What Does The Labour Result Mean for Left Electoral Strategy?
By: Ryan Mosgrove
Tags: Dsa, Labour Party, Elections, Bernie Sanders, Labor

The results of the 2019 UK general election are shocking and disappointing. The Labour Party have seen their seats in parliament drop to their lowest number since 1935. This is especially jarring after the 2017 snap election, where Labour under Corbyn saw one of their largest surges in decades. But after last night the momentum of Labour under Corbyn appears to have been stopped dead in its tracks.

The resurgence of the Left in the West as a force which could govern arguably began with Syriza’s electoral surge in Greece in 2012. It became engendered with new hope by Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015. It forged a new and insurgent left in the US in 2016 through Bernie Sanders Presidential campaign. But now this new 21st century left is now seeing one of its most serious setbacks in years. Like all thunderous defeats, these events will inevitably invoke deep strategic reflection within the left both in the UK and globally, including here in the States.

I will not attempt to go into much detail as to why this loss occurred, as others closer to events have already begun to weigh those questions up. Here I will only attempt to offer my take on strategic questions this defeat is bound to provoke in the coming months.

Foreign Policy Will Always Get In The Way

Healthcare, social development, anti-austerity. These are bread and butter issues that the left has always preferred to make their principal focus. But the stark reality is that every political party — left, right and center — would prefer to focus simply on domestic issues and leave foreign policy to general positions they hope they’re never called on to carry out.

But what is clear is that this election was all about Brexit, and the Tory’s pitch to get “Brexit sorted”, to give them the majority they needed to get this issue settled once and for all worked.

Labour took a middle position on Brexit, saying that they would get a deal from Belgium and have another referendum with “Remain” back on the ballot alongside a final deal. This position was a compromise with the “New Labour” liberal hold-overs and other forces who’ve been staunchly in the remain camp within Labour. The party conference this summer sorted this out by adopting this Frankenstein position on Brexit and they paid dearly for it. As Labour Hub pointed out:

There was clearly a suspicion — based in reality — that Labour wanted to talk about anything but Brexit. This fed cynicism, as though the more radical the policy offer, the more it smacked of a desperation to distract. Too many people thought that threat to the NHS was being exaggerated for instrumental purposes, and therefore doubted the veracity of the claims we were making. We need to learn how to win back trust, and begin to engage the concerns of working class communities on their own terms, not on the ground that “progressives” find most comfortable.”

Here in the United States, the socialist pitch is almost entirely around domestic issues. Healthcare, Green New Deal, police brutality, union rights, trans rights and so on. To be sure there are many more straight forward foreign policy issues that the left does talk about; the military budget, foreign war, apartheid in Palestine just to name a few. But more complex questions could come to cast a long shadow over the prospect of workers government in the US. What these question will be is always difficult to predict. For example we may see foreign affairs become increasingly dominated by the developing cold war between the US and China, and how the left would approach such a question as a matter of state policy is uncertain.

As socialists of course we see the idea of nation itself as illegitimate, a contrived formulation wholly necessitated by the functions of capital but an unnatural and onerous barrier to workers as a political and economic class. Nationalism is indeed a function of capital, one exploited for their economic and political purposes. But this fact does not in and of itself address the problem that Marx himself identified where though “not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie…Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.”

This is in no way an argument that socialists must be in some sense nationalists, though unfortunately some may indeed draw that conclusion from the UK election. Rather it means our internationalism must be programmatic and has to relate to national questions and foreign policy in an operational and coherent way; not simply slogans pinned to what is otherwise a developed domestic policy. Nor can we just ignore it or kick it down the road and hope an ambitious domestic policy will carry us.

What is certain is that a failure to adapt to such complex contradiction between nation-state and foreign affairs dealt crushing blows to Syriza in Greece, and now Corbyn’s Labour, in ways that overshadowed their domestic policies, and from which that phase of political struggle was unable to recover.

When It Comes to Party Politics, Total Warfare Is The Only Option

When Corbyn became party leader, the left wing attempted to tolerate the Blarite New Labour wing that had lost power and bring them along for the ride while attempting to deny them any serious influence over party program. But their voices and influence proved in the end too hard to ignore and helped lead to the disastrous Remain middle ground position Labour ended up with.

Whenever the left gains the sort of unprecedented influence like it did with Corbyn there is always an impulse to assuage the fears of internal opponents and to attempt to win them over (or to at least keep them whipped and in traces). After any leadership win few would seek to continue the campaign, press the advantage, and drive dissidents from the party all together. Its draining, politically costly, and there is a risk you lose it all trying to let it ride.

