Where Next for the Transatlantic Left?
It was good while it lasted. For a brief shining moment, it seemed as though a new democratic socialist left might be poised simultaneously on the threshold of state power in two of the most important capitalist economies in the advanced industrial world: the United States and the United Kingdom. Writing in the Nation, veteran US political commentator Robert Borosage wrote of a new radical progressive politics that is ‘on the rise, driven by ideas, grassroots energy, and authenticity’, suggesting that between them these forces might ‘create a revolution’ of potentially global significance.
On several occasions at important historical junctures in the past, parallel political developments in the UK and the US have heralded major political shifts and realignments, setting the stage for enduring new political-economic settlements that subsequently spread internationally. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan blazed the trail for neoliberalism. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair instituted the Third Way. And so, in the past few years, socialists faced the tantalising prospect that a new radical transatlantic left might inaugurate another such momentous shift in global politics.
This new transatlantic left was an odd formation politically. It emerged from what was, by historical standards, a position of relative weakness rather than strength. In terms of strategy, it was the political equivalent of a pole vault attempt, as the movements that coalesced around Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders strove for a ‘Great Leap over the institutions’ (as opposed to a ‘Long March through them’) in an audacious and opportunistic grab for the highest levels of state power.* An instinctual rather than a carefully calibrated move, these efforts always represented a long shot – a ‘Hail Mary pass’, in American football parlance – motivated by desperation at the dire condition of a bloodless centre-left politics firmly beached by history, on the one hand, and by the climate clock’s unforgiving countdown to ecological disaster, on the other.
Since Sanders’s formal withdrawal from the US presidential primaries in April 2020, both of these efforts have now fallen short – although they came far closer to succeeding than even their most enthusiastic early supporters had any right to expect. The question now is where this leaves the emergent transatlantic left – and whether, having run headlong into its first major political defeats, these will prove fatal.
As recently as 2015, the idea that the eyes of the international left would be turned hopefully on the fortunes of the UK Labour Party and the US Democratic Party – two of the most deeply compromised and problematic vehicles for progressive political change – would have seemed highly implausible, to say the least. And yet, this is what has transpired. All around the world, a restless political energy has been searching for an outlet, attempting to find a route to the surface, as evidenced in repeated outbursts, from the Arab Spring and Occupy to the student movement, 15-M and Syriza. The cunning of history is such that it erupted spectacularly in the two advanced industrial economies in which neoliberalism was first unleashed, and where its rot has consequently run the deepest.
In the UK, the beneficiary, against all expectations, was the Labour Party. With the shocks of Jeremy Corbyn’s two victorious leadership campaigns, it became evident that a decades-long political ice age was finally coming to an end. The Labour Party’s membership tripled, making it the largest left-wing party in Europe. A radical policy programme was rapidly developed and put in place. ‘It’s been like being in a dark tunnel for a long period of time,’ as John McDonnell put it, ‘and people are staggering into the light.’ When Theresa May called the snap June 2017 general election to annihilate Corbyn, Labour’s vote surged, as one shaken right-wing commentator put it, ‘in a way we’ve never seen before’, with the Party achieving its greatest increase in vote share since 1945, under Attlee’s leadership. Along the way, Corbyn and McDonnell transformed Britain’s national conversation, opening up more political space, and in a shorter time, than anyone in living memory.
Meanwhile, across the pond, similarly momentous political developments were afoot. Bernie Sanders’s call for a ‘political revolution’ became an inspiration to a new generation of activists around the country. Following his 2016 presidential bid, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) gained 50,000 new members, while Our Revolution – an offshoot of the Sanders campaign – built volunteer chapters across the country in order to drive progressive initiatives, take over state and local Democratic Party structures and elect progressives at all levels. Galvanised by the horror of Donald Trump’s election victory over the clapped-out neoliberal centrism of Hillary Clinton, independent groups such as the Justice Democrats have also been helping to organise progressive candidates to challenge conservative Democratic incumbents, while chapters of People’s Action – a national network of community organising groups – have been recruiting and running insurgents for state and local offices.
Following the 2018 mid-term elections, in which the Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) grew to ninety-eight members (about 40 per cent of the Democratic Caucus), and its members chair thirteen major committees, from where they exert important influence and can advance significant reform proposals. Progressive insurgents – most notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley – knocked out longstanding Democratic office holders in the last round of primaries, a warning that other incumbents could not ignore. There is a growing consensus across a broad majority of the country that seeks a bold activist government to address real needs, and the left is on the rise in ways not seen since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Corbyn and Sanders have been both central and incidental to the movements that bear their names. Following a long period of technocratic rule by empty suits, it is no accident that radical new political movements in both countries turned to an earlier generation of veteran political warhorses for their standard-bearers. Each in his own way, Corbyn and Sanders are representatives of an awkward squad that was politically isolated by but somehow survived the neoliberal era intact. Their authenticity and moral authority, accumulated over many years, as well as their belief in the power of the collective, allowed them to function as ‘servant-leaders’ and to embody their movements’ demands for economic and political transformation. It remains to be seen whether the movements to which they lent their names will be able to survive their personal political eclipses.
The early promise of the new transatlantic left now appears to have been dissipated in a round of significant political defeats. In the UK, the 2017 general election was a near victory against all odds, but the aftermath was more complicated. On the one hand, the policy agenda and programme for wielding state power accelerated, but its strength also overtook that of the wider social forces necessary to bring it to fruition. On the other hand, the promise of Corbynism as a movement-building strategy following 2017 was not sustained, and the project eventually succumbed to its own weaknesses and contradictions – including getting wrapped around the axle of Brexit by gravitating increasingly towards a second referendum position that cost Labour dearly in its political heartlands.
