In the Hamburg winter of 1990/1991, I spent long periods shivering in subzero temperatures outside the American consulate. Camped beside the frozen Alster lake, this was a peace vigil set up to protest the second Gulf War, which saw the US-led invasion of Iraq in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, a classic ‘war for oil’ on both sides. We were part of a much broader peace movement in Germany, with large marches and some dramatic direct action by schoolchildren, large numbers of whom walked in circles around major street intersections and brought the city to a halt.
Initially, I had come to the camp as a liaison from the Hamburg Green-Alternative List, a radical movement-oriented part of the Green Party. As I stayed there, the party infighting brought on by German reunification and a series of difficult elections came to seem much less relevant than the ongoing vigil trying to avert mass loss of life. Parties did become relevant from another, and surprising, direction, though: the orthodox Communist Party (DKP) turned out to have large quantities of camping equipment that made it possible for us to keep the camp going through a hard winter.
It later transpired that the DKP, loyal to East Germany in the Cold War context, had maintained a small quasi-military group, training across the border until it fell in 1989. This would have been entirely irrelevant in an actual war but had presumably helped keep some party members active and feeling that they were doing something ‘real’. We were in any case grateful for the tents, camp beds and heating gear, which were put to a less macho use.
From the Green Party to a peace camp to a communist private army, the relationships between social movements and other kinds of politics are not always as straightforward as one might imagine.
Chapter 2 showed what an important part social movements play in shaping our history. We saw social change, state structures, political ideas and popular culture underpinned by struggles from below around class, race and nation, gender and sexuality and much more. You might think, then, that where you find radical ideas and debates, progressive organisations and parties, you would also find a lot of discussion of social movements: after all, if these popular struggles matter, don’t people who care about them move towards the left? Sometimes, and in some places, this is true; but often much of what calls itself ‘the left’ today has little or nothing to say about social movements. This chapter is particularly written for people who are interested in politics, but think of that mostly in terms of parties, states and policies, and see movements as irrelevant. It asks why there might at times be a gulf between ‘the left’ and ‘social movements’, how we can think about what ‘the left’ is from the perspective of movements, and what kinds of relationship might be possible between the two.
For many people on the English-speaking left, the phrase ‘social movements’ has come to carry a lot of baggage. Often, it is understood as specifically referring to ‘new social movements’, a series of struggles which returned to prominence (most were not new issues) in the radical wave of the 1960s and 1970s, including the US Civil Rights Movement and other anti-racist movements, women’s liberation, gay and lesbian struggles, the ecology and anti-nuclear power movements, struggles against war and nuclear weapons and so on. In this understanding, the phrase ‘social movements’ is read as part of very specific arguments within the British and US left about the role of culture and identity, the changing shape of the economy and the working class, and social movements are often understood as something which is by definition opposed to political parties and trade unions.
But this particular definition is rather odd. After all, Marxism in particular – often understood in this particular way of thinking as the opposite of ‘social movements’ – comes out of what has been variously called the workers’ movement or the labour movement. In fact, the original point of the phrase ‘new social movements’, in the continental New Left of those decades, was to ask what the relationship of this new wave of movements was to older social movements – meaning not only the labour movement but also nationalism, peasant struggles, religious movements, movements of the far right, democratic movements and so on.
These older movements regularly had (and sometimes still have) political parties, at times unions, their own journals, intellectuals and many of the things which are now identified with how ‘the left’ organises and social movements are supposed not to. Furthermore, as Colin Barker has shown, Marx’s own work contains a much broader conception of social movement in which not only labour conflicts but also radical-democratic politics, the Irish or Polish national struggles, battles over land or forest rights, opposition to imperialist wars, women’s emancipation and the struggle against established religion all played a part. We need to step back from a clumsy vocabulary which positions ‘the left’ and ‘social movements’ as two different things, and restart the clock on our own thinking.
Talking to comrades and companer@s, it is often clear that they assume that the main reason for writing about a particular form of struggle is to celebrate it, and to propose it as The Way Forward. In this view, there is a constant battle between (for example) talk about parties and talk about movements. The assumption is that we should only write about ideal examples of whichever we believe in, in order to propose that mode of organisation, often for other countries and situations. In this picture, there is no real difference in (say) the issues at stake in organising in Ireland (where a massive working-class movement has just defeated the state on the commodification of water) or England, in the US (with its remarkable wave of mobilisations from Black Lives Matter on) or Germany, in Greece or Argentina (depending on our preferences) and in France or Canada. The real role of ‘the left’ or movement researchers would then be to act as international cheerleaders for the best model, be that Chavez or the Zapatistas, Syriza or Rojava, Argentinian piqueteros or South African shanty-town dwellers – in the belief that whatever model represents ‘international best practice’ will work just as well in one place as in another.
