Is the Left Finished?

I have been reading The Death of the Left – why we must begin from the beginning again S Winlow and S Hall (2022) - a 350 page book which could do with some editing but which contains an admirable mix of sociological analysis and intellectual history. They are both Professors of Criminology 

The left has clearly undergone fundamental change. It no longer offers a genuine alternative to the existing order of things, whether reformist or revolutionary. Now, as we move further into the twenty-first century, the left seems to have discarded its traditional identity as a mass movement intent on achieving political power. It displays little interest in protecting – let alone improving – the prosperity and security of multi-ethnic working populations. Centre-left political projects of the past – such as Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s or the British Labour Party’s programme of economic restructuring after 1945 – achieved electoral success on the back of a compelling range of policy initiatives made comprehensible to their electorates. Electorates continue to yearn for the genuine kind of economic change that would provide a platform of material security. However, today’s left has little to offer.

The left abandoned its traditional commitments and transformed itself into a cultural hub serving mildly apologetic neoliberals and a range of bespoke activist movements that oppose what they see as historical structures of social injustice. This cultural or identitarian left has accepted neoliberalism’s individualised mode of social competition and rejected democratic socialism’s appeal to solidarity and common interests.

Throughout our lives we have invested heavily in the principles and ideals of the left, only to watch it fail, fail again, and then gradually mutate into a clannish, exclusive, intellectually bereft and politically suicidal melee of disparate cultural groups, some of which now appear to be as belligerently disconnected from each other as they are from the population at large.

So far – so good.

Virtually every sphere of intellectual life veered sharply not to the left or the right but towards liberalism. Many other traditional leftist themes atrophied. Individuals, it was argued, should be freed from the authoritarian diktats of an interventionist state, from traditional gender roles and norms, from the expectations of their parents, from heteronormativity, from popular condemnation and censure, from the myths of religion, from ‘morality’, from accepted knowledge and wisdom, and from established biographical patterns. The list grew ever longer as everything solid seemed to melt into air. So much that was previously categorised as known was removed from that category and put into question.

An accompanying critique was levelled at the institutions that seemed to be propping up the supposedly conservative social order: the criminal justice system; the welfare system; the education system; the tax system; religions; marriage; even the established conventions of electoral democracy itself.

A huge amount of effort was poured into proving how the criminal justice system failed, how the welfare system failed, how the education system failed, and so on. Some of this material was of considerable worth. Institutions of this kind were rightly subjected to sustained intellectual critique. However, as the left liberalised, increasingly these institutions were portrayed as inherently and irredeemably oppressive, and in need of abolition rather than reform. Many radical liberal leftists became as unashamedly antagonistic to the state as their radical cousins on the liberal right.

However, as time wore on, the socialists on the right wing of the Labour Party found themselves at first outnumbered and then completely swamped by a new class of right-wing Labourites: these incomers were essentially advocates of the free market, and they believed that the interests of Labour voters would advance if the state withdrew from the formal economy, stepped back from economic management and encouraged investment capital to drive innovation and create employment. Some were directly influenced by the work of Hayek, and keen to convince all who would listen that Keynesianism was over and that the Labour Party could succeed by developing a better understanding of the market. It takes 200 pages for the book to start treating the The New Left

Our analysis here moves away from the practical world of politics and economic planning to explore a range of intellectual matters. This is simply because it is in the realm of ideas that the roots of change are to be found. There can be little doubt that the intellectuals we discuss in this chapter and the next informed the left’s post-war remodelling. By identifying new goals and concerns, and developing new forms of critique, they encouraged the gradual evolution of the left’s political culture, which in turn prompted changes in the practical sphere of leftist politics. The Frankfurt School’s influence in Britain spread slowly and sporadically. Its scholars, greatly influenced by the fields of continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, displayed little interest in academic history. British intellectual culture has always been largely dismissive of the abstractions of continental thought, which is one of the reasons why EP Thompson’s version of cultural Marxism caught on quickly in Britain, and the Frankfurt School’s cultural Marxism did not.

The Frankfurt School, however, made great strides in the United States.

