The last month of the 2010s dealt the British left a harrowing blow. For the second time in that decade, the Labour Party had been led into an early election by a democratic socialist leader with a radical policy platform. For the fourth time in that decade, the Party was defeated at the polls. While Corbyn’s Labour won a higher share of the vote in 2019 than the Party had in 2010 or 2015, the consolidation of the right around Boris Johnson saw Labour gain the fewest seats since 1935. This collection of essays by leading thinkers, campaigners and activists from throughout the vibrant socialist movement that underpinned Corbyn’s leadership is an attempt to learn some of the lessons of that defeat and chart a way forward for the left.
As the reader will soon discover, there remain disagreements between our contributors, which reflect divergent opinions within the wider movement. On the Party’s Brexit position, the strengths or weaknesses of its manifesto and the strategic alliances that socialists should or should not have made, to name but a few issues, there is no consensus between the authors. This was a conscious decision: to have chosen contributions based on their adherence to a predetermined political line would have been to occlude real and important differences of opinion. And yet there also exists a striking degree of convergence, reflecting the powerful collective process of sense-making that has been undertaken in the short period since the election defeat. Our contributors agree on the need to strengthen and consolidate the progressive social forces that make up the wider left – forces such as the labour movement, the environmental movement and the feminist and anti-racist movements, to name but a few. Most cite the importance of ongoing democratisation within the Labour Party, and the stepping up of political education outside it. All are clear that, in the UK, the US and across Europe, the socialist movement is far stronger today than it was before the financial crisis – and also that we have a long way to go.
We do not have much time. As this book went to press, the world was entering perhaps the most significant social and economic crisis of our lifetimes, triggered by the spread of a novel coronavirus, declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation in March 2020. Many of the contributors are clear that, in COVID-19, we face a unique existential threat for which our social, economic and political systems are woefully unprepared. Decades of neoliberal consensus have eroded the capacities of the state, now so desperately needed both to contain the spread of the virus and to treat those affected by it. In the UK, the weakening of our public services, our social safety net and our public infrastructure are all being exposed, as millions of workers are enduring hazardous conditions to meet the needs of those who are forced to remain at home.
The massive expansion in the size of the state necessary to deal with this crisis was immediately recognised by many of the contributors not as a progressive development – an acceptance of the ideas put forward by socialists over the last several years – but as a reaction by the ruling classes to the threat posed to global capitalism by the pandemic. The speed with which our political leaders acted to support finance, big businesses and the wealthy stood in stark contrast to their lagging efforts to help the selfemployed, the unemployed and the asset-poor. The long-term effects of this crisis and the state response to it are not yet clear. But if, as seems likely, the next several years witness a significant increase in market concentration as weaker firms are swallowed up by smaller ones, along with a dramatic expansion in the size of the state, we could be entering a new era of state-monopoly capitalism, under which the interests of senior politicians, financiers and corporate executives become fused into one.
How should socialists orient themselves in this age of upheaval? We have to consolidate a new popular mood of mutuality and solidarity, argues Sam Gindin, and get ourselves off the back foot. ‘This is a moment to think more ambitiously,’ he insists. There is widespread agreement among our contributors that while the left eventually found positive expression in the multiple insurgent political movements that emerged in a variety of national contexts, it failed to respond constructively to the potential energy released by the last crisis, the financial meltdown of 2008. Our collective assumption that the sub-prime crisis – the panic that it spread throughout the financial system and the consequent collapse of the global economy – would confirm all the socialist adages about the inherent unsustainability of capitalism proved hopelessly naïve. Our initial failure to translate the widespread dissatisfaction with the economic and political consensus that followed into a progressive movement for change led to the subjugation of countless millions across the world under brutal austerity regimes. Perhaps the slowness of our response, given the depths into which the movement had sunk, was to be expected. But we cannot afford to make the same mistakes again.
This book seeks, as far as is possible, to make sense of the astonishing political moment in which we find ourselves – beginning with the financial crisis of 2008 and ending with the coronavirus crisis of 2020 – and chart a course forward. Much as Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism acted as a touchstone for liberals within the Labour Party over the course of the mid- to late twentieth century, we hope that this book will lay out the beginnings of a strategy for socialists to pursue, both within and outside the Labour Party, for years to come.
