Left Renewal in an Age of Waiting

By Ben Gidley and Daniel Mang, from Left Renewal.

Some extracts:

Introduction

The text For a consistently democratic and internationalist left (which we wrote together with Daniel Randall, with input from numerous other contributors, and published in December 2023) has attracted support from people holding a wide range of political views: from anarchists to social democrats, from anti-Zionists to left Zionists. 

It has also been met with much defensiveness and hostility on the radical left. In this context, the authors have occasionally been labelled “liberal Zionists”. In reality, of course, neither we nor our co-author Daniel Randall are Zionists, or liberals, but leftists opposed to all forms of nationalism, including Zionism. 

We are open to discussions and political alliances with a wide spectrum of emancipatory currents and social movements: socialist/communist/anarchist, feminist, trans liberationist, queer, anti-ableist, anti-speciesist, ecological, peasants’ rights, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-caste, indigenous rights, anti-racist…

We are critical of liberalism, particularly of the racism inherent in liberalism, and of the mainstreaming of far right ideas by liberals – but we also recognise important differences among liberals, and, for that matter, among conservative political currents.

Not all enemies of radical social change are the same or equally dangerous. However bad the Democrats in the US are, they are not as dangerous as the Republicans; however conservative Congress in India is, it is not as authoritarian and racist as the BJP; however neoliberal the Civic Platform in Poland is, it is not as reactionary as Law and Justice. 

And however oppressive, exploitative, death-dealing and hypocritical the “liberal world order” has been (and, in its crisis, still is), the new world order dreamt of by the global far right – from big players like Russian neo-Eurasianists, CCP ultranationalists and US paleocons, to smaller players like the Gulf elites or the military rulers of Myanmar (to name only a few examples) – is going to be much worse.

We are in favour of strategic alliances with liberals, when necessary even with conservatives, in defense of political democracy and civil liberties, and against the far right. We want to win liberals over to more radical positions, for example by pointing out the impossibility of achieving full democracy under capitalism and, more generally, the fundamental contradictions of liberalism. 

We advocate working in unions and, where it makes sense, parties, and emphasise that even bureaucratised and conservative organisations can, if conditions are right, be transformed from below. We are in favour of engaging, where it is possible, in electoral politics and trying to win concrete improvements within the framework of the state. 

We nonetheless consider ourselves radical leftists. Our political horizon is “revolutionary” rather than “reformist”. 

What exactly do we mean by this? 

Here we get into some of the disagreements not only between different supporters and signatories of our text, but also among the authors, one of whom is an unorthodox Trotskyist, while the two others are anti-authoritarian leftists of different formation.

In this pamphlet, we (the “two others”) return to some of the fault lines within our December 2023 text – which reflect some of the differences among the authors as well as fault lines in the coalitions we call for. We wish to clarify ambiguities in our original text (as we see them) but also to deepen and broaden the analysis proposed there. 

In our 2023 text, we identified some of the ways in which the left was in urgent need of renewal, as starkly revealed by responses to October 7 and its aftermath – from simplistic forms of anti-imperialism to truncated forms of anti-racism, from susceptibility to conspiracy theories to the temptations of reaction. Here, the two of us try to point to what we think are some of the deeper conceptual issues underlying these problems. 

At the same time, although liberals and centrists today often point to some of the same problems on the left that we do (such as a tendency towards antisemitic discourse or the embrace of reactionary movements that pose as counter-hegemonic or anti-imperialist), laying out our stance on these deeper conceptual issues demonstrates the gulf separating us from liberalism – an important project in the face of liberalism’s attempt to co-opt the critique of the critique in defence of the status quo. 

For example, we believe that overcoming the vulgar, manichean versions of “anti-imperialism” that so much of today’s left regurgitates requires a far more complex, planetary understanding of internationalism and solidarity from below. We believe that susceptibility to conspiracy theory will only be overcome through a return to class analysis, as we argued in our previous text, but that in the 21st century this requires stretching Marxism’s orthodoxies more radically than we intimated in that text. Conversely, a reckoning with class reductionism and the conservative politics it licences requires a deeper engagement with the insights of social movements and marginalised identities. Similarly, loosening the hold reactionary nationalism has on the left, as well as its fetishisation of certain national liberation movements, requires a more radical engagement with anti-nationalist perspectives. 