The best Marxist traditions of thinking about social movements, however – those of the ‘British Marxist historians’ like E. P. Thompson and Christopher Hill, for example – do not take this approach. Their starting point was the movements that actually existed in particular times and places, with all their limitations. As Thompson wrote,
I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not.
This is no less true today when we are commenting on an online newspaper article in English about struggles in a shanty town on the far side of the world. Of course, one thing these historians – and in more recent generations writers like Sheila Rowbotham, Peter Linebaugh or Marcus Rediker – were fully aware of was that the movements they researched lost.
At times they lost because of practical political mistakes they made: in England, for example, things might have gone differently with the Levellers or the Chartists. More commonly, though, they lost because they were small movements facing impossible odds, meaning that the present-day left habit of ‘drawing lessons from X’ (in practice, suggesting that if only a given movement had had the right line they could have won) rarely makes sense – and the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ is misplaced. However, movements like the Diggers or the Corresponding Societies were important even when they lost: they expressed the best of what the radical poor were able to articulate intellectually, organisationally and in terms of visions of the future, and they left important legacies in terms of political traditions.
With the study of present-day movements, too, in practice good researchers often write about the movements they know through their own activism, rather than parachuting into movements which they have decided from the outside to be worthy of their attention. Nor are most other participants sitting on the sidelines, waiting to decide what movements they should align themselves with, in the kind of strategic game that some critics seem to imagine. Most commonly, in fact, movements respond to something happening in their participants’ lifeworlds, so that the idea that movement A is worthwhile and movement B isn’t simply misses the (materialist) point.
Being inside movements as well as reflecting on them, the best of present-day research in the area (such as the activist researchers who write for the journal Interface) has no great interest in cheerleading or condemning. After all, it is hard to seriously imagine that celebrating working-class community activism in the pages of an international left publication would do more than attract a few revolutionary tourists, or that condemning the ideas of people occupying farmland to prevent an airport being built will convince them to leave and join an editorial committee instead. Like other activists, researchers often oscillate between moments of deep despair and moments of hope in relation to the movements they are involved in: unsurprisingly so, because people typically get involved in movements when success through ‘normal channels’ seems excluded but alternative forms of activism hold out the possibility of winning in unusual (hence unpredictable) ways.
The questions activist researchers ask are different ones, more political in that they are far more closely tied to the debates among present-day movement participants. Prominent among these are discussions on how to organise and what kinds of action to take; arguments about internal democracy and decision-making; the question of whether this or that organising practice makes it easier or harder for women, migrants, working-class people and so on to get involved; and conflicts over who to make alliances with and where to draw the boundaries of the movement. Our research thus feeds into the process of movement democracy, with all its many faults. It is neither an advertisement for the movement nor a warning against participation, but rather an exploration of what happens when people in a particular society get involved with processes of social struggle.
There is an element of cursing the weather in objecting to the fact that people mobilise for this and not for that, or that when they come together they do so in this way and not in that way. Railing against the practical reality of what people do in movements, for political activists, means actively seeking not to understand it and proposing that what has convinced us personally (or what seems to work in our own lifeworlds) is more right or more real than what has motivated everyone else. If we do the latter, not only do we not understand movements or become any wiser individually, we also make ourselves unable to build serious alliances. We cannot become any better at relating our own organisations to newly arising movement struggles if our first concern is to have an opinion on the movement, rather than to understand what we can learn about the shape of popular struggle today from taking the time to listen and examine the movement more closely.
The tradition of writing I have discussed above comes out of a particular history within the left. Thompson’s generation had become involved in orthodox communist politics under the impact of fascism and above all the European Resistance, a high point of popular struggle which saw at its peak in 1943/1945 collaboration between communists, socialists, anarchists, radical democrats and Trotskyists in opposing fascism and then the arrival of superpower armies on both sides of what would become the Iron Curtain.
In the west, empire and Cold War would set sharp limits to what popular power could achieve. In the east, Soviet power turned ever more clearly against popular movements, culminating in the brutal repression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. One result of these experiences was that this generation left the communist parties, attempted to organise through improvised New Left structures and then committed itself more to supporting popular movements of different kinds. For different activists on the New Left this meant antiwar movements, the new forms of working-class struggle, the revolts of 1968, the women’s movement, the movement against nuclear power and so on. Dissident movements in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union fought many of the same battles, challenging their own states and talking past the censors to unorthodox comrades abroad.
