With France’s presidential Election three months away, the general view is that the left is again heading for defeat. What reinforces this feeling is that, even in the unlikely event of the various strands that make up the left uniting during the campaign, they no longer have much in common. How could they govern together, when they disagree on issues as basic as taxation, retirement age, nuclear power, the EU, defence policy and relations with the US, Russia and China?

All that still unites them is fear of the far right. But in the last four decades the far right’s rise has continued even when the left has been in power (1981-86, 1988-93, 1997-2002, 2012-17). In other words, their strategies to curb this danger have been a spectacular failure.

Beyond France, the picture is no brighter. ‘There’s no point in twisting the knife. We’re overwhelmed! The left has been wiped out in a whole series of countries,’ says Jean-Luc Mélenchon (1), who seems to be the French left’s leading presidential contender, though he is trailing several candidates from the right and far right. In 2002 social democrats ran 13 of the EU’s 15 governments; 20 years later, the figure is seven out of 27 (Germany, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Portugal and Malta).

This collapse is not unrelated to a cruel paradox highlighted by Jean-Pierre Chevènement, himself a former leftwing contender for the presidency: ‘Neoliberal globalisation, in the form of the free movement of goods, services, capital and people, is being challenged not by the left, which has largely rallied to social liberalism, but by the so-called “populist” right’ (2).

Rout of the ‘left of the left’

Such a challenge should have favoured the far left. But the picture isn’t much rosier here either. In Greece, Syriza’s creditors ordered it to toughen the economic and financial policies it had pledged to fight; when it reluctantly did so, it lost power. Podemos in Spain and Die Linke in Germany are weakened (see Podemos and the limits of change and How Germany’s left lost its way, in this issue); the French Communists no longer have any seats in the European Parliament. Jeremy Corbyn, having led the British Labour Party and attempted to get it out of its Blairite rut, was ejected from his party, and in the US Bernie Sanders, who also hoped to give a new identity to a party that had shaped neoliberal globalisation, saw his presidential campaign collapse in under a week. Only Latin America offers the left any reason to take comfort (see Chile’s victorious ‘new left’ brings hope, but it’s all to play for, in this issue).

If social transformation is to be achieved, it must be built on a powerful working-class movement. Knowing that a policy has failed, or even that a system is illegitimate, does not automatically generate the will to bring it down. When the means to do so are lacking, revolt and anger often give way to just getting on with it or looking out for yourself, or the belief that your neighbour’s social rights are in fact privileges: attitudes that work to the advantage of conservatives and the far right.

For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin Chuck Schumer

In France and elsewhere, the failure of most of the major social mobilisations of the last 20 years, though partly due to ineffective union strategies (such as intermittent action rather than all-out strikes at SNCF, the national railways, and RATP, the Paris transport system), also owes much to government policies that prevented the organisation of (paralysing) strikes by imposing, for example, a minimum service requirement on public transport. The bourgeoisie know how to learn from their defeats and destroy the tools that caused them. They won’t hesitate to change, or break, the rules of the game. Whenever they have to, they can, and do. As the philosopher Lucien Sève observed, ‘Capitalism will not collapse on its own, it still has the strength to lead us all to our deaths, like those airline pilots who commit suicide with their passengers. We urgently need to enter the cockpit and seize the controls together’ (3).

The left has often been in the cockpit. And this is part of its current problem, as memories of the left in power have destroyed the willingness to grant it the controls again. Names like Blair, Clinton, Mitterrand, Craxi, Gonzáles, Schröder and Hollande often provoke a strong negative reaction. To the point that you need to delve a long way back before the word ‘left’ sparks any nostalgia: the US’s New Deal and France’s Popular Front in the 1930s; the ‘spirit of 1945’, to which the British owe their National Health Service; ‘the communism that is already there’, as sociologist Bernard Friot describes France’s social security system.

The history of the disappointments that followed, particularly in recent years, is well known. However, two aspects are worth recalling. The first is that the left hasn’t simply failed to implement its own programme, it has carried out that of its opponents. The second is that, whenever it didn’t swiftly cave in — on his first day in office in the case of President Hollande — it wasn’t a coup or a foreign army that proved its undoing, but financial strangulation. ‘The Athens Spring,’ former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said in 2015, ‘was crushed, just like the Prague Spring before it. Of course, it was not crushed [by] the tanks. It was crushed [by] the banks.’