But this is exactly what Corbyn should have done. Corbyn MPs should have immediately engaged in a mass de-selection campaign against Blairite MPs who have spent the last four years working to undermine Corbyn and the left within labour. Peacemaking bought Corbyn some time, and the Blairites at first held their fire until 2017 because they thought Corbyn was a joke with no shot at the PM job. But this delay in turn compromised the party’s position in the long run and ultimately helped secure their defeat.

This doesn’t mean that all parties must in all cases be homogeneous. But it does mean that one cannot serve two masters, and a party cannot exist which is at war with itself over a fundamental disagreement about program.

Once Corbyn had secured his leadership seat a second time in 2016, what should have followed was an all out assault on Blairism. An exorcism of the old and ossified, driving them from the party. Their ideas were dead and their support never more marginalized than at that time. This would not have guaranteed the death of New Labour or meant that Labour would be firmly socialist forever and always, but it would have allowed for more space to develop and execute a truly pro-worker program.

But now the opposite process may be in the cards. Just hours after Labour’s defeat former cabinet minister under Blair and Brown, Alan Johnson, was already calling for a purge of Momentum from the party. In the end it didn’t matter how many concessions Corbyn made to New Labour, they were never open to accepting him as party leader and were always only bidding their time until a moment such as now presented itself to drive the left out of the party and, as Johnson puts it, back to “your student politics”.

This lesson has bearing on us in the US as well. As the socialist left continues to gain ground, our base among Democratic Party voters — and by extension our wing of the Democratic Party itself — will continue to grow. In many important ways we have not yet gotten to the point that the Labour left reached when Corbyn was re-elected as party leader in 2016. We are not the authoritative majority of the Democratic Party base. But that may change, and perhaps quite soon. And when it does it will not be time to make nice or sign peace treaties, and certainly not to rest on our laurels and pretend the party structure is at that point irrelevant. It will be time to press our advantage and deny Corporate wing of the Democratic Party any and every lever of power we possibly can.

The party system in the US is by no means the same as in the UK, in fact in many ways they share only a passing resemblance. But this does not mean party politics don’t matter at all, far from it. If we want to build the critical mass needed for socialism in the US to become a force which can govern, it requires continuing to contest political space that interacts with the Democratic Party sphere.

That means continuing to grow and develop our party primary game, especially on the state level where a lot of power resides around ballot access and primary law. This may mean also establishing and growing caucuses and factions within the party structure itself at various levels that can challenge the Centrists wing and prevent a crackdown by party fiat and create more space for the left.

Such an approach will require not only political will, but also a more firm investment in party politics itself as a field of struggle; something that many on the left are deeply uncomfortable with. But ceding this ground means giving up a significant arena of influence to the Neoliberal wing without a fight. When the opportunity presents itself, we should be ready to press our advantage.

It goes without saying that building our grassroots base among workers remains integral. Building a base doesn’t mean simply being visible in neighborhoods as it is sometimes characterized, but directly recruiting workers to join membership organizations in which they are enfranchised and given an active voice and power over our work. There is some evidence to suggest that Labour’s failure to address this as well is also a factor in their loss. As Ronan Burtenshaw of Tribune Magazine wrote:

[M]any of those places which most needed the transformations promised by Labour’s economic agenda never felt in any sense that this project was theirs. As party memberships exploded in London and the South East, they were often stagnant in the very ‘heartlands’ we lost tonight. That was disguised by the result in 2017. It cannot be disguised anymore. Labour lost not because it was too much of a working-class party, but because it was too little of one, in too few areas.

Mass Politics are Still the Only Path For the Left

There is no doubt that many in the UK, and perhaps elsewhere, will draw the conclusions that the Corbyn project was always doomed for failure. Some will conclude that Labour was fundamentally never a vehicle for struggle, still others that electoral organizing is itself not a viable path. Some degree of disillusionment among the Labour left is likely inevitable, though to what magnitude it’s too early to say.

But its important to remember that new party projects in both the UK and the US have been an abject failure. In the UK it wasn’t even that long ago that projects such as the Trade Union & Socialist Coalition (TUSC) were attempted, which even had the backing of respected labor militants such as the late Bob Crow, who was then president of the Railroad and Maritime workers union. TUSC was an attempt to break away labor and the left from Labour exactly at a time when left politics appeared to be gaining some ground.