One of the most obvious fault lines in “For a consistently democratic and internationalist left” is how we talk about class. We are all generally sceptical of the “retreat from class” discourses of many left intellectuals (such as Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe, or André Gorz) in various core capitalist countries emerging in the 1980s and 1990s. But we differ in our evaluation of the ideas and developments these various theoretical currents were reacting to. 

This is due to our different relationships to the socialist tradition, and our different understandings of the history of the left in general, and our differing views on various developments of left theory (more on this later).   

This opens a set of questions about organisation and the mobilisation of a “revolutionary subject” (if any) and a set of questions about how radicals should position themselves in relation to the language of “bourgeois” rights. 

“New” social movements, including around gender and sexuality, have transformed the terrain of struggle in the last several decades in ways with which the “trad left” has not fully reckoned. We argue that these movements offer important lessons the left has still not fully taken on board, including about what we might call “micropolitics”. 

While some streams of the left have leaned into the reactionary backlash against “identity politics” and “wokeism”, other streams have abandoned some core left values in favour of a retreat into identity absolutisms. 

Finally, a key fault line relates to the place of religion and “fundamentalism”, an issue raised in our original statement and clarified here.

Two threads run through this text. 

First, we argue for a politics of alliance and coalition-building. We recognise that we are living in a time of defeat of radical politics – an age of waiting, as Victor Serge put it – which makes alliances and coalition-building both more essential and more risky. This means radical activists and organisers need a clear-eyed identification of the most present dangers and must risk the venture of compromise with those with whom we disagree (and, in many cases, will never convince and should never trust), to defeat these dangers – rather than rage away in the splendid isolation of ideological purity. This does not mean abandoning our principles in a rush to the lowest common denominator, or an appeal to a populist politics of grievances, or some kind of “beyond left and right” configuration. It means always thinking tactically about the contingency of the current conjuncture, strategically for the day after, and also with an eye on the horizon of a fuller emancipatory time. A politics of the possible, with a realistic theory of change; but also acting in such a way as to send a message in a bottle to a future time, after the “age of waiting”, when mass radical movements may emerge again from the wreckage of the current crisis.

Second, we argue, in the spirit of consistent internationalism, for a planetary view of the current conjuncture: a critique of the parochialism of so much of the left. What happens in attempts to organise transnationally in a grossly unequal world, where the landscape looks completely different from different vantage points, where the red lines involved in coalition-building are different in every location? For example, as we argue below, a retreat from class or defence of old-style class politics in the de-industrialising global North looks different when we note that de-industrialisation there always means industrialisation and the creation of an industrial proletariat somewhere else. Similarly, “bourgeois” rights that might seem trivial to some in “liberal democracies” are a matter of life and death in nakedly authoritarian states.

Resources for Left Renewal

We are not here to defend or extend any particular left sub-tradition, whether Trotskyist, council communist, anarchist, or democratic socialist. Rather, we see many possible resources for renewal within the heterogeneous history of the existing left. Specifically, we place ourselves in the broad tradition of the anti-Stalinist left, which has long had to contend with the dominance of dogmatic, authoritarian and statist (not to mention masculinist, heterosexist and nationalist) leftisms, whether “revolutionary” or “reformist”, in left movements and spaces. 

At various times, often of emergency, the anti-Stalinist left has worked in broad alliance, without any of its elements sacrificing their independence. Without succumbing to nostalgia for lost opportunities, we similarly seek a broad alliance of anti-capitalist, eco-socialist, anti-racist, feminist, trans and queer liberationist… activists against the dangers of the present day. 

In particular, while some traditional leftists see the “new” social movements of the 1960s and 70s and “identity politics” as aberrations or degenerations, we think the left has a lot to learn from social movements that do not necessarily label themselves as “left”, even if, at times, the rise of such social movements “outside the left” and the left’s defeat and disorientation have been part of one and the same process. Similarly, we take inspiration from the wealth of continuing innovation within the critical Marxist tradition, without wanting to maintain Marxism as the one true faith.

