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OXFORD UNIVERSITY LABOUR CLUB

HILARY TERM 2022

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CONTENTS

Editor’s Note Co-Chairs’ Report

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LOOK BACK What Can Clement Attlee Teach Us Today? Ali Khosravi Edward Carpenter: ‘Going Barefoot Into Utopia’ Alex Williamson Judith Hart: Labour’s Lost Heroine Ella Staddon 1997, Twenty-Five Years Later Anas Dayeh Chartism: Why Did It Happen? Sharon Chau LOOK AROUND The Win for Indian Farmers Shows Mass Resistance Works Anvee Bhutani Labour and the Unions: In a Place of Strife Danny Leach From Generation Left to Population Left: The Myth of Age-Based Conservatism Michael Doolan The Canadian Truckers’ Protest and the Case Against Left Populism Rachael Grimmer In Conversation With Richard Burgon LOOK FORWARD Let’s Talk Lords Hari Bravery NATO: For or Against NATO, the Left, and the Case for Peace in Eastern Europe Luke Hatch The Leftist Case for Western Military Intervention Johannes Haekkerup Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?

In Defence of Utopian Socialism Hari Bravery Consciousness, Not Utopia Alex Beard

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Alex Beard

Publications Officer, Hilary Term 2022 Dear Reader, I was hoping to avoid some of the pleasantries that are typical of this kind of introduction. The fact is, however, that it really has been a pleasure to serve as Publications Officer for OULC this term, and to do so under two of the most diligent CoChairs the club has had in years.

There has been plenty of inspiration for would-be writers both inside and out of the society. Various mentions are given in the articles to the speakers that Danny and Amy managed to secure. One of them, Richard Burgon, even gave us an interview.

Meanwhile, the depressing reality of the global situation beyond Oxford’s dreaming spires inspired two articles on NATO, both fighting different corners, which can be read in the Look Forward section.

I argued when I was running for the position that Look Left is one of OULC’s biggest assets. You would be hard-pressed to find a student publication that publishes such considered takes from such a range of different perspectives. Under one roof is thus contained both an article singing the

praises of Tony Blair’s victory in 1997 and a defence of Marx and Engels’ historical materialism.

I would like to thank Naomi Man, who produced a design for the magazine that I have more or less directly imported. She was in turn inspired by a Labour campaign poster from 1966 which bears the text “You Know Labour Government Works”. I am also indebted to Hari Bravery, our incoming Co-Chair, who I not only consulted on various ideas for the magazine and managed to convince to write a debate piece on utopian socialism, but also transcribed the conversation I had with Richard Burgon.

Being able to edit this issue has been well worth the many frantic nights spent on Adobe InDesign, not least given the many things I have learnt from the articles themselves. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

Happy reading!

Alex Beard Publications Officer

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Editor’s Note

Co-Chairs’ Report Amy Field and Danny Leach Co-Chairs, Hilary Term 2022 Firstly, we’d just like to thank each and every one of our members who came to events this term, joined us on the streets of Oxford, or spoke at Beer and Bickering. This club wouldn’t be anything without you all. It’s been great to see so many new faces at OULC events every week, we hope you all keep attending regularly and maybe consider running for committee!

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This term has on the whole been a very positive one for the club. Our membership has increased significantly, as has our social media following. We’ve had some fantastic and interesting speakers from the shadow frontbench, from trade unions, from left and from right. We held OULC’s first black tie dinner for two years, and with a fantastic speaker and great numbers. And though storm Eunice thwarted our original plans, we have managed to reschedule Neil Kinnock for early next term. In addition, we have gone canvassing, rain or shine, every week of this term and still found time to help out in Labour’s by-election victory in Birmingham Erdington – you’re welcome, Keir!

Our reputation as a campaigning club is back and so is our traditional Page 5

role as a social hub of the Oxford left. “Beer and Bickering” has been well attended every week, and we are sure this will continue next term! We are also immensely proud to have supported and passed Fiónn’s campaign for transgender and non-binary equality both in the party in country.

OULC should never be an insular talking shop – we must use our power to make our city and party into better places.

We could never have achieved all of this without the help of our dedicated committee. We are grateful beyond words for all you’ve done, and the dedication of all of you – especially our first year committee members – has been an inspiration. It’s great to know that the club is more than safe in the hands of this new generation of members.

Hari and Maia are two of the most conscientious people we have ever met at OULC, and their termcard will be fantastic – we can’t wait to see you all at their events! We wish them the very best.

In solidarity forever, Amy and Danny

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LOOK BACK

Ali Khosravi

This year marks a century since Clement Attlee was first elected to Parliament. By 1935 he had risen to the party’s leadership in Parliament.

Yet none of his contemporaries (or probably even himself) ever expected him to one day serve as Deputy Prime Minister during a world war, or to lead Labour’s first ever majority government after the landslide of 1945. His government transformed post-war Britain and altered the relationship between the citizen and the state with the creation of the National Health Service and the welfare system. His legacies also include the nuclear deterrent and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) he helped found, the last having recently become particularly topical, for tragic reasons.

But can Clement Attlee offer us any lessons for today’s Labour Party? The modesty man that he was (and there seems to be a historical consensus on his modesty) would have found the idea of being a role model from beyond the grave absurd. Owing to his modesty, he was often underestimated by his contemporaries. Such a quiet and unpretentious man was seemingly overshadowed by big personalities like Ernest Bevin, Nye

Bevan and Herbert Morrison, each of whom would have at points felt themselves more suitable than Attlee ‘for the job’. But Attlee’s effectiveness as a leader and as Prime Minister was precisely due to his palpable absence of ego. He was a man driven by an almost paternalistic sense of public service.

Just to get a sense of his modesty, we may look at the fact that he housed a Jewish child refugee in his family home, something which was consciously concealed from anybody outside his family until discovered years later. You may compare that attitude with our current political culture where politicians pose for photos when they donate tins of food to their local food banks and post them on social media.

Attlee came from a comfortably establishment background, as a product of Victorian ‘public schooling’. Indeed as an undergraduate in Oxford, he is said to have been something of a young Tory, with a romantic view of the British Empire. So it can be seen as a strange twist of fate that he rose to become the Labour Prime Minister who helped to dismantle the British Empire after the Second World War, Page 8

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What Clement Attlee Can Teach Us Today

having forced Churchill to include the principle of self-determination in the Atlantic Charter (which arguably became the basis of the United Nations). As Prime Minister, Attlee also insisted on bringing forward the timetable for Indian Independence, which was opposed by Churchill’s Conservatives.

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That episode alone, aside from the rest of his career, may remind us about the importance of giving people the chance for redemption: the chance to undergo journeys, through which they may change their views and mend their ways. It can restore our faith (as people on the political left) in the importance of rehabilitation which may sometimes be taken for granted. It demonstrates why individuals should not be eternally encumbered by the sins of their youth and should instead be given a second chance.

In terms of his principles, if they could be called Attleeism, Attlee synthesised cautious radicalism with an unashamed sense of patriotism.

He was unquestionably a cautiously radical child of the British establishment. He would not have had the almost clichéd working class backstory which seems to characterise modern day leadership contests. But that didn’t make him any less aware or less angry at the poverty and the social injustice he witnessed. He found his radicalism in the streets of London’s East End before the First World War, where he worked as a social worker.

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Attlee was also notoriously a man of few words. He was described by his peers as enigmatic. It can be argued that he was a skilled practitioner of ‘constructive ambiguity’ decades before Henry Kissinger theorised it.

Something which the current leadership may have also inherited. We can almost certainly say that had Attlee been around in the 2020s, he would not have had a Twitter account.

Another of his character traits was his sense of respect and grace towards his opponents which he may have got from his work in the wartime coalition alongside the Tories.

We know that he wouldn’t have been a fan of what is termed ‘opposition for opposition’s sake’. He is said to have lost faith in Nye Bevan’s leadership potential after Bevan made his infamous comments about Tories being “lower than vermin”. To this Attlee reportedly replied that ‘we may disagree with the Tories on public policy but you can’t doubt their patriotism’. I heard that sentiment repeated when Barry Gardiner generously gave us a talk in Hilary Term. “Never assume that your opponents are evil,” Gardiner said.

It is fair to say that Attlee was to an extent a product of his age, as indeed we all are. His methods were particularly suited to the age of radio and newspapers. We may not feasibly be able to directly copy and paste the Attleeist mode of operation and style.

But he still offers a lot of valuable lessons for us today. His synthesis of patriotism with radicalism is indeed

For me, that is the most important lesson: the subordination of personal ego to public duty and the subordination of the player to the game. Those are the most important values which we must rediscover to move beyond the cults of personalities of previous leaders, beyond factionalism and a step closer to a Labour government, to once again serve the country and the people we love.

Ali Khosravi is a second-year PPE student at Balliol College.

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a very important framework. His modesty is a virtue to be promoted and celebrated as much as possible. In the words of Attlee’s American counterpart, President Truman: “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit”. And that was particularly true of Attlee. He accomplished a lot and didn’t seem to care about personal credit.

Edward Carpenter Going Barefoot Into Utopia

Alex Williamson

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The portrait of an unfairly forgotten writer hangs in a London gallery.

Hands buried in what the painter described as a “very anarchist overcoat”, the figure stares fixedly outside the frame, as though he has caught sight of the world beyond. The writer is Edward Carpenter, a nineteenth-century English socialist poet and lecturer, remembered too infrequently for his radical tracts on homosexuality, women’s emancipation, and the simplification of life.