There are many other left histories in the world, and I do not want to place this particular history on a pedestal, except in one respect: it was a history of acknowledging and learning from the mistakes of past formations and attempting to draw practical conclusions. This commitment to learning was once a proud left tradition, but in the present context often the reverse is the case. To be on the left sometimes seems to mean a position of refusing to learn; even, today, celebrating a nostalgic ‘communism’ with no serious attempt to engage with the disaster that was Stalinism. At other times, it becomes a position of pure opinion, separate from actual popular struggle but elevated above it by a schoolmasterly wagging of fingers at the theoretical errors committed by ordinary people who are trying to resist the latest assault on their own lives.
If ‘the Party’ could once claim to be the memory of the class, now today it is all too often the amnesia of the class, an active celebration of refusing to learn from the mistakes of one’s own tradition – since the real point is to act as apologists for that tradition. In this model, whatever theoretical and organisational points define a specific tradition have to be held up as correct in all times and all places, no matter what. Small wonder that such formations are rarely successful, because this is the politics of the stopped clock. Twice a day, any given time will of course be right…
A particularly unhelpful manifestation of this way of thinking is the two different sets of scales on which leftists sometimes weigh movements in commenting on contemporary struggles. For example, the argument might be that this or that movement (the 2011 ‘Occupy’ protests in the US and UK, for example) was not just a failure in its own terms but that this failure was an inevitable result of some theoretical failure (horizontalism, for example) whose wrong-headedness is made visible precisely by the failure of Occupy. And yet this same criterion is not brought to bear on one’s own party or group – which is almost certainly far smaller and with far less effect on the world. We (in our own particular tradition) are to be measured not in terms of how we are actually doing but in terms of (say) the historical significance of the Russian Revolution, or of what is ‘objectively’ needed in order to overcome capitalism today – never mind the fact that we are not within a million miles of being able to do so.
But what is sauce for the goose has to be sauce for the gander. If we want to allow our own organisations the luxury of being small, ineffective and crisis-ridden without concluding from this that we are making some fundamental theoretical mistakes, we have to give movements which are much larger and more effective and have managed to provoke some crisis in the existing order real credit for that. We can and should argue with them, but on fair and concrete terms that reflect the realities they are struggling with – rather than in terms of a wished-for future that is no closer for us than it is for the movements we criticise.
I want to propose a different, and more historically minded, analysis of the relationship between ‘the left’, parties and unions and popular struggle. We have seen just how painfully slow the struggle for democracy was. There were good reasons for this: popular movements and elites alike assumed (at the time entirely reasonably) that if the masses had equal political rights they would use them to redistribute wealth equally. In this context, as Thompson among others has shown, political rights – the freedom of speech and publication, the freedom to organise politically and to demonstrate, the freedom to join trade unions and form political parties, the rights of political refugees not to be deported to the states they were fleeing – were hotly contested and won with great difficulty and many limitations by various forms of liberal, radical-democratic, nationalist and labour struggles.
In this situation (in this respect closer to our own than we might like), popular movements struggled to maintain any kind of representation in the official public sphere. The First International (1864–1876), the first systematic attempt at international working-class organising, was killed as much by its association with the Paris Commune and subsequent repression as by the famous squabble between Marx and the anarchists. More commonly, until the very last decades of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth, working-class parties were unable to enter parliament (where there were meaningful parliaments to enter) so that the interests of working men and women developed peculiar and not always transparent relationships with individual politicians and journalists who represented the radical end of the liberal spectrum.
The waves of repression which swept the European continent, most dramatically in the years following the pan-European revolutions of 1848, meant that sustained popular organisation over decades was an almost impossible achievement. Movements oscillated between existing primarily in the space of popular memory, hidden traditions and clandestine conspiracies on the one hand and sudden outbreaks of mass engagement on the other, threatening the state and usually calling down severe repression.
Labour and workplace organising too was a complex and difficult process, dogged by periods of illegality and repression, capable at times of gaining a strong presence in individual, usually skilled, trades. It was not until the rise of the new mass unionism in the late nineteenth century, around the same time as the new mass parties of the Second International and the generalisation of other forms of mass working-class self-organisation, that trade unions could exist as stable, well-established organisations with professional staff lasting over decades. Indeed, as readers of Michels and Max Weber no less than of Luxemburg and Lenin know, they might become so stable that they were barely capable of moving any more.