Which “Return To Class”?

In our original statement, we argued for a “return” to class analysis: “The only possible agency for an authentically democratic, anti-capitalist politics is conscious struggle by the exploited and oppressed for self-emancipation.” Class politics, we argued, have been set back by decades of neoliberal victories and labour movement defeats. The weaknesses of the left we identified – “the rise of syncretic politics, campism and conspiracy theory, as well as the deepening purchase of pseudo-emancipatory antisemitism” – can, we argued, “partly be explained as symptoms of this left abandonment of class” and its abandonment of “an analysis of the dynamics of global capitalism.” 

In this, some readers might have seen a parallel with the wave of “back to class” calls emerging since the global financial crisis of 2007/2008, which come from the traditional left (e.g. Adolph Reed, Chetan Bhatt) as well as from pseudo-leftists (e.g. Angela Nagle, Musa al-Gharbi, Catherine Liu, Amber A’Lee Frost).

However, in the same text we also argued that the left has at times suffered from viewing liberation struggles over gender and sexuality as of secondary political importance to the left’s traditional struggles against the “main enemy” –  which has sometimes led to it allying with socially conservative forces that also appear to oppose the “main enemy”.

In other words, while advocating class analysis, we oppose the class reductionism championed by many of those calling for a “return to class”. 

Class reductionists imagine the working class in the same way the traditional western left imagined it a century ago: the normative worker was male and employed in heavy industry. As materialist feminists, Black Marxists and others have long shown, that image was already problematic then: it excluded whole sectors, such as domestic service and hyper-exploited agricultural labour, for example – sectors where women and negatively racialised people (including of course negatively racialised women) predominated. 

But it is even more problematic now, as the nature of capitalism continues to mutate, with ever more of us working in immaterial (“white” and “pink collar”) industries, from the care sector to “creative” industries, often producing information, feelings or states of being rather than tangible objects. 

For us, the renewal of the left requires both a critique of forms of domination other than class and an understanding of how these intersect with and reshape class itself. 

Class reductionists see the left’s case for open borders as a variation on the dream of parts of the global capitalist class of a more frictionless global market (who they, like the populist right, call the “globalists”, a term that invokes old Stalinist antisemitic narratives about “rootless cosmopolitans”). Class reductionists imagine the working class to be rooted in a place, and to be defined by the nation states in which they live, missing the extent to which uprooting, mobility and migration were central to the very emergence of a proletariat. For us, in contrast, the struggle for the right to move (including across nation-state borders) is a central working class demand. Building walls, attacking migrant workers for crossing borders, blaming them for wage reductions made by the employers who exploit them, or even the demand to bring jobs home, are all ultimately anti-working class positions.

Class reductionism, then, is always a parochial vision, not an internationalist one. In a planetary perspective, we know that de-industrialisation in one country is always industrialisation somewhere else; the de- and re-composition of the working class in the rust belts of the capitalist core (such as in the USA) cannot be separated from the re-composition of the working class in peripheralised regions where new factories are built due to lower wages, more authoritarian labour discipline and cheaper natural resources, in what Beverly Silver and David Harvey have called capital’s “spatial fix”. 

Internationalists should seek to link up “rust belt struggles” in capitalist core regions with emergent workers’ movements in industrialising regions – and not play them off against each other in a zero-sum contest. 

Class reductionists in the old core of the capitalist world-system tend to uncritically defend what Silver has called “backlash resistances”, the defensive struggles of working classes “that are being unmade by global economic transformations”. These struggles, which mobilise especially ”workers who had benefited from established social compacts that are being abandoned from above”, necessarily have both reactionary and radical aspects. 

A consistently internationalist class politics would seek to radicalise these struggles by linking them up with what Silver has called “the struggles of newly emerging working classes”.

But global capitalism is not only producing new industrial working classes, but also an ever growing class of people it has no use for at all – people that capitalist society, at least as it is organised today, cannot integrate. The fate right wing thinkers have in store for this “surplus population” is mass death. 

We think leftists could engage more seriously and consistently with the struggles emerging from this “world” – land rights, informal workers’ rights and food security, debt struggles and poor women’s struggles, the right to the city and migrants’ rights…

[...]