In the wake of 2019, commentators from across the political spectrum were quick to pronounce the final collapse of class politics. When measured according to the income and occupation-based class metrics developed in the mid- to late twentieth century, this picture checks out. The Conservatives performed better among lower-middle- and working-class (C2DE)voters in the 2019 election than it did among middle- and upper-class voters (ABC1), based on the UK’s National Statistical Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) schema. But such schemas completely fail to capture the transformations that have taken place in the class structure of British society since the financial crisis.
In his contribution to this collection, Keir Milburn questions this narrative by arguing that the real story of the last two general elections has been not the declining importance of class, but the growing salience of age – a divide which has a solid material basis. The generational divide that now marks electoral politics across the rich world results from the austere legacy of the precrisis boom: the material interests of older home-owners nearing the end of their working lives, the core of the Conservative electoral coalition, ‘are currently tied to the value of residential real estate and, because their pensions are invested in stock markets, the performance of the financial sector’. The interests of younger voters, generally on low wages, in insecure work and living in the private rented sector, are diametrically opposed to those of their forebears. Generation Left, argues Milburn, comprises those who have come of age in the wreckage of the economic model that enriched their parents; they have no real interest in continuing to support the status quo. Now facing another deep economic crisis, will today’s young people grow into a politics of reaction, or retain their socialistic instincts?
Another much remarked-upon aspect of the 2019 election was the astonishing geographical distribution of votes. Labour lost seats across English regions that it had held for decades, as the ‘Red Wall’ finally crumbled. One did not have to look far to find members of the commentariat arguing that Jeremy Corbyn bore responsibility for severing the longstanding bond between the Labour Party and working-class voters in the North of England. As Tom Hazeldine shows in this volume, this claim is misleading: Labour’s declining popularity in the North is part of a gradual trend that dates back to the Blair years. Hazeldine interrogates opposing claims that the left must either resist this trend or ride it, by focusing its energies on building support among progressive liberal voters within England’s cities and the burgeoning working class in many southern towns.
The answer will, in no small part, be determined by Johnson’s ability to hold together his new electoral coalition. In his first Budget speech, Johnson’s newly anointed Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, announced he would be releasing a wave of investment for the North and the Midlands; but even before the world was plunged into a renewed global economic crisis, replacing their outdated rail systems seemed unlikely to provide England’s regions with enough productive heft to counter the extraordinary weight of a first city engorged on capital sucked in from every corner of the globe. If northern voters really did ‘lend’ Johnson their votes, he will need to pull many more policies out of Labour’s playbook to hold on to them over the long haul. Whether or not the rest of his party – and indeed British capital – will allow him to do so remains an open question.
Owen Hatherley reflects on the longstanding parting of ways between the Labour Party and older voters in England’s northern regions, through the eyes of one of the North’s best loved bands, The Smiths. Morrissey’s trajectory, from apparently anti-establishment, working-class origins to the reactionary xenophobia of his later years, argues Hatherley, reflects similar journeys undertaken by many children of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. In his vivid contribution, Hatherley explores what the music of The Smiths, and the political unravelling of its lead singer, can tell us about the English character. The way in which Morrissey at once despises and idealises the pain of his childhood reflects ‘the nostalgia for misery, a longing for boredom, a relocation of poverty from economics to aesthetics’ of the older middle-class voters who delivered the Conservatives their victory.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, Labour was once again routed by the Scottish National Party (SNP). The Party now holds just one seat in Scotland, next to six for the Conservatives, four for the Liberal Democrats and forty-eight for the Scottish National Party. The SNP’s success, Rory Scothorne argues in this volume, has rested on its ability to portray itself as a traditional social-democratic party of the kind you would expect to find in a typical small north European state. Yet as the party has consolidated its hegemony in Scotland, its leaders have ‘diluted this left-leaning identity’. Can Labour recover its electoral fortunes in Scotland simply by attempting to outflank the SNP from the left, as seems to have been Corbyn’s strategy? As Scothorne argues, it is only by confronting the question of independence head on that the Party can hope to rebuild its battered reputation in Scotland.