The Frankfurt School’s continued influence there might be better explained by the fact that a number of key Frankfurt School theorists fled from Nazi Germany to the United States and remained there until the 1950s. One might also argue that Frankfurt School Critical Theory contained an undercurrent of hybridised libertarianism and showed little interest in social class or the complexities of the rapidly evolving capitalist system. These features of Critical Theory fitted neatly with the United States’ established characteristics of political radicalism whose critiques of the capitalist economic system are broad and generalised, whereas their critiques of capitalism’s cultural effects are nuanced, multifaceted and, on the whole, unremittingly bleak. The liberal left in the United States tended to treat the capitalist system as a fait accompli, and only in the trade union movement did talk of class linger on into the post-war era. However, the Frankfurt School’s intellectual assault upon Western culture drew a great deal of attention and seemed to give the liberal left in the United States a new lease of life. The Frankfurt School’s criticism of Western civilisation is undoubtedly incisive and occasionally convincing. These were, after all – especially Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin – intellectuals of genuinely historical significance. Their attack was unrelenting, and they certainly managed to land some effective blows. For the Frankfurt School, Western civilisation was brutal and strewn with manifold injustices. It had been built on tyranny and oppression and had stripped man of his humanity and freedom. It was not simply the working class that suffered. All groups from across the social hierarchy were invited to gaze into the Frankfurt School’s deep well of cultural criticism to find resources that could be used to explain their diverse discontents.

Postmodernism was built upon the negative conception of liberty we commonly associate with the neoliberal right whereas the reforms pursued by traditional socialism, and those put into practice by social democratic governments during the first half of the twentieth century, reflected a commitment to positive social liberty. However, over and above minimal welfare provision, postmodernists saw nothing in modern social democracy worthy of commendation or preservation. Social democratic interventions produced, they argued, freedom-sapping bureaucracies geared towards the reproduction of cultural uniformity and the status quo.

The Chapter on Postmodernism focuses very much on Foucault and is where the book begins to lose its way. But it is the chapter “Identity Politics” which I find incoherent rubbish

Postmodernism accelerated existing processes that were already liberalising the left and moving it further away from its traditional values, policies and sources of support. In advocating a creative individualism free from the intrusions of the state and the judgements of the social order, it also paved the way for contemporary identity politics. However, the truth of the matter is that post-structuralism played a more active role in determining the shape and content of twenty-first-century identity politics. Postmodernism and post-structuralism are often conflated, but to shed light on the intellectual foundations of identity politics, we need to briefly disentangle these two terms.

In future posts I hope to explore other books on this theme.

In Praise of Bibliographical Essays

Last April I posted on this theme

Readers are aware of the rather eccentric stress this blog puts on the importance of 

books having annotated bibliographies. Last year Penguin published 

Why Politics Fails – the 5 traps of the  modern world and how to escape them  

Ben Ansell (2023) which ends with a rare essay which covers, for each chapter, the key 

books the author has found essential as themes for the lens through which he examines 

democracy, equality, solidarity, security and prosperity. 

The only other book I’ve come across with such an essay is Peter Gay’s 680 page 

magnum opus Modernism – the lure of heresy  (2007) which has a stunning 32 page  

bibliographical essay which, he warned, was “highly selective”! 
Peter Gay was born in Germany in 1923 but his family came to the States via Havana 

in 1941 where he became a prolific US historian – as is evident from this Wikipedia entry.

One of his books is My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (1998), a powerful 

and insightful account of his teenage years in Berlin. 

Another which also has an extensive bib essay is Freud – a Life for our Times (1988) 

whose bib essay extends to 76 pages. The book does, after all, have 1350 pages! 

For me, such bibliographical essays are rare gems which offer an opportunity to understand 

an author’s preferences.

Yesterday I came across another book with a great bibliographical essay - 

Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven published in 1991. It’s essay is only 50 

pages long!

A Bibliography

I said yesterday that I had enjoyed Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine – on the unmaking of humanity (2025) partly by virtue of the frequency with which he mentions book titles. Just some of the books mentioned by Kingsnorth which I subsequently downloaded

• The Culture of Cities Lewis Mumford (1938)

• The Crisis of the Modern World Rene Guenon (1941-1961) short book

• The City in History Lewis Mumford (1961)

• The Sibling Society Robert Bly (1996)

• The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times Rene Guenon (2001)

• The Crisis of) Modernity  del Noce (2014)

• Why Liberalism Failed Patrick Deneen (2018)

• In the Shadow of the Machine Jeremy Naydler (2018)

• Why Liberalism Failed Patrick Deneen (2018)

