What's Left ... And What's Left?

A (probably-doomed) attempt at a bit of clarity.

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Last week’s essay sparked off (not for the first time) a great deal of discussion about “The Left”, whether certain parties and certain ideas could be considered “of the Left,” and indeed whether it mattered. A few people were kind enough to suggest I put some thoughts down on the subject, so, here goes.

As with all these essays, the one is primarily an attempt at explanation. I’m not interested in polemicising about why my definition of the Left is better than yours, nor in awarding marks out of ten to parties or ideologies for how Left they are. Among other things I’m not, I’m not a historian or (thankfully) a political scientist. But I do think that there are a number of useful, pragmatic things to say about this question that might help to dispel confusion a little. I’ll structure this essay by setting down points that I think the majority of people would agree on, and then look at the practical consequences of them.

First, we can agree that there has been a political tendency called the Left for the last couple of centuries. The origins of the term are interesting, because they give us a clue about the nature of the Left itself. It appeared, as everyone knows, at the time of the French Revolution, when those members of the National Assembly who supported the continuation of the Monarchy and the status quo generally sat the the Right of the President, and those who supported the Revolution, in the widest sense, sat on the Left. The same broad distinction was employed through the confusing and conflictual years that followed, though the precise boundaries moved around a bit.

This reminds us that the original Left/Right distinction emerged from a struggle over the future form of government in the country, and the consequent distribution of power. On the Right, the purists believed that the Ancien régime distribution of power (essentially an absolutist monarchy with some regional and local countervailing powers) was perfect and should never be changed, because it had been ordained by God. As time passed, the more pragmatic members of the Right were still keen to retain the system, but were prepared to make some modest accommodations, to share power a little more equally. The Left stretched from those who favoured a constitutional monarchy along the British model, through those who wanted a Republic with power in the hands of the middle classes, to those who wanted to put all power into the hands of the common people. As the political system rapidly evolved, a new class of “moderates” or “centrists” emerged, who believed that the Revolution had gone far enough, or even a little bit too far, and things should now stop where they were. These pragmatic distinctions, largely independent of theory, were to shape the nature of politics for more than a century. The fundamental question of collective politics was then (and still is, I would argue): who has the power? Depending on where the power was, therefore, labels such as Left, Right and Centre were always relative, and could move around quite a bit.

Second, it was only over the course of time that these ideological patterns actually produced formed political parties. (In any event, formed political parties in the absence of elections are slightly redundant.) Earlier political struggles had been contests between different forms of political organisation: the famous trilogy of Tyranny, Oligarchy and Democracy in Greece, the struggle between the great families and the Republicans in Florence, and so forth. Even in Greece and Rome where there were representative political institutions, the concept of Party, or even a career as a professional politician, was not well developed. In Britain, where things happened earlier, and where Parliament had always been an independent centre of power, something like organised political parties existed by the Eighteenth Century, but they represented constellations of interests more than abstract political ideas. Paradoxically, it was not until the coming of a reasonable amount of democracy, as well as the development of technology and so an urban industrial working class, that organised mass parties of the Left actually became feasible, often, though not always, with “Socialist” or “Communist” as part of their name.

Third, the original Left/Right distinction was not only about who was going to have power, it was also about who should have the power (ie about ideology) and this remains the case until today. This is why the struggles of the French Revolution, and others that followed it, were essentially about the best type of government system. For many ordinary French people in the countryside, which was where the overwhelming majority lived, the system in place was one that had been ordained by God, and that was it. They therefore rose up in defence of a divinely-ordained system, and against those whom they considered to be little short of atheists. Their improvised armies fought under the slogan “For God and the King,” emphasising that they were defending a particular ideological position. In turn, the Revolutionary government sent troops to bloodily suppress the risings, in the name of their own ideology, with consequences that have endured until the present day.

