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.

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

CAN LABOUR WIN?

A recent post identified a widespread despondency indeed cynicism about contemporary British politics. Some forty years ago, there was a mood of hope - John Smith had commissioned the “Commission on Social Justice” Will Hutton was just about to publish his seminal text “The State We’re In”. John Major and the Tories may have won the election in 1992 but Black Wednesday a few months later destroyed the Conservatives' credibility – although they limped on before the overwhelming Labour victory of 1997.

Today there is little hope – the Labour party inspires little confidence, is seen as just too responsible not least for its expulsion of most of its left-wing critics. Just compare the party's 2017 Manifesto with its current “Covenant”.

Renewal is a soft-left journal (the link explains the term which publishes thoughtful articles and this one is a review of a recent book with the great title “Futures of Socialism - ‘Modernisation’, the Labour Party and the British Left, 1973-97”. This excerpt gives a great sense of an intensity of debate which has been lost in recent decades -

His book is a deeply researched history of ideological change on the British left in the late twentieth century. Murphy offers a fascinating guide to the debates about how to modernise socialism that raged across seminar rooms, conference floors, party documents, think tank pamphlets and periodical pages from the 1970s onwards. His findings make a powerful case against the commonplace portrayal of Labour in the late twentieth century as offering nothing more adventurous than a mildly humanised neoliberalism........

During the 1970s and 1980s a very large number of political actors on the left and centre of British politics became convinced that the model of centralised state-driven socialism associated with Labour’s heyday in power in the 1940s was out of step with modern Britain. Political formations as various as the New Left, leading trade unionists, disillusioned Labour revisionists, left-led Labour councils, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, the Liberal Party and the emergent SDP all agreed that there needed to be greater economic and political empowerment below the level of the UK state. Initially this was often framed in socialist terms as the extension of economic democracy through worker participation in industrial decision-making and trade unionists taking seats on company boards. But these ideas quickly widened (or perhaps moderated) to include passing power on to consumer and community groups, local councils (with Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council as a model) and co-operatives. At a theoretical level, these decentralising tendencies were forged into what Murphy dubs the ‘neo-corporatism’ advocated by David Marquand and Paul Hirst. Marquand and Hirst envisaged a British economy that looked a lot more like the West German social-market model, by combining federal constitutionalism with a more collaborative and long-term industrial culture.

All of this was premised on the assumption that Labour’s traditional political vision was too top-down and statist and thus out of step with a less deferential, more individualist society. This was said to be the vulnerability in Labour’s earlier model of socialism that Thatcherism had exploited, by offering a right-wing vision of individual economic empowerment that widened private property ownership and increased disposable incomes through direct tax cuts (a point that had been presciently made by Stuart Hall even before the Thatcher government was elected in his famous 1979 Marxism Today essay ‘The Great Moving Right Show’).

Four quadrants can be used to plot the old and new left and right -

Old Left; supporting a strong state sector for infrastructure and health (inc insurance although the religious and cooperative sectors could equally have responsibility for this last)

Old Right; recognizing the role of the state in sustaining property rights and traditional ways of doing things

New Left; which has supported the liberation struggles of repressed groups and the onward march of post-modernism….

New Right; which tends to divide strongly between the economic agenda of the Neo-liberals (whose eulogies for “the market” conceals support oligopolistic licence and the spread of “commodification”) and the more traditional social agenda of the American Neo-Cons.

But how long can we keep using the term “new”? The UK “New Left” some 60 years ago – and the “New right” at Mont Pelerin a decade earlier.. e are surely, therefore, overdue another term…..and the one I suggest is “emergent”  (which Mintzberg, I think it was, first used to distinguish one meaning of strategy). And, as few people relish being labelled as either left or right, we need a mid-way point for them….That then gives a 3x3 matrix and the question is what terms to use for the resultant combinations……??? This is what I’ve come up with

key words/symbols for the various points of the political spectrum

	LEFT	CENTRE	RIGHT
OLD	Working class	Family, property	Tradition, duty
SOFT	Social democracy	liberalism	duty
NEW	Liberation struggle	consumerism	The individual
EMERGENT	The commons	identity	libertarian

In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Scruton attacks the left idea of thought for a cause, ‘politics with a GOAL’.

‘Conservatives are by their nature people who are trying to defend and maintain existence without a cause’. Simply to keep things as they are? ‘We obviously all want to change things, but recognise that human life is an end in itself and not a means to replace itself with something else. And defending institutions and compromises is a very difficult and unexciting thing. But nevertheless it’s the truth.’