And the enemy has often been within... Until recently, who could have imagined a former Labour prime minister going into the private sector and making a fortune working for Barclay’s Bank and JPMorgan (Tony Blair), or a former Socialist finance minister becoming head of the IMF (Dominique Strauss-Kahn)? Three French Socialists or Mitterrand associates were the architects of the deregulation of capital that drove financial globalisation: Jacques Delors as president of the European Commission, Henri Chavranski at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Michel Camdessus as head of the IMF.

So the Single European Act, public-private partnerships and privatisations, including media privatisation, were often the left’s doing. When declaring his candidacy for the 2002 French presidential election, the Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin even suggested that his government had privatised France Télécom and Air France in the interests of its employees. How can you politically mobilise a leftwing electorate with a record like that?

But things are no easier when the left in power refuses to implement rightwing policies. A little under a century ago, the French Socialist leader Léon Blum expressed concern on the eve of a parliamentary election that the Cartel of the Left would go on to win: ‘We are not convinced that the representatives and leaders of society today, at the moment when its essential principles may seem to them too seriously threatened, will not themselves step outside the law’ (4). Blum feared a sudden violent intervention. Today, there would be no need for that, or even for stepping outside the law to ensure that the ‘essential principles’ of a capitalist society remain in force, whatever the people affected decide.

‘No choice against EU treaties’

Just four days after the Greek left’s election win, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker warned, ‘There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties.’ This structural lock, the feeling that almost everything has become impossible, is now so deep-rooted in governments’ laws — and minds — that when France’s public accounts minister was told last November that 90% of people wanted VAT on 50 essential products abolished, he replied, ‘That would take years of discussion with the European Commission, as introducing a 0% VAT isn’t possible under the current rules’ (5). We’d like to do it, but we’re no longer able to...

Such repeated pleas of impotence have ultimately meant the political debate has lost credibility. Parties that have haemorrhaged members (France’s Socialist Party had just 22,000 last year, compared to nearly 200,000 40 years ago) no longer look like engines of potential change, but electoral machines that encourage navel-gazing, leadership wars and personality clashes. Many activists are keen to distance themselves from this world, which they see as corrupt, and are turning to other forms of horizontal, inclusive, participatory action. The demonstrators who took part in the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Nuit Debout and the Gilets Jaunes all rejected leaders (to avoid personalisation), hierarchical organisations (to avoid authoritarianism), alliances with parties or trade unions (for fear of cooption) and standing for election (which would bring them too close to a world of scheming and compromise).

But this quest for purity can come at the expense of effectiveness. On 15 October 2011 the Occupy movement brought together millions of people in 952 cities across 82 countries, the largest global mobilisation in history. It achieved nothing. The Gilets Jaunes, France’s longest-lived social movement, held dozens of Saturday marches. It didn’t get very far either. And the Arab Spring? Ten years after the Tahrir Square demonstrations in Cairo, Egypt is living under Abdel Fattah al-Sissi’s dictatorship, which is even worse than that of Hosni Mubarak, ousted in 2011.

‘The youth, who spearheaded the movements ... rejected any concept of vertical, top-down organisation,’ Middle East analyst Hicham Alaoui said of the Arab Spring. ‘Why? After seeing decades of corruption, they had inherent doubt of politics. Politics was dirty, it was corrupt. For them, maintaining their idealism was to basically stay untainted ... You can build pressure by getting people on the street but eventually if that pressure cannot find the pathway into the political system, then you’re completely marginalised’ (6). In this sort of situation, the equation is simple: without organisation, there is no influence; and without influence, there can be no results.

Local, concrete initiatives

Hence the feeling of resignation, even fatalism, and the quest for different battlegrounds. Since millions taking to the streets failed to change the world, many activists now favour local, concrete initiatives that allow them to subvert a social structure they dislike. This is why ‘Zones to Defend’ (ZAD), which block unwanted development projects, self-governing communities, and buy-local initiatives are flourishing. Living outside the system, however, is tantamount to accepting that your actions are marginal, as you cannot change its fundamentals.