Not unlike his portrait, Carpenter’s works defied easy limits and categorisations. He envisioned a “larger socialism” than his contemporaries, one which “would not simply end inequality but would bring new forms of associating and relating, a new aesthetic of the everyday in harmony with Nature” as his recent biographer, Sheila Rowbotham, writes. Carpenter despised the presence of “commercialism in public life … the worship of stocks and shares … the contempt of manual labour, and the cruel banning of women from every useful expression of their lives”. His ideas were popular; crowds of otherwise acrimonious I.L.P. members, Fabians and trade unionists travelled to hear

him lecture in a circuit of northern cities. His ‘religion of socialism’ that preached revolution not merely through economic precepts or class struggle, but also comradeship, retreat to nature and free-love, found many unexpected fans, among them leading socialist figures like William Morris, Henry Hyndman, Ramsay MacDonald, Bruce Glasier and Keir Hardie.

His central work, Towards Democracy – originally a slim volume of poetry with Epic aspirations that Carpenter continually added to for over a decade – circulated widely and internationally. On Carpenter’s request, it was smuggled into Russia to be read by Leo Tolstoy, who declared him the “heir to Ruskin”. Though he may have preferred a comparison to Whitman or Thoreau, and certainly these comparisons were made, to be read alongside such a hugely influential figure to the labour movement of the late nineteenth century as John Ruskin must have been incredibly complimentary to Carpenter.

Nevertheless, there were detractors.

Shortly after his death, the journalist and novelist George Orwell had

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Calling Carpenter a “noble savage”, George Bernard Shaw’s criticism seems less spiteful. After all, the poet was a middle-class Cambridge don who had merely adopted the labouring-class community of Sheffield. No matter how earnest Carpenter’s beliefs, his upbringing and England’s rigid social codes marked him out.

His ideas of simplification and wholelife socialism were equally as derided as they were venerated. Many found his haste to go “barefoot into Utopia” politically naïve.

work Maurice had been inspired by Carpenter’s romance with George Merill, wrote after his death that he “touched everyone, everywhere ..

Even when he wasn’t intimate he was in direct contact”. It is surprising that a figure once considered so influential has been so sidelined in scholarship. He was a man who, as Sheila Rowbotham writes, “helped to prod the modern world into being” before it forgot him and his outlandish ideas, trapping him in smaller and smaller frames from which he can only peer beyond.

Alex Williamson is a History Student at Mansfield College.

Despite being an increasingly controversial figure on the British left, his death just over a year after that of his partner George Merill inspired a rare moment of unity among the frenetic and disparate socialist groups and movements of the early twentieth century. Obituaries from the leading figures of the first Labour government, including the Prime Minister, joined a chorus of grief led by national newspapers and socialist publications. He was remembered for his striking eyes, his spirited defence of homosexuality, his opposition to rabbit coursing, and so much more. The novelist E.M. Forster, Page 12

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complained in The Road to Wigan Pier that “Socialism” was home to “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, pacifist and feminist in England”.

These were the “readers of Edward Carpenter”, an overly “pious sodomite” whose vegetarianism, love of sandals and eastern spirituality were particularly loathsome to Orwell.

Judith Hart Labour’s Lost Heroine Ella Staddon

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Following the announcement of Judith Hart’s death in 1991, Labour Leader Neil Kinnock described her as “a woman of high abilities who will long be remembered and admired for her distinguished work to advance human rights”. And yet, 30 years on, Judith Hart is largely forgotten. A brilliant campaigner for the marginalised across the globe, against nuclear weapons, and for the advancement of women in politics, Hart should be considered up there as one of the greats of our movement’s past. In reality, she is usually lucky if she gets a footnote in Labour history books. In the context of Putin’s war in Ukraine and Tory cuts to the foreign aid budget to fund our breaking of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Hart’s life’s work is just as relevant now as it was 50 years ago.

Born Constance Mary Ridehalgh in 1924, Hart grew up amongst the poverty and mass unemployment of the 1930s. Her mother, a schoolteacher and active pacifist campaigner, died when she was 11, after which she changed her name to Judith.

Having gained a full scholarship to study at the local grammar school, she went on to study at the LSE, which had relocated to Cambridge

during the war. It was in Cambridge that she became active in Labour politics, rising to becoming Secretary of the Labour Club and later its Chair.

Her political pursuits at university had little impact on the outcome of her degree, and she graduated in 1945 with a first.

Though not yet pursuing political office, she remained active in Labour politics and her trade union. It was during a trade union meeting that she met Dr Tony Hart, who joined her in speaking out against nuclear weapons. They married in 1946. Against the convention of the time, Hart continued to work as a researcher and began to stand in council elections.

In 1951 she made her first conference speech, warning her comrades “not to underestimate the womenfolk”, who wanted to live in a world free of nuclear weapons. After standing unsuccessfully for parliament twice in 1951 and 1955, she was selected to stand for Lanark- the largest constituency in the UK. That same year Tony Hart had also been selected for a parliamentary seat, however upon Judith’s selection he withdrew his candidacy, believing her to be the better candidate. Later, when she was a minister, he took a demotion in

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Despite Labour’s decimation at the 1959 election, Hart won the seat and overturned the Tory majority. She quickly gained a reputation for working beyond what would be expected of any MP, personally replying to all correspondence from constituents and sending follow up letters.

which created 130,000 jobs and provided Scottish industry with £2 billion in investment.

Unsurprisingly, she opposed Polaris submarines being based in her constituency. On the 2nd March 1961, she spoke out against their installation, arguing “when we are providing money […] for Polaris submarines which are armed with nuclear weapons capable of wreaking the most tremendous damage—it is a killer weapon on a massive scale—then we are likely to increase provocation. […] As soon as a weapon is developed by one side a counter weapon is developed by the other […] We are not providing a contribution to peace but a contribution to the greater danger of the outbreak of war”. The Tory benches heckled and ridiculed her, to which she retorted that nuclear annihilation was not a laughing matter.

In 1966, Hart was promoted to the Commonwealth Office. Her main task was dealing with Rhodesia, whose white supremacist Prime Minister Ian Smith declared a Unilateral Declaration of Independence around the time of Hart’s appointment. Instinctively siding with the African majority and Zambia’s President Kenneth Kaunda, she successfully “fought like a tigress” to increase the aid budget of Zambia to £13.85 million. Zambia remained unconvinced of Britain’s opposition to Smith’s regime, so Hart negotiated a further £21 million aid package and forced Wilson to commit to No Independence Before Majority African Rule. Wilson began to ignore Hart’s advice regarding sanctions, resulting in Hart and Barbara Castle threatening a joint resignation in protest. In December 1966, Castle, Hart and Shirley Williams threatened resignation again in opposition to the possibility of a settlement. Shortly afterwards Hart was given a promotion within the department to move her away from the Rhodesia issue.

By 1964, she had been an MP for five years and had increased her majority nearly tenfold. She entered the government as the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, where she was given free range to pursue issues that interested her. Her two main achievements were changing the law around children’s hospitals visiting hours and the introduction of the Scotland Plan,

In 1967 Hart was appointed Minister of Social Security. She didn’t enjoy the bureaucracy of the DHSS, and didn’t last long in the job- as her boss Richard Crossman wrote in his diary, Hart was destined for bigger things.

On the 15th October 1968, Harold Wilson called Richard Crossman into his office to inform him that he needed to find a new minister. The

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order to move the family to London to better support her.

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following day Hart was appointed the first woman Paymaster General, and for the first time in history there was more than one woman in the Cabinet. That year, eleven of the nineteen women elected for Labour in 1966 were given government posts. The Guardian was appalled, and accused Wilson of promoting “anything articulate in a skirt”.

Her first task was to ‘win the hearts and minds’ of the 2.5 million under-21s now eligible to vote, a job made easier by her interest in anti-racism and women’s equality. She was also tasked with ensuring Minister’s speeches were in line with government policy, which later led to the establishment of a committee at Transport House to enforce just that.

Thirdly, she worked towards Scottish devolution, which she hoped would reduce the growing support for the SNP. Finally, she was left in charge of Labour’s policy regarding women’s rights, becoming the first ever Chair of the Women’s National Commission. The Commission lobbied ministers ‘on everything from health, education, women in society, to even general problems like race relations’. It instigated divorce law reform, backed Barbara Castle’s campaign for equal pay, worked to improve the rights of single mothers and the overall status of women in society. A self-confessed raging feminist, Hart enjoyed this job immensely. Within a year Hart fell seriously out of favour, and she was moved to the Overseas Development ministry.

Back in a department she cared deeply about, she immediately set about defending foreign aid programmes against budget cuts. Unfortunately Labour was out of government before she could make any lasting impression. She did, however, successfully move half the department to East Kilbride, which continues to employ over six hundred people to this day.

She also began work writing her book Aid and Liberation: A Socialist Study of Aid Politics.

In September 1973, the democratically elected socialist government in Chile was deposed by General Pinochet and backed by the CIA, ending 160 years of democracy and beginning seventeen years of dictatorship.

The junta banned all left-wing parties, outlawed trade unions, censored the press, abolished Congress and filled government posts with military leaders. Universities were closed and books were burnt. Planes and weaponry sourced from Britain were used to commit flagrant human rights abuses, massacring over 3,000 people, and tens of thousands were tortured. One of Pinochet’s favourite methods of murder was to drop pregnant women out of aeroplanes- aeroplanes that continued to be sourced from Britain.