• The Struggle for Humanity  Jeremy Naydler (2020)

• The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self  Carl Trueman (2020) 

• The God that Failed – liberalism and the destruction of the West John Q Publius (2020)

AGAINST THE MACHINE

 I’ve been reading Paul Kingsnorth‘s latest book Against the Machine – on the unmaking of humanity (2025). Kingsnorth is an investigative journalist and green activist, known for his Dark Mountain project and The Abbey of Misrule site. One of the reasons I’m attracted to the book is the way Kingsnorth integrates into the text quite naturally references to long forgotten figures such as Lewis Mumford and Stephen Toulmin

We have arrived at the point which the writers I have explored so far—Oswald Spengler, Christopher Lasch, Robert Bly, Patrick Deneen, Simone Weil, Ian McGilchrist and others—warned us we would come to. It is the point at which our underlying cultural and spiritual brokenness is manifesting on the surface as politics, with explosive results. This is the result of the Great Unsettling: a time and place where nothing seems to be solid, comforting or even real.

This process has been accelerated a thousandfold by the arrival of the internet, and particularly social media, which, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued, has had the same impact as the collapse of the tower of Babel: ‘people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate,condemned to mutual incomprehension.’p152 

Paul Kingsnorth goes on to argue that

The ‘decline of the West’ which is so hotly debated right now is, in my view, not a matter of the wrong people being in charge, or the wrong economic policies being pursued. It is not due to the rise of China or Russia, or racism, or ‘misinformation’, or nasty populists, or the institutionalisation of ‘woke’ ideology. As such, it will not be solved by tougher border controls, or radical rightist governments, or revolutions, or ‘decolonisation’, or controls on freedom of speech in the name of ‘protecting our democracy’. Any number of these things might or might not be real or true or desirable, but they are symptoms, not causes, of our malaise. The malaise is deeper, older, more interesting and far more consequential than any of this, and it affects the very basis of our humanity. What happens next will determine what it means to be human in the twenty-first century and beyond.

This book seeks to tell the tale of this Machine: what it is, where it came from, and where it is taking us next. Drawing from history, from religion, from current events and from the work of many other writers and thinkers, it aims to pin down the shape and genesis of this thing. My inquiry is divided into four parts. Part one explores the roots of the current Western cultural malaise. Part two explains where the Machine came from, and how it contributed to that problem. Part three examines how its values manifest around us today, and what they are destroying. Part four offers a guide to practical and spiritual survival and resistance.

But while I learned this early, it was much later that I learned something else, dimly and slowly, through my study of history, mythology and, well, people: that every culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. This does not, of course, need to be a Christian order. It could be Islamic, Hindu or Daoist. It could be based around the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin. But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.

The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representatives of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions—‘the people’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘progress’. I’m all for liberty, and it would be nice to give democracy a try one day too; but the dethroning of the sovereign—Christ—who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order has not led to universal equality and justice. It has led, via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler, to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.

Sometimes, his writing can seem a bit excessive -

You can judge a culture, I think, by its tallest buildings; what it chooses to reach towards is a reflection of its soul and purpose. The tallest buildings in a modern city are not cathedrals, temples, or even palaces: they are skyscrapers, which are homes to banks, finance houses and global corporations. (p85) And so we find ourselves in the age of AI and apps for everything, with CCTV cameras on every street corner, our opinions manufactured by interest groups, our communications tracked and monitored, wondering what is true or who we can believe, and feeling, day by day, like we have less agency, less control, less humanity than ever before. In the future that is offered to us we are not even cogs in the Machine, for the Machine can increasingly operate without human input. Mumford, as ever, is bracingly frank about where this leads:

Never before has the ‘citadel’ exercised such atrocious power over the rest of the human race. Over the greater part of history, the village and the countryside remained a constant reservoir of fresh life, constrained indeed by the ancestral patterns of behaviour that had helped make man human, but with a sense of both human limitations and human possibilities. No matter what the errors and aberrations of the rulers of the city, they were still correctible. Even if whole urban populations were destroyed, more than nine tenths of the human race still remained outside the circle of destruction. Today this factor of safety has gone: the metropolitan explosion has carried both the ideological and the chemical poisons of the metropolis to every part of the earth; and the final damage may be irretrievable.