In 2015 TUSC took a good hard swing at establishing an electoral foothold across Britain. They ran 135 candidates for Parliament and 619 for local councils. But despite this TUSC captured 0.1% of the popular vote and won exactly zero seats in parliament, and even losing seats in local council, holding on to only a smattering that they had secured in 2010.

Thousands of socialists then found themselves with a failed project in TUSC and on the wrong side of the door with regards to Labour exactly as radical left politics appeared to be gaining ascension. Their ideas had gone mainstream, but without credibility they themselves as a formation became marginal.

Breaking away when we should be burrowing within is not new in our movement. Similar events took place 100 years ago in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. In 1919 when the conditions of membership in the new Communist International were being clarified, the Russian Communist Party proposed that all Communist parties must break from social democratic and socialist parties in their country, change their name, and to change their “old social democratic programmes… as quickly as possible and working out a new communist programme”.

The Russian CP believed resolutely workers would flood these new communist parties. They predicted that workers would see pro-capitalist and social-democratic parties alike as all pro-imperialist for their support for the First World War. The social democratic parties “have betrayed the banner of the working class” and that the difference to them and the new Communist Parties “must be clear to every simple toiler”.

But reality did not conform to these predictions. In France, the social-democratic party (what would ultimately evolve into the French Socialist Party) had opposed the war up until 1914 when they finally capitulated and joined the war cabinet. In 1920 the Communist Party broke away from social-democrats declaring that “At long last French socialism is publicly and solemnly breaking with the out of date traditions of the Second International; with the humiliated, as well as humiliating routine”.

But in the 1920 election the social democrats instead had their largest percentage of the vote in their legislative history. In 1924, when the Communists also fielded candidates, the social democrats still received double the CP’s vote total and four times as many seats.

In Italy, the results were even more disastrous. The Italian Socialist Party (PSI) did not support the war, instead taking a middle road pledging “neither to support it or sabotage it”. After the war, like in France, the PSI saw an increase in their electoral share, in this case a dramatic one, receiving the highest vote total of any party. Meanwhile a wave of factory occupations swept the country. In 1919 the PSI’s membership swelled from 50,000 to 200,000 members. Fascist cells began to organize proactively throughout the country to violently suppress the growingly militant trade union movement.

Despite objections from Italian delegates to the Comintern’s Second World Congress that a split within the PSI at that time could open themselves up to attack, the Congress mandated that parties must break from the “yellow social-democratic parties” which they had “declared war” on. Despite the left carrying a 2/3rds vote in the PSI to join the Comintern among its members they were not able to convince the majority of the party to expel the right-wing as the Comintern had required. The far-left wing had no choice but to split away from the PSI to form the Communist Party of Italy (PCI).

The results were disastrous. Despite Lenin’s prediction that if the left built a new party then “all the oppressed will come to you” the PCI remained small. The exit of the communist wing necessarily raised the stock of the right wing within the PSI which had previously been in the super-minority against Bolshevism. One author observed that the split “resulted in practice in the unity of those who disagreed and the split of those who agreed”. That next year 100,000 members did not renew their membership to either party.

Similar events played out in country after country as a result of the decision to break organizationally from social democratic parties, despite the fact that in most countries communists represented a considerable minority within these parties and in cases such as Italy and the United States, an outright majority. The united front tactic would be developed in tandem with the growing awareness that communist forces in various countries would not constitute a majoritarian left movement by their weight.

The Comintern was correct that the close of the war ushered in a wave of global struggle, but workers in many countries saw the social democratic parties — which in many cases they themselves had built — as the more credible vehicle for their demands. Lenin’s formulation of “putting on the clean shirt” as the communist movement did didn’t endear them to workers, but instead marginalized them at exactly the time when workers were turning to socialism in a mass way unseen before in history at that time.

At the risk of descending into true-isms, the left does not dictate the conditions we operate within. The deck is stacked against us and we are required to balance contradictions in a way that no other political project is ever required to. But that is unfortunately the business we got into when we decided to be socialists and decided to build a new world from the ashes of the old. And while Corbyn’s tenure as party leader is likely over, Labour’s left will now need to head down the path of Corbynism without Corbyn. I however am optimistic for the Labour left’s future, even after this thunderous defeat. The thousands who have been galvanized and mobilized by Labour under Corbyn will learn a tremendous amount from yesterday’s election. They will internalize and apply those lessons, not in theory but in life. We should all take note and apply what we can for our part in this global movement.