What’s Left of the Left?

I do understand that many readers dislike wading through chunks of text and like to get to the “bottom line”. That’s why, a couple of years ago, I started these famous TABLES - which try to extract the core messages from a dozen or so books. Today’s post starts positively – moves into more critical vein but ends with extolling a book which seems to strike all the notes this child of the 60s has been desperately looking for

The last post ended with an excerpt from Jacobin’s review of Thomas Pikety’s “Time for 

Socialism” which had me returning to the future of the British and, indeed, European Left

- on which so many anguished columns have been devoted in recent decades. 
This article from 2013 I found very thought-provoking  Labour – left and right; party positioning and policy reasoning

 - in that it made me realise that we needed to explore the links between different levels -

• the working class/precariat – whose interests left-wing parties are supposed to further 

• parliamentary representatives – who have to balance considerations of feasibility, legitimacy and support

• party programmes – which need to appeal to the floating voter

• public perceptions – very profoundly affected by mainstream media (controlled by corporate power) 

Liam Byrne (a Labour MP) has an article in (Political Quarterly - a famous Social Democrat journal establised a century ago) which, in so many ways, indicates the impotence of the breed. His piece -

• repudiates nationalisation

• prioritises educational opportunity

• and aspiration

• wants more punitive welfarism

• supports (ill-defined) “de-inflationary measures”

and continues -

The conservative response to the pandemic was in many ways extraordinary, but confined within the bounds of what was deemed acceptable in the post-GFC fiscal and monetary framework. But, there is little evidence that social democrats would have acted in a manner that was drastically different.

Since the end of the Third Way era, little has been done by the party family to develop a new political economy—a way of comprehending the world and the possibilities for rupture—specific to the creed. Social democrats have differentiated themselves by proposing specific progressive policies, but when it comes to broader ideas about the economic and political framework, they tend to replicate the core tenets of the governing orthodoxy, formed as it is through the institutional networks of power that shape established social relations. But more generally, the stark reality is that social democratic politicians are often indistinguishable from progressive technocrats

Centre-left parties have sought to distinguish themselves by their probity, loyalty to fiscal and monetary orthodoxy and fidelity to correct parliamentary process. They have done so while the ‘political centre of gravity [h]as shifted leftwards’, with a greater general acceptance that higher rates of government debt are acceptable if it is being used to create ‘the industries and jobs of the future.’24

Social democrats who pledged too far-reaching a vision of social reform routinely found themselves disciplined by the merciless mainstream media conglomerations, leading policy experts and the markets themselves. Now, in a period of tightened economic and fiscal constraints, jumpy markets and endemic low growth across the developed world, social democrats have again raised adherence to the orthodoxy to a principle. The bounds of the politically possible are being policed not by their opponents, but by social democrats themselves.

The social democratic project needs to be more than the reallocation of budgetary expenditures; it needs to be about the rebalancing of social power. To do this, the creed must develop a consistent and coherent alternative political economy—one that reflects the interests of a social constituency of labouring people as they exist today. It is insufficient to retrofit an economic agenda suited for a class structure that existed forty years ago.

The political cynicism that has become endemic in the neoliberal era poses challenges for all democratic parties, but is particularly potent for social democrats. Social democracy is the political force of social transformation—albeit within constitutional and electoral bounds. A generalised belief that democracy is failing, that politicians constitute an alien and self-protecting class, and that change is not possible—all rebound significantly on the left’s political prospects.

The challenge for social democracy is to utilise government to undercut this disillusionment through practical and immediate changes that can be identified in local communities and individual workplaces, but which also compose a larger picture on social change for general betterment. Through this, social democrats can create social constituencies for their policies and construct long-term governments. This is a transformative project that can only be pursued with a coherent and distinctive vision of the type of society the creed seeks to create, but one that is perceived as realisable. As British Labour discovered to its detriment in 2019, it is not sufficient to present a bundle of individually popular polices.

Somewhere beyond both Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Blair there is a social democratic means to comprehend the political economy of modern capitalism, and a strategy to change it. The challenge is to find it.

And I think I’ve found it!! It’s by an Italian sociologist now living in London and it’s called 

The Great Recoil Paolo Gerbaudo 2021

Recent Assessment of the Left
What’s Left of the Left – democrats and social democrats in challenging times ed James Cronin, George Ross, and James Shoch 2011
Endgame for the Centre-Left?  Patrick Diamond 2016

The Socialist Ideas of the British Left's Alternative Economic Strategy Baris Tufekci 2020

The Great Recoil Paolo Gerbaudo 2021
Toward a Social Democracy Century? ed K Hofman de Moura, A Skrzypek, R Wilson 2022