Back to Kingsnorth -

One man who tried back in the 1960s, when an unquestioning faith in science and its offspring, technology, was roaring across the Western world, was the French thinker Jacques Ellul. Ellul’s 1964 book “The Technological Society” attempted to understand and explain what the Machine was made of. Its thesis is that the society we live in today—which he predicted with accuracy—represents a fundamental, qualitative change in what it means to be human (p113). Around the same time that Robert Bly was writing “The Sibling Society”, another American thinker, Christopher Lasch, was also predicting a future of elite colonisation. In “The Revolt of the Elites”, Lasch forecast the future accurately. ‘The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties’, he wrote, ‘are best understood as a form of class warfare, in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate, as to create parallel or “alternative” institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all.’ p135

What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the ‘progressive’ left had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same rootstock? What if the left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the new world of the Machine? (p142) It’s not hard to see that progressive leftism and the machine, far from being antagonistic, are a usefully snug fit. Both are totalising, utopian projects. Both are suspicious of the past, impatient with borders and boundaries, and hostile to religion, ‘superstition’ and the limits on the human individual imposed by nature or culture. Both are in pursuit of a global utopia where, in the dreams of both Lenin and Lennon, the world will live as one.

Kingsnorth continues -

We have arrived at the point which the writers I have explored so far—Oswald Spengler, Christopher Lasch, Robert Bly, Patrick Deneen, Simone Weil and others—warned us we would come to. It is the point at which our underlying cultural and spiritual brokenness is manifesting on the surface as politics, with explosive results. This is the result of the Great Unsettling: a time and place where nothing seems to be solid, comforting or even real.

This process has been accelerated a thousandfold by the arrival of the internet, and particularly social media, which, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued, has had the same impact as the collapse of the tower of Babel: ‘people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate,  condemned to mutual incomprehension.’(p152)

The West’ is, above all, a way of seeing—a way of looking out at the world. Once, that gaze was Christian, but it has not been that way for a long time now. The contemporary Western gaze is the gaze of the Machine; of Enlightenment Man, of cosmopolis, of reason, of money. And it is because this gaze has been unable for centuries to appreciate that the world in its fullness that we have come so unstuck. If we are going to get stuck again, as it were, we will need to learn to see the world very differently. (p236)

McGilchrist’s thesis boils down, in simple terms, to brain hemispheres. All animal brains are divided into two hemispheres, joined by a thin band of connecting tissue, and nobody quite knows why. What they do know, according to McGilchrist, is that each hemisphere has its own particular way of seeing—or, as he puts it, ways of ‘attending to the world’. This does not break down according to the popular stereotype, in which the ‘left brain’ is masculine, scientific, rational and cold and the ‘right brain’ is feminine, intuitive, artistic and warm. Rather, according to McGilchrist, ‘the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend—and thus manipulate—the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend it’. The left and right hemispheres seem to have very specific ways of relating to their world. The left’s way is the way of certainty, manipulation, detail, the local and familiar, the isolated, discrete and fragmentary. Its world is fixed, decontextualised, inanimate, general and optimistic. The right, on the other hand, sees the whole picture, notices the peripheries and is comfortable with the new, ambiguous, circumspect and complex. It attends to change, flow, context, the animate, narratives, the pragmatic, empathy and emotional expressivity, and it tends towards pessimism.

But something happened, posits McGilchrist, over the course of Western history. In this little part of the world, there was a revolution. At some point, or perhaps at many points, the left hemisphere—the emissary—overthrew the right—the master—and began to run the show itself. Instead of the parts being in service to the whole, the whole became diminished or dismissed by a perspective that could only see the world as a collection of parts. The result is the Machine mind, and the irony is ‘that the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it. Meanwhile, compounding the problem, we take the success we have in manipulating it as proof that we understand it.’

The upshot, says McGilchrist, is that ‘we no longer live in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it’.[2] There is no territory in this new world, only map. Those who can see this, and try to point it out, are dismissed as ‘romantics’, ‘nostalgics’, ‘reactionaries’ or ‘dreamers’. The left hemisphere’s world is taken to be reality, whereas it is, in fact, only an inadequate representation of it. The result, says McGilchrist, is an age that is literally unprecedented in human history. ‘We exist in the world, of course’, he writes, ‘but we no longer belong in this world—or any world worthy of the name. We have unmade the world. This is entirely new in the history of humanity and it is impossible to exaggerate its significance’.