Identity Politics

Truncated understandings of emancipation have hindered radical politics from moving forward. In particular, moving forward requires a more dialectical analysis that defends the gains made by emancipatory social movements against conservative backlash, building wider popular coalitions in defence of these gains, while also understanding the extent to which the language, and sometimes ideas and practices, of these emancipatory social movements have been taken up by elites committed to the maintenance of the capitalist order. Power’s ability to recuperate resistance is ever renewed, from the embrace of “diversity” and “inclusion” or “flat hierarchies” and “co-production” in workplaces, to spurious claims about “green” or “sustainable” capitalism, to the deployment of gender equality or gay rights to legitimise military intervention; corporate interests have co-opted the language of identity politics into a corporate discourse of diversity and inclusion as part of the management of difference to maintain capitalist domination.

At the same time, left currents have emerged that promote a fractured world of segregated identities, or which reify the imagined moral excellence of particular subaltern identities. This has taken some in a sectarian direction, a politics of identity-based moral purity inimical to building new coalitions of liberation, in which standpoint trumps reasoned content. 

In response to these managerial and sectarian drifts, a left critique of “identity politics” has emerged, from which we have learned a lot. But some parts of what we might call the trad or orthodox, class reductionist left – in the US, Western Europe and elsewhere – have gone further, to embrace “anti-woke” positions, articulating a version of “back to class” which rolls back some of the advances brought about by “new” social movements since the 1960s (encompassing issues such as ecology, climate change, and redefining concepts of progress and abundance, as well as themes relating to collective identities, discussed above). Ironically, many of the calls for a return to class end up as a form of identity politics, celebrating the imagined – “white” – identity of a reified working class defined by culture rather than by power relations.

The evolution of movements like ecologism and gay rights, at least in the United States, partly reflected the weakness of the classical left, a retreat from class politics and class analysis in the wake of the defeat of the cycle of struggle which peaked in the late 1960s. In the emotional landscape of the trad left, nostalgia for an imagined golden age before that defeat and retreat, is intertwined with bitterness at the gains of “new” social movements. Constrained by its theoretical and affective limitations, all it can offer is the same false “universalism”, premised on the figure of the heterosexual white male industrial worker in the nation-states of the capitalist core. 

Another way of naming this tendency is “conservative populism” – identified by Daphne Lawless in 2016 as one of the three pillars of “conservative leftism”: “opposition to the social changes which have happened in the neoliberal/globalised era (opposition to cosmopolitan urbanisation, anti-immigration, idealisation of ‘traditional’ rural/small-town/working class life, scepticism of newer identities around gender/race which are smeared as ‘identity politics’)”. Recently, Lawless has noted the convergence between the Trump project and this milieu around an “anti-woke” agenda. Because putative “wokeness” (the corporate identity politics mentioned earlier) can be mobilised from above, “anti-wokeness” can generate support from those who identity with “the underdog”, even when it is deployed by the global right to pursue, in Lawless’ words, “class war from above”. 

We believe that “new” social movement themes – often demonised by self-styled “radical leftists” as “radlib” (radical liberal), “woke” or “identity politics” – need to be brought into a broader leftist framework, recognizing their importance as a corrective to previous universalist aspirations that failed to be truly inclusive. In this sense, identity politics, as formulated for example by the Combahee River Collective, is a challenge to articulate a more genuine universalism, that has room for the flourishing of myriad particularities. Some aspects of what has been labelled “wokeness” or identity politics are remnants of previous emancipatory struggles, representing victories worth defending. We need to hold on to gains made by earlier (overlapping) liberation movements such as for women, indigenous and negatively racialised people, and queer people (including struggles within and against the left). The left’s embrace of “anti-woke” rhetoric potentially undoes past successes.

Confusionism, Anti-Trans Politics, Reactionary Decoloniality

Specifically, anti-woke leftism opens up a vulnerability for leftist politics to be co-opted by anti-emancipatory projects, with leftist and former leftist personalities used as an alibi for right-wing politics or as sales assistants in bids to enter, confuse or reroute leftist movements – in what commentators have called syncretic, confusionist or diagonalist politics. Instead, we argue, we need to push through, not roll back social movement advances in the renewal of left politics.

