Reflections on the Future of the Left

David Coates, David Coates

• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781788210942
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What is the future for progressive politics in advanced capitalism? With its political fortunes so low, how might the Left move forward?

These essays from leading left intellectuals – Dean Baker, Fred Block, David Coates, Hilary Wainwright, Colin Crouch, Wolfgang Streeck, Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin and Matthew Watson – reflect on the scale and nature of the task that the Left now faces and consider the following questions:

• What in modern capitalism has brought the Left to this impasse? • What role has the Left played in its own failings? • What lessons can be learnt for progressive politics going forward? • What are the immediate options and how can they best be pursued?

The views and opinions expressed vary, but all offer searching insights into the task the Left now faces. All point to the intellectual and practical experience on which the Left now needs to draw as it deals with its contemporary challenges. These essays represent a major statement on the future for centre-left politics and offer a frank appraisal of the Left's current capacity to keep conservatism at bay and to strengthen radical politics again.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

David Coates

“Social democracy is at a dead end, but is by no means dead”

Ingo Schmidt¹

“Europe’s centre-left progressive politics is in crisis, maybe in its most existentialist crisis since the foundation of the social democratic movement in the late nineteenth century”

Christian Schweiger²

“The unique place of the social democrat to be the champion of the people is over and is never coming back”

Neal Lawson³

“Labour is becoming a toxic brand. It is perceived by voters as a party that supports an ‘open door’ approach to immigration, lacks credibility on the economy, and is a ‘soft touch’ on welfare spending”

Jon Cruddas⁴

“People are fed up”

Jeremy Corbyn⁵

If further proof were still needed of the fact that one swallow does not make a summer, try comparing the performance of the Labour Party in the UK’s June 2017 general election with that of the French Socialist Party in the elections for the National Assembly, the first round of which occurred just three days after the UK election. In both cases, centre-left parties went down to expected defeat: but whereas in the British election, the Labour Party’s unexpectedly strong performance cost the Conservative Government its majority, in the French one the Socialist Party and its allies, in government as recently as the previous month, lost all but 44 of their 284 seats. Given that the French performance was by far the more typical of the two, given recent results in both American and European elections, it remains the case, therefore, that – the results of the 2017 UK general election notwithstanding – these are not great days for centre-left parties in developed capitalisms. And a hundred years out from the Russian Revolution, they are even worse days for the revolutionary Left. Indeed, it is quite difficult to think of a recent time in which left-wing prospects of either a moderate or a more radical kind have looked so problematic. Which means, among other things, that reflecting on the future of the Left against such a background is likely to be neither an easy nor a pleasing affair; but then, precisely because it is not, the need for such a reflection has arguably never been greater.

As I have long understood it, the first rule of politics is always this: that if you are in a hole, the initial thing that you must do is to stop digging. Across the western world, the contemporary Left is in a serious hole: which is why the precise nature of the hole, the manner of its creation, the immediate consequence of its existence, and the best way to find the ladder out – understanding all these dimensions of the Left’s present predicament are now key requirements for the successful achievement of any political project designed to return progressives to power. The only way to ensure that the present underperformance of progressive forces becomes the lowest point of their political trajectory over time, rather than part of their permanent condition, is to have all of us who care about progressive values concentrate on trajectory improvement. We need, as a matter of urgency, to find a combination of institutions, strategies and programmes that is capable of recreating a broad basis of support for left-wing causes. And because that is so, quite what those institutions need to be, what strategies they should follow, and what policy commitments should go with them – these basic design questions are collectively the subject matter of the essays gathered here. The purpose of this introduction is to set those essays in their shared context, and to explain how and why they have been pulled together.

I

Labour Party supporters in the United Kingdom woke on 9 June 2017 to discover an overnight improvement in the Labour vote, and in its representation in Parliament, that few had anticipated just 24 hours before: and for very good reason. Because until that point, and over the last half-decade, support for left-wing political parties across Europe and North America had steadily sunk to a new low: so low indeed that Árni Árnason recently asked “is 6% the new norm for the progressive left”⁶ and Sheri Berman recently wrote that “the European centre-left risks irrelevance”.⁷ The 2017 UK election stands now as an oasis of hope amid the more general desert of centre-left fortunes across western Europe to which Sheri Berman referred, as in its own way did the size and character of the vote accruing to Hillary Clinton as she fought Donald J. Trump for the US presidency just seven months earlier. But on either side of the Atlantic, it is still a desert out there, when examined calmly from even a moderate (and certainly from a more radical) progressive point of view. Hillary Clinton fought, but she also lost – and lost to Donald J. Trump of all people. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party did better than expected, but still lost – and lost in a general election in which both main parties increased their share of the vote. How different is all this from the heady days of 1997, when an untested set of New Labour parliamentarians could sweep to power by inflicting on a Conservative Party once led by Margaret Thatcher its heaviest electoral defeat since 1846; or from 2008, when a young and charismatic Barack Obama could reach the White House merely by asserting that “yes, we can!”? Just two decades later in the UK case, and less than a decade in the American one, power in each political system has shifted into highly reactionary hands: leaving progressive forces in the United States facing a deliberate deconstruction of the regulatory state by ultra-libertarian Republicans and a charlatan president; and leaving the Left in the UK watching a minority Tory government (one now suddenly entirely dependent on the support of right-wing Ulster MPs) preparing to pull the United Kingdom out of the European Union – out of the one supra-national institution, that is, within which centre-left values and practices had until recently found their firmest embodiment.

