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

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.

AGAINST THE MACHINE

 I’ve been reading Paul Kingsnorth‘s latest book Against the Machine – on the unmaking of humanity (2025). Kingsnorth is an investigative journalist and green activist, known for his Dark Mountain project and The Abbey of Misrule site. One of the reasons I’m attracted to the book is the way Kingsnorth integrates into the text quite naturally references to long forgotten figures such as Lewis Mumford and Stephen Toulmin

We have arrived at the point which the writers I have explored so far—Oswald Spengler, Christopher Lasch, Robert Bly, Patrick Deneen, Simone Weil, Ian McGilchrist and others—warned us we would come to. It is the point at which our underlying cultural and spiritual brokenness is manifesting on the surface as politics, with explosive results. This is the result of the Great Unsettling: a time and place where nothing seems to be solid, comforting or even real.

This process has been accelerated a thousandfold by the arrival of the internet, and particularly social media, which, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued, has had the same impact as the collapse of the tower of Babel: ‘people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate,condemned to mutual incomprehension.’p152 

Paul Kingsnorth goes on to argue that

The ‘decline of the West’ which is so hotly debated right now is, in my view, not a matter of the wrong people being in charge, or the wrong economic policies being pursued. It is not due to the rise of China or Russia, or racism, or ‘misinformation’, or nasty populists, or the institutionalisation of ‘woke’ ideology. As such, it will not be solved by tougher border controls, or radical rightist governments, or revolutions, or ‘decolonisation’, or controls on freedom of speech in the name of ‘protecting our democracy’. Any number of these things might or might not be real or true or desirable, but they are symptoms, not causes, of our malaise. The malaise is deeper, older, more interesting and far more consequential than any of this, and it affects the very basis of our humanity. What happens next will determine what it means to be human in the twenty-first century and beyond.

This book seeks to tell the tale of this Machine: what it is, where it came from, and where it is taking us next. Drawing from history, from religion, from current events and from the work of many other writers and thinkers, it aims to pin down the shape and genesis of this thing. My inquiry is divided into four parts. Part one explores the roots of the current Western cultural malaise. Part two explains where the Machine came from, and how it contributed to that problem. Part three examines how its values manifest around us today, and what they are destroying. Part four offers a guide to practical and spiritual survival and resistance.

But while I learned this early, it was much later that I learned something else, dimly and slowly, through my study of history, mythology and, well, people: that every culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. This does not, of course, need to be a Christian order. It could be Islamic, Hindu or Daoist. It could be based around the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin. But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.

The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representatives of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions—‘the people’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘progress’. I’m all for liberty, and it would be nice to give democracy a try one day too; but the dethroning of the sovereign—Christ—who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order has not led to universal equality and justice. It has led, via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler, to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.

Sometimes, his writing can seem a bit excessive -

You can judge a culture, I think, by its tallest buildings; what it chooses to reach towards is a reflection of its soul and purpose. The tallest buildings in a modern city are not cathedrals, temples, or even palaces: they are skyscrapers, which are homes to banks, finance houses and global corporations. (p85) And so we find ourselves in the age of AI and apps for everything, with CCTV cameras on every street corner, our opinions manufactured by interest groups, our communications tracked and monitored, wondering what is true or who we can believe, and feeling, day by day, like we have less agency, less control, less humanity than ever before. In the future that is offered to us we are not even cogs in the Machine, for the Machine can increasingly operate without human input. Mumford, as ever, is bracingly frank about where this leads:

Never before has the ‘citadel’ exercised such atrocious power over the rest of the human race. Over the greater part of history, the village and the countryside remained a constant reservoir of fresh life, constrained indeed by the ancestral patterns of behaviour that had helped make man human, but with a sense of both human limitations and human possibilities. No matter what the errors and aberrations of the rulers of the city, they were still correctible. Even if whole urban populations were destroyed, more than nine tenths of the human race still remained outside the circle of destruction. Today this factor of safety has gone: the metropolitan explosion has carried both the ideological and the chemical poisons of the metropolis to every part of the earth; and the final damage may be irretrievable.

