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This article is a preview from the Spring 2019 edition of New Humanist

Leftism Reinvented (Harvard University Press) by Stephanie L. Mudge

The mainstream parties of the left around the world are in serious trouble. Long-standing parties of government like the German Social Democrats, the French Socialists or the Dutch Labour Party poll at between 6 per cent and 15 per cent. The few parties to have bucked the trend, like Corbyn’s Labour or the Portuguese socialists, have done so by tacking sharply left. In a capitalist crisis, voters are punishing socialist parties. Many explanations have been advanced for this, but none of them are as ambitious as the sociologist Stephanie Mudge’s Leftism Reinvented.

This hulking red slab of a book began, Mudge explains in the introduction, as a way of understanding the phenomenon known as the “Third Way”. Older readers may remember it. Led by Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder and Bill Clinton, and explicated intellectually by Anthony Giddens, the Third Way purported to be a way of combining free-market capitalism with social justice. Its rise was brief, and its decline steep. To explain this, Mudge starts at the beginning, in the formation of socialist parties themselves, and the way they’ve responded to crises and shifts within capitalism. Rather than seeing it as either “betrayal” or “realism”, she argues that the Third Way was the culmination of the gradual annexation of the historical parties of the left by experts. She charts their rise in four parties – the Labour Party, the German Social Democrats, the Swedish Socialist Workers Party and the US Democrats.

The result is complex and sometimes densely academic – a dictionary or Google are useful to have on hand – but frequently gripping. Mudge begins with the first theoreticians of the British, German and Swedish parties, and finds them to be agitators and journalists, generally without an academic background, who had joined parties dedicated to representing the poor, consisting of a sometimes tense alliance between socialist enthusiasts and the trade unions. The “party theoreticians” would generally keep their distance from both. By the 1920s, these people, committed in theory to the overthrow of capitalism, found themselves in government when the “crisis of capitalism” hit, in the form of the Great Depression. Young radical economists told ministers they didn’t need to cut benefits or adhere to 19th-century fiscal rules, but they were ignored. Labour’s Chancellor Philip Snowden dismissed the ideas of John Maynard Keynes as “madcap finance”, and preferred to allay the fears of the City of London and destroy the living standards of his own constituency. German finance minister Rudolf Hilferding did the same thing on Marxist grounds, believing that crises in capitalism were inevitable and couldn’t be helped by government action.

Yet Sweden’s socialists and trade unionists did listen to the “experts”, and so began the most successful experiment in managed, “social democratic” capitalism seen before or since. The US Democrats would follow suit at the end of the 1930s. In so doing, they went from being a “catch-all” party of insiders to something close to a social democratic party, backed by unions. After 1945, the party experts were in control, and the post-war boom was the result.

But in the 1980s, this phenomenon where outside experts actually radicalised a rather conformist socialist establishment was reversed. The fashion for “neoliberal” ideas led even left-identifying economists to define their role as being spokespeople for the market. Sweden was again the pioneer here. These new economists – Ed Balls, who joined the Labour, Tory and Liberal clubs at Oxford, is Mudge’s ideal type – joined with various “wonks”, “political technologists” and psephologists, and transformed the old parties into the “New Democrats” and “New Labour”. In the late 1990s, this model seemed to work well, but Mudge’s evidence shows how mediocre the Third Way was electorally and economically, and how from early on it alienated the people these parties were set up to fight for in the first place.

Rather than a recent phenomenon caused by the financial crisis, the internet or the collapse of “truth”, she finds the roots of the Third Way’s collapse right at the start. This was politics without a subject, without a constituency. But this is not an accusatory book. The point is in stressing how ideas, alliances and ideological battles matter, and set policy agendas – neither capital “H” History, the economy or the market determining everything. At the end, she gently suggests that a similar shift in ideas may be happening now. Hopefully, she is right.