Up until this period – the 1880s or 1890s in most countries – ‘party’ did not mean anything like a disciplined body of deputies elected on a single ticket and answerable to a single organisation. Before this it usually meant faction or tendency, as in the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, which declared paradoxically that communists did not form a separate party in any organisational sense. The Manifesto was commissioned from Marx by a small organisation of radical migrants emerging from clandestinity and excited little interest until official condemnation of Marxism as the supposed inspiration of the Paris Commune, two decades later, convinced activists across Europe that there really was a spectre haunting Europe and it was a Marxist one.
The variety of different organisational forms in the early Second International (in particular around the relationship between parties, trade unions and state power); the post-World War I split with Lenin’s Third International and its very specific organisational model; the development of Trotsky’s Fourth International; and then the postwar mutation of the French or Italian communist parties into popular subcultures while those in the Soviet bloc or China became organs of state power – all of this is, or should be, familiar to those who now assert from a supposedly Marxist standpoint the centrality of ‘the party’ as though the two words were a definition rather than a question.
From the transformational moment of 1968, however, the meanings of ‘party’ have changed again. Communist parties had long degenerated into institutions of brutal power in the Soviet bloc and China; in parts of India (or South Africa after 1994), they had become part of the ruling apparatus. Social Democratic parties and the US Democrats were already well on their way to becoming ‘catch-all’ parties; while electoral radical left parties outside these traditions were squeezed into spaces of marginality. In Mexico, the ‘Institutional Revolutionary Party’ killed three to four hundred protesting students in that year.
Most importantly, though, the long 1968 was primarily a revolt against parties: the parties of orthodox Stalinism and its successors in the east, the parties of orthodox social democracy in the west and the parties of national-developmentalism in a country like Mexico. If there is one thing which marks out the revolts of that year from earlier revolutionary waves, it is this scepticism towards existing party forms. The subsequent creation of new parties – from the International Socialist Organization to Die Linke, from today’s Sinn Féin to Syriza and from the Greens to Podemos – remains in practice a (contentious) exploration of this question rather than a simple assertion of ‘the party’.
This is not only a west European, or ‘global North’, question. It is equally and far more a question of what happened to ‘the party’ as a central form of state power under Stalinism, including the last major survivor of the period, the Chinese Communist Party, as well as those in North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba. And in the majority of the world, it is the question of the disappointments of popular beliefs in the state and party forms associated with independence and postcolonial national-developmentalism.
In the run-up to independence and the decades immediately following, parties such as the Indian National Congress, Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, Ireland’s Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, South Africa’s African National Congress and many more were able to secure long-term power as the institutional form through which a movement became a state. They combined a genuine capacity for mass mobilisation with state power and a programme for some economic redistribution combined with industrial development, despite the very different periods involved: the 1920s for Mexico and Ireland, the 1940s and 1950s for much of Asia and Africa, the 1990s for South Africa. Today, it is not just the credibility of parties which has been burned away by these experiences of failed popular hopes; it is the question of what ‘the party’ actually means in practice.
I am arguing two things. First, in the labour and peasant movements, in national-democratic and anti-colonial movements and for that matter in religious and fascist movements, parties were often an integral, even the dominant, part of movements. (Sinn Féin members still talk of ‘the republican movement’ today.) Unions, journals and newspapers, and the other organisational forms now identified with ‘the left’ as distinct from movements were an integral part and parcel of this historical period, which is broadly speaking the moment of ‘organised capitalism’, between the rise of sustained mass organisation from below in the late nineteenth century and before World War I, via the highpoint of the welfare state compromise, state socialism and postcolonial national-developmentalism, to the crisis of 1968 and the turn, sooner or later, to neoliberalism in all of these contexts.
Second, the dominant aspect of these forms became intimately associated with state power in different parts of the world – as social democracy, official nationalism, Soviet-type states and so on – so that after the collapse of this period we have seen them maintain a zombie-like existence, ever more closely associated with neoliberal politics – whether European centre-left parties, India’s CPI(M), the ANC in South Africa or the Chinese communist party. As Tomás MacSheoin pointed out in response to an earlier draft of this book, if movement-linked parties once set out to capture the state, it is at least as true to say that the state wound up capturing the party. Movements need to learn from this experience: not necessarily to reject parties per se, but to think seriously about how and in what way parties can actually further movement struggles.
