ciencias politicias, Apuntes de Ciencia Política

¡Descarga ciencias politicias y más Apuntes en PDF de Ciencia Política solo en Docsity! While there are a number of plausible labels that might be attached to the 20th century, in terms of social history it was clearly the age of the working class. For the first time, working people who lacked property became a major and sustained political force. This rupture was heralded by Pope Leo XIII—leader of the world’s oldest and largest social organization—in his encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891. The Pope noted that the progress of industry had led to ‘the accumulation of affluence among the few and misery (inopia) among the multitude’; but the period had also been characterized by the ‘greater self-confidence and tighter cohesion’ of the workers. [1] On a global level, trade unions gained a foothold in most big industrial enterprises, and in many other firms too. Working-class parties became major electoral forces—sometimes dominant ones—in Europe and its Australasian offshoots. The October Revolution in Russia provided a model of political organization and social change for China and Vietnam. Nehru’s India set itself the avowed goal of following a ‘socialist pattern of development’, as did the majority of post-colonial states. Many African countries spoke of building ‘working-class parties’ when they could boast no more proletarians than would fill a few classrooms. May Day began on the streets of Chicago in 1886, and was celebrated in Havana and other Latin American cities as early as 1890. Organized labour proved to be an important force in the Americas, even if it was usually kept subordinate. The US New Deal marked a confluence between enlightened liberalism and the industrial working class, which succeeded in organizing itself during the Depression years through heroic struggles. Samuel Gompers may have epitomized the parochial craft unionism which preceded the New Deal, but he was a formidable negotiator on behalf of the skilled workers that his movement represented, and was honoured with a monument in Washington that exceeded any bestowed upon a workers’ leader in Paris, London or Berlin. [2] Mexico’s small working class was not a leading actor in its Revolution—though not a negligible one, either—but the post-revolutionary elite expended much energy absorbing organized labour into its machinery of power. The Revolution’s first president, Venustiano Carranza, forged his social base through a pact with the anarcho-syndicalist workers of Mexico City (the Casa del Obrero Mundial), and in the 1930s Lázaro Cárdenas gave the structures of the new order an explicitly workerist orientation. [3] While that could hardly be said of Getúlio Vargas and his ‘New State’ in Brazil, a raft of progressive labour laws became one of its legacies. In Argentina, it was working-class mobilization, notably directed by Trotskyist militants, that brought Juan Perón to power, guaranteeing Argentine trade unionism—or at least its leadership—a major voice in the Peronist movement ever since. Bolivia’s miners played a central role in the Revolution of 1952, and when tin production collapsed in the 1980s, the organizing skills of those obliged to seek work elsewhere provided Evo Morales and his coca growers with a spine of disciplined cadres. Perhaps the greatest tribute to the centrality of the working class in the last century was paid by the most fanatical enemies of independent workers’ movements, the Fascists. The idea of ‘corporatism’ was vital to Mussolini’s Italy: purporting to bring labour and capital together, in reality corralling labour into a field fenced off by capital and the state. Hitler’s movement called itself the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, and his Germany became the second country in the world—trailing after the Soviet Union but ahead of Sweden—to establish May Day as a public holiday, the ‘Day of German Labour’. In the first eighty years of the 20th century, workers could not be written off or dismissed. If you were not with them, you had to keep them under tight control. Workers became heroes or models, not only for the artists of the left-wing avant- garde, from Brecht to Picasso, but also for more conservative figures, such as the Belgian sculptor Constantin Meunier—creator of several statues depicting workers of different occupations, and of an ambitious ‘Monument to Labour’, erected posthumously in Brussels in the presence of the King. In Germany, the Prussian officer-writer Ernst Jünger penned an admiring essay, ‘The Worker’, in 1932, predicting the end of the Herrschaft (domination) of the third estate and its replacement by ‘the Herrschaft of the worker, of liberal democracy by labour or state democracy’. [4] While the working-class century no doubt ended in defeat, disillusion and disenchantment, it also left behind enduring achievements. Democracy as a universal political model, violations of which nowadays require special pleading, is one. The Social Democratic labour movement was the main proponent of democratic reform, following the example of its Chartist predecessor. Before 1918, most liberals and all conservatives were convinced that democracy was incompatible with the preservation of private property, and thus demanded severe restrictions on the right to vote and the freedom of parliaments. [5] The defeat of Fascism by an inter-continental Popular Front of Communists, Liberals, Social Democrats and Conservatives such as Churchill and de Gaulle; the more protracted downfall of counter-revolutionary military dictatorships; and the demise of institutional racism in South Africa and the United States established the validity