The Labour Party’s ambivalence over constitutional questions extends beyond Scottish independence to the issue that dominated the 2019 general election in England, Wales and Northern Ireland: Brexit. Andrew Murray places the blame for Labour’s defeat squarely on the shoulders of those who pushed the Party towards campaigning for a second referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. But the mistakes made by the Labour Party could not simply be attributed to electoral miscalculation: they were symptomatic of a deeper ideological confusion between socialism and liberalism, which has contributed to defeats experienced by socialist parties across the bloc. Murray considers how, as the legitimacy of the liberal establishment has been steadily eroded, the right has made hay from the European question, developing a critique of the bloc that blends a rejection of the enforcement of neoliberal policies with a xenophobic, nationalistic reaction to the erosion of the imperial power of the once-dominant British nation state. His contribution explores how Johnson successfully passed himself off as a left-populist, ‘wielding nation-state power to protect the economic interests of the people’ while Labour was perceived as ‘belonging to a stonewalling establishment’.
It seems unlikely that, had the Party maintained its 2019 commitment to respecting the result of the referendum, it would have lost more votes to the Liberal Democrats – and indeed that those lost votes would translate into such a staggering loss of seats – than it did to the Conservatives. Even so, with the right completely united after the Conservative–Brexit Party pact, and half the country united behind them, it also seems unlikely that a weak pro-Leave message would have saved Labour from defeat. And after the rout of the local elections, the internal struggle faced by the leadership in entering another election with the same position would have been phenomenal. Not only the Parliamentary Labour Party, but members too, would likely have revolted – indeed, Murray concedes that by 2019 the leadership faced few other options. In the era of the culture war, socialist parties face few good options: give up on class politics altogether and take up arms alongside progressive liberals, or hope to drown out the politics of reaction with a populist economic message.
Jeremy Gilbert cautions against such binary political thinking: if the Labour Party is to succeed in winning state power on a platform that includes socialist elements, it must build out its electoral coalition ‘in all directions’. The return of the socialist left from the depths of the 1990s defeats, when the apparent ‘end of history’ seemed to signal the death of the left as a coherent political force, is, argues Gilbert, quite astonishing – even as it represents a reversion to ‘normal’ historical conditions. The successes of the new new left are evident from the extent to which these movements have transformed the dominant economic ‘common sense’ – now evident in the generous responses by right-wing governments to the crisis consuming the global economy. But even these successes do not negate the lesson the Party should have learned from historical experience: the UK media landscape is irreconcilably hostile and our majoritarian electoral system offers the Conservatives, with their efficient, geographically dispersed voter base, a permanent upper hand. Gilbert explores the options for socialist strategy in light of these constraints, weighing up the arguments for and against fighting to broaden the progressive electoral coalition by championing electoral reform and cooperating with other parties where possible in the meantime.
The feature that differentiates the Labour Party from other potential members of a progressive coalition is that it emerged as the vehicle for the electoral representation of the trade union movement and retains a close link with the labour movement. But Dalia Gebrial highlights how the changing composition of the labour force – in particular, the rise of precarious employment and underemployment – poses challenges to both the labour movement and the Labour Party. The strategies employed by capital to undermine the once-stable categories of ‘work’, ‘worker’ and ‘workplace’, inflected with gendered and racialised logics, have both supported accumulation since the crisis of 2008 and further fractured an already divided workforce. As the right seeks to exploit these divisions in service of their culture war between the ‘metropolitan elite’ and the ‘traditional working class’, socialists must rethink the strategies they use to organise and mobilise working people. Gebrial argues that the principle of ‘universal access to the means of life’ must be a central feature of socialist strategy in the age of precarity.
The question posed by Gargi Bhattacharyya is how the left might acquire some new habits to allow us collectively to imagine a new world, one based on ‘mutuality, survival and justice’. The left’s focus on electoralism, while important, has taken precedence over the centring of the lived experience of the British working classes – many of whom are simply struggling to survive from one day to the next. Bhattacharyya’s essay challenges socialists to look at strategy with new eyes – not those of a movement triumphantly marching towards victory, understood as the capture of the state, but those of communities working together to build a better world from the ground up without diverting too much energy from the daily pressures of survival. Our movement must be as deeply aware of our mutual interdependence in the working class’s struggle for survival and recovery as it is of the traditional hallmarks of strategy: the state, the economy and the media. Bhattacharyya does, however, recognise that ‘the continuous onslaught of character assassination and outright lies [by the UK media] shaped the extent of the Labour defeat’. This onslaught and character assassination are the subject of Tom Mills’s essay on the relationship between the Labour Party and the UK media.