For Judith Hart, this was a personal- many of those killed and tortured were friends from the Socialist International. Hart campaigned relentlessly to impose sanctions, and helped found the Chile Solidarity Campaign and Chile Campaign for Human

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In 1974, she returned to government as the Minister for Overseas Development, where she negotiated the Lomé convention- a trade and aid agreement between the EEC and seventy-one African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. Her left-wing colleagues would later say her successes at Lomé undermined their argument that the EEC was not an internationalist organisation. During this time she also chaired the Public Sector Working

Group, which proposed the founding of the National Enterprise Board, set up in 1975. One of its investments went on to prosper in Silicon Valley, and its technology can be found in our phones and laptops. It was during this time that she mentored a young Margaret Beckett, who she had initially found in Labour HQ’s research department and decided was the future of the Labour movement. After encouraging her to become an MP, she appointed Beckett her Parliamentary Private Secretary with the intention of training her up for high office, particularly surrounding issues of foreign policy, industry and the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Following the 1975 referendum on EEC membership, Hart was sacked

by Wilson. Upon discovering Wilson’s intention to sack Hart, Barbara Castle stormed into his office looking like a drowned rat with a burnt fried egg sandwich in hand to demand Hart get her job back, unfortunately with little success. Hart resigned in the House of Commons the next morning. She was reappointed Minister of Overseas Development mere months later. This time, she cancelled Third World debt and replaced interest-free loans with grants.

Back in opposition, she continued to campaign for Chile and for women’s rights. In 1982, the Thatcher government attempted to remove women from unemployment figures, resulting in Hart calling the Tory minister defending the proposals a ‘male chauvinist pig’. She was, by this time,

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refugees, personally funding escape routes and using underground education networks and foreign aid workers to smuggle people out, and later housing them in her own home. One such family she saved and housed was Salvador Allende’s widow and children. Every refugee from Chile had references written by Hart.

Back in government in 1974, she used the Overseas Development ministry to fund escape routes, and worked with the World University Service to organise transportation, saving thousands from state sponsored murder.

Her final speech in Parliament in 1987 was dedicated to the plight of Chilean refugees, arguing that the government’s new bill provided no legal routes for those escaping brutal military regimes, and as such they would not only be refused entry but be deported back to the nations they had only just escaped, probably to be slaughtered on return. Shortly before her death, the regime collapsed and she was the first non-Chilean to be offered the Chilean Order of Merit.

She passed away before she could receive it in person.

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the only remaining woman MP in Scottish Labour’s ranks, and ill health forced her to retire in 1987. She entered the House of Lords shortly afterwards, but was unable to take an active role.

free of suffering and injustice.

Ella Staddon is a first-year History student at Merton College. She was OULC’s Women*s Officer for Hilary Term 2022.

After a long period of illness, Hart died in 1991, aged 67. It is thought that her bone marrow cancer was caused by exposure to a significant amount of radiation in 1957 following the explosion of a nuclear power plant in Cumbria, where she had gone to aid survivors. What she saw there only reinforced her belief in the evil danger of nuclear weapons. She never lived to see the next Labour government, nor the achievements of her protégé Margaret Beckett, whose work on multilateral nuclear disarmament and the Non-Proliferation treaty can only be seen as a continuation of Hart’s work. At a time when Labour is promoting the largely catastrophic foreign policy that was overseen by Ernest Bevin, its historical figures like Judith Hart who we really should be looking to. A woman who, despite being on opposition benches, or repeatedly being sacked, managed to not only outline what a socialist foreign aid plan should look like, but campaigned to save the lives of refugees, even to the detriment of her career. While Putin bombs nuclear power plants in Ukraine and Johnson breaks the Non-Proliferation treaty, we are yet again faced with the growing threat of nuclear weapons. Now is the time to not only remember Judith Hart, but to have the courage to continue her fight, and create a world Page 17

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Chartism

Why Did It Happen?

Sharon Chau

“The approaching termination of the great war, the burdensome weight of taxation, the increasing distress of the people revived popular agitation. The vain struggle against machinery attested to the misery of the people and the incompetence and heartlessness of their rulers” .

This quote by George Julian Harney, a critical Chartist leader, demonstrates the hardship from which Chartism was born. At its core, Chartism argued that “all men are born with equal rights” and consisted of a large group of working and middle-class individuals calling for parliamentary reform and universal suffrage. Demanding six terms, namely Universal Manhood Suffrage, abolishing property qualifications for MPs, holding yearly elections for the House of Commons, establishing equal electoral districts, a salary for MPs, and a secret ballot, Chartism was seen as one of the most influential working-class movements in the nineteenth century. However, it was also seen as a “knife-and-fork” movement correlating with rising economic woes as much as it was a political one.

In this essay, the reasons leading to the rise of Chartism will be examined, including long-term economic and ideological factors and shortterm economic and political factors.

For the long-term, these include the process of industrialisation, the influence of the French Revolution, Britain’s intellectual climate and the nature of the Chartist movement; for the short-term, these include the economic depression and rise in food prices, as well as disappointment towards the Great Reform Act and Whig reforms and the growth of the popular press. These factors were all indispensable to the rise of Chartism, but ultimately short-term economic and political factors were the matches that set alight the powder keg of economic hardship and intellectual radicalism.

The first long-term economic factor for Chartism’s rise was industrialisation, which had three crucial effects.

Firstly, industrialisation caused increased job insecurity. Royle notes that industrialisation and urbanisation were transforming the lives of the people drastically , as the rise of automation meant that much of the working class had been replaced or were worried about losing their jobs to machines. Secondly, industrialisation led to increased economic inequality and an unequal distribution of benefits to the population. Such inequality left the working class feeling “isolated, neglected, and exposed” , prompting action to be taken for

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social change. Thirdly, industrialisation created worse working conditions. A pertinent example was the rising mining industry - reports illustrated a state of “filth, barbarism, and demoralisation which both beggars description and defies belief ” . Horrific working conditions, long hours and low pay caused many individuals to dread going to work every day and wish for a better future. Nonetheless, economic discontent had to be translated into action. Hartwell argues that the industrial revolution “enabled the working classes, for the first time in history, to organise effectively, both industrially and politically . This was mostly due to the urbanisation happening along with industrialisation.

In 1801, 78% of the population lived in the countryside and 22% lived in towns; but in 1851, 50% of the population was living in towns. Briggs notes the “rapid increase in the size of towns” which “provided new opportunities for political discussion and action” were often “centres of subversive ideas” . Such urbanisation united agitation, allowing radical ideas to spread more quickly through wordof-mouth.

However, industrialisation alone is insufficient in explaining the rise of Chartism. Firstly, it does not explain why Chartism was a political instead of an economic protest movement; and secondly, given the gradual process of industrialisation, it does not explain why there was a sudden tipping point which mobilised people to the Chartist cause. Hence, one potential theory for this gap is intellectual

and ideological radicalisation, which could explain the political nature of the movement and the incentives for the mass mobilisation that happened.

The first ideological factor was the impact of the French Revolution of 1789-1799. Hovell argues that “in a world of injustice and inequality, the working men found hope and a call to action in those theories of natural rights and justice which the French Revolution had popularised” , with the Revolution providing persuasive intellectual theories for people to rise against tyrannical governments . Mainstream newspapers at the time echoed this sentiment, with the Times writing, “while all our neighbours are having their revolutions, we must have a revolution of our own” .

The fact that the most popular paper at the time was inciting subversion suggests that the message reached a wide audience and that a significant portion of the population supported this idea. Those in government were not also immune to the seduction of the French Revolution - an 1830 pamphlet by MP Henry Brougham emphasised “the effects of the French Revolution must teach him the absolute necessity of reforms in all the abuses of our system” , supporting his argument for necessary parliamentary reform. Despite this, one must keep in mind the limited extent to which the working classes genuinely knew or cared about the French Revolution, as argued by E.P. Thompson. Chartism, an ostensibly working-class movement, was mostly shaped by the response of the middle

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Secondly, Britain’s intellectual climate, including the beginnings of trade unionism and increased class and political consciousness, led to the rise of Chartism. Organisations such as the British Association for the Promotion of Co-operative Knowledge and the Metropolitan Trades’ Union combined traditional political goals, particularly the vote, with demands for measures to secure the working classes’ independence from the capitalist’s economic power . These institutions fostered and consolidated radical political thought which was crucial to Chartism by disseminating information and encouraging unionisation. The strong class divide within Britain was also ripe for new political theories. Marx and Engels wrote, “In England, there exists the most numerous, most concentrated and most classic example of a proletariat” , demonstrating the clear separation between the upper and working classes which amplified the reason for social agitation. This demonstrates how ideas of class consciousness, and equality and universal suffrage had already existed before the start of the movement, so they were not entirely novel ideas which would be harder to accept.

However, the importance of the Charter and Six Demands in the eyes of working-class Chartists is questionable. Woodward argues that “the charter was to some of its supporters almost an end in itself ” and

“there was a finality about the establishment of a political democracy” .

However, it seems dubious that much of the working class was motivated by these high political ideals, or by philosophical arguments against despotic tyranny and for a social contract. The French Revolution had happened around fifty years ago, so there must be an alternative reason for Chartism to arise not then but in the 1830s. Moreover, support for Chartism waxed and waned according to the economic situation at the time, suggesting that many Chartists did not genuinely have a sustained wish for parliamentary reform, but merely joined Chartism as a protest movement. Woodward concedes that to some, “the attainment of political power was the first stage in the establishment of a new economic order of society” , implying that political change was merely a means to a better economic end. Indeed, the future disagreements between Chartists along class lines demonstrate that many Chartists, especially those from the working class, did not have political aims in the forefront of their minds. Hence, we ought to examine more short-term economic and political reasons as factors for the rise of Chartism.