Scruton’s is not the only book this year to explore “the culture wars”. A site I must consult more often is the Society for US Intellectual History which carried recently an interesting comparison of a couple of books which throw light on all this -

‘Ideas moved first in the arena of economic debate.’ Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the dominant tropes in economics had been institutional, even among conservatives. Right-wing critics of the welfare state and state-managed economies did not speak of the market; they spoke of corporations and banks and ‘championed the rights of management and the productive powers of the free enterprise “system”.’

The idea of the market that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s – ‘self-equilibrating, instantaneous in its sensitivities and global in its reach, gathering the wants of myriad individuals into its system of price signals in a perpetual plebiscite of desires’ – dispensed with these settings and constraints.

It also dismantled the ‘troubling collective presence and demands’ of social democracy, turning unions, workers and the unemployed ‘into an array of consenting, voluntarily acting individual pieces’.

Everyone became a buyer or seller, everything – kidneys, pollution – got bought and sold. The only thing holding it all together was the magnetic energy of these individual acts of exchange. Like most scholars of the free-market movement, Rodgers assigns great weight to Milton Friedman, ‘the University of Chicago’s most forceful politiciser’, and the right’s answer to J.K. Galbraith. He wrote columns for Newsweek, advised presidents (and dictators), and organised the ten-part PBS series Free to Choose as a counter to Galbraith’s 15-part BBC series on capitalism.

With his focus on the money supply as the source of economic well-being, Friedman helped popularise a ‘radically simplified model of aggregate economic behaviour’, in which ‘state, society and institutions all shrank into insignificance within a black box that translated money inputs directly into price outputs.’

But Friedman’s monetarism was also far more state-centric – the Federal Reserve played an almost heroic role in determining the direction of the economy – than most market theologians would have liked. What truly pushed the market into the culture – high and low – were the adjutants of Friedman’s revolution: the law professors and jurists, not just on the hard right (Richard Posner) but also on the squishy left (Stephen Breyer), who made economic efficiency the measure of all things and provided much of the rationale for deregulation; the second wave of free-market economists (Robert Lucas, for example, or Gary Becker), who took apart the field of macroeconomics in favour of game theory, behavioural economics, rational expectations and other individualist approaches; and journalists like George Gilder and Jude Wanniski who recast the market as a popular (and populist) vision of the good society.

55 years in a couple of pages

I always like a bit of intellectual history ….and last week I alighted on a conversation with Roger Scruton around a revamp of a book which this English Conservative philosopher first issued in 1985

We have been told for several decades that the left-right spectrum no longer has any basis in reality although it remains a label very much in evidence 

Now 71, Scruton has been the bête noire of British left intellectuals for more than 30 years, and gives them another beastly mauling in his new book “Fads, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left”. It is a tour de force that, the introduction concedes, is ‘not a word-mincing book’, but rather ‘a provocation’.

In just under 300 pages he Scruton-izes a collection of stars, past and present, of the radical Western intelligentsia – the likes of Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson in Britain, JK Galbraith and Ronald Dworkin in the US, Jurgen Habermas, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze in Europe. An expanded and updated version of his controversial Thinkers of the New Left (1985), the book ends with a new chapter entitled ‘The kraken wakes’ dealing with the ‘mad incantations’ of Alan Badiou and the left’s marginally newer academic celebrity, the Slovenian Zizek.

A copy of the book was lying in Bucharest’s English bookshop when I popped in there on Sunday -  giving me the chance to read its opening pages which, I have to confess, made a great deal of sense even to an old lefty like me. 

“Why, he asks, use a single term to cover anarchists such as Foucault, Marxist dogmatists like Althusser, exuberant nihilists like Zizek and US liberals like Dworken, Galbraith and Rorty? Two reasons – they call themselves this and they all have an “enduring outlook” – some belonging to the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s and others to the post-war thinking according to which the state is or ought to be in charge of society and  empowered to distribute its goods…..”   

This - the dimension of economic ownership (monopoly through oligopoly to cooperatives/shared ownership to private owners) - is indeed one of the axis you need to make sense of world views. But it is not the only one – particularly these days when the social dimension has become so important. Class (rarely talked about now) is only one form of group identity – with race and sexuality being the new entrants. So an additional axis is needed for the strength of social norms - with totalitarianism being at one axis and anarchy at the other. There is a third – for the role of the state, for example, in welfare provision and general regulatory measures – but that’s a bit complicated for this blog.

