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26th September: What’s Left? Is this moment of national decline a political opportunity?
Nandita Lal / Owen Hatherley / Dan Evans / Fiona Lali / Phil Burton-Cartledge
For decades, Britain’s working class has been battered by falling wages, rising poverty and gutted public services. The Starmer government is offering them austerity and authoritarianism, while the far right are attempting to capitalise on the atmosphere of discontent. The left, atomised and fragmented in the wake of Corbynism, seems ready to re-emerge as a national political force. What are its current power bases? Where is it strong and where is it weak? What type of organisation is needed to challenge Labour’s fragile hegemony and remake our rotten system? Join with other comrades who have been asking these questions for the first in a series of three events exploring left strategy today.
10th October: What is to be Done? Organisational forms and the prospect of a new party.
Andrew Feinstein / Ash Sarkar / James Schneider / Keir Milburn / Hilary Wainwright
In 2017, nearly 13 million people voted for Jeremy Corbyn’s radical left-wing programme, demonstrating the viability of a popular mass politics opposed to inequality at home and war abroad. Since then, the establishment has tried to erase that result from public memory. Yet the election of nine Green and independent MPs this year shows that they have not succeeded yet. To capitalise on this historic breakthrough and rebuild our strength at the national level, socialists need a new political organisation. But what form should it take? How should it relate to left parliamentarians, trade unions, social movements and the broader working class – especially outside the major cities? Should it be focused on the electoral sphere, or should it play a more expansive role?
What Next? How can we take on the far-right and the extreme centre to remake national politics?
Jeremy Corbyn / Richard Seymour / Ashok Kumar / Halimo Hussein / Grace Cowan
The long-simmering threat of the far right has now burst into the open. Reform UK elected five MPs this year and came second in 98 seats. Racist riots have erupted across the country, fuelled by an ecosystem of migrant-baiting politicians, media outlets, funders and influencers. With Labour more than willing to mimic the toxic politics of Farageism, a new left electoral project will have to challenge the xenophobia of the entire political class. How can it rise to the challenge? How can those interested in national organisation move forward collectively? What should we do next?
3 comments:
Very metro. Not perhaps what might be needed, for instance a meeting could be held in Brum or Manchester. There is a world of lefties out there!
That 13m people voted for bread and circuses tells you that you can get lots of people to vote for bread and circuses, the question is whether you can get enough people to vote for a ticket that might actually be deliverable and what that looks like? I put a lot of those 13m people in the same bucket as current Reform voters, they suspend their credibility in order to believe things they want can happen rather than settling for realistic goals that accept realistic trade offs.
Bread and circuses are the time-honoured staple of capitalist politics (and of politics in class-divided societies in general - hell, the phrase 'bread and circuses' is believed to date back to ancient Rome in the era of the Principate). Indeed, you kind of can't get anywhere in politics _without_ offering bread and circuses.
Now, no doubt many people in 2017 and '19, quite possibly due to being offered nothing but bread absolutely riddled with mould and purported circuses characterised by unadulterated tedium for so long by the main parties (nay, their entire adult lives in many cases), and consequently suffering from severe undernourishment, mistook the mould-free but nonetheless dry, hard and stale bread being offered by Labour under Corbyn, for gourmet bread, and confused the somewhat entertaining circuses for something that would result in systemic and fundamental change that would benefit their lives in tremendous ways. Some of us, however, could see that the bread in question was somewhat on the stale side, but also that, hey, at least it wasn't chock-full of mould, and we consumed it purely on the basis of filling our starving bellies, and giving ourselves some short-term relief from the effects of our long-term lack of sustenance. We also didn't get too swept up by the circuses, but saw them for what they were.
In 2024, by contrast, we were offered a choice between mouldy bread and _extremely_ mouldy bread. Some of us said 'no, ta'. (It's worth pointing out that even _slightly_ mouldy bread should be discarded, as the visible parts of the mould are likely far from the extent of the pathogenic fungus, which may well permeate the entirety of the loaf, or whatever remains thereof.)
As for compromise, I've kind of alluded to this, but as far as people like myself are concerned, left social democracy as represented by Corbyn, McDonnell et al _was_ the compromise. Now that that compromise has been denied to us, here's yearning for the day when the gloves come off!
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