The age of AI, the metaverse and the deepening technosphere both results from and turbocharges this way of seeing, to the point that we are now losing contact with reality altogether, all the time imagining that we are ‘progressing’ towards it. ‘Machines and tools’, notes McGilchrist matter-of- factly at one point, ‘are alone coded in the left hemisphere.’ It is the left hemisphere which built Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley which built us. He believes that ‘we have systematically misunderstood the nature of reality, and chosen to ignore, or silence, the minority of voices that have intuited as much and consistently maintained that this is the case’. Now, as a result, ‘we have reached the point where there is an urgent need to transform both how we think about the world and what we make of ourselves’.

In short, ‘the West’ as we know it today is an overwhelmingly left hemisphere culture, and this descent into a narrow way of seeing has been accelerating as modernity has progressed. At one point, McGilchrist even makes the startling claim that Western art from the modernist period onward often looks like the kind of representation of the world that is produced by people who have suffered brain damage to the right hemisphere, and he is neither being insulting nor speaking metaphorically. Are we in ‘the West’ literally a culture with brain damage? It would explain a lot. P238

I have written already about the Four Ps—people, place, prayer, the past —which could be said to underpin traditional culture, and the Four Ss—sex, science, the self and the screen—with which Machine modernity has replaced them. A reactionary radicalism could be usefully defined as an active attempt at creating, defending or restoring a moral economy built around the four Ps (p252)

This, then, is my idea of an anti-Machine politics. A reactionary radicalism, its face set against Progress Theology, which aims to defend or build a moral economy at the human scale, which rejects the atomised individualism of the liberal era and understands that materialism as a worldview has failed us. A politics which embraces family and home and place, loving the particular without excluding the outsider, and which looks on all great agglomerations of power with suspicion. The rejection of abstract ideologies in favour of real-world responses, and an understanding that material progress always comes with a hidden price tag. A politics which aims to limit rather than multiply our needs, which strategically opposes any technology which threatens the moral economy and which, finally, seeks a moral order to society which is based on love of neighbour rather than competition with everyone.

The Humanitarian Impulse is alive and well – exemplified in Mondragon

I haven’t posted enough about Mondragon and the shining example it offers about the potential of workers’ cooperatives. A young American, Ellie Griffin, from Utah state recently published The Elysian Manifesto

Once we wrote constitutions and built governments, the work was done and our future became fixed. The pamphlets stopped. The illuminated ideas ceased. We no longer amend our constitution or reinvent our governments. You wouldn’t see something like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense or Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers published today—something that would “decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice.” Instead, we cover all of the ways our systems are failing without imagining what better ones could be.

Journalism is no longer about thinking up solutions, it’s about reporting on the problems. Even our fiction is dystopian. Our science fiction writers can only imagine a future plagued by AI apocalypse, government surveillance, computer chips in our brains, and space colonies that take us away from the polluted world we created. If even our best literary minds cannot imagine a better future, how are we supposed to create it?

That’s why I’ve created the Elysian League—a utopian garden where we can study philosophy and debate politics and rethink capitalism and enjoy contemplative leisure and be part of a new Enlightenment. It’s a place where we can think through a more beautiful future through essays and literature and discourse. And I’m just optimistic enough to believe that’s enough of a start to building one. The Elysian League is the Enlightenment social club made modern, and this Manifesto is my entry into the utopian canon

Her blog is a celebration of Mondragon with such posts as

• https://www.elysian.press/p/the-cooperatist-manifesto-of-mondragon?hide_intro_popup=true

• https://www.elysian.press/p/social-companies-like-mondragon

For readers wanting to know more about cooperatives I strongly recommend

• Democracy at Work Richard Wolff (2012)

• Owning our Future – the emerging ownership revolution Marjorie Kelly (2012)

• The Case for Community Wealth-building J Guinan and M O’Neill (2020)

• Design of a Worker Cooperatives Society – an alternative beyond capitalism and 

socialism and the transition roward it Geert Reuten (2023)

The Routledge Handbook of Cooperative Economics and Management ed JN Warren et al 

(2025)

MAKING SENSE OF THE LEFT

A couple of years ago I tried to do justice to my thoughts on the subject, It’s Hilary Wainwright’s essay on David Marquand in the book in his memory Making Social Democrats – essays for David Marquand ed J Nuttall and H Schattle (2018) which persuaded me to put pen to paper this time

There are many examples which indicate the phenomenon of a socially and environmentally purposeful trade unionism. The most widely known of these examples is that of the LucasAerospace shop stewards’ alternative plan for socially useful production in the 1970s. This was the result of workers in Lucas Aerospace factories in eleven different places responding to corporate rationalisations (the outcome of accountants’ calculations) with proposals driven by social needs—needs shaped by workers’ sense of being citizens as well as workers. (Workplace trade unionism was a good deal stronger than it is now.)

