Richard Seymour on the rise of a new left in Europe | Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

Well, I think if we want to see a new left emerging from this, we need to change the relationship between these strategic elements.

First of all, we need to recognise the limits of a strike-led strategy based on public-sector workers. These groups of workers are too narrow for the most part, and their conditions of work too atypical, for them to transcend the "economic-corporate" moment by themselves and become the vanguard of a counter-hegemonic movement. Their strikes, while important, are going to be largely defensive. Given what neoliberalism has wrought, we have to stop identifying the working class with its organised minority, and start think about strategies for organising the unorganised workers, and that includes confronting the problem of precarity.

Second, we need to go beyond the utopian moment of Occupy, and think about how we can deploy its principles of communicative, prefigurative and disruptive power. So, for example, one might ask, is there a way that we can introduce these principles into a new labour movement, one based on the ideas of social movement unionism?

Third, we need to see think of these radical left formations not as better, upgraded versions of the old social-democratic left. One problem with social democracy was that it always tended to rely on a degree of political passivity in its base. It would support a limited degree of "economic" action by trade unionists, but political action had to be strictly channelled through the controlled, top-down structures of social democracy. And there would certainly be a temptation for any radical left formation, particularly once in office, to try to use any social depth or influence that it attained to try to politically control its supporters in order to allow it to translate its ideas into the language of state policy, which would mean all sorts of compromises and betrayals.

These formations should not be captivated by electoralism, nor should elections be conflated with politics as such. Rather, we need to develop parties with a much broader repertoire of political actions -- including the sorts of actions that would not be good for an electoral strategy, but which can be said to enhance the wider objectives of the movement.

via links.org.au