by Brendan Duncan-Shah

The question of this Talking Reds is “What is wrong with the left?” I want to begin this piece by forwarding a provocative claim in response which is this:
that there is nothing wrong with the left. 

Having made the claim, I now want to walk it back it in a number of ways. When I say that there is nothing wrong with the left, I don’t mean to deny that the left is in a state of disunity, that the organised Marxist left is not a significant social force in Australia or elsewhere, or that the dominant principles, strategies and tactics of the left are things that should be unreservedly endorsed. Instead, I only want to propose that the state of the left—its fragmentation, its social weakness—is not mainly the result of some subjective error made by the existing or historical left, but for the most part the consequence of the objective situation over the last five decades. Perhaps even more controversially, I want to entertain the idea that the left is moving in the right direction. 

The suggestion behind the question, “what is wrong with the left”, is that the reason for the left’s weakness lies in something about its existing principles or strategy. Taking a broad look at the state of the left, we want to understand how we ended up this way, how a movement which is supposed to embody the interests of the overwhelming majority of humanity can be so thoroughly and completely defeated. The natural tendency is to want to start with first principles—to go back to the Bolsheviks, or even further to Marx and Engels, and diagnose some rot inherent in the traditional principles of communist organising, from which the defeats of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries naturally flow. We want to start here because these are the things we can most easily change, probably. If we can discern something wrong with the beginning, then a whole different line of march can be brought into view, one which avoids all the old pitfalls. The problems of the left can then be solved in one full sweep. 

But to focus on first principles in this way is to vastly underestimate the importance of objective factors—of the world conjuncture—in explaining why the left is the way it is. I don’t mean to suggest that we should avoid examining first principles or strategy. My own view is that the principles of Marxist and Leninist organising are sound, since they follow from the class antagonism inherent to the capitalist mode of production—which has not changed. But I don’t deny that, because of the failures of the twentieth century, we may be forced to innovate on questions of strategy in particular. But any innovation must be coupled with a recognition of just how dire the period we are now emerging out of was. The dynamic of this period and its inhospitability to organised Marxism, is the main reason for the state of the left. 

I want to suggest that we can think of the last five decades in terms of four periods. The first period, beginning in 1980, constitutes the worldwide defeat of socialism and the burgeoning crisis of Marxism, which was complete by 1990-91. Following this begins the second “belle époque” of capitalism, which would last until 2008.¹ Here was the flourishing of capital, its victory lap after the 80s. These are the dark ages of socialism and the spontaneous working class and mass movements. The defeat of Marxism was so thorough and so complete that we have only just recently begun to emerge from it. The third period, from 2008-10 until 2020, saw the revival of the spontaneous mass movement. This was the decade of the big street protest, the occupation of the city square, and of horizontal mass organisations. Marxism, organised class politics, existed only embryonically. The 2010s were also years of failure. Spontaneous struggle showed itself incapable of system-wide social change, and the gap opened up by the struggle was occupied by the right—in some cases the far-right. This brings us to the 2020s where, I believe, organised socialist politics is finally rebuilding and beginning to re-emerge as a worldwide social power.

Defeat: 1980-1991

In 1985 former Maoist Alain Badiou wrote about the “crisis of Marxism” induced by the collapse of what he called the three ‘historical referents’ of Marxism: the existing socialist states, the struggles for national liberation, and the workers’ movement.² We do not need to agree with the details of Badiou’s analysis to note that the focus on these three areas is correct. The 80s were the great defeat of Marxism as a social force.

Actually existing socialism had proven to be, if not in crisis, then at least in retreat. The collapse of the Bretton-Woods system in 1971 brought about the ‘second systemic crisis of capitalism’ from which it would not recover until the 1990s.³ The global economy suffered from a declining rate of profit, slack investment, and tepid growth, from which no state could escape, not even the socialist ones, which, still in the primary stages of socialism, remained tied to the world market. By the mid-1980s Vietnam and Cuba were undergoing their own respective economic contractions. By 1989 the Soviet Union’s domestic situation, and international reputation, was in tatters. Quickened by Gorbachev and later Yeltsin, the first scientific socialist state in history was put to its end in 1991. Even China, which survived the crisis without turning wholesale to neoliberal shock therapy,⁴ was forced into retreat, formally adopting market socialism in 1992.

The movements for national liberation, which defeated the five-hundred year system of European colonialism, and which in the 50s and 60s were, as Ho Chi Minh put it, a ‘surging wave’ over the planet,⁵ had by 1990 run into problems. The protracted crisis of global capitalism had forced the socialist-led states of the Global South onto the economic backfoot. Vietnam, whose liberation struggle mobilised millions throughout the 60s and 70s, was perhaps the most politically significant example. On the other hand, when socialist states survived the crunch, their leaders were killed and their projects toppled—Thomas Sankara in 1987. 

