Left wing ideas will always be relevant, but left-wing politics are not always relevant. In the Great Depression, the left critique of capitalism mattered more than ever but a Labour Party torn apart by a turncoat leader, Ramsay MacDonald, was incapable of rising to the moment.
Left-wing ideas are just as important now as ever before. Wealth inequality is worse than ever before, genocide and war are destroying countless lives, far right politics is on the rise domestically and the climate crisis is looming as never before. Our job is to find, or build, an organisational vehicle to get those ideas a wider reception in the general population.
Your Party is incapable of this task. Its official leadership, in the officers’ group and in its parliamentary leader, are merely reheating the politics that lost in 2019, but without the impetus of an established national party and the trade union movement behind it. Corbyn’s moralistic politics is no longer relevant to the vast majority of the country – the Peace and Justice Campaign has achieved almost nothing of note since its creation. This socialist moralism spoke to tens of thousands of Labour members – and it spoke to the public in 2017 – but it is not a language of power. It is insufficient for a time of anger and fear.
Your Party’s unofficial opposition, Zarah Sultana and the grassroots left slate, is equally as limited. After eight months spent speaking to the sects – the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party, The Spartacus League and The Weekly Worker – (and to the wannabe sects, The Democratic Socialists of Your Party) – Zarah has almost no control of the direction of the party. It hardly needs stating that their politics is not a mass politics; sects of fewer than 3,000 people have not been generative of a new politics. In fact, in order for their politics to be relevant, everyone would already have to agree with the left right now.
However, there is already a vehicle making our ideas popular. Whether it is capping the wages of CEOs or advocating rent controls, the Green Party is now the popular vehicle that is championing our ideas. So, the question is, whether we want to ensure that this vehicle is concretised to the left or do we just leave it and see what happens? Do we enter a party of 220,000 members that is polling between 17-20% of the vote, or do we sit in our corner and criticise them for not being pure enough? If our aim is to ensure that left-wing politics is relevant, it isn’t a hard question to answer.