Partly as a result, the bulk of popular movements in recent years have preferred to invest less heavily in hopes of a new kind of party. In the west, the radical and minority form of this kind of left has all too often continued in existence without any sustained relationship to popular movements, using the party form as a means of its own organisational survival but at the cost of an institutionalised separation from popular struggle, attempting in different ways to intervene from outside. I say this not as criticism but as observation, because it helps us to understand the difficulties involved better.
Today we do see a handful of cases where this is not the case, and it is worth noting how different they are one from another: those South American contexts where radical parties, far more organically linked to popular movements, have taken control of the state – themselves varying from Cuba to Ecuador and from Brazil until 2016 to Venezuela; Anglo-American experiences of trying to infuse the existing Labour and Democratic parties with movement content via Momentum or Bernie Sanders and European explorations varying from Syriza to Podemos and from Die Linke to the Pirate Party.
Once again, ‘the party’ is a question – notably, its relationship to social movements; and many of the experiments just mentioned, from Greece to Bolivia, have seen severe conflicts with social movements. If, in many countries, traditions of popular struggle feel well and truly burnt, exploited or betrayed by political parties, the first response of a left worth any respect should be to take that position seriously and listen to it. Only then, as I will argue, to ask how the left can contribute positively to movement development and building real counter-power.
Nothing is less helpful, in this complex and contradictory context, than to insist on the unproblematic meaning of ‘the party’ and to expect others to agree, after this long and difficult history, that ‘the party’ is self-evidently the way forward to systemic transformation. Party members do not, after all, always have much to show by way of evidence for this belief. In many countries, movement activists can reasonably observe that their efforts have tended to bear rather more fruit than those of radical parties. Hence, the aspects which convince party members and around which they build their own identities are not the only, or even the main, things that other activists think of when they hear the word ‘party’. In this context, neither defensiveness nor attacking other activists who are expressing a very widespread historical experience are serious political strategies for those who aspire to lead popular struggles for change.
Part of the difficulty is the primacy of internal politics on the left. In moments of political defeat – which the neoliberal period in general was up to the rise of the anti-capitalist ‘movement of movements’ from the late 1990s on – the organisations which survive and persist tend to be those which invest most heavily in internal identity formation and organisational maintenance. Those which are most open to the wider world tend to get pulled apart, or co-opted, as happened notably to those green parties which once expressed feminist, ecological and antiwar movements that had radically challenged state power on a very large scale. On the Marxist left, and especially in the English-speaking world (itself increasingly dominant culturally in the neoliberal period), a belief in ‘the party’ became defining of what it meant to be ‘a Marxist’ as against ‘an anarchist’. At one time, different variants of Marxism were further defined by allegiance to a specific model of the party, which remains the case notably within Trotskyism.
In recent years – particularly in this same Anglophone world where there is no real memory of a large-scale Marxist party, whether of the French, Italian, Soviet or Indian kinds – we are seeing a new kind of contentless nostalgia for ‘the party’, innocent of any sense of this history. It has become a symbolic marker of radicalism to attach hammers and sickles to logos, or to joke about airbrushing and gulags, as though these things never had a real meaning. (Self-identified ‘tankies’ may well have little or no idea of the origins of the name, in the Soviet invasion of Hungary to put down a popular uprising.) It goes without saying that this represents something of the sheer unlikeliness of such movements ever achieving state power; but it also represents a very un-Marxist refusal to learn from our own history – as well as a barrier to serious solidarity with movements in majority world countries and elsewhere where orthodox, Soviet- or Chinese-aligned parties exist as oppressive and exploitative parts of the system rather than as part of popular struggle.
There are material reasons for this new contentlessness. If we think further about the real organisational meaning of ‘the left’ in most countries today, we are far from the older situation where the typical left intellectual was a paid organiser, writer or politician directly accountable to a left party or union. Much more commonly, today’s left intellectual exists within ‘traditional intellectual’ relationships: of the university, commercial journalism, publishing and the media. To assert themselves within this sphere as left intellectuals, they need to commodify certain kinds of identity marker and develop a sort of left celebrity status. These are real organisational relationships, with different practical effects in the kinds of relations they create between the intellectual and their audience, what these two positions ask of one another and what kinds of communication they privilege.
An important aspect of this last point is a new politics of opinion, visible not only on social media but equally in the kind of argument which seeks to assert one’s political identity by celebrating this and condemning that – rather than, in a more political mode, finding ways to build alliances across difference and support the more radical tendencies within one’s own context. Indeed the politics of opinion, particularly as manifested in the online space, is a politics which is not about convincing other people to do things together; it is a politics of asserting one’s own identity by attacking others for the benefit of an audience.
