A History of Leftist Failure

A History of Leftist Failure

13th December 2019 will forever be remembered in the bourgeois establishment’s and media’s annals of history as being the day the left lost its argument. We should strongly admonish this notion; the loss of the Labour Party is not a statement on the nature, state or veracity of the left’s arguments for a better kind of world.

The left’s arguments and policies are in fact more popular[1] than ever according to recent surveys[2]. If this truly is the case, then what went wrong? I’ll tell you, but you will not like this one bit: We stopped listening to the working class as a whole. This is a hard pill to swallow since many of us will consider ourselves, friends and families to be working class and will be unable to see past this. I’m suggesting that we’ve stopped listening to a specific, generational parts of the working class and instead started sneering at them.

“Sneering at them?”, I hear you ask. Yes, sneering at them. These older generations of the working class who may have been miners, steel workers, tradesman and industrial workers have tended to be more socially and fiscally conservative just by virtue of the times they lived in. What I mean by this is that they may harbour attitudes and lingual traditions that today we might consider to be racist, xenophobic or otherwise offensive and for this, they have been cast onto the almighty Pyre of Leftist Righteousness and co-opted by forces that purport to have solutions for them. This isn’t the only issue though; look at this dialectically and historically.

A Brief Abridged History

The trade unions in these areas used to be strong and had the backing of the workers, the relationship was almost symbiotic. Then the Winter of Discontent and global oil price shocks happened and though no fault of their own, the trade unions had to step in and demand better wages against the upward-spiralling cost of living[3]. Enter Thatcher.

Thatcher spent over a decade demonising trade unions and by proxy, the working class. Her regime violently shredded once thriving nationalised industry and sold off what was left[4]. Regulations and red-tape were burnt and the working class were abandoned and left penniless; told to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Enter Blair.

By the time Blair came to government, anti-EU sentiment was already fermented and building in the left and the working class. What was left our industry was sold off to foreign interests; the privatisation boom and the economy as a whole was financialised with the help of an increasingly global form of capitalism. The EU were seen as part of this and still are part of this. Blair’s government only perpetuated this form of globalised, deregulated capitalism which increased financialisation, privatisation and destruction of industry and only managed to save face and hence alliance with the left by maintaining a strong welfare state, something that Thatcher didn’t do. As British workers were seen to be cast aside, in favour of cheaper labour and raw material sources from within the EU, anti-immigrant sentiment started to build. Blair’s war in Iraq in 2003 only served to further disenfranchise the working class[5].

The ever opportunistic and fervently hostile bourgeois press and media noticed this and capitalised on it. Suddenly, on the front of every widely circulated newspaper were articles pushing the notion that it wasn’t globalised capitalism and the governments that perpetuate it that caused you to loose your job, the problem was in fact much simpler: It was immigrants!

Even after the 2008 global recession caused by knock on effects of Thatcher’s Big Bang deregulation of the financial sector, Labour, the only major party with a hint of leftism about it, were to blame[6]. They didn’t see this coming and the biggest mistake they made was bailing out the banks to the tune of £500 billion. Were the left in the form of New Labour really on the side of the working class? It must’ve hurt so much to see your home ripped from your hard-worked hands, beds taken from under your children and your very livelihood cast aside so that Labour could bail out the banks. Why didn’t they spend that money on the working class? This exemplifies the dichotomy and contradiction of capitalism – a government must always choose between supporting capital or the working class. Enter Cameron and austerity.

“Labour have spent too much, we’ve no money left” - as one rather badly thought out and placed letter had claimed. Nearly a decade of austerity has left public services, councils, households and small businesses destitute and over 130,000 dead from from these cuts[7] whilst filling the boots of the wealthy through corporate tax cuts and hand-outs. Who can the working class trust now?

A Very Brexity Problem

This brings us to Brexit and the very crux of the problem. Anti-EU sentiment had at this point been co-opted by the far-right, by public figures with a history of xenophobia and by an increasingly vitriolic press looking to further capitalise on misery and suffering. We all know what happened here.
A newly democratised Labour party with Corbyn, a life-long leftist at the helm and with a new economic mandate sought to proceed with Brexit in spite of the faults and flaws of the referendum. Corbyn understood the plight of the working class, he had for his entire career fought for them and done everything within his power to bring peace and prosperity to them. He recognised that we had to listen to this vote, because for the working class it wasn’t entirely an ideological charge to exit the EU but a final cry for attention echoed by 17.4 million people.

