Quo Vadis, Democrats?

[Razgovory]

So, the DSA is a "hostile takeover". From whom, exactly? The "let's check what our focus groups say" crowd?

Mamdani showed that you can win on a from an American viewpoint, radical platform.

I would say the United States are ahead of Europe there, as we are collectively going for retrograde nationalism with ordo-liberalism without a conscience.

From the majority.  The people who believe in Democracy.

[Sheilbh]

And was it three or actually four elections that he lost?

A great hero of the left, indeed

He lost three elections and - with Michael Foot also a hero for the left - saved the Labour Party. Not sure I entirely agree with a purely electoralist argument/ends justify the means and the measure of whether a leader is or isn't a "hero of the left" is how many elections they win. Tony Blair: Order of Lenin at this rate

I've not read the article. But Militant Tendency were (and are) not just a left-wing pressure group within the family of left-wing democratic politics. They're genuinely Trots.

[Sheilbh]

Kinnock lost to John Mayor.

Interestingly the last election with turnou over 75% (before the depoliticisation of New Labour) and to this day John Major received more votes than any other PM. I think because we remember Major as 92-97 - after Black Wednesday and being forced out of the ERM - we forget his effectiveness especially as a campaigner on the soapbox. Incidentally often discussed as an election the Tories would have done better to lose - then Labour would have to deal with ERM and it would probably be a one term government.

But also Kinnock should have gone before I think being leader of the opposition for almost ten years and two elections is tough to come back from. The people have formed an opinion that it's difficult to shake (especially if the governing party re-fresh their top team).

[Norgy]

I only remember The Sun's famous lightbulb with Kinnock's head. Free and fair elections and all. The last person to leave was to put out the light.

I think the journey of the Democratic Party is rather in the mould of Canada's New Democratic Party rather than British Labour.

Maggie Thatcher called James Callaghan's cabinet "hard left". In West Germany, Helmuth Schmidt called it "hardly left".

There is a before and after with Reagan and Thatcher, just like there is a post-George Wallace Democratic Party.
Before, televangelists were few. Before, being in a trade union was normal. Before, there was a goddamned working class, white, black and Hispanic.

I am not going in deep on this, as I am but an idiot, however, if you ask me, facts have moved left, while politics have moved towards the far right.

This post-factual thing, I would love someone more clever than me to explain. And, I know it begins with the algorithms.

[DGuller]

Mamdani showed that you can win on a from an American viewpoint, radical platform.

Yes, Mamdani won in NYC, against an array of flawed candidates.  Not exactly representative of the broader electoral prospects, even the flawed candidates part.  It also remains to be seen what damage he'll leave behind to discredit the likes of him.  Just because Republicans manage to avoid attribution for their misrule doesn't mean that Democrats can do the same.

I think the big error that lot on the left are making is assuming that if the current strategy doesn't win often enough, then it cannot be the best strategy.  The reality is that sometimes the cards are stacked against you, and you'll be facing headwinds on matter what, but that doesn't mean that some ways to play the cards are not much worse than the others.  Going in the DSA direction is playing a bad hand very badly.

[crazy canuck]

And was it three or actually four elections that he lost?

A great hero of the left, indeed

He lost three elections and - with Michael Foot also a hero for the left - saved the Labour Party. Not sure I entirely agree with a purely electoralist argument/ends justify the means and the measure of whether a leader is or isn't a "hero of the left" is how many elections they win. Tony Blair: Order of Lenin at this rate

I've not read the article. But Militant Tendency were (and are) not just a left-wing pressure group within the family of left-wing democratic politics. They're genuinely Trots.

I get your hatred for those who he opposed. I'm not sure that your hatred is justified, but I do certainly know that the person you say, saved the labour party also doomed it too electoral irrelevance and largely paved the way for Blair.

[Razgovory]

This is very weird.  After 2020, I complained about the defund the police protests.  I said that it really hurt the Democratic party.  I was told by several people here that they didn't really mean defund the police.  And really, it was just a few radicals and nobody listened to them.  Nobody in the Democratic party is actually for something that stupid.  6 years later we are championing defund the police again.


The DSA program looks like they had Donald Trump write it for them.  Abolish the military?  No border?  No prisons?  Non-citizens voting?  This is electoral poison.

[Sheilbh]

I get your hatred for those who he opposed. I'm not sure that your hatred is justified, but I do certainly know that the person you say, saved the labour party also doomed it too electoral irrelevance and largely paved the way for Blair.

Again they were genuinely Trotskyists. So in the year he gave that speech their internal political policy was that "in non-revolutionary periods demands for the arming of the working class and the dismantling of the state will not be sufficient. These presuppose that the workers are arriving at or have reached revolutionary conclusions. Soviets can only be demanded or established when objective conditions are ripe."

