salience. Theoretically, both the centre and the periphery can enlarge, simply incorporating more ideas as social forces on the ground find ways to accommodate them systemically. This is a plausible assumption as long as it is taken into account that change in one concept, whether its addition, aban-donment or modification, generates further ideational realignment within the ideological system, because the latter’s essence is above all relational.29
The morphological perspective is important because it reveals the central and less central variants of ideologies and by extension the constellations of agents expressing these variants. By itself, though, it is still insufficient for our task. Political families reveal the assump-tion that ideas can only be understood in terms of mobilisaassump-tion, as
‘manifestation[s] of a particular being-in-the-world of conscious actors; of human subjects’.30 Ideologies and systems of ideas are thus understood here in the sense used within the Gramscian tradition that sees ideology as an action-oriented system of values and beliefs that allow different groups to make sense of the world. Social linguis-tics, for example, remind us that knowledge, values, intentions and goals of actions are properties of mental representations, themselves generated by the human mind.31 In turn, the mind is often driven by
interests that ideas rationalise, although not necessarily the material interests of all groups espousing these ideas.32
interests that ideas rationalise, although not necessarily the material interests of all groups espousing these ideas.32