The Crisis of Labour and the Left in the United States

The 2008 economic crisis and its aftermath were viewed by many as the ‘Lazarus moment’ for the US left. After all, here was a crisis brought about by the classic contradictions of capitalism playing out on a political landscape shaped by vast and growing disparities of wealth and power. In familiar left foundational mythologies, this was a moment that would give rise to revolution or, at the very least, a ‘new New Deal’. And there was no shortage of commentary proclaiming no less than neoliberalism’s death agonies. Yet the left has been spectacularly unsuccessful in crafting a coherent response to this crisis, much less influence the terms of debate about its causes and solutions. The exaggerated proclamations of the beginning of the end of neoliberalism, unjustifiably inflated expectations of the Obama presidency, and the irrational exuberance stimulated by Occupy all point to the same reality: there is no left worth talking about in the United States and there has not been one for quite a while. Not only is there no organized left capable of contending for hegemony; in more mundane terms, the left is no longer even capable of affecting the wage structure in the auto industry or intervening in urban development decisions in Brooklyn. Whole swaths of the population, no doubt the vast majority, never come in contact with left institutions or ideas.

Historically, a left of the sort we describe has been anchored to a vibrant labour movement, which has provided the institutional resources, the living and breathing constituency, the core agenda and feet on the ground for any significant counterhegemonic intervention into the political economy. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how a left capable of challenging corporate power and capitalist hegemony could be built, much less survive, without being linked to a dynamic labour movement. George Soros’s Open Society Institute or other liberal foundations will not fund challenges to capitalist class power. Nor can a left capable of mounting such challenges be galvanized through appeals to an evanescent ‘public’ or the ‘people’. For one thing, such appeals have to be projected through the corporate news and public information industry, which will never give serious left critiques or agendas fair hearing. Moreover, formation of a serious anticapitalist force in American politics will not be sparked by dramatic actions or events, not least because the constituency for that sort of left does not yet exist; it must be created. That is a lesson that must be taken from the reality of our defeat: on the one hand, the relentlessness of the post-crash capitalist offensive understandably feeds a sense of urgency in fighting back; on the other hand, their relentlessness is possible only because we do not have the capacity to challenge them.