This was the context of the speech. The Militant council in Liverpool had won a big fight with the Thatcher government in the previous year over passing an illegal budget (there are legal limits on how much of a deficit councils can run) - they misread that so went even bigger in the next year. Thatcher didn't blink a second time. From Militant's perspective - and this is in internal party documents at the time - it was a win-win. Either Thatcher gave in in which case they strengthen their position within the Labour Party and other bits of Militant take over other cities, or they lose and they get into a fight with Thatcher that will raise the revolutionary consciousness of the advanced working class (they were very, very big at this time on organising protest "days of rage" which they'd gently encourage civil servants in local government to attend).  Either way they increase their power in the mainstream party of the left, or they raise revolutionary consciousness - either way they are improving the objective conditions for revolution.

By the Labour Party Conference it's clear that Thatcher isn't blinking and that it isn't increasing revolutionary consciousness - which is when they make swingeing, huge cuts to try and get a legal budget including firing tens of thousands of public workers. That's why they're on the backfoot and Kinnock goes on the attack. This is the context for Kinnock's lines about "a Labour Council, a Labour Council sending taxis around a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers" and that you "can't play politics with people's lives and people's services". Edit: Just to flag Militant's plan was to immediately push those budgets back and make them even bigger and rehire everyone to start another fight with Thatcher - but in their view they'd be more organisationally prepared to take advantage of it a second time round.

Militant were (and are) a literally Trotskyist party - you can't just join you need to demonstrate commitment over a long period of time and full members are expected to become full-time cadres. It's now publicly known but their constitution (which was still secret in the 80s) is a democratic centralist revolutionary party. The divide in soft/hard left in the Labour party really crystallises in these years between the hard left who take a "no enemies to the left" approach which means that Labour should work with and be open to (including allowing membership of) parties from the revolutionary left who oppose the parliamentary road to socialism and the soft left whose view is that it should be a precondition for Labour to open to a group that they support for the parliamentary, democratic route to socialism and reject the revolutionary road. It was a fight that was happening - and I'm 100% on the Kinnock/soft-left perspective on that. I think to an extent that goes to Raz's point my view is commitment to democratic government and democracy is a firewall issue for me - and I wish it was for the American right.

The fight with Militant wasn't that they were pushing for a slightly more left-wing platform - they did publish one that was a bit like their version of the Transitional Programme. Although they actually often had quite oddly conservative views on economic issues as anything Labour did was just "ameliorism" when the priority should be raising revolutionary consciousness. Fundamentally they were a revolutionary socialist group opposed to the parliamentary, democratic route to socialism - and I think that is an alien body in a democratic socialist party. They didn't do terrorism (other of the Trotoskyist factions in the UK were more inclined that way) but they're closer in spirit to the Red Brigades or the RAF than the Labour Party - or for that matter Berlinguer's PCI or other Eurocommunist parties.

I'd add on the dooming to irrelevance that in my view Neil Kinnock saved the party (as did Michael Foot before him) - the people I'd blame for the electoral irrelevance were the Labour right, pro-Common Market fanatics who brokeaway to form the SDP. I think in general Thatcher would have won anyway and there is evidence the SDP also took votes from moderate Tories, but I think it was that split more than anything else that caused the damage and it was very touch and go whether the SDP would supplant Labour. I mean there are may other issues. But I think we are in a similar period of crisis as the 70s and new formations and possibilities and threats are emerging in the 1980s.

Now having said all that, as I say I've not read the article but I don't see a vast amount of overlap with Mamdani.

One slightly interesting caveat which is maybe worth pondering is how Militant took power in Liverpool which is that basically the Liverpool Labour Party had functionally ceased to exist. Liverpool had been a city with a sectarian divide (Protestant English/Scots/Ulstermen vote Tory - or, occassionally the Protestant Party - while Irish Catholics voted Labour). The Labour Party was basically machine politics run by two dominant figures on the Labour Right, Bessie Braddock (herself interestingly an ex-Communist who came via the ILP and the left of the party) who was the local MP for basically the docks and the homes of dockers and her husband Jack Braddock who was council leader. They dominated Liverpool politics from 1945 to the 70s when they die. The machine carries on for a while but it is in decline - and what it leaves is a lot of council and constituencies that return Labour MPs with 70%+ of the vote but basically don't have any party members - because the Braddocks didn't really want members or people to be engaged (there's stories of them actually telling people they couldn't join the party). Militant start organising and stepping into the void. It's not the same as Militant but I think that pattern of moribund parties has been repeatedin Scotland and Wales and the North. It's a theme in Labour. And I think there is a light echo there with the DSA.

Edit:  I would add hatred's a strong word - I don't hate Militant Tendency or Trots. I just think you do actually need a cordon sanitaire against them - not least because it's a movement that's spent 80 years in entrenched factional infighting, broadly between four factions who do not disagree on a single issue of "policy" purely on issues of analysis and "praxis" over who gets to be the British wing of the Fourth International. And my observation is they bring all of that constant grinding factionalism etc into every organisation they join. So I believe in a cordon sanitaire against forces that are not committed to democracy even if they also like nationalising things, and I think in my experience they tend to be a pretty toxic element (it's a tactic: make the environment toxic so anyone not committed/part of their group leaves and they take over).

[Sheilbh]

I think most "industrial" and "post-industrial" states are in a race towards the bottom. By choice, really.

There is a very strong and politically charged upper strata throwing money at anti-immigration parties and nationalist parties. Which is rather contradictory to this class' interest, which has been and is free flow and free trade.

