Time for the Left to start again. Again.

THE DEATH OF THE LEFT

WHY WE MUST BEGIN FROM THE BEGINNING AGAIN

SIMON WINLOW AND STEVE HALL

Policy Press, 352 pages, 15 November 2023, 9781447354154, RRP £12.99

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The return of populism after the 2008 global financial crisis was, given the left’s abandonment of interventionist economic policy, inevitable. However, the dominant narratives that accompanied the return of populism were remarkably one-sided and tended to ignore the long history of Western populist responses to technocratic arrogance and economic injustice.

The fundamental political struggle in the Ancient World was rooted in economics and property ownership. Put simply, state authorities functioned to prevent landholding creditors using private loans to become oligarchs. In return, small subsistence farmers struggled against state authorities who wanted to stabilise economies in order to retain satisfactory production levels and produce individuals loyal and healthy enough for military service.

Life was hard and neither side was motivated by pristine values but, on balance, the majority were significantly better off under the authority of the state. Populism was simply popular support for tyrants—at that time, a word with positive, noble connotations because it denoted rulers who would overthrow oligarchs, redistribute land and legislate in the interests of the majority.

The ‘decadence’ that Gibbon placed centrally in the fall of Rome was the triumph of the landholding, moneylending families against the populist tyrants who, like Caesar and the Gracchi brothers, were often murdered by oligarchs. The decline in production and health—compounded by fraud, coercion, foreclosure and political assassinations—dispirited and impoverished the population. The barbarians had always been at the gates, but the internal deterioration of morality and political life in Rome was the main factor in its demise.

When Christian eschatology relocated the debt jubilee in the afterlife, Western history became a struggle to establish the rights of creditors to retain assets (paid to service debts) above the rights of debtors to have debts cleared and property restored. The debtor must always take the risk; the lender must always be paid. (CONTINUED AFTER BREAK)

READERS’ COMMENTS

Paul Embery, author of Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class:

A well-argued and deeply persuasive analysis, illustrating how and why the British Left went so wrong.

Tara Brabazon, Flinders University:

Probably the most important book to emerge in the humanities and social sciences in the last two decades.

After a very long wait, this was interrupted to some extent by the establishment of the limited company in the nineteenth century, but the creditor could still assetstrip while the bankrupt debtor would still lose all property associated with his or her business.

The great ideological reversal of reality was to portray the creditors as the noble elite, and the indebted, wage-dependent people as the dangerous mob. This narrative is central in a lot of liberal literature and retains a significant presence in both academic life and popular culture. The fear of crowds derives from an assumption that the mob is always replete with bigotry, in essence a nativist, exclusionary and hostile sub-democracy with no rational leadership, plan or moral purpose.

Populism has been framed as intrinsically bad, so we don’t see it as a legitimate political reaction to the failures of the liberal elite, but what was populism when it had some political shape? In the USA during the nineteenth century, Bryan’s Populist Party was actually a labour party, lining up producers against emerging oligarchs, corporations, banks, trusts and other elite economic institutions involved with credit, foreclosure, asset-stripping and the extraction of surplus value at the point of production. Populists demanded that the government issue fiat currency, nationalise railways, seize land owned by speculators and asset-strippers, and relocate national banks into post offices.

In the 1930s, Roosevelt put similar ideas into practice in an effort to combat the Great Depression and offer the American people a New Deal. He abandoned the gold standard, strapped regulations around bankers and creditors, made speculation more difficult, supported unions, expanded public sector employment and established a welfare system. After yet another economic failure of the liberal elite and the implementation of policies that worked, Roosevelt was roundly denounced as a populist. (CONTINUED AFTER BREAK)

READER'S COMMENTS

Thomas Fazi, journalist and economist:

The most enlightening exploration yet of why the left died and whether it can be resuscitated.

Philip Cunliffe, Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction, UCL:

Winlow and Hall tackle head-on the central political and social question of our time.

Deirdre O’Neill, film-maker:

Combative, provocative and necessary, this book should be read by anyone interested in the plight of the working class.

What the liberal elite fear most is ambitious, feasible, effective and popular social democratic reform. But, given the scale of the present crisis and the problems that lie ahead, is even this ambitious enough? The current mainstream left across the West has quite systematically marginalised these discussions. In such a climate of repression and silence, less rational and organised forms of populism were inevitable.

