The left faces big challenges, but the establishment is deeply unpopular, argues Vladimir Unkovski-Korica

Revolutions occur when ordinary people no longer wish to continue to live in the old way, and when the upper classes are unable to rule in the old way. Globally, we are living through such an era, even though the experience is highly uneven.

The economic crisis that shook the world in 2008 resulted in the ‘great recession’. World growth in GDP dropped from 3% between 1993 and 2007 to 1.5% between 2009 and 2023. The neoliberal model of capitalism entered a significant era of decline, perhaps a terminal crisis.

Major states grapple with how to overcome the limits of unbridled markets, attempting to use the state to marshal investment in the direction of (‘green’) growth and protectionist measures to fight rising competitors. This shows that the ruling class is no longer able to rule in the old way.

Over the same period, the centre of gravity in the world economy began to shift from North America and Europe to East Asia. That resulted in increasing geopolitical frictions, as the world moved from unipolarity to multipolarity. Major wars have erupted in Ukraine and the Middle East. The resulting swings and strains have challenged the capacity of states to rule.

The period since 2008 has indeed seen a wave of revolutions spread internationally, as occurred after 1917 and 1968, most notably during the Arab Spring. In recent years, mass movements have toppled governments with increasing frequency, in Burkina Faso (2014), Guatemala (2015), Armenia (2018), Sudan (2019), Algeria (2019–21), Mali (2020–21), Sri Lanka (2022) and Bangladesh (2024), to give a few examples.

Britain

While not as dramatically, the crisis of neoliberalism and the decline of the West since 2008 have inevitably affected Britain. The crisis of the British state was evident even before that, reflecting the country’s slow decline from global pre-eminence at the start of the preceding century. Participation in elections has been in decline since the mid-twentieth century, as one indicator of this progressive loss of legitimacy.

Yet crisis has been ever more visible in the economic, political, territorial and international spheres since 2008. The Tories took over from Labour in 2010, but fourteen years of austerity failed to restore economic health, while devastating the public services that so many working people rely on, day in, day out. 

The resulting political fallout saw the Scottish independence referendum narrowly fail in 2014, and the Brexit referendum go against the wishes of the leaderships of the main parties and of the dominant sections of the British establishment in 2016. At the same time, political polarisation saw the leadership of both main parties go from mainstream, centrist politicians to less traditional leaders. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss led the Tories, to the horror of the British elites. More worryingly, Labour was run from 2015 to 2019 by the left under Jeremy Corbyn, and came tantalisingly close to office in 2017.

Even as the two main parties have had centrist leaderships return in recent times, and even as Keir Starmer returned Labour to office earlier this year, stability has proved elusive. Labour won almost two thirds of the seats on a mere third of the popular vote, and the government is already almost as unpopular as Liz Truss after just two months in power.

Starmer’s slavish obedience to the US in foreign policy led him to clash with the mass Palestine solidarity movement in the UK even before his election. His short time in government has already been characterised by the return of sleaze, quarrels and austerity, with Labour looking much like the Tories, as the Times newspaper put it. 

Challenges

The erosion of the stability of what Tariq Ali has called ‘the extreme centre’ should provide opportunities for those challenging the status quo. Over time, we have indeed seen significant polarisation of politics globally, with breakthroughs for both left and right since 2008. That has often allowed the establishment falsely to present the far right as its main competitor, as we have seen repeatedly across North America and Europe.

The revolutionary left has in this period declined in terms of size. Perhaps the entire revolutionary left combined currently has fewer than 10,000 members organised in several small groups in the UK. To compare that to the past, the Socialist Workers Party alone claimed 10,000 members in the 1990s. That, too, was smaller than the kind of membership enjoyed by the Communist Party at the end of the Second World War, when it had 40,000, two MPs, and hundreds of local councillors.

The failure of the revolutionary left to grow is probably in part tied to historical legacies. There is still a widespread popular perception that revolutionary socialism is a thing of the past. The failure of the Soviet Union and its bloc in the Cold War, which was broadly, but erroneously, associated with socialism, contributed to that. Furthermore, the decline of manufacturing in the old centres of advanced capitalism, the changing nature of work under neoliberalism, and the hostile environment towards trade unions after Margaret Thatcher defeated the Miners’ Strike in 1984-5 also did so. Union density in the UK dropped from almost 29% in 2000 to 23.5% in 2019. Strike levels have also been declining for forty years, recently reaching lows comparable to figures during the Second World War.

But we should not forget that the left has also rebuilt a constituency, following a difficult decade in the 1990s. The explosion of mass movements over several decades began to rebuild confidence: the anti-capitalist movement in the late 1990s, the spectacular international anti-war movement in the 2000s, and noteworthy anti-austerity movements in the 2010s, saw the rise of new political parties and figures on the left. From Rifondazione in Italy and Die Linke in Germany to Syriza in Greece to Podemos in Spain, radical left parties entered parliament or even office. 

Britain was no exception, with Respect in England and the Scottish Socialist Party in Scotland winning seats in the 2000s, and with Corbynism recruiting literally hundreds of thousands of radicalised activists in the period 2015 to 2019 into the Labour Party. Since then, workers proved central during the Covid-19 pandemic and there has been an uptick in struggle and union organising in the gig economy in recent years. These processes were clearly suggestive of significant sections of the population being radicalised through their participation in the social movements and envisaging alternatives to neoliberalism. It is undoubtedly the case that a mass constituency for radical left politics has emerged.