Back to Kingsnorth -

One man who tried back in the 1960s, when an unquestioning faith in science and its offspring, technology, was roaring across the Western world, was the French thinker Jacques Ellul. Ellul’s 1964 book “The Technological Society” attempted to understand and explain what the Machine was made of. Its thesis is that the society we live in today—which he predicted with accuracy—represents a fundamental, qualitative change in what it means to be human (p113). Around the same time that Robert Bly was writing “The Sibling Society”, another American thinker, Christopher Lasch, was also predicting a future of elite colonisation. In “The Revolt of the Elites”, Lasch forecast the future accurately. ‘The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties’, he wrote, ‘are best understood as a form of class warfare, in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate, as to create parallel or “alternative” institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all.’ p135

What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the ‘progressive’ left had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same rootstock? What if the left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the new world of the Machine? (p142) It’s not hard to see that progressive leftism and the machine, far from being antagonistic, are a usefully snug fit. Both are totalising, utopian projects. Both are suspicious of the past, impatient with borders and boundaries, and hostile to religion, ‘superstition’ and the limits on the human individual imposed by nature or culture. Both are in pursuit of a global utopia where, in the dreams of both Lenin and Lennon, the world will live as one.

Kingsnorth continues -

We have arrived at the point which the writers I have explored so far—Oswald Spengler, Christopher Lasch, Robert Bly, Patrick Deneen, Simone Weil and others—warned us we would come to. It is the point at which our underlying cultural and spiritual brokenness is manifesting on the surface as politics, with explosive results. This is the result of the Great Unsettling: a time and place where nothing seems to be solid, comforting or even real.

This process has been accelerated a thousandfold by the arrival of the internet, and particularly social media, which, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued, has had the same impact as the collapse of the tower of Babel: ‘people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate,  condemned to mutual incomprehension.’(p152)

The West’ is, above all, a way of seeing—a way of looking out at the world. Once, that gaze was Christian, but it has not been that way for a long time now. The contemporary Western gaze is the gaze of the Machine; of Enlightenment Man, of cosmopolis, of reason, of money. And it is because this gaze has been unable for centuries to appreciate that the world in its fullness that we have come so unstuck. If we are going to get stuck again, as it were, we will need to learn to see the world very differently. (p236)

McGilchrist’s thesis boils down, in simple terms, to brain hemispheres. All animal brains are divided into two hemispheres, joined by a thin band of connecting tissue, and nobody quite knows why. What they do know, according to McGilchrist, is that each hemisphere has its own particular way of seeing—or, as he puts it, ways of ‘attending to the world’. This does not break down according to the popular stereotype, in which the ‘left brain’ is masculine, scientific, rational and cold and the ‘right brain’ is feminine, intuitive, artistic and warm. Rather, according to McGilchrist, ‘the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend—and thus manipulate—the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend it’. The left and right hemispheres seem to have very specific ways of relating to their world. The left’s way is the way of certainty, manipulation, detail, the local and familiar, the isolated, discrete and fragmentary. Its world is fixed, decontextualised, inanimate, general and optimistic. The right, on the other hand, sees the whole picture, notices the peripheries and is comfortable with the new, ambiguous, circumspect and complex. It attends to change, flow, context, the animate, narratives, the pragmatic, empathy and emotional expressivity, and it tends towards pessimism.

But something happened, posits McGilchrist, over the course of Western history. In this little part of the world, there was a revolution. At some point, or perhaps at many points, the left hemisphere—the emissary—overthrew the right—the master—and began to run the show itself. Instead of the parts being in service to the whole, the whole became diminished or dismissed by a perspective that could only see the world as a collection of parts. The result is the Machine mind, and the irony is ‘that the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it. Meanwhile, compounding the problem, we take the success we have in manipulating it as proof that we understand it.’

