Is the Left Finished? part 2

I've been trying these past few days to get my head around a growing list of books I need to read. Here are some of them - with a few excerpts...

After the Third Way – the future of social democracy in Europe ed O Cramme and P Diamond (2012)

We take ideas to be of central importance in our analysis, structuring the electoral strategies, political identities and policy agendas of centre-left parties. There is a vast historical literature on European social democracy which explores the role of ideologies, institutions and interests. Although ideas are referred to in passing and are closely related to ideologies, institutions and interests, for many authors, they remain of secondary concern.

Underminers – a practical guide to radical change  Keith Farnish (2012) Like it for 

the versatility of the authors selected

Taking Socialism Seriously ed Antole Anton and Richard Schmidt (2012)

Why the Left Loses – the decline of the centre-left in comparative perspective ed 

Rob Manwaring and Paul Kennedy (2018)

After the 2008 financial crisis many observers expected a significant swing to the left among Western electorates, since many blamed the economy’s problems on the neoliberal policies that had proliferated during the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. But the centre-left lacked a convincing message for dealing with the crisis, or a more general vision of how to promote growth while protecting citizens from the harsher aspects of free markets. Instead, it kept on trying to defend out-dated policies or proposed watered-down versions of neoliberalism that barely differentiated it from the centre-right. The centre-left also lacked a convincing message about how to deal with increasing diversity or a vision of social solidarity appropriate to changing demographic and cultural realities. Instead, the centre-left either ignored the challenge of diversity or especially among the intellectual left, put forward a message of ‘multiculturalism’ – neither of these responses was able to stem social conflict or electoral flight from the left, especially on the part of the working class.

It has now become fairly commonplace to note the support given by traditionally centre-left voters to the populist right. This connection was on obvious display in the Brexit referendum, where many traditional Labour strongholds and supporters voted to leave the EU, and it has been a prominent feature of elections in Europe as workingclass voters have flocked to right-wing populist parties. And, of course, a version of this was present in the US, where Donald Trump garnered disproportionate support from less-educated and working-class voters. What is still worth stressing, however, is the causal connection between the failures or missteps of the centre-left and the rise of right-wing populist parties that offered simple, straightforward messages in response to citizens’ economic and social fears. Economically, the populist right promises to promote prosperity, via increased government control of the economy and limits on globalisation. Socially, the populist right promises to restore social solidarity and a sense of shared national purpose, by expelling foreigners or severely limiting immigration, diminishing the influence of the EU and globalisation, and protecting traditional values, identities and mores.

For those who bemoan the decline of the centre-left and the rise of the populist right, the challenge is clear: you can’t beat something with nothing, and if the centre-left can’t come up with more viable and attractive messages about how to solve contemporary problems, and a more attractive vision of the future than those offered by its competitors, it can expect to continue its slide into the dust heap of history. The following chapters provide an excellent starting point for the debate about the centre-left’s future.

Leftism Reinvented – western parties from socialism to neoliberalism Stephanie Mudge (2018)

Key to the ideological mass party form was a triple orientation: first, toward knowledge production, education, socialization, and truth-claiming; second, toward representation, agitation, and mobilization; and third, toward office-or power-seeking. Each orientation, in its own way, expressed the historical moment. Ideological mass parties of the left were educators and knowledge producers when there was no mass education; they agitated and mobilized in a world of severely limited voting rights; they provided a means to political careers for the nonwealthy in an age in which aristocratic avocational politicians, with no need for a regular salary, were the rule rather than the exception.8 As such the mass party of the left shaped the formation of parties, politicians, political identities, and the boundaries of politics itself. They are major reasons that one can say, in the words of the political scientist Peter Mair, that “above all else, the twentieth century has been the century of the mass party. My approach to the study of center-left parties is comparative, historical, and biographical. I narrow the general task of analyzing mainstream leftism by punctuating a long-term, four-party analysis with emphases on three time periods: the 1920s–1930s, 1950s–1960s, and 1980s–1990s. I construct my explanatory puzzle, leftism’s reinventions, not by measuring policies in these periods but by tracking changes in political language—that is, changes in the most basic stuff of representative politics. Embracing the time-tested sociological principle that historical analysis should be able to tell the “big” story and that of actors on the ground, I account for changes in political language via an analysis of both large-scale institutional transformations and the trajectories, positions, and self-accounts of actors who speak for parties: party experts. Party experts are social actors in party networks who orient their activities toward the production of ideas, rhetoric, and programmatic agendas in political life in the effort to shape how both electorates and politicians view and understand the world. For reasons explained further below, I focus especially on European ministers of finance and their advisory networks and, in the case of the American Democratic Party, on economic advisory networks centered on presidential candidates.

The Dark Knight and the Pupper Master Chris Clarke (2019) 

Renewing Left-Wing Ideas in 20th Century  Britain Max Shock thesis (2020)

Alternative Societies for a Pluralist Socialism Luke Martell (2023)

I’ll Get to that Bridge When I get to It – heretical thoughts on identity politics, 

cancel culture and academic freedom Norman Finkelstein (2023)

Hilary Wainwright on David Marquand Political Quarterly 2025