More Leftist Stuff

Four books up for review today – with the second being my favourite

The Socialist Challenge Today Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (2018)
A very short essay (only 52 pages) by two US authorsSearching for Socialism – the project of the labour new left from Benn to Corbyn Leo Panitch and Colin Hay (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.

Would Democratic Socialism be Better? Lane Kenworthy (2022)
A curious book from someone with a rather jaundiced look at the subject 
– with a US focusSocialism for Today – escaping the cruelties of capitalism David Kotz (2025) 

A rather right-wing treatment by a US author

Chapter 2 examines the system known as capitalism. It will show that, despite 
the undeniable economic and social advances that have occurred in the capitalist 
era since its inception centuries ago, today capitalism is the underlying source of 
the severe problems encountered by the majority. 

Chapter 3 considers whether the reform of capitalism can adequately address 
the problems it generates. It argues that a reformed capitalism can indeed be 
more benign than its raw and unmodified form, but it makes a case that reform 
can at best bring an amelioration of the problems that is both limited in extent 
and cannot last. 

Chapter 4 reviews the lessons of twentieth-century efforts to move beyond 
capitalism to build a socialist system that gave rise to the Soviet system and 
some cases of market socialism. Those developments did bring some economic 
and social advances, but they also had significant negative features, in particular 
an authoritarian and repressive state. All of those post-capitalist systems proved 
to be unsustainable in the long run. Both the successes and the failures of those 
moves beyond capitalism provide important lessons for a future socialism.

Chapter 5 proposes a socialism for the United States and other high-income 
industrialized countries. It provides an account of the main institutions of an 
alternative socialist system, taking account of the twentieth-century efforts to 
construct a socialist alternative to capitalism. It argues that a future socialism 
can eliminate the severe problems that capitalism inevitably generates, while 
building a society that promotes human development, solidarity, democracy, 
liberty, and environmental sustainability. 
Finally, chapter 6 considers how to get from here to there.

The analysis in this book does not indicate that socialism will be a utopia, automatically banishing all human problems. Rather, it will be one more advance for humanity, one that provides the only socioeconomic framework for addressing, and over time resolving, the most pressing problems we face in common.

Since the 1980s a number of books and articles have appeared proposing models of a future democratic socialism based on economic planning and public ownership. The authors of such works include Pat Devine, Robin Hahnel, Michael Albert, David Laibman, and W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell. Those works offer relatively detailed speci­fications of the institutions of a future democratic socialist economy. Those authors present a variety of proposals for the design of a system of economic planning that would align production and distribution decisions with popular needs and wants. This chapter will mainly draw on the version of democratic socialism proposed by Devine. Devine’s model most directly relies on active participation by the population in making allocation decisions.

This chapter takes up the following topics: (1) democratic participatory planning as the central economic institution of a future socialism; (2) forms of property ownership to go along with DPP; (3) workers’ rights; (4) introduction of new small businesses, new products, and new technologies; (5) the role of the state; (6) overcoming non-class forms of oppression; (7) cultural and political freedoms; (8) environmental sustainability; and (9) advances and problems in a democratic socialist society.

It is not possible to know the detailed structure of a future democratic socialist system in advance. However, in light of the pervasive mainstream insistence that there is no viable alternative to capitalism, socialists must make a case that there is a plausible socialist alternative. An article by Sam Gindin states it well:

For socialists, establishing popular confidence in the feasi­bility of a socialist society is now an existential challenge. . . . This, it needs emphasis, isn’t a matter of proving that socialism is possible (the future can’t be verified) nor of laying out a thorough blueprint (as with projecting capitalism before its arrival, such details can’t be known), but of presenting a framework that contributes to making the case for socialism’s plausibility

Continuing the series on the Left

After my brief foray into styles of writing, let me continue my series on the future of the left. Jeremy Gilbert and Hilary Wainwright are 2 writers I very much respect – the first for his Common Ground – democracy and collectivity in an age of individualism (2014), the second for her Public Service Reform – but not as we know it (2009). Here I’m offering two (shorter) books by these 2 authors - first

A New Politics from the Left Hilary Wainwright (2018). Only 89 pages!

By the late 1950s, however, a ‘new left’ was emerging, mainly among the intelligentsia broadly defined – media professionals and self-educated workingclass intellectuals, as well as academics – that rejected both sides of the Cold War. It was 1956, with Soviet tanks on the streets of Budapest and British ships and troops in the Suez Canal, that was the catalyst. One of the new left’s most eloquent early voices was E. P. Thompson. With the instincts of the social historian, he was attentive to what was happening beneath the surface of the institutions of the Cold War. While the international show of the Stalinist Soviet bloc versus NATO and the capitalist West proceeded, he noticed the young people who had slunk out of the theatre to make their own music on the streets.