A crucial short-term economic factor is the correlation between support for Chartism and economic conditions.

For example, the 1843 economic improvement saw an immediate decline in Chartist participation, the 1847 financial crash witnessed a rise in Chartist activity and the post-1850

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and upper classes to the French Revolution .

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Victorian prosperity coincided with the decline of Chartism. Rostow’s “social tension chart” which identified years between 1790 and 1850 when social tension was unusually high or low , demonstrated an evident correlation with Chartism, especially during the economic downturn in 1830s and 1840s. This strongly rebuts the theory that many Chartists were largely politically motivated - if this were true, support for Chartism should have been constant regardless of the economic situation at the time.

Royle supports this theory, pointing out “the political message of Chartism did find its readiest, most widespread and most violent responses in years of business depression and high bread prices” . The most intuitive explanation for this correlation is that Chartism was primarily a protest and agitation movement and its supporters wanted economic changes instead of political ones. Cobbett, an MP at the time, once said, “I defy you to agitate a fellow with a full stomach” . This illustrates how those content with their material wellbeing are less likely to participate in protest movements - firstly, because their opportunity cost of not working is higher; secondly, because they have more to lose if they are arrested or punished; and thirdly, because those suffering economically have more to be angry about. Hence, the fact that Chartism strongly correlated with economic cycles provides damning evidence against political factors as a motivation for Chartism.

At this point, the questions of why

there was a mass mobilisation of people for the Chartist cause and why thousands of people turned up to mass rallies are mostly explained there was a large economic impetus to do so. However, the gap now is how the movement became political.

Hence, we should examine the shortterm political causees and its interaction with the working class to establish why Chartism was so political in its goals.

The first political reason was disappointment towards parliamentary reform, especially towards the Great Reform Act of 1832. The growth of the electorate created by the Act was limited and still required property qualifications, causing the working class to view this as an act of treachery. The British Charter Association wrote a publication in 1840 lamenting how “the hopes of the nation were laid prostrate by the failure of a measure they had been accustomed to consider as the precursor of universal suffrage” - the bitter disappointment this caused prompted many to further agitate for genuine reform.

Brown and Daniels argue that the importance of this Act lay in “what it did not do”. It did not introduce democracy nor give the working-class control of the political system “which continued to lie with the aristocratic elite until at least 1867” . Additionally, Chartists questioned the government’s intent to reform through this Act. The Guardian illustrated this sentiment, arguing that those who passed the Act did not wish to subvert aristocratic institutions but wished to

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“consolidate them by a reinforcement of sub-aristocracy from the middle classes”. This suspicion towards the government’s intentions left many middle and working-class individuals feeling alienated. Hence disappointment towards parliamentary reform and the perception that the Great Reform Act was a cunning government manoeuvre for “the preservation of subordination” was a key reason why many turned to Chartism.

The first political reason was disappointment towards parliamentary reform, especially towards the Great Reform Act of 1832. The growth of the electorate created by the Act was limited and still required property qualifications, causing the working class to view this as an act of treachery. The British Charter Association wrote a publication in 1840 lamenting how “the hopes of the nation were laid prostrate by the failure of a measure they had been accustomed to consider as the precursor of universal suffrage” - the bitter disappointment this caused prompted many to further agitate for genuine reform.

Brown and Daniels argue that the importance of this Act lay in “what it did not do”. It did not introduce democracy nor give the working-class control of the political system “which continued to lie with the aristocratic elite until at least 1867” . Additionally, Chartists questioned the government’s intent to reform through this Act. The Guardian illustrated this sentiment, arguing that those who passed the Act did not wish to subvert aristocratic institutions but wished to

Large-scale opposition towards Whig social legislation also contributed towards people joining the Chartist movement. Royle notes that “in the popular journals and radical speeches of the 1830s the image was built up of the Great Whig Betrayal - one of the myths on which… working-class consciousness was founded” . The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 generated particular resentment, as it cut relief to able-bodied persons and their families unless they entered a workhouse . Many viewed this as double punishment for individuals who did not have power over their circumstances and were forced to leave their families under the harsh law. According to Hovell, the act was “a piece of cruel and calculated tyranny” which spurred political protest against the government. Another significant Whig failure was the failed restriction of working hours to ten hours per day, which was a change many industrial workers had hoped for. Hovell notes that “when the salvation promised by the Whig reform of 1832 proved illusory”, it was “perfectly natural” to agitate for popular

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there was a mass mobilisation of people for the Chartist cause and why thousands of people turned up to mass rallies are mostly explained there was a large economic impetus to do so. However, the gap now is how the movement became political.

Hence, we should examine the shortterm political causees and its interaction with the working class to establish why Chartism was so political in its goals.

LOOK LEFT

“consolidate them by a reinforcement of sub-aristocracy from the middle classes”. This suspicion towards the government’s intentions left many middle and working-class individuals feeling alienated. Hence disappointment towards parliamentary reform and the perception that the Great Reform Act was a cunning government manoeuvre for “the preservation of subordination” was a key reason why many turned to Chartism.

Large-scale opposition towards Whig social legislation also contributed towards people joining the Chartist movement. Royle notes that “in the popular journals and radical speeches of the 1830s the image was built up of the Great Whig Betrayal - one of the myths on which… working-class consciousness was founded” . The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 generated particular resentment, as it cut relief to able-bodied persons and their families unless they entered a workhouse . Many viewed this as double punishment for individuals who did not have power over their circumstances and were forced to leave their families under the harsh law. According to Hovell, the act was “a piece of cruel and calculated tyranny” which spurred political protest against the government. Another significant Whig failure was the failed restriction of working hours to ten hours per day, which was a change many industrial workers had hoped for. Hovell notes that “when the salvation promised by the Whig reform of 1832 proved illusory”, it was “perfectly natural” to agitate for popular

People’s Charter. This demonstrates how the Whig government’s failure to legislate reforms meant that popular anger was directed towards the government, contributing to the rise of Chartism.

The growth of the popular press was the last political factor for the rise of Chartism. The press was able to spread ideas through publications like the Northern Star and the Poor Man’s Guardian - E.P. Thompson calls the nascent radical political journalism of the working class “the literary culture of the radical artisans” . These news publications were extremely important because Chartist groups in different parts of the country were forbidden to correspond officially, so newspapers were the primary means of communication . The Northern Star, for example, was willing to include almost all news it received relating to the movement, making it the main channel of communication among Chartists . Additionally, publications were crucial for integrating local agitation into the national Chartist movement and gave local radicalism national coverage . The impact of the Chartist publications can be evidenced by Engel’s letter to Marx which praises O’Connor’s article in the Star - “it is a masterpiece… even better than Cobbett and recalls Shakespeare” . Of all publications, the Northern Star was the most important and largest Chartist newspaper. Glasgow illustrates its impact by noting that “no description of the Chartist movement would be satisfactory if it ignored the Northern

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In conclusion, the Charter became “a battle cry for those who… were suffering from the increasing competition of machinery, the long months of a trade depression, and the hardship of the poor law”. There was a complex web of reasons why the Chartist movement came about in the particular time it did, why it enjoyed its extent of support and why it had a political nature and specifically agitated for parliamentary reform. The long-term factor of industrialisation and urbanisation made a small but significant contribution to Chartism - it created discontent, job insecurity and poor working conditions, as well as concentrated pockets of workers in towns that prevented the movement from being geographically dispersed and weak. However, industrialisation alone does not explain the trigger that transported people into the streets, nor does it explain why the Chartist movement was about political change instead of economic ones.

Intellectual reasons including the impact of the French Revolution and Britain’s intellectual climate explain to some extent why Chartism was political from the top-down, but to use it as an explanation for the rise of Chartism assumes that the working class was politically conscious, which is discredited by the wavering support for Chartism based on economic conditions. Short-term economic conditions successfully explain the mass mobilisation of people into the streets protesting against their current conditions, but it is ultimately three political reasons that explain why Chartism was centred around the Six Demands - the disappointment towards the failure to enfranchise through the Great Reform Act, the failure of Whig social legislation, and the rise in the popular press which exposed the masses to radical political ideas and made mainstream the concepts of parliamentary reform and universal suffrage. The disappointing political circumstances crystallised within the minds of the working class a fledgling political consciousness upon which they were willing to act in a time of economic hardship.

Sharon Chau is a second-year PPE student at University College. She served as Women*s Officer in Hilary Term 2022.

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Star… it exercised an immense influence among the mass of the population, left discontented and turbulent as a result of drastic economic and social changes” . The Star had also eclipsed every other paper’s sales less than two years after its establishment; only The Times sold more papers in a week than the Star in 1839 , demonstrating its popularity and ascension into mainstream content. Hence, the growth of the popular press, with the widespread popularity of the publications coupled with its strong Chartist arguments, contributed significantly to the rise of Chartism.

1997, Twenty-Five Years Later Anas Dayeh “There it is, ten o’clock, and we say Tony Blair is to be Prime Minister, and a landslide is likely” Indeed, even after twenty-five years, these words haven’t left our memory. After eighteen years of tory rule, Labour finally won. Not only had they got enough MPs to form a government but they achieved a historic landslide.

With the current government, and every one of its outrageous scandals and shambolic policies, it is difficult to envision a time when the UK had a government that actually cared about people. Many young people like myself spent our teenage years knowing only austerity, cuts to our youth centres, tripling tuition fees and chaos added to every aspect of our lives.

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“A new dawn has broken, has it not?”

