On 2012-01-30, at 8:10 PM, Wojtek S wrote:
> I also take Marv's point that polls can be very misleading, especially
> in politically volatile times. But poll reliability notwithstanding,
> the voter sentiments tend to drift to the right rather than to the
> left. In fact, the left in any form has lost most of its electoral
> support almost everywhere, except relatively small groups of radicals.
It's not surprising that left-centre governments in Greece, Spain, Portugal, the UK and the US lost popularity during the financial and economic crisis. They all equally failed to protect jobs and incomes while running up deficits, bailing out the banks, and acceding to right wing demands for austerity. But by the same token the Socialist Party may displace the governing right-centre Sarkozy government in France later this year because of rising unemployment. So sentiment does not always drift to the right when it is the right which is governing.
> This is alarming, no? If I were a CEO and saw my company losing
> market shares and its stock going south at a rate that the left is
> losing electoral support, I would be very very concerned. The last
> thing I would like to hear is that this is due to market volatility.
It's dismaying that opposition to the left-centre governments didn't move to the left. But there are no longer any mass anticapitalist parties on the left which could have offered an alternative for disgruntled voters as there once were. So voters fed up with the governing bourgeois party gravitates to the bourgeois opposition party, hoping that its formula will lift the economy out of its malaise. The low level of political consciousness permits this, though there are signs of a political awakening, especially among young skilled and educated workers shut out of the workforce.
> Instead, I would like to hear what to do to reverse it.
That's been the subject of a century and a half of fierce debate between and within social democratic and Marxist parties and the anarchists to their left. You can be sure that whatever you'll hear here or anywhere else has been proposed and experimented with over many generations.