What’s more depressing, the UK election result or your difficult family Christmas? Hard to say! But if you’re stuck in a corner this Christmas trying to avoid the inevitable bubbling over of familial tensions, and you’d like to swap one kind of existential angst for another, here’s some reading material to tide you over.
Callum Cant on the “gap between the advanced elements of the Labour party and the current level of working class organisation in Britain”, and why closing this gap is crucial to Labour’s future electoral chances.
James Meadway, the MVP of Novara Media’s live election coverage (i.e. the only person who didn’t succumb to total ennui and despair live on air) writes clearly and convincingly about the failures of communication around Labour’s economic policy.
Here’s a really great big-picture piece by Adam Ramsay, arguing that the popular scapegoats for Labour’s loss (the leadership, Brexit) obscure the real problem of Labour’s failure to mobilise people’s distrust and dislike of the entire political system.
“The problem was that Labour ran a campaign with a ‘retail’ offer when voters wanted empowerment. They asked people to trust the political system to transform their lives after the Tories had been waging war on trust in the political system. They failed to drive a debate about radical change to the British state, to rage against a system designed to ensure elite rule. And so huge numbers didn’t believe they’d deliver their otherwise popular policies. Because they have no faith in politics.”
This is for when you need a serious time-out: Christine Berry’s longread on the result, covering just about everything, in terms of both underlying politics and organising strategy. (Berry is the co-author of the now-rather-tragically-titled People Get Ready! Preparing for a Corbyn Government, so spare her a thought.)
On a (slightly) more upbeat note, this piece by Nolan MacGregor in New Socialist addresses the lessons we can learn from this experience, and the concrete steps we can take to “guarantee that socialist movements and organisations grow their active membership in proportion with the wider growth of general sympathy towards left-wing ideas … That is to say, how can socialists get outside familiar activist spaces and ensure that the left becomes more and more genuinely representative of the working class in all its diversity?”
Finally, via Dave, this is some “solid ultra content” that basically argues against the entire project of democratic socialism: “A socialist government would be forced to weaken its own power base in order to deal with the continuing discontent (“Keep calm and give your workers’ government a bit more time”). In the long run this creates disillusionment and the material basis for a reactionary turn. These are the historical lessons.” Not sure if this will make you feel better or worse.
Photo by Dana Berlith, shared via Creative Commons licensing