What use is the left?

What is the left for? I don’t mean that literally, though some wag would surely answer ‘absolutely nothing’. But, rather, what is it that ‘the left believe’? For many on the left the very question would seem absurd. We are for lots of things – equality, justice, democracy etc. And, so we are. But what do we actually mean by these things?

These thoughts have been in my mind for a little while (I studied political philosophy so they were sort of the bread and butter of the job), but were brought to the forefront of my mind following a comment made by somebody after my post last week. Actually, it was my cousin who made the comment but that is irrelevant.

The comment concerned the left’s commitment to changing society and it was this that made me realise that my own socialist journey did not start with an analysis of capitalism, but was rather motivated by a desire for a Labour government. Not everybody takes the same political journey and for many people their commitment to change seems to start and stop at changing the government.

As I have mentioned previously I joined the Labour Party in 1983. I’d like to say it was because I was infused with the spirit of socialism, but actually I was simply sick of Thatcher and felt it was time to get involved and do something about it. Perhaps I should have called this post ‘Margaret Thatcher, my part in her downfall’! 

Joining a party at election time was, and presumably still is, a weird experience. Having contacted the Labour Party on the phone saying “I’d like to help kick out the Tories”, I was invited to the campaign headquarters in the ‘local’ Labour Club. Well, local as in a 45 minute walk away, but I was unemployed and motivated and had time on my hands. I’m not sure what I expected but I know I was bitterly disappointed to be told that the best way I could get the Tories out was to spend an afternoon putting leaflets into envelopes. Perhaps I’d expected to be given a rifle or sent to erect barricades, but the whole thing seemed to me a long way from what I imagined politics to be.

I quickly graduated from envelope stuffing to actual canvassing, but as I knocked on doors I realised that nobody had actually told me what I was supposed to say. However, I was told, bizarrely, not to get into any arguments. It may not surprise anybody who knows me that I completely ignored that advice and would spend far too much time (according to the people with the boards) trying to convince Tories of the error of their ways and cajoling Labour supporters to do more than just vote.

We lost that election, dear reader. But, as it progressed I realised that, contrary to what I had believed at the outset of this journey, I was actually on the left of the party! I quickly made contact with other left-wingers including the local branch of Militant. Literally two men, and a very nice woman who was married to one of the men. 

If it had not been for Militant I would have received no political education beyond my own experiences. I attended Labour Party meetings but found them as dull as an evening with John Major. Attempts to introduce political discussion were invariably sidetracked in favour of some bureaucratic wrangling. I became Branch Chair to try to change things, but the last thing the local membership wanted was a discussion of Nicaragua or economics, or Labour history. Far better to concentrate on important things like raising money for the next local elections where we would knock on doors and avoid politics like the plague in the hope of enthusing people to leave their homes on polling day and vote in a Labour Council that would then implement the Tory Governments cuts for them.

Through Militant, the Socialist Workers Party (who I came into contact with when I went back into higher education), the Communist Party and the numerous other fringe groups I met at the various demos I started attending I began to learn about the history of working class struggle, the failures of successive Labour governments to bring about real change and, crucially, Marxism. I became an avid reader immersing myself in left-wing politics. I was processing this information like mad, and forming my own ideas about what needed to be done.

Within the Labour Party, especially once Militant were expelled, there appeared to be no guiding theory or even intellectual current with any kind of explanation of society. All we heard were vague commitments to equality or fairness without even a reference to R.H. Tawney or John Rawls. Everything was subsumed toward what Ralph Miliband termed Parliamentary Socialism. At least sellers of Militant, Socialist Worker and Workers Power seemed to have some genuine commitment to changing society, even if too many of them believed they were living in Petrograd in 1917.

Okay, I know the majority of people reading this are Labour Party members and many of you will have encountered left-wing paper sellers at various events and been thoroughly pissed off by their certainty that they know best. But, what is the Labour left putting forward as an alternative. Since the so-called fall of communism in 1989 and what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history” it is as if we have lost the confidence to construct a theory of society. Anything which posits capitalism as the problem runs far too close to Marxism for too many people.

This has led the left in Britain and elsewhere to adopt a kind of relativist nihilism, seeing all theories as essentially the same and equally dangerous. It means that “electing a Labour government” or even “electing a left-wing leader” is as much theory as we need. When the Berlin Wall was sent crumbling it was as if theory was no longer something ordinary people could be involved in or excited by, it has become the sole property of intellectuals such as Zygmunt Bauman who produce pages and pages of drivel for undergraduates whose main aim, beyond impressing their friends, is to drain any hope of real change from yet another generation of young people.