of global human rights. The right of wage-workers to organize and bargain collectively was another major gain of the post-war conjuncture. Conservative forces have chipped away at those advances recently in the US and the UK, but in the meantime their purchase has spread across the world, to the formal economic sectors in Africa and Asia; it remains strong in Latin America and in most of Europe. The 20th century can never be understood without a full comprehension of its great revolutions, the Russian and the Chinese, with their profound repercussions for Eastern Europe, the Caribbean and much of East and Central Asia—not to mention their influence on labour movements and social policy in Western Europe. Their assessment remains both politically controversial and, from a scholarly perspective, premature. Undoubtedly, these Revolutions gave rise to brutal repression and to episodes of arrogant modernist cruelty that resulted in vast suffering, such as the famines which took place during the rule of Stalin and Mao. Their geo-political achievements are equally beyond dispute—though this is hardly a left-wing criterion of performance. Decaying, backward Russia, beaten by the Japanese in 1905 and the Germans in 1917, became the USSR: a state which defeated Hitler and established itself as the world’s second superpower, appearing for a time to be a serious challenger to US primacy. The Chinese Revolution ended 150 years of decline and humiliation for the ‘Middle Kingdom’, turning China into a global political force before its progress along the capitalist road made it the world’s second-largest economy. These 20th-century revolutions have left the world with at least four important progressive legacies. Firstly, their challenge had a crucial impact on post-war reform within the capitalist world: redistribution of land in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea; the development of social rights in Western Europe; and the ‘Alliance for Progress’ reforms in Latin America—all were inspired by the Communist threat. Secondly, the existence of a rival power bloc with its own ideology did much to weaken Euro- American racism and colonialism. Eisenhower would not have sent federal troops to enforce desegregation in Arkansas if he had not been concerned about winning the propaganda battle with Moscow. Two decades later, Cuban troops held back the South African army as it tried to conquer Angola, and the apartheid regime could not have been isolated so effectively without the shadow cast by the Soviet Union in global politics. Thirdly, whatever may be said about the ruthless authoritarianism of its leaders, the Communist movement produced an extraordinary number of self-sacrificing, dedicated militants in every corner of the world. Their adulation of Stalin or Mao was wrong-headed, but very often they were the best—sometimes the only—friends of the poor and the downtrodden. This everyday commitment demands the respect of all progressives. Finally, and of more questionable significance, there is an centres of industrial production—East Asia above all—the Little Dialectic was slow to take effect. But now we can trace its consequences, first visible in South Korea during the 1980s and currently spreading across China—though organization and protest by workers is usually confined within local boundaries, Chinese wages and working conditions are improving significantly. By 2002, China had twice as many industrial employees as all the G7 countries put together. [7] Nations and classes It is somewhat ironic that we can speak of the 20th century as having belonged to the working class. While it may have been the age of class equalization within nations, as a result of working-class struggles, it was also the time of maximum inequality between nations on a global scale. The ‘development of underdevelopment’ across the 19th and 20th centuries meant that inequality between humans was largely determined by where they lived. By 2000, it was estimated that 80 per cent of income inequality between households could be attributed to their country of residence. [8] Yet in the 21st century, nations are converging while classes are diverging. The last two decades have been good for the poor nations of the world. Asia’s economic powerhouse—China, India and the ASEAN member-states—has been growing twice as fast as the global average. Since 2001, Sub-Saharan Africa has also been outgrowing the world and its ‘advanced economies’, having lagged so tragically behind for the last quarter of the 20th century. Latin America, too, has generally out-performed the developed states since 2003. With the exception of post-Communist Europe, ‘emerging and developing economies’ also weathered the Anglo-Saxon bankers’ crisis better than the rich world. Here, I think, we are experiencing a historical turn, not only in geo-politics but also in terms of inequality. Transnational inequality is declining overall, although the gap between the rich and the poorest has not stopped growing. But inequality within nations is, on the whole, increasing—albeit unevenly, for we cannot speak of any universal logic of ‘globalization’ or technological change without doing violence to the facts. What this amounts to is the return of class as an ever-more powerful determinant of inequality. This trend was established in the 1990s, a time when China’s income gap soared in tandem with that of post-Soviet Russia, while the modest tendency towards equalization in rural India was sent into reverse. In Latin America, Mexico and Argentina endured the shocks of neoliberalism. AnIMF study has shown that on a global scale, the only group which increased its income share in the 1990s was the