This helps to explain the (apparent) paradox of people supporting one political party where their economic interests might suggest they should support another. Deep-seated views about the kind of society you want are often more powerful than the promise of immediate economic benefits. Quite often, moreover, people used to support parties of the Right because they feared change: the present might not be perfect, but the future, if the Left took power, might be worse. There is no-one more reactionary, after all, than the individual who has succeeded in climbing socially a little, and now looks down with contempt on his or her erstwhile equals. The fear of losing the tiny advantage you have gained, or the fear of no longer being able to easily distinguish yourself from the working class, are powerful incentives to vote for the Right, since that preserves the situation, and thus your tiny advantage.

So the reasons why people have historically voted for the Left or the Right (irrespective of transient party labels) are not necessarily financial, and indeed financial and political power have not always gone together. They did for as long as wealth was more-or-less exclusively tied to rents from ownership of land, but the development of an urban middle class and the coming of the Industrial Revolution meant that in many countries the hold on power of the (often relatively poor) aristocracy was increasingly contested, sometimes violently. There’s also a recognised tendency for property-owners in any country to vote disproportionately for the Right, because they identify psychologically with the traditional property-based structures of power. (It’s interesting that a property qualification was one of the interim steps to full democracy in some countries.)

Fourth, as will by now be evident, the Left is necessarily a moveable feast, and at any one time will exist in different forms with different views about exactly how power should be distributed, and who should have what. Moreover, because the Left was historically an insurgent force trying to upset the status quo, there was a great deal of room for arguments about the best way in which to promote the wider distribution of power. Broadly, this resolved itself into a conflict between gradualists, who believed in piecemeal reform and slowly winning the battle of minds and ideas, and revolutionaries who believed that the system as a whole could not be reformed and had to be overthrown. For a while, and especially after 1945, it looked as though the gradualists were getting the better of the argument, although that seems less clear now.

It was obvious that both of these policies could not be pursued at the same time, and indeed that they were antipathetic to each other. Especially after the Russian Revolution and the foundation of the Communist International, the two tendencies were at each other’s throats. This turned out to have disastrous consequences: Stalin’s insistence that the non-Communist Left (“social fascists” was one of the politer terms) was effectively the same as the Right, prevented any cooperation between Communist and Socialist parties. This was especially a problem in Germany where the Communists refused to support the Weimar Republic, and thus hastened its demise and all that followed. By the time Stalin changed his mind in 1936, it was already to late and in any event, where it mattered such as in Spain, the Communists spent much of their time wiping out the left-wing competition.

Thus, the Left will inherently have divisions over both strategic goals and tactics, since there is no agreed mathematical formula for calculating the ideal distribution of power, and no sure way of arriving at it. Historically, leftist parties have therefore ranged from those seeking radical political and economic change, not excluding violence, to those believing that the current system can be captured and made to work better. They have also ranged from those who abhor any form of centralised power and favour direct democracy, to those who believe that if the right people are in control of the existing system, then it could be made to work in the general interest. What united the Left historically was the belief that power was concentrated in the wrong hands, and sometimes this was all that united it. The situation today is more complicated, as we shall see in a moment.

Fifth, once mass parties of the Left became organised; they were inevitably led and run disproportionately by middle-class educated Socialists. Although there were many outstanding working-class leaders, much of the work passed inevitably into the hands of those who had the spare time, the education, the organisational and professional skills, and who could operate effectively in a parliament and with the media. This was something that was noticed  early on, by Robert Michels, an official of the German Socialist Party, who wrote about what he called “Iron Law of Oligarchy,” where in any organisation a few people will eventually come to dominate. Indeed, by the 1950s, most parties of the Left were in practice headed at national level by middle-class university-educated leaders, whilst at local level, most of the power was still held by trades union members whose support was essential to maintain a mass political base.

This was not necessarily a problem, because most of the middle-class leadership shared a genuine commitment to making the world a better place: Hugh Gaitskell, arguably the best Prime Minister Britain never had, was the son of a prosperous manufacturer, but was converted to Socialism after seeing the grim conditions of the working class around him. It became more of a problem with the massive expansion in university education from the 1960s, which produced a new class of party member  with a degree, working in a “white-collar” job, often in education, the media or something similar, and both physically and intellectually very remote from the party’s traditional base. With the passage of time and the progressive de-industrialisation of western countries, these people began to dominate. They were less worried about traditional leftist objectives—after all, by the 1960s, society had become much more equal, power was much more diffused, and poverty and unemployment were things of the past—and much more concerned about ethical questions and the problems of the world. They cut their teeth in most countries on the Vietnam War, after which they began to campaign on issues such as the environment, apartheid in South Africa and world poverty: causes which, for all their inherent virtue, were not the major preoccupations of their electoral base. They also tended to have views which were much more socially liberal than those of the party’s naturally conservative working-class base.