The upshot, says McGilchrist, is that ‘we no longer live in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it’.[2] There is no territory in this new world, only map. Those who can see this, and try to point it out, are dismissed as ‘romantics’, ‘nostalgics’, ‘reactionaries’ or ‘dreamers’. The left hemisphere’s world is taken to be reality, whereas it is, in fact, only an inadequate representation of it. The result, says McGilchrist, is an age that is literally unprecedented in human history. ‘We exist in the world, of course’, he writes, ‘but we no longer belong in this world—or any world worthy of the name. We have unmade the world. This is entirely new in the history of humanity and it is impossible to exaggerate its significance’.

The age of AI, the metaverse and the deepening technosphere both results from and turbocharges this way of seeing, to the point that we are now losing contact with reality altogether, all the time imagining that we are ‘progressing’ towards it. ‘Machines and tools’, notes McGilchrist matter-of- factly at one point, ‘are alone coded in the left hemisphere.’ It is the left hemisphere which built Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley which built us. He believes that ‘we have systematically misunderstood the nature of reality, and chosen to ignore, or silence, the minority of voices that have intuited as much and consistently maintained that this is the case’. Now, as a result, ‘we have reached the point where there is an urgent need to transform both how we think about the world and what we make of ourselves’.

In short, ‘the West’ as we know it today is an overwhelmingly left hemisphere culture, and this descent into a narrow way of seeing has been accelerating as modernity has progressed. At one point, McGilchrist even makes the startling claim that Western art from the modernist period onward often looks like the kind of representation of the world that is produced by people who have suffered brain damage to the right hemisphere, and he is neither being insulting nor speaking metaphorically. Are we in ‘the West’ literally a culture with brain damage? It would explain a lot. P238

I have written already about the Four Ps—people, place, prayer, the past —which could be said to underpin traditional culture, and the Four Ss—sex, science, the self and the screen—with which Machine modernity has replaced them. A reactionary radicalism could be usefully defined as an active attempt at creating, defending or restoring a moral economy built around the four Ps (p252)

This, then, is my idea of an anti-Machine politics. A reactionary radicalism, its face set against Progress Theology, which aims to defend or build a moral economy at the human scale, which rejects the atomised individualism of the liberal era and understands that materialism as a worldview has failed us. A politics which embraces family and home and place, loving the particular without excluding the outsider, and which looks on all great agglomerations of power with suspicion. The rejection of abstract ideologies in favour of real-world responses, and an understanding that material progress always comes with a hidden price tag. A politics which aims to limit rather than multiply our needs, which strategically opposes any technology which threatens the moral economy and which, finally, seeks a moral order to society which is based on love of neighbour rather than competition with everyone.

MAKING SENSE OF THE LEFT

A couple of years ago I tried to do justice to my thoughts on the subject, It’s Hilary Wainwright’s essay on David Marquand in the book in his memory Making Social Democrats – essays for David Marquand ed J Nuttall and H Schattle (2018) which persuaded me to put pen to paper this time

There are many examples which indicate the phenomenon of a socially and environmentally purposeful trade unionism. The most widely known of these examples is that of the LucasAerospace shop stewards’ alternative plan for socially useful production in the 1970s. This was the result of workers in Lucas Aerospace factories in eleven different places responding to corporate rationalisations (the outcome of accountants’ calculations) with proposals driven by social needs—needs shaped by workers’ sense of being citizens as well as workers. (Workplace trade unionism was a good deal stronger than it is now.)

More recent, though less developed, examples include the partially successful defence of jobs at Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, and also the resistance to job losses at Rolls Royce in 2022.Moreover, such organising isn’t just limited to manufacturing production jobs. Academics and education staff have also been organising in pursuit of ‘green bargaining’ to influence the university as a site of education production and economic justice for workers from the bottom up.

