There have, apparently, been posts about 30 books on the leftist theme in my recent writing – of which several are my favourites eg
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.
the fall of Corbyn Michael Chessum (2022).Alternative Societies for a Pluralist Socialism Luke Martell (2023)
Today I have 3 Beyond Social Democracy – the transformation of the left in
emerging knowledge societies ed S Hausermann and H Kitschelt (2024)
The slow and intermittent electoral erosion of Social Democracy in the late twentieth century has accelerated over the past two decades across much of Europe. Almost none of the European social democratic parties has managed to defy the maelstrom of electoral decline. By the 2020s, most center-left parties carrying the social democratic, socialist, or labor label have become shadows of their former selves in terms of aggregate vote shares, members, activists, legislators, and government cabinet members. Scholars have offered many explanations for Social Democracy’s misfortunes.
No single hypothesis may be sufficient to account for this development exhaustively. Some of the explanations have a nostalgic flavor, arguing that social democratic parties have changed “too much” over the past decades, reneging on their established policy promises and thereby abandoning the needs of an erstwhile loyal electoral constituency. Other explanations posit that social democratic parties have changed “not enough,” failing to adapt to transformed voter potentials and to develop creative responses to novel societal and political-economic challenges that require Social Democrats to reimagine ways to advance social equality and universalism in society.
The first perspective – Social Democracy having changed “too much” – draws empirical support from some undeniable facts, such as the declining propensity to support Social Democracy among the parties’ traditional core constituencies, particularly blue-collar workers. However, the various empirical analyses in the chapters of this volume suggest that the overwhelming balance of evidence points toward Social Democrats not having adapted enough to changing substantive policy challenges, changing programmatic dynamics, and changing electoral landscapes.
Social democratic parties encounter massive difficulties in reimagining their programmatic electoral appeal to stem electoral decline. These difficulties, however, are not simply the consequence of strategic mistakes or myopia. Rather, both structural political-economic change and strategic party calculations make it virtually impossible to capture as encompassing an electoral constituency as many social democratic parties did in the period of post–World War II (WWII) economic prosperity growth in the West. Society has been profoundly transformed both socially and economically; it has become pluralized and more fragmented, and so have programmatic electoral competition and party systems.
In this more scattered and fragmented political space, ripe with political divides over programmatic positions and priorities, social democratic parties can nowhere extricate themselves from their current electoral predicaments. However, their fortunes vary with how they have coped over time with these new competitive situations. Most importantly, they are no longer the only and sometimes not even the largest parties in a “left field” of competitors – all of which embrace fundamental “social democratic values” but articulate them through different policies and by appealing to constituencies absent in the traditional social democratic electoral coalition.
Andrew Murray is a trade union activist with a strange aristocratic pedigree and author of The Fall and Rise of the British Left (2019)
While much of this book focuses on the fortunes of the Labour Party over the last fifty years, the Party itself is not necessarily coterminous with the British left. The latter includes all those who politically advocate for a shift to a socialist system of society, a grouping that overlaps considerably with the labour movement. In contrast, the Labour Party has always included an element (usually dominant) not interested in socialism at all, while the left has embraced movements, campaigns, initiatives and parties standing outside the Party.
Today, the left and the Labour Party are more closely entwined than at any point in history. This has been the outcome of the left’s own struggles against a rising and then declining neoliberalism since the 1970s. It is represented by Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, although it did not start there and won’t end there either. As a result, this is not another book about the rise of Corbyn. It is about a movement and the ideas underpinning it, which cannot be reduced to any one individual and will outlast any particular leadership and any foreseeable electoral outcomes.Chapters 1 through to 8 are more or less chronological, telling the fall–rise and rise–fall stories together, perhaps informing younger activists how we got here and what debates there were along the way. The two concluding chapters break with the chronology. In essence they seek to answer the question posed by a colleague who read an early draft of this book – ‘How do we win?’ – by which she meant how do we get from here to socialism.
None of the scenarios which gripped the left I grew up with in the twentieth century appear fully plausible any more, although neither 1917 nor 1945 seemed so in prior contemplation. In that spirit, we cross the river a stone at a time. The other bank is there, even if only dimly perceived, the present side no longer habitable. So what’s next? In many countries across Europe and North America, only two choices present themselves – a reconstituted centrism flogging the dead horse of the old dispensation, or a nationalist authoritarianism trading on populist sloganizing. These two live in a symbiotic relationship, sharing far more than either likes to admit. When push comes to shove, liberalism defends property and market rights first of all. If the liberals wanted to stop the rise of the authoritarians, one contribution to that cause might have been the jailing of a few bankers.
Instead, they were rewarded with a super-fast return to business – and bonuses – as usual. The parties and politicians of the left, like Hollande and Obama, who campaigned offering a different approach but ended up abandoning many of their pledges and conforming to the Wall Street–City–Brussels consensus instead, did more than anyone to inculcate a cynicism towards democratic politics and open the door to the nastiest elements of the right wing. The leaders of the authoritarian nationalists’ pseudo-alternative, for their part, treasure most of the system they rail against. Theirs is a rebellion against powerlessness organized by the powerful. Authoritarian populism is neoliberalism’s ugly enabler, not its principled opponent – a ‘populism’ which seeks to entrench gross inequality, strengthen every institution of class power, and preserve the basic institutions of economic liberalism while indulging freely in racism and xenophobia. The main purpose of the lurid Donald Trump is to make the rich still richer (himself definitely included). Indeed, the shift to authoritarianism represented by Trump, Erdoğan, Orbán, Modi and Bolsonaro mostly reflects the difficulty in extending neoliberalism by democratic means at a time of its rampant
unpopularity. This is not how history ends. Conjuring the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin warn that ‘the persistence of neoliberalism alongside hyper-nationalism through the crisis increasingly poses the question of “socialism vs barbarism redux”’.2 Barbarism redux is evidently on the menu, synthesizing elite neoliberalism with authoritarian identity politics – backing the bankers while banning the burka. Behind Boris Johnson, still worse may lurk.
The final book is Our Bloc – how we win James Schneider (2022). The Guardian reviewed the book and had this to say - James Schneider was a co-founder of Momentum, the political movement formed off the
back of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, and was later the party’s head of strategic communications. In his new book, he takes a different approach. Opening boldly and promisingly, his first
words are “defeatism plagues the British left”, and his introduction sketches his ambition: “To keep the possibilities open and turn winning from a distant hope into a reality, we must use the coming years to build power, weaken our opponents, and prepare ourselves for the next surge.” At just over 100 pages it is more of a pamphlet and the footnotes are
vital, linking to books, blogs and articles, and pointing the reader towards a wide range of debates. The intellectual parenthood of the book is obvious – the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, and in particular her For a Left Populism, Antonio Gramsci’s Modern
Prince in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, and the work of Stuart Hall.
Such influences set severe standards, though, and Schneider fails to meet them. The intellectual energy that powered the rise of Corbyn was real, and it puts Labour party
moderates to shame that the centrist intellectual touchstone Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism is nearly 70 years old. Yes, the Labour manifesto was soundly rejected by voters in 2019, but it was enthusiastically endorsed by the same electorate in 2017. The UK left has to internalise the fact that both general elections were equally consequential: currently moderates focus on the landslide in 2019, and the left celebrate successfully destroying a Tory majority in 2017. Both sides are right – and both sides need each other.
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