richest national quintile, in both high- and low-income countries. [9] All of the lower quintiles lost out. The most important changes have taken place at the very top of the income ladder. From 1981 to 2006, the wealthiest 0.1 per cent increased their share of USincome by six points; the rest of the infamous 1 per cent did so by four points. The 9 per cent below them gained or kept their share, while the remaining nine-tenths of the population lost ground. [10] In a year of modest recovery following the crisis of 2008–09, the richest percentile has laid claim to a startling 93 per cent of all income gains in the US. [11] The same inegalitarian trends have been at work in China and India, although the share of wealth accruing to the richest 1 per cent is much smaller than in the USA: about 10 per cent in India and 6 per cent in China (before taxes). [12] India’s ‘miracle’ has done hardly anything for the poorest fifth of Indian children, two-thirds of whom were underweight in 2009—just as had been the case in 1995. Rapid economic growth across much of the former Third World during the first decade of the 21st century made little impression on global hunger: the number of undernourished people rose from 618 to 637 million between 2000 and 2007, and food prices continue to rise.[13] At the other end of the scale, Forbes magazine hailed the records shattered by the billionaire class in March 2012: more numerous than ever before—1,226, including 425 Americans, 95 Chinese and 96 Russians— with their total wealth of $4.6 trillion exceeding Germany’s GDP. [14]We should not assume that such developments were inevitable. Having long been the world’s most unequal region, Latin America has turned in the opposite direction and is now the only place where inequality is decreasing. [15] This reflects a popular backlash against the neoliberalism of military regimes and their civilian successors, with policies of redistribution adopted by Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and others over the past decade. Another way of comparing classes across national boundaries is to calculate their Human Development Index, which includes income, life expectancy and education— a heroic and very complicated operation with considerable margins of error. Nevertheless, it gives a useful impression of world inequality. The poorest American quintile has a lower level of human development than the richest quintile in Bolivia, Indonesia and Nicaragua; it falls below the luckiest 40 per cent of Brazilians and Peruvians, and stands on a level footing with the fourth quintile of Colombia, Guatemala and Paraguay. [16] The importance of class is also likely to grow for reasons other than national economic convergence. Inequalities of race and gender, though far from extinct, have lost some of their relevance—one important case being the fall of apartheid in South Africa. The latter country now offers one of the most dramatic examples of class polarization, after the demise of institutional racism. World Bank economists have estimated that the Gini coefficient of income inequality among the households of the world lay between 0.65 and 0.7 at the beginning of the new century. But in 2005 the city of Johannesburg had one of 0.75. [17] Even allowing for margins of error, we may conclude that one city alone contains as much inequality as can be found across the entire planet. Class and class conflict in the 21st century will develop in two new configurations, both predominantly non-European and with their centres of gravity well to the south of Natoland. One is likely to be driven by the hopes and resentments of the middle class. Another will find its base among workers and the popular classes in all their diversity—the plebeians, rather than the proletariat. In both configurations we can distinguish two conceivable paths ahead. A coming middle-class century? A conception is already taking shape of the 21st century as the age of the global middle class. The workers of the last century are banished from memory; a project of universal emancipation led by the proletariat is replaced by universal aspiration to middle-class status. Dilma Rousseff, the former guerrillera who replaced Lula as President of Brazil, has declared her wish to ‘transform Brazil into a middle-class population’. [18] In its survey of global perspectives for 2012, the OECDspoke of the need to ‘buttress the emerging middle class’, while Nancy Birdsall of the Center for Global Development has referred to the ‘indispensable middle class’ and urged a shift from ‘pro-poor growth’ to ‘pro-middle-class growth’ as the objective of policy- makers. [19] Definitions of this social layer vary widely, in spite of its alleged centrality. Let us take note of three attempts to map its contours: none is conclusive, but each is illuminating. Martin Ravallion of the World Bank places the middle class of the developing countries in a belt between $2 and $13 a day; the first represents the Bank’s own poverty threshold, the second marks the poverty line in the United States. He identifies a bulge of this ‘middle class’, from a third of the developing world’s population in 1990 to almost half in 2005—an increase in absolute terms of 1.2 billion. This layer would include almost two-thirds of Chinese but only a quarter of those who live in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. [20] Nancy Birdsall, looking to the middle class as a liberal political agent, sets the bar higher, at $10 a day. She is keen to distinguish the middle class from those who qualify as rich: your income must not place you among the wealthiest 5 per cent of your compatriots. By that measure rural China has no middle class worth