Abstract
James Schneider’s new book, Our Bloc, is perhaps surprising in its focus. Where others associated with the Corbyn project have largely focused on whether left activists should leave the Labour Party or ‘stay and fight’ (e.g. Gann 2022), or why the Corbyn project failed (Jones 2020), Corbyn’s former Director of Communications deliberately elides these questions. A focus on whether to leave the Labour Party, Schneider argues, retreads debates of the pre-Corbyn era (Gann 2022: 1). Obsessing over Corbynism’s failure, meanwhile, risks ‘a descent into left melancholia’ (Gann 2022: 2), and post-mortems of Corbynism have tended to descend into ‘hyper-narrow’ analyses of internal disagreements within Corbyn’s team, ignoring the broader context the project operated within (Eagleton 2021: 141).
In circumventing these questions then, Our Bloc moves in an interesting and useful direction. The book is a short, concentrated discussion of the future, with Schneider seeking to shake off the left’s ‘defeatism’ and find ways to ‘keep growing’ in a context where there is now ‘no single strategic horizon to organize around’ (Gann 2022: 17). In line with this refocusing, Our Bloc offers an impressive array of practical guidance, with the ‘Movement Populism’ chapter of the book offering interesting suggestions on building left media, advancing socialist education, municipal-level initiatives and how the British left can ‘expand [its] horizons internationally’ (Gann 2022: 76). Some of these discussions suffer with the book’s brevity but are useful in setting out a series of issues the left should consider post-Corbyn, and signposting proposals the left might advance.
This practicality is complemented by a degree of theoretical engagement, with Schneider drawing both on the recent work on organization (Nunes, 2021), and more prominently, the left populist approach expounded by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2014). Schneider advances two broader proposals corresponding to these touchstones. First, organizationally, Schneider (2022) argues that the left should create a ‘federation of movements’ (pp. 41). Second, Schneider (2022) argues for an adaptation of left populism – movement populism – which seeks to formulate a new ‘political agent . . . to bring us together under a single banner’ (p. 58).
In terms of the ‘federation of movements’, at times, Schneider (2022) supports a loose ‘interlocking structure’ that will ‘develop over time’, ‘through ad hoc alliances around discrete campaigns’ (pp. 46–47). Here, Schneider draws on Nunes’ (2021) argument regarding the futility of attempting to impose one strategy across the left. Instead, federation is about adopting a diversity of ‘tactics and practices’ that ‘look like they might work’ (Schneider 2022: 54). At other points in the book, however, Schneider (2022) imagines a federation with ‘a shared secretariat to coordinate between groups, mount campaigns, wield a parliamentary voice and form a pole of attraction in popular struggle’ (p. 46). Thus, while Schneider (2022) concedes a ‘complete left bloc will not be formed in one fell swoop’, an all-encompassing umbrella under which the whole left will be amassed does seem to be his aim (p. 47). Indeed, Schneider (2022) ends his discussion of federation by calling for the creation of ‘a movement-party capable of winning elections, taking power and overturning the established order’ (p. 56).
Two problems arise as Schneider shifts towards this more concrete vision of a federated left. First, while the general aim of building alliances and increasing collaboration between different left actors is useful, as Schneider (2022) himself notes, the same idea has been an ambition for a long time (p. 41). Yet, as Schneider (2022) also notes, even modest attempts during the Corbyn period ‘to bring together seven-Labour affiliated and left-led trade unions into a formal organization did not bear fruit’ (p. 42), perhaps betraying the outstripped ambition of Schneider’s grander proposal. Second, while Schneider (2022) engages with the work of Nunes, in calling for a ‘complete left bloc’ (p. 47), Schneider falls back into what Nunes cautions against: a ‘prescriptive approach to . . . organization’ that ‘pleas for a return to some redefined notion of the party, the contours of which tend nonetheless to be left equally vague’ (Nunes 2021: 4–5). Thus, if federation is to be a focus for the post-Corbyn left, there needs to be realism and clarity about both the limits to which this federation can be formalized and the extent to which it can be contained under one roof, which Schneider sometimes loses sight of.
In addition to this, contradictions exist between Schneider’s focus on federation and his left populism approach. Specifically, in stressing federation and the construction of a left bloc, Schneider (2022) seeks a resilient, deep-rooted set of institutions, built over years, that are ‘prepare[d] . . . for the next surge’ (p. 7). The emphasis, in short, is on durability. A left populist approach, and the kind of hegemonic bloc it is capable of constructing, are, by contrast, ‘characterized by essential instability’, ‘submitted to constant shifts’, and involves an ‘incessant process of redefinition’ (Laclau & Mouffe 2014: 135), thus stressing contingency and ‘indeterminacy’ (Laclau & Mouffe 2014: 7).
In light of this, Schneider’s overall strategy is uncertain. Must the left commit itself to the longue durée of building social power through robust institutions? Or is the best the left can hope for in uncertain times a tenuous coalition galvanized through an evocative discursive articulation of the unfolding neoliberal crisis? Schneider therefore ultimately offers a somewhat contradictory set of ideas in Our Bloc. However, in doing so, Schneider ends up posing significant questions which, if pursued further, offer the left a path beyond the defeatism that has thus far characterized much of post-Corbynism.