HOW depressed should we be at the state of the left? Do most people agree with us? How can we unite different channels of struggle that are erupting into a co-ordinated movement to change the country and the world?

Those were the themes discussed in London’s Foyle’s bookshop on Monday night as James Schneider, the Momentum co-founder and former director of strategic communications for Jeremy Corbyn, discussed his new book Our Bloc — How We Win with former Unite leader Len McCluskey and Extinction Rebellion’s Clare Farrell.

Farrell’s observation that we have “left an era of stability and entered an era of permanent instability” is illustrated by a whistle-stop tour of the events which have shaken Britain since the 2000s: the bankers’ crash, austerity, Corbynism, Brexit, pandemic, now collapsing living standards.

On a global level, of course, the instability started earlier: the “forever wars” launched by George W Bush and Tony Blair which spread chaos and terrorism across the Middle East, steadily undermining the authority of global institutions and international law — something Western powers are now seeing their rivals pick up on.

This chain of disruptive events can find its reflection in a left which itself responds to crises as they arise without much sign of a consistent strategy. 

One divided into particular campaigns — such as XR or Black Lives Matter or the peace movement — which are not always in communication with each other or with the simultaneous industrial struggles of trade unions. 

One which for five years of Corbynism was dominated by a parliamentary approach and which is now refocused on workplace struggles without significant support in Parliament.

It can seem that rather than “the left” as a movement what we have are a range of different lefts each ploughing its own furrow.

For Farrell, the overarching crisis that has to link them all is climate breakdown: “The world is a very, very unstable place, not just geopolitically, but much more fundamentally — in terms of what’s at stake with our food supply systems, that the weather is unreliable.”

Global crop production is beginning to show signs of serious disruption. “The first industry report that has ever come out on the impact of climate change on the cotton industry has just been released. The industry is just beginning to think ‘Shit, what is this going to do by 2040?’ 

“At the moment what is happening is farmers are turning those crops back into the ground and claiming on their insurance.

“At some point you can’t claim on your insurance because you can’t insure a farm that never works.

“The same thing is going to happen with the food system. And building insurance. There are coastal cities right now where insurers are wondering how much longer they will insure those basement apartments.

“And it seems to me that these conversations are happening but nobody is joining the dots. People are talking about the climate as if it’s ‘an issue’ and not the operational function of the entire world.”

Adapting to a crisis on this scale requires really radical shifts in how we organise our economy. A fundamentally different approach was promoted by Labour for five years under Corbyn, and Len McCluskey remains adamant that the left needs to hold onto the importance of that movement and its ideas.

“Jeremy Corbyn changed politics in Britain for the better, and perhaps forever, because he showed that radical policies can be popular with the British public.

“The right-wing media would have us believe that 2019 was a rejection of those policies, but 2019 was about one thing, Brexit. The Tories only said three words in that election — ‘Get Brexit Done’ — you can’t remember them saying anything else.

“People were not voting to reject public ownership of the energy companies or the railways or abolition of zero-hours contracts. 

“The media want to banish the memory of 2017, when more people voted for Jeremy Corbyn than had voted for Tony Blair.

“The 2017 election shocked the Establishment. I don’t mean the right wing of the Labour Party, they’re flotsam and jetsam. I mean the Establishment. You can picture them in their clubs and private rooms asking how the hell was someone like Jeremy Corbyn allowed to get this close to power.

“They are determined never to allow that to happen ever again, their response was that they needed to destroy Corbyn as an individual, destroy Corbynism as an ideal, destroy anyone close to him.”

That’s why “the heart and soul” of Labour is now under such fierce attack from Keir Starmer, whom McCluskey dismisses as a “puppet” doing the bidding of the British ruling class. 

“The aim is not to marginalise the left but to eliminate the socialist trend in Labour completely.”

McCluskey does not believe Labour is yet lost, but argues it is on “a very short, very slippery slope” and more needs to be done to push back against its current trajectory.

Schneider agrees with McCluskey on the enduring importance of the Corbyn experience: “It took people on the left out of what can be self-marginalising, minority areas. 

“The prospect of entering government, trying to build a majoritarian project, was very constructive.”

Key to the debate around the left’s relationship with Labour is the question of state power — to which Schneider, McCluskey and Farrell returned over the course of the evening, as did speakers from the floor.

“Ultimately,” Schneider argues, “we do want state power — there is no path through the current issues that at some point does not run through the state.

“I think you saw the importance of that in two ways in the pandemic. States decided whose livelihoods carried on, whose stopped, who lived, who died… but also, who got fabulously rich.

“During lockdowns when the economy was shrinking because so many couldn’t work, the wealth of billionaires on the planet went up by 50 per cent.

“The economy was tanking but their wealth went up by 50 per cent! Why? Because they control the states.

“The big central banks produced trillions of liquidity which predominantly went to propping up asset prices, inflating the wealth for people who have it already. 

“There’s no path to deal with that problem without state power, and the other reason why we need a strategy that looks at state power is the scale and speed of the transition we need to make in almost every aspect of our society.”

When Corbyn led Labour, divisions existed across the left. Many organisations did not work together; some personalities on the left took division to the point of joining in right-wing witch-hunts.

But there was a sense that the left had a leader in Corbyn, and that the Labour leadership was the place where the varying priorities of anti-racist, environmentalist, peace and trade union strategies could come together and be co-ordinated, even if this didn’t always happen in practice.

A problem now, the speakers suggest, is that there is no such unifying project. There’s plenty of activity, including the greatest wave of industrial militancy for decades, but it isn’t united.

How do we resolve that? This is a familiar problem: one a left newspaper like the Morning Star has been trying to play its role in as a reporter on and connector of struggles and strikes for nine decades. 

But with living standards dropping through the floor and climate chaos threatening havoc with global food, water and energy supply, it’s one that needs addressing with some urgency.