In turn, power in the political parties, as opposed to in the apparatus of government, was often still held by traditional trades union leaders. This was especially the case in Britain, where the Labour Party annual conference was dominated by the trades unions, and party policy was, at least in theory, dominated by the block votes of millions of members wielded by trades union leaders. This produced enormous instability and divisions within the Labour Party: James Callaghan, the last Labour Prime Minister before Blair, compared weekly meetings of the party’s National Executive Committee to a “Calvary.” Trades union leaders made themselves unpopular, even with their own members, by their often-clumsy interventions in politics, and their poor public image tended to undermine the Labour Party, and to obscure much of the good work that the trades unions actually did. Attempts by the government of Harold Wilson in the 1960s to put industrial relations on a proper legal basis were defeated by trade union opposition: the first stage in the suicide of the British Left. As the power of the trades unions declined precipitately from the 1980s, and the party’s mass base started to disappear, the grip of the white-collar membership on all aspects of the party necessarily increased.

The same thing happened in most western countries, especially with the decline of the previously powerful and well-organised Communist parties after the Cold War. The naturally fractious nature of leftist parties, coupled with the economic stresses of the 1970s, had already began to splinter them. The most catastrophic example was, again, in Britain, where much of the middle-class elite of the Labour Party, tired of the trades unions and fed-up with the Trotskyist fringe and their entryist tactics, walked off in a huff to found the Social Democratic Party, which was never able to secure much representation in Parliament, but did manage to destroy the Labour Party’s chances of forming a government itself all through the 1980s and most of the 1990s, until it eventually disintegrated in turn.

I dwell for second on this example, because the Conservative victory in the 1979 election is often taken as the beginning of a worldwide move to the Right, and a rejection of the postwar economic consensus. The policies of Thatcher’s Conservative government—such as they were—were rapidly taken up elsewhere, with the enthusiastic support of the wealthy, much of the western media and the banking and finance systems, as they promised rich pickings from the privatisation of public assets and the progressive destruction of the public sector. For example, when François Mitterrand was elected first Socialist President of the Fifth Republic in 1981, his sensible and impeccably post-war consensus policies ran into the brick wall that was hastily being constructed on the basis of Thatcher’s victory, and, more than anything else, on the sense of despair and defeat that quickly seized parties of the Left around the world in the 1980s.

Yet all this was unnecessary. In 1979, Thatcher won a fluke victory essentially out of a protest vote. A long hard winter punctuated by industrial disputes and strikes and a fumbling government with a tiny majority combined to produce an unanticipated election and a narrow Conservative majority. But an election in October 1978, which James Callaghan was strongly advised to hold, would probably have resulted in a Parliament with no overall majority, or a tiny majority for Thatcher. The decision not to hold an election then, was probably the greatest error in twentieth century British politics. Even so, the economic catastrophe brought about by Conservative economic policies should have led to a Labour victory in 1983, and would indeed have done so, had it not been for the split just described, which amounted in practice to the Left in Britain cutting its own throat.

So the apparent triumph of the Right, and the apparent defeat of the Left, in Britain and elsewhere, was largely contingent, and even partly an optical illusion. Public opinion in most western countries actually moved to the Left through the 1980s, if we understand “Left” in the traditional sense used here of the pursuit of a more equal distribution of power and wealth. Opinion poll after opinion poll showed that when western publics were asked, not which party they supported, or which label they liked, but which policies they favoured, the traditional policies of the Left remained popular with the majority of the electorate.

