The year 1905 has been compared to 1848. It may also apply to the world of today. This does not refer to the obvious but weak comparison of today’s action in Ukraine with the Russo-Japanese War but instead to the moment when several European governments experienced a succession of popular, consequential revolts. They resulted from the exhaustion and frustration with the existing political ‘order’. Politicians from the Right, who had dominated the politics of several European countries during the previous (and later) decades, lost out to reactionaries from the Left, whose own domination was brief but notable.
The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has written:
There is, indeed, a relation between the Industrial Revolution as a provider of comforts and as a social transformer. Those classes whose lives were least transformed were also, normally, those which benefited most obviously in material terms (and vice versa), and their failure to grasp what was troubling the rest, or to do anything effective about it, was due not only to material but also to moral contentment. Nobody is more complacent than a well-off or successful man who is also at ease in a world which seems to have been constructed precisely with persons like him in mind.
The biggest losers in today’s politics are the erstwhile complacent forces and parties of the centre, on both the Left and the Right. It is trite to say that about most rich countries, and now more often about middle-income countries. The real question is, who and what shall replace them? The Bundist politics of a Bernie Sanders or the Brandeisian politics of Elizabeth Warren? The pied-noir nationalism of Marine Le Pen or the post-colonial romanticism of Jean-Luc Mélenchon? Will there emerge a new tyranny of technocrats, or something worse?
Today’s politics awaits the arrival of its Lenin. That much is obvious.