While left ideals are excellent, and left theory overall is pretty good…

 

Yes, while left ideals are excellent, and left theory overall is pretty good, left practice leaves much, very much, to be desired.  Our left political practice is not good enough for our left movement, to put it bluntly.  We of the left lack not only political understanding and sophistication, but our tactical and strategic acumen is woefully inadequate.  As a result, all we can appeal to is our ideals, which we ofttimes simply can’t put into practice, make realizable.  That is why, while the left ofttimes punches above its weight (to borrow a phrase from fellow critical leftist Barry Finger, my closest political comrade), we leftists normally remain a minority, and an often beleaguered and marginalized minority at that.  While we incessantly talk of galvanizing the masses, typically we don’t galvanize them; they ignore us, or express hostility to us.  And that is our great tragedy as leftists.  Try as we may to be effective, ofttimes we fail at that.

This abstractly expressed argument above was made concrete for me recently, as I read a book about how Jeremy Corbyn became British Labour Party head in 2015, staved off a challenge to is leadership in 2016 (where the book ended), only to go down to ignominious defeat in the British elections of 2019, where Labour was trounced, suffering its greatest defeat since 1935.  Corbyn, who in 2015 was a little-known left backbencher Labour MP (Member of Parliament) from a safe district near London with no previous leadership experienced, galvanized many Labour Party members, it is true; he was especially strong among the young (under 39) and with women, but garnered only a plurality among trade unionist Labour members, had the open hostility of many fellow Labour MPs and the Labour bureaucracy, and his stunning win in 2015, coupled with his stunning reduction to ignominy in 2019, proved decisively that it takes more than a surprise insurgent candidacy to transform a party hierarchy that is strongly in place.  He came out of the antiwar and Palestinian movements, and many of his political views can be described as naïve at best.  Personally a nice, if somewhat colorless, person, he was drafted reluctantly as the left Labour leadership candidate, and while probably not anti-Semitic himself, had a real blind spot to left anti-Semitism, which rendered him open to attack on that front; also, his campaigning in support remaining in the EU, both in 2016 and in 2019, was tepid at best also.  He also had a campaign team that was enthusiastic and earnest, but inexperienced.  His seeming strengths overshadowed his glaring weaknesses.

There were similarities, of course, between Corbyn’s insurgency and the insurgent Democratic Presidential campaign of 2016 by Bernie Sanders, which also started in 2015.  But there were important differences.  For one thing, Sanders was a much more adept and eloquent politician than Corbyn, who, coming from a safe Labour seat of little importance for decades, where he was just another backbencher, had never been tested as a leader.  Also, Sanders was much more discriminating in who he publicly allied with and supported than was Corbyn, whose past uncritical and campist solidarities came back to haunt him not only throughout his campaign for Labour leadership, but also his time serving in office.  (Chief among these was his seeming support for “left” antisemitism, to which he was notably blind.)  Further, although British English is notably drier and more formal than American English, Corbyn’s spoken English in speeches (of which this writer has only seen snippets in print; but revealing snippets) was far more colorless and lackluster than was Sanders’s, who could be notably aggressive and forceful in making points—which he did with cogency and alacrity!  In short, Sanders was much more a natural-born leader than was Corbyn; and he had demonstrated that successfully not only while in legislative (and executive—he began his political career as Mayor of Burlington, Vermont) office, but during his campaign for the Presidential nomination.  Notably in this regard was the way Sanders responded on Sunday-morning TV to journalist George Stephanopoulos’s redbaiting objection that calling himself a “democratic socialist” would only hurt him, Sanders snapped back, “What’s wrong with that?” and proceeded to briefly but effectively explain what democratic socialism was. 

Both Corbyn and Sanders galvanized youth support for their candidacies, and turned out the youth vote.  Corbyn won the Labour Party leadership by strong support among new Labour members (62%), women (63%), those 25-39 (67%) and newly affiliated trade unionists (57.6%), but among overall Labour members who voted, only won a plurality (49.6%), not an absolute majority.  (Data taken from Alex Nunn, The Candidate [New York and London: OR Books, 2016], the book I read referred to above, pp. 301-302.)  Bernie Sanders, though arguably his base of support was larger and more diversified, was also only a minority candidate—he won 47% of the Democratic primary votes in 2016, and before he aborted his Presidential campaign in 2020, 40% of the vote.  Which indicates that, in both cases, while support for the left is strong, it does not constitute an absolute majority.  In forming his shadow cabinet after winning, Jeremy Corbyn reached out to his opponents and non-supporters in Parliament, only to have them turn against him in the summer of 2016 (ironically, among his most vocal opponents was Hilary Benn, a right-wing Labourite, and son of noted left-wing Labour leader Tony Benn!); while Corbyn won that battle, and under his leadership in the elections of 2017, led Labour to an admirable showing (though not enough to form a government), Labour with him at the helm was massacred in the election of 2019, ousting him not only from power, but making him very vulnerable to his Labour enemies.  (2019 was Labour’s worst showing since 1935, as mentioned above.)  Truth be told, Corbyn had important baggage he carried, and it was very noticeable in 2019:  although possibly (no one is really sure) not personally an antisemite, he had a serious antisemitism problem due to his uncritical pro-Third Worldism, notably in support of the Palestinians against Israel, no matter what; he was also a tepid supporter of Britain remaining in the European Union, and his call for a second Brexit referendum, after three years of Brexit, Brexit, Brexit! turned many past Labour voters against him.  As for the ambitions Labour Party manifesto of 2019, exit polls indicated that a large number of voters thought it unrealistic, and doubted it Labour could fulfill it.  This in sharp contrast to Conservative Party Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s cry on long-regurgitated and talked-about Brexit, “Get it done!” 