More recent, though less developed, examples include the partially successful defence of jobs at Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, and also the resistance to job losses at Rolls Royce in 2022.Moreover, such organising isn’t just limited to manufacturing production jobs. Academics and education staff have also been organising in pursuit of ‘green bargaining’ to influence the university as a site of education production and economic justice for workers from the bottom up.

This move amongst a minority of workplace trade union organisations beyond the narrow limits of traditional collective bargaining (normally concerned only with wages and conditions) reinforces Marquand’s rejection of individualism. It also indicates a limitation in his implicit notion of agency, which, in his prescriptions (in contrast to his contemporary history), tends to be focussed exclusively on political parties. This publicly purposeful trade unionism could be understood as a move away from the individualist ethic of traditional trade unionism which could be described as ‘sectional’ or ‘particularistic’, concerned narrowly with the interests of the unions’ individual members, vital though these are. The workers and their organisations at Airbus, Lucas Aerospace, Rolls Royce and elsewhere all attempted, with varying degrees of success, to extend collective bargaining for public benefit.

In doing so, they were both deepening the public dialogue around the shared, public problem of climate change—taking it beyond electoral politics. More specifically, theywere challenging production priorities driven by private profit andacting as a force (and potential ally of a republican government) to socialise production.

After Marquand who represents the centre of the left, it was time to move to the 

harder end of the spectrum – people like Leo Panatch and Colin Leys who 

produced some 5 years ago Searching for Socialism – the project of the labour 

new left from Benn to Corbyn (2020)

Each of the three great economic crises of the last century – the 1930s, the 1970s and the decade after 2008 – precipitated a crisis in the Labour Party. Each time, the crisis posed fundamental questions of ideology, organisation and unity, and ended up by propelling into the leadership a radical socialist MP from the party’s left wing. In each instance this produced a sharp reaction aimed at blocking whatever potential the crisis had for taking the party in a new democratic-socialist direction. And in each case Britain’s relationship with Europe played an important role.

The first instance was in 1931, at the onset of the Great Depression, after the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald had formed a ‘National Government’ in order to impose massive cuts in social expenditure on the unemployed and the working poor. In the ensuing general election, the Labour Party, although it won 30 per cent of the vote, was reduced from 287 MPs to 52. In the wake of this, the radical socialist and pacifist George Lansbury was elected leader, and party policy took a sharp turn to the left.

Yet, despite massive street demonstrations by the unemployed, most of the remaining Labour MPs were opposed to any except purely parliamentary measures, leaving Lansbury feeling, as he wrote, ‘absolutely helpless’ in face of the imposition of ever more draconian austerity. In 1935, after the party conference endorsed military rearmament in response to developments in Europe and the Soviet Union, Lansbury resigned.

His successor, Clement Attlee, put the party in the hands of ‘a much more professional team’, but ‘also a much more “responsible” one’, as Ralph Miliband wrote in Parliamentary Socialism. This was the team that would later carry through Labour’s major post-war reforms, while leaving unchallenged the capitalist economy, the inherited structures of the state and the country’s place in the new American empire.

