The Left Is Having to Start Over

In this tumultuous political era, it’s common to hear that the Left needs to rebuild its historic sources of power. But it’s more accurate to say that the Left is in the process of starting over again.

Below is my keynote address at the September 13th Jacobin conference, “Socialism in Our Time,” which marked the fifteenth anniversary of the magazine. I discuss how capitalism has changed since the turn of the century, how the Left has been neoliberalized, and why Zohran Mamdani’s campaign may point in a new direction.

This was also published as “Reviving Class Politics Today” as part of the podcast Confronting Capitalism, which is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, and published by Jacobin. You can listen to the full episode on Apple or Spotify. This transcript was also published on Jacobin as The Left Is Stepping Out of the Neoliberal Dark Age and has been edited for clarity.

Reviving Class Politics Today

The Left Reemerges

It’s an honor to be able to speak on the fifteenth anniversary of Jacobin, because it’s always remarkable when any magazine in today’s climate manages to survive as long as Jacobin has. But for a magazine of the Left to survive and to grow and to flourish the way it has, and to actually get better over time the way it has . . . I think it’s no exaggeration to say that Jacobin is the most important magazine of the Left of the English language today anywhere.

It’s a very different time right now than when it started. When Jacobin started, there was not much of a hint of the political storm that was coming in the United States and really much of the world. We could see some glimmerings, with the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring. But it really only got going with the explosive arrival of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign of 2016. So if we start with Occupy and the Arab Spring, it’s been one development after another for fifteen years, all of which has given rise to a shift back toward a Left that had seemed at the very least dormant for the longest time.

As we saw these developments unfolding, what became clear, at least to some of us on the Left, was there was a dual operation that was underway, the first component of which was that for the first time since the late 1970s or early 1980s, we could genuinely say that the reigning model of accumulation, which was known as neoliberalism, was actually in a crisis. This was remarkable. Just five or eight years prior to that, it had seemed as if it was an unshakable force of nature, immovable. And Margaret Thatcher’s aphorism that when it comes to the modern free market world, the proper description is TINA: “There Is No Alternative” — it really seemed appropriate as late as 2009.

The Twin Crises

But by 2016, it was clear that we were in the midst of an actual crisis that none of us would have foreseen. And there are two dimensions to this. The first, which is still underway today, was an ideological crisis, what you might call a crisis of legitimacy. Whatever else was going on, whatever else was happening, it was clear — certainly in the advanced capitalist world but in many parts of the Global South as well — that neoliberalism had lost all legitimacy with the general public.

Why? It should be obvious. The same forces that brought about the Occupy movement and the same forces that have brought about this political churning in the culture brought about the delegitimation, which was the yawning, unbelievable inequality that had now enveloped the advanced world. We have never seen inequality like this since the early 1900s.

And the second, of course, was that alongside the inequality was a slowdown in economic growth. Since the 1990s, what we have seen across the advanced world is a quite gradual but unmistakable slowing down of the economic tempo from business cycle to business cycle. The rate of accumulation has gone down, and the rate of economic growth that’s attendant upon the rate of accumulation has also gone down. So what you’ve had is a slow-growth capitalism, where the standard of living of ordinary people has either been stagnant or declining, accompanied by an obscene concentration of wealth at the top.

This is a story everybody knows. It is not a surprise that thirty-five years into this, it resulted in a tremendous loss of legitimacy and popularity within the population. This is not to say that it was ever legitimate. There is a view out there among the lumpen intelligentsia that neoliberalism survived because it elicited the consent of the masses. It never had any such consent. What it had was a kind of grudging acceptance, because the masses saw no other alternative and most of them thought that whatever animosity, whatever hostility they had toward the social order was confined to them. They were the ones feeling it, but everybody else seemed happy.

What the Occupy movement did, even though it didn’t itself give rise to a politics, was to reveal to everyone that they were not alone in their unhappiness, that everybody else was unhappy as well. So what was, in fact, a state of resignation to neoliberalism turned into a rejection.

