The Great Gamble

All politics is about making bets on the future. Right now, the Labour Party has gone all in. The kind of future that emerges will determine whether it wins big, or is entirely destroyed.

The bet that the Labour leadership has put everything on is the product of a very specific vision of our dislocated times. It is contextualised by a long historical narrative, built by many writers and thinkers over the last decade or two, in which the axes of conflict are capitalism and socialism, and where history moves decisively in one direction or the other at key moments, or “conjunctures”, as verbose theorists are wont to call them. This body of literature on the history of neoliberalism, of Naomi Kleins and The Road to Mont Pelerins, tells a story about the shifts in Western politics since the 1970s and 1980s toward the current era and places great stress on the role of a key group of thinkers and their political allies in government. In just the right place and with just the right ideas, such people were, like Archimedes, able to move the world. Exploiting critical points of political crisis, whether Chile in 1973, Anglo-America in 1979–1980, or the Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, individuals seized power then deliberately provoked confrontations with their enemies in order to weaken and divide them before building a new political order founded, above all, on the power of the state. This power was used ruthlessly, even though the foundational rhetoric was that the state should get itself out of the way.

This is a story that not only accounts for the origins of our time, the “age of neoliberalism”, but becomes a kind of model in reverse for the politics of “disaster socialism” (not their phrase) that could be enacted in the wake of the 2008 crisis. This critical moment — the one happening right now — is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a genuinely socialist political movement to seize the reins of government and then, from that vantage point, provoke confrontations with key enemies and transform the nature of the modern state back toward the socialist side of the axis. There’s no point in worrying about half measures, trying to gain power by triangulation, since to do so would make genuine transformation impossible. The only option is to take power pure, and to then use the machinery of state to enact the transformative vision that is required.

There are many ways in which this narrative looks plausible, but the clear and visible rise of socialist politics is at the heart of it. The support enjoyed by Corbyn’s Labour project in the last election is a proof, it is suggested, that the old idea of socialism’s unviability is no longer true, that the long-standing fears of the Cold War are irrelevant to an era in which many voters have no recollection of that world at all. All that is needed is one last heave to get the keys to Number 10 and then a genuinely radical future can begin to be built. One cannot be distracted: anything that serves to weaken the leadership or divide the movement must be dealt with quickly or pushed to one side. There is no second choice; if this project is side-tracked the moment will be lost for good. The stakes are far too high to engage with concerns about the leadership or other matters. If one thinks from this perspective, the idea, suggested by Labour moderates, that Corbyn could be shifted to one side to improve the chances for Labour’s electoral viability, is utterly absurd. More than that, it would be wilful suicide.

The implications of this view of current politics are many, but the key aspect of the gamble is in the implication it has on Labour’s position on Brexit. Many people talk about the leaderships’ instinctive Euroskepticism, and this may well be true, but to stress that point undermines the degree to which there is a coherent and deeply held strategic view that informs the leader’s office’s policy choices as well. After all, if this narrative is true, the most important and critical goal is to hold the coalition together long enough for Brexit to wreck the Tory party. This requires making no hostage to fortune that will split the party, and avoiding as far as possible any clear position. A bit of leakage here or there is ok, as long as the core of the Party holds. It doesn’t really matter whether this policy is good for Brexit or Remain were it to be enacted. This is entirely a second order priority to obtaining power. It can, if necessary, be addressed once one is in government, but worrying about it now is just foolishness. Opposition is for opposing, not legislating. The Euro elections, disastrous as they’ve been for both main parties, have clearly not unseated this calculation any more than previous insurgencies within the Labour coalition did, not least because the stakes of this poker game have already been added to the pot: the leadership has gone far too far to change its strategy now. But this is not just a matter of sunk cost fallacies: the gamble may still be right. If it comes to a General Election where the alternative is a Tory Party committed to a Hard Brexit, then Remain voters may do what they did in the last election: hold their noses and vote for the Labour Party’s muddled position as the only way of stopping a dangerous cliff-edge. If this is enough to hold the Party about where it is now, while Lib Dems steal dozens of seats from Remain-minded Tory constituencies, then you quickly have a situation with no overall majority and the possibility of building a grand (Labour-SNP-LibDem) progressive coalition in which Corbyn will be the leading element, and the SNP trades their support for a socialist agenda in the rUK for a new referendum on independence. And, from Labour’s perspective, once you’re in Number Ten, you can start to use the power of the state to build your new constituency and break your enemies, and everything starts to look different…

The problem with this bet is that there is a second narrative, one that also sees 2008 as a profound break with the past, a “conjuncture” leading to a profoundly distinctive political era, but one that doesn’t orient around a socialist-capitalist axis but one that might be called liberal-conservative (in the classical sense of the terms) or, as others have suggested, open-closed. This is a model which suggests the key distinction in the emerging era is not really about one’s commitment to state versus private ownership (which both sides may have mixed views on), but a commitment to cosmopolitanism versus insularity. The big dividing lines in this model are between those with university educations and those without, those who benefit from a mobile labour market among unskilled workers and those who suffer from greater competition by working within it, those who are comfortable moving among many nations versus those that are rooted in place, those with long futures ahead, and therefore for whom global warming and other threats will dramatically impact them, versus those without too many decades to worry about. In this model, the surge in support for Labour in the last election was not a product of any new-found enthusiasm for socialist politics per se, but the “open” voters’ material interests in defending the EU single market, attacking tuition fees (which directly target them as a class), and calling for action on housing shortages (ditto).

Ironically, this could be said to be a more materialist reading of the current situation than the alternative, since it suggests the new support for Labour is based on the specific interests of the young, the upwardly-mobile and the university-educated.

This alternative narrative posits no especial loyalty to Corbyn, and would perhaps seem to be vindicated by the persistent low overall polling numbers for him as well as the terrible performance of the Party in the Euros. If this model is actually the truth, then Corbyn’s bet looks like it was a terrible one. His campaigning was credited with a triumph in 2017 that was actually a product of sociological processes that pushed people toward a Labour Party as the only vehicle for the expression of their class interests, and which could just as easily push them elsewhere if the Party is no longer seen to be so. Indeed, if this is true, then the battle may already be lost. There is basically nothing that Corbyn and his team could do to stop the inevitable fragmentation of the historic alliance between working classes and reform middle classes that sat at the heart of the Labour Party, with the insular working classes and rich rural voters turning to brands of Trumpian nationalism of the Right and leaving a hardened “Remain” core who are furious with Labour’s refusal to fight tooth-and-nail against Brexit. Labour’s future would then be a repeat of events that have taken place in Scotland over the last decade, when an insurgent party managed to successfully generate a blend of progressive politics that was liberal and cosmopolitan toward the EU, selectively interventionist and statist on some domestic matters, but fundamentally and profoundly hostile to the Labour Party.

There is only one way of finding out who is right in this great gamble, which is to wait and see. But there can be no doubt how big the bet is for the future of Labour — and our country.