The left variant of this is no better, and no less a form of identity politics, than what it condemns under that name. It is not only in its moralising forms, but equally in its ‘more radical than thou’ forms, that such a politics of pure opinion is actively destructive to any chance of building counter-hegemonic power – which depends precisely on listening carefully to what other people say about what they need, how they are organising and where they want to go, and then trying to build links which help to advance the process; as Marx put it, ‘In the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement’.
Where parties have been willing to listen, remarkable things have happened, as in the two most dramatic present-day revolutions. In Mexico’s Chiapas, a Marxist-Leninist group aiming at a conventional kind of revolution made contacts with indigenous activists and discovered, as they put it, that they had been resisting colonisation for the past five hundred years. The urban leftists had the good sense and humility to listen to what the peasants had to tell them about this resistance and existing movements in the region. The ensuing Zapatista movement, driven from below with decisions made by all participants and foregrounding indigenous and women’s struggles, has been able to defeat the Mexican state for nearly quarter of a century.
In Syrian and Turkish Kurdistan, the authoritarian communist PKK remade itself substantially in the 2000s as its imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan read the writings of the US anarchist and social ecologist Murray Bookchin and its cadres reflected on the failures of their original strategy. In the extraordinarily difficult conditions of the Syrian civil war, the Rojava region has seen an autonomous, grass roots-democratic popular revolution, working across different ethnic groups. The feminist dimension of this revolution has become dramatically visible in the women’s military units fighting against ISIS and the Turkish invasion. Effective contemporary revolutions, then, offer some strong empirical support for the proposition that parties which are willing to listen and learn, rather than propose eternal truths, may contribute significantly to genuine popular rule, ethnic liberation, the defeat of capitalism and patriarchy.
In a broader perspective again, all of the things we have been discussing – left intellectuals, radical academia, alternative media, political parties, trade unions, but also credit unions, community organising, solidarity economy, NGOs and so on – typically have their origins in social movements. There is then – for all of them – a serious question both over whether they can still be considered as part of movements, but also the question of whether it is worth making the attempt to take them back, in whole or in part.
This argument is very familiar in relation to different forms of labour struggle: can we, should we, fight within existing trade unions, given the long-term history of most actually existing union organisations? Are they irredeemably ossified and incorporated within the system? Is there scope – as well, or instead – for new forms of worker organising? And if so, is the question primarily one of how to support new emerging forms or does it make sense to actively carry out missionary work on behalf of (for example) social movement unionism or whole worker organising?
If we think in this way, across this whole organisational range, we are asking a much clearer political question. On the one hand, there is a long history of popular struggle generating new and creative institutional forms, which have inflected large parts of society in many different ways, and (on the whole) positively. If none of these forms existed today, there would be little hope indeed. At the same time, many of these forms seem to be thoroughly co-opted by the institutions of neoliberal capitalism, the nation state and cultural conservatism; while some have colluded deeply in repressing popular struggles. Understanding this paradoxical dialectic helps us to see both the ways in which movements from below have helped make the modern world, and the ways in which movements from above have reshaped our movements and what were once their institutions.
Strictly speaking, then, the question is not one of movements versus parties: it is one of whether a particular party, or party form, can still be considered a real part of social movement struggles, or if it represents something else, a ‘gathered church of the elect’ standing above and apart from those struggles and condemning their theological failings. In fact, this question goes for the left as a whole.
The unqualified phrase ‘the left’ is beloved of subeditors for precisely the same reason as it is useless to help us think. In a subtitle, ‘The left must …’ or ‘The left’s problem with …’ works well precisely because it is a fudge, an empty signifier into which everyone can read whatever suits them best. It should be fairly obvious that in most countries today, and especially in the US and UK, there is no ‘real’ meaning of the left in (to put it baldly) the traditional Marxist terms of concrete political organisation. Nobody would seriously argue that we have a present-day equivalent of the French Revolution’s Assemblée in which one could identify those deputies sitting on one side of the room and radically opposed to the power of church and king as ‘the left’.
Instead, there is a constant practical question: if within society (whether within parliaments or opinion columns) there are forces which can be said to represent that same general tendency but in our present circumstances, what are they? There is therefore an argument, first, as to what we include on the left. If we grant – as we usually do since the later nineteenth century – that it must include not only radical-democratic but also socialist (in the sense of anti-capitalist) visions of the future, do we also grant that feminism, anti-racism, LGBTQI, disability activism and so on belong there in the same way despite their conservative wings? After all, there are also right-wing radical democrats, conservative trade unionists and one-nation socialists.
