Wanna buy a labour movement? Millions of careful owners.

It is no doubt a symptom of the onset of middle age that I am worrying about the state of the Labour left, and it particularly its failure to attract the young. I have been aided and abetted in this worry by Mark Fisher's Exiting the  Vampire Castle. If you've not read it, you should - here.

He is, I think, unfair to the Twitter ultra-left. If he has the people in mind I suppose him to have in mind, many of them are prodigiously talented, thoughtful, and have been involved in some impressive feats of organisation. Nonetheless his diagnosis of a (big) layer of the young left, termed by Fisher 'neo-anarchists', is spot on:

They are also overwhelmingly young: in their twenties or at most their early thirties, and what informs the neo-anarchist position is a narrow historical horizon. Neo-anarchists have experienced nothing but capitalist realism. By the time the neo-anarchists had come to political consciousness – and many of them have come to political consciousness remarkably recently, given the level of bullish swagger they sometimes display – the Labour Party had become a Blairite shell, implementing neo-liberalism with a small dose of social justice on the side. But the problem with neo-anarchism is that it unthinkingly reflects this historical moment rather than offering any escape from it. It forgets, or perhaps is genuinely unaware of, the Labour Party’s role in nationalising major industries and utilities or founding the National Health Service. Neo-anarchists will assert that ‘parliamentary politics never changed anything’, or the ‘Labour Party was always useless’ while attending protests about the NHS, or retweeting complaints about the dismantling of what remains of the welfare state. There’s a strange implicit rule here: it’s OK to protest against what parliament has done, but it’s not alright to enter into parliament or the mass media to attempt to engineer change from there. Mainstream media is to be disdained, but BBC Question Time is to be watched and moaned about on Twitter. Purism shades into fatalism; better not to be in any way tainted by the corruption of the mainstream, better to uselessly ‘resist’ than to risk getting your hands dirty.

All of which is true, but which poses more urgently the question - framed by Fisher in Leninist terms calculated to enrage his subjects - 'what is to be done?' His own suggest is the rejection of identitarianism* and the revival of class politics. And bravo for that, but as advice goes it floats at a blisteringly high level of abstraction. Ironically, given his (correct) criticism of moralism on the left, Fisher's more concrete advice seems to be aimed at those he is discussing - change your behaviour and your attitudes.

So let me rephrase the question. Not "what is to be done?", but rather "what are we to do?". If the likes of me are correct, and class politics has to be the starting point for challenging capitalism and its concomitant oppressions, and if I am further correct that the state of play in Britain is such that class politics can't be effective whilst short-cutting the existing labour movement and its institutions, an indelicate question arises. Given the past couple of decades of defeat, uselessness, and morose resignation, how exactly do we make the case to those eager to change the world that the British labour movement is the place to do it?

I don't have a particularly good answer. But I think that this is the right question.



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*Which doesn't mean - or shouldn't mean - the rejection of politics based around particular non-class oppressions. If you want a good example of someone doing intersectionality in a way that doesn't undermine class politics (indeed strengthens it by the draw-dropping observation that some working class people are women, see Rhian Jones' Clampdown.)