There was also a clear class divide between the young who supported the Labour left, and the older, more socially conservative and traditionalist, working class and trade unionists who had formerly voted Labour—just as there is such a divide here in the U.S., although the left doesn’t want to admit it, or even talk about it.  The young are often college-educated, in contrast to the older, and come from backgrounds of privilege that enable them to go to college.  They are often better employed than older workers, and despite the rise of the precariat among the young, have better prospects for the future.  This is especially noticeable in the U.S. in the death rate for white males 55 and older, many of whom have lost their once-secure blue-collar and ordinary white-collar jobs—and now die prematurely of opioid addiction, alcoholism, and suicide, while other demographic groups see their lifespans increase.  Today’s left, both in Europe and in the U.S., is focused on social issues rather than economic ones because, truth be told, youth are more beneficiaries of neoliberalism than have been older workers.  Deindustrialization and globalism have brought layoffs and job disappearance to the traditional working class, or else severe drops in income and status as workers are forced to trade higher-income employment (often in manufacturing) for lower-income employment (often in services).  While youth doesn’t have it that great anymore either, they have employment options in NGOs and in professional employment lacking for the non-college educated.  For the youth, economic precarity is not a compelling issue, despite neoliberalism making it more prevalent.  Hence the turn of youth to social issues away from economic ones, and of course, the rise of neoliberal, pro-capitalist modes of supposedly radical “isms” such as feminism and anti-racism.  But as many a worker will tell you, in the end, there’s no difference, except perhaps stylistically, between a woman boss and a man boss, a boss of color and a boss who’s white!  As The Who sang tellingly, “Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss.”  Bernie Sanders grasped that.  I don’t think Jeremy Corbyn ever did.  Among other left leaders in the U.S. besides Bernie, only AOC seems to grasp what is really going on—and she often gets accused of “selling out” by certain persons on the U.S. left!

The Sanders, Corbyn, struggles for leadership encapsulate many of the failings of the contemporary left.  We are long past the golden days of Marxism and Marxist leaders of the first part of the 20^th Century such as Trotsky, Max Shachtman, Rosa Luxemburg, her nemesis Eduard Bernstein, Gramsci, even Lenin and Kautsky, not to mention Marx and Engels themselves, who lived and died entirely within the 19^th Century; and we are sorely missing later leaders such as Michael Harrington.  In my opinion, our current left “leadership,” as represented by such figures as Noam Chomsky, Vijay Prashad, and Medea Benjamin, are really not suitable leaders at all; hence our left descent into mediocrity, obsessive focus on cultural and social issues, including identity politics to the detriment of real class analysis and focus on economics and economic reality.  Today’s left, as it has been since the 1960s, is overwhelmingly college-educated, but not any smarter because of it.  We of the left are not terribly good at talking to average workers; we are far “better” talking (or rather, lecturing, hectoring) at them!  That is especially noticeable in the rise of “cancel culture,” the left equivalent of irredeemable Original Sin.  If we of today’s left were truly honest, we would read to everyone we talk to or about this version of their Miranda Rights:  “Not only will anything and everything you ever said or wrote be held against you, it will mark you forever, even at the expense of losing your reputation and employment.”  While leftists may protest, “But we have good intentions!” such intentions are never enough; politics, especially left politics, is not a morality play; it is a push to achieve power to effect substantive change.  It is not, decidedly not, about forming consensus-agreeing affinity groups, it is about forming coalitions, often diverse and even on some issues, contradictory coalitions, where not everyone agrees on every single issue.  It is also about using tact, sophistication, and nuance in organizing, and having a healthy skepticism of what we advocate, what we are for, so that we of the left are able to say to ourselves, “While I think I’m right in this, I will also admit I could be wrong.  I do not think so at present, because I have thought this over thoroughly.  But I may have overlooked something.”  Let us recall as leftists, many of us as Marxists, the dialectic, and how the dialectic means change, transformation, over time, so that what is so certain today may be substantially not so in the future.  That is what we of the left must do today—come to that understanding.