Mills argues that socialists have too often ignored the constraints imposed upon the Labour Party in general, and socialists within the Labour Party in particular, by the UK’s hostile media. Over the last several decades, and particularly during the Thatcherite assault on the UK’s public institutions, both the print and broadcast media – including the BBC – became steadily more hostile to Labour. Blair’s conciliation with the media, effected by providing Britain’s media barons with a veto over Labour Party policy, was the exception that proved the rule. How, then, can socialists hope to organise in the context of such a powerful coalition of forces ranged against them? Mills explores the case both for the construction of an expansive left media infrastructure, and for developing policy that could be used to transform the UK’s media landscape once Labour is in power.
The electoral defeat of a socialist-led Labour Party by a Conservative Party united around a politics of nationalist reaction and spurred on by the right-wing press has one obvious historical parallel: the election of 1983, when a Labour Party led by Michael Foot on a socialist platform was pummelled by Thatcher’s Conservatives, even as unemployment hit the 3 million mark in 1982. Rory MacQueen interrogates the comparison between 1983 and 2019 with reference to a post-election pamphlet not dissimilar to this one, The Future of the Left. Grappling with Labour’s electoral defeat, Tony Benn mused: ‘If hope is to replace fear, people have to be able to believe that there is an alternative. Unfortunately for us, the electorate did not believe in Labour’s alternative – and wondered whether we all believed in it either.’ MacQueen points to the relevance of these lessons for today’s Labour Party: Thatcher’s resounding success at communicating an ‘alternative way of life’ stood in stark contrast to Labour’s inability to provide a picture of what life would really be like under socialism. Unable to sketch the contours of a new political horizon, the construction of a progressive alliance based around support for the continuation of the Keynesian politics of the post-war consensus would not, argued Raymond Williams in The Future of the Left, deliver renewed electoral success for Labour. MacQueen analyses the ongoing relevance of the arguments made by Benn, Williams and others in the wake of another defeat for the left, cautioning that the main lesson the Labour left must learn from history is that only a party united around its own manifesto will ever be capable of winning elections.
The question of Party unity is, argues Leo Panitch, central to the question of the left’s electoral failure; but with most Labour members united behind the establishment-endorsed leader Sir Keir Starmer, will Party unity now be used as a bat to beat back socialist policies? In an interview with the editor, Panitch considers a reversion to Blairism under Starmer’s leadership unlikely. However, he predicts that the direction of travel – at least at the top of the Party – will be towards an equivocal ‘politics of compromise’, cautioning that, with the Conservatives united, such a move will only create ‘ideological confusion’ among the majority of the membership. How to prevent confusion, disorganisation and conflict from emerging within the left? Panitch gestures to the critical importance of political education. How might socialists turn CLPs into ‘interesting centres of workingclass life’? And how might they organise to change the nature of union branches? Only once these things are achieved can socialists hope to take charge of the party apparatus, and build unity around a new, socialist common sense.
This process, argues James Schneider, will not be a swift one. In many ways, the defining feature of the Corbyn project was its unique ability to ‘occupy the gap’ left by the absence of progressive forces in the UK. The decline of the labour movement has been, perhaps, the most obvious manifestation of this absence; but the defanging of local government, the steady erosion of cultural centres of working-class life and the failure of the loose constellation of social movements on the left to coalesce into a more organised bloc were also factors. In 2016, what remained of the UK’s progressive social forces flocked into the Labour Party to support Jeremy Corbyn; Schneider offers an insider’s perspective on the challenge of transforming this group of progressively minded individuals into an organised entity capable of engaging in a process of class formation. The huge successes achieved over the last four years were, he argues, largely driven by the contingent fact that Corbyn’s coalition never really shifted out of campaign mode, which forced those who believed in the project to subdue their differences for longer than might otherwise have been the case. In the wake of the 2019 defeat, Schneider considers the implications of the social forces that underpinned Corbynism splitting off in a variety of different directions. While this process of separation may prove messy, argues Schneider, it ‘need not be disastrously divisive and is, indeed, necessary’.