Theory does not have to be about overcoming capitalism, though my personal favourites tend to be. It is possible to have a theory of society that sees socialism as emerging through the planned management of the capitalist economy. This was the view of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the founders of the Fabian Society. It’s not a theory I personally think holds up to scrutiny but developing it would at least allow its intellectual basis to be challenged. In other words, in saying that we are not concerned enough with theory it is not inevitable that the theory we adopt would necessarily be Marxist, though it is the theory in my view that best explains modern capitalism. It was not disproved by the fall of the Soviet Union any more than the theory of gravity is disproved by weightlessness in space.

If the left in the Labour Party is to survive, particularly if the right win the leadership, then we must do more than think like bureaucrats with carefully constructed organisational structures. We must be more than just a group of people vying for positions simply to stop the other side from having them. And we must stop from engaging in reactive political practices which are only about challenging the latest government outrage, of which there will surely be plenty. That is not to say the left should not engage in such activities entirely, but if they become our raison d’etre we are doing no more than treading water as the tsunami of right-wing bilge overwhelms us. 

If we are serious about equality, justice and democracy we must stop taking these concepts for granted and start examining what they are and why a socialist equality is both desirable and achievable. If we want to be anti-capitalist (and I realise that there are people on the left who get nervous at that possibility) we must develop an understanding of the internal contradictions of capitalism, and an understanding of the mechanisms to transform society. (Spoiler alert: if you read Marx – I’d recommend The Communist Manifesto if you haven’t already – capitalism is not going to fall by the election of a socialist government with the express aim of making capitalism more benign).

In 1983 when I joined the Labour Party nobody in the party, including people on the left, thought that meetings were anything other than talking shops for arranging, mostly non-political, activities. If we discussed politics at all it was usually an opportunity for people to simply say what they thought, often devoid of any facts or evidence. At my last CLP meeting we had a discussion of the election. Oh, how little has changed. Members confidently asserted that if we had adopted remain we would have won the election but were completely unaware of how many leave seats we had lost. They asserted that there had been a massive swing away from Labour to the Tories seemingly unaware that the Tories had actually gained few votes since 2017. They made definitive assertions about how we should manage the media without any apparent understanding of who owns the press or the relationship between the print and broadcast media. They were, in essence, a group of people who seemed to have an appalling lack of awareness of even the narrow politics they were supposedly there to support. Obviously, I am exaggerating slightly. There were certainly people at the meeting with a good grasp of what had happened and why, but they were given little opportunity to share that knowledge as discussion was dominated by a sense of ‘how do we feel’ as if our personal feelings were politically significant.

I can’t imagine that if I had wandered into the phone box where the local Liberals meet that the discussion would have been much different. It was not a discussion of how do we change society for the many, not the few. It was not a discussion of how we widen out our strategy to include more people and find ways to highlight the iniquities of the system. And, it certainly was not a discussion of how an electoral defeat is a setback on the road (or path) to socialism, but not the end of the struggle. 

It was a discussion of which slogan would have won. It was a discussion of how we need a telegenic leader (preferably a plummy voiced barrister from London, though that was barely mentioned). It was a discussion of how unpopular free broadband or justice for WASPI women was. It was a discussion pretty much entirely devoid of any real understanding of the currents that are underpinning contemporary capitalism. And, that is not really a criticism. Because the majority of people in the room had been given their political education by the same newspapers they thought could be turned to our side and by a Labour Party that barely knows its own history let alone have a deep intellectual understanding of modern society.

What is the left for? Currently it is the donkey who does all the work to keep the right in their privileged positions. It is the infant to be chided and blamed by the adults in the room when they refuse to face up to their own errors. It doesn’t have to be this way. The left was once the vibrant intellectual force that developed ideas and strategies for change. It was the place where the young gravitated both to learn and to do. The doing part is important incidentally. Young Labour members (and some not-so-Young one’s) do want to develop an understanding of how society works, but, like me all those years ago, they don’t want to waste their time shoving leaflets into envelopes or sitting in endless meetings discussing the next jumble sale. They need activities which provide the adrenalin rush: picket lines, demos, paper sales, fly-posting, occupations etc.

Losing an election is a big deal. But in the wider scheme of things it is just a minor setback if we believe that our goal is a significant change of society. And, whilst changing capitalism has always been attractive to socialists, with the climate emergency now requiring ever more drastic action as each day passes, it has become an imperative. Unless we are armed with an understanding of the forces shaping modern capitalism, and unless we shift from the dominant identity paradigm which has been the focus of the left in retreat, we are doomed in so many ways.

New challenges call for new ways of understanding. These may be based on older theories, as I have said Marxism offers for me a fairly comprehensive account of capitalism. But, Marx could not have foreseen the destructive and ultimately self-defeating nature of modern capitalism. Marx himself faced with the climate emergency, austerity and the rise of the far right would have sought to understand the nature of the beast, and to seek to develop theories leading to actions that could allow the workers of the world to unite to slay that beast once and for all. If we, the left, fail to do so then we are betraying not just ourselves but future generations.