Immediately prior to the introduction of pandemic emergency measures, the general state of left politics on either side of the Atlantic seemed clear. Bernie Sanders’s second bid for the Democratic nomination appeared to be over, despite a heroic campaign, as the centrist establishment converged behind a revived Joe Biden candidacy. Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party – having culminated in a devastating electoral defeat in December 2019 – was about to end, leaving the left’s preferred successor Rebecca Long-Bailey with no real hope of winning the contest against the more establishment-friendly Keir Starmer. Boris Johnson’s government seemed secure and intent on carrying out its project of decisively breaking with Thatcherite neoliberal orthodoxy, aligning itself instead with the current wave of right-wing reaction against globalisation, cosmopolitanism and liberalism.
But although it would be easy to describe this simply as a moment of defeat for the left, this would be too simplistic and short-sighted an assessment. Both Corbyn’s and Sanders’s achievements must be understood against the backdrop of a historical phase, between 1988 and 2015, when the organised political left had been inactive as a political force in either country. Of course, there had been oppositional movements, labour organisations and left-wing publications, but the institutional left consisted almost entirely of residual elements, with little influence on wider public debate (outside universities) or mainstream politics. The scale of defeat suffered by the labour movement and the socialist left across the world during the 1980s had been so significant that many commentators had assumed that no recovery for it could ever be conceived, while any realistic assessment had to assume that, if possible at all, it would take decades.
Whether we see that recovery as beginning in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, in the various anti-austerity campaigns that sprang up around the world in 2011, or at any other time, it only became clearly visible and significant within mainstream electoral politics in 2015, when Corbyn became Labour leader and Sanders emerged as a credible contender for the 2016 nomination. It was always wildly optimistic to have expected the movements organised around these figures to rise from such a low base to the point of forming governments – governments that would have been the most radical for half a century – within the space of half a decade.
The fact that the recovery of the socialist left is not yet far enough advanced to be likely to gain state power in the US or the UK does not mean that it is unreal or insignificant. During the one-on-one debate with Sanders that apparently sealed Biden’s bid for the candidacy, the most striking feature of the latter’s discourse was the extent to which he appeared explicitly to accept – on behalf of the professional political class of which he has been such an assiduously loyal member – that, finally, the era of technocratic neoliberalism had drawn to a close. In the UK, while Corbyn’s liberal centrist opponents remained stubbornly unwilling to accept this fact right through the disastrous election campaign, the Johnson government had clearly reached the same conclusion by the time of Rishi Sunak’s first Budget.
The responses to the pandemic from both the Trump and the Johnson administrations have been astonishing in their scope. Both have shown their willingness to deploy many of the tools of the state in defence of universal minimum living standards. Of course, the moment of political uncertainty and conflict will come once the crisis is deemed to have passed, and capital begins to agitate for the long-term costs of those emergency measures to be transferred to workers and the public sector. And there is no question that, over the medium term, both quasi-fascist and ultra-technocratic responses to this crisis and to the impending climate catastrophe seem at least as likely to succeed as any kind of progressive governmental response. For now, however, it seems fair to suggest that, without significant socialist revival in recent years, these right-wing governments would not have moved so far or so fast to protect wages and living conditions.
So – the situation isn’t all bad; but it clearly isn’t all good either. For the revived left to have any hope of making further advances on this very difficult terrain, it is crucial to make a sober assessment of the current state of the forces ranged against it. In the UK, in the wake of the December 2019 election result, it is imperative to consider the long-term obstacles to any attempt to use the Labour Party as an exclusive vehicle for the advancement of socialist politics.
The fact is that the Labour Party has never – not once in its history – moved from opposition to winning a convincing parliamentary majority on a progressive platform. It has won elections when already in government or in wartime coalition, and it has won a tiny unworkable parliamentary majority from opposition. Tony Blair achieved a landslide victory in 1997 by promising Labour’s traditional enemies in the media and the City of London that they would hold a veto over its programme in government. Since the 1980s, the Bennite tradition from which Corbyn came had comforted itself with the certainty that, if only it got the chance to lead the Party on a robust, explicitly socialist platform, it could sweep aside the forces of reaction and finally fulfil its destiny by winning a convincing parliamentary majority. Between 2017 and 2019, that theory was tested to destruction.
As I have argued several times elsewhere, the theory was always predicated on a catastrophic underestimation of the significance of two key institutional features of the British polity: the extraordinary bias of the established press (in England and Wales) towards an ideology of conservative English nationalism; and the fact that the ‘first past the post’ electoral system routinely advantages right-leaning populations of voters who tend to be more evenly spread across suburbs and rural areas, at the expense of those left-leaning constituents who tend to concentrate in cities. The only Labour leader within living memory to take full account of these factors was Blair; and his response was to tailor almost all of his policies and messaging to the prejudices of suburban swing voters and tabloid newspaper proprietors.
