Condensing the Gaza crisis – Developing Economics

The Gaza crisis has underscored the deep fractures of domestic politics in Western Europe, the US and Australia. It is as much a domestic political crisis as a conflict in the Middle East.

What is the nature of this crisis? Well, it is not one but multiple crises that are condensed around the Gaza war. Now condensation is an interesting concept – first used by Freud to show how a single idea or dream stands for multiple associations and ideas. We can think of the Gaza crisis as a political condensation of several multiple and intersecting crises and their  different temporalities. It condenses a series of fracture points: the crisis of representation, an increasingly authoritarian response to the political conflict, the unravelling of the international liberal order and the politics of race and class. It reinforces a shift to what the Marxist political theorist Nicos Poulantzas termed authoritarian statism which is the intensification of authoritarian tendencies within ostensibly democratic institutions and processes.

First, it is now fashionable to apply the term decolonisation to global politics but this decolonization is always seen as ‘out there’ and distinct from the politics of class. Instead, I want to argue the Gaza crisis has brought decolonisation back home to the streets of London, Paris, Berlin, Sydney and New York. It is often forgotten that many of those on the streets are demanding not just a ceasefire in Gaza but a political voice that is marginalised.  And let’s not forget that this plays out in the register of both class and race.  Many – but by no means all – of those in the streets are the new migrant working class and Gaza is an expression of their political discontent. The social theorist – Stuart Hall – famously said that race is the medium through which class is lived and in the Gaza crisis we see an intersection of class and race. It is return of the political time of colonial politics but this time in the metropolis of the old colonies. This class and domestic dimension is often forgotten in the sanitised version of decolonisation that circulates within academia. Again, the Gaza crisis condenses existing political fractures.

It has also led to an increasingly authoritarian turn in restricting dissent. Perhaps the most disturbing is the attempt to ban marches and demonstrations. Recently Rishi Sunak talked about ‘mob rule’ and the need to protect parliament and MPs.  He was supported by Keir Starmer the labour leader. In New South Wales Premier Chris Minns proposed banning rallies. These attempts to criminalise protest and we have seen this over climate protests is a further disturbing indicator of the growing authoritarian drift – authoritarian statism – in liberal democracies. Even more problematic is the fact that these references to law and order and ‘mob rule’ have an underlying racial component. A point that Stuart Hall noted in his analysis of the emergence of Thatcherism in the UK in the early 1970s. This time it is paying out in the register of security and the defence of the ‘West’.  

Many observers have noted how paramilitary techniques used in Hong Kong and Northern Ireland are not being deployed in London just as the US police force increasingly uses counter-insurgency policing techniques in Michigan or New York. This again is the new face of the emerging authoritarian statism that now finds expression in political conflict over the Gaza crisis.

The third fracture is perhaps the most striking and it is the way centre-left parties – and that includes the Democrats in the US – have been sharply divided over the Gaza crisis. Biden – and a considerable number of elected democrats – have been isolated from many grassroots activists. Perhaps the most striking example of this was when his own White House staffers protested against his stand on Gaza. More recently a large number of abstention votes for Biden in the Michigan primary underscored the fact that the party is increasingly disconnected from its electoral constituency. In the UK, in the Rochdale by-election, the win by George Galloway – a social conservative who dabbles in conspiracy theories – exposed the deep dissatisfaction with labour by its migrant working-class base. Now, of course, there is much written on the way the British Labour Party lost its ‘white working class’ but Rochedale shows that it is also losing the migrant working class – often located in the service sector. This is a deeper crisis within the party that has seen the political disincorporation of its class constituencies.

As parties have become increasingly enmeshed within the state they have lost the connection to their societal bases – or what political scientist like to call their representative functions. We have seen that with third-way politics in Australia, the UK and the US. In Australia, the primary vote for the party has been declining over several elections. What is new though is that these parties are increasingly locked into a kind of militarised global economic and political inter imperial rivalry between the US and China. Note here the AUKUS agreement that the Australian Labour signed on to or Starmer’s enthusiastic support for US policies on Gaza – that is now causing even greater alienation amongst the electoral coalition, such as the migrant working class that supported these parties. The Gaza conflict condenses the increasing contradiction between these parties’ support for security and defence policies and their electoral coalition. These ‘hollowed out’ parties have no way of mediating these conflicts which as a result resort to authoritarian statist modes of decision making and curbing dissent.

Finally, much of the liberal international order that emerged in the 1990s is now collapsing.  The language around human rights, humanitarian intervention or even the global rule of law has now been dealt a death sentence by Gaza. But what is equally clear is there is now a new conservative order that is emerging – where human rights concerns are secondary even in the rhetorical mode that it functioned in the long 1990s. There is a more authoritarian order that is emerging where the far right not just in the global north but in China, India and Turkey is increasingly fusing ethnonationalist politics and policies that benefit key sectors of capital – be it state or private.  Centre left and centrist parties must operate on this conservative and authoritarian terrain. Gaza more than anything has condensed the domestic politics of the crisis of the liberal international order.

The Gaza conflict is then a portent of our future authoritarian politics.

Kanishka Jayasuriya is  Professor of Politics and International Studies at Murdoch University, Perth , Western Australia.