That was the ideological crisis. But accompanying that has been what one might call a political crisis, and even though the political class — the dominant parties of the center left and center right — know that this crisis is underway, they have no way of providing an alternative to it. And that’s largely because their corporate masters are uninterested in an alternative.

So you have this extraordinary situation in which, as Marxists at the turn of the last century used to say, the old order is dying, but the new one cannot be born. That was the situation that we saw emerge with the Bernie Sanders movement, and we’re still in that condition today.

In such a situation, you would imagine it’s a God-given opportunity for a revitalization of the Left. This is a moment in which the crisis within the economic regime could have been turned into a new era of mobilization of workers, and many of us had expected that that is what would happen. What you’d see is a revitalization of the Left after a hiatus since the 1980s. This is the project that most everybody in this room is involved in today.

Starting Over

But I would make the argument that what we’re engaged in today is not so much revitalizing the Left so much as starting over. We’re having to cobble together institutions where they do not exist. Not only are we having to cobble together these institutions, we are having to make intellectual, ideological, political arguments within the Left that you have never had to make in a hundred years.

If the challenge today is best described as us starting over, the question is, why? What is it that is impelling us to start from the very beginning again? What are the challenges in doing so, and what is the way forward as we embark on this?

The crisis that I’ve made reference to, of neoliberalism, had as its complement an ongoing dismantling and crisis of the institutions that working-class parties and working-class organizations had built up for almost a hundred years. Starting in the late 1970s, in much of the advanced world, certainly in the English-speaking countries in the Atlantic world, what you saw was a quite rapid dismantling of not only social democracy and the welfare state but also of the trade unions and the working-class organizations that had built up this welfare state, that had fought for it, and which had sustained it over time.

The unions and all the organizations that orbited around them were being dismantled. At the same time, the parties that had led working-class struggles for more than three-quarters of a century — the socialist, social democratic, and labor parties, whatever names they went by — all of those parties were getting hollowed out. They were getting hollowed out in the sense that, first of all, they had ceased to explicitly be parties inhabited by the working class, and second, the vertical links that they had with the class were being severed.

They were being severed in part because those links depended on union support and union organization, so as unions were dismantled, the links went with them; but also because the parties had turned away from the historic commitments and the struggles that they had engaged in and had become essentially managerial parties.

So there was this yawning gap between parties up top and the working class down at the bottom. The Democratic Party had never been a working-class party, but it did have tenuous albeit real links to the trade union movement, and those trade unions did provide it with a kind of a cultural and political anchor within working communities — and by the 1990s that was also gone.

So when these murmurings about taking up the struggle against neoliberalism start in the early 2000s and 2010s, what you find yourself in is not only the crisis of the establishment, but a Left that, by this time, does not have the anchor in the very constituency that it had been associated with and identified with for a hundred years. Of course, this was the result of the absence of any kind of organized expression of resistance. But it also has an ideological and cultural expression, which is that not only is it the case that the Left, such as it is, fails to organize its class constituency — the centrality of the constituency is itself called into question.

By the early 2000s, what you have found is that in the intervening years, between the 1980s and the early 2000s, you had now had the longest period we have seen since the 1880s of a complete absence of class struggle in the advanced world. From the 1880s onward, if you look at the record, every twenty-five to thirty years there’s been a wave of working-class mobilizations in continental Europe, in England, and in the United States. Starting in the late 1970s, with the destruction of the trade union movement in the US but also even in Europe, you have seen an unbelievable abatement of explicit union-led movements and union mobilizations.

The result has been that for the first time since the inception of the trade union movement, you have lost one of the main mechanisms of political education. Every generation of trade union militants, socialists, and party activists has brought in and educated the next generation from those movements every twenty-five to thirty years. They have not had to learn it from scratch. They’ve been partly educated by the people who led the previous cycle of movements; there’s been a cumulative process of political learning on the Left. It’s a very long process.

But after four decades of a complete absence of struggle, that tradition was gone. Not only was it gone, politics abhors a vacuum. You still had a political discourse. You still had some kind of ideological “radicalism,” some kind of left-wing posturing. But for the first time, it was exclusively coming out of elite institutions, which are the universities and the nonprofits.