In the 1970s, as the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan responded to a new economic crisis by abandoning the Keynesian welfare state and restraining union militancy, a new Labour left emerged that was determined to democratise and radicalise the party; and soon after the party’s defeat by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, Michael Foot, whose political formation was rooted in the Lansbury years, was precipitated into the leadership. But in the interest of party unity Foot allied himself with the centre-right of the parliamentary party against the Labour new left and its most prominent spokesman, Tony Benn, reasserting the party’s commitment to traditional parliamentarism. This did not prevent a second heavy defeat, by Thatcher in 1983. Nor did the ruthless repression of Labour’s new left by Foot’s successor, Neil Kinnock, prevent two further electoral defeats. Instead it paved the way for ‘New Labour’, and the embrace of neoliberalism under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Throughout these years, too, the issue of Britain’s relationship with Europe was a constant complicating dimension of the party’s internal divisions. The contradictions of New Labour in government, culminating in the financial crisis of 2007–08, first propelled ‘Red Ed’ Miliband to the leadership. But when he, like Foot, gave top priority to securing the unity of the parliamentary party, leading yet again to electoral defeat in 2015, the crisis finally led to the election as leader – this time by the whole membership of the party – of Jeremy Corbyn. His election, the surge in membership that accompanied it, and the support he received from the trade unions finally brought the project of the Labour new left to the top of the party’s governmental agenda. The question now was whether the cycle of resistance and neutralisation would once again be repeated, or whether the Labour Party could after all become the agent of democratic-socialist advance in the UK.

Jeremy Corbyn and his most senior colleagues had been formed in the previous attempt to make this happen, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In “The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New Labour,” Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (1997) published in 2000, we traced the record of that attempt, and its ultimate defeat by the combined forces of its opponents inside and outside the party. Our conclusion was that ‘the route to socialism does not lie through the Labour Party’. This did not make us despondent. While accepting that ‘the first reaction to disillusionment … is fatalism, in the face of what are presented as global forces beyond anyone’s control’, we thought that this ood would ‘sooner or later change to resentment and anger, and a rediscovered will to act, to which a new socialist project must respond’. We did not foresee how soon, in reality, this would happen, in the reaction against the inequality, militarism and economic failure of the neoliberal project; nor that events would again propel a socialist into the leadership of the Labour Party and reopen the question of whether the party could yet be transformed into one capable of leading the socialist transition that the surge of activists into its ranks called for.

Although the enthusiasm behind the Corbyn leadership and the achievements of its first years were impressive, the obstacles the Labour new left project faced were if anything greater than ever. By early 2019 it was clear that its prospects of success had been severely whittled down, so that its eventual defeat in December was not a surprise. The country’s relation with Europe played an even more critical role in this than in the past, but the continuities with what had blocked the Labour new left project since the 1970s, above all the fierce obstruction from within the parliamentary party and from the media, were once again evident in every aspect of the events which culminated in defeat in the December 2019 election.

We have therefore condensed the previous book into the first five chapters of this one. The six chapters that follow cover the last twenty years. For help in researching them, we are extremely grateful to all those people inside the party, at every level, from whose knowledge and insights we have learned so much, for the generous time and help they have given us. In all of our work on the project of the Labour new left, we have tried to point to its huge importance while at the same attempting to analyse as clearly as possible the obstacles to realising its potential. But, in whatever form, the drive for democratic socialism will continue. This book is intended as a contribution and a tribute to the purpose and vision of those who, in wanting the Labour Party to become a genuinely democratic socialist agent of transformation, have done so much to recover the capacity to think ambitiously about social change.

From Illiteracy to Idiocracy?

Time was when it was books that people were deep into. Now it’s smartphones with universities now complaining that their students have difficulty reading

James Marriott’s recent post The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society went viral, 

arguing that social media represented a revolution not dissimilar to Gutenberg’s 

invention of the printing press

Where readers had once read “intensively”, spending their lives reading and re-reading 

two or three books, the reading revolution popularised a new kind of “extensive” reading. 

People read everything they could get their hands on: newspapers, journals, history, 

philosophy, science, theology and literature. Books, pamphlets and periodicals poured 

off the presses.

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the 

eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to 

superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other 

historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the 

Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the 

beginnings of the industrial revolution.  

Now, we are living through the counter-revolution. More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.

In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, “books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.” The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens.

and prompted this article from Niall Ferguson

Earlier this month Dan Williams asked whether the social media wasn’t destroying 

democracy

Because algorithms and other platform features are designed to capture people’s attention and keep them scrolling, they amplify content that is sensationalist, bias-confirming, and divisive. This viral content then infects public opinion and political debate, driving large numbers of people to adopt misinformed and hateful ideas hostile to liberal democracy. I’ve criticised this narrative. Although social media platforms undoubtedly reward low-quality discourse, narratives that place significant weight on this fact to explain recent political developments are misguided. They rest on implausibly rosy pictures of legacy media and pre-social media history. They’re not well-supported by scientific studies. They overstate the public’s manipulability and underestimate organic demand for low-quality content. And they conveniently overlook more consequential causes of anti-establishment backlash, including the objective gap between the cultural preferences of elites and those of many voters. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see no connection between social media and the rise of populism. To make sense of this connection, however, we should focus less on social media as a dysfunctional technology and more on its status as a democratising technology.