‘You can’t transform social relations by abstracting yourself from some of them,’ says Frédéric Lordon. ‘An anticapitalist islet does not eliminate capitalism: it leaves all the “continents” in place. That said, it demonstrates the movement in motion, which is invaluable. On condition, of course, that we prepare for a return to the continent: generalisation’ (7). Yes, but do these local movements, which are often led by young middle-class graduates, also involve working-class areas to the same extent?

Reflecting on the left’s failures cannot, therefore, overlook the class alliance which, throughout the 20th century, enabled the left to win and transform society. It always was fragile; now it’s in pieces. Can it be rebuilt, or should it be replaced with something new? Because the united front of progressive middle and working classes has disintegrated. These two groups no longer meet, as they increasingly live, work and study in separate places; they have stopped campaigning together in political parties that are now mostly composed of middle-class graduates and pensioners; they are no longer mobilised by the same causes or priorities.

Over the last 30 years, the estrangement of the left and the working-class electorate has been attributed to a series of factors: political (commitments betrayed), economic (service sector expansion, financialisation, globalisation), ideological (neoliberal dominance), sociological (the educated class’s championing of meritocracy), anthropological (the dissolution of different aspects of life into quantified, commercial rationality), geographical (metropolises versus outer suburbs), cultural (societal versus social struggles). Such classic explanations only form a coherent picture if we take into account two other infrequently cited causes: the moderating effect of the ‘Soviet threat’ on the leaders of the capitalist ‘free world’ on one hand, and the deterioration of the working class’s relationship to institutional politics on the other.

‘Communist counter-model’

Thomas Piketty, a resolute opponent of revolutionary Marxism, nevertheless recognises that ‘the reduction of inequalities in the 20th century is very much linked to the existence of a communist counter-model ... Through the force of pressure and the threat that it represented for the property-owning elites in capitalist countries, it contributed very significantly to transforming power relations and allowing the emergence in the capitalist countries of a tax system, a social system and a social security system that would have been very difficult to impose without this counter-model’ (8).

Because, strange as it may seem today, for decades the Soviet Union represented, especially among the most militant sector of the western working class, the concrete possibility of a different present and so of a different future — a hope. There can be no politics without faith in the future and it was precisely this blend of desire, illusion and hope that disappeared in the 1980s, just when the left in power was converting to neoliberalism and destroying industrial strongholds, which had the effect of removing from the game the social group that had been in a position of strength since the 1930s (9). What commentators and pollsters call the depoliticisation of the working class is simply a way of referring to their refusal to play a game they feel they cannot win.

And the withdrawal of some has consolidated the monopoly of others. As the proportion of graduates has increased (less than 5% of the population after the war, now more than a third in Europe and the US), they have become culturally dominant and electorally key. Consequently, they feel political victory depends less on forging alliances with others, which would require their priorities to be taken into account.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the rich and educated voted for the right, while the poor and those with only a high school education voted for the left. This is no longer the case: a university qualification — the position of expert, executive, specialist — means you’re likely to vote for the left and this sometimes, in reaction, leads those who are neither experts nor graduates, and who feel despised by them, to move in the opposite direction. This ‘American model’ is found almost everywhere in Europe: rich, intellectual cities like New York and San Francisco vote Democrat. A poor, rural state like West Virginia or Mississippi votes Republican.

But unlike 30 or 40 years ago, moderate leftwing parties — Socialist, Labour, Democrat or Green — can now bet on winning even if they neglect the demands of the working-class electorate, especially in elections where working-class turnout is low. They can then prioritise a social and cultural liberalism tailored primarily for the educated middle class. ‘Losing the workers isn’t serious,’ François Hollande concluded. New York Senator Chuck Schumer said something similar in July 2016: ‘For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.’ A few months later, Donald Trump won Pennsylvania, and the presidency...

Dominique Strauss-Kahn similarly recommended that French socialists abandon the working-class electorate and ‘make what’s happening in our country’s middle class the top priority’. He had explained this choice shortly before the 2002 presidential election, in which his candidate was eliminated: ‘The members of the middle group, overwhelmingly made up of wage earners who are astute, informed and educated, form the backbone of our society and guarantee its stability.’ This, he said, was not the case for the ‘most disadvantaged group’, who ‘most often do not vote at all’ and whose ‘irruptions sometimes manifest themselves through violence’ (10).