This is why, after Occupy and after Bernie Sanders, when the Left started to pick itself up again, it was not clear anymore what it means to be on the Left. The space that had been occupied by the labor movement, by labor militants, by class-struggle unionists was now taken up by the professoriate, by the NGO-university complex, by politicos, by journalists.

And instead of having a direct appreciation or connection with the working class, you not only had a retreat into what we now call “identity politics” but you also had a questioning of the very foundations of the centrality of class organizing from the Left. And beyond that, you had a questioning of the universalism that socialists held to, of the materialism that undergirded their social analyses, of the location of capitalism as the central challenge, and the central focus of left-wing organizing. All of that was gone. And all of that was gone explicitly under the banner of radicalism.

So it’s not just that the Left was organizationally and politically enfeebled — it was ideologically confused. And it continues to be today.

This is the first left in the modern era where you have to make an argument for the primacy of class. And when you do it, you should expect to be attacked from the Left. That is what neoliberalism wrought. Much of today’s left is internal to neoliberalism still. It is in no position to challenge it, because it cannot conceive of a world in which ordinary working people are the central political agent.

That’s where we were. And so, I think it’s fair to say that socialists have found themselves having to rebuild the very pillars of their political project — organizationally, institutionally, and ideologically. Not just to revive them, but in a very real sense, to rebuild them anew. We are having to build — not revive, but build — the institutions and the political outlook that once connected the Left to its historical constituency, which is workers.

Finding Our Compass

But doing so, first of all, requires extricating ourselves from the intersectional, identitarian miasma that has defined radical politics for the last fifteen years. And this has been one of the central missions of Jacobin. This is why it is the one indispensable organ of the Left, because there’s no other organ that understands that without a focus on the lives and the conditions of working people, the project goes nowhere. And just to be clear, they’re not all white; they’re not all men. We are not just talking about heterosexual white men, as “radicals” like to pretend. The working class will soon be a majority women and people of color.

And for them, the everyday struggle for livelihood, for housing, for health care defines their existence. The challenge, therefore, to which Jacobin has been committed has been to defend and advance this intellectual project. A magazine can only do so much, but it’s done a lot just with this.

Because the Left has shifted away from the language and politics of class — and from prioritizing economic demands — and toward identity and culture, it has been the far right, not the Left, that has been able to capitalize on the crisis. Because the far right understands one thing the Left has forgotten, which is that if you go to people and you talk to them about their immediate economic conditions, whatever horrible discourse you’re wrapping it in, if you say to them that we are concerned with your jobs, with your welfare, with your benefits, they’re going to come to you.

And this is why, as far as I’m concerned, we’re basically starting over. Not just to rebuild institutions that have decayed, that have been allowed to fall apart, but to reachieve at least the one thing that socialists always had, which was clarity on what your constituency is, who you’re trying to organize, and who you’re organizing against.

The Mamdani Learning Curve

But here’s the good news. Against this backdrop of defeat, confusion, and degeneration, there’s also been an extraordinary process of political learning. Precisely because of the obvious futility of identity politics and its aggressive “woke” variant, a growing section of socialists are starting to understand that the whole intersectional culture is a political dead end — at least for the goals that progressives have traditionally had.

And there’s no better sign of this than the extraordinary success of the Zohran Mamdani campaign.

Mamdani’s campaign is an extraordinary vindication of the basic insight that once used to be common sense for the socialists. Get your shit together on the economic questions. You want to bring people together? You want to organize a multiracial, multicultural working class of different sexual expressions? They are workers. What they have in common is their economic situation. Focus on that.

Sanders has been pushing this point ad nauseum. Ask Sanders any question: “What color is the sky today?” He’ll say, “60 percent of Americans can’t make ends meet except paycheck to paycheck.” Ask Bernie Sanders, “What date were you born?” He’ll say, “Well, it turns out universal health care is the only solution to this, that, and the other.” There’s never been anybody as monotonically on point as Bernie Sanders.

