In his weekly column, David Jamieson surveys the strategic dilemmas facing the left
In 2007, taking his lead from the developments in the Latin American left, and some more tentative ones in the European scene, the French Marxist Daniel Bensaid announced a ‘return of strategy’. This return was characterised by a re-engagement with political struggle beyond defensive social movements.
“The withdrawal from politics found expression in what could be called a ‘social illusion’, by analogy with the ‘political illusion’ of those criticised by the young Marx for thinking ‘political’ emancipation through the achievement of civil rights was the last word in ‘human emancipation’.”
A preparedness to launch political projects and programmatic demands represented “the end of the phase of the big refusal and of stoical resistance”, and opened new vistas to the radical left, which could move beyond emotive and symbolic action.
What Bensaid could already see was the development of what would come to be called ‘left populism’, which would flourish in the years after the financial crisis, before ending in near total defeat by the end of the 2010s. Indeed, the last half decade was book-ended by failure. In 2015, Greece’s Syriza succumbed to the national and transnational architecture of neoliberal capitalism. In a striking parallel, Corbynism finally succumbed in December 2019 to broadly the same capitalist forces aligned with the European Union.
One response to the collapse of ‘left populism’ has been to deny it is happening at all.
Few attached to the left-populist project have been brazen enough to claim that Syriza has left a healthy legacy. Almost as few are prepared to register a rump Podemos joining the centre left PSOE government as a serious victory.
But many around the Sanders and Corbyn projects view the last few years as stepping stones on a long and necessary course back to a mass social democratic tradition, perhaps one based on generational rather than class politics. But the truth is, Corbyn and Sanders were one shot guns. Sanders had his shot in 2016, Corbyn in 2017. By 2019-20 the centre-left establishment had re-consolidated and the challengers, particularly Corbynism, had succumbed to their own profound weaknesses.
Above all else, the left failed to be as radical as the right. Boris Johnson, though he almost certainly never wanted Brexit, accepted it as the will of a disgruntled population, and was in a position to steward a reluctant British capitalist class behind it. It was the left that clung to a fading status quo, which would never return the favour.
Now Corbyn and Sanders are gone. The apparats in the Democratic and Labour parties will not allow them, or anything like them, to return. The humiliation of Rebecca Long Bailey, and the renewed onslaught against Corbyn in recent weeks is just a taste of the brutality with which the centre will face down any future challenges from the left (and indeed will likely be meted-out in the forthcoming EHRC investigation).
What’s more, both left their respective parties in a more weakened state among key working-class constituencies. This is especially true in the UK, where 2017 saw a moderate return of working-class voters to Labour. In 2019, the party haemorrhaged working-class votes to the Conservatives and, after the masochistic reversal of policy over Brexit, to disillusionment.
Failure to recognise this collapse, and to take it seriously, will simply lead to the loss of a generation of activists. Plugging ears on the Labour left and accepting that there is nothing to be done but grit teeth and bear Starmer will only squander forces.
A second response is the retreat from politics. By this I do not merely mean resigning in a huff and turning to more enjoyable pursuits.
The more dangerous ‘retreat from politics’ is a turn away from state power. Many activists who have backed Sanders and Corbyn have signalled that they will turn their attention to the building of grassroots power in workplaces and communities.
It would be a strange kind of socialist who didn’t view such activity as necessary. But while necessary, it is far from sufficient. It doesn’t answer the questions faced by socialists in a historical period of massive social change and dislocation.
Divorced from wider strategic questions such sentiments can become a displacement activity. We do not deal with questions of ‘high politics’ and state power not because we are born-again syndicalists who eschew the importance of such questions (at least, one would hope not), but because we no longer feel we have the capacity to address such issues.
In these troubled times for radical politics, Antonio Gramsci’s famous request for us to practice “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” is often treated as a fashionable self-help technique; a form of ‘positive self-visualisation’. It is really a demand from socialists to defy their instinct to turn away from difficult problems. It was in fact a polemic against those who wanted to use the experience of a militant working-class movement in northern Italy to ignore the troubling national and state-level threats that ultimately closed around the movement with disastrous consequences.
What would be the intellectually pessimistic orientation on our present problems? There is no alternative to state power, and we presently have no ability to possess state power.
With this pessimistic realisation accepted, we can then set the different parts of a new strategic alignment in their place. In his article for Notes from Below, reproduced on Conter, Sai Englert has suggested what some of these items may be.
“1. Developing organs of working-class self-organisation in the largely unorganised industries of the period and in oppressed communities (think of the new union movement in Britain for example but also of the Bund’s Workers’ self-defence committees against anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe);
“2. Organising networks of political education in workplaces and working-class communities with an eye on encouraging the emergence of organic intellectuals and working-class cadre (Capital reading groups in factories were a staple of the period);
“3. Producing socialist analysis and theory through the establishment of groups of like-minded individuals and publications;
“4. Moving towards gathering socialists under a common organisational umbrella, despite sharp disagreements, which could unify the new cadre that emerged through these different aspects of their political activity.”
We are only at the beginning of this debate, which we hope to continue on Conter and with other socialists. But attempting to combine a sharp political focus with practical and serious activity, must be the right place to start.