So I will start with four quadrants which we can use, for example, to plot the old and new left and right-

- Old Left; supporting a strong state sector for infrastructure and health (inc insurance although the religious and cooperative sectors could equally have responsibility for this last)

- Old Right; recognizing the role of the state in sustaining property rights and traditional ways of doing things

- New Left; which has supported the liberation struggles of repressed groups and the onward march of post-modernism….

- New Right; which tends to divide strongly between the economic agenda of the Neo-liberals (whose eulogies for “the market” conceals support for oligopolistic licence and the spread of “commodification”) and the more traditional social agenda of the American Neo-Cons.  

But how long can we keep using the term “new”? The UK “New Left” started all of 60 years ago – and the “New right” at Mont Pelerin a few years earlier..

We are surely, therefore, overdue another term…..and the one I suggest is “emergent”  (which Mintzberg, I think it was, first used to distinguish one meaning of strategy). And, as few people relish being labelled as either left or right, we need a mid-way point for them….

That then gives a 3x3 matrix and the question is what terms to use for the resultant combinations……??? This is what I’ve come up with as a first shot…..

key words/symbols for the various points of the political spectrum

	LEFT	CENTRE	RIGHT
OLD	Working class	Family, property	Tradition, duty
SOFT	Social democracy	liberalism	duty
NEW	Liberation struggle	consumerism	The individual
EMERGENT	The commons	identity	libertarian

 See also the Acorn Guide to Consumers

 You can actually read the entire “Thinkers of the New Left” here

 In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Scruton attacks the left idea of thought for a cause, ‘politics with a GOAL’. 

‘Conservatives are by their nature people who are trying to defend and maintain existence without a cause’. Simply to keep things as they are? ‘We obviously all want to change things, but recognise that human life is an end in itself and not a means to replace itself with something else. And defending institutions and compromises is a very difficult and unexciting thing. But nevertheless it’s the truth.’

For Scruton, the left intellectuals’ apparent attachment to a higher cause only disguises what they really stand for: ‘Nothing.’ He writes that ‘when, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had “capitalism” as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice’.

More recently, ‘the windbaggery of Zizek and the nonsemes of Badiou’ exist only ‘to espouse a single and absolute cause’, which ‘admits of no compromise’ and ‘offers redemption to all who espouse it’. The name of that cause? ‘The answer is there on every page of these fatuous writings: Nothing.

So, what is all this Nothing-ness about? ‘My view’, says Scruton, ‘is that what’s underlying all of this is a kind of nihilistic vision that masks itself as a moving toward the enlightened future, but never pauses to describe what that society will be like. It simply loses itself in negatives about the existing things – institutional relations like marriage, for instance – but never asks itself if those existing things are actually part of what human beings are. Always in Zizek there’s an assumption of the right to dismiss them as standing in the way of something else, but that something else turns out to be Nothing.’

Scruton’s is not the only book this year to explore “the culture wars”. A site I must consult more often is the Society for US Intellectual History which carried recently an interesting comparison of a couple of books which throw light on all this -

‘Ideas,’ Rodgers writes, ‘moved first in the arena of economic debate.’ Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the dominant tropes in economics had been institutional, even among conservatives. Right-wing critics of the welfare state and state-managed economies did not speak of the market; they spoke of corporations and banks and ‘championed the rights of management and the productive powers of the free enterprise “system”.’

The idea of the market that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s – ‘self-equilibrating, instantaneous in its sensitivities and global in its reach, gathering the wants of myriad individuals into its system of price signals in a perpetual plebiscite of desires’ – dispensed with these settings and constraints.
It also dismantled the ‘troubling collective presence and demands’ of social democracy, turning unions, workers and the unemployed ‘into an array of consenting, voluntarily acting individual pieces’.

Everyone became a buyer or seller, everything – kidneys, pollution – got bought and sold. The only thing holding it all together was the magnetic energy of these individual acts of exchange. Like most scholars of the free-market movement, Rodgers assigns great weight to Milton Friedman, ‘the University of Chicago’s most forceful politiciser’, and the right’s answer to J.K. Galbraith. He wrote columns for Newsweek, advised presidents (and dictators), and organised the ten-part PBS series Free to Choose as a counter to Galbraith’s 15-part BBC series on capitalism.

With his focus on the money supply as the source of economic well-being, Friedman helped popularise a ‘radically simplified model of aggregate economic behaviour’, in which ‘state, society and institutions all shrank into insignificance within a black box that translated money inputs directly into price outputs.’