Yet it is also the case that most of the radical left projects that emerged in the twenty-first century experienced substantial crises and setbacks. A major weakness that most of them exhibited was their shift in focus away from the social struggles that they emerged out of and towards elections and parliamentary politics. That in turn led to a visible process of deradicalisation that in some cases saw them overseeing support for war, as in the case of Rifondazione, or austerity, as in the case of Syriza. In almost all cases, it ultimately led to electoral decline or even eclipse. 

That does not mean that positive lessons cannot be drawn from their experiences, or from the continued and inspiring work of France Unbowed in France. We should also not draw the conclusion that the radicalisation that they came out of, and contributed to, simply dissipated. But it is clear that they contained flaws and that their failures need to be analysed and debated in the movement. Indeed, their deradicalisation often damaged the social movements from which they grew, opening up space for the right to feed off the subsequent disillusion. If anything, the emergence of Reform UK should be a warning sign of this beginning to happen here unless we rise to the challenges ahead.

Power

What is important in these circumstances is to recognise points of strength for our side as well as recognising the challenges we face. The truth is that, rather than being a situation of all doom and gloom in the UK, we have seen points of collective power emerging in Britain over several decades.

An important trend, currently at the centre of British politics, has been the rise and durability of anti-war politics. The mass campaigning against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in the early 2000s has sustained enough momentum to re-emerge time and again, most impressively over the last year to protest against Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. The ability of that movement to mobilise hundreds of thousands, and even at times millions, on major national and local demonstrations has set the UK apart in the global Palestine solidarity movement. 

The scale of the movement has shaped mass consciousness, moved the trade unions into positions of support for the Palestinian cause, and even led to electoral breakthroughs in municipal and parliamentary elections. Indeed, the rise of the independents associated with the movement, clinching five MPs, including Jeremy Corbyn, and many spectacular second places, is a political breakthrough unlike anything seen to the left of Labour in the history of British parliamentary politics. 

There was nothing automatic about that being achieved in the UK as against other countries of advanced capitalism like the US, France or Germany. It also contrasted with the derisory votes won by socialist candidates without any obvious connection to the mass movements of the past year or indeed the last few decades. This holds a major political and strategic set of lessons that need to be learned.

And while left-Labour politicians, trade-union leaders and others have been part of the movement, revolutionary socialists have also played a central part in leading and maintaining organisations like the Stop the War Coalition. In other words, the movement has been led by those on the left who had the strategic vision that could identify the decline of the West, its imperialist politics abroad, and its attacks on populations at home as key issues that had to be tackled head on in politics.

The model used has been to build nationally as well as locally, but also to build on a broad and democratic basis. The way that the Stop the War Coalition has been sustained contrasts with the rapid rise and fall of other popular campaigns, like the short-lived ‘Enough is Enough!’ initiative designed to support the strike wave in 2022-3, which never developed national and local structures, or indeed any sustainable plan of action. 

While the Palestine solidarity movement allows us to pose broader questions, like putting welfare ahead of warfare, or challenging the state and the far right over issues like Islamophobia and civil liberties more broadly, the question of how to push beyond the experience of the last two decades is now critical. As establishment politics is in ever deeper disarray, with public services at breaking point, the prospect of the next general election producing a Reform UK breakthrough should concentrate minds about how to channel political generalisation from the left.

Strategy

If we are to re-build revolutionary organisation and power in the twenty-first century, we should both be prepared to see new forms of struggle for what they are and learn which lessons from the past need to be applied and how, in the struggles we face today. Even if trade-union density and strike levels are low, for instance, we should recognise that social movements contain class politics and we should attempt to link them with our workplaces.

Re-building the kind of mass campaigning conducted by the People’s Assembly against Austerity during the 2010s, akin to the kind of work performed by the Stop the War Coalition on foreign policy, is a critical next step in terms of opposing the onslaught on the public sector being prepared by the new Labour government. It is evident that a mass depletion of benefits and privatisation of institutions like the NHS is on the horizon, and we need to be prepared to fight it, on the streets and in the workplaces.

It is from building successful campaigns and winning victories for the movement that we will help rebuild the confidence of working-class people that they can run the world for themselves. Learning the lessons of past failures can prevent us from repeating our mistakes. The mass anti-war and anti-austerity movements in the 2000s and 2010s ultimately turned to the Labour Party as a mechanism to try to turn their power outside parliament into power inside parliament. The result was a catastrophic defeat.

We should learn from that. Any attempt at building an electoral vehicle outside Labour should be welcomed and revolutionaries should try to shape it. It appears logical that any such project will start from Corbyn. But we should not hope that Corbynism 2.0 will end differently than the first round unless we are prepared to build extra-parliamentary movements with much deeper roots in the working class and which are much more independent of the electoral sphere than Corbynism inside Labour.

In doing so, we need to build revolutionary organisations that are part of the movement and trying to push it to ever greater heights of self-organisation and self-consciousness. And we should not forget that Britain may be an island, but it is not cut off from the wider world. In neighbouring France, the left has recently won a spectacular electoral victory over the far right and the centre, even as it remains deprived of state power. Further afield, the working class continues to grow, and a majority of the world’s population now lives in cities. Opportunities exist for breakthroughs for the left elsewhere that can affect what happens here.

As capitalism produces more crises and wars, so it will throw up mass movements and revolutionary moments. With the West and Britain in decline, the ability of the state to regulate domestic class conflicts will come under increasing strain even in the core of the advanced capitalist world. We may not be in a revolutionary situation now, but we may well see one in our lifetime. Everything we do, every step we take, should be with a view to preparing the ground for such a time.