How might socialists use this period of reconstruction to bridge another gap – that which separates the United Kingdom from the United States? Joe Guinan and Sarah McKinley reflect on the fortunes of the transatlantic left – the increasingly unified socialist movement that has emerged around the prime ministerial and presidential campaigns of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders respectively. Schneider and Panitch argue that the electoral focus of both movements involved an attempt to find a shortcut around the longer-term process of movement building. Guinan and McKinley assess how socialists in the US and the UK can work together to learn the lessons of their respective defeat, and build a stronger, more cohesive and more strategic socialist movement. The foundations of this project have already been laid in the form of the complementary policy programmes developed by both projects, but Guinan and McKinley reflect on the need to develop a much deeper level of cooperation, one that prioritises genuine solidarity, mutual care and long-term resilience.
If social movements and political parties must cooperate in the post-Corbyn era, how should each orient itself? Just one month after Corbyn’s defeat, points out Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Unidas Podemos – the radical socialist party founded in the wake of the post-crisis 15M protest movement – entered a coalition government with the Spanish centre-left PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español or the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party). Podemos, argues Fominaya, has channelled ‘widespread dissatisfaction with established politics’ into electoral success, where in other contexts this strategy has been the preserve of the right. What lessons can movement parties – which seek to retain characteristics of social movements while attempting to acquire executive power – such as Podemos provide for socialists in other national contexts? The answer to this question, argues Fominaya, hinges on the balance these parties strike between ‘real democracy’ and the imperatives of electoral politics. She analyses the challenges of effecting this balance within Podemos, which now seems to resemble a hollowed-out ‘classical party’ more than a socially embedded ‘challenger movement’. Nevertheless, the movement parties in Europe’s western periphery – in Spain, Portugal and Ireland – now appear stronger than those in the US and the UK. Socialists everywhere will be watching very closely for clues as to how the challenges posed by movement parties can be resolved.
In his contribution, Chris Saltmarsh explores the claim that the timeline of the impending climate crisis militates against such long-term socialist strategising, and instead lends itself to the agile politics of protest that have dominated the environmentalist movement for decades. Many members of environmentalist groups such as Extinction Rebellion have taken Labour’s defeat at the polls as a vindication of their anti-political, anti-statist stance. As the economic collapse resulting from the world’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has sent carbon emissions tumbling, some members of these groups are now veering towards an ecofascism that sees the hundreds of thousands of deaths likely to result from the virus as a necessary correction to humanity’s dominance over the earth. Saltmarsh warns against anti-electoral reaction among the climate movement, arguing that the timeframe of climate breakdown requires eco-socialists to buttress a continuing orientation towards electoral politics with a commitment to ‘building a more diverse power base from below’. He interrogates the strategic options both for eco-socialists seeking to organise within the Labour Party, and for those engaging in new forms of political struggle within the labour movement and local communities.
But the global South is where the ecological crisis is presenting itself most acutely. The focus of the contribution from Vijay Prashad, Richard Pithouse and P. Sainath is on the way in which climate breakdown and COVID-19 are exacerbating the inadequacies of our existing food production and distribution systems, with dire consequences for the poorest people on the planet. Acute hunger is, just like climate breakdown, disproportionately likely to affect the ‘dispossessed’ – those who have been expelled from their land and denied access to the basic means of subsistence. Under capitalism, food is a commodity – not a human right – and under hyper-globalised, financialised capitalism, agricultural production has become ‘enveloped into a global supply chain’. Farmers in the global South receive a tiny portion of the value of the commodity they produce, while speculators in the City of London generate huge returns from bets made on commodity prices, which in turn influence the terms of trade for some of the poorest countries on the planet. The irrationality – and inhumanity – of this system has been starkly exposed by the coronavirus pandemic. In response, the authors demand a radical restructuring of global food production and distribution based on ‘popular control over the food system’.
The global inequities of power and wealth generated by an imperialistic world system are not only evident in agriculture. Ashok Kumar’s essay focuses on the struggles of textile workers in Bangladesh against the extractive global supply chains that mark the garment industry. Kumar shows how the pandemic is shifting the terrain on which this battle is fought. Monopoly and monopsony power are central to Kumar’s analysis – the monopolistic brands with which many consumers in the West are familiar are also international monopsonies, some of the largest purchasers in their respective markets. In the textiles sector, this has historically created significant asymmetries of power between buyers and sellers, further entrenching the imperialistic relationships between global North and South. Kumar interrogates how these relationships are shifting in the context of the pandemic – particularly given its dramatic impact on global supply chains – and how these shifts are affecting the organising strategies of some of the most marginalised workers in the world.
