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A MUTINY AGAINST THE WEST’S ORDER  
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Peter Mertens - Interview by Loren Balhorn
October 11, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Western hegemony is in decline, the Left has to reckon with a new
international balance of power. Peter Mertens, general secretary of
the Workers’ Party of Belgium, spoke to us about what the
“mutinies” in the Global South mean for socialist strategy _

Peter Mertens, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Belgium,
gives a speech during the party’s electoral congress in Brussels on
March 10, 2024., James Arthur Gekiere / Belga /AFP via Getty Images

 

For a decade or so, the idea of a “world order” led by the West
has been coming apart at the seams. The United States is increasingly
unable to play its self-proclaimed role as global policeman, its
legitimacy stained by disastrous illegal wars abroad and the rougher
edges of its own domestic political combat. Rising powers like China
and India are no longer content to play second fiddle to the world
hegemon.

These developments are still in their infancy, but it’s increasingly
clear that a new balance of power is emerging on the world stage. This
is the subject of _Mutiny_, a new book by Peter Mertens, who is
general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Belgium
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(PTB). He spoke with _Jacobin_ about how our world is changing and
what he thinks it means for socialists in the West and East alike.

Loren Balhorn
Your new book, _Mutiny_, isn’t quite what I would have expected from
the general secretary of a Marxist workers’ party
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I guess I was expecting something a bit, well, wordier. Can you say a
bit about how it came about, and what you sought to achieve with it?

Peter Mertens
Two things were important to me when writing the book: first,
understanding today’s tilting world order, because a lot of things
are happening — there is a war in Europe, a genocide in Gaza playing
out in real time on our smartphones, the far right exploding in France
and Germany, and more. Fifteen years ago, you’d hardly have imagined
it. So I wanted to understand for myself what is happening both
politically and economically.

The second thing was to translate that into an understandable
language. My books are about democratizing knowledge, including here
in Belgium. A lot of things are happening right now — Audi intends
to close its plant in Brussels, for example. It’s one of two car
factories left in this country, whereas fifteen years ago there were
five — and a lot of people want to understand why.

I’m pleased that the book is being used in some parts of the Belgian
trade unions to understand things like Joe Biden’s Inflation
Reduction Act, the growing rivalry between the United States and
China, and what they could mean for Europe. The biggest compliment I
get is when a worker writes me and says, “This was my first time
reading a nonfiction book. I thought I was too stupid to understand
it, but I did.” People want to understand, and they can, but you
have to give them access to the information.

Loren Balhorn
Let’s unpack the metaphor in the book’s title a little bit,
“mutiny.” What exactly are you referring to? Where is this mutiny
happening?

Peter Mertens
There was this idea after the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991 that we
had reached the end of history — the United States would be dominant
forever. After that, there were of course various tipping points, or
what I call “watershed moments,” but today something else is
happening: for the first time, the economies of the Global South, of
the five BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South
Africa — are larger than those of the G7. That’s remarkable and
completely different from the 1950s and ’60s, where you had a
Non-Aligned Movement that was of course politically much more radical,
clearly anti-imperialist and anti-colonial, but economically still
very dependent on the Global North.

The shift is happening at the economic level. But it also has
consequences on the political level. Who would have thought, fifteen
years ago, that Iran and Saudi Arabia would reconcile thanks to
Chinese mediation? Or that the fourteen Palestinian factions would
come together and sign a joint statement
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also brokered by the Chinese? Or that the Namibian president would
rebuke Germany on the world stage?

Don’t get me wrong: I’m under no illusions that these governments
are all progressive. It’s very mixed. But to stick with the
metaphor, there is a mutiny happening on the upper decks. There is a
new self-confidence and assertiveness growing in the Global South.

Loren Balhorn
You mean among the ruling elites of the Global South?

Peter Mertens
Yes, exactly. Within the state apparatus. There is also power from
below, with grassroots movements trying to push through a progressive
agenda. That’s the mutiny below deck. But above deck as well, the
Global South is in turmoil, searching for a new form of nonalignment,
a realpolitik that serves national interests. That’s why I call it a
“double mutiny.”

For example, Narendra Modi’s government in India is obviously
reactionary — it attacks the peasantry, it does nothing to protect
the rights of women, and it unleashes racist pogroms against Muslims.
You could almost call it a kind of Indian fascism. Below deck, you
have a peasants’ movement, a women’s movement, and a working-class
movement opposing that government. But at the same time, above deck,
on the international stage, you have this kind of mutiny by the Indian
government against the current world order, with the foreign minister
S. Jaishankar telling Washington in no uncertain terms that India will
never join NATO, even if the United States would like it to.

South Africa’s government is not reactionary, but it’s also clear
there that the African National Congress (ANC) was responsible for a
lot of privatizations and neoliberal policies that vastly increased
the gap between the rich and poor. I was in Soweto for a presentation
of my book, and I spoke with members of the NUMSA (National Union of
Metalworkers of South Africa), who broke away from the main trade
union confederation and protest against the government. The level of
corruption and inequality there is crazy — it’s like two worlds in
one state. But at the same time, South Africa is the only country to
stand up against Israel at the International Court of Justice, and it
is doing so in a very serious way.