‘Influence of the plural left’

Twenty years ago, the socialists beat the right in the Paris municipal election but lost control of more than 20 cities nationwide. One of their leaders, Henri Emmanuelli, published an article (‘The left, at what price per square metre?’) in which he wrote: ‘Henceforth, the influence of the plural left [a leftwing coalition] may tend to follow the price [of property] per square metre, whereas it was traditionally in inverse proportion to it’ (11).

In 1983 and 1989, Jacques Chirac had won for the right in each of Paris’s 20 arrondissements. Since 2001, Paris has had Socialist mayors (Bernard Delanoë followed by Anne Hidalgo) and property prices per square metre have tripled. At the same time, the far right, which won 13.38% of the vote in Paris in the 1988 presidential election — a similar result to the rest of the country — got only 4.99% in the capital in 2017, although that year Marine Le Pen won 21.3% of the national vote, thanks in particular to the working class. Given such a demographic switcharound, it’s unsurprising that the upper middle class and graduates set the tone for the left and define its strategic priorities.

But what matters most to some is not what matters most to others, even when they support the same party. When US blue-collar workers who voted Democrat in 2017 listed their top priorities, they picked the cost of healthcare, the state of the economy, jobs and pensions. The top priorities for progressive graduates — the ‘creative classes’ of journalists, artists, teachers, pollsters, elected officials, professors, New York Times readers, bloggers, public radio listeners — were, in order: the environment, climate change, healthcare costs and education (12).

Corbyn gave in to pressure

Such discrepancies don’t necessarily map neatly onto the divide between moderates and radicals. The British Labour Party, for example, suffered a major setback in 2019 when its leader Jeremy Corbyn bowed to pressure from both Blairite MPs, who loathed him, and radical students, who loved him, and announced that if he won the election, he would hold a second Brexit referendum. The most working-class Labour constituencies in the north of England had voted for Brexit, which was hated by the educated middle class, both radical and moderate. Corbyn’s decision on this meant dozens of such seats fell to the Conservatives. The lesson is clear: if the left wants to win back the electorate, it had better avoid focusing on the issues most likely to rub it up the wrong way. The right, Twitter and the media already do that.

When times are hard, the demand for good news increases. But with the pandemic, mobilisations that suggest the left is on the offensive are becoming rarer; this increases individual withdrawal, melancholy over the ‘before times’ and public debate focused on the far right’s identity-based obsessions. These are all elements of a politics of fear which, if the left gave in to it, would lead it to limit itself to defending past gains or making hasty electoral pacts to avoid the worst. In such a scenario, it’s often behind the most moderate, most timid proposal, the one least likely to upset the existing order, that a defensive coalition is organised: Hollande and Macron rather than Mélenchon in 2012 and in 2017, Clinton and Biden rather than Sanders in 2016 and in 2020. At the risk of seeing the water rise again next time round.

The architects of neoliberalism such Friedrich Hayek, tired of always being on the defensive against postwar socialism, chose a different path. They invited their followers to opt for ‘an intellectual adventure’, ‘an act of courage’, ‘a true radicalism’. Today, the same advice applies to the left: scrupulously respecting the economic and political rules of the game which its opponents established 30 years ago can only lead again to certain failure. By contrast, the triple environmental, social and democratic emergency demands that the real ‘neoliberal radicalism’, which is now triumphant and whose continuation would ultimately mean the destruction of society and the end of humanity, be opposed by a countervailing radicalism. This time in the certainty that an almost uniformly intellectual and meritocratic left will be neither egalitarian, nor popular, nor victorious.

Chile’s president-elect Gabriel Boric, assuming he acts on his claim that he will make his country the ‘grave’ of neoliberalism, has set out the aim. To say that the road will be rocky would be an understatement. But when asked about his unwavering optimism, Noam Chomsky once replied, ‘Look, you have two choices. You can say: I am a pessimist, nothing is gonna work. I’m giving up, I’ll help ensure that the worst will happen. Or you can grasp on to the opportunities that do exist, the rays of hope that exist and say maybe we’ll make it a better world. That’s not much of a choice.’