Nathan Witkin has a different view which he elaborates here

But the argument is best summed up in a video I came across recently which first beautifully summarises the plot of an older film set a couple of decades ago. The film portrays an America where the average IQ has sunk to an abysmal level not least through the influence of commercial advertising. I don’t particularly recommend its viewing but, for the masochists amongst you, the film itself is called “Idiocracy” and can be seen here

update

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/18/are-we-living-in-a-golden-age-of-stupidity-technology

https://substack.com/home/post/p-176480390 post from “The Culturalist”

Michael Walker of Novara
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e4YY9OQoNY

“This too shall pass……” - taking the long view

The table below identifies some of the central issues which have rocked public debate in the West in each of the decades since the 1930s - something I first doodled 20 years ago (with updates from time to time). We think, for example, that populism is something new - but talk of “populism” surfaces whenever things seem to be slipping from the control of “ruling elites”. Such talk has occurred every 30 years or so in the past 150 years – the 1880s in the US and Russia; the 1930s in Europe and Latin America; the late 1960s globally; the late 1990s in Europe. It’s just that we lack the sense of history to appreciate this.…

Decade	Themes of intellectual discussion	Key authors
1930s	End of capitalism Fascism	J Strachey, H Laski G. Sorel, Gramsci
1940s	The managerial revolution Keynesianism Realism in politics	James Burnham John M Keynes Reinhold Niebuhr, Edward H Carr
1950s	Totalitarianism Brainwashing Meritocracy Revisionism Private affluence/public squalour	Hannah Arendt; Zevedei Barbu. Vance Packard Michael Young Anthony Shonfield; Tony Crosland,  J K Galbraith
1960s	End of ideology Corporate planning, management Modernisation of society Participation critique of professionals	Daniel Bell Russell Ackoff, Peter Drucker Peter Berger Paolo Freire, Colin Ward Ivan Illich
1970s	Costs of economic growth, ecology Public choice theory Small is beautiful Change Corporatism Feminism	Edward J Mishan, James Lovelock, Club of Rome James Buchanan Ed Schumacher, Leonard. Kohr Alvin Toffler, Donald Schon Andrew Shonfield Betty Friedan
1980s	Deindustrialisation Privatisation decentralisation globalisation racial equality	Frank Blackaby; Ken Dyson Consultancies; World Bank OECD Joseph Stiglitz, Martin Wolf Bhikhu Parekh
1990s	End of history Flexibility and reengineering Reinvention of government; NPM Climate change The learning organisation Washington consensus	Francis Fukayama Mike Hammer David Osborne, OECD and Scientific community Peter Senge World Bank
2000s	Good governance Neo-liberalism Environmental collapse Migration and social integration Populism	World bank; OECD David Harvey Scientific community Chris Cauldwell Cas Mudde
2010s	Migration Climate warming Capitalism Austerity Inequality Populism	Everyone Everyone Joseph Stiglitz, Jerry Mander, Paul Mason, Paul Collier Mark Blyth, Danny Dorling, Richard Wilkinson, Thomas Pikety Jan-Werner Mueller,
2020s	Migration Populism Extinction AI, robots, future of work Surveillance, big data Pandemics	Everyone Everyone Rupert Read, Jem Bendell ILO, Richard Baldwin, Geoff Mulgan Shoshana Zuboff Adam Tooze, Niall Ferguson

Note to table; I do appreciate that the allocation is arbitrary and therefore contentious….and that the table gives no indication of how long each “debate” lasted….Managerialism, for example, seems to have had several phases….and various forms of human rights were being argued throughout the entire period. Nor do I try to justify detail with google analytics. My purpose is simply impressionistic – to remind us of the ebb and flow of ideas…

Our constant preoccupation with what is new and modern has a name – ”neophilia” – which makes us too easily the prey of the latest political and intellectual fashions. We drift into without exploring why we dropped our previous enthusiasm develops in us what Clive James called “cultural amnesia” – an almost fatal inability to look back at what people much wiser than us were saying in previous generations