2017 and the future of the left.

The arrival of the New Year 2017 provoked the biggest spate of dramatic projections of possible futures from academics and commentators across the western media, since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was no doubt a result of Brexit and then Trump’s victory in the US. There was the odd gem among the buckets full of clinker. But most of the pundits extended characteristics of recent politics and amplified them. In their minds the future was simply a bigger version of now.

There were a few braver efforts published that attempted to provide a coherent explanation why the western world was evolving in the direction it is. The most imaginative of these was Editor of the Economist, Daniel Franklyn’s theory that the globe has entered into a new stage of capitalism, a second (or third?) ‘Industrial Revolution’, that was drastically reorganising both Capital and Labour. Digital communication, automation and, soon to emerge, artificial intelligence, were all products of this new revolution. As with the previous major shifts in technology, the new capitalism was producing social frictions and political fractures. Millions of traditional workers, especially in the west, were inevitably insecure and uncertain. But like previous periods where new techniques became dominant, it would all get sorted out with a new type of social contract, albeit quite different from the crumbling, traditional version that was now collapsing (and thereby causing all the populist angst so apparent in the west.)

Franklyn’s idea is an attempt to couple up the social and political world with the latest technology, spinning out of globalisation. But his idea is fatally flawed. Leaving aside his presumption that there is obviously a new technology coming out of what he sees as a new stage of capitalism, which is a proof of the endless fruitfulness of this apparently permanent system of society, his assertion that a new social contract between Labour and Capital will gradually evolve out of the new conditions demonstrates the lack of any sense of history. (Or any vision of the fundamental contradictions between the interests of Labour and those of Capital.)

In this year of all years it is surely blindingly obvious that millions of working class people had the most immense battles against Capital across history, from strikes to national liberation struggles, from revolutions to World Wars. Their huge efforts and monumental sacrifices across the globe have forced Capital to offer ‘social contracts’ to defend themselves and their system against Labour’s 100 year tsunami. It is not new technology that attacks the gains that Labour has made in the last century. (And before we are distracted by Twitter and robots that can talk – sort of – technological change between 1900 and 1960 was infinitely faster than the modern period of 1970 to today.) Capital attacks Labour, ceaselessly. The current economic mechanism for that attack is not I phones but the fact that Capital’s largest returns (profits) come from the sale of money and not from production. This is a gigantic machine literally designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.  

At the beginning of 2017 lots of observers rightly commented that a new right is winning political power in the west. In the US and in Britain a recomposed right wing has already taken mainstream political leadership and elections in France and the Netherlands are likely to show an increase in their strength in Europe as a whole.

While this fact throws the working class movement onto the defensive in the west it is not the same as the social defeat of the working class. Trump scored less of the popular vote than Clinton. In Britain the working class vote split, but nearly half the population of the UK, including some of the most progressive centres of the labour and trade union movement (in Scotland, in London etc) voted against the rightwing campaign of the Brexiteers. It is not true, even in the US and in Britain, let alone in Spain, Italy, Germany and even France, that the new right has won the leadership of society.  Key battles are still breaking out based on the social weakness of the new right’s agenda. For example in the UK there is a competition between PM May and the unions as to who is more likely to improve the lot of the ‘Just About Managing’. May makes speeches about raising the standard of life of ordinary people while making no concessions whatsoever. Meanwhile key unions battle for working class conditions, against the ‘gig’ economy, keeping employment, public safety and raising income as government ministers anxiously check to see if they can whip up a public mood for the strangulation of all strikes. The right in Britain does not (yet) lead society.

While social struggles continue, including the right to life movement in defense of black youth in the US, the new right’s grip on mainstream political leadership in insecure. The union action in Britain and the anti racist movement against the police in the US will be the first targets. Racism will be stoked up to divide the working class layers of society in order to isolate the right’s targets. The issue for the political left is first to renew its connections with the working class people in the western societies that are challenging globalisation, in many cases up to now by using political vehicles designed by the new right. But the right’s political leadership is still fragile. In the UK UKIP’s 4 million votes are still open to fluctuation. The left can still win the argument in society by openly recognising the reality of rationed services, housing and the use, by employers, of immigration to reduce wages – and denouncing it all; lock, stock and barrel. Second the left should openly fight any division among working class people in their social struggles as a gift to the rich and the road to a more and more wretched life for all of us. That will isolate the real racists. Thirdly the left should shout out the need for a new political system and the need for an economy that serves the people. Radical change and only radical change will get the attention of an alienated but politically mobilised working class.

In the US, despite his mistake in linking up to the Clinton Foundation, which still has to be worked through, Bernie Sanders offers a lead and others, like the occupy movement seem ready to follow. The situation in the UK is a dramatic paradox.

Britain’s traditional political system is collapsing and the first victim of that collapse is the traditional Labour Party. Even the Fabians now recognise that traditional Labour cannot win a UK general election. The Fabians, naturally, in line with their long history, make the most cautious and feeble recommendations to deal with the problem. The contradiction at the centre of Labour’s future is that as a mass party it is the largest in Europe. But two, entirely distinct class interests are at war in the envelope with the Labour Party address. Only one of those interests can speak to Britain’s working class in the context of the current terms of politics. Only one part of that party is capable of the presenting the bold vision of a totally new democratic politics and an economy for the people. But as the Tristan Hunts (Labour MP) drift off to other establishment sinecures, despairing that Labour will ever be able to provide a solid platform of ministerial advancement to one who is entitled, the left leadership of the party is as quiet at the Fabians and as cautious!

Above all, the left leadership of the Labour Party must lead. But they often lose sight of what it is that they should lead. They imagine that they should lead the Parliamentary Labour Party, if only the MPs would cooperate and settle down and stop lighting fires under Corbyn. The truth is that they have their moment and only their moment. Most Labour MPs will disappear like brother Tristan or fight with fury against their leadership. The left’s moment and its role is to use their opportunity to lead the working class, to use the massive, healthy and renewed base of the party to bring the message of the need to change society to the millions who reject globalisation, the rule of the super rich, the destruction of services and poverty of every day life.

Will the right MPs split the party? In some form or another, probably. But the left’s direct actions, over the heads of the MPs, rallying the conference and the most active unions behind it, could, in the here and now, create a solid political nucleus, with a sizeable caucus of older and newer MPs, at the centre of the biggest mass movement for social, political and economic justice in Britain since the Chartists.