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The left in retreat

CANADIAN SOCIALIST JOURNAL

April 1,2025

Mike Phipps reviews Openings and Closures: Socialist Strategy at the Crossroads, Socialist Register 2025, edited by Greg Albo and Stephen Maher, published by Merlin.

The 61st volume of Socialist Register comes at a transitional moment, say editors Greg Albo and Stephen Maher, in a period marked by ‘morbid symptoms’. The left appears on the defensive, with many of the new left experiments in western Europe, from Corbynism to Podemos, defeated, and the ‘pink tide’ of Latin America in retreat.  

In Europe, those parties that got closest to power, such as Greece’s Syriza, underestimated, as Panagiotis Sotiris argues, the extent to which Eurozone institutions cold block progressive movements, which lacked the strategic vision to see that a rupture with these institutions was the precondition for reform. Another problem with many similar left-populist projects has been their short-termism and a reliance on media popularity rather than long-term mass organisation.

In Britain, argue Michael Calderbank and Hilary Wainwright, the electoral defeat of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 cannot fully explain the marginalisation of the left subsequently. Momentum’s efforts to organise after this defeat were made all the more difficult by Keir Starmer’s rightward march, the witch-hunt against leading people allied to Corbyn, the exodus of many of their supporters from the Party and the conditions of Covid Lockdown. This, as well as making organising more challenging, also handed control of online meetings and elections to a factional Party apparatus.

Yet as the authors point out, “Starmer could not have achieved such an iron grip over the internal culture of the party without a notable shift in the mood of the unions on the NEC.” Arguably, their support has been rewarded by a manifesto commitment to a ‘New Deal for Working People’ – albeit quite diluted in practice – above-inflation pay awards in the public sector and public ownership of part of the railways.

But not much else, it seems to me, and not much for working people more broadly: the precariat, renters and those suffering most from the cost of living crisis, above all people on benefits – which often includes those in work. If Labour continues to plummet in the polls and gets thrown out at the next general election – admittedly some way off – it will be a defeat for the unions as well. Should their leaders not be making more demands on the Government?

Last year’s Party Conference saw unions voting against the Government’s cut to Winter Fuel Payments, indicating tensions between the drive to improve living standards on one side and Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ commitment to tight spending rules and neoliberal fiscal orthodoxy on the other. The rise of far right agendas since the general election, however, makes it unlikely that any affiliated unions will break from Labour. This means that, electorally at least, left alternatives are likely to be personality-based or single-issue, like the four Independents elected in 2024 alongside Jeremy Corbyn, primarily because of their stance on Gaza. Consequently, however far to the right the Labour leadership leans, the battle for a government that meets the immediate interests of working people is likely to continue to be centred on the Labour Party itself.

This is not to say that the left cannot work creatively in their communities beyond the political and organisational limits of Labourism, as has been the case in activities in solidarity with Palestine, for example. But it does underline the uphill nature of building any electoral alternative to Starmer’s Labour at present.

Elsewhere, signs of municipal radicalism, such as Barcelona en Comú, also appear to be in retreat. As Greig Charnock, Jose Mansilla and Ramon Ribera Fumaz explain, this insurgent movement, itself very diverse, once in office had to build coalitions with a range of other forces. This blunted its radicalism, which was already constrained by having to work in the framework of multi-level governance in the Spanish state. For example, as Barcelona city council sought to stem the influx of short-stay tourists, the regional government promoted the exact opposite policy. Notwithstanding these obstacles, Barcelona en Comú did pioneer some vital measures for tackling the city’s housing crisis and significantly increased social services spending at a time of continued austerity across the rest of Spain.

Across Europe, the left has collided with the restrictive rules of the EU. Catarina Principe asks “what it is about the European Union that makes it so hard for states – namely peripheral ones – to both thrive and leave?” In Portugal, the Left Bloc entered a left government led by the Socialist Party in 2015 to keep out the right and contribute to a progressive agenda. But four years later, it was the Socialist Party that increased its vote share, and in 2022, it got an absolute majority with the radical left vote cut in half. The result underlined the dilemma facing the Left Bloc and similar currents which are tempted to join coalitions to their right: attempting to influence government policy from the inside, but being co-opted into a limited policy agenda and being held accountable for it at the ballot box.

Not all the analysis here is uniformly incisive. On Germany, Ingar Solty attributes the decline of Die Linke to its support for Covid lockdowns and its deference to “NATO discourse” on the war in Ukraine. Yet in retrospect, the breakaway split led by Sahra Wagenknecht, who rejected these positions, opposing vaccine mandates and calling for closer ties with Russia, proved unpopular with the voters in February’s parliamentary elections. The new leadership of the Left Party, on the other hand, was able to gain an unexpected 9% of the vote on the basis of its anti-austerity policies and support for migrants’ rights.

Other contributions here look at the state of the left in the USA and countries in Asia and Latin America, as well as broader themes the left might focus on, such as the re-municipalization of public services – 1,600 cases in over 70 countries have been documented – and the transformative potential of public banks.

It’s an eclectic collection, with no instant solutions to what the left should do in these unpredictable times. At least, it indicates that some serious thinking is going on and that’s positive – but a lot more will be needed!

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.