FINAL POST ON LEFTISM

There have, apparently, been posts about 30 books on the leftist theme in my recent writing – of which several are my favourites eg 

• Searching 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.

• This Is Only The Beginning – the making of a new left from anti-austerity to 

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. 

AN UPDATE ON JOURNALS WORTH READING

Almost ten years ago. I posted about intellectual journals worth reading. As a Xmas bonus I thought it useful to repost it (with a few titles deleted since they no longer operate). I started with a question about which (English language) journals would pass a test which included such criteria as –

- Depth of treatment

- Breadth of coverage (not just political)

- Cosmopolitan in taste (not just anglo-saxon)

- clarity of writing

- skeptical in tone

My own regular favourite reading includes The Guardian Long Reads and book reviews, London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books – and the occasional glance at the New Yorker; New Statesman; and Spiked. This choice betrays a certain “patrician” position – not too “tribal”…….although my initial google search limited itself to such epithets as “left”, “progressive”, “green”;; “radical” and “humanist”. 

It threw up a couple of lists – one with “progressive” titles, the other with “secular”. From these, I have extracted the other titles which might lay some claims to satisfying the stringent criteria set above…..

Current Affairs is a fairly new American radical journal which looks to be very well-written eg this take-down of The Economist mag

Dissent; a US leftist stalwart 

Jacobin; a leftist E-mag which I have grown to appreciate – one of the few to which I subscribe

Lettre International; a fascinating quarterly published in German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian and Romanian. It makes available translated articles with superb etchings..

Literary Hub; a literary site with original selections and frequent posts. Not one I now follow
Los Angeles Review of Books; relatively new journal whose writing occasionally grates 

Monthly Review; an old US stalwart with good solid analysis

Mother Jones; more journalistic US progressive

N+1; one of the new and smoother leftist mags

New Humanist; an important strand of UK thought

New Left Review; THE great UK leftist journal - running on a quarterly basis since 1960. Also one to which I subscribe 

New Republic; solid US monthly

Prospect (UK); rather too smooth UK monthly

The American Prospect (US); ditto US

Public Books – an impressive recent website (2012) to encourage open intellectual debate
Quillette; a "free-thinking" contrarian and libertarian journal 

Resurgence and Ecologist; ditto UK Greens

Sceptic; celebration of important strand of UK scepticism

Slate; more right wing

Social Europe; a european social democratic E-journal whose short articles are a bit too predictable for my taste

The Atlantic; one of my favourite US mags
The Conversation; a rare venture which uses academics as journalists

The Marginalian; an interesting cultural journal which I no longer follow – being a bit too predictable  

The Nation; America's oldest weekly, for the "progressive" community

The New Yorker; impressive US writing which I’ve been tempted to subscribe to
Washington Independent Review; a new website borne of the frustration about the disappearance of so many book review columns

World Socialist Website; good on critical global journalism

Academic journals

I would not normally deign academic journals with a second glance since theirs is an incestuous breed – with arcane language and specialized focus which breaches at least two of the above five tests. But Political Quarterly stands apart with the superbly written (social democratic) analyses which have been briefing us for almost a century. Parliamentary Affairs; West European Politics  and Governance run it close with more global coverage.

Self-styled “Radical“ journals 
seem, curiously, to be gaining strength at precisely the moment the left is collapsing everywhere.

Beyond the small grove of explicitly revolutionary titles lies a vast forest of critical publications. From “Action Research” to “Anarchist Studies”, from “Race and Class” to “Review of Radical Political Economics”, an impressive array of dissident ventures appears to be thriving. As Western capitalism jabs repeatedly at the auto-destruct button, it may seem only logical that rebel voices are getting louder. But logic has nothing to do it with it. Out in the real world, the Left is moribund. Socialism has become a heritage item. Public institutions, including UK universities, are ever more marketised. Alternatives seem in short supply.

So, far from being obvious, the success of radical journals is a bit of a puzzle. And they have proved they have staying power. The past few years have seen a clutch of titles entering late middle age, including those in the Marxist tradition, such as “New Left Review” (founded 1960), “Critique” (1973) and “Capital and Class” (1977), as well as more broadly critical ventures, such as “Transition” (1961) and “Critical Inquiry” (1974). Numerous other titles have emerged in the intervening years. And they are still coming.
Recent titles include “Power and Education”, “Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies” and “Human Geography: A New Radical Journal”. Of course, some disciplines provide more fertile soil for such ventures than others. In cultural studies, politics, geography and sociology, radicalism has entered the mainstream. But even the more stony ground of economics nurtures a wide assortment of dissident titles.

A concept with unrealized potential, I feel, is that of the “global roundup” ” with selections of representative writing from around the globe. Courrier international is a good, physical, Francophone example – the others being “virtual” or E-journals eg Arts and Letters Daily a good literary, anglo-saxon exemplar; The Intercept a political one; with Eurozine taking the main award for its selection of the most interesting articles from Europe’s 80 plus cultural journals

I learn one main thing from this review - how tribal most journals are. Most seem to cater for a niche political market. Only N+1 (and the New Yorker) makes an effort to cover the world of ideas from a broader standpoint...The lead articles which Eurozine gives us from different parts of Europe makes it an interesting read; and Political Quarterly is a model for clear writing - even if it is a bit too British in its scope. But I give away both my age and agnostic tendencies when I say that my favourite journal remains "Encounter" which was shockingly revealed in the late 80s to have been partially funded by the CIA and which therefore shut up shop in 1990....

The entire set of 1953-1990 issues are archived here – and the range and quality of the authors given space can be admired. European notebooks – new societies and old politics 1954-1985; is a book devoted to one of its most regular writers, the Swiss Francois Bondy (2005) 

A generation of outstanding European thinkers emerged out of the rubble of World War II. It was a group unparalleled in their probing of an age that had produced totalitarianism as a political norm, and the Holocaust as its supreme nightmarish achievement. Figures ranging from George Lichtheim, Ignazio Silone, Raymond Aron, Andrei Amalrik, among many others, found a home in Encounter. None stood taller or saw further than Francois Bondy of Zurich.

European Notebooks contains most of the articles that Bondy (1915-2003) wrote for Encounter under the stewardship of Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, and then for the thirty years that Melvin Lasky served as editor. Bondy was that rare unattached intellectual, "free of every totalitarian temptation" and, as Lasky notes, unfailing in his devotion to the liberties and civilities of a humane social order. European Notebooks offers a window into a civilization that came to maturity during the period in which these essays were written.

Bondy's essays themselves represent a broad sweep of major figures and events in the second half of the twentieth century. His spatial outreach went from Budapest to Tokyo and Paris. His political essays extended from George Kennan to Benito Mussolini. And his prime metier, the cultural figures of Europe, covered Sartre, Kafka, Heidegger and Milosz. The analysis was uniformly fair minded but unstinting in its insights. Taken together, the variegated themes he raised in his work as a Zurich journalist, a Paris editor, and a European homme de lettres sketch guidelines for an entrancing portrait of the intellectual as cosmopolitan.

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.