It truly had. For millions of people across the country, that day gave them hope that their lives could at long last improve. One of the main priorities of Blair and Brown’s government was the national minimum wage. A policy that is not necessarily seen as radical today, yet one which both the Tories and Lib Dems

activelly campaigned against. Such policy reminds us that what is defined as ‘radical’ changes over time, and what is seen as radical today, might be seen as the norm in twenty-five years. Immediately after its introduction, two million workers saw their wages rise. That’s more individuals and families finally having greater disposable income, and better living standards.

The achievements don’t stop there.

There’s much, much, more that could be said about Sure Start, Educational Maintenance Allowance, the shortest NHS waiting times since records began, more doctors, nurses, and teachers, and the very long list of achievements.

Things could only get better from the breaking of that new dawn and for many people, they did.

“And it is wonderful! we always said that if we had the courage to change then we can do it, and we did it!”

It’s always difficult to make change, and hard to agree on what that change should look like. If the 2019 General Election taught us anything, it’s that the Labour Party

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“For eighteen years, eighteen long years. My party has been in opposition. It could only say, it could not do…. Today, enough of talking, it is time now to do” Doing the best for Britain, in the short term and long term. Even when the Labour Party is now twelve years out of office, many young people are still benefiting from its policies. The Child Trust Fund policy, introduced

by Blair and Brown, meant that all children born between 2002 and 2011 can access funds of over £1000 when they turn eighteen.

Many adults might argue that it isn’t much, but for someone who is 18, from a low-income household, it could mean a new device to help them with university, a cultural travel experience or many other opportunities that would otherwise be simply out of their grasp.

office. Unfortunately that policy, like many great others, was abolished by the Tories and Lib Dems.

“All we ask, is the chance to govern” In the end, we must not forget the real impact we can have by winning a Labour government. The thousands, even millions, of people who benefited are not simply statistics on a paper.

They are real lives, real people, some of whom we are probably friends with without even knowing. After all, it is only those who can afford a Tory government, who dismiss the last Labour government and its achievements. We can only hope that in the next general election we can have the opportunity to change this country for the better!

“2024 will be a defining moment in British history, and as the night goes on, we’ll be sharing with you the results as they come. And there it is, 10 o’clock, and we say Keir Starmer is to be prime minister, and landslide is likely.” This, surely, is the only thing we all want to hear on the 1st May 2024.

Anas Dayeh is a first-year History and Politics student at St John’s College.

It is that Labour government that took care of us, our education, and aimed to keep at it even after leaving Page 26

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cannot simply continue doing what it previously did, and hope for the best.

It is our duty to make this party one that the British people can not only vote for, but be proud of. We need to remember that for every day, month, and year where we’re out of office, there are millions of people who are suffering under a Tory government. if we don’t want change for ourselves, we should change for those who need us the most. Our party exists for them, after all.

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LOOK AROUND

Anvee Bhutani

After a whole year of protesting, Indian farmers have finally seen the repeal of three laws that were designed to decrease government involvement and regulation of the agricultural sector and largely resign it to the free market economic system. Beyond being a large victory for those protesting, however, this victory sets a precedent for the future of labour movements.

How did farmers win?

Having initially seen the unionisation of farmers predominantly from the states of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan, the protest then made history when, in November 2020, over 250 million people across the subcontinent participated in a general strike in solidarity with the protests.

The global support and solidarity the movement has received by diaspora South Asian groups as well has now made this the largest protest in human history.

Organizers also leaned on those outside the country. Big Sikh diaspora charities like Khalsa Aid International, a British relief group, raised money for the protesters. Even non-Indian figures like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and singer-songwriter

Rihanna got involved.

The philosophy of Sikhism emphasizes supporting victims of injustice and the value of the community over the individual. Financial aid, particularly from Sikh temples and organizations outside India, has been critical to the movement’s staying power. The farmer movement’s sprawling protest camps, which fed and clothed thousands of people daily and provided clean water, sanitation and even barber shops and tailors, reflects the Sikh value of community and self-sufficiency.

Controversy Around the Repeal There has been immense speculation as to the real reason the laws were repealed, with some claiming it was for electoral gain. The BJP were gearing up for election battles in several states across India, namely Uttar Pradesh, where they have been campaigning aggressively. The state, which is the country’s largest and its most populated, could indicate which party forms the national government after the 2024 elections.

Elections are also due in Punjab,an agrarian state where a significant chunk of the farmer protests took

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The Win For Indian Farmers Shows Mass Resistance Works

took place, and which recently saw political upheaval. Nonetheless, electoralism aside, the repeal has been warmly welcomed by both farmers and supporters of the movement.

A new direction for the farmers movement This win isn’t the end for the movement. India’s farming system still needs to be fixed, a fact that even many of the protesting farmers acknowledge. Initiated during a time of widespread starvation in the 1960s, the system created centralized markets where farmers could sell their crops. Some of the proceeds are funneled back to farming communities though infrastructure projects, pensions and programs providing free technical advice on matters like seed and fertilizer.

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Today, however, that system contributes to inefficiencies. For instance, the government subsidises watertensive crops in drought-stricken lands. Farming also focuses on staple grains while more nutritious crops, like leafy vegetables, are neglected.

The farmers protest is, however, one of the few labour movement wins that we’ve seen during the twenty-first century. One of the great paradoxes of the current era is that the world working class continues to grow, while at the same time many labor movements are experiencing a crisis, a paradox. The global simultaneity of the crisis suggests that the failure of individual organizational leaderships is not the main cause, but that more factors play a role.

The labour movement refers to two ideas: first, that workers, especially blue‐collar or manual workers, share common political and economic interests which may be advanced through organized trade union struggle and political action. Secondly, that trade unions can form an effective alliance with left-of-centre parties in Parliament with the objective of forming a government in which workers’ interests would be of central importance.

Most of the sixty percent of the country employed in agriculture survives on subsistence farming. While some farmers enjoy middle-class lives, helped by modern aids like tractors and irrigation, many others do not see a profit and are in debt. This leaves much more for the farmers movement to try and protest to achieve.

The mid-twentieth century labour movement was strongly internationalist in character, emphasizing the shared interests between workers in different countries in opposing capitalist political regimes and in the movements for freedom from colonial rule. However, post‐independence, the idea of independent trade unionism representing the rights of workers via governments was often difficult to carry into effect.

International Labour Movements

What now?

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Anvee Bhutani is Oxford SU President

This authoritarian streak has shaped the pandemic policies of the Indian government, which not only rushed through the farm laws but also promptly acceded to industrialists’ demand for labour reforms that weaken the rights of workers in both the formal and informal sectors. This includes changes like looser hire and fire policies, longer working hours, reduced social protection and restrictions on the right to strike.

But global solidarity was achieved in this movement through mass resistance and this is something that can be replicated. The Trade Union Congress (TUC) in Britain issued a statement at the height of the protests saying, “Neoliberal policies that make the poorest pay whilst corporations amass massive profits have driven huge inequality and a planet on the edge of catastrophe. The UK labour movement stands in solidarity with the hundreds of thousands of farmers in India and the wider trade union movement in India fighting for a just future.” It’s time we leverage our proud trade union history as a nation and mobilise workers just as those in India have done.

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The farmers protest exemplifies the perfect movement against India’s capitalist growth engine. In policy terms, this means an unending cycle of structural adjustments, privatisation and disinvestment from the public sector. This is why the capital-owning classes often root for a strong leader who can “get things done” such as Modi.

Labour and the Unions In a Place of Strife Danny Leach

LOOK LEFT

When Steve Turner, the Assistant General Secretary of Unite, visited Oxford University Labour Club just a few weeks ago he made it clear that his union’s relationship to and influence in Labour was more important than any individual, or dispute.

Since then, it feels as though that accord has been wearing dangerously thin. Unite’s new General Secretary, Sharon Graham, has been making threatening noises over their affiliation fees every time a member enters into any dispute with a Labour organ, and in retort the leader’s office offers only generic left-bashing. It wasn’t always this way. The Labour right used to be the most strongly union-affiliated, and even where there were public spats, the back channel connections were strong. These days we have a situation where the leadership of major unions, even so-called “moderate” ones, barely care about Labour, and vice versa. What went wrong, and what can Starmer do to fix things?

To understand why unions used to be on the right of the party we can go right back to the start of the 20th century. When Labour was formed, it was an amalgam of smaller left wing political groups like Hardie’s Independent Labour Party, and larger trade unions. Until 1918, one couldn’t

be a Labour member at all except by affiliation. Even way back then, the union sponsored MPs were usually more moderate than the ILP ones.

This may be because trade unions have sometimes been lacking in political ambition in this country, and always had a position in favour of free bargaining. Maintaining the conditions for free bargaining is hardly a doctrine for ethical socialism. The left-right pattern of the party was confirmed in the interwar period, as Unite’s forerunner the T&G (among others) spent the decades trying to expel communists, thereby defining themselves against the left to some extent. While Labour also expelled communists and continued to proscribe them, despite many requests for affiliation, there were those on the Labour left who were in favour of a “united front”, against fascism and the right. It never got anywhere but may have deepened the suspicion of some left MPs by trade unionists. The Labour right still kept a strong presence in the unions until the 1980s: Callaghan, Labour’s last Old Right leader, was always a union man.