This move amongst a minority of workplace trade union organisations beyond the narrow limits of traditional collective bargaining (normally concerned only with wages and conditions) reinforces Marquand’s rejection of individualism. It also indicates a limitation in his implicit notion of agency, which, in his prescriptions (in contrast to his contemporary history), tends to be focussed exclusively on political parties. This publicly purposeful trade unionism could be understood as a move away from the individualist ethic of traditional trade unionism which could be described as ‘sectional’ or ‘particularistic’, concerned narrowly with the interests of the unions’ individual members, vital though these are. The workers and their organisations at Airbus, Lucas Aerospace, Rolls Royce and elsewhere all attempted, with varying degrees of success, to extend collective bargaining for public benefit.

In doing so, they were both deepening the public dialogue around the shared, public problem of climate change—taking it beyond electoral politics. More specifically, theywere challenging production priorities driven by private profit andacting as a force (and potential ally of a republican government) to socialise production.

After Marquand who represents the centre of the left, it was time to move to the 

harder end of the spectrum – people like Leo Panatch and Colin Leys who 

produced some 5 years ago Searching for Socialism – the project of the labour 

new left from Benn to Corbyn (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 first instance was in 1931, at the onset of the Great Depression, after the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald had formed a ‘National Government’ in order to impose massive cuts in social expenditure on the unemployed and the working poor. In the ensuing general election, the Labour Party, although it won 30 per cent of the vote, was reduced from 287 MPs to 52. In the wake of this, the radical socialist and pacifist George Lansbury was elected leader, and party policy took a sharp turn to the left.

Yet, despite massive street demonstrations by the unemployed, most of the remaining Labour MPs were opposed to any except purely parliamentary measures, leaving Lansbury feeling, as he wrote, ‘absolutely helpless’ in face of the imposition of ever more draconian austerity. In 1935, after the party conference endorsed military rearmament in response to developments in Europe and the Soviet Union, Lansbury resigned.

His successor, Clement Attlee, put the party in the hands of ‘a much more professional team’, but ‘also a much more “responsible” one’, as Ralph Miliband wrote in Parliamentary Socialism. This was the team that would later carry through Labour’s major post-war reforms, while leaving unchallenged the capitalist economy, the inherited structures of the state and the country’s place in the new American empire.

In the 1970s, as the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan responded to a new economic crisis by abandoning the Keynesian welfare state and restraining union militancy, a new Labour left emerged that was determined to democratise and radicalise the party; and soon after the party’s defeat by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, Michael Foot, whose political formation was rooted in the Lansbury years, was precipitated into the leadership. But in the interest of party unity Foot allied himself with the centre-right of the parliamentary party against the Labour new left and its most prominent spokesman, Tony Benn, reasserting the party’s commitment to traditional parliamentarism. This did not prevent a second heavy defeat, by Thatcher in 1983. Nor did the ruthless repression of Labour’s new left by Foot’s successor, Neil Kinnock, prevent two further electoral defeats. Instead it paved the way for ‘New Labour’, and the embrace of neoliberalism under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Throughout these years, too, the issue of Britain’s relationship with Europe was a constant complicating dimension of the party’s internal divisions. The contradictions of New Labour in government, culminating in the financial crisis of 2007–08, first propelled ‘Red Ed’ Miliband to the leadership. But when he, like Foot, gave top priority to securing the unity of the parliamentary party, leading yet again to electoral defeat in 2015, the crisis finally led to the election as leader – this time by the whole membership of the party – of Jeremy Corbyn. His election, the surge in membership that accompanied it, and the support he received from the trade unions finally brought the project of the Labour new left to the top of the party’s governmental agenda. The question now was whether the cycle of resistance and neutralisation would once again be repeated, or whether the Labour Party could after all become the agent of democratic-socialist advance in the UK.