It’s at exactly this point, though, that the traditional Left gave up, and it became increasingly difficult to find parties that actually supported a better and fairer society. In the end, the Left did not really resist, still less fight back. Those who increasingly controlled the Left from the 1980s onwards made two mistakes. They took a transient political blip for a major structural change in the thinking of the electorate, gave up completely and lay down in the mud in front of the steamroller waiting resignedly to be flattened. (Here, of course, we see the traditional masochism of the Left, and its love of defeats, on full display.) There was a considerable market at the time in various countries for books arguing that the Left was over, that it would never hold power again and that the best it could do was to emulate the Right, but with a slightly less inhuman face. This generation of leftists was far more influenced by elite opinion, by the media and by people they knew socially than by the common herd of voters, who stubbornly continued to support ideas traditionally associated with the Left.  I recall a typical figure of the day who believed that the Left needed to change in this way: Martin Jacques, a Communist party stalwart and editor of Marxism Today with a PhD in economics, who wrote a series of self-lacerating articles throughout the eighties about the end of the Left in Britain, before changing his mind after the Labour victory of 1997.

The second mistake was one of imagination. At the beginning of her reign, Thatcher was such a divisive and in many ways ridiculous figure (she was nicknamed “Attila the Hen” in Whitehall because of her outbursts of temper) that it seemed impossible that she could last very long. And indeed had it not been for a great deal of sheer luck and the utter incompetence of the Opposition she would not have done so. By the time her political enemies realised that she and her clique were serious, the machine was loose, rampaging through the country and destroying everything, as well as invading other countries.

Sixth, the ideas of the Left are not the same as the ideas of Liberalism, and never have been. In the past, this distinction would have come as no surprise to either Leftists or Liberals, who were often bitter enemies. The fundamental difference is that the Left has always been interested in the good of society as a whole, whereas Liberalism is all about the interests of the individual. Liberalism arose before the age of mass democracy—indeed it is antipathetic to it—and the argument of some Liberals that the sum of individual rights can add up to a collective right, is clearly flawed. Most “rights” are really claims on the time and money of other people, and inevitably those who are most successful in enforcing these claims will be those with the power and the money. Philosophers like John Rawls who have attempted to construct ideal Liberal societies—for example based on his Veil of Ignorance hypothesis—are really writing science fiction, rather than political theory.

Liberalism began, after all, as a middle-class response to the power of the monarchy in various countries. It was not conceived as, and never intended to develop into, a mass political movement. (A mass political movement of competing individualists is anyway a curious concept.) It was against the concentration of power in too few hands, and against the idea of a strong and capable government, but very much for the idea of gaining more power for itself. Indeed, we can define the difference between the ideas of the Left and the ideas of Liberalism broadly as the difference between democracy and oligarchy. Montesquieu noticed this in his famous hymn to the virtues of the British political system. Power in Britain, he argued, was shared between different parts of the Establishment, such that no one part would become too powerful, as the Crown had become in France. But it is precisely in the difference between the separation of powers and the diffusion of power that the contrast between these two systems of thought is to be found.

To take a simple analogy, consider a Liberal-run society rather as an upper-middle class family discussing what to do with the parental home which is starting to need maintenance and might have to be sold. One child, perhaps, is a politician, another a banker, another works in the media, a fourth is a lawyer, a fifth is a doctor. So they might commission a study by an architect or a builder to help them decide, but would never dream of asking the gardener or the cleaning lady for their opinion. Thus, the major Liberal parties of history always had a structural problem in attracting a mass electorate. It was not obvious why the working class should vote for parties which distrusted government action and government spending (except on the police and on the courts), and preached the virtues of economic freedom, which obviously benefitted the strongest most. (As the great British Socialist RH Tawney famously remarked, “freedom for the pike is death to the minnow.”) Moreover, when the two tendencies came into collision, then Liberals, as a fundamentally elitist movement, threw their lot in with the Right. This was most notoriously the case in France in 1871, when the newly installed Republican government of Adolphe Thiers  sent the Army in to slaughter the Communards who had taken control in Paris and tried to set up a real democracy.