Prompted by ‘the positives of Aldermaston and the negatives of ‘“hip” and the

“beats”’, he spied a new critical temper. It offered a future outside the political

culture shaped by the Cold War. ‘Beneath the polarisation of power and ideology

in the Cold War world’, he wrote, ‘a new, rebellious human nature was being

formed, just as the new grass springs up beneath the snow’. In “The Making of the English Working Class”, Thompson, writing of the 1820s in a comparable period of retreat and defeat and mild prosperity, quotes a London artisan alerting nineteenth-century historian Henry Mayhew: ‘People fancy that when all’s quiet that all’s stagnating. Propaganda is going on for all that. It’s when all’s quiet that the seed’s a-growing. Republicans and Socialists are pressing their doctrines.’

The quiet decades of the 1950s and early 1960s were the years in which workers’ strength and organization in the workplace began to grow, benefiting from the bargaining power of the economic boom and creating the conditions for an increasingly militant workplace trade unionism, with some autonomy from the

alliance of trade union leaders with the parliamentary Labour Party (PLP); years

in which networked activists against the nuclear bomb converged to create the

Aldermaston Marches, through which, every Easter weekend, over 50,000

marchers from all parts of the left and dissenting opinion created a radical left

politics independent of political parties (though periodically engaging with it)

and a space in which politics and culture came together creatively and

experimentally – even renewing, through the Committee of 100 and the

campaign against regional seats of post-nuclear government, the tradition of

direct action. They were years in which film-makers documented everyday

working-class life, its ingenuity and its forms of cultural rebellion; in which

Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex gave women marginalized by domesticity and subordinated by Hollywood culture the confidence to experiment with autonomy and ways of living that refused male domination; in which popular music provided a language for escaping the narrow constraints of conventional values and morals. Fertile ground, then, for the burgeoning new left which was, in its own way, searching to theorize both the failures and defeats of the Russian

Revolution and the limits of Labourism. 

By the end of the 1960s, and most visibly in the rebellions of 1968, a new

consciousness was emerging among the generation that did not itself experience the war, that benefited from the material advantages and expanded educational opportunities of the welfare state and, as if echoing their victorious forebears, expected something more than material security. In different ways, they demanded democratic control and, drawing on the new traditions of direct

action, took autonomous initiatives to achieve it, whether as students, workers,

women, tenants, or civic activists more generally. In particular, the bond between

knowledge and authority, which was at the centre of the benevolent paternalism

of the post-war settlement, was in their sights and began to be broken.

Moreover, the new contradictions – distinctive to post-war capitalism – posed

problems to which the previous nostrums of socialism, as it was known then,

also had no adequate answer: socialism had become rather vague and confused after the experiences of communism and the nationalizations of the Attlee government. So these were also years of searching, questioning and

experimenting with alternatives in the here and now, rather than promoting a

ready-made programme.

It was not until 1973 that anything remotely comparable with the levels of selfconfidence and radicalization seen in the 1940s flowed through the institutions of the Labour Party again. At that time, it was a result of wider economic and social processes rather than inner-party dynamics. Debates within the Labour Party followed the impact of the growing self-confidence, expectations and militancy of shop-floor trade unionism, together with the reverberations of the anti-colonial liberation movements, the events of 1968 and the assertive rebellions of the first post-war generation as students, women, gay people, black people and other subordinated groups. They wanted more than the material security they had come to take for granted and were seeking to transform the power relations towards which they no longer had deference.

The second book is Twenty First Century Socialism Jeremy Gilbert (2020) 116 pages

Capitalism is characterised by the unlimited pursuit of capital accumulation, by the tendency to commodify resources and social relations, and by the tendency to generate a plutocracy. It’s quite common to refer to a society in which these tendencies predominate as a ‘capitalist society’. This is a useful shorthand. But it’s worth sounding a note of caution here. The idea that we live in a ‘capitalist society’ can often lead to the assumption that ‘capitalism’ is a totally integrated and self-enclosed system, which subsumes every element of contemporary social life.

Some theorists have certainly seen it this way. But this can be misleading. We live in societies in which capitalism has some effect on every aspect of social life and presents an obstacle to the realisation of many social goals. But there are all kinds of things going on all the time that are not capitalism, from teaching in public schools to the commercial activity of medium-sized businesses or to ordinary interaction between friends. Capitalists are absolutely committed to finding ways of using all these activities for the purpose of accumulating capital: they sell services to schools, lend money to businesses, mine every online conversation for data. But those activities can carry on perfectly well without capitalists or capital accumulation.