However, the rumblings of discontent were already present before and during Callaghan’s leadership. The Old Right wasn’t the only game in

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It was this context which pushed the major unions to leverage their block votes in favour of an underdog candidate in 2010: Ed Miliband. Despite the fact that he was, and is, a moderate left MP, he drew the ire of the

the Labour right for defeating their candidate and his own brother. Ed Miliband had lost in both the members’ and the MPs’ section, but a strong victory in the trade union vote meant he won very narrowly. This only heightened the animosity of the right, and led to the implementation of the one member, one vote system in 2014. While unions may not have had any direct influence over the winner of the 2015 leadership election, many of Corbyn’s campaign staff were seconded from Unite. After his win, much of his office staff was made up of former union people. Jennie Formby, Simon Fletcher, and Andrew Fisher had worked for Unite, Unite, and PCS respectively before entering Corbyn’s office. Andrew Murray as chief of staff at Unite, and Len McClusky as general secretary were also regular advisers to his office. Many other union figures were less, but still, important. Cortes, from the TSSA; Serwotka, from PCS; Ward, from the CWU; all provided support, funding, and ideas to the leader’s office under Corbyn. To return briefly to Steve Turner, he himself is the chair of the People’s Assembly, a left organisation which fights austerity. It would not be a stretch to imagine that the more overt support given by unions to the left of the party in recent years could account for the new schism they’ve had from the party’s right.

After Corbyn’s defeat and exit, all three of the major unions held leadership elections. However, Labour was far from the front of members’

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in town for Labour moderates anymore; an intellectual right had developed in the 50s and 60s, and in turn, the party and the unions became more left-wing in the 70s. All this meant that while there remained still a large body of right unions, and a similarly large number of right and pro-union MPs, one faction was already considering a split under Callaghan. In 1981, Owen, Rodgers, Williams, and Jenkins declared they were leaving Labour to form their own party, the SDP. After a few fractious years in which the unions had begun to flex political muscle within the party by passing left motions – including one in favour of the electoral college which gave unions 40% of the vote in leadership elections – the Gang of Four had decided that either the party was ungovernable or not worth the effort. To a large extent, New Labour was the result of a drive to make the party governable, and the new Labour right learned not from those who had stayed, but from those who had left. To make things worse, New Labour also chose not to contest the legacy of the 1970s, but to agree with Thatcher that the unions had run amok and caused financial ruin.

The right no longer wanted to be associated with the unions, and never even seriously tried to build relations in the 1990s and 2000s.

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the front of members’ minds. GMB and Unite, which have a combined two million members, both elected leaders who explicitly promised a focus on jobs, pay, and conditions, with an implicit rejection of playing Labour’s political game. Unison elected a “moderate” General Secretary but a left-wing executive committee. While the results had appeared to be a break from the organised left in Unite, and continuity in GMB and Unison, it soon became apparent that the unions would not be acquiescent. When Starmer proposed a return to the electoral college, a move that would have given the unions significantly more power, they refused to back it.

In the end he was forced into accepting watered down proposals for an increased MP threshold, and even then, he needed Angela Rayner to leverage her own roots in Unison to get the votes for the measure on the NEC. You might imagine this would have offered an opportunity for a reset in union relations, but you’d be wrong. A number of union general secretaries, including ASLEF’s Mick Whelan, who is the chair of the Labour-Union link committee, are reported to be facing an uphill fight to persuade their conferences to vote for re-affiliation. More recently Sharon Graham has been threatening disaffiliation over a series of industrial disputes between Unite workers and Labour councils, and even though this is unlikely, funding has been cut despite the fact that Labour is badly cash-strapped. GMB, previously a loyal right-ish union has been making increasingly unfriendly

noises under new general secretary Gary Smith. Starmer can’t go on alienating Labour’s biggest funders, not to mention its raison d’êtres, so, what’s the solution?

The fact is that LOTO have often been overcomplicating things in this dispute, or simply failing to act in good faith. For example, while Starmer met with Graham fairly recently, he had noticeably failed to for several months now, which is ridiculous given how heavily Labour relies on Unite’s money and organisational strength. It sounds so simple, but it’s a truism that picking the phone up won’t do any harm! This failure to engage characterises so much of what has gone wrong. Unison’s NEC representation were clearly persuadable on the issue of leadership contests – if they weren’t they wouldn’t have been persuaded – but Starmer’s team failed to move them where Rayner succeeded. We shouldn’t underestimate her links to Unison or political talent, but the fact is that plenty of Starmer allies have strong Unison connections and instead he chose Morgan McSweeney to be his trade union enforcer. McSweeney is no doubt talented but he’s a former adviser and office manager to politicians. He has no experience working with unions and charging him with pushing Starmer’s project among them is a move which values factional loyalty over ability. This same obsession with factionalism runs right through the anonymous rent-a-quotes given to various journalists every time Graham threatens Labour.

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For the time being though, we are at a dangerous juncture. Trade unions built this party. They, not focus group gurus, are Labour’s authentic link to the British working class. If Starmer wants the Red Wall back he should start by listening to the unions, who have more members there than anywhere in the Southeast. The risk is that, with a leader’s office at best indifferent to the unions, and with union leadership similarly uninterested in Labour politics, we could reach a point of no return in this completely unnecessary stand-off. If we do, and if Labour loses the unions, it would be more like the SDP than the US Democrats. Labour without labour is nothing.

Danny Leach is a second-year PPE student at Pembroke College. He served as Co-Chair of OULC during Hilary Term.

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Not only are Graham’s issues with Labour not factional, but they’re also not hard to solve. She wants what is best for her members, and if Starmer got on the phone and promised to apply pressure on the councils in dispute with Unite members, this disaffiliation talk would cease. Generally listening to the trade unions and acknowledging their concerns would go a long way to ease tension. Finally, over the past two years, Starmer’s close team have shed even the few trade union people they had.

Bringing some staff into the leader’s office who understand the various unions and their feelings would go a long way to bridging the gap that has opened.

From Generation Left to Population Left The Myth of Age-Based Conservatism Michael Doolan

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“You’ll be a conservative by the time you’re 30,” my grandmother said to me on my recent visit. This is a common idea in British politics. The optimism of socialism is said to be reserved for the young. With age comes rationality, a realism about the world, and a personal investment in the performance of the market. It’s undeniable that the Conservatives currently have a monopoly on the older population, with 67% of over 70-year-old voters voting Conservative in the 2019 general election. And the narratives of people turning right with age is not helped by the fact that centrist icons such as Peter Mandelson and Alistair Darling spent their youth supporting the Young Communist League and the International Marxist Group. However, has it always been the case that people become more right-wing as they get older? Or, perhaps a more appropriate question – are people becoming more conservative with age today?

The revival of left-wing politics emerging across the West in the last few years has brought huge amounts of survey data on the public opinion of socialism. For socialists, the results were overall very positive. The Thatcherite think-tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), found

that 67% of people aged between 18 and 40 would like to live in a socialist economy. The same survey found that socialism was also most commonly associated with words like “workers”, “equal”, and “fair” by the public, and that very few people associated it with “failure”. Capitalism, however, was most commonly associated with words like “rich”, “exploitative”, and “unfair”. A similar poll concluded that 40% of people under 40 have a positive opinion of socialism, with a similar number agreeing with the statement “communism could have worked if it was executed properly”.

The surveys did not reveal a complete victory for the left in the battle of ideas. When presented with a definition of socialism and a definition of capitalism, only half the respondents could correctly define socialism. This would imply support for socialism is relatively depthless: people like the ideas of socialism more than they know the practicalities of it. However, the young almost unanimously identify capitalism as a cause of the climate crisis and British housing crisis (with over 75% of people agreeing with both these statements). And 71% agree with the notion it fuels racism. In short, even though many may not know what socialism is, they

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When the IEA conducted their analysis on public opinion of socialism the results gave them “cause for concern”.

They found no detectable difference in opinion between those aged 18 and those in their early 40s when it came to economic policy: opposition to the free market shows no sign of declining. The argument that by the time people reach their late twenties and thirties, when they have children and buy a home, they become invested in the performance of the market and hence more rational, no longer holds true. “It is no longer true that people ‘grow out’ of socialist ideas as they get older”, the author resentfully exclaims.

Considering that the young are feeling the consequences of inflated house prices, the effects of the \climate crisis, and have been persistently characterised as ‘overly-sensitive’, ‘idol’, and ‘idealistic’ by the right, it is not shocking they haven’t grown out of their left-wing tendencies.

Denigrating the under 40s may help unify a coalition of older voters; but attacking one’s future voting base is a high-risk strategy.

It is not that all young people have a copy of Das Kapital on their bookshelf or are well versed in the events of the Bolshevik revolution. On the contrary, I would argue mainstream ideas of socialism today exist in a different conceptual realm to the socialism of the Soviet Union or Venezuela

(only 4% of young people in the UK associate socialism with Venezuela when given the option). For better or for worse, there has been an undeniably successful campaign by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to market her ‘democratic socialism’ as distinct to the socialism of the twentieth century. If you’re an ardent socialist, this may be a cause for concern: once again, bad faith political actors are co-opting left-wing rhetoric to win elections. It does, however, also hold benefit in that the young, whose secondary school history education focused heavily on the failure of the Soviet state and the poverty of Southeast Asia, differentiate between the socialism of Corbyn and Sanders, and the socialism of the past. The primary critiques of socialism from the right, where socialism is ‘authoritarian’, ‘bad economics’, or has ‘never worked’, are completely ineffective at convincing a youth who imagine their socialism to be different.

The message of this article is not that the left can be complacent and that, if we wait our turn, we’ll soon see a socialist government. Complacency never got us this far. After the disaster of 2019, however, it is easy for the hope in socialism or any progressive politics to wane. Despite the chaos of left-wing politics within the UK, it would appear these spikes in support for radical policies are different to spikes seen in the 1930s and 1960s.