Sita Balani’s contribution reflects on the impact of the pandemic on workers in the United Kingdom, who spend each day living with the intimate knowledge of death. Balani reminds us that ‘knowledge alone is not power’ – just because we know that our government’s actions have contributed to the deaths of thousands, this does not make us any more able to stop them. In a country where our prime minister has progressed from attempting to downplay the severity of the virus to simply disappearing from view; where our media seem to lack ‘any desire to seek the truth’; and where politicians seem to get away with treating citizens with a thinly veiled contempt, it would be easy to lapse into a state of despair given the severity of the challenges we face. Balani’s piece looks past the triumphalism of those who seek to ‘use’ this moment to implement radical, top-down policy solutions, and into the springs of optimism arising from the emergence of mutual support networks, through which people have learned to live in a world created by the ruling classes, while also defying its authoritarian logic.
Over the past decade, working people across the UK have organised to defy the brutal austerity regime imposed by the Conservatives in the wake of the financial crisis. Siân Errington reflects on how this fight will continue in the context of a pandemic that has seen government spending increase substantially.
The result of Tory austerity was as economically senseless as it has been morally tragic: the UK has endured a near unprecedented decade of stagnation, in incomes, productivity and investment. With a new economic crisis now rippling throughout the global economy, the right is teaching the left a new lesson in the politics of the shock doctrine: there is no limit to the amount governments will spend in order to save capitalism. As public spending increases, some on the left are claiming victory in the battle of ideas, but Errington cautions against this statist reading of antiausterity politics: Corbyn’s leadership was about more than simply standing against the cuts: ‘it represented a new vision of how the government should intervene in the economy and society.’
Why, then, has it been so easy for so many to conclude that the Corbyn project was about little more than advocating for a slight increase in public spending? James Meadway’s contribution grapples with this question, arguing that, over the course of Corbyn’s leadership, the project’s insurgent character was muted as questions of policy detail replaced those of socialist strategy. The 2019 manifesto was simultaneously ambitious in its scope and modest in its ambition: the level of detail was impressive, but the sum of policies such as the Green New Deal, the creation of a National Investment Bank and investment in public services amounted, in the end, simply to a reheating of the Keynesian politics of the post-war period. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Party’s strategy for challenging the dominance of the finance sector in British political economy: where the 2017 manifesto contained some fairly radical proposals for transforming the finance sector, the 2019 manifesto simply mused on the mechanics of constructing a public banking system. Meadway interrogates how socialists can recover both their insurgent character and their sweeping strategic orientation, while resisting the authoritarian tendencies unleashed by the Conservative response to the coronavirus crisis. He calls for centring the question of democracy in both policy development and organising.
Cat Hobbs, who has been campaigning on the issue of public ownership for many years, explores how socialists might achieve such a democratic reorientation. Hobbs charts the dramatic increase in support for public ownership witnessed over the last several years, laying out in detail the arguments she and fellow campaigners have honed in support of collective ownership of our most important national assets. The left’s success in building a new consensus in favour of public ownership has proven timely for the Conservatives, who will likely be forced to take significant public stakes in many large corporations as the coronavirus crisis worsens. Hobbs explores the conditions that socialists must insist upon regarding the use of public money for corporate bailouts, ‘so these bailouts do not serve simply to enrich private shareholders at the expense of people and planet’. Over the longer term, she lays out a democratic socialist vision for recovery from the crisis, centred on public democratic ownership of key infrastructure and a Green New Deal aimed at reflating, and decarbonising, our battered economy.
The coronavirus has not simply highlighted the unsustainability of our economic model, argues Daniel Gerke; it has contributed to the erosion of the ideology of capitalist realism, increasingly under threat ever since the financial crisis of 2008. Socialist culture in such an age must, he believes, be structured around a ‘radical political realism’, which emphasises modernism, humanism and realism – in contrast both to the nostalgia and anti-humanism of the right, and to the anti-materialism of postmodernists. The left must acknowledge the power of capitalist realism, the remnants of which undoubtedly contributed to the Labour Party’s 2019 defeat, and the real constraints imposed on human beings by the imperatives of capital accumulation, while emphasising the possibility of constructing a new politics and encouraging collective attempts to imagine and build it. Gerke explores how the shifts currently being generated by the coronavirus pandemic might reinforce the message that we are constantly engaged in a process of constructing political, economic and cultural consensus, and how socialists can fight to ensure this process is progressive in nature.