Transphobia within feminism and on the left is one manifestation of this kind of confusionism and why the left needs to be uncompromising in its defence of emancipatory movements. Transphobia has been central to the current globally ascendant authoritarian wave, which has deployed culture war conspiracy theories and the anti-woke backlash to promote its message. Former radicals and progressives have embraced “purple-brown politics” in what has been called the “TERF to far right pipeline”, ending up in alliance with religious nationalists and authoritarian political parties while claiming to act in the name of emancipatory values. This kind of confusionism has given legitimacy and intellectual energy to the authoritarian wave, enabling it to claim to act against “elites”. In the name of “gender criticism”, anti-trans feminists have found themselves promoting conservative movements that see the (authoritarian, patriarchal, heteronormative…) family as the foundation of society. 

In such contexts, a renewed, emancipatory, anti-fascist left must stand up for the rights of people of all genders, even, or especially, when transphobic attacks come in left-wing or feminist garb.

In similarly confusionist ways, authoritarian movements, often deeply patriarchal and hostile to women’s and queer lives, have employed the language of anti-imperialism and decolonisation. Borrowing decolonial critiques, conservative and sovereigntist forces outside the capitalist core have portrayed emancipatory movements as western imperialist projects. 

Civilisational racism and the denial, or trivialisation, of the harms of Western colonialism/imperialism are an important part of the “common sense” of majority white countries of the capitalist core. Feminist and LGBTQ+ movements in the US, Western Europe, etc, were never free of such tendencies. And it is true that feminist and liberationist language has been abused by western elites (as when Laura Bush declared during the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan that “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women”), earning feminism a bad name in many contexts. 

However, the hasty dismissal in some quarters of feminist and gay liberation’s universalist aspirations as always automatically “white feminism”, “femonationalism” or “pinkwashing” can objectively serve the power interests of authoritarian states and para-states – from Putin’s Russia and Modi’s India to Ortega’s Nicaragua and Maduro’s Venezuela. In such contexts, a renewed, emancipatory, democratic left must be clear in standing in solidarity with global queer and feminist movements, even when they resist states that pose as “anti-imperialist” – without retreating into a defence of white feminism or liberal false universalisms!

Fundamentalisms

The complexities here are especially acute when we look at the entangled politics of the “Middle East”, which have been so symbolically important in the current cycle of struggle. Our original statement gave significant space to a critique of the left’s accommodation with Islamism in particular and fundamentalisms in general. We noted that Islamist movements and regimes have, in common with other forms of politicised fundamentalist religion, brutalised religious, ethnic and sexual minorities, women, political dissidents and progressive movements; and we noted the particular role that antisemitism has played in the history of Islamism globally. The critique of religious authority, particularly when that authority is backed by state power, has deep roots on the left, in anarchist and feminist traditions, which have long raised the alarm about the use of religion to buttress patriarchal power, enforce the heteronormative family, and exclude minoritised ethnicities. 

However, we recognise that the term “fundamentalism”, as well as the critique of Islamism, comes with problematic political baggage. The last two decades have seen the increasing use of what has been named “liberal Islamophobia”, including the deployment by the right of “liberal” critiques of Islam to mainstream and whitewash anti-Muslim racism. “Muscular liberal” secularism has been another gateway to confusionism, as secularists and the far right form alliances. The term “fundamentalism” is part of the lexicon of this alliance. The same language has been echoed on the “anti-imperialist” left against the Syrian revolution, with Sunni Muslim Arabs who resisted the putatively “secular” Assad regime demonised as bloodthirsty jihadi “headchoppers”.

The Syrian example also reminds us that religious sources can sustain resistance to state power, and history provides multiple examples of emancipatory movements animated by religious faith. 

