Rochdale and the Future of Democracy

Thomas Fazi writes:

By-elections — elections held in a single constituency to replace an elected member of Parliament who has died or resigned — usually don’t make headlines, especially when they’re held in small constituencies. However, the recent by-election in Rochdale, a small town in Greater Manchester, one of the UK’s most deprived areas, was different. The landslide victory of a radical working-class outsider like George Galloway — former Labour MP, longtime anti-imperialist and pro-Palestinian advocate, and now leader of the Workers Party of Britain, an old-school anti-NATO and anti-EU socialist party — is causing a political earthquake. 

Galloway placed the bipartisan support of the UK’s two main parties for Israel’s exterminationist campaign in Gaza at the centre of his grassroots campaign, with a particular emphasis on the complicity of Keir Starmer’s Labour. It paid off: Galloway won twice as many votes as Labour and Conservative combined. “Keir Starmer, this is for Gaza”, Galloway said in his victory speech. “You will pay a high price for the role that you have played in enabling, encouraging and covering for the catastrophe presently going on in occupied Gaza, in the Gaza Strip”.

Mainstream commentators are now attempting to put Galloway’s victory primarily down to the fact that Rochdale has a big Muslim community. If this were true, there would be nothing wrong with it, of course: British Muslims have every reason to be particularly concerned about what is happening in Gaza. But the reality is that this attempt to explain people’s attitudes towards Gaza through the prism of religion or ethnicity is not only dangerously divisive; it is also divorced from reality. An overwhelming majority of British citizens — close to 70 percent — support a ceasefire. So this isn’t about the ethnic or religious makeup of Rochdale; it’s about the UK government’s bipartisan support for Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza — and the people’s growing opposition to it.

In this sense, Galloway is right to describe his victory as “historic”: his election represents the first serious crack in the political dam erected to ensure unconditional UK support for Israel despite massive popular opposition — and, of course, the first real challenge to the uniparty since Farage’s UKIP. No wonder the establishment is reacting in such a hysterical fashion. Not only have the media’s attack dogs been unleashed against him (but this was to expected, and besides, Galloway, a gifted orator, is perfectly capable of fending them off); more astonishingly, the prime minister himself, Rishi Sunak, felt compelled to give a 10-minute speech simply to address the results of the Rochdale by-election.

In the rather chilling speech, Sunak accused Galloway of being a terrorist sympathiser and, perhaps even more ominously, of being part of a broader extremist attack on democracy itself — against which the government would now be “taking action”. Sunak then went on to rehearse a script that we’ve become accustomed to in recent months: conflating the mass pro-Palestine and pro-ceasefire demonstrations with violence, antisemitism and pro-terrorist apology — despite the fact that these mass protests have been unequivocally peaceful, have been attended by people of all faiths, including thousands of Jewish people, and have been conspicuously devoid (with single-digit exceptions) of pro-Hamas imagery and slogans.

The intent is clear: to criminalise people’s right to protest — or even to vote for candidates who oppose the uniparty’s policies on key domestic and/or foreign policy issues. All in the name of the “fight against extremism” (Sunak mentioned the term 13 times throughout his speech). In this sense, Sunak’s speech heralds a dangerous turning point in the authoritarian and anti-democratic regression of British society — and Western societies more in general — which has been unfolding for various years now.

Indeed, there is something decidedly Orwellian, to put it mildly, about a billionaire oligarch who has never been legitimated in a national vote, and who is actively supporting a plausible genocide (according to the International Court of Justice), one of the most extreme policies imaginable, accusing a working-class politician who has just overwhelmingly won a popular vote, on a ceasefire platform shared by the majority of Britons, of being anti-democratic and an extremist — and promising to “take action” against the movement he represents.

This tells us a lot about the state of Western “democracy” — and our elites’ conception of the latter. It tells us that they’ve become so averse to democracy that they’re shocked at the idea that people might actually use the ballot box to elect someone who’s not part of the oligarchy. From their perspective, the electoral “democratic” process serves only one purpose: to whitewash the fact that we live under a de facto system of oligarchic rule, in which the rules of the game are rigged by, and in favour of, the ruling classes.

State and corporate power have become merged to such an extent that the ability of people to truly challenge the status quo through the ballot box is effectively nullified through the deployment of a wide array of tools: electoral rules designed to marginalise small parties; consensus-manufacturing propaganda and censorship ensured by the compliance of mass media and social networking platforms (which may even be deployed to engage in character assassination of unwelcome candidates, e.g., Corbyn); unlimited economic resources to buy political allegiance; the shifting of sovereignty away from the nation-state and towards international and supranational institutions structurally insulated from democratic pressures, etc. And this is not even considering the extent to which elites are willing to bend, and even break, the law in order to stifle any challenge to their rule — as Assange’s decade-and-a-half-long legal persecution is there to dramatically testify.