That’s the dialectical approach I take in the book. I think we have
to support this mutiny on the upper deck without having any illusions
that it will necessarily lead to a more progressive politics. The
world is tilting, but it can tilt in any number of directions.

In Europe, on the Left, we tend to have a very defeatist and
pessimistic view of the future that is based on nostalgia for the
past.

Loren Balhorn
You alluded to the politics of the Non-Aligned Movement, the last time
the world order began to “tilt.” Another historical precedent we
could look at would be the revolutionary wave after World War I, when
the world order not only tilted but was almost overthrown.

You said yourself that the current mutiny is primarily economic and,
in terms of its political radicalism, quite tame indeed. Given that
reality, to what extent does it really pose an opportunity for
socialist politics?

Peter Mertens
I think the first thing is to develop a sense of hope and
self-confidence again. In Europe, on the Left, we tend to have a very
defeatist and pessimistic view of the future that is based on
nostalgia for the past, for the socialist revolutions of the twentieth
century. And yes, the working-class movements of the twentieth century
gained a lot of things — social security systems, for example — at
least partly because our ruling classes were afraid of a socialist
revolution.

But we have to live in the present; 2024 is nothing like the period
after World War I, with mass working-class movements in Italy,
Austria, Germany, Hungary, and so on. We are not in that situation.
But things are changing — objectively, economically — and people
are looking for explanations. As Marxists, we should have the
self-confidence to provide those explanations.

Why are prices so high? Why are government ministers telling us to
turn our heating down in winter? Why is Western Europe suddenly
threatened with deindustrialization? We, as the Left, as the movement
of the working class, have answers to those questions. We don’t have
solutions to every problem, but we have a vision of a world that is
more equal, more ecological, and more democratic than the rotten
system today.

The most important thing, though, is that we have to have the
self-confidence to struggle, to go into the working-class areas and
fight the battle of ideas against the far right, against the religious
fanatics. Conditions are getting worse for working people all over
Europe, and I think we are in the beginning of a longer phase — five
years, ten years, I don’t know — of struggling over their ideas,
of struggling over the working class. We aren’t yet at a point where
we have a world to win — first we have to win over the class.

Loren Balhorn
Okay, but if we’re talking about winning over the European working
classes, what does the global mutiny have to offer them? If we look at
the specter of deindustrialization, for example, one could blame that
on the sanctions against Russia, but there are also broader,
irreversible trends at work, like the growth of the Chinese electric
vehicle industry. Isn’t this kind of a zero-sum game for many
workers?

Peter Mertens
I don’t think protectionism is the answer, but what has happened
over the last five years, and especially since Russia’s illegal war
against Ukraine, is that Europe has become more and more economically
dependent on the United States. In that sense, the US has been the
biggest winner in Russia’s war so far.

What we need, what the European working class needs, is a vision for a
Europe that is independent of Russia, but also of the US and China.
Europe needs a bit of self-confidence as a continent — not an
imperial continent, but a continent that follows its own path, because
I think we will lose if we are caught up in a conflict between the
United States and China.

We need a plan for social and ecological investments on a massive
scale as part of a broader European industrial strategy. I mentioned
Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act — Europe has an answer to that,
the Green Deal, but it mostly consists of incentives and subsidies for
the private sector. That’s not what we need to address the
challenges we face.

I went to Berlin while doing research for the book, and as a Belgian,
I naively expected that German trains would be on time. It was a
catastrophe! But it’s not just Germany, it’s not just Belgium —
everywhere in Europe, our transportation systems are underfunded, our
schools are underfunded, our hospitals are underfunded. We need
massive investments in public infrastructure across the board, which,
incidentally, will also create a lot of jobs.

It’s not a revolutionary approach or a socialist approach; it’s
basically a neo-Keynesian approach. But that’s the phase we are in
right now, a phase of chaos, and we have to put forward tangible
democratic, social, and ecological proposals to get out of that chaos.

Loren Balhorn
I don’t disagree, but couldn’t you say that, in Europe, our mutiny
has already come and gone? Jeremy Corbyn was defeated and expelled
from the Labour Party; the Left in Spain has taken a series of
electoral beatings; in Germany, Die Linke is on the verge of collapse.
Meanwhile, the far right is winning elections in country after
country. Hasn’t the momentum shifted to the other side?

Peter Mertens
No, I don’t agree. We may have lost some momentum, but the potential
is still there. On the social and economic level, all of the problems
are still there, and the class anger is still there. It expresses
itself in many ways. Look at France: first you had the _gilets jaunes_
movement, then you had some of the biggest strike waves since 1968. In
my book, I describe the “winter of discontent” last year in
Britain
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which was much bigger and lasted a lot longer than the racist riots
organized by Elon Musk’s friends on Twitter.