speaking of; the same could be said of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria. In urban China, 3 per cent fall into this category, in South Africa, 8 per cent; the figure rises to 19 per cent for Brazil and 28 per cent for Mexico, reaching a peak of 91 per cent in the USA. [21] Two distinguished economists of poverty, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, offer a perspective based on international household surveys from thirteen countries— including Tanzania, Pakistan and Indonesia—concentrating on those with an income between $2 and $10 a day and asking what, precisely, is middle class about them. Their most remarkable finding is that this ‘middle class’ is no more entrepreneurial in its approach to savings and consumption than the poor who fall below the $2 threshold. The defining characteristic of its members is that they have a steady, waged job. [22] One could thus describe them as occupying a stable working-class position rather than belonging to a nebulous middle class. The Brazilian government tends to stress the vulnerability of the middle class, which is said to be always at risk of falling back into poverty, therefore needing careful attention and support. [23] In Asia—particularly East Asia—the same concern is not evident. In China, the middle class or stratum has become a major topic of discussion for scholars and the media since the late 90s. Before that point, all talk of a middle class was forbidden, and some of its advocates still lament the ‘ideological pressure’ which denies the class full social legitimacy.[24] Chinese scholars now tend to idealize the middle class, drawing on US stereotypes while avoiding critical discussion of the concept. The class is seen as a prime target audience for the Chinese media, whose approach is largely inspired by American publications— from Vogue toBusiness Week—that are now widely available in China. [25] It has also been identified as the bulwark of political stability and moderation in the years to come. Some perceptive commentators have noted, however, that it is the widening income gap which has laid the foundations of this new middle class: China is now Asia’s most unequal country, its Gini coefficient having soared from 0.21 in the 60s to 0.46 at present. [26] India has also witnessed the rise of conspicuous middle-class consumption in the wake of economic liberalization, and a boosterism that was epitomized by the Hindu Right’s 2004 electoral slogan ‘India Shining’. Yet the ideological landscape was far more complex and contentious there than in China. Critical voices rose against a class that was said to be ‘morally rudderless, obsessively materialistic, and socially insensitive’. [27]The ‘India Shining’ campaign backfired, and Congress returned to government. Consumption or democracy? In a world in which the modernity of the working class and of socialism have been declared obsolete, middle-class society has become the symbol of an alternative future. The developed countries of the North Atlantic are retrospectively dubbed middle-class—although this is an American notion which never really caught on in Europe. The core of this utopia is a dream of boundless consumption, of a middle class taking possession of the earth, buying cars, houses and a limitless variety of electronic goods, and sustaining a global tourist industry. While this globalized consumerism may be the stuff of nightmares for ecologically conscious people, it makes businessmen and their publications salivate. Middle-class consumption also has the great advantage of accommodating the privileges of the rich while supplying a quiescent horizon of aspiration to the popular classes. The dark side of this dream is its inherent exclusivism. People who are not middle class—or rich—do not have any redeeming features or assets. They are just ‘losers’, as the televised rant which ignited the US Tea Party in 2009 put it. They are the ‘underclass’, the ‘chavs’. In the developing world, the ‘cleansing’ of public space is one manifestation of this sinister tendency, as the poor find themselves excluded from beaches, parks, streets and squares. An especially provocative example is the fencing of Jakarta’s Independence Square with its phallic National Monument, turning it into ‘a kind of exclusive middle-class theme park’ and depriving the poor of their sole recreational area. [28] have limped on, but they have failed to establish themselves as a pole of attraction for the great masses of the working poor. Since the fall of Suharto, there has been a resurgence of Indonesian trade unionism, but mostly in the form of plant unions, concentrated in the formal sector—which accounts for just one-third of the labour force—and with a slant towards white-collar workers, in banking for example. Legal rights for those in regular employment have been strengthened by the Manpower Act of 2003. But labour is far from being a major social actor, and even in the formal economy only about a tenth are unionized. Attempts to form a labour party have so far proved abortive. [41] May Day was celebrated in 2012 by a crowd of 9,000 workers, flanked by 16,000 police. South Korea, one of the pioneers of Asian industrial development, is unlikely to produce a movement comparable to those of 20th-century Europe, although its trade unions remain significant. The ferocious exploitation of labour under Cold War military regimes became one of the rallying-points for a democratic opposition in the 1980s. That was also the high point of Korean trade unionism, with a fifth of workers organized by the labour movement. Union organization has since been eroded by de-industrialization and the growth of service-sector