“On Political Innovation,” by D. K. Renton, is a Communis original feature.
“Most of the Left’s recent innovations have failed because they touched on only one of these three areas: bureaucratic movements summoned anti-fascist crowds into being which kept quiet, deliberately and self-defeatingly, about both the State and capital. Pro-Palestine direct action pushed back against the State, and to some extent the Right but offered nothing to organised workers. It’s in new forms of protest which answer all three adversaries at once, there most likely, that longer-lasting victories will be found.”
— D. K. Renton
I wrote this piece as an activist in London reflecting on recent signs of the weakness of the Left here — those include 6-year sentences for protesters who damaged factories making war machines for Israel; two far-right parties winning a combined 45 percent of the vote in the solidly working-class constituency in Makerfield; the emergence of a new Labour leader who will keep on with social neo-liberalism even though it has been for decades a disaster for the Left. While those experiences are particular to Britan, the general pattern of left listlessness is near-universal. It’s that retreat which I’m writing about and against.
The subject of this piece is renewal. I am interested in left traditions and how they recover from a period of decay into growth. Recovery will not happen only by adopting a big intellectual project, a programme. Just as often, growth comes about through finding a new style of organising, one which fits some part of the period and which your adversary finds hard to resist.
Here’s one celebrated example of left-wing social movement revival. In 1936, General Motors was the largest business in the world; workers wanted to organise in its plants, but GM was determined to resist them. General Motors employed around 200,000 people, the stock market valued the firm at over a billion dollars. The company spent a lot of money to keep the unions out; it employed 200 anti-union spies in Flint and was the Pinkerton Detective Agency’s largest client. Members of the United Auto Workers resisted through a new form of protest, the sit-down strike. This tactic was quick, all workers needed to do was sit down and declare the fact of their protest. It was the work of militant minorities. The plan was original, it addressed some of the workers’ key weaknesses. The most important of these was the ability of the company to call on the local state to give its backing a crisis. Until now, the bosses had always won by waiting until workers formed picket lines outside the plant and then sending for the police. This time, with the occupation underway, the strikers were inside and the cops on the out. Just getting into the plant required the police to do things they hadn’t done before like cutting off water and electricity and which the union could present to people watching as an escalation. Another union weakness was that these plants had never been organised and union density was low. In Fisher Body 1, the first plant occupied by workers, fewer than one in ten workers were union members when they went into occupation. The first strike meetings were called on the shopfloor, they drew in people who’d never been to a union meeting. Action came first, membership second. After six weeks, GM conceded recognition. Victory encouraged imitators; the UAW’s membership rose to 90,000 in February 1937, 400,000 by that October. Many more sit-down strikes followed. For a period, the new tactic brought success everywhere it was tried.
In 1936-7, the auto workers were lucky. They’d chosen a target whose commitment to union-bashing was more a matter of habit than ideology. The context was favourable: while both the state Governor and President Roosevelt promised to help GM, they were populist Democrats dependent on union voters and the help they gave to the employer was half-hearted by the standards of US history. The workers’ enemies made mistakes: a week after the start of the sit-down, GM obtained a restraining injunction. The judge who gave it had failed to declare $200,000 in General Motors’ shares. The move made the company look stupid, and the law corrupt. But, if United Auto Workers were fortunate, that’s not something to use against them; their innovation was all about spotting an opportunity and acting on it.
Innovation doesn’t only happen on this giant scale. In 1936-7, the union movement in the US was renewed in an instant, as never before or since. I’d distinguish between three levels of invention. First, there is enduring innovation: Marx’s identification of the workers as a rising class, Social Democracy, Bolshevism, anti-fascism, women’s liberation, gay/queer liberation, the transition from civil rights to the Black Panthers. In all these cases, the discoveries were new ideas or practices which shaped the Left for decades afterwards. Those breakthroughs changed what it meant to be on the Left. Then, there’s a mid-layer, epochal breakthrough achieved by the workers’ movement which offered the possibility of a similar raising of the possible, yet after a period of success their impact was curtailed within five or ten years. Here I am thinking of something like the discovery by the British workers’ movement of flying pickets in the early 1970s, an innovation which seemed to change everything except that the breakthrough was made shortly before a cycle of deindustrialisation, so that the offensive strikers to which it gave birth became defensive, and the new idea achieved less than it should. Last of all, you can speak of cyclical renewal. Almost every time left-wing people call crowds onto the street, there’s a back-and-forwards dance between them and the State. So, in response to the failure of A-to-B marches to stop the Iraq war in 2003, our recent stage of Palestine organising saw direct action against arms factories. The State threatened the mainstream, it treated the radicals of Palestine Action to violent punishments, sentences of a duration we have never seen before, the State now threatens even to jail their lawyers. Under the pressure of innovation by our enemies in the State, we have no choice but to find new tactics. However, unless they succeed in relation to an antagonist — and our renewal is not cyclical but epochal – we’re at risk of having to give up a form of organising, the public demonstration, on which the Left has relied for centuries.
So far, I’ve been talking about innovation on the Left, but the Right innovates too. When Mussolini’s followers in mid-1990s Italy abandoned the name of their party, the Italian Social Movement, more was at stake than just a name. They accepted something they’d never agreed upon before, that democracy was the only legitimate basis for political rule. The leader of a party which had existed to gather together the shattered remnants of the interwar regime now claimed that fascism was “absolute evil.” The strategic disavowal of the party’s former positions enabled the next generation to take over the Italian Right. This was one of a series of changes which constituted, together, a single period of enduring innovation. Think of the part played by the nouvelle droite in France, the emergence of Tommy Robinson’s street movement, the success of far-right electoral leaders, the 2016-era Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, etc, who grew a base while keeping some of the substance but none of the form of their predecessors’ loyalty to interwar fascism.
