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.

More Reading about Socialism

Four more to whet your appetite - 

Towards Socialism ed Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn (NLR 1965)

An amazing collection of essays from some of the original thinkers of the 1960s – including Anderson, Balogh, Blackburn, Coates, Crossman, Gorz, Nairn, Titmus, Westergaard and Williams

Arguments for Socialism Cockshott and Zackariah (2012)
a series of fairly hard-left essays. Not recommended 

Leftism Reinvented – western parties from socialism to neoliberalism Stephanie

Mudge (2018) – from the Intro

Insofar as left parties are checks on plutocracy, they are also lynchpins of democracy writ large. Without left parties, in other words, democracy is in trouble. Indeed, standard theories in historical political economy—in particular, those of Karl Polanyi—are quite clear on what we should expect of a world in which there is no longer any democratically imposed limit on the expansion of market society: the rise of an unpredictable populist and extremist politics marked by protection-seeking rebellions against the march toward homo economicus, grounded in a volatile mix of class politics, ethno-racial and nationalist resentments, and basic human responses to disruption, risk, uncertainty, anxiety, and boundless competition. Around the turn of the twentieth century the French sociologist Emile Durkheim used the term “anomie” to refer to this state of affairs; by the time of Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944), the fate of the whole Western political order hung in the balance.

There is now good reason to see the 1990s as the eve of a new Polanyian moment that is very much with us still. To my mind, if we are to grasp these troubling times, the story of the third ways requires a careful, analytical, historical retelling. This retelling needs to be clear-eyed about the self-justifications of third way spokespersons, but, at the same time, it should avoid the “logic of the trial”—in the phrasing of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu—in which the more or less explicit question is where, or with whom, blame lies.7 Third wayers need to be situated and historicized, not frozen in time or rendered one-dimensional. If the aim is to shore up left representation not for parties’ sake but for democracy’s sake, then we need to grasp the forces that shape how left parties “see,” informing political debates rather than feeding the divorce of politics and reason.

To this end I adopt a historical, cross-national, and biographical approach focused on parties and their spokespeople. Essential here is the juxtaposition of third way leftism, and the people who gave it form and substance, with the leftisms (and spokespersons) who came before it. Starting from this premise, my analysis centers on left parties’ cultural infrastructure—that is, the organizations, social relations, persons, and devices through which parties organize how people see and understand the world. Instead of asking whether party change is “top-down” or “bottom-up,” I ask how left parties have shaped the very meaning of what it is to be an American “liberal,” or to be “Labour” in Britain, or to be a “social democrat” in Sweden or Germany. I also ask why a strikingly uniform cross-national identifier—“progressive”—has now supplanted all of these terms. To ask these

questions is to acknowledge that, like the umbrella terms “left” and “right,” monikers like “liberal” or “social democratic” do not have the same meaning, or describe the same kinds of people, across times and places. There is also variation in such terms’ territorial reach, and indeed whether they travel across national boundaries at all.

And so, to understand Western leftism’s reinventions, I focus on four parties: the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP), the British Labour Party, and the American Democratic Party. I punctuate a long historical view, ranging from the late 1800s to the early 2000s, with emphases on three moments: the 1920s–1930s, the 1950s–1960s, and the 1980s-1990s.

Karl Polanyi’s Vision of a Socialist transformation ed M Brie 

and C Thomasberger (2018)

The last two decades have been marked by a renewed interest in the work of Karl Polanyi. Spreading resistance to the neoliberal agenda and the deepening crises of the last 25 years, which culminated in the global financial and economic crisis of 2008, are viewed as a strong support for the main theses of Polanyi’s 1944 masterpiece The Great Transformation. Karl Polanyi was quoted by leading intellectuals and in the editorials of the main newspapers around the world as one of the most influential thinkers in the time of crises. But reception of his work remains largely restricted to the so-called “double movement” of commodification vs. social regulation. Polanyi is typically regarded as a social reformer supporting an increased social state, welfare intervention, and a broader national and international regulation of the financial markets. Or he is depicted as a theorist who gives legitimacy to various social associations and organizations which develop in the niches of current society. Both interpretations fail to address the depth of Karl Polanyi’s analysis and alternatives which are linked to his understanding of socialism as a new and different type of civilization.

The socialist intention behind The Great Transformation, and indeed of the totality of his work, is not widely understood. The first reason is that a large part of his oeuvre concerning his understanding of socialism has, until now, not been published in english. Some important texts noted down in the 1920s and 1930s as well as some of his Hungarian writings have been published only recently (Polanyi 2014, 2016b, 2016c, 2017, forthcoming). To bring his unpublished writings to a wider public, we include in this book first-time translations of some of Polanyi’s most significant papers from the 1920s. A second reason is the depth and complexity of Polanyi’s analysis. The Great Transformation strives neither for a sociological theory of social development nor for a blueprint of a new great transformation. It aims primarily at an explanation of the disasters which, starting with the great war, caused the european civilization of the 19th century to collapse. It lays bare the roots of this historic cataclysm. In “The Great Transformation” Polanyi makes the attempt to reveal the meaning of this unique and singular event. He searches for a true understanding of the reasons which caused the horrors of two world wars, the great Depression, the rise of fascism and Auschwitz so as to prevent the repetition of disasters which threatened to extinguish the legacy of the west.