Jeremy Corbyn and his most senior colleagues had been formed in the previous attempt to make this happen, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In “The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New Labour,” Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (1997) published in 2000, we traced the record of that attempt, and its ultimate defeat by the combined forces of its opponents inside and outside the party. Our conclusion was that ‘the route to socialism does not lie through the Labour Party’. This did not make us despondent. While accepting that ‘the first reaction to disillusionment … is fatalism, in the face of what are presented as global forces beyond anyone’s control’, we thought that this ood would ‘sooner or later change to resentment and anger, and a rediscovered will to act, to which a new socialist project must respond’. We did not foresee how soon, in reality, this would happen, in the reaction against the inequality, militarism and economic failure of the neoliberal project; nor that events would again propel a socialist into the leadership of the Labour Party and reopen the question of whether the party could yet be transformed into one capable of leading the socialist transition that the surge of activists into its ranks called for.

Although the enthusiasm behind the Corbyn leadership and the achievements of its first years were impressive, the obstacles the Labour new left project faced were if anything greater than ever. By early 2019 it was clear that its prospects of success had been severely whittled down, so that its eventual defeat in December was not a surprise. The country’s relation with Europe played an even more critical role in this than in the past, but the continuities with what had blocked the Labour new left project since the 1970s, above all the fierce obstruction from within the parliamentary party and from the media, were once again evident in every aspect of the events which culminated in defeat in the December 2019 election.

We have therefore condensed the previous book into the first five chapters of this one. The six chapters that follow cover the last twenty years. For help in researching them, we are extremely grateful to all those people inside the party, at every level, from whose knowledge and insights we have learned so much, for the generous time and help they have given us. In all of our work on the project of the Labour new left, we have tried to point to its huge importance while at the same attempting to analyse as clearly as possible the obstacles to realising its potential. But, in whatever form, the drive for democratic socialism will continue. This book is intended as a contribution and a tribute to the purpose and vision of those who, in wanting the Labour Party to become a genuinely democratic socialist agent of transformation, have done so much to recover the capacity to think ambitiously about social change.

Return of the Strong Gods

Two books have come to my notice – the first Return of the Strong Gods – nationalism, populism and the future of the west by Rusty Reno (2019) is a right-wing intellectual history of the past 80 years which attacks a hero of mine – Karl Popper and his idea of the “Open Society”

The second, Anger, Fear, Domination - dark passions and the power of political 

rhetoric is a small book (120pp) by William Galston (2025). The first was reviewed 

thus 

Reno’s argument is that after the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century, the ruling 

classes of the West chose to create societies of “openness, weakening and disenchantment,” 

in an explicit attempt to prevent the “return of the strong gods”—“the objects of men’s love 

and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that united societies.” Rather than 

simply trying to wall out only the terrible strong gods, the ruling classes chose to wall 

them all out: truth along with fascism; loyalty along with Communism. 
He starts by acknowledging post-liberals such as Patrick Deneen and (an early voice) 

Alasdair MacIntyre, and if I had not read this book, I would have guessed that Reno 

mostly agrees with them. Yet, after some wavering, comes down on the side of the 

Enlightenment—that is, of liberalism, of atomized freedom, and the destruction of all 

unchosen bonds in a desperate quest for total emancipation. For Reno, we find, it was 

not 1789, but 1945, which was the year that it all went wrong. 

The book starts with a bang...

... the emphasis on openness and weakening in highly theorized literary criticism and cultural studies in universities, often under the flag of critique and deconstruction, and in popular calls for diversity, multiculturalism, and inclusivity, all of which entail a weakening of boundaries and opening of borders (p8).

Nor is the cultural influence of the postwar consensus confined to the left. The same insistence on openness and weakening is found in libertarianism as well, which seeks cultural deregulation so that individuals are not constrained by shared norms.

It is felt in free-market economic theory and sociobiological analysis of politics and culture, both of which adopt a reductive view of human motivation that disenchants public life. Openness, weakening, and disenchantment are at play in postwar sociology, psychology, and even theology. In every instance, they rise to prominence because they are seen as necessary to prevent the return of the strong gods…..I want to understand how the West was reconstructed after 1945 in accord with openness and weakening and how they debilitate us today, threatening to destroy the Western tradition they are meant to redeem.

