As 2024 comes to an end, Michael Doyle returns to a book published in 1995 that offers a way forward for socialists in the UK and US in 2025.
For the past couple of months, I have been reading Ellen Meiskens Wood’s Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism. Wood’s argument in the wake of the end of the Cold War was that the socialist left needed to reject the clarion call of identity politics, not to get trapped in a post-modernist ditch of fragmentation and a rejection of totality – as well as class politics. In the early 1990s, Wood argued that the socialist left began to shift away from the familiar terrain of political economy to the intellectual fads of identity politics. This was an accommodation with capitalism, seeking space within the system and still arguing for traditional left-wing objectives of racial equality and justice – minus class struggle. Class struggle, as Marx famously wrote, is the history of human societies.
In the penultimate chapter of Wood’s book, she cites an occasion when Isacc Deutscher delivered a not altogether welcome message: ‘You are effervescently active on the margin of social life, and the workers are passive right at the core of it. That is the tragedy of our society. If you do not deal with this contrast, you will be defeated’. This remains the conundrum that the socialist left must overcome. Whilst it is important to support the pro-Palestinian campus demonstrators, it must be integrated into a wider class analysis of how materially supporting Israel’s barbarity harms the working class. At the core of historical materialism is the principle that the working class is the revolutionary subject. It is only the working class that can fundamentally change the mode of production from one that generates violence, want, and destruction, to one that allows human emancipation to occur.
If Wood ever needed vindication for her thesis, the 2024 Presidential election delivered it. The Democrats ran a campaign based on electing the first black female President with a plethora of celebrities coming to rallies to emphasize that campaigning objective. Rather than oppose this, the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) leading politicians AOC and Bernie Sanders threw themselves into campaigning for Harris. What was missing from Sanders and AOC’s campaigning for Harris was any emphasis on improving material living standards. Rather, it was the threat of ‘fascism’ from Trump. This pitiful praxis has been characterisitic of socialist politics since the end of the Cold War.
Rather than forging a distinctive socialist politics heeding Wood’s call to renew historical materialism, it has hitched itself to progressivism. Progressivism is committed to capitalism, socialists are not. When progressive argue for regulation, this is not to make capitalism fairer, but more efficient. To be seen as agents of human progress, progressives emphasize their commitment to having representation from minority communities in the elite class. A key difference is that whilst socialists are committed to human emancipation of all, progressives are not. Despite these fundamental differences, because socialists have subordinated themselves to progressivism, the ‘left’ is used as a catch-all term by the right.
Trump and his acolytes labelled Harris a ‘communist’ and said the ‘radical left’ are the main force in Harris’ campaign. In their election post-mortem, the Democrat top brass have largely concluded that Harris’ campaign was too left-wing and was far too close to the DSA. Nevertheless, socialists have been far too close to progressives and this has inevitably disconnected them from working-class Americans. This is not just an American phenomenon. In the UK, socialists have for too long retreated into identity politics and have either overlooked or neglected the centrality of social class in their analysis.
There is much to commend in advancing a politics that opposes racism and sexism. but as Wood shrewdly notes, a politics that centres the fight against racial and sexual oppression can be tolerated and even co-opted by capitalism. More contentiously, Wood argued that ecological concerns were not a solid basis for a anti-capitalist politics because of their universality. However, Wood does write that there is potential for ecological concerns intersecting with class relations. Yet if we see the types of campaigns that pop-up groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil engage in – and supported by some socialists – they do the opposite of looking for those intersections and instead seem to almost go out of their way to alienate working class people with their tactics.
Historically, socialists strength lay in its roots and capacity to organise within the working class. Undoubtedly the process of deindustrialisation did incredible damage to the collective institutions of working class life and political organisation. However, rather than retreat into post-Marxist analysis of a ‘new subjectivity of the multitude’ which is an intellectual cover for a retreat from class struggle, socialists must accept that whilst heavy industry may have largely gone, capitalism remains the dominant mode of production and the intellectual basis of historical materialism remains intact.
For too long in the UK, socialists have sought electoral shortcuts to increasing class consciousness. The best example of this was the Corbyn project. For all its proclamations that it was a populist project, it was centred in London and relied on celebrity journalists to mobilise hundreds of canvassers during election time who had no roots in the working class. Furthermore, they indulged in identity politics to distinguish who could be part of their movement. When Eddie Dempsey – rightly – said that working class contempt for liberals was being channelled into support for the far-right, he was no-platformed by self-proclaimed socialists who attached themselves to progressivism’s clarion call for a second referendum on EU membership.
The renewal of historical materialism is still a viable and even more necessary project for the left to undertake. When Wood made her call for historical materialism to be renewed, it was a courageous intervention in an academic discourse that had been infected with the postmodern infection of identity politics, post-Marxist fads and the brazen triumphalism of the end of history. As of today, Fukuyama’s end of history thesis remains intact. Not because history has ended, but rather because there is no counter-hegemonic project based on historical materialism that offers a different future. It is not worth, nor ever worth looking to American liberalism since it offers no future beyond the present. In this respect, it is no different from American conservatism, hence the perpetual doom loop that has characterised American politics since the 1980s. Wood was right in 1995 and more than ever, right today.