Yet, as Rodgers points out, Friedman’s monetarism was also far more state-centric – the Federal Reserve played an almost heroic role in determining the direction of the economy – than most market theologians would have liked.What truly pushed the market into the culture – high and low – were the adjutants of Friedman’s revolution: the law professors and jurists, not just on the hard right (Richard Posner) but also on the squishy left (Stephen Breyer), who made economic efficiency the measure of all things and provided much of the rationale for deregulation; the second wave of free-market economists (Robert Lucas, for example, or Gary Becker), who took apart the field of macroeconomics in favour of game theory, behavioural economics, rational expectations and other individualist approaches; 

One recent analyst on the “ideological roots of populism” suggests that there are now 4 tribes – liberal and conservative centrists and left and right anarchists.

For more, read –

Spectrum – from left to right in the world of ideas Perry Anderson 2007

http://s-usih.org/2015/03/age-of-fracture-v-age-of-culture-wars.html

https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=44132

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n20/corey-robin/achieving-disunity

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-eus-culture-war-against-the-people/15931#.VngkXfl97IU

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-I-Miss-the-Culture-Wars/151435

https://www.claremont.org/featured-article/that-new-time-religion/#.Ve8PdZd0c_g

http://www.claremont.org/download_pdf.php?file_name=1519Voegeli.pdf

ttp://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260742/culture-wars-volume-v-black-book-american-left-david-horowitz

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.

MORE READING ON THE SUBJECT

Another four books this time – starting with some classics 

from the 1980s The Forward March of Labour Halted? ed M Jaques 

and Ed Mulhern (1981)

perhaps the most important contribution of the 1980sPolitics for a Rational Left – political writing 1977-1988 Eric 

Hobsbawm (1989)
The grand old man of historical writing reproduces some of 
his most important thoughts from the period
The Left in History – revolution and reform in 20th century politics 

Willie Thompson (1997)

The confident optimism of the early century was perhaps no longer present (in the era of Mutual Assured Destruction how could it be?) but the vista of indefinite technological and material progress was well reinstated. Cultural pessimists continuing to lament the good old days still existed but were on the defensive. A very popular and renowned text published in 1962 (and still in print), entitled What is History? by the historian of Soviet Russia and maverick pillar of the English academic establishment, E. H. Carr, eloquently conveyed the prevailing sense of advance. The theme of this short book is historiography, but Carr takes space to mock intellectuals who bemoan the alleged deterioration in civilised standards during the twentieth century, remarking that these gripes have more to do with the difficulties Oxbridge academics have in hiring servants than with the actual experiences of ordinary people. In addition he commits himself unreservedly to the idea of progress and longterm historical improvement. In this he reflected the elite and popular perception that the outcome and lessons of the Second World War had definitively overcome the causes of economic and political collapse that racked the world during the internar decades.

Leaving aside the question of the Soviet bloc, the era of the late 1950s, though presided over, paradoxically, by formally right-wing governments in all the major states, may certainly be viewed historically as the hour of the left. Carr, the more so because he was not identified with any specific political party or grouping, can be seen as representative of a general left-wing ethos. His text emphasises the left’s status as a historical current closely associated with modernity, and which would indeed be meaningless in any other circumstances. The left’s distinctive feature in the landscape of modernity however is its identification, rhetorically at least, with social improvement and regulation of economic structures in the interests of the masses.

If the values of the left implicitly dominated the language of politics in the 1950s, the language of the left came to dominate the discourse of politics and culture in the succeeding decade. The 1960s are traditionally regarded as the high tide of left-wing ascendancy in the public domain - era of hope or devil’s decade depending on your point of view. Alongside the established traditions of the left, which continued to flourish and spread up dll that point, emerged also a proliferation of new ones, influencing social levels hitherto scarcely touched by its outlook.

The subsequent collapse was by any historical standard astonishingly rapid. In just a little over two decades an entire modem culture appeared to wither and perish. Mighty institutions fell apart and expired almost without a struggle. Systems of belief were abandoned by millions practically overnight, even where, in governments or parties, institutional continuity and outward symbols were preserved. It is difficult to suggest any parallel in history: the only analogy which comes to mind is the uprooting of European paganism by Christianity - and that was a much more prolonged process, as well as the conquest of the old by the new rather than vice-versa. Barely two hundred years after the term first appeared in political usage it has begun to look as though ‘the left’, both culturally and institutionally, might well prove a transitory historical episode or even, in a breathtakingly ambitious formulation, that its catastrophe has marked ‘the end of history’.

