Beginnings

 

There’s a lot to write about at the moment because there’s a lot to think about. This is what motivates my return to political blogging; there are things I want to think through, and writing deliberately for an audience might help with that. I also hope that it might help others who are thinking about the same things.

For any socialist in Britain first amongst these things has to be the situation after Corbyn. To be on the left here at the moment is to feel battered, haunted by failure, the hurt compounded by the Labour leadership’s ongoing attacks on the left. I write having heard of several friends being ‘auto-excluded’ from the Party. Yet, for all that we rightly take stock and reflect on the difficulties of the present time, it would be disastrous to forget the great gains for the left which preceded the 2019 general election defeat and its fallout. Labour was led from the left, a programme was presented which represented a decisive break with neoliberalism at key points, socialist ideas entered, however fleetingly and cautiously backed, into public debate. The modest gains of the 2017 election gave, at the time, cause for some optimism.

The rest, of course, is history. Corbyn and his supporters never enjoyed the backing of the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party, nor of the Labour ‘machine’. His opponents found ample opportunity to impale him on the twin forks of the anti-Semitism crisis and the politics around Brexit. Both deserve discussion. But perhaps more urgently for the future of left politics in Britain is the question of organisation. Why were Corbyn’s supporters, who numbered hundreds of thousands, unable to build themselves into a bloc within Labour capable of supporting and defending him, exerting pressure on the PLP, redirecting the Party, and countering smears against Corbyn and his allies? In terms of supporting organisation, the Corbyn leadership was in a contradictory position, elected at a low-point of union militancy and without a strong Labour left, it lacked the opportunity for the kind of alliances one would expect from a left-wing Labour leadership. Bodies like Momentum appeared which for a time seemed like they might go some way towards filling this gap, but ultimately failed. Could things have been otherwise? What does the experience of the Corbyn years tell us about the nature of the Labour Party and its role in socialist politics? These are the kind of questions that concern me.

I’m not a socialist for any reason other than seeing socialism as offering the only prospect for a decent future for humanity in union with the rest of nature. The climate crisis ought to force us to reconsider a world run for profit, even if the persistence of hunger, poverty, and homelessness does not. Similarly, I am not a Marxist out of bloody-mindedness or as some kind of retro fashion statement, but simply because I see Marx as having offered an account of capitalism which, at crucial points, is true, and which is an indispensable resource for socialist politics. Defending the relevance of Marxism at the present time, which is another one of my aims here, will involve explaining why I think Marx’s claims are true, why I think they offer the best explanation of the workings and failings of capitalism. It will also involve talking about class, and unpicking Marx’s account of class as an economic phenomenon from commonplace cultural understandings of class, particularly as these play a role in the current culture wars.

The international situation is complicated along several axes, but the current situation in Afghanistan allows the basic questions to be posed. How do we oppose Western imperialism, whilst at the same time expressing our solidarity with those resisting reaction in the two-thirds world? Neither Washington, nor the Taliban – there’s a slogan, but what does it mean concretely? How do we organise on this basis? More immediately, how can a strong ongoing anti-war movement be sustained to oppose further Western interventions when the fallout from Covid-19 makes this so difficult?

Covid itself will not be something I am writing about, except so far as it impinges on political organisation or economics. Whilst far from being a denialist about the disease, I think we need to look beyond and organise beyond it, not least because our political opponents are doing so already. The left seems more nervous; there are good and bad reasons for this, but we need to be re-engaging in politics.

This blog is intended as a modest contribution towards that re-engagement.