Even in Germany, you have a lot of strikes and industrial actions. The
question is whether they are translated into a political expression
and whether there is a political organization that wages the battle of
ideas. In my city, Antwerp, the far right used to get 40 percent of
the vote. But the Workers’ Party of Belgium spent decades
campaigning in working-class communities, going door-to-door, talking
to people about their problems, and explaining why they are class
problems. You can’t get into social housing? The problem is not your
Sudanese neighbor, but the fact that we don’t have enough social
housing. In the last election, we beat the far right and won 23
percent of the vote.

There are workers with racist and fascist ideas who really are lost to
our cause, but a lot more of them are not, and we have to fight over
them.

Of course, there are workers with racist and fascist ideas who really
are lost to our cause, but a lot more of them are not, and we have to
fight over them. People are hurting, but people are isolated. We have
to organize, organize, organize if we want to reach them and bring
them together. That doesn’t mean we can’t lose, or at least face
temporary setbacks, but at the end of the day, we can’t leave the
working class to the far right.

Loren Balhorn
It sounds like what you’re saying is that, at least in Belgium, the
momentum of the 2010s “mutiny” was captured by an organization and
thus did not dissipate in the same way.

Peter Mertens

Yes, absolutely. It’s like the story of the three little pigs. The
first pig builds a house of straw, the second builds one out of wood,
and the third builds his house out of bricks. When the wolf comes, he
blows down the straw and wooden houses, and only the brick one is left
standing. In the Workers’ Party, we say we are building a brick
house, because the wolves are coming and we want to be prepared.

Now, it takes a lot longer to build a brick house, and it can be very
tempting to build one out of straw instead — one that relies on
social media and charismatic spokespeople — but at the end of the
day, without durable structures, you are lost. You need a party rooted
in communities and workplaces, that meets on a regular basis, that
intervenes in the community, that educates its members and serves as a
kind of university for them. We shouldn’t be naive: if we are going
to confront capitalism, if we are going to organize real ruptures in
how our societies are governed — not just participate in a
coalition, but lead a government that actually improves working
people’s lives — we will need a strong organization behind us.

Ultimately, I think what we saw in the 2010s was the last gasp of a
kind of movementism rooted in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
triumph of neoliberalism. I have a lot of respect for the people who
built movements like Podemos, but I never thought they could last.

Loren Balhorn
Assuming we manage to get our house in order in time and build those
working-class parties you describe — what then? Your book ends by
saying if the mutinies in the Global North can lend a hand to those in
the Global South, we can move the world in the direction of a social,
ecological transformation. What would that look like? The days of
truly international socialist movements are so far back in time,
it’s hard to imagine one today.

Peter Mertens
For now, I think it is important to open windows for those kinds of
discussions, because ultimately we will have to recreate those
movements ourselves. That’s what the book is trying to do.

When I was in South Africa to present it, some people came up to me
and said, “You poor boy, it must be so tough in Europe with all of
those fascists.” But I responded, “Are things any less difficult
here?” Look at India, look at the new government in Argentina.
Fascism is not just a European thing, it’s a global thing — and so
is class struggle. The class interests of a British nurse and a South
African miner, or an Indian farmer and a landless peasant in Brazil,
are ultimately the same.

The BRICS are not socialist, they aren’t even anti-imperialist, but
they are a game changer in terms of how the global economy is
structured.

There is a very institutionalized way of doing trade unionism, a very
top-down way, where the only international exchange is at the
executive level. But there is another way, an internationalist way,
where you draw the links between struggles in other countries. I think
that is what’s happening in some ways right now around Gaza. Some
people call it a Vietnam moment. I don’t think it’s reached that
level, at least not yet, but it’s certainly a moment where all kinds
of people — students, but also workers — are opening their eyes to
the international dimension of politics and coming together to oppose
a grave injustice. That, I think, opens up the possibility of a more
global movement.

The BRICS are not socialist, they aren’t even anti-imperialist, but
they are a game changer in terms of how the global economy is
structured. The Left should critically support them to the extent they
challenge the current world order, while also building our own forums
and institutions that go beyond them.

Loren Balhorn
The last two years have seen a number of terrible wars — not only in
Ukraine and Gaza, but also in Sudan and the Congo, to name just a few.
Is there not a danger that the end of the unipolar world order will
also be very violent?

Peter Mertens
Like I said, right now we are in a phase of chaos, and chaos always
kicks up a lot of dust. But the Left should not be afraid of that
dust. If you look at all the disasters imposed on the countries of
Asia, Africa, and Latin America — not only during colonialism, but
also in the neoliberal period — it’s clear that the current order
is already very violent.

This process is just beginning and is currently in the most difficult
phase. It could go in a far-right direction, but our job is to ensure
that it doesn’t. I realize there are people in Europe who feel like
they have stable lives and are afraid of the chaos, but that chaos is
caused by capitalism. We have to show people a way forward, through
the chaos, to a new kind of stability — a socialist stability.

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Peter Mertens is general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Belgium.

Loren Balhorn is editor in chief of Jacobin’s German-language
edition.

* Global South; Climate Change; Workers’ Party of Belgium; Peter
Mertens
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