This Is Only The Beginning – the making of a new left from 

anti-austerity to the fall of Corbyn Michael Chessum (2022). 

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this text is the reading list at the end!

Below are a limited set of recommendations on further reading, split up thematically and chronologically.

It would be a fool’s errand to try to give a full list of classic theoretical texts relating to the themes covered in the book, so I will focus instead on highlighting books which are more or less contemporary and designed for the general, as opposed to the academic, reader. So, from a theoretical perspective, Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (Zero, 2009) is short in length but essential reading. Keir Milburn’s Generation Left (Polity, 2019) is a concise and excellent summary of the radicalization of millennials. Hilary Wainwright’s A New Politics from the Left (Polity, 2018) is another concise bringing together of many years of thinking about a new left. Meanwhile, Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (Verso, 2022), Jeremy Gilbert’s latest book (written alongside co-author Alex Williams), develops the theme of the ‘long 1990s’ touched on in our interview. Similarly, those interested in exploring debates around technology and the future of capitalism touched on in interviews should read Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism (Penguin, 2015) and Clear Bright Future (Allen Lane, 2019); Aaron Bastani also released a book on the subject, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (Verso, 2019). In and Against the State is not a contemporary text, but the new edition (Pluto, 2021) contains insightful and timely reflections from John McDonnell and the book’s editor Seth Wheeler.

There remains relatively little general literature on the student movement of 2010. Matt Myers’s oral history Student Revolt: Voices of the Austerity Generation (Pluto, 2017) remains the only authoritative account. Fightback: A Reader on the Winter of Protest (Open Democracy, 2011, edited by Dan Hancox) contains a diverse range of articles and essays from participants in the movement. For anyone interested in primary sources on the movement in a more global perspective, Springtime: The New Student Rebellions (Verso, 2011, edited by Clare Solomon and Tania Palmieri) is also worth a look. Those interested in the higher education policy landscape at the time would do well to read The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education (Pluto, 2013) by Andrew McGettigan and The Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance (Pluto, 2011 – edited by Michael Bailey and Des Freeman).

For wider texts on the global revolts of 2011, there is much more available. In terms of the events themselves, the classic text is Paul Mason’s Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (Verso, 2012). The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (Spiegel & Grau, 2013) is David Graeber’s first-hand account of the start of the Occupy movement. The specific history of the UK anti-austerity movement is a much less covered area, however. By and large the sources that go into any kind of detail, or engage with the movement on its own terms, are to be found in academic journal articles, blogs and position statements from the time – though accounts of it can be found in passing in mainstream print (for instance, in Owen Jones’s This Land: The Story of a Movement, Allen Lane 2020; and Andrew Murray’s The Fall and Rise of the British Left, Verso, 2019). One of the reasons why Chapter 3 is the longest chapter of this book is an attempt to fill some of these holes in the literature – though much of that work remains undone.

There are no shortage of accounts of the rise of the new Labour left and the Corbyn Project, though the vast majority of these are focussed on the high politics of the moment rather than the broader picture behind it. Two accounts of the Labour left’s rise, by Owen Jones and Andrew Murray, are already listed above. Alex Nunn’s The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path to Power (OR Books, 2018) remains a good inside story of the campaign. For a less involved journalistic take, Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn (Vintage, 2020) gives a detailed and entertaining court history. David Kogan’s Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party (Bloomsbury, 2019) also provides an outsider’s perspective, including a great deal of detail and historical background.

There are a wealth of texts on the general history of the Labour Party and the Labour left, but two recent titles in particular are worth mentioning. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys’s Searching for Socialism: The Project of the Labour New Left from Benn to Corbyn (Verso, 2020) is an unmissable account. So too is Simon Hannah’s A Party with Socialists in It: A History of the Labour Left (Pluto, 2018), which covers a longer chronology and is written from a more critical and politically engaged perspective.

Finally, there are a number of forthcoming books which should be mentioned because they relate to key themes that this book contains and are written by people who feature as protagonists in this book. These include Ash Sarkar’s debut book and take on the culture war, Minority Rule, published by Bloomsbury; Owen Jones’s The Alternative and How We Built It, published by Penguin, which may cover some of the same ground as this book; James Schneider’s Our Bloc: How We Win, a strategic manifesto for the British left published by Verso; and James Meadway’s Pandemic Capitalism, also with Verso.

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