People believe in socialism for longer than they previously have done. I am sure my grandmother will be shocked to hear those in their early forties

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know what it stands in opposition to, and they agree.

remain as radical as they were back in their youth. Given that the median age in the UK is 40: how long before Generation Left become Population Left?

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Michael Doolan is a Masters student in Sociology at Blackfriars College.

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And The Case Against Left Populism

Rachel Grimmer

The BBC reported the ideology of the Canadian Truckers protesting throughout January and February as it was articulated by trucker Harold Jonker: “We want to be free, we want to have our choice again, and we want hope - and the government has taken that away”. Such a declaration only confirms the speculation of opposing trucker, Lovepreet Singh Gill, “I wouldn’t call it a truckers’ protest […] It has nothing to do with trucking.” The so-called ‘Freedom-Convoy’ travelled throughout Canada, ultimately blockading significant areas of the country’s capital, Ottawa, for almost a month. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau decided to call a state of emergency, the country’s first in fifty years. Originating in protest against vaccine mandates, what initially appeared to be industry strikes devolved into a confusion of disillusioned agitation, righteous anger, and outright abhorrence.

This entropy was a cluster of every imaginable public expression of anger, from ‘public urination’ and vocal opposition to the on-duty police, through to the presence of “confederate flags […], swastikas and other Nazi imagery”. The protests thus contained the disparate entirety of populist trademarks, with every possible symbol of hatred and every possible method of protest converging

to discredit and taint all valid union activity. Unsurprisingly, the Canadian Truckers’ Alliance, the largest truckers’ union in the country, alongside the Teamsters Union, the largest trucking union internationally and the oldest union in the United States, did not hesitate to renounce the protests. Within this vacuum of leadership, a clearcut, organized protest style became usurped by the chaotic, uncontrollable mass seen throughout the streets of Ottawa. The unions, so often considered the unshakeable mediators of labour’s outcries, have all-but admitted their own failure.

The Canadian protests exemplify a new kind of populist penetration, wherein the labour movement becomes co-opted by extremism; the new leadership of the protest dramatically overrepresents officials within the separatist Maverick Party. The populist infiltration has misdirected the anger of an unrepresented, voiceless working class movement, and scattered potent, proletariat anger into a cacophony of violence and vitriol. This disappointment of popular energy has been felt ubiquitously, with The Independent declaring ‘‘Protesting Canadian truckers aren’t having a ‘working class revolution’ — the truth is a lot more strange’, and the New York Times identifying an imported “American style of protest”.

This “American Style” may simply

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The Canadian Truckers’ Protest

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represent the inwardness of American journalism, however, the image of an angry white working class forming a populist mob has become too easy of a journalistic shorthand to remain unexamined. The origins of the protests in Canada in vaccine hesitancy indicate yet another channel through which populist groups can derail scepticism of the impositions of an unrepresentative government into ‘bigotry and ignorance’. The protests homogenised striking union members, the ‘anti-vaxxers’ and truly abhorrent bigots in the public imagination. Such a tactic only entrenches an othering conception of a supposed working-class ignorance.

The core tenets of populism, “distrust, destruction and dealignment”, might make disillusioned groups easily identifiable, however they provide no means for their increased representation, rather only the concentration of a directionless resentment.

The notion of a ‘left populism’ is often presently encouraged as a means of directing energy toward class-consciousness. However, the Canadian Protests act as a cautionary tale about the potential destructiveness of misdirecting public outrage, regardless of the origins of such outrage. Whilst populism might easily harness a potent public energy, the Canadian strikes indicate the fine line between the exploitation of anger crucial to populism and the representation of indignation crucial to class consciousness. The distinction drawn is that between the masses and the mob, or the people and the horde.

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Rachael Grimmer is a second-year English student at University College.

Richard Burgon Alex Beard

I had the opportunity to speak briefly to the Chair of the Socialist Campaign Group and MP for Leeds East Richard Burgon following a talk he gave to OULC in Week 4. We recorded the conversation, which is transcribed in full here. Afterwards, when I returned Richard to the train station, our conversation turned from the future of socialism to his love for heavy metal. I found Richard to be avuncular and thought-provoking, and I hope you enjoying reading what he had to say.

Alex Beard: One of the things that you mentioned during your talk was the idea of a three-pronged labour movement consisting of trade unions, grassroots protest groups and the institutional Labour party.

Between 2015 and 2019, these three prongs were very much galvanised by Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Do you think that there needs to be something like the Socialist Campaign Group to lead this? If so, what should give it its direction – does there need to be a figurehead?

Richard Burgon: I think that it is true that the Labour party is a broad church and a collation – it always has been. The Labour party was founded by the trade unions with socialist societies. I look at it these days and I think ‘The Labour party itself is a

coalition of socialists, social democrats and trade unionists.’ In wider society, I made the point that there are three ways of fighting back against unjust and unpopular Tory policies.

Firstly, it’s through the ballot box where people are hopefully voting Labour. Secondly, it’s through taking industrial action and strike action.

And third it’s through protests and what you see is the Conservatives being acutely aware that they are pushing an unpopular policy programme – and one which will include many more policies as this crisis deepens that people will object to and oppose – and they want to remove people’s ability to fight back against that unjust policy programme. That is why they have introduced voter ID to suppress the working-class vote, particularly the black and minority ethnic working-class vote. That’s why they’ve introduced anti-trade union laws, to make it harder and harder for unions to take strike action legally. And that’s why they are bringing in this draconian anti-protest bill, trying to criminalise protest. What you have got is a really concerning, authoritarian drift from this Conservative government and it is one that we must organise against, mobilise against and defeat.

AB: Another of the points you made

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In Conversation With

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was about class politics. What I found particularly interesting was the way that you defined, or rather didn’t define, what exactly the working-class was. Do you think that class politics can be fought in terms of ‘we the people’ versus the vested interest and the elites? And further do you think that, for example, what Bernie Sanders did during his two election campaigns was an effective example of populism as class politics?

RB: I think Bernie Sanders is an absolutely fantastic communicator and a very principled politician. He is certainly one of my heroes. I remember reading his biography. And in it he talked about how he got an academic to work in his office who would be drafting articles or speeches and he recalled that he said to this academic ‘remember, our classroom is the classrooms of three hundred million people.’ So, in other words, that reflected that he is very interested in communicating not just to the people that are already interested [in politics], but communicating to the vast majority of the population – and that’s important. I think that in 2017, our manifesto title ‘For the Many, Not the Few’ communicated class politics in the way that the phrase ‘the 99%’ communicates it. I do think that the majority of people in this country are working class in that they have to work for a living, and if they can’t work due to sickness, due to losing their job or due to disability then they need either the support of social security or that of their family or others to get by. I think that the majority of

people are by that definition working-class. The people who create the wealth in our society. The people who make our society and our public services run. And so Labour has always meant to be a majoritarian enterprise. We exist to represent the interests of the vast majority in our society including, of course, the discriminated against minorities. Class politics is a fact. The Conservatives wage it very well and very ruthlessly on behalf of the ruling elite that they exist to represent. Of course, they sugar the pill, they don’t tell people that is what they are doing. And, as Aneurin Bevan said in his book In Place of Fear, the art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century is the art of persuading the majority to vote in the interests of the privileged minority.

So, in the twentieth century, as in the twenty-first century too. I think that Boris Johnson did that very effectively in 2019 through his slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’. It almost made lots of people forget that really this government and this politician weren’t on their side. But the way that he made it into a Brexit election, a Brexit drama helped to persuade people to vote for a party which sadly isn’t really on their side.

AB: I agree that ‘For the Many, Not the Few’ is an effective way of putting across what people can perceive to be ‘old-fashioned’ class terms.

RB: Although, curiously of course, it was a phrase coined by Percy Shelley in ‘The Masque of Anarchy’.

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RB: Well, we’ve started actually. Because I didn’t win the deputy leadership election, I don’t have the resources from the party to set up the ambitious education unit for the members that we would have done.

But I did do some fundraising and with that I have prepared a package, which is out there now, on the politics of Tony Benn. And the package is available, we have sent it out to tens of thousands of people. They can use it to hold seminars and discussions and workshops in their own CLPs, in their own union branches, in their own community. And so, we put together that and it kind of talks about the different strands of political thought of Tony Benn. The next one that we’re going to do – we’ve been fundraising for this – is an education package on Sylvia Pankhurst.

As for what the third one will be, we haven’t decided yet, but it may be an international figure. So we shall see.

But I think in the Labour party, obviously the political thought of Tony Benn is very important to me as a left Labour activist and MP. The political thought of Keir Hardie, Aneurin Bevan and also the crucial role that

Diane Abbott, for example, played in the anti-racist movement and the way that the Labour movement relates to that and the way that the anti-racist movement relates to the Labour movement as well. But, as I said, Sylvia Pankhurst is the next person that we are preparing political education packs about because her politics were wide-ranging. Yes, a suffragette campaigning for women to have the right to vote, but also her campaigning against poverty, against war, against inequality is so important to reflect upon.

AB: Thank you so much!

Thanks to Hari Bravery for transcribing the conversation.

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AB: Who was sent down from Univ, my college! It’s really interesting you mention that Bernie Sanders hired an academic, and that you evoke this idea of the ‘classroom of three hundred million people’. I think that one of the overlooked parts of your deputy leadership campaign was political education. If you had to assign three things as required reading for young socialists, what would they be?