Part of the collective failure of recent forms of Marxism has been our shared inability to see off our opponents on the Far Right. Old strategies of the Left to shame our adversaries have had diminishing success. Despite that, we have kept on sticking to them. Since the 2008 crisis, the Right has responded to an epoch of public funding cuts by voluntary relinquishing its association with austerity. The Right has become the spenders, the party of change, the people seemingly dissatisfied with the existing order of things. The historic parties of the centre-left (Democrats and Socialists in Europe) have kept on going without any idea of how to rule, have promoted mediocrities, have in relation to their own voters lacked all conviction, while fighting their competitors on the Left with a unique and passionate intensity. Wherever you look, the Left has stagnated; the Right innovated and won on the streets or in the ballot box.
Thomas Kuhn’s classic study, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, provides a way of thinking about scientific theories after they’ve seemed to lose their way. Any such way of thinking Kuhn calls a “paradigm.” Any successful model of reality Kuhn explains is capable of either factual or theoretical extension. So, to relate that to the Left, ideas which were always present in Marx’s work but which the Left ignored have in recent years been brought back to life. Compared to the leftists of 30 years ago, writers today are fortunate. We have an expanded theory of social reproduction equipping us to see not just the involvement of workers in production but in social reproduction too, we have learned to speak of the metabolic rift. The socialist tradition inside which I’m writing needs renewal, a strict focussing on the ideas which will fit the crises to come. But it doesn’t need junking entirely.
Any paradigm integrates “anomalies,” problems which are not resolved but nag away at the coherence of the whole. Within the history of Marxism, for example, older metaphors imagined the revolution as happening along the lines of the May 1968 General Strike in Paris. Part of the working class is a younger, non-productive element, more militant and revolutionary because they are not tied quite so deeply to the system. They protest first. In doing so, they bring other groups of workers into the struggle, workers involved in production, people with mortgages and a stake in the system, the ones who can stop the machines. The model works as a description of social change between 1968 and 1975. But half a century has passed since then; white collar workers are no longer a new player in the system. There are, meanwhile, many fewer blue-collar workers at least in Britain, the US and Western Europe than there used to be. Production is spread out along international chains. In relation to capital, leftists need to find new ways of showing labour’s power over the bosses.
In Kuhn’s model, the weight of anomaly becomes so significant that the paradigm goes into crisis. Another factor which ought to encourage rethinking in our camp is the very obvious success of non-conservative right-wing politics at claiming to speak for a version of the working class – and winning an audience when they do. Parties which insist on tearing everything up are prospering on the Right. Not on the Left, with very few exceptions.
The next stage, he describes, is one of “stagnation” – where a paradigm is in need of renewal, yet no one matches to the task. We lose to the Right, and in any sensible world our defeats would cause us to rethink what we are doing and change our approach. Our paradigm is not altogether inadequate. But nor has our side found a way of reversing the capture, by the Right, of industrial working-class areas with a tradition of resistance to capital. US tech is coming at us, nastier than any predecessor. And yet our cause has become a movement of graduates, isolated from a large part of the blue-collar working class. We need to find a way of reversing that situation – not by giving up on the movements of the oppressed, but by and with them.
In Kuhn’s telling, scientific revolutions happen when the contradiction between a paradigm’s explanatory potential and its actual record of understanding the world becomes so intense that it is no longer bearable. People will find something new. They have no choice but to change. On the Left, we have most often called those experiences of unbearable isolation defeat. By that last word, I don’t mean the ordinary humdrum experience of failure which means that, until capitalism is overthrown, every revolutionary life has ended without success. I mean 1871 in France, 1923 in Germany, 1927 in China, the setbacks so intense that you wonder afterwards if anything can be rescued. I am raising their possibility as a way of recognising how conservative our ways of organising have become, what a good job they do of keeping new insights out and how far our movements are from victory.
Not all defeats are quite that catastrophic. The Jacobins acquired a mass following after the Champs de Mars massacre of July 1791. Thousands of people queued to sign a petition in favour of the Republic; the National Guard opened fire on them. “If that terrible scene is but the result of a formidable coalition against the progress of the Revolution,” one paper warned, “then liberty is truly in danger.” People saw the possibility of the old order renewing itself and readjusted before it was too late. Schooled by their enemies’ spite, made aware of the stakes of the battle they were in, revolutionaries founded political clubs, food riots resumed, mass assemblies grew in number, setback deepened their ambitions. Set-backs clear away exhausted leaders. Defeats shatter the appeal of failing and exhausted strategies, enable new ways to emerge for campaigners to articulate the interests of workers or the poor.
I don’t know what form renewal will take. That it will happen is certain; you can’t abolish people’s will to change the world for the better. I have, though, a sense of what it could look like. The Left’s task is to innovate in relation to each of our enemies, all three of the State, the Right, and the bosses. Most of our recent innovations have failed because they touched on only one of these three areas: bureaucratic movements summoned anti-fascist crowds into being which kept quiet, deliberately and self-defeatingly, about both the State and capital. Pro-Palestine direct action pushed back against the State, and to some extent the Right but offered nothing to organised workers. It’s in new forms of protest which answer all three adversaries at once, there most likely, that longer-lasting victories will be found.
Feature image: Auto workers at a General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, sit-down strikers for 44 days during the winter of 1936-1937. Image from the Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor & Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.
