A Crisis of Legitimacy for Our Rulers
Expanding wars, economic stagnation, runaway financial speculation, widening social inequalities, political polarisation, ecological disasters and the ongoing threat to the biosphere – today’s world is shot through with uncertainties. A recent book, Epochal Crisis, by William I. Robinson argues that we are in a new period of worldwide capitalist instability and volatility and its ruling orders stand exposed[mfn]William I Robinson, Epochal Crisis, Cambridge University Press, 2025. See Chapter Three and Chapter Five in particular.[/mfn].
The previous regime - neoliberal globalisation and the so-called “rules-based order” - cracked the world open to new levels of plunder and exploitation but, he argues, turned out to be unable to prevent crisis. Trump has disrupted its key structures, such as the UN, the WTO, the G20, and NATO, in favour of a US go-it-alone approach in the hope of restoring US hegemony. But this has only made the system more unstable.
The way states have responded to social crises at home and the genocide in Gaza has dramatically brought their legitimacy into question. This has triggered new forms of consciousness and organisation which are basic requisites for system change, but, Robinson argues, this is only the beginning.
Social polarisation
Robinson sees western governments’ crisis of legitimacy as arising from the economic and political contradictions of the capitalist system itself. He explains that the class dynamics of capitalist exploitation maximise the extraction from labour, which results in greater social polarisation. The capitalists control ever more wealth while destitution and poverty rise among the working class.
The wealth gap has intensified across the capitalist world. In the US today, the richest 10% own over two thirds of the nation’s wealth. In the EU, too, decades of tax policies have benefitted the super-rich and squeezed workers. As a recent Oxfam report shows the richest 3,600 Europeans now hold as much as the poorest 181 million, or the equivalent to the populations of Germany, Italy and Spain combined. The recent Oxfam report on Ireland, entitled ‘Resisting the Rule of the Rich’, contains the stark revelation that Ireland’s 11 billionaires are wealthier than 3.5 million Irish people combined. It concludes, ‘Economic inequality is fuelling political capture worldwide. A new oligarchy is emerging as the super-rich shape the rules. Too many governments are siding with the powerful, not the public’.
The Southern Irish state represents a small, but significant, working out of these dynamics. The Government must answer to the tune of international capital, which it does mainly in the form of very preferential treatment of foreign direct investment, overwhelmingly from the US, to ensure that capital accumulation proceeds. This also involves, as Paulie Doyle, Patrick Bresihan and Patrick Brodie show, adopting foreign policies, such as abandoning neutrality and adopting militarisation, so as to answer exclusively to the needs of competitive capitals on the global market.
Irish labour, as many polls on their support for neutrality show, has no interest in these policy priorities, still less in war and militarisation. The Irish state is aware that it cannot completely alienate its people, and that it needs to achieve a measure of popular consent. But the logic of its position as protector of the interests of capital pushes it to enact tax and other policies which reward capital, not labour. The result, as we have seen, is an increase in social deprivation – of which a housing crisis of historical proportions, inadequate health, educational and social services, and inflation and unaffordability are the main features.
Over time, these skewed policies erode popular support for the traditional governing parties. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are now at an all-time low: 37% together in a recent opinion poll which, compared to the 84% that they could command forty years ago, is a striking historical change. The same trend is to be seen in the UK where support for Labour and its Tory-like, pro capital, anti-working-class policies, has also plummeted. It has haemorrhaged support since its landslide victory in July 2024 and now attracts only around one-fifth of support among voters, a new low for a governing party in Britain. Across the EU, we see a similar phenomenon. The political centre has been weakened from inflation, falling living standards and political disenchantment on many levels, resulting in a widening disconnect between citizens and their governments. A poll last year found that support for traditional centre-left and centre-right governing parties has fallen from 73% in 2000, to 51% today.
‘Moral barbarism’
A significant contributor to the lack of trust in governments has been the US and western governments’ complicity in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. For the last twenty-eight months, mass protests, workers’ strikes, local protests, direct actions against Israeli armaments firms, local weekly protests, boycott campaigns across the EU, the UK, the US Australia, Indonesia, have created the biggest global protest movement in recent times. On one Saturday last year, no less than 80 countries were demonstrating. The UK and the US, meting out repression against Palestinian activists have only hardened the movement and steeled resistance.
One writer describes the complicity of the British state with Israel’s genocide as ‘moral barbarism’ and a ‘searing indictment of British ruling elites’. For Martin Shaw, long-time writer on genocides, the blanket western backing of Israel, which includes the world’s most powerful military states, makes them not only complicit in genocide but active genocide perpetrators. Moreover, the many official meetings between Netanyahu and the Trump administration as the mass murder in Gaza was happening, represents a level of state conspiracy in genocide not seen before in modern history.