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FORWARD

Hari Bravery

The 2017 Labour manifesto, For the Many not the Few, pledged to “end the hereditary principle and reduce the size of the current House of Lords” as part of the party’s bid to ‘extend democracy’. Yet Corbyn’s 2019 manifesto, It’s Time for Real Change, went further, cementing the House of Lords at the centre of UK constitutional failure and seeking its wholesale abolition, in favour of “an elected Senate of the Nations and Regions” though asserting that “the people must be central to historic political changes.” The 2019 resolution to abolish the House of Lords was caveated by popular approval, but a resolution to abolish the House of Lords it was nonetheless.

Labour criticism of the House of Lords should not come as a surprise; in recent history, the Labour Party has consistently called for modernisation and constitutional reform. It was after the 1997 general election delivered Tony Blair’s a landslide majority that House of Lords reform was seen as an actual possibility, culminating in the passing of the 1999 House of Lords Act, reducing the number of hereditary peers by more than 600 and freezing the number of hereditary peers at 92 until further constitutional reform. The subsequent establishment of the independent House of Lords Appointments

Commission in 2000 aimed to make the appointment of Lords more impartial. However, modernisation under the Blair administration came to an end with the 2007 debate on the governments House of Lords: Reform white paper. In a series of indicative, but non-binding, votes the House of Commons voted by a majority of 113 for an all-elected House of Lords, something celebrated at the time by Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell as “a famous victory for progressive opinion both in Parliament and in the country.” Indicative House of Commons votes also showed support for the abolition of both bicameral and hereditary peers.

The House of Commons resolutions were then resoundingly rejected by the House of Lords, whose indicative votes unsurprisingly showed a strong preference for a fully appointed house, as Lords voted for the preservation of their existing privileges. The point to take away from the Blair-Brown years is that there was a legitimate appetite in the House of Commons for reform of the House of Lords, and a partial success in the removal of a vast number of hereditary peers.

Faced with popular approval of Labour’s modernisation motions, during the 2010 general election the Conservative Party agreed for the first time in its history that reform

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Let’s Talk Lords

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of the House of Lords was necessary.

The subsequent Conservative-Liberal Coalition agreement that promised a wholly or partially elected second chamber – to sate the Lib Dems – was largely forgotten during the Cameron administration, particularly clear in the Conservative’s abandoning of the 2012 Reform Bill, leading to Nick Clegg’s disputed claim that the Conservatives had “broken the coalition contract.” No further modernisation attempts have been made by the Conservative party, with the 2014 Reform Act merely facilitating expulsion and resignation from the Lords.

Since 2000, then, we have seen the House of Lords reform agenda wax during the Blair years to fever pitch in 2007 and then wane dramatically throughout the Cameron administration, due primarily to a Conservative government that seeks the continuation of aristocratic privilege, masquerading as the continuation of British ‘tradition’. Yet, this is not to say that the issue has disappeared from the mind of the electorate. The most recent YouGov poll gives 28% approval of a partly or wholly elected secondary chamber, 22% approval for abolition and 15% approval for continuation as an unelected, appointed chamber; there is support amongst the British population for reform of the House of Lords - the Labour Party must remember this. When discussing House of Lords reform with others I am often met with the response that ‘this is not a vote-winner,’ yet why needn’t it be? There should not

be a lack of public interest in what the 2019 Labour manifesto called ‘constitutional issues’ - Brexit and Scottish independence are themselves constitutional issues and have led to some of the most heated conflicts in contemporary British politics. Indeed, the exact same logic of ‘unelected officials’ that became rote for Leave-supporting populists is directly applicable to contemporary Lords, themselves unelected officials with the power to significantly alter the law, many of them lacking the expertise to allow them to fulfil their key role of providing checks and balances to House of Commons bills. House of Lords reform will not and cannot be a vote-winning issue if the Labour Party does not make it a priority in electoral policy, with clear messaging that the House of Lords existence makes every British persons’ vote matter less. Perhaps the most important statistic to take away from the aforementioned YouGov poll is that the largest majority of respondents indicated that they ‘Did not Know’ (31%) what the correct direction for the House of Lords is.

Let me simply set out my personal antipathy for the House of Lords in its present state. There are 92 unelected, hereditary MPs still sitting in the Lords, despite the 1999 House of Lords act removing their entitlement – all of these Lords are men, all of them are white and all of them only hold their position due to their aristocratic family heritage. The Prime Minister of a given day can elect as

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scrutinising body and serves instead as an extension of partisan politics.

The House of Lords is a ridiculous anachronism, a shard of unashamed archaism in an already imperfect political system.

Yet, how does the Labour Party’s consistent commitment to a modernisation of British democracy through House of Lords reform or abolition square with the current leadership?

Keir Starmer, though pledging to retain House of Lords abolition in the 2019 leadership election, has since rowed back on this promise. Starmer’s failure to abide by the Corbynite policies of his leadership campaign have oft prompted the ire of Labour’s left, his policy on the House of Lords is no different. Previously promising to “[a]bolish the House of Lords [and] replace it with an elected chamber of regions and nations,” Starmer has more recently refused to recommit to abolition in November 2021, instead only stating in an interview with Andrew Marr that “We certainly need change in the House of Lords”.

This is the only significant mention of the House of Lords that Starmer has made in his whole time as Labour leader. The role of the modern Labour leadership must be to draw attention to the injustice of the House of Lords in its current state, its facilitation of Tory sleaze, its blatant blocking of the House of Commons’ democratic processes and failure to represent the nation in its majority white, male, upper-class makeup. It should be to stir up public resentment for this

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many lifetime peers as they desire; during Boris Johnson’s premiership over a hundred have been appointed, all too often to former Tory party donors (15 of the 16 past Conservative treasurers, all donating over £3 million or more), Conservative lobbyists and well-connected businesspeople (particularly relevant is the peerage of Evgeny Lebedev). The Lords includes bishops (the Lords Spiritual) with full voting rights, making Britain the only country other than Iran to automatically reserve spaces amongst its legislature for unelected religious figures. The House of Lords is bloated beyond functionality, with 767 seats making it one of the largest legislatures amongst developed nations, with many Lords barely even taking their seats. But above all, the House of Lords is damaging to British democracy. Take the House of Lords filibustering preceding the 2019 prorogation of parliament; the Benn bill passed through the House of Commons on a legitimate vote, but the Johnson government wanted to stop the bill passing before prorogation.

102 amendments were made by Conservative peers to slow the progression of Benn bill. It was only due to media and popular pressure that the Benn bill became law, just hours before parliament’s suspension; this is not scrutiny of Commons legislation, this is the rejection of parliamentary democracy by the House of Lords on the command of the government of the day - an institution with this much power cannot exist in its current state. It fails to function as a

institution, one that has so intransigently refused to modernise. The House of Lords reform question, which too many have pessimistically claimed is a dead-end that cannot appeal to the electorate, can become a vote-winning issue if the Labour Party merely allows this injustice to ring true.

In the future of the Labour Party’s policy on the House of Lords, abolition must remain a serious possibility; I personally would present the case for a unicameral system as used by New Zealand, Norway and Finland, combined with greater powers for select committees and the backbenches, though that is a different issue, one that can only be countenanced once the Labour Party recommits itself to reform of the second chamber.

Scrutiny of House of Commons bills is vital, but no one will convince me that the modern Lords, in all its archaic excess, is the most qualified institution to enact this. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party must reinject life into a debate that has the capacity to fundamentally alter British politics for the better; over two years of silence on the House of Lords is not the way to begin this.

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Hari Bravery is a second-year English student at University College. He is serving as OULC’s Co-Chair in Trinity 2022.

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NATO

For or Against?

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NATO, The Left, and the Case for Peace in Eastern Europe

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Luke Hatch

The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine can truly be described as a nightmare scenario, for Europe and indeed the world. A full-scale conflict between two large conventional forces on the European continent is something few expected, even as Russian troops were amassing for months on the Ukrainian border.

The decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin to launch this invasion of Ukraine has rightly been condemned around the world as a reckless escalation of global tensions, that will undoubtedly cost the lives of countless innocent Ukrainians, a decision made under the painfully contrived pretext of the “demilitarisation and de-Nazification of Ukraine”. While the decision to begin this armed conflict is an atrocity that lies squarely with Putin, the state of tension between Russia and Ukraine that existed prior to the invasion is a much more complex affair, involving deep-seated issues of Russia-West relations going back decades. It is a tragic story of mistrust, arrogance, and perceived betrayal on both sides of the divide. There is a pressure now to forget all of this; some will call it irreverent to be discussing historical geopolitics at a time when a sovereign nation is being shelled by its neighbour. Yet such discussion is of vital importance if there is to be any hope

i of restoring peace to Europe, and it is the duty of peace-minded progressives to analyse these factors and seek a robust security environment going forward that is based on inclusivity and understanding, rather than eternal rivalry and paranoia.

In early February, Labour leader Keir Starmer penned an opinion piece in The Guardian with the strapline, “Under my leadership, Labour’s commitment to NATO is unshakable”, laying out his reasons for backing the UK Conservative government in denouncing Russia and sending weapons and troops to Ukraine. Starmer makes pains to dress his support for NATO with progressive language to appeal to his party’s support base, but in truth the Labour leader’s support for the government’s particularly belligerent stance on the issue positions him decisively to the right, not only of progressive groups, but also of several centrist governments in Europe.

French President Emmanuel Macron had repeatedly called for high-level diplomatic engagement that takes into account Russia’s legitimate security concerns, including a meaningful discussion of Europe’s post-Cold War security environment. To this end, Macron travelled alone to meet with Vladimir Putin in February to seek a diplomatic resolution.

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In his article, Keir Starmer openly and directly attacks anti-war groups, naming the Stop