Mike Phipps reviews Facing the State: Left Analyses and Perspectives, edited by David Broder, Eric Canepa and Haris Golemis, published by Merlin.

Fifty years after the Socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile was overthrown by a US-backed military coup, it seems like a pertinent time to bring out a collection of writings on the nature of the contemporary state and left strategies to transform it. The current context – neoliberalism in crisis, the climate emergency, the Covid pandemic – has produced much talk of an indispensable ‘return of the state’. But the reality is that the state didn’t go away: it played a central role in facilitating global marketisation and policing the social consequences of rampant inequality that this produced.

Russia, argues Boris Kagarlitsky in an essay here, offers a classic example of this. A fragile ‘managed democracy’ has been transformed into an open dictatorship. Mass privatisation and the destruction of enterprises which followed created a vacuum at local level which has been filled by corrupt informal arrangements between state bureaucracies and local business. Ordinary citizens are completely excluded from participation in decision-making, losing even the limited channels that existed in Soviet times, such as party and trade union networks.

Opposition in Russia has increasingly been suppressed, as the regime seeks to shore up its support through an imperialist foreign policy – as the invasion of Ukraine demonstrates – which also suits oligarchic business’s search for new investment opportunities.

In Ukraine itself, a level of governability necessary to resist the invasion has been achieved, argues Kagarlitsky. One could go further and say there is a heightening contradiction between the inherited corruption and the current fight for national survival.

In Russia, unless the Putin regime can regenerate in some way, it may face not just military defeat, but an insurmountable crisis on all fronts. Kagarlitsky himself currently languishes in a Russian jail, one of many victims of Putin’s suppression of oppositionist opinion.

There are over twenty different essays here. Some, frankly, conceal the thinness of their ideas behind a studied obscurity: try, for example “a critical-performative conception of the state as a modality of political agonism.” Other contributions are more interesting.

Hilary Wainwright’s essay draws on her knowledge of social movements to address the problem Aneurin Bevan raised in a speech in 1944. He said: “In practice it is impossible for the modern state to maintain an independent control over the decisions of big business. When the state extends its control over big business, big business moves to control the state. The political decisions of the state become so important a part of the business transactions of the corporations that it is a law of their survival that most decisions should suit the needs of profit making.”

How can the left begin to counteract this? Wainwright responds: “The answer lies, surely, in developing a trade unionism that can answer the integrated relations between business and the state with equally close and productive relations between the trade unions and the political movements and organisations of the left… rooted in struggles to extend collective bargaining and local-authority power to maximise public benefit rather than private profit.”

This is easier said than done. Even the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, she acknowledges, who was one of the most radical Labour leaders ever, with a long record of extra-parliamentary campaigning, tended, according to James Schneider, “to treat the party programme as something that could be implemented through existing state machinery, without mass mobilisations and with little establishment backlash.”

The heart of the issue lies in the contradiction between the nature of Corbynism, as an essentially left Labour electoral project focused on winning a parliamentary majority, and the need for ongoing popular mobilisation to ensure its radical programme could get enacted. The left needs to do some serious thinking about this central aspect of the Corbyn project. It’s all the more urgent as the problem remains relevant post-Corbyn: even the limited progressive measures proposed by the Starmer leadership will require popular mobilisation to ensure their implementation in the teeth of corporate opposition.

The country case studies looking at where the left has been in power and how it fared are interesting, but some broad conclusions need to be drawn. The consequences of the left participating in government – in Greece, Spain, Finland and Portugal – have been mixed. On the one hand, the left has gained experience of governing at national level. It has influenced policy and won public trust. On the other hand, the parties involved have usually lost electoral support and become less radical as a result of the experience. They have often been out-manoeuvred by coalition parties to their right which can draw on greater experience, as well as the institutions of the state, to minimise the left’s impact.

Five years ago, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin wrote of the need “to counter the pull from inside the state towards social-democratisation. This is why strategic preparations undertaken well before entering the state on how to avoid replicating the experience with social democracy are so very important. But even with this, the process of transforming the state cannot help but be complex, uncertain, crisis-ridden, with repeated interruptions.”

Central to this is a recognition that the influence and success of the left depends as much on the social and political context as the strategy and tactics socialists pursue. There are many on the left in the UK who hope that introducing a fairer electoral system would allow a new left party to get a wedge of seats, allowing a wider range of views to be represented. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but the likely result can already be guessed at from experiences in mainland Europe – coalition, compromise, recrimination.

An alternative scenario in Britain could be the election of a Labour government, even without a particularly left wing leader, by a big majority, being forced by external pressure from the trade unions and social movements to enact radical change. The post-1945 Labour government is usually hailed as the most radical Labour government Britian has ever had – but it should be recalled that its leader, Clement Attlee, who gets the credit for its achievements, was not particularly left wing. He opposed the 1926 general strike; he was a close supporter of Ramsay MacDonald until he formed a National Government with the Conservatives; and he tried – unsuccessfully – to get Aneurin Bevan expelled from the Party in 1944.

Bevan himself is a pivotal figure in the post-war government’s radical reputation. He had in fact been briefly expelled a few years earlier for campaigning for a united front of all parties of the left. His return to Labour’s front bench and his successful introduction of the National Health Service underlines an obvious point: external pressure mounted from below upon centre-left governments needs to be reinforced by principled figures inside the Party with the will to fight for and implement socialist policies.

Anther potentially fruitful area to consider when addressing these strategic questions is the extent to which the left’s experience in local and sub-national government might shape its attitudes towards, and prepare it for, national office. One of the worrying aspects about the background of many of Labour’s current candidates is not just their vacillating commitment to political principle, but also their narrow social background and lack of experience of office.

Overall, reading this collection was a bit disconcerting. The unvarnished truth is that left thinking on strategies towards state power has not developed enough in recent years and lessons from the experience of being in office have not been fully drawn. All this leaves the left ill-prepared for opportunities to exercise governmental power whenever they may occur.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.