Today, the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led. Fearful of strong loves and committed to ever-greater openness, the postwar consensus cannot formulate, much less address, these problems.

Unable to identify our shared loves—unable even to formulate the “we” that is the political subject in public life—we cannot identify the common good, the res in the res publica. Under these circumstances, increasingly prevalent in the West, civic life disintegrates into the struggle among private interests, and in this struggle the rich and powerful win. In the twenty-first century, oligarchy and an unaccountable elite pose a far greater threat to the future of liberal democracy than does the return of Hitler.

Our troubles do not stem from William of Ockham, the Reformation, John Locke, capitalism, or modern science and technology. It is true that there are atomizing, deracinating, deconsolidating trends in modernity. Many historians, philosophers and social critics have pointed them out. But it is always so. The fall of man left every civilization, every era under the law of entropy, which is why renewing shared loves and unifying loyalties is one of the primary arts of leadership. This is what we lack today.

The distempers afflicting public life today reflect a crisis of the postwar consensus, the weak gods of openness and weakening, not a crisis of liberalism, modernity, or the West. The ways of thinking that became so influential after 1945 have become unworkable and at the same time obligatory. We need to recover the “we” that unites us, but the postwar consensus is an undying zombie. The West needs to restore a sense of transcendent purpose to public (and private) life. Our time—this century—begs for a politics of loyalty and solidarity, not openness and deconsolidation. We don’t need more diversity and innovation. We need a home. And for that, we will require the return of the strong gods.

There is an interview about the book on this podcast

Rhetoric is hardly Trump’s strong point but Twitter has given him a powerful 

means of communication which is explored in Anger, Fear, Domination 

- dark passions and the power of political rhetoric 

There are a couple of video presentations here and here. 

Is the US really going Fascist?

Answering the question requires a definition of the word. I wanted to extract the essence of the term from the voluminous texts which have appeared on the subject since the end of second world war but have been defeated by the sheer number of relevant texts, of which I mention a few in Recommended Reading at the end. Paxton’s book ends with a bibliographical essay of almost 30 pages!  

The sociologist Michael Mann has presented a useful definition of fascism, in which he identifies three fundamentals: key values, actions, and power organizations. He sees it as ‘the pursuit of a transcendent and cleansing nation-statism through paramilitarism’.He suggests five essential aspects, some of which have internal tensions:

• Nationalism: the ‘deep and populist commitment to an “organic” or “integral” nation’.

• Statism: the goals and organizational forms that are involved when the organic conception imposes an authoritarian state ‘embodying a singular, cohesive will [as] expressed by a party elite adhering to the “leadership principle”.’

• Transcendence: the typical neither/nor of fascism as a third way – that is, as something transcending the conventional structures of left and right. Mann stresses that the core constituency of fascist support can be understood only by taking its aspirations to transcendence seriously. ‘Nation and state comprised their centre of gravity: not class.’

• Cleansing: ‘Most fascisms entwined both ethnic and political cleansing, though to varying degrees.’

• Paramilitarism: as a key element both in values and in organizational form. Like previous analysts, Mann notes that ‘what essentially distinguishes fascists from many military and monarchical dictatorships of the world is [the] “bottom-up” and violent quality of its paramilitarism. It could bring popularity, both electorally and among elites.

Recommended Reading

Articles are perhaps the easiest way in

Ur-fascism Umberto Eco (1997)