Second, do we feel that ‘the left’ necessarily relates to a particular force in society – or even, is it defined by such a relationship? Marx was wary of the term ‘socialism’ in 1848 precisely because it represented a programme of the radical middle class. More specifically, does the left have to have concrete social points of reference (working-class people, women, ethnic and racial minorities and so on, who are often the same people in practice) – and, more threateningly for the neoliberal centre-left and a certain kind of radical intellectual – does it have to have some structures of democracy, participation, accountability, dialogue, collaboration and so on that structure this relationship? In other words, is ‘the left’ in whatever form a transcription into some more public articulation of social movements? Or does it stand in glorious isolation from these?
Third, where in society does this left exist? In the early twenty-first century, it rarely exists in parliaments – not so much because of active repression in most countries (despite some vicious exceptions like Turkey and Russia) but rather because we have returned to the late nineteenth-century situation where the left may have some relationship with liberal forces in the official public sphere but largely exists outside of these. Certainly, we cannot talk of ‘the left’ in a parliamentary sense in anything like the way one could even fifty years ago, on the eve of 1968.
In fact – as the preceding discussion has hopefully shown – some of the liveliest debates are not really about the political vision of the left, or even about the proposition that the left should have some kind of active and two-way relationship with popular actors, but rather about what organisational forms best express this, today. This debate, I would suggest as a student of social movements, will be won in practice by those who develop the most effective and sustainable organisational forms for the conditions people are actually trying to organise under, rather than by those who argue loudest (and often against all the evidence) for the universal suitability of their particular model.
We can think about this in two ways. First, from a historical point of view, ‘the left’ as it exists at any concrete point in time represents something like an archaeological sediment of movement history, a combination of more or less fossilised forms that once helped to shake empires and force capital to organise redistribution and provide welfare, as well as many individual elements of this history – particularly intellectuals, theoretical traditions, periodicals and small organisations – which have taken on a life of their own, for good or ill. (As with language and culture, so too in any political tradition we often practise and justify given ways of doing things as an identity marker, with little real idea of where they have come from.)
The left is thus only in part made up of people who have entered the left from movements. It equally includes people who have entered this left directly, in its discrete forms (today often via social media or the university), and are only aware of its roots in this longer movement history to the extent that they learn about it through sectarian circuits, reproducing the many blind spots particular to that specific tradition. This is one important reason why many people think of ‘the left’ as a sort of Platonic entity, existing prior to and even against actual popular agency.
Second, however, what gives ‘the left’ real life is that in one way or another it includes – although it is by no means restricted to – the best of many movements. Many people, having become involved in movements, come to see a wider picture and come to feel the need for some form of theory, organisation and vision which goes beyond that particular experience and connects multiple struggles – over time, across space and between different social groups and conflicts.
This is, incidentally, the vision Marx presented for his imaginary communist party (faction) in 1848: a coming together of the most determined, most insightful and most strategically minded activists from the struggles of the day. Comparable visions have been conjured up by many since: from Gramsci’s idea of the party enabling a proto-hegemonic alliance between the most conscious elements of urban workers, the rural poor and for that matter intellectuals (under working-class leadership), to some of the best radical left and left-green visions after 1968 of a ‘social movement party’. To mention these different histories is at once to indicate a sense of the common challenge, but also the vast differences that lie between them.
It is also worth noting that this ‘party’ role can be carried out within an anti-authoritarian framework, geared to the coming together of grass roots struggles which do not seek to have a common line or electoral programme, but rather seek to find what could be called their ‘highest common denominator’ in the same process of mutual radicalisation that goes together with movement development in general. As in the nineteenth century or under conditions of clandestinity, it is important not to fetishise electoral politics or ideology as defining what a ‘party’ is.
From a Marxist point of view, as I have argued elsewhere, the real question is not whether ‘the party’ is a good or bad thing for movements in the abstract, separate from any consideration of the level of movement development or the concrete organisational nature of a specific party. Rather, a party is a good thing for movement development precisely to the extent that it actively contributes towards connecting previously separate struggles, bringing large sections of these movements with it in a real process of deepening political consciousness in ways that arise organically out of movements’ own needs and learning processes, and in this way helping what Lukács called ‘the point of view of totality’, of the whole social order, to become visible and contested in ways that are connected to real social agency rather than an abstract idea.