The question of what it would mean for the British left to take these factors seriously without simply abandoning any socialist project for Labour will remain absolutely crucial for the foreseeable future. But it is also critical to understand any attempt to address these specific problems in the context of the larger challenge to advance radical politics under relatively adverse conditions: the requirement to build winning coalitions.
Any political force that seeks to challenge established relations of power and inequality must build a broad coalition of social forces. This has been a political truism since at least the seventeenth century. Almost by definition, such a coalition must include sections of the population whose current orientation, self-conception and political consciousness diverge from those of the people who comprise the core of that force. While both the Corbyn and the Sanders movements had tremendous success in building support among forces aligned well to the left of their own explicit projects, each was defeated both by failing to attract enough middle-class liberal ‘progressive’ voters and by failing to convince enough working-class voters that the movement had the capacity to deliver its programme.
In the case of Labour’s 2019 electoral defeat, far too much analysis has focused on one or other of these key factors rather than considering them together. In fact, for entirely understandable reasons, post-mortems have tended to result in contrary assertions about the political significance of the Brexit issue for Labour’s losses between 2017 and 2019. From the ‘hard’ left of the Party, it has been frequently claimed that Labour’s move away from a commitment to implement Brexit without a second referendum cost it crucial working-class votes and seats, dooming it to defeat. From other sections of the Party and the wider commentariat – including the ‘soft’ left – it has been repeatedly pointed out that Labour suffered catastrophic loss of votes (if not, to any great extent, of parliamentary seats) to the Liberal Democrats, Greens and Scottish National Party during the same period, largely because of strongly anti-Brexit voters deserting the Party. Still others have observed that many working-class voters ultimately seemed unconvinced that a Corbyn-led government could implement its socialist project, instead hoping that a Johnson-led Tory administration would at least offer them a measure of stability and modest economic improvement.
The truth is that all of these analyses are simultaneously true. At the same time, the fact is that Labour – including its pro-Brexit wing – never made any systematic effort to challenge the reactionary tabloid nationalism that clearly still plays a role in shaping the consciousness of many voters (especially older working-class voters outside metropolitan centres). The challenge for Labour and the wider left in the coming years will be to address not one or the other of these key obstacles to our project, but all of them simultaneously.
What would this look like in practice? On the one hand, there is no sane or rational approach to Labour’s catastrophic electoral history that does not include an embrace of electoral reform, and cooperation with other parties committed to the same goals wherever possible. Much of the Corbynite left still reacts with revulsion to any suggestion of potential collaboration, in particular when it comes to the Liberal Democrats. Frankly, most of these responses seem based on a fundamental category mistake: they apply political and critical criteria that would be appropriate under pre-revolutionary conditions, when the commitment (or lack of it) to full socialism on the part of possible coalition partners would be a central issue of contemporary political debate. Clearly, we are not currently operating under such conditions, and neither are we likely to be any time soon.
The present historic context is such that the Corbynite left is neither large enough nor strong enough to challenge Conservative hegemony alone, while many other parties and organisations – from the Liberal Democrats to much of the NGO sector to the far left – experience the current pro-Tory bias of our media ecology and electoral system as highly debilitating factors which they all have a shared interest in overcoming. At the same time, the scale of the impending social crisis – both in the wake of a global pandemic and under accelerating climatic breakdown – is such that the need and opportunity to construct broad and inclusive coalitions have never been greater. This is not 1917. Our situation resembles, if anything, the emergency of 1939.
At the same time, there is no question that the greatest obstacle encountered by both the Corbynite left and the Sanders movement has been the limited capacity to organise poor workers, again outside metropolitan centres, and convince them of the viability of their programmes. In an essay such at this, it would be remiss to omit a clichéd remark calling for a determined effort to organise in workplaces and communities, to raise the consciousness and capacities of the working class, while challenging the propaganda of the right. This could have been said – and often has been said – at almost any point and in almost any place, since the earliest inception of the socialist movement. So what is most relevant to emphasise under present conditions is that this effort – crucial as it undoubtedly is – must take place in the context of a willingness to work with multiple organisations and to build a coalition that includes the more progressive sections of the liberal middle classes. Any exclusive emphasis on working-class organisation, on building the Labour Party or on strategic alliances with other parties and organisations will prove inadequate to our task. We must build our coalition out in all directions – to the left, to the right, into the sphere of mainstream media and deeper into the lives of our communities – if we are to have any chance of overcoming the obstacles that face us.