As well as exposing cracks in the edifice of capitalist realism, the coronavirus crisis has revealed the fundamentally human basis of our economy. The renewed appreciation of what has traditionally been seen as ‘women’s work’ – nursing and care work, for example – has come as no surprise to feminist writers who have been documenting the marginalisation of workers in these sectors for decades. This new appreciation for social reproduction could form the basis for what Amelia Horgan calls ‘socialist feminism’: ‘a feminism that takes issues of class, work and the relationship between production and reproduction seriously’. Horgan explores the ways in which the arguments made by socialist feminists have been obscured by the dominant strands of capitalist-friendly feminism, which she divides into corporate feminism and what she terms the ‘personal brand feminism’. Both are based on a liberal, individualistic account of politics and society, but are also built on the lessons of radical feminism – specifically, the idea that there are ‘distinct female ways of being’. How might a socialist feminist revival fostered by this crisis – based on an acceptance of the centrality of social reproduction in production, without naturalising it as an inherently ‘feminine’ activity – be undercut by the tendency of liberal feminism to mystify and idealise care work, without recognising its often exploitative and oppressive character?
As this book went to press, anti-racism protests catalysed by the murder of George Floyd by US police were rippling across the UK; Joshua Virasami and Simukai Chigudu reflect on the openings the protests have created and the challenges they pose for the British left. Virasami exhorts those who see themselves as allies of the Black Lives Matter movement to take action in support of the protestors: ‘to be anti-racist means to involve yourself directly in the movement to end racism, to take action’. He interrogates the way in which racism is woven into the structures of a global economy reproduced only through the poorly paid labour of the dispossessed, under the constant threat of violence and imperialist war. Any action aimed at challenging racism must also take aim at the structures upon which it is built: anti-racism is anti-capitalism, and vice versa. Virasami explores how members of the socialist movement might undertake the transition from ‘passive non-racist’ to ‘active anti-racist’, emphasising how much we have to learn from those socialist anti-racists who came before us.
Simukai Chigudu writes of his own journey as a Zimbabwean academic and anti-racist campaigner, from his participation in the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) movement that began in 2015, through to the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020. Chigudu, one of just seven black professors at Oxford, remembers the ‘hostile, infantilising and casually racist’ responses of journalists and commentators to the RMF movement in 2015. He reflects on hearing high-profile white academics accuse students like him of attempting to erase history. In fact, movements like RMF and the recent Black Lives Matter protests have created the only moments when activists have been able to start honest conversations about the legacy of British colonialism and racism in the UK. Racism in the UK will not end with the toppling of a statue – the hard work of anti-racist activists will continue. The future of socialism depends on this struggle.
Entering the 2020s and surveying the prospects of the movement that has, for these last few years, dominated the horizons of our lives, it would be easy for this book’s contributors to allow themselves more than a hint of despondency, or even despair. What is remarkable about the essays collected here is the thread of optimism that winds its way through them all. Are we naïve to hope things will turn out any differently this time? Perhaps, not least because we are now entering what is likely to be one of the most challenging decades in recent history; but it would also be unrealistically cynical to suggest that there are not grounds for optimism. Lola Seaton’s contribution to this book seems to reflect the experiences of new activists across the country, in that the anguish of defeat has not dented her determination to continue fighting for a better world.
Editing these pieces while in lockdown, surrounded by apocalyptic stories of the unfolding pandemic, I felt this optimism quite deeply. It is not a hope driven by an objective assessment of the forces mounted against the socialist movement; nor is it a hope driven by the internal contradictions of the capitalist system, which, if anything, seem to have proved more help to the reactionary right than the socialist left. It is a hope driven by my admiration for the wisdom, strength and immense compassion of my friends and comrades on the left, many of whom have contributed to this collection. If we can learn anything from the crisis currently engulfing the planet, it is that we survive individually only through our strength as a collective – this lesson applies to political movements as much as to communities or societies. When I reflect on the solidarity that continues to exist between those engaged in the struggle to build a better world, in spite of all our setbacks and defeats, it seems that we cannot help but survive this era of crisis – and that we may even learn to thrive.