This is the programme which I and others have articulated as one of ‘learning from each other’s struggles’: one in which the basic position is not one of a separate elite judging popular movements and approaching them in an instrumental way, but rather one of activists involved in different ways in the many different learning processes that go on in social movements, who come to understand their own needs, struggles and visions more clearly in the encounter with each other.
For members of ‘the left’ who do not come from this process, the challenge – if they are serious about actual popular agency and do not just seek organisational reproduction as a goal in itself – is to engage in this dialogue constructively and, if they have nothing specific to offer in terms of their own social experiences and struggles, to help transmit learning from other generations and other places in ways which help to build links of solidarity and to deepen strategic thinking.
Movement activists often need this learning and understanding, when it is presented as part of a dialogue of equals and a contribution to their own struggles. If people do not have a personal, family or community background in struggle, it can be a huge effort to reinvent the wheel, whether in terms of tactics and strategies, making links beyond an individual issue or beyond a single place, and perhaps most fundamentally seeing the structural and interest blockages that stand in the way of genuine systematic change. The necessary arguments over the boundaries of a movement and its relationship to other movements – the development of a bigger picture and deeper alliances or the choice to ally with elites in return for limited local concessions – are shaped by this learning. The left has much to offer in this context.
The challenge is then to overcome the historical alienation of the left, the extent to which it has become an object originally produced by movements but now standing as separate and often opposed to them. This might be a double movement, both (as suggested above) a movement of people who come from the left and learn to understand their own knowledge and practice more deeply as the sedimented product of earlier popular struggles, and to translate it back for present-day generations and through processes of building alliances and solidarity – and one of social movements coming to reclaim ‘the left’ as their own terrain, if necessary against the career celebrities and the bureaucrats, or rather against those who choose to prioritise organisational reproduction and their own internal status over everything else.
‘The left’, in this vision, is what survives, beyond the struggles of the moment, of the work of popular movements, deformed by the conditions of defeat and marginalisation, co-optation and commodification, academicisation and routinisation in which the institutions and traditions produced by movements have had to try to survive. In order to continue as a left, it needs the constant, life-giving encounter with the process of movement struggles, learning and development and the constant inclusion of new people shaped in this process.
Part of what defines moments of political advance is that they are times when, far from the left being primarily constituted of survival mechanisms, it is transformed by this encounter with new people and experiences. When movements remake not only the party, but also the radical press, trade unions, the left academy, NGOs, left publishing, popular memory, community organisations, alternative media, popular art and all the rest of it – these are also the moments in which popular movements make history beyond this point and become able to imagine transforming the whole social order in line with their own practices and visions.
If we are not in a moment of political advance today, we are certainly in a moment of organic crisis of the social order. This doesn’t just mean the ‘morbid symptoms’ of the different ways in which competing ruling-class factions attempt to define ways forward for themselves. The corruption and soft coups of a Temer or a Zuma, the religious right movements underpinning a Modi or an Erdoğan, the tightening grip of a Xi or a Sisi, the sabre-rattling of a Putin, the spectacle of a Trump or the witlessness of Brexit: these all represent more or less desperate experiments, on the part of ruling classes which are no longer able to continue ruling as they have done, or whose populations are no longer willing to going on being ruled as they have been.
The challenge in this situation is to see if and how far our movements are capable of constructing an alternative way out – which doesn’t mean primarily the creation of a ‘vision’, in the sense of a party manifesto, a think tank report or a cookbook for the future, but the construction of alliances of popular movements with a clear identification of the opponent and a serious attempt to act as challengers for the power to shape society. If we are already active within existing institutions connected to movements, our job is then to see if we can help to make them work for movements in this period, rather than remaining self-referential organisations focussed primarily on their own reproduction: can we ‘reclaim, recycle and reuse’?
I hope it is clear, then, that this chapter is not intended as an attack on particular organisations or even an ‘if the cap fits, wear it!’ Rather, it is intended to encourage activists organised in parties, radical periodicals and other ‘left’ projects to keep asking themselves seriously if those projects do contribute in real ways to the development of movements, and if they are growing and learning from their engagement with movement struggles.
Conversely, of course, it is also an encouragement to activists and organisers who identify primarily with a particular struggle to consider how far their movement organisations reach beyond themselves to make allies, to generalise the struggle at a higher level and to understand the structure they are resisting more deeply – and to ask themselves how they can contribute to sharing what they have learnt from their own struggles with new generations of activists in other movements, other places and (as history and age catch up with us all) other times.