Nonetheless, we feel the advantages of using the term “fundamentalism” outweigh the disadvantages, especially when used in the plural, as by the feminist group Women Against Fundamentalisms (WAF), which “insisted on the importance of challenging fundamentalism across all religions, not just Muslim fundamentalism. For instance,… critiquing the Hindu Right and its attacks on Muslims and other minorities in India”. WAF defined fundamentalisms as modern day religious political movements that make use of state machinery to consolidate their power and to impose their version of religion. This definition highlights fundamentalism as distinctly contemporary (rather than some atavistic throwback to “barbarism”, as liberal Islamophobia conceives of Islamism) and as an authoritarian drift cutting across denominational and ethnic categories. In the current political conjuncture, as religious conservatism deepens its grip on state apparatuses and on women’s bodies, resisting this drift is more important than ever. This is why we made the decision to go with the term “fundamentalism” as a globally applicable category, seeing Islamism as sharing features with Hindutva, Buddhist supremacisms, Kahanism and Religious Zionist messianism, Russian Orthodox Nationalism or MAGA-affiliated Christian Nationalism.

People, Nature, Extractivism

The age of waiting is also an age of emergency. Our planet is burning. In this context too, the existing left’s blindness to the insights of “new” social movements is disastrous. Just as left renewal means changing our ideas about gender, ethnicity and nation, it also means redefining progress, abundance and non-abundance, questioning hierarchies of beings, animality and humanity, thingness and aliveness.

Social relations of domination and exploitation among people are inextricably bound up with relations between humans and the non-human world. Building a new society based on equality, autonomy and reciprocity among people will entail a radical change in our relationship to other living beings and the world at large.

This is about much more than a sullen acceptance of “limits to growth”. We should emphatically reject the “pioneer spirit” of recent centuries (as well as even older injunctions of the “be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it” variety). A renewed left must propose alternative cultural narratives to heroic tales of discovery, expansion and conquest – “Western” or otherwise. 

We are decidedly not “eco-modernists”, but neither are we “primitivists”. In articulating a politics of hope towards an emancipatory horizon, we should be free to envision a range of possible futures, that may perhaps include the continued scientific exploration of outer space, or the choice to radically alter our bodies. But in none of the futures we envision will “humanity conquer new frontiers”. There will certainly be no “colonisation” – not by fascist billionaires, nor by anyone else, nor will there be extraction of resources that have grown scarce on Earth from the Moon or Mars for the purpose of perpetuating a totally insane socioeconomic system.

In this context, beyond simplistic idealisations of “non-Western ontologies”, there is in fact much to be learned from cultures that have, or had, other ways of relating to the world than that which is today dominant.

The old orthodox left was committed to a vision of limitless growth. In 1920, Lenin announced that “communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” Electrification would transform the Russian empire from a “small-peasant basis into a large-scale industrial basis”; it would literally bring “enlightenment” to the people. But Stalinism’s storm of progress has left great wreckage, and too much of the left continues to think that human emancipation can be bought by the continued extraction of the planet’s dwindling resources.

A key faultline in the left, then, is between an extractivist and an anti-extractivist left. For instance, in South America the “pink tide” governments (often led by culturally conservative, Christian men) that so inspired the global left in the first decades of the century, in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela, pursued mining, fossil fuels, logging and industrialised agriculture with as much vigour as the neoliberal governments they opposed. Similarly, post-apartheid governments in South Africa have pursued mineral extraction and fossil fuel exploitation, often accompanied by the repression of trade unions in these sectors – with little to show for it in terms of improving the incomes and quality of life of the great majority of the population. 

As another left has emerged in South America, grounded in indigenous and peasant communities and committed to an ecological, feminist vision of emancipation, the authoritarian left in the west has slandered it as neoliberal. 

A Planetary Left

In the face of capitalism’s globalising tendencies, some leftists have seen the nation-state as a grounds for defence against capitalism: inveighing against  “globalists”, fantasising about autarky, seeing national ownership as a shortcut to social justice, and advocating for extraction of resources as a path to national growth. We see this from the authoritarian currents in the “pink tide” to those on Britain’s trad left who saw the departure from the EU as a victory for the British working class. Radicalism wrapped in the flag is another form of conservative leftism.

In this text, we have tried to gesture towards a different kind of left, not just inter-nationalist in the sense of bringing together different national lefts, but one whose horizon is always already trans-national, rooted in the interdependencies between people and other living beings across borders: a planetary left.