Neoliberalism’s murky past

In its attempt to build on communal values and repurpose the sovereign nation-state to work on behalf of working people, what was the traditional left up against? The initial answer to that question is ‘neoliberalism’. It’s not a difficult concept—a political doctrine that prefers the minimally regulated global free-market to be the principal system of economic organisation. This system continues to govern the lives of a large proportion of the world’s population. It is against true democracy, against organised labour and against the state, unless the role of the state is restricted to protecting free markets.

What brought this thing upon us? Contrary to popular opinion, it wasn’t the work of Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s, or even that of the neoliberal think-tanks that began to spring up and influence the mass media and politicians after the Second World War. It began life during the final years of the Habsburg Empire, which had been a free-trade playground for a powerful banking and investment elite, based mostly in the opulent streets of Vienna. Here the Austrian school of economics was founded which, in the 1920s, received funding from the Ford Foundation, a US think-tank always alert to possible ways of spreading free-market doctrine.

The Austrian economists hatched one of history’s most audacious economic plans. Even though the principal strain that eventually collapsed the Habsburg Empire was the mounting dissatisfaction felt by individual regions over an uneven distribution of wealth and power, these doctrinaire economists, supported by the investment elite, were convinced that if the world’s nations could be persuaded to roll out the free market worldwide, this time it would work.

At first the Austrian thinkers saw a positive role for nation-states as subservient hands-on economic managers. However, in the 1930s, leading neoliberal intellectual Friedrich Hayek, reflecting on the difficulties experienced by the Habsburg and British Empires and observing the even greater difficulties encountered by the fledgling Soviet command economy, was persuaded of the impossibility of economic management on such a scale. Here we see the beginning of the risky move to trust the forces of the unregulated market to ‘correct’ problems and restore equilibria, even though life might be tough for those waiting for the correction to happen.

Hayek and his growing band of supporters had also witnessed the rise of the German and Italian national socialist and fascist states. Whilst taking little notice of the deep social problems that had set the context for the rise of these monstrosities, the fledgling neoliberals decided that they—along with Soviet Communism— were the inevitable political forms that a firm nexus between the working class and a powerful state would take. (CONTINUED AFTER THE BREAK)

READERS' COMMENTS

Lisa Mckenzie, author of Getting By:

Hard to put down. A long, difficult and sad tale that needs to be told.

Keith Hayward, University of Copenhagen:

A much-needed wake-up call for the so-called progressives and latte liberals that patrol the borders of academe.

Ashley Frawley, Swansea University and author of Semiotics of Happiness:

A hopeful and rousing call for humanity to retake the economic engine-room.

But for Hayek and his followers, Roosevelt had implemented state-centred Keynesian economic management policies in the 1930s as a response to the Great Depression, first in 1933 and with renewed vigour during his second term after 1937. Criminal activity was significantly reduced and the high American homicide rate dropped by almost a half as a growing number of people found legitimate livelihoods, some directly provided by the government.

Whereas the monstrosities of Nazism, fascism and Stalinism were easy to discredit and demonise, the early and very popular successes of Keynesian economics and social democracy were not. Alerted by this political threat, the neoliberal vanguard met in Paris in 1938, at the Walter Lippmann Colloquium.

In the midst of complex discussions of burning issues such as freedom, individualism, free markets, finance and wealth creation, the principal enemy was identified as the organised working class and the democratic state together taking up the reins of Keynesian economic management. According to an economist who spoke up at the colloquium, the organised working class must be ‘eliminated’.

In the midst of complex discussions of burning issues such as freedom, individualism, free markets, finance and wealth creation, the principal enemy was identified as the organised working class and the democratic state together taking up the reins of Keynesian economic management. According to an economist who spoke up at the colloquium, the organised working class must be ‘eliminated’. The principal ideological tactic was to persuade as many people as possible that social democracy was really a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the first step on ‘the road to serfdom’ and totalitarian brutality. It was an effective tactic, because individual freedom was Western liberalism’s foundational value, and the totalitarian states of the postwar era were indeed palpably monstrous. However, social democracy pressed on to become a reasonably popular orthodoxy. So neoliberals were forced to work hard in the back- (CONTINUED IN THE BOOK)