employment. [42] One of the union federations has nonetheless managed to set up a Democratic Labour Party which is represented in the Seoul parliament. When I last visited Korea, in December 2011, there were great expectations of a merger between left and centre-left parties, but in the end that process broke down. The Russian working class which made the Revolution of 1917 was largely obliterated in the civil war which followed, and the new one created under Soviet rule was knocked out of action by the capitalist restoration of the 1990s. Strike waves in 1989 and 1991 contributed to the fall of Gorbachev, but post-Soviet Russia had even less to offer its workers than the old system, and life expectancy plummeted over the following decade. The Communist Party is still an electoral force of some importance, but relies on backward-looking nationalism rather than any left-wing ideology. No social-democratic organization has managed to establish itself. Russia’s trade-union federation remains substantial in terms of membership, but has done little to protect the interests of workers. [43] The trade-union movement built by industrial workers in São Paolo has created a successful political vehicle, the Workers’ Party (PT), whose candidate was elected in 2002, at the fourth attempt, as a very popular president of Brazil. The PT has transformed the social landscape of the country, tackling extreme poverty, expanding popular education, and bringing more workers into the formal labour force where their rights will be protected by law. [44] But it has always been a coalition of many different social movements, and its presidents and regional executives have had to exercise power while relying on shady networks of clientelism and patronage. Today, as noted, Dilma Rousseff aspires to a ‘middle- class’ Brazil, not to a country of workers or wage-earners. Yet her country still has the strongest left-wing forces to be found in any of the world’s ‘giant’ states, and offers the brightest prospects for social change. South Africa is another rising economic power with a strong, well-organized labour movement which was part of the coalition that led the struggle against apartheid. But the ANC has given priority to nurturing a black economic elite since taking power in 1994: one striking example of this process is the former mineworkers’ leader, Cyril Ramaphosa, who has become a wealthy businessman. Despite a substantial reduction in extreme poverty, inequality was probably higher in 2009 than it had been when apartheid was dismantled. [45] The huge mining strikes that began in August 2012 were launched by a new, rival union: they were met at first with lethal repression and the use of apartheid-era laws against protest. Whatever the final outcome of this strike wave, working-class hegemony in South Africa is a distant prospect. Elsewhere in the continent, Nigeria’s union federation decided to launch a Labour Party in 2002 with support from the EU and Germany’s Friedrich Ebert foundation. But it proved to be a stillborn creature: the party project never rooted itself in the union membership, and its leaders soon drifted towards traditional forms of politics based on patronage. [46] No forward march of labour in the classical sense is discernible in today’s world, yet we can still find advances being made on various fronts. The capital–labour nexus is expanding and will continue to do so. We can expect workers to pose their own demands as they confront the new industrial world, gaining strength through organization and becoming more ambitious over time. It may be hard to envisage a transformation of society precipitated by the Marxian Little Dialectic of class struggle, but the expansion of capitalism and the growth of its inequalities will keep the working class on the agenda of 21st-century politics. Plebeian prospects The red banner has passed from Europe to Latin America, the only region of the world where socialism is currently on the agenda, with governments in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia speaking of ‘21st-century socialism’. It is also the only region where left-of-centre governments have the upper hand, thanks to the weight of Brazil and Argentina, and where inequality is decreasing—though admittedly from Andean levels. The ‘socialism’ of Morales, Correa and Chávez is a new political phenomenon, which stresses its independence from 20th-century Eurasian models of left-wing politics and is itself quite heterogeneous. It draws support from many layers of society: the urban poor (slum-dwellers, casual workers, street vendors); people of indigenous or African descent; progressive elements of the middle strata (professionals and white-collar employees). Industrial workers are rarely in the vanguard: while the remnants of Bolivia’s mine proletariat joined the coca farmers to back Morales, the chief union federation in Venezuela actually supported the abortive coup of 2002. [47] The centre-left governments of the Southern Cone also have a diverse social base, but the traditional working class and its unions play a much larger role, reflecting the greater degree of industrialization in Brazil and Argentina. The ideology of the progressive forces in Latin America contains many different currents. Chávez is inspired by the left-wing military nationalism of Peru and sees Fidel Castro as an important mentor, although he has developed his own style of democratic populism, drawing heavily (if selectively) upon the heritage of Simón Bolívar. Morales is an indigenous leader of mixed ethnic origin who developed his negotiating skills in the coca-farmers’ union and works alongside a veteran indigenista, his vice-president Álvaro García