More Leftist Tracts

I seem to be unable to stop posting about the books attempting to understand where the left has gone wrong. For the moment let me mention three which caught my attention – with the first (and shorter) being my favourite

20th Century Socialism David Bowie (2022)

Appealed by virtue of it being short (88 Pages) and a brief summary of 47 key 

texts of the 20th century and 2 of the 21st. These range from Ramsay MacDonald 

and Philip Snowden in the early 1900s through Tawney, Cripps, Strachey and 

Jay in the 1930s; Durbin and Laski in the 1940s; Perry Anderson in the 60s; 

Stuart Holland and Tony Benn in the 1970s to Hirst and Wainwright in the 1990s

It’s OK to be Angry about Capitalism Bernie Sanders (2023)

A little too US focused for me

The Age of Social Democracy – Norway and Sweden in the 20th Century Francis 

Sejersted (2011)
 

Sheri Berman has made a comparative analysis of the Social Democratic

movements in five European countries (Germany, Austria, France, Italy, and

Sweden) up to World War II. According to her, “social democracy emerged

out of a revision of orthodox Marxism.” The fact that this is the case in

these five countries is one of her reasons for choosing them. Among these

countries Sweden is the exception, as it was only in Sweden that Socialists

“were able to outmaneuver the radical right and cement a stable majority

coalition, escaping the collapse of the left and democracy that occurred

elsewhere in Europe.” Berman continues, “The key to understanding the

Swedish SAP’s [the Swedish Social Democratic Labor Party’s] remarkable

success in the interwar years lies in the triumph of democratic revisionism

several decades earlier.”

Berman identifies Sweden with Scandinavia. If she had considered Norway, she would have had to modify her conclusions, as we shall see. Norwegian Social Democrats clung to their Marxism for a long time but were nevertheless almost as successful as the Swedes.

Berman is certainly right in maintaining that Sweden became a model for

Western Europe after World War II, as the Western European countries were

developing the democratic mixed-economy welfare state as we know it.

Criticizing the common view that the mixed economies that emerged after

World War II were a modified version of liberalism, Berman writes that

“what spread like wildfire after the war was really something quite different: social democracy.”9 She argues convincingly that Social Democracy must be regarded as a separate order in its own right. But whether this view applies to all of Western Europe is another question. Tony Judt has a different take: the post–World War II history of Europe includes more than one “thematic shape,” and it was not until “the crab-like institutional extension of the European Community” that we can discern something like a “European model”—a model born “of an eclectic mix of Social Democratic and Christian Democratic legislation.”

The chapters are thus -

Introduction

The Many Faces of Modernization

The Scandinavian Solution

Three Phases

PART I 1905–1940: Growth and Social Integration

1 Dreaming the Land of the Future

Norsk Hydro

Science and Modernization

Industrialization, a Natural Process for Sweden

Norway Follows Hesitantly

Emigration and Industrialization

War and Structural Problems

2 National Integration and Democracy

The Question of Political Democracy in the Period around 1905

Mobilizing the Public

Training for Democracy

Toward an Integrated School System in Norway

Contrasting the Two Countries

Currents of Antiparliamentarianism

Farmers on the Offensive: Norway and Sweden

Women and Civil and Political Rights

3 Assistance for Self-Help

Health Insurance

National Pension Plans

Unemployment Insurance

Population Crisis?

The Politics of Sterilization

4 Revolution or Reform

Marxist Rhetoric and Reformist Practice

The Labor Movement and the Land Question

The Big Strike of 1909

The Level of Conflict Escalates

The Solidarity Game Is Established

Revolution or Reform

5 Distance and Proximity

World War I

An Expanded Home Market?

A Nordic Defense Alliance?

Part II 1940–1970: The Golden Age of Social Democracy

6 Cooperation in a Menacing World

The Cold War—Still Not the Same War?

A New Drive for a Nordic Customs Union

SAS: A Success Story

Cooperation in a Menacing World

7 “The Most Dynamic Force for Social Development”

Class Society in Transformation

The Vision of the Atomic Age

The Wallenberg System

Swedish and Norwegian Labor Market Policy

8 The Crowning Glory

Technocracy and the Welfare State

The Radicalism of the Myrdals

The Struggle over the Compulsory General Supplementary Pension (ATP)

Swedish Health Policy

Good Family Housing

9 What Kind of People Do We Need?

A Break with the Past?

What Kind of Equality?

Swedish and Norwegian University Reform

Church and Morals

10 Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

The Struggle over the Planned Economy in the 2 countries

Corporatism and Economic Democracy

How Democratic?