To some extent, this conflict was concealed by a degree of common interest with the Left that is not entirely dead. For example, Liberal parties in Europe tended to oppose a political role for organised religion (even if it was pragmatically helpful in keeping the poor in their place), they tended to be in favour of a degree of education, because they needed an educated workforce for factories and offices, they tended to be against wars and militarism, as a wasteful use of public resources, and were in general happy to increase the proportion of the population that could vote, at least up to a certain point. They supported higher taxation for the very rich, because they were not themselves the very rich. They were in time converted to a larger role for the state (for example in things like health and education) because they could see that it helped to make their countries more economically competitive. Moreover, given the ideological vacuity of Liberalism itself, Liberals often tended to take on the political colouring of the era. In the nineteenth century, Liberals in some countries were greatly influenced by Evangelical religion, with its commitment to social welfare, and in France they adopted Republican ideas, including equality. For much of the twentieth century they went along with prevailing Social Democratic concepts, the more so because they were afraid of the electoral attractions of Communist parties. Moreover, many Liberals were from the comfortable middle class that considered itself morally superior to other parts of society, and many were churchgoers or involved themselves in benevolent activities. In my youth, being a Liberal politician was almost a synonym for being “nice,” if ultimately ineffectual, and on the same side, ultimately, as parties of the Left. It is only in the last generation or so, when such accommodations no longer seem necessary, that the gloves have come off.

In addition, Liberals had, and largely retain, the great political advantage of the custody of the word “freedom.” After all, who would not want to be “free?” Who could reasonably vote for a party which promised to make you less free? But as Tawney had noticed, and as George Orwell pointed out frequently, “freedom” is a very slippery concept. (It’s a useful rhetorical exercise to substitute “uncontrolled” or “unregulated” for “free” in a Liberal discourse and observe the results.) The Left, on the other hand, has always emphasised that normative or declaratory “freedom” is of no value unless actual specific measures are put in place to ensure that the theoretical freedom becomes actual, and that it is not then misused by the wealthy and powerful. So something like the Schengen Accords, part of the “free movement of peoples” the EU is so fond of, is a classic Liberal measure. Theoretically everybody is free to travel everywhere, although in practice the majority of Europeans go abroad less than once a year, and then only for holidays. Many never leave their countries of birth. On the other hand, Schengen makes it easy for workers, not least unskilled immigrants, to be shuttled from country to country to where employers need them: it is less the free movement of peoples than the freedom to move peoples. But then none of all this is really surprising: as Anatole France had acidly remarked some time before, in a Liberal society, “the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.”

Yet the absence of any real Liberal philosophy other than the pursuit of ego gratification produces a curious paradox that an ideology allegedly all about personal freedom largely consists, in practice, of endless rules and regulations as a way of filling the existential void. In place of organised religion—or the works of Marx, if you like—we have bodies of contract law. One example of this has been the effective criminalisation of everyday life: the replacement of custom, tradition, good manners and good judgement by infinitely detailed and complex rules to regulate personal behaviour (see any western university.) By contrast, most variants of leftist thought emphasise the need for, and the  advantages of, people working out and applying their own rules, as trades unions and working mens’ clubs historically did.

A final, but substantial, difference is that the Left has generally taken up and implemented the “Equality” part of the French Revolutionary rubric, which means less that people should be equal (an effective impossibility) but rather that they should be treated equally, and therefore that rules, laws and rights should be universal. Liberalism, on the other hand, seeks to universalise its own set of largely a priori assumptions about uncontrolled personal freedom, not just domestically but everywhere it has the power to do so, and to try to contain the resultant chaos through more and more detailed and coercive rules and laws. Put another way, Liberalism is stuck in the hopeless contradiction of promoting everybody’s theoretical freedom to be different, whilst in practice coercing everybody into being the same robot-like value-maximising economic actors, all with the same limited set of acceptable opinions. Unlike the tradition of the Left, which sees rights as universal, the Liberal concept of “rights,” the nearest thing Liberalism has to a religion, inevitably leads to conflict between self-defined identity groups all demanding special treatment, usually on the basis that they have not been “equal” in the past.