Quite rightly though, the 48% of the working class who voted to remain recognised some of the token benefits the EU had brought to them and how, even though this was only a tacit recognition, the capitalist class through the power and hegemony of the media had co-opted the working class left’s own movement to leave the EU by appealing anti-immigrant and xenophobic sentiments that they themselves had helped ferment in the working class.

So why did Labour lose the 2019 election? Other than media hostility to Corbyn himself, the reasons are two-fold which should be discussed further:

• The failure to make a credible economic argument in light of the actions of New Labour and by virtue of dumbing down through media representation and by not offering their own deeper inquiry as to the nature of economic reforms, taxation and spending.
  
• The failure to re-appropriate Brexit as a leftist, working class movement.

The reason for the latter points to a deeper issue within the nature of bourgeois democracies and “big tent” party systems. Between the 2017 and 2019 elections, the only thing that shifted significantly was Labour’s position on Brexit. The leadership had spent years being cajoled by the both the membership, it’s associated organisations and the neoliberal/centrist element of the PLP into pushing for a second referendum[8]. The failure of the 2019 election is therefore a failure of centrism. Our position should have been to appropriate Brexit as a working class, leftist movement, maintain the Lexit policy and effectively neuter the xenophobic, anti-immigrant elements of it by doing so.

With regards to Corbyn and his “baggage” being the problem and without going too far into it: The mere fact that someone who has a history that can be exploited and spun by those acting in bad faith and for the purposes of political expediency honestly says more about the systemic issues that allow this and less about the person themselves than we're led to believe. You should not want to change the person because of this; having a slick looking go-getter of a career politician in his position even with the same policies would not resolve the problem; if anything that would be a tacit endorsement of it.

Questions and Conclusions

Back to a point I made earlier about older generations of the working class being ignored and sneered at. My point is that even though they may harbour older and more vulgar traditions of social interactions and norms that we may construe as being offensive, they are still the working class. We collectively are the working class, we need them and they need us because we are the same; the generational gap is being used to divide us.

The virtue of socialism is in being united by what defines us being working class through the capital-labour antagonism – this is how we are united regardless of any other arbitrary divides that the establishment may throw at us such as generation, race, pseudo-class distinctions like “middle class”, gender identity, sexual identity, religious identity and so on. We are unified by our relationship to capital – we need a way to reconcile all of the above with our essential quality; that of being working class. The question is, how do we do this whilst maintaining solidarity and not falling back to the tactics of the capitalist class? Remember that they already have class unity;  it has led directly to their strength in organization, it’s one of the reasons capitalism has succeeded. Why don’t we have this strength?

Proof of this strength of organisation is in the pudding itself – the capitalist class not only appropriated a left-wing movement but commodified and marketed it back to the disenfranchised after laundering it through their own hate-machines. And no-one batted an eyelid.

Today in the new Tory government, Brexit will be used as a scapegoat for one thing only: as a means to further deregulate, privatise and asset strip the country to perpetuate the dying capitalist mantra. The working class now have a hodge-podge, contradictory notion of what Brexit will mean by virtue of years of disinformation from governments, media, commentariat and even the EU itself mixed in with the remnants of the lefts own reasoning for EU skepticism.

We need a new way, from the bottom up. We must agitate the grass-roots into action and we must stop falling for the ploys of capital.

References

    1. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/12/labour-economic-policies-are-popular-so-why-arent-
    2. https://voteforpolicies.org.uk/survey/results/XdjvNqjuAbZ7fvu5
    3. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/mar/03/1970s-oil-price-shock
    4. https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/political-parties/conservative-party/house/house-magazine/103574/dan-jarvis-margaret
    5. https://theconversation.com/new-labour-20-years-on-assessing-the-legacy-of-the-tony-blair-years-76884
    6. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/oct/09/big-bang-1986-city-deregulation-boom-bust
    7. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/01/perfect-storm-austerity-behind-130000-deaths-uk-ippr-report
    8. https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/labour-admits-it-lost-general-election-because-of-neutral-brexit-stance