Quite why this change of political fortune had occurred remains a matter of both central importance and huge controversy in left-wing circles on both sides of the Atlantic, as a later reading of the essays gathered here will only underscore. But four things are at least clear, and worth noting as a shared framework for everything that follows.

The first is that, on both sides of the Atlantic, significant numbers of voters in traditionally left-wing voting constituencies have, in a series of recent elections, stopped voting for centre-left parties. They have turned instead either to conservative parties offering a more centrist message;⁸ or, turning away from both mainstream political currents altogether, have become enthusiastic supporters of rightwing populist parties and figures. Asbjørn Wahl recently put it this way, and he is right.

Large parts of the western working class now seem to have gathered around right populists, demagogues and racists. They vote for reactionary and fascistoid political parties. They helped to vote the UK out of the EU and to make Trump president of the world’s superpower number one, and they vote so massively for the far right political parties that the latter have government power in sight throughout several of Europe’s most populous countries. Since working people traditionally are expected to vote for the left, this creates unrest, insecurity, and confusion among experts, as well as commentators and mainstream politicians – particularly in the labour movement.⁹

This working-class realignment is not simply an American and a British phenomenon, though it is certainly the most significant feature of contemporary American politics, and of UK politics both in the 2015 general election and in the referendum on EU membership that followed a year later. For the rise of authoritarian populism is also marked across much of western and southern Europe – from France and Holland in the north to Spain and Greece in the south. At least along the Mediterranean rim, however, the defection from centre-left parties has been as much a move to the left as to the right – politics there have polarized, beaching the moderate centre – but not in either the US or the UK. In the US in 2016, Donald Trump gathered crucial working-class votes in key swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio; and in the UK in 2016, rightwing Conservatives and the crude nationalism of UKIP combined to produce a successful referendum bid to take the UK out of the European Union. In the UK case at least, much of that UKIP vote quickly returned to the two main parties; but even there, the gap persisted between the Labour Party and sections of its traditional base. To quote Robert Ford:

Labour, founded as the party of the working class, and focused on redistributing resources from the rich to the poor, gained the most ground in 2017 in seats with the largest concentrations of middle-class professionals and the rich. The Conservatives, long the party of capital and the middle class, made their largest gains in the poorest seats in England and Wales. Even more remarkably, after years of austerity, the Conservatives’ advance on 2015 was largest in the seats where average income fell most over the past five years, while the party gained no ground at all in the seats where average income rose most.¹⁰

The second general point worthy of note as we begin to reflect upon the future of the Left is one related to why this limited but real degree of working class political realignment is now occurring. Many traditionally left-leaning voters seem to have turned away from their normal political loyalties in part because of the severity of the economic and social conditions to which they are increasingly exposed. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War brought members of well-organized labour movements in western Europe, and of less well-organized ones in North America, into increased competition with lower-paid and even less well-organized workers in former communist states; and facilitated the increasing movement of manufacturing employment out of core capitalisms to developing ones. The years of neoliberal ascendancy that coincided with this Cold War collapse were accompanied by sharp increases in inequalities of wealth and income, before culminating in the most severe financial crisis since the 1930s, and in an associated recession of unprecedented depth and (in many weaker economies) longevity. Both the inequality and the recession hit traditional left-wing supporters hard – particularly those supporters locked away in communities that were heavily dependent for their own prosperity on the production of traditional forms of energy, or of manufactured commodities that could be produced more cheaply elsewhere. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that as more and more people found their own economic circumstances depleted and the prospects for their children diminished, they should have shifted their political allegiance to parties with no authorial responsibility for any of those adverse developments, and to parties that – because they lacked any role in the creation of these worsened conditions – could address them openly, and offer ostensibly effective and simple solutions for their resolution. And that the solutions on offer, particularly in 2016, were and are invariably backward-looking – Donald J. Trump promising to make America great again, and Nigel Farage’s UKIP exploiting electoral desires to “take back control” – tells us something else of importance too. It underscores the extent to which the underlying premise of centre-left politics – a faith in progress over time – has been eroded in sections of electorates who “no longer believe that the future will bring them material improvement and that their children will have a better life than their own”. Or, as Jean Pisani-Ferry recently put it: “They look backward because they are afraid to look ahead”.¹¹

One might well have thought – certainly at the height of the financial crisis, many of us did – that the main beneficiaries of this growing awareness of the limits of deregulated capitalism would be parties of at least the centre-left, and possibly of more radical leftism too. But the third shared feature of our current condition is that this “great moving left show” has not occurred, and has not done so in large measure because of the authorial responsibility for our current malaise that parties of the centre-left in both North America and the European Union share with their more conservative opponents. Centre-left parties are currently hemorrhaging support because of their failure, when last in power, to break fundamentally with the neoliberalism of the Right. It is striking that a financial crisis as severe as that of 2008, and an initially discrediting of neoliberal financial deregula...