On the other hand, splitting working people into them and us is rather effective. The point being made is that it should be harder for people to move between borders and easier for money to move.

We live in a Hayekian dystopia. None of the promises of the St. Pelegrin Society have come true. And all the worst fears of those brave enough to oppose the Reagan/Thatcher/Hayek/Friedman agenda have become true as well.

We spend our time discussing which immigrant group is the worst, while we should and can confront those powers that make us do that.

End of.

So I think we need to put the case for the defence here

Intellectually - and I think this is more sympathetic in Globalists than his later work (where as I say he plays a little loose and fast with some of his quotations in ways that I think can be quite misleading) - a lot of the origins of what becomes neo-liberalism is the trauma of inter-war Central Europe. That is a source of a huge number of thinkers who are influential on the development of neo-liberalism. And their formative experience is the collapse of a multinational empire of many millions, with freely circulation goods, people and capital (you think of Keynes similar description of the world in 1913 in the Economic Consequences of the Peace) into small units. That division is driven by nationalism. Those units themselves had varied experiences from Bela Kun's Soviet to various forms of various shades of proto-fascism, social democracy, populism etc. Their fundamental formative experience was of the enormous power politics or the political had to disrupt and destroy lives, opportunities, a cultural space, economies and the simple power for people to make free choice for futile, irrational things like a flag in a tiny country, or, say, Kun's Soviet or all the other problems experienced in different states in inter-war Central Europe.

And as economically influenced thinkers (and maybe also as German speakers so a little influenced by Marx and Freud perhaps ) they think the economy is key to this. Again this is reminiscent of Keynes evocation of the gentleman having his coffee in the morning in 1913 - I think that first era of globalisation was only surpassed in the 2000s. Basically it is the disruption of the economy by politics and in particular by nationalism which destroys their world and then within those smaller units the political interferes even more through socialism or proto-fascism or populism further eroding economic freedoms and leading with each ratchet to a diminuition of political and social freedoms. There is a deeply anti-democratic and anti-political core to their thinking - but it is not a million miles from the anti-democratic instincts of all liberalism. It's the same fear of the mob going back to the oldest political authors, that run through the founders thinking, the "two wolves and one sheep" vote what to have for dinner etc.

I think that background matter in terms of the ideas they produce which is basically about reversing that vicious cycle. So you protect the market from the vicissitudes of democratic politics through things like privatisation, technocracacy, promoting freer trade for globalisation (subject to technocratic, non-political governing bodies/constraints), monetarism (ideally overseen by a scrupulously independent central bank) - which promotes consumer and business choice and freedom, prompting more individual flourishing and is a necessary condition for political freedoms - because as long as the political has a say over or controls economic forces then that experience of inter-war Europe can happen again and leads to unfreedom of one form or another.

And they persist - an underrated virtue in politics - for a long time on the relative fringes. Which mans they are available when there is a crisis - and there are multiple crises in the 1970s. This isn't just a Western/Developed world story - I think in many ways the warning signs start in the Global South with the problems faced by developmentalist regimes and World Bank schemes. But the more planned and social democratic economies of the early post-war face similar challenges. And this crisis is not just felt on the right, but also on the left. It produces the years of lead and growth of radical revolutionary left movements (including Militant, incidentally), Bennism (with its calls in effect for an autarkic war economy) and Mitterrand's propositions. Because on both left and right there is a search for a coherent answer to the crises of the 70s and the existing model (because there is no end - there is no winning, final ideal state, every model contains the flaws that will undermine and destroy it) - because simply muddling on no longer seemed a plausible answer (which is why the turn to the radical and new on both sides happened simultaneously).

I personally don't really think Thatcher or Reagan actually matter that much (I basically think 99.9% of politicians don't matter) - I think their primary impact is stylistic. The fundamentals of what becomes neo-liberalism are already underway by the late seventies under Carter and (because of the IMF) under Callaghan - because they have an intellectually coherent diagnosis, analysis and solution. I think the best example is Mitterrand who begins on a radical line in coalition with the PCF and begins implementing that radical left-wing alternative and within two years is forced onto what is ultimately the neo-liberal path - particularly with Jacques Delors' ascendancy.

As I say I think we're in a 70s-ish moment now. So I think other long dormant but marginally influential groups wtih interesting ideas and analyses and intellectual coherent answers have a chance to get a hearing and hold some form of power. I think it's why as much as you've got the fringe stuff percolating on the right - Marxism's back and interesing etc. We're in that period now in my view when, under the weight (you might say) of its own contradictions the existing order is in crisis and the solution isn't going to come from within it but the fringes and the weirdos and lunatics (and in the US I slightly worry the Democrats, especially, successfully isoluated too many of theirs - John Ganz's When the Clock Broke is great on that theory).

Edit: Although I'd add I don't think that's going to come from the old Trot groups like Militant - FWIW I think the most interesting figure on the Euro-left (who is not unproblematic) is Melenchon by some way.

[Jacob]

Tell me about Melenchon.

All I know is that he's a leftist, which doesn't bother me; and that he's sympathetic to Russia when it comes to Ukraine, which I abhor.