Fascism Anyone? Lawrence Britt (2003) which identifies 14 common features of fascism - 
1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. From the
prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins,
the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the
regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always
obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity
were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually
coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on
xenophobia.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights. The regimes themselves
viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing
the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda,
the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by
marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was
egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.
3. Identification of enemies/scape-goats as a unifying cause. The most
significant common thread among these regimes was the use of
scapegoating as a means to divert the people’s attention from other
problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in
controlled directions. The methods of choice—relentless propaganda
and0 disinformation—were usually effective. Often the regimes would
incite “spontaneous” acts against the target scapegoats, usually
communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities,
traditional national enemies, members of other religions,
secularists, homosexuals, and “terrorists.” Active opponents of
these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with
accordingly.
4. The supremacy of the military/ avid militarism. Ruling
elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial
infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of
national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic
needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of
nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals,
intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the
ruling elite.
5. Rampant sexism. Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and
the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably
viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly
anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually
codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the
orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for
its abuses.
6.A controlled mass media. Under some of the regimes, the mass media
were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to
stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power
to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing
and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism,
and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often
politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually
success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes’
excesses.
7. Obsession with national security. Inevitably, a national security
apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite. It was
usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond
any constraints. Its actions were justified under the rubric of
protecting “national security,” and questioning its activities
was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together. Unlike communist regimes,
the fascist and protofascist regimes were never proclaimed as godless
by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves
to the predominant religion of the country and chose to portray
themselves as militant defenders of that religion. The fact that the
ruling elite’s behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the
religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the
illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and
opponents of the “godless.” A perception was manufactured that
opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion.
9. Power of corporations protected. Although the personal life of
ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large
corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The
ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure
military production (in developed states), but also as an additional
means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often
pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of
interests, especially in the repression of “have-not” citizens.
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. Since organized labor was
seen as the one power center that could challenge the political
hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was
inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass,
viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Under some regimes, being
poor was considered akin to a vice.
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals 
and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them
were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were 
considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. 
Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed 
or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked,
silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the 
national interest or they had no right to exist.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment. Most of these regimes maintained 
Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. 
The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to 
rampant abuse. “Normal” and political crime were often merged into trumped-up 
criminal charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. 
Fear, and hatred, of criminals or “traitors” was often promoted among the 
population as an excuse for more police power.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. Those in business circles and close to 
the power elite often used their position to enrich themselves. This corruption 
worked both ways; the power elite would receive financial gifts and property 
from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of government 
favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast 
wealth from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. 
With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, 
this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the 
general population. 
14. Fraudulent elections. Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion 
polls were usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates were held, 
they would usually be perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. 
Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery, 
intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing 
legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the 
power elite.
Ur-fascism and Neo-fascism Andrew Johnson (2020)

Adorno write of such a danger - “National Socialism lives on, and even today we still do not know whether it is merely the ghost of what was so monstrous that it lingers on after its own death, or whether it has not yet died at all, whether the willingness to commit the unspeakable survives in people as well as in the conditions that enclose them.”

On Tyranny – reading guide Dave Forrest (2021)

How to Spot a Fascist  Terry Trowbridge (2022)

Fascism - a comprehensive reading list (2025) contains some interesting and unusual reads