If you looked at Mamdani five years ago, you would have found a very elite, very cloistered and identitarian American leftist, the kind that populates campus politics — the very opposite of the Sanders culture. But today, in his campaign for mayor of New York and his public persona, we see a dramatic, almost breathtaking transformation. Four years ago, he embodied much that I am criticizing. But today he is a Sanders-style socialist, centering his campaign on the economic conditions of working people.

His maturation into what he is today is an extraordinary vindication of the Left’s common sense. It shows that it’s possible to come out of the depths of what is called the woke radical culture, become serious about real politics, build a mass campaign — and become the next mayor of one of the most important cities in the world.

Whatever challenges come, this alone is both an index of the rapid maturation of this emerging left movement and a sign that there is hope for the future. So in the rest of this talk, I would like to zero in on the tasks ahead and the issues we need to confront as we build this emerging left.

The Tasks Ahead

The central defining element of this New New Left, New Old Left, or whatever you want to call it is that it is organizationally and politically constrained by the very factors that I’ve laid out, which is that it still does not have an organizational, cultural, or institutional anchor within the working class.

So the way it’s able to fight for its political advances is purely through the electoral realm. By putting out a message — and lucky for us, Mamdani is a generational talent in putting out the political message — and showing people that there’s someone here willing to fight for you, and then hopefully fighting for the promulgation, the legislation of that agenda.

But make no mistake, most every left political success over the past six or eight years has been purely electoral. The successes, such as they are, have been without a corresponding set of gains in institutions of the working class. And this has tended to make them focus laser-like on elections as the center of their politics. But I would suggest that if the revitalized left continues to move forward, continues to make advances, it’s going to have to modify this view. It’s going to have to look at elections as primarily an instrument, a stepping stone, to building class organizations, not as the main political instrument.

You can win elections here and there. But it’s, I think, almost impossible to sustain it over time without strong organizations underneath. Because without them, you have no direct contact with your constituency. Instead, you have to rely on the media. And the media is what it is — controlled by the forces who also control the means of production. And however much you’re going to reach out through social media, through YouTube, through TikTok, and so on, it’s going to be very hard to win the ideological battle.

Not just because of capitalists’ advantage in the resources they have but also because “messaging” is a very, very imperfect science. It’s not even a science; it’s at best an art. You put out a message, and it’s very hard to predict how it’s going to be interpreted and absorbed by the people who you’re putting it out to if it’s done from an altitude of 30,000 feet.

If you win these victories of the elections here, perhaps in Minneapolis, perhaps in Michigan or Maine, you must use them, in my view, as a springboard to build your anchor and sink that anchor within the class. You have to do it, first of all, through building trade unions.

There has never been a sustained success on the Left except through partnership with the unions. You can see why. It’s not just that the unions give you power against capital. I’m saying that like it’s a small thing. It is the thing. But there are also other aspects of it that people may not immediately think of. The unions are what helps build the identity of the class that you’re trying to draw upon for your electoral strategies. The unions are what builds confidence that people have not just in their organizations but in each other. The unions are what gives them the sense of having a collective mission. A Left that focuses on elections to the detriment of the unions is one that’s going to, sooner or later, lose.

The reason is simple. Once you win elections, you’re going to have the entire ruling class lined up against you. They’re going to attack the economy. They’re going to make sure your administration is impossible.

And if you don’t have an enduring face-to-face relationship with the people who you’re trying to represent, of course they’re going to sooner or later turn against you. They have to. Because your election is going to be associated with a dramatic fall in the quality of governance, in the economic situation, and perhaps even in their livelihoods.

If you do win the elections, it has to be just the first step toward rebuilding the organizations. Alongside that, you have to build a machine that doesn’t just do door-knocking once every two or four years, which doesn’t just talk to the people to tell them why your candidate is better. But the machine has to live in the same neighborhoods as the people who you’re trying to attract. It has to talk to them on a daily basis. Because it’s on the basis of that that you’ll articulate a program. And that program will not be communicated from 30,000 feet on high. They will see it as an expression of their own interests and their own aspirations. And they will fight for the program because it came from them.