Even the non-socialist but dirigiste nationalists were either killed, deposed, or transformed into comprador bourgeois. Indonesia was firmly in Suharto’s grip; 1986 had replaced the fascist collaborator Marcos in the Philippines with the more politely comprador Cory Aquino. Structural Adjustment was imposed everywhere, but especially on Latin America and Africa. By 1990 anti-imperialist forces had been defeated worldwide. 

The working class movement did not fare much better. On the one hand, the movement itself was objectively weaker. In the imperialist countries, the sop from unequal exchange had for half a century made the social compromise between labour and capital possible. In Australia the apex of this was, of course, the Accord in 1983. In the U.S. and the U.K. the blunting of class antagonisms had allowed a slate of violently anti-worker figures to enter office: most obviously Thatcher in 1979 and Reagan in 1981. On the other hand, where the working class movement did exist in the Global North, it was totally divorced from Marxism—a state of affairs which weakened both the workers movement and the movement for socialism. The consequence of manufactured anti-communist panic, among other things. 

The Victory Lap of Capital: 1991-2008

The result of these factors was the second belle époque of capitalism: 1991-2008. This is the period of the full retreat of Marxism and Communism, and the full ascendancy of capital. No longer facing any state-led resistance, the global financial oligopoly drained surplus from the Global South through its organs the IMF, the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank, all of which are cronies of the undisputed world hegemon: the United States. The U.S. itself enjoyed the fruits of unrestricted, ‘naked’ imperialism,⁶ carrying out a slate of invasions with complete impunity: Iraq (1991), Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq again (2003), to name just the well known ones. 

The rate of profit recovered; manufacturing  was relocated to the Global South, especially China, where low wages, and therefore a low organic composition of capital, ensured a high rate of exploitation. As a result, the compromise between labour and capital in the Global North began to unravel. Forced into competition with Global South labour, wages in the North no longer rose in line with productivity and no longer kept pace with inflation. The social wage was also rolled back: public healthcare was privatised, welfare programs deconstructed, state water, gas, and electricity companies were sold off, and public transport became private transport. 

All of this amounted to a massive wealth transfer from the working to the property-owning class. In the Global North, decades of social compromise meant the working class was totally unprepared to resist the neoliberal sea change. A new era of—not compromise—but concession to capital had begun. In the Global South, neoliberalism was inaugurated by a wave of mass death. All in all, global capitalism was enlivened by the injection of two massive sources of capital: from the surplus of low-wage Global South labour, and from the worldwide privatisation of public assets, “accumulation by dispossession,” to use David Harvey’s well known phrase. 

Between 1990 and 2008 the onslaught of capital corresponded to a lull in the spontaneous mass movement. Where resistance to capital existed, it was sporadic and largely unsuccessful. The anti-globalisation movement, which began in the late 90s, could not prevent the worldwide entrenchment of finance capital. The Battle for Seattle in 1999 and the S11 protests in Australia were significant mobilisations, and perhaps partial victories, but by the mid 2000s the whole alter-globalisation movement had sputtered, and died out. The anti-war movement also saw significant mobilisations, particularly against the Iraq war. But in retrospect, it was powerless to stop the ongoing imperialist conquest of the planet. 

In the Global South, resistance to capital, armed or otherwise, was suppressed or was forced into a stalemate. Aside from Nepal, , no socialist force managed to seize political power between 1990 and 2008. The 1992 split in the Communist Party of the Philippines, and the strengthening of Filipino state power, forced the party into a tactical consolidation in the rural areas from which it has not yet emerged. In India, the brutal and criminal Operation Greenhunt in 2009 severely weakened Naxalite forces. 

Back in the Global North, “radical” thought retreated from Marxism. Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy in 1985 heralded a trend that was to consolidate itself up to 2008: the retreat from class politics. Whereas in the first half of the twentieth century Marxism was always able to pare away a moderately sized section of the petit-bourgeois intelligentsia, in the period of political downswing class analysis itself became intellectually passé. Various kinds of “post-Marxisms” emerged and became dominant in the centres of intellectual production. Non-class based forms of political organisation, like Hardt and Negri’s Multitude (2004), entered the scene with increasing frequency. All of these theoretical trends should be seen for what they were: symptoms of a period of complete defeat for the real movement. 

The Mass Protest Decade: 2008-2020

2008 reversed the downswing in the spontaneous mass movement. 2010-2020 marked what Vincent Bevins called “the mass protest decade,” a ‘decade that surpassed any other in the history of human civilisation in its number of mass street demonstrations.’⁷ But the contradiction of the decade was this: the global resurgence of mass activity coupled with underwhelming—and in some cases even retrograde—social progress. Nearly everywhere on the planet the spontaneous movement failed to achieve its aims, and in some cases punctured a hole in the social structure that made room for the forces of reaction. The Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt (2010), Occupy (2011), Brazil’s Free Fare Movement (2013), the 2019 Chilean protests—none of these can be considered successful. Instead, the immediate effects of these mass movements were that Egypt got el-Sisi in 2024, the U.S. got Trump in 2016, and Brazil got Bolsanaro in 2019. 