Is It Fascism? Dan Garner (2025) 
When Trump first ran for office in 2016, Paxton and other scholars were asked if 
Trump was a fascist. Some said yes. Some said no. Paxton was among those who said no. 
But the January 6th insurrection changed his mind. Immediately afterward, 
he published a short essay explaining why. An excerpt:
Trump's incitement of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 
removes my objection to the fascist label. His open encouragement of 
civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line. The label 
now seems not just acceptable but necessary. It is made even more plausible 
by comparison with a milestone on Europe's road to fascism—an openly 
fascist demonstration in Paris during the night of February 6, 1934.
On that evening thousands of French veterans of World War I, bitter at 
rumors of corruption in a parliament already discredited by its inefficacy 
against the Great Depression, attempted to invade the French parliament 
chamber, just as the deputies were voting yet another shaky government into 
power. The veterans had been summoned by right-wing organizations. 
They made no secret of their wish to replace what they saw as a weak 
parliamentary government with a fascist dictatorship on the model of Hitler 
or Mussolini.
…
In the United States, after the ignominious failure of a shocking fascist 
attempt to undo Biden's election, the new American President can begin his 
work of healing on January 20. Despite encouraging early signs and the 
relative robustness of American institutions, it's too soon for a responsible 
historian to say whether he'll be more successful in sustaining our Republic 
than European leaders were in defending theirs.
That last sentence makes for painful reading today.
Last October, after Donald Trump was called a fascist by the man who had been 
his longest-serving chief of staff — the four-star Marine Corps general John 
Kelly — The York Times ran a lengthy profile of Paxton and his changed view 
about Trump and fascism. From the Times:
"This summer I asked Paxton if, nearly four years later, he stood by his 
pronouncement. Cautious but forthright, he told me that he doesn’t believe 
using the word is politically helpful in any way, but he confirmed the diagnosis. 
“It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like 
the original fascisms,” Paxton said. “It’s the real thing. It really is.”
I agree with Robert Paxton that Trump and his movement are fascist. I also 
agree that it is not politically helpful to say so (thanks largely to 
generations of leftists who turned the word into a lazy insult.) That’s why 
I generally avoid calling them fascist. Generally. But not always.
As Paxton noted in The Anatomy of Fascism, a “radical instrumentalization of 
truth” is a routine feature of fascism. To the fascist, truth is contingent. 
What is good for the fascist is true; what is not, is not. Does that remind 
you of anyone?
This “radical instrumentalization of truth” makes standing and stating a truth 
regardless of political expedience an anti-fascist act.
And that is why, despite believing it is not politically useful to call Trump 
fascist, I sometimes do. It is my small way of insisting the fascists will 
not win.
Ray Dalio wrote an interesting book in 2021 (listed at the end) about which 
he posted today (I don't understand how he can put such a long post on X!!)
Books
Three Faces of Fascism Ernst Nolte (1969) the renowned German historian offers a 700 page 

analysis

Fascism – a readers guide ed Walter Laqueur (1976) the longest read at 488 pages
Fascism Michael Mann (2004) 436 pages
The Anatomy of Fascism Robert Paxton (2006) 335 pages summarised here

American Fascists – the Christian Right and the war on America Chris Hedges (2006)
The Nature of Fascism Revisited Antonio Pinto (2012)

Chapters three and four provide a critical overview of new interpretations based on two review articles in which some major works on fascism are debated: Michael Mann’s “Fascists” and R. O. Paxton’s "Anatomy of Fascism. The first book asks the classic questions: Who were the fascists? How did they grow? Who supported them? And what are the conditions most conducive to their taking power? Mann attempts to construct a dynamic model that is not merely a taxonomy of fascism. Like Mann’s study, "The Anatomy of Fascism is also a critical reaction to some aspects of the ideological centrism of recent years. Because it was written by a historian, criticism of culturalism is more present in Paxton’s book, with the author more marked than Mann by the historiographical debates. By claiming ‘what fascists did tells us at least as much as what they said’ (a stance criticised by historians such as Sternhell and Roger Griffin), Paxton attempts to locate the ideas in their rightful place. If Mann’s research concentrates on the conditions leading to the growth of fascist movements, Paxton’s studies the processes involved in their seizure of power and the nature of the resulting regimes.

Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity Bill Robinson (2014) 
OK no mention of fascism in the title but, in 256 pages, he discusses the nature of the new 

global capitalism, the rise of a globalized production and financial system, a transnational 

capitalist class, and a transnational state and warns of the rise of a global police state to contain 

the explosive contradictions of a global capitalist system that is crisis-ridden and out of control. 

Robinson concludes with an exploration of how diverse social and political forces are responding 

to the crisis and alternative scenarios for the future.

Fascism – the career of a concept Paul Gottfried (2016) The author reveals in his intro his “paleoconservative” leanings – in 236 pages.

How Fascism Works – the politics of us and them Jason Stanley (2017 book) Probably the 

best read on the subject (and mercifully brief – at 145 pages)

Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order Ray Dalio (2021)