Explaining the Dire State of the Western Left

Seven Historical Parameters

The Dire Political State of the European Left

I recently participated in a discussion of this question and here is the full text of my remarks.

Where is the European Left Headed?

Radhika Desai

The state of the western and European left is dire. In understanding why it is so, particularly at a time when people sorely need it to be strong, I would make 7 points.

1. If, rather than benefitting from what some call ‘the systemic crisis of the liberal system combined with Western decline’, dominant left forces are in decline themselves, it is not because of any Gramscian mechanisms: Gramsci’s extrapolation of Lenin’s concept of hegemony among compatible classes to theorise the ideological relation between antagonistic classes was always problematic. Rather, we need to understand this ideological relation as a struggle.

2. It is a struggle in which the left threw in the towel a long time ago, a good century before the end of the USSR, which is the turning point for some.

a. First, there is the objective pull of imperialism which led working class parties to enter into ‘guns and butter’ compromises – reform in return for support for imperialism – with their respective national capitalisms in the decades before the First World War. This accounted for their scandalous betrayal when it broke out.

b. Connected to this, as the left in Europe split between a ‘Western’ and an ‘Eastern’ Marxism with the Bolshevik Revolution, there was a tendency to dismiss the experience of actually existing socialism as something alien to the left.

c. Both these tendencies were tied to an intellectual capitulation. It began with the arrival of neoclassical economics to displace political economy whose implications for legitimising capitalism had already become adverse with Ricardo, let alone Marx. Rather than challenging it comprehensively, Marxists pursued what Bukharin called ‘a policy of theoretical reconciliation’ with it. They criticized it only for ignoring the exploitation of workers. For the rest, their reconciling only led to a series of false accusations against Marx’s analysis of capitalism as contradictory value production: that it suffered from a ‘transformation problem’, that it did not consider paucity of demand a problem and that it was wrong about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The result was that Western Marxism and so-called ‘Marxist economics’ sports not a Marxist understanding of capitalism but a Schumpeterian one, bereft of contradiction, prodigiously productive and, very importantly, unconnected with imperialism. The result, as I have argued in a 2020 article, is that the New Left Review Tradition denies the necessary relation of capitalism and imperialism outright while the Monthly Review tradition examines it with an eclectic non-Marxist theoretical apparatus. Both ignore Marx’s account of what make imperialism imperative for capitalism.

The effect of this capitulation to liberalism cannot be overstated. It led Marxists to claim capitalism was superior to socialism. It led them to attribute Western prosperity to capitalism’s allegedly promethean productivity, not to imperialism. And, while it is true that Marxism did not remain the leading force of the dominant left forces in the post war period, the lack of an authentic Marxism ensured that there was no force further to the left of the dominant left forces was capable of pulling them leftwards in the wake of their repeated failures and disappointments.

3. These failures and disappointments have pulled dominant left forces only further to the right, evacuating the left of the political spectrum. Today, the historic parties of the left are parties of the corporate establishment, threatened only by insurgent forces further to their right. These are headquartered in the US with strong outposts in the English speaking countries and then the continental European countries. They represent a maverick form of capital demanding even more deregulation, as if four decades of deregulation that have already deindustrialised and financialized western economies and sent inequality skyrocketing were not enough. These forces have been coyly called populist. In reality, as I recently argued in the British Marxist Journal Theory and Struggle, they are fascist, they are what fascism must be in the twenty-first century.

4. These developments have reached a point where we now have, in the UK, a chancellor of the exchequer to whom the trust of financial markets is more important than delivering on election promises to her working class base and a prime minister who is willing to pander to the worst forms of racism as preferable to promising real material gains to that base.

5. In the absence of a serious left politics, politics dominated by the confrontation between two parties of the right, two parties of corporate capital. The intense political rivalry between them has given rise to comparisons to civil war. Indeed, I would argue, using an expression of Arno Mayer, the great historian of international politics in Europe at the end of the First World War, that it is an ‘international civil war’ fought as much within as between countries.

6. The rise of new forces championing so-called ‘woke’ issues but weak on imperialism and war was inevitable given that the historic parties of the working class themselves gave up on Marxism, with its theoretical understanding of the formative relation between capitalism and imperialism, and its original feminist and anti-racist principles. This sacrifice left these forces susceptible to the corporate sponsorship of ‘woke’ social liberalism as a substitute for genuine, inclusive anti-imperialist socialism.

7. Finally, therefore, the problems of the left as arising from a popular submission to the dominant ideology. Such submission is simply not possible in such unequal societies as ours. Instead, it is important to recognise that the historic parties of the working class have become parties of the professional middle class. As this class, which has burgeoned in the age of monopoly capital, and is particularly heavily concentrated in the West in the age of deindustrialization, has taken over the historic parties of the working class, some working people, though by no means all, have been lured by new fascist forces. However, many others continue to search for genuine left alternatives, as the surge in support for Your party when it was announced or the popularity or Zack Polanski or the election of Zohran Mamdani or the resistance in Minneapolis to the ravages of Trump’s Praetorian guard, ICE, suggest. The point is not that the leaders are less than ideal but that the spectacular support for them evinces popular hunger for a left politics. This is material foundation on which the left must build. With the weakening of imperialism, the old guns and butter contract between Western working classes and their corporate masters can only break down and that can only make this foundation broader, deeper and stronger.

You can watch the full discussion here.