Summarising then, and talking of the “Left” in general, rather than specific groups, tendencies or ideologies, we can say that the Left seeks a society where power and wealth are widely distributed, and where decisions are taken as close to ordinary people as possible, in the interests of society as a whole, and not some group marked out by wealth, position or identity.  These ideas did not arise in a vacuum, and were linked to concepts of what a better (if not necessarily ideal) society would look like, and political movements were established to help bring that society about. But because the Left was essentially about the direction society should take, rather than the fine detail of the route and the destination, there was a great deal of argument about exactly where to go and the best tactics for getting there, which had the effect of weakening the Left overall. Moreover, internal tensions developed as parties of the Left lost their original working-class base and leadership, and became increasingly taken over by university-educated professionals, with other priorities. This process tended to obscure the profound and important differences between leftist thought and Liberalism, in spite of some coincidences of interest: a problem which exists even more strongly today.

By any standards, therefore, we now live in a society which has little to do with the traditional aspirations and values of the Left, and more importantly, where none of the major western political parties genuinely embraces the idea of redistributive politics, nor of a society and an economy run for the benefit of all. Rather, government has become more distant, less capable but more powerful, and unelected new actors such as the European Union and various national and international courts have inserted themselves into what remains of the democratic processes. Although wealth does not automatically confer power, we have nonetheless seen an unprecedented increase in disparities of wealth in most western societies. Moreover, much of this wealth is concentrated in the hands of commercial actors doing work that used to be performed by the state, and thus in practice, no-one is actually accountable to the electorate for the proper provision of most of the services that make our lives possible. The concept of universal rights has been disaggregated into ramshackle collections of asserted “rights” for any group that self-identifies itself as possessing them. (There are no “homosexual rights”, for example: there is the universal right of homosexuals to be treated equally to others and thus not discriminated against.) Finally, “freedom” and “tolerance” have been reinterpreted to mean coercion and intolerance, in case politically-powerful lobbies find something to complain about.

Objectively speaking, nothing in that description corresponds to the traditional concerns and objectives of the Left: that is not a value-judgment, since clearly many people, and many political parties are in fact content with all of the above, and would argue that it is both right and necessary, it is simply a pragmatic fact. To the extent that any political parties at all still hold to the traditional view that decisions should be taken as close to the ordinary citizen as possible, and as far as possible in the general interest, they are mostly to be found on what is referred to as the Right, if not the Extreme Right. Yet it’s probably not a good idea to get too excited about that, or to try to erect ambitious theories on the basis of it. After all, the traditional parties of the Left, now run by comfortably-off, university educated, goodthinking managerial politicians, almost entirely separated from the concerns of the real world but heavily influenced by theory, are simply behaving as one would expect them to, rather like hedge-fund managers who have taken over a family firm. Indeed, it is helpful to think of the traditional parties of the Left as being rather like famous companies (Disney, perhaps?) taken over and ruined by outsiders just extracting benefits for themselves. In effect, the long struggle between the Left and Liberalism has now been won, by the latter infiltrating the former like a parasite, but keeping some of the external points of reference and discourses. It makes no sense, therefore, to say “the Left controls the Universities.” All that can perhaps be said is that groups often identified with parties that used to be of the Left but now aren’t, do so. These are the parties I have always described as the Notional Left.

I am very much afraid that the real Left may turn out to have been an unrepeatable phase in the evolution of political societies. It relied on clear and obvious injustices that needed addressing, on clear and obvious political and economic targets that needed attacking, on a mass working class base, on communities organised around the workplace, on a discourse of class-based solidarity and economic justice, on middle-class supporters and on politicians close to the concerns of ordinary people. None of that now exists.

Which is not to say that today’s gutless Liberalism has “won” in any important sense. Indeed, its inherent incoherence and its inevitable internal warfare mean that it will be shoved aside by the first organised force that confronts it. It’s fairly clear that this force will be a kind of radical populism, perhaps notionally identified with the Right, simply because the Notional Left will refuse to have anything to do with it. But then those who make the victory of the Left impossible, are going to make the victory of the Right inevitable. I hope they are gong to be happy with the result.