This is why, when we make statements such as ‘we live in a capitalist society’, we should be careful. This can give the impression that the only way in which we could emancipate ourselves from capitalism at all would be to overturn 

completely the social system we inhabit. There might be times and situations when this is true. But there might also be times when resisting the encroachment of capitalism doesn’t require such total transformation. Sometimes it can simply mean creating, defending or building up institutions that are not organised along capitalist lines – public libraries, non-commercial broadcasters, cooperatively owned social media platforms, the National Health Service, and so on – and pushing back against the inevitable capitalist attempt to take them over.

I do not, however, recommend Warring Fictions – left populism 

and its defining myths Christopher Clarke (2019) - a book which, 

for some reason, has 2 different titles – the other being 

“Dark Knight and the Pupper Master”. Clarke is a journalist and 

son of Charles who was a minister in the Blair/Brown governments and his right-wing 

credentials are very much on display in the book which excoriates

 Jeremy Corbyn.

There are three belief systems which sustain these new movements.

• The first is the belief in a common enemy – ‘us versus them’. Populists rely on a malign foe.

• The second is an anti-establishment default.3 Populists imply that omnipotent and self-serving elites block the ‘will of the people’.

• The third is a sense of decline – often expressed through opposition to growing inter-dependence between countries. This lends urgency to the populist cause.

Drilling down, there are three key areas where we perceive things differently. These can be summed up by three myths, which the far left holds dear and the centre left mistrusts.

The first myth is the Dark Knight, which concerns morality and the political spectrum. The far left usually believes the right is motivated by self-interest or spite. As a result, they regard as immoral many of the causes, methods, interests and institutions which they think are closer to the right. The centre left doesn’t tend to interpret issues through this lens.

The second is the Puppet Master, which concerns power and society. The far left often believes that society’s problems are coordinated and deliberately created by those in power. The centre left, by contrast, leans towards chaos-based explanations, and is less suspicious of government.

The third myth is the Golden Era. This relates to change, decline and the past. The far left’s interpretation is usually that society is becoming increasingly right-wing, and has been for decades. The centre left is inclined to see the positives in globalisation, or to feel Labour has made as many advances as retreats.

Whether we believe in these myths governs our approach, and how we try to turn values into strategies and policies.

Other relevant posts

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2025/10/making-sense-of-left.html

A Celebration of Style

I am currently reading “Panther Soup – a European journey in war and peace” (which, unfortunately, I can’t download) by John Gimlette and am deeply impressed with its style. Section 32 is a good example -

Provence is dangerously magnificent. The mountains are as keen as knives  and the 

soil’s the colour of blood. Rivers never seem to meander here but boil through the 

stones, and the trees are as hard as iron and knotted by the wind... 

St Victoire – a crag so brutally alluring that Cezanne couldn’t stop painting it and 

gave us more than sixty different versions. He even visited it on the day he caught 

a chill in 1906, and died on the way back home. Poor Cezanne, he wasn’t the first 

to bring us news of Provence but was the first to die of its beauty. 

The writing style of other writers has impressed me – particularly Yanis Varoufakis  

What makes Varoufakis' various books such excellent reading is the sheer originality of his prose – showing a mind at work which is constantly active…...rejecting dead phrases, clichés and jargon… helping us see thlngs in a different light..... using narrative and stories to keep the readers’ interest alive…He's in total command of the english language - rather than, as so usual, it in control of him.....

You don’t expect to find good prose in the “Further Reading” section of an economics textbook, but just see what Varoufakis does with the task…… 

Lawrence Durrell is a novellist – a younger version of whom is rather unfairly 

portrayed in the TV series The Durrell family - whose style very much appeals to me. 

Indeed I’ve developed a theory about “outsiders” to try to explain how moving to a 

new world changes ones perceptions.

Recommendations on Style

Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters Harold Evans (2017) Evans was the editor of 
the London "Times" before moving to the States. This is an important book

The Sense of Style Stephen Pinker (2014)

Many eminent stylists have applied their gifts to explaining the art, including Kingsley Amis, Jacques Barzun, Ambrose Bierce, Bill Bryson, Robert Graves, Tracy Kidder, Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, F. L. Lucas, George Orwell, William Safire, and of course EB White, the beloved author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little.

The Economist Style Guide Greene (2018) 


Posts about Style
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-craft-of-writing-and-thinking.html 
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/11/a-magnum-opus.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-importance-of-critical-reading.html 
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/11/words.html style
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/05/martin-amis-unexpected-death-has.html