We need to be honest about the implications of this: challenging the system through the electoral process has become close to impossible. Indeed, one can only shudder at the thought of the “dirty war” the establishment would wage on Galloway’s party if it were to start gaining traction at the national level. This, however, doesn’t mean that we should give up on democracy altogether. After all, the panicked reaction of the British establishment to Galloway’s victory is a testament to the impact that even a small, relatively uninfluential local election can have.

But why? After all, Galloway becoming an MP doesn’t shift the power balance within Parliament, let alone the government, by one iota. Moreover, we’ve just said that the the ruling classes wield almost unlimited power — and are effectively able to safely control the (outcome of the) “democratic” process, at least at the national level. So what are they so afraid of? Couldn’t they just have shrugged off Galloway’s victory and got on with it? Why mount a head-on attack on him?

About a century ago, during the Fascist era, an Italian historian and sociologist named Giuseppe Ferrero found himself pondering upon a similar question. He had been deeply shocked by the murder, in 1924, of the socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti at the hands of the Fascist regime — not only because it revealed the latter’s brutality, but because Ferrero failed to understand the logic behind it. Sure, Matteotti was an outspoken critic of Fascism and Benito Mussolini — but he was also virtually the only member of Parliament to openly criticise the regime. Mussolini could count on a completely subservient Parliament, including the formal opposition. He could whisk through whatever law he wanted, and did. So why was Mussolini, who projected an aura of absolute self-confidence in public, so afraid of Matteotti’s solitary opposition — to the point of murdering him? Ferrero couldn’t wrap his head around it.

The more he pondered on the issue, the more he realised that Mussolini’s apparently irrational behaviour had numerous historical precedents — most notably, Napoleon’s coup d’état of 1799, through which he outlawed all independent newspapers and established a military dictatorship under his absolute control. “Why did Napoleon, who was already an incredibly popular military commander, feel so threatened by the voices of a few critical journalists and lawmakers to the point of effectively outlawing any form of dissent?”, Ferrero asked himself.

Ferrero’s intellectual investigation resulted in the publication of one of his most important books, The Principles of Power. In it, Ferrero offers an explanation of the behaviour of these all-powerful-yet-apparently-fearful leaders in terms of the relationship between power and legitimacy. “Principles of legitimacy are justifications of power, that is, of the right to rule”, Ferrero wrote. “Of all human inequalities none is as important in its effects or has greater need of logical justification than that established by power”. Power, in other words, because it implies a deeply unequal relationship between the ruler and the ruled, requires legitimacy — or consent, we might say. The greater the power that is wielded, the more legitimacy, or consent, is required to sustain it.

No power, no matter how great, can be wielded indefinitely without legitimacy. Rulers understand this iron law of history very well, which is why, according to Ferrero, power that is gained or exercised illegitimately — especially following a coup — inevitably causes fear to insinuate itself into the minds of rulers, leading to increasingly paranoid, repressive and fearful regimes. The more illegitimate a power is, the more it will perceive even the tiniest challenge to its rule as an existential threat — to a degree proportional to the power inequalities that characterise the regime in question.

I believe Ferrero’s analytical prism goes a long way in explaining what is happening today in the West. Our ruling elites are hugely powerful, but their power is illegitimate — they rule, and are able to reproduce their rule, for no other reason other than the fact that they are powerful. It’s a purely autochthonous form of power, but one that lacks the legitimacy of previous forms of autochthonous power, such as monarchies. They have no no legitimating symbolic reservoir, or “secular theology,” to draw from. Alongside fear — their claim to be protecting us from evil forces out to get us, be it Russia, terrorists, viruses, etc. — the only legitimising force the oligarchs have left is “democracy”. The vote is ultimately the only thing that lends some legitimacy to their de facto absolute rule.

This is why they go to great lengths to control the democratic process — but can’t afford to do away with it altogether. Because, if they were to do so, all that would be left would be raw, naked elite rule, revealed in all its illegitimacy. But even this so-called democratic legitimacy is wearing increasingly thin — and elites know this. Hence their fear, which in turn leads to a constant tightening of the bolts of social control (greater censorship, repression, etc., as well as the constant search for foreign enemies) — and to hysterical reactions to even the slightest challenge to their rule.

In this context, even though we shouldn’t foster too many illusions about the possibility of using the democratic process, under the current conditions, to fundamentally alter the balance of power, we nonetheless can, and should, use the democratic process to expose the true, fundamentally rigged, nature of the system — and thus chip away at the last legitimising force elites have left. Only by exposing the absolute illegitimacy of their absolute power can we hope to challenge their rule — and create the conditions for building a true democracy. This is why, despite everything, elites still fear democracy. In this sense, the Rochdale by-election might truly prove to be “historic”.