Linera. Ecuador’s Rafael Correa is a trained economist influenced by liberation theology, surrounded by a team of gifted young thinkers whose opinions range from the nationalist centre-left to Marxism. The circles around Dilma Rousseff, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and José Mujica stand somewhat to the right of those mentioned above, but are also eclectic in their thinking. In Mexico, the movement led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador— twice narrowly defeated (or cheated) as a presidential candidate—combines republican austerity with policies of social-democratic reform. Latin America may not offer a model that can be exported to the rest of the world in the immediate future. But if there are to be radical social transformations in the years to come, they will surely have more in common with recent developments in that region than with 20th-century experiences of reform or revolution based on a wage-earning proletariat—a social actor which is a small minority of the working population across much of Africa and Asia. Though empowered by rising literacy and by new means of communication, popular class movements face great obstacles: divisions of ethnicity and religion, and between different kinds of employment. But only programmes and organizational forms which take these challenges into account will have a serious chance of bringing these plebeian strata together. On a local scale we can already find many initiatives of this kind. The Bolivian cocaleros could use the movement-building skills and experience of unemployed miners. One of the trade unions in Maputo, having seen its members driven out of formal employment, has organized an association of street vendors. [48] This is not the only time this has happened: in fact, street vendors now have their own international, StreetNet, with its headquarters in South Africa. In Mexico City they constitute a political force which the mayor has to take into account. Indian women working in the informal economy have established their own structures of mutual aid in cities like Mumbai, Chennai and Ahmedabad, and in the national Self-Employed Women’s Association. [49] Trade unions have often been channels for wide popular protests against rising prices and authoritarian regimes, most recently in Tunisia during the revolt against Ben Ali. Formal-sector workers have taken the lead, but trade-union demands have been supported by broad social coalitions stretching beyond those layers. One example would be the Asian ‘floor wage’ campaign in the garment industry, a transnational initiative that emerged from the World Social Forum in Mumbai and was supported by unions, women’s organizations and development NGOs. [50] Class in this context becomes a compass of orientation—towards the classes of the people, the exploited, oppressed and disadvantaged in all their variety—rather than a structural category to be filled with ‘consciousness’. The social alliances on which future transformations will base themselves have yet to be formed, and no ‘leading role’ can be assigned to any group in advance. But without a class compass, even the best social movements are unlikely to overcome the inequalities of modern capitalism. We can thus identify four class perspectives for the decades to come which appear plausible to a sociologist’s eye: globalized middle-class consumerism; middle-class political rebellion; industrial class struggle—perhaps giving rise to new social compromises—with its centre in East Asia; and heterogeneous mobilizations of the popular classes. The social character of the new century is yet to be determined, but class will certainly be of vital importance. New geo-politics of the left The demise of Eurocentric industrial socialism has far-reaching implications, not only for the constitution of social forces but also for their organization. The party form—both the mass parties of German Social Democracy and Italian Communism and the smaller Leninist vanguard—has lost much of its appeal. Trade unions outside Europe have already realized the limitations of such parties and try to liaise with social movements and NGOs of various kinds. Yet organizational vehicles are still crucial for political influence. The mobilizations of 2001 in Argentina had a greater impact than those of the Spanish indignados a decade later, chiefly because there was a progressive political mechanism available: the left wing of the Peronist movement. The tenaciously organized Muslim Brotherhood has proved to be the medium-term victor of Egypt’s revolution. We should not allow ourselves to be carried away by the supposedly momentous capacity of internet networks to mobilize support outside the normal channels of political life. [51] Bearing that in mind, a powerful new dynamic has nonetheless been evident in recent years. We have seen the emergence of loose, decentralized networks, from al-Qaida franchises and the Tea Party to the left-wing protest movements of 2011. Leaderless, ‘starfish’ organizations are now being discussed eagerly in faddish management literature. [52] The ‘non-hierarchical’ character of such bodies is not inherently democratic nor progressive, as the examples cited show. But collective discussion and individual autonomy are undoubtedly a vital legacy of 1968, and must be part of any future left project. Ideologically, the new movements have been driven by a blend of rejectionism and pragmatism. Rejectionist outrage has mobilized people, although its targets vary greatly: perceived insults to the Islamic faith have inspired protest in many Arab countries; mortgage relief and health insurance for low-income ‘losers’ provoke the wrath of Tea Party supporters; the