Two patently false tropes have been central to binding Western elites to Israel. The first is a notion of “anti-antisemitism” which absurdly conflates anti-Zionism and anti-semitism. The second is the assertion of “Israel’s right to self-defence” as a means of justifying its atrocities, (even though under international law, this right does not apply in occupied territory, which Gaza remains). In addition, Western states have resorted to unprecedented repression of Palestinian activists. These measures set aside long-accepted principles of civil liberties and the right to protest, and were introduced, ironically in the case of Britain, under a Prime Minister who was once a human rights lawyer. Shaw is right: this is indeed a genocide ‘which has changed the world’ in part because it has starkly laid bare the hypocrisy and moral depravity of western governments.
The Irish government, despite its circuitous rhetoric appearing to support Palestinians, has not, in the whole duration of the genocide, actually lifted a finger against Israel – and certainly not its big backer, the US. Its constant bending of the knee to the US for its supposed generosity in ‘creating Irish jobs’ has become like a broken record. The Irish government has not just been passively useless in the face of genocide, it has aided and abetted Israel.
Already this year, the Irish Government has further discredited itself. The Taoiseach declared in February that football matches between Ireland and Israel should go ahead. He has lost everyone here. People are outraged by his complacency over this. Bohemians FC chief commercial officer Daniel Lambert spoke plainly and for many: boycotting the Nations League ties against Israel was simply "the right thing to do".
Martin is also dismissing calls to boycott the White House on St Patrick’s Day because he believes in ‘engagement’. This announcement came in a week when we learned that ICE arranged deportations from the US passed through Shannon. Two of these flights, unbelievably, were deporting groups of Palestinians to Tel Aviv to face god knows what. We are used to our neutrality being flouted at Shannon by being used for American troops and armaments, but cooperating in delivering Palestinians to the regime that has annihilated them is beyond belief. For Martin, shamrock offerings at the White House are far more important than standing against genocide.
‘Morbid symptoms’ and the crisis of authority
The Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci famously identified certain moments in history when the old is dying and the new cannot be born and when ‘morbid symptoms’ appear[mfn]Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), 275- 276.[/mfn].
Morbid symptoms we certainly see today. A genocide enabled by the Western ruling classes is terrible enough. But the ongoing Epstein files revelations have further corroded trust in the capitalist order. They are a long list of the rich and powerful: Wall St billionaires, a sitting US president and a previous one, British and Norwegian royals, MAGA influencers, heads of big tech and law firms; a Northern Irish secretary Mandelson, key figures in the Belfast peace process, George Mitchell and Bill Clinton. All these either indulged in, or connived in, multiple incidents of paedophilia, rape, abuse or child trafficking. This level of depravity at the top is indicative of a society in deep decay.
The involvement of the monarchy only underscores the severity of the crisis of legitimacy for the British ruling class. Andrew’s lying, violent misogyny and obscene impunity will bring the royalty and the government into the spotlight again, creating further political instability for them, and also, indirectly, for Unionism in the six counties.
It should also be remembered that Epstein's gruesome circle contained Irish bankers and politicians, and yet the Irish government remained silent when the story broke. Since then, the possibility that an Irish woman was trafficked via Ireland to Epstein prompted the government to call for the Gardaí to investigate. Nevertheless, it seems extraordinary that this sordid tale of misogyny and sexual violence warranted no official government statement and speaks volumes to our own woeful record on sexual violence.
Consent and hegemony
Consent, Gramsci maintained, was not just an optional extra to capitalist rule, but a vital part of any ruling class maintaining its hegemony. Consent is manufactured through the promotion of a version of values – a ruling ideology – which masks, or presents as natural, the crude, exploitative levers of capitalism. Gramsci sometimes referred to this collection of dominant beliefs as ‘common sense’ – passive taken-for-granted ideas, which chime with the capitalist status quo. ‘Common sense’ is made and remade through different channels: institutions like schools and universities, the press, national television and social media. One theme of modern-day ‘common sense’ is extreme individualism and the ‘self-made’ tech-bro model. AI-driven, highly tailored content recycles this ultra-individualism as toxic masculinity, where the obsession with possession is extended to women through sexual violence and misogyny. Monopolisation in the industry reinforces the uniformity of message: 9 out of the top 10 social media companies in the world are owned by just 6 billionaires.
But in periods of general crisis, ruling ideology comes under strain. Societal division and decay, scandals at the top of society, and pressure from below weakens its hegemony. Its ‘common sense’ fragments and a different view of the world – what Gramsci termed ‘good sense’ – begins to emerge, one which speaks for the vast majority in society, not the few.
Social seeds of the far right
Societal crises, as we know, do you not automatically favour the left. They can be dangerous in the short run because of the unevenness of political consciousness. The morbid symptoms of a crisis that Gramsci referred to also included the rise of fascism in Italy at that time.
Far right and neofascist parties now head the governments of four EU member states – Belgium, Italy, the Czech Republic and Hungary. In six – Bulgaria, Finland, Italy, Croatia and Slovakia and Sweden – they are holding up minority governments. Support for far-right parties has doubled over recent years. They now hold just over a quarter (26%) of the seats in the European Parliament and are able to influence the balance of power within the EU’s political system.