The devastating scale of the December 2019 general election defeat has dealt the movement a decapitating blow, forcing Corbyn’s resignation and severing the vital link between a radical party leadership and the mass membership it had created.
By the same token, the Democratic establishment’s unfailing talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory should never be underestimated. Hopes that Sanders was in pole position to take the Democratic nomination and carry the fight to Donald Trump in the general election ran aground, the result of an all-out effort by a hidebound and moribund Democratic Party establishment. Democratic elites coalesced around perhaps their least impressive candidate: a barely cogent and visibly impaired Joe Biden, relic of the Obama era with none of Barack Obama’s redeeming features.
What transpired in the UK and US amounted to an audacious bid to capture the commanding political heights of two of the most important nation states in the world. If successful, this would have been a heroic shortcut, an opportunistic power grab by the left, bypassing the need for years, if not decades, of hard organising and base-building, to seize the state for the benefit of all.
Where does this leave the transatlantic left? We need to recognise how far we’ve come and how fast – but also the limitations of our strategies and what must be done to make up for their deficiencies. We are now in a far stronger position than before, however, in two vital regards.
First, we now know our programme. Over the past few years, for the first time in decades, the left began to chart a viable political-economic path forward, through and beyond the multiple crises – economic, political, social and ecological – of our decaying neoliberal order. The new transatlantic left, if it is anything, is a growing coherence around the need for a set of radical structural interventions to change the shape of the economy and the state. Under Corbyn and John McDonnell, Labour developed a necessary and credible programme to undo the damage wrought by four decades of neoliberalism and make the economy work better for most people – for the many, not the few. It drew upon existing democratic economy models as well as a longer-standing left heritage of strategies developed in response to previous crises. Collectively, these strategies formed the mosaic of a new political economy, of which Corbynism became the tip of the spear.
The democratic economy featured heavily in this agenda, with support for insourcing of local public services and further development of the cooperative sector to address local needs that cannot be insourced, as well as a proposal for inclusive ownership funds (IOFs) that would require large companies to transfer 10 per cent of equity to their employees on a collective basis. This tied in with Labour’s support for Community Wealth Building strategies, made popular by the success of Preston City Council in developing a new set of institutional relationships – the ‘Preston Model’ – that keep wealth circulating locally. Labour’s economic strategy presented a dramatic shift and rebalancing of power away from corporate finance and the City of London to so-called ‘left-behind’ regions, communities and ordinary working people.
These ideas were picked up by Sanders and his supporters, who speak freely of public ownership of utilities and propose an even more radical version of the IOFs. Similarly, the Green New Deal (GND) championed by Ocasio-Cortez and others became the basis for Labour’s Green Industrial Revolution, which included a proposal for a Green Transformation Fund as the vehicle for a £250 billion spending programme committed to a just transition to an environmentally sustainable economy.
The second way in which we are now in a stronger position pertains to the extraordinary unfolding of recent events. What seemed even a matter of months ago to be definitive setbacks have already been overturned by a world in flux and crisis. The coronavirus pandemic is shaping up to be an even larger economic event than the great financial crisis of 2007–8, with potentially far more significant political and economic ramifications over the long haul.
The economic responses to the coronavirus crisis, quite apart from the true scale of the medical emergency, have torn the veil from the last remaining neoliberal assumptions, radically resetting the contours of politics and of what is economically not merely possible but essential. The state is back, in a kind of reverse Wizard of Oz moment. In response to the pandemic, the curtain has been pulled back to reveal, not the shrunken withered state of the neoliberal orthodoxy, but instead the new Leviathan. As we write, our enemies are being forced to consider and even adopt core planks of our programme, not as long-term objectives but as emergency responses.
The new transatlantic left needs to mobilise quickly if we are to continue to shape the direction in which things are moving. We already have many of the policies and strategies this new era requires. Community Wealth Building, the democratic economy, new forms of public-community partnerships and public ownership at all levels, together with a new politics of mutual aid and solidarity – all are critical avenues for action. We must mobilise to demand these policies and show that we can rebuild our broken economies on the basis of a re-localisation and democratisation of economic activity. If we don’t, an ugly alternative is on the horizon: a full-on ‘shock doctrine’ disaster response, combining a new state authoritarianism with ongoing uncontrolled capitalism.
Recent defeats offer us the opportunity to do things properly going forward. Excluded from national-level state power, we are now forced to take the time to do the hard work that was not done in the wake of 2017. We must use the coming years in new ways: for community organising, base and movement building, political education, leadership development and resilience. There is simply no shortcut, no royal road, to the democratic economy. The challenge will be to avoid oscillating wildly, as before, between mutually exclusive poles of electoralism and direct action, but rather to retain the strengths of both and to reach a new, politically effective synthesis.
We must pick ourselves back up and get on with the struggle. We must advance radical self-care and build collective resilience so that we can dig in for the medium term as well as the long haul. Above all, we must practise solidarity in all forms, especially with the most vulnerable, those on the frontlines. In the face of mounting crises, there is an opportunity to grow cooperative networks of mutual care and provision that will strengthen the foundations of the new democratic economy we are already trying to establish. Politics is volatile and history is cunning; the defeats of today may well pave the way for the victories of tomorrow. No matter what, we must be ready to seize the next opportunity to bring about the economic transition that is so urgently required.
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* Edmund Griffiths, ‘The Great Leap over the Institutions’, 13 December 2019, edmundgriffiths.com.