Taxation Socialism

PART III 1970–2000: A Richer Reality

11 A Difficult Modernity

A Decade of Conflict

The Nordic Energy Market

Norway Becomes an Oil Nation

Sweden Loses Its Leading Position

12 What Happened to Economic Democracy?

Corporatism under Pressure

Self-determination

Wage Earner Funds—a Radical Move

State Ownership

13 From Equality to Freedom

The Welfare State under Pressure

From an Emigration Society to an Immigration Society

Toward the Two-Income Family

Gender Equality Lite

Toward the Dissolution of the Comprehensive School

14 The Return of Politics

A Weakened Party System

New Forms of Participation

The Media-Biased Society

The Decay of the General Public?

15 The Last “Soviet States”?

The Volvo Agreement: Another Unsuccessful Campaign

Toward a Nordic Economic Region?

Europe

Why Did Sweden Reverse Its Policy on Europe?

AFTER SOCIAL DEMOCRACY: Toward New Social Structures?

A Success—but Not Exclusively So

Social Democracy’s Liberal Inheritance

The Institutional Structures under Pressure

The Freedom and Rights Revolution

What Kind of Freedom?

Another Post on..Style

Following on from an earlier post about STYLE, I realised I had omitted an important book Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters Harold Evans (2017). Evans was the editor of the London "Times" before moving to the States and his book offers a useful guide, with the Intro opening by referencing Orwell’s classic Politics and the English Language

Words have consequences. The bursting of the housing bubble that led to the Great Recession revealed that millions had signed agreements they hadn’t understood or had given up reading for fear of being impaled on a lien.

But as the book and movie The Big Short make clear, the malefactors of the Great Recession hadn’t understood what they were doing either. This book on clear writing is as concerned with how words confuse and mislead, with or without malice aforethought, as it is with literary expression: in misunderstood mortgages; in the serpentine language of Social Security; in commands too vague for life-and-death military actions; in insurance policies that don’t cover what the buyers believe they cover; in instructions that don’t instruct; in warranties that prove worthless; in political campaigns erected on a tower of untruths.

with the following chapters 

I. Tools of the Trade

1. A Noble Thing

2. Use and Abuse of Writing Formulas

3. The Sentence Clinic

4. Ten Shortcuts to Making Yourself Clear

5. Please Don’t Feed the Zombies, Flesh-Eaters, and

Pleonasms

II. Finishing the Job

6. Every Word Counts

7. Care for Meanings

8. Storytelling: The Long and Short of It

III. Consequences

9. Steps Were Taken: Explaining the Underwear Bomber

10. Money and Words

11. Buried Treasure: It’s Yours, but Words Get in the Way

12. Home Runs for Writers

Posts often echo in my mind after they’re written and suggest an updating – 

hence this post.

And I would also recommend The Tyranny of Words Stuart Chase (1938) 

Is it possible to explain words with words?

Can some of the reasons why it is so difficult for us to communicate with

one another by means of language be set forth in that same faulty medium?

It is for the reader to judge.

I have read a few books which have broadened my understanding of the

world in which I live. These contributions I here attempt to pass on. To

them I have added much illustrative material and a few conclusions of my

own. The subject dealt with—human communication—has worried me for

many years. I believe it worries every person who thinks about language at

all. Does B know what A is talking about? Does A himself know clearly

what he is talking about? How often do minds meet; how often do they

completely miss each other? How many of the world’s misfortunes are due

to such misses?

As a result of this uneasiness I long ago formulated a few rules which I

tried to follow in my writing and talking. They were on the edge of the

subject which concerns us in this book. In due time I found certain men

who had penetrated boldly into the heart of the subject, equipped with tools

of analysis more sharp than any I had used. I follow behind them here. I do

not tell all that they tell, because I do not understand all that they tell. So

this is not a full and careful account of the findings of other explorers into

the jungle of words, but only an account of what I found personally

illuminating and helpful.

More Leftist Stuff

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

The Socialist Challenge Today Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (2018)
A very short essay (only 52 pages) by two US authorsSearching for Socialism – the project of the labour new left from Benn to Corbyn Leo Panitch and Colin Hay (2020) 

Each of the three great economic crises of the last century – the 1930s, the 1970s and the decade after 2008 – precipitated a crisis in the Labour Party.

Each time, the crisis posed fundamental questions of ideology, organisation and unity, and ended up by propelling into the leadership a radical socialist MP from the party’s left wing. In each instance this produced a sharp reaction aimed at blocking whatever potential the crisis had for taking the party in a new democratic-socialist direction. And in each case Britain’s relationship with Europe played an important role.

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

A rather right-wing treatment by a US author

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continuing the series on the Left

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revolution and the limits of Labourism. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ready-made programme.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

credentials are very much on display in the book which excoriates

 Jeremy Corbyn.

There are three belief systems which sustain these new movements.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other relevant posts

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