Far-right and neofascist parties purportedly stand against the establishment in their opposition to immigration and their promotion of extreme forms of nationalism. In reality, there is considerable overlap: the far right harks back to old political elites and mainstream politics have increasingly given ground to the far right. Official immigration policies - tighter immigration and more deportations – offer a similar racist message in order to deflect social anger onto immigrants and away from themselves.
Here in Ireland some sections of the relatively small far right seek to follow Trump's MAGA model, This was the message that financial advisor turned far right conspiracy theorist, Eddie Hobbs, gave to a gathering of the far right in Meath in January. The fact that the ‘populist’ MAGA movement chose to back one of the most elitist mega-rich governments in recent history may be coming back to haunt them, as many now want Trump to focus on economic rather than foreign policy. Indeed, MAGA support for Trump after the ICE killings in Minnesota appears to be falling back although for how long remains to be seen.
Resistance
What is clear, however, is that while social conditions feed into neofascism, confronting it as a political force, both politically and on the streets, is vital to eroding its popular support.
This period of crisis has catapulted far-right neofascist figures to power in the US and in Italy, to take but two examples. But it is interesting that these two places are where resistance to the far right and solidarity with Palestine have been the strongest in terms of mass workers’ action.
Trump’s imposition of the Gestapo-like ICE, their murder of Renée Good and Alex Pretti and the subsequent mobilisation in Minneapolis in January against ICE has, according to one account, been the largest and most intensive local struggle since the civil rights movement and adopted a manifestly working class character. Further mass strikes are planned for May Day. Other cities like Chicago, alongside citywide protests, have also been organising locally against ICE, in response to ICE’s brutal use of pepper spray, their attacks on protestors and their kidnapping of community members for days at a time, before deporting them out of the state.
In Italy, the fascist Meloni’s anti-immigrant, extreme nationalist government has made things a lot worse for Italians. Soaring inflation, militarisation, falling living standards and the lowest median wage in Western Europe, have resulted in absolute poverty affecting one in ten workers in Italy, with immigrants suffering the hardest.
This lived reality under Meloni’s government overlapped with anger around Gaza, with millions of workers, including many immigrants, taking to the streets in September and October 2025 against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Italy’s complicity in it. Millions of workers and young people stopped work, blocking roads, railways and ports across the country to demand an end to the genocide and a boycott of trade, including armaments with Israel. A network of Palestinian organisations together with an autonomous union SI Cobas launched militant actions aimed at disrupting the supply chains of genocide, and also at providing material support to the Palestinian resistance. Lucia Pradella makes the point that Palestine disrupts everything and radicalises the youth. This was a lived internationalism, even under a far right government, that saw the diverse Italian working class uniting together and heralded the return of the mass political strike.
Socialist politics and revolutionary change
One clear lesson from recent crises is that reformist social democratic/ labour parties, ultimately chose to protect the system rather than disrupt it. Think of the Labour Party in Ireland, who were the strongest advocates for austerity after the 2008 banking crisis. But even amongst the apparently more left versions of social democracy there is often a knee-jerk reaction to steer things back to ‘accepted politics’. Recently, many were taken aback that the Social Democrats, after being part of the Catherine Connolly campaign which was openly identified with the Boycott Israel campaign declared in February that Micheál Martin should go to Washington on St Patrick’s Day. Leader Holly Cairns said it was an opportunity to use Ireland’s “unique platform” to convey the strong message, claiming, without a hint of irony, that “we don’t bow down to bullies”.
Pressure from believing that everything lies in elections can lead even left parties to being shunted down the straight and narrow of ‘normal politics’. This risks not only disappointing those that voted for them, it also risks missing how global, big picture politics, at certain crisis moments, can shape everyone’s ideas.
For revolutionary socialists, radical socialist parties and their role in elections are important precisely to be a voice on behalf of struggles outside the Parliament, in communities, nationally and internationally, movements for Palestine and in opposition to wars and imperialism. Elections are also to platform radical alternatives to those disaffected with mainstream politics and make socialist politics make ‘good sense’ to wider layers of people. The epochal crisis we are facing requires bold socialist politics which emphasises, even in elections, mass mobilising, class struggles and organising from below as the key levers of change.
We have seen this in Minneapolis and Milan. In Ireland, we have seen huge and diverse forms of mobilising on Palestine, locally and nationally, making it one of the biggest and most determined movements of recent times. We have also seen small beginnings of some militant workplace organising, for example, in the recent school secretaries strike and recent small but significant strikes in Dublin. This action is likely to grow as the affordability crisis continues.
What faces us is stark. But widespread disillusion with the existing order and with the mainstream political parties has opened the space for active resistance on the ground. Capitalism may face a profound crisis but without class struggle to overthrow it, as Robinson argues, the system will limp on with disastrous consequences. Clear revolutionary socialist politics are needed at the heart of organising and mobilising, within the broad movements countering racism, opposing the ongoing genocide in Palestine, protesting against militarisation and further imperialist wars, to begin to offer the system change that we so badly need.
