Populism and grassroots politics: 'New Left' critiques of social democracy, 1968-1994.

AuthorCampsie, Alex
PositionAGAINST NOSTALGIA - Essay

The new social movements of the New Left that transformed British politics from the late 1960s onwards are an important source of inspiration for the Labour party today. But we cannot simply go 'back to the 70s'. Understanding the history of grassroots progressive activism--its strengths, weaknesses and stumbling blocks--can help us craft a renewed vision for Labour.

2017 finds the left grappling for solutions to a pervasive sense of malaise. Our political culture is marked by scorn for organised politics, with the cause of social justice openly ridiculed by forces of reaction. Particularly disturbing is the advance of a crude and illiberal populism at the expense of any majoritarian left-wing politics. Various commentators have for some time warned of the increasing cleavage between the left and 'ordinary' culture, yet the Brexit vote still felt profoundly shocking. (1) Perhaps even more depressingly, the roots of the left's disconnect from the rest of society run deep. As Lewis Minkin has highlighted, New Labour's key architects conceived of politics as something performed by a core 'modernising vanguard', whose job it was to enact 'permanent revolution' upon Party structures and British society at large. (2) Their technocratic faith in the power of top-level statecraft saw the Party fail to reach out to ordinary people, entrenching a sense of disaffection. Meanwhile, in organisational terms, New Labour's managerial practices saw both grassroots members and MPs who were deemed not 'on message' shut out from political discussions. It was all too easy to view policy decisions like the 2003 invasion of Iraq as symbolic of this detachment.

Elected party leader on a wave of resentment against this type of politics, the appeal of Jeremy Corbyn is that he self-consciously eschews New Labour's technocratic modus operandi, speaking a language of democracy, consultation and decentralisation. This is a resolutely 'new' type of politics that shatters the impersonality of Tony Blair's managerialism. And yet this style of politics is not new: it has a debt (and in certain quarters, personal connection) to an older lineage of left-wing activism, namely the wealth of 'New Left' grassroots social movements that emerged in the wake of the cultural upheaval of the late 1960s. The idea that Corbyn's Labour Party can rehabilitate the radical democracy of the post-1968 social movements is tantalising--particularly at a moment when decentralised forms of political organization appear to have reinvigorated the left on the Continent. This rehabilitated social movement politics might once more reconnect the left to British culture, which seems to have rejected conventional politics in favour of the populist appeals of the right.

In what follows I sketch out the history of the 'New Left' new social movements and their emergence from a situation similar to our own--with economic crisis, the rise of the far right, and an increasingly anti-authoritarian popular culture. I will examine their successes, but also underscore the difficulties these groups faced when attempting to enact radical

change--issues which must be borne in mind when attempting to replicate their model in the present day. Nonetheless, the social movements of the late 1960s reinvigorated Labour politics across the 1970s and 1980s, notably in stressing the importance of a creative use of statecraft, and the power of political language in shaping ordinary people's understanding of the world around them. Crucially, these movements helped re-integrate a focus on freedom and individual emancipation. Such themes might once more be used to construct a popular progressive agenda that speaks to the current socio-economic, cultural and political moment. We can never 'bring back' a politics shaped by a world that was in many ways very different--but analysing the strengths and weaknesses of the New Left social movements of the 1960s and 1970s can offer us insights into what questions we begin to ask as we move forward.

The post-war settlement unbound, 1966-1973

By the late 1960s post-war social democracy was beset by problems. The need to maintain production levels in line with global indicators of growth was causing 'speed-up' in many industries, whereby workers were being paid the same rate to work more quickly and intensely. But Harold Wilson's Labour government appeared ill-disposed to greater workplace protection--most shockingly symbolised in the 1966 Seamen's Strike, where a national state of emergency was declared to quell industrial action. It no longer seemed as if the social-democratic state was in favour of ordinary people. Indeed, the recession also stymied Labour's ability to meet its housebuilding targets. In London, this further deepened the housing crisis which had wracked the city since at least the late-1950s. (3) Soon, all over the country working-class citizens were faced by a lack of affordable, good-quality housing. Spending cuts also harmed public service provision, especially at a local level, with inner-cities increasingly failed by the crumbling institutions of the welfare state. More fundamentally, sociologists like Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith showed that the basic parameters of welfare state policy had been misguided. (4) Targeting benefits towards male breadwinners and their dependents was insufficient--hardship remained amongst the elderly, the young, immigrants and women. Ken Loach's 1966 television play Cathy Come Home, the story of the struggles endured by a poverty-stricken young family, was a notably poignant evocation of how social democracy was failing society's most marginal.

The collectivism of the welfare state was founded on a sense of shared, cross-class sacrifice in the war effort. Political leaders were felt to have granted ordinary people concessions for putting the nation's interests before their own during the war. But just as its policy limitations were increasingly revealed in light of socio-economic change, so too did the deferential cultural implications of this post-war arrangement begin to be challenged. Some of these challenges to tradition, convention, hierarchy and deference were 'progressive', like the squatting movements that demanded adequate homes for all. But some of these revolutions were incomplete--the 'sexual revolution' of the late 1960s, for example, has been widely criticised for assuming women should be sexually available. (5) And a racialised language of Britishness, articulated by privileged politicians like Enoch Powell, was also drawn on by working-class people dissatisfied with what they saw as the elitism of mainstream politicians. (6) London's striking dockworkers drew on Powell's arguments to claim that falling real pay and the waning promise of full employment was the fault of an Establishment that placed the interests of new immigrants before their own.

A new politics? 1968-1976

The late 1960s thus saw the exhaustion of social-democratic institutions--amidst an increasingly assertive challenge to cultural authority that could be progressive or reactionary. Out of this moment emerged a whole range of new social movements and grassroots political organisations. In an attempt to shed light on how we can make sense of our own populist, anti-elite conjuncture, I consider here the activities of some of these diverse movements. Cumulatively, from the late 1960s, they launched an important challenge to what the libertarian socialist and community activist Peter Hain called the 'mechanistic excesses' of social democracy, whose aloof and out-of-touch leaders simply delivered piecemeal benefits from on high. They instead used grassroots forms of political organising in an attempt to create a politics that was egalitarian, but also less centralised and more attuned to the needs of ordinary people.

Firstly, as proponents of the new politics found, their task was more than one of simply 'going to the people'. Peter Sedgwick was a member of the International Socialists (IS), but was shaped less by the group's Trotskyism than an anarchist scepticism towards political leadership. In 1969 he bemoaned that the mainstream of the British left was still dominated by the 'priggish', out-of-touch middle-class socialists first scorned by George Orwell. (7) A number of IS members believed that the co-operative, sceptical outlook of thinkers like Orwell and the anarchist Colin Ward--which was rooted in an unsentimental appreciation of working-class culture--could serve as a more honest antidote to the fanciful posturing of predominately...

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