If we define electoralism as seeking power through elections, it has a very limited future for the Left. We should be grateful for it right now, because right now that’s where the energy is. But it has to be, in my view, seen as simply the step toward a more sustained strategy, which is to rebuild the kind of presence inside the working class that the Left had for seven, eight decades in the twentieth century.

Second, at some point, you have to take the party question seriously. Right now, socialists are trying to use the Democratic Party and ballot initiatives and the independent party line to the best of their ability. But at some point, you’re going to have to have a party. Maybe not to run elections; it’s virtually impossible in the United States to run as a third party. But absolutely, as a way of organizing the class, in which you have cadre, in which there has to be a commitment on the part of the cadre to a political program, not just a vague gesture toward “I want to see a better world.” And that party is going to have to wage national campaigns.

If your goal is socialism, there’s never been even a social democratic advance without a party of the working class, not just social clubs with some workers in them. And finally, I’ll close with this. Just to get there, just to start this process, there is also an intellectual challenge.

One of the things that the four decades of the neoliberal dark ages did in driving the radical left into the universities and the nonprofits was that the socialists within it were now in a hostile and alien environment: an environment in which they were constantly pilloried as being insensitive to this, insensitive to that, reductionist toward this, essentialist toward that. What I’ve seen from the early 2000s onward is a tremendous loss of confidence among socialists in their own theory and in their own politics.

If we’re going to move forward with this, if there’s going to be an actual revitalization not of just the populist left but of the socialist left, you have to confidently embrace, once again, those commitments, those nostrums, that used to once define the socialist left. You have a theory. It’s called Marxism. Whatever flaws it has, it’s still the best theory in town. There is no alternative to it. If you see flaws, develop it, fix it. It’s a research program. Figure out what’s wrong with it and fix it, rather than being embarrassed about it.

You have to be committed to universalism. There is no socialism without a universalist commitment against all oppression everywhere, even among dark-skinned people, even in the Global South. You have to stop exoticizing it. You have to stop reducing it to cute stories about rituals and customs, about its having different cosmologies and different conceptions of time and space. You have to realize that these people with darker skin struggle for the exact same things that white Americans and white Europeans do. It’s a matter of some shame that in the past thirty years, something called “postcolonial theory” was able to present itself as being a form of radicalism, when all it did was revive nineteenth-century racism. You have to come back to the universalism of the classical left.

You need to understand that real politics is based on materialism, which means that you figure out your program based on people’s material interests — not on a vibe, not on values. You’re fighting for people’s material interests and their material needs, for which there is no questioning the centrality of class. If you call yourself a leftist, a radical, a socialist and you can’t abide by materialism and the centrality of class politics, you’re in the wrong room.

There is no working-class and socialist politics that doesn’t prioritize class struggle, because even for those social identities of gender and race, you have to make a choice. Are you going to be an anti-racist and fight against the challenges faced by racialized elites, or by racialized workers? There is no such thing as anti-racism as such. There is the anti-racism of the rich and the anti-racism of the working class. And if you really want to improve the lives of racially oppressed working women and working men, you’re going to have to have the leverage that class struggle gives you. There is no shunning the centrality of class if you’re on the Left.

And finally, just say that our goal is socialism. We’ll go through social democracy. It’ll be a pit stop. But the goal has to be a democratic, liberal, universalizing socialism for everyone.

These commitments were once the common sense of the Left. They are today outliers. You have to actually still fight for them, argue for them. Until we place them at the center of our intellectual project, we are going to be hampered in advancing our political project.

I’m optimistic. The Mamdani victory is a watershed. It has revived a process that the Sanders campaign had triggered but that had lost steam over the past couple of years.

The biggest challenge for us organizationally and politically is to use these electoral victories to rebuild the Left’s connection to working people. Intellectually, our biggest challenge is to go back and work on our analytical framework that comes out of class analysis, for which the best theory is still Marxism. And hopefully, we’ll all be here for Jacobin‘s twenty-fifth anniversary, some of us for its fiftieth anniversary, because there’s no better and no more important organ for the Left to advance this project than Jacobin.