I became politically active in the 2010s. Around 2011 something shifted in the political mood of the Global North. Class politics had only just recently been re-tabled in the form of a weak social democratic impulse. 2016 in the U.S. saw the emergence of Bernie Sanders. At the time his popularity was a surprise; looking back, it was those disillusioned from Occupy giving it the social-democratic go once again. But the movement at least drew new layers of youth to the signifier “socialism.” 2019 saw a similar thing happen in the U.K. with Corbyn. In Australia, we have not yet had a corresponding social democratic movement.

Horizontalism was the order of the day. “Decentralised,” “non-hierarchical” forms of organisation predominated, sometimes in self-conscious opposition to the supposedly outdated Leninist cadre organisations of the twentieth century. The feeling in the room was that the “failure” of actually existing socialism had shown Leninism to be a dead duck. In the imperialist countries, decades of New Left and post-Marxist social theory had contributed to the enthusiasm for structurally flat, networked organisations. And, as Bevins observed, the new social technology made decentralised, spontaneous association much easier.⁸

In his book If We Burn Bevins interviewed hundreds of participants in the mass protest decade, many of whom were members of horizontalist organisations, involved in the social democratic upswing. Years later, they drew the same lessons from their experience that I did: 

Not everyone I met came out of the decade adopting positions in favour of formal structures, in support of “verticalism” and hierarchy … But everyone moved in the same direction. I spent years doing interviews, and not one person told me they had become more horizontalist or more anarchist, or more in favour of spontaneity and structurelessness. Some people stayed in the same place. But everyone that changed their views on the question of organisation moved closer to classically “Leninist” ones.⁹

We now have that experience behind us. 

Renewal?: the 2020s

This brings us to the present decade, the 2020s. For those comrades who are younger, or newer to organised socialist politics, it might be difficult to imagine how far we have come since then. I’ve had the privilege of travelling to a few places outside Australia, including to the Global South, to meet and build real relations of solidarity with comrades and their organisations. Without exception, every organisation I met with was growing, and in every one young people were present, no matter how dire the country’s political conditions. In the Global North too, even in the U.S., the left is growing—not only in numbers, but as a social force. The gains of the DSA and the PSL are undeniable. They provide a vision for the future for us here in Australia, which, relatively inoculated from the world economy, is always about a decade behind the rest of the Global North. Even now, the regrowth of the left, however slow, is tangible. 

I don’t mean to minimise the enormity of our tasks. Obviously the fragmentation of the left and its social weakness are unacceptable. But equally we should not overstate the severity of the problems of a left just now emerging from capital’s two-decade long victory lap from 1990 to 2008. 

Ten years ago the societies of the Global North were rotting in a trench of depoliticisation. Today, more and more, the general mood is that politics is inescapable. Ten years ago it really was socially outdated to be a Leninist. Today, horizontal organising is being replaced with clarity of vision and firm class politics. Ten years ago the revolutionary experience of the twentieth century was memory holed. Today, comrades are reconnecting, not only with the October revolution, but with the socialist-led movements for national liberation, and with the projects and problems of actually existing socialism. Ten years ago it would have been outrageous to declare, with Lenin, that ‘the Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true.’¹⁰ Today, there is a growing conviction that Marxism is adequate to our times, that it furnishes us with all the tools necessary to confront all the oppressive elements of the social totality: gender, race, ability, colonialism, and caste. 

I believe that class politics is permanently back on the agenda. I believe that the left will overcome its fragmentation and cohere around a Leninist form of organisation. And I believe the left will settle on a principled anti-imperialist and anti-colonial politics. These things are not inevitable, but I don’t believe it is unreasonable to expect them to happen. The trend is no longer downwards, but upwards, however slowly it rises. 

Notes

1. Samir Amin, “Seize the Crisis!” Monthly Review Vol. 61 (2009–2010), No. 07 (December 2009). https://monthlyreview.org/articles/seize-the-crisis/ ↩︎
2. Alain Badiou, Can Politics be Thought (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 40-44. ↩︎
3. Samir Amin, “Seize the Crisis!” https://monthlyreview.org/articles/seize-the-crisis/ ↩︎
4. Isabella Weber, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate (New York: Routledge, 2021). ↩︎
5. Ho Chi Minh, “The October Revolution and the Liberation of the Peoples of the East,” in Ho Chi Minh on Revolution: Selected Writings 1920-1966 (New York: Frederick A. Praegar, 1967), 300. ↩︎
6. John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006). ↩︎
7. Vincent Bevins, If We Burn (London: Wildfire, 2023), 235 ↩︎
8. Bevins, If We Burn, 268. ↩︎
9. Bevins, If We Burn, 266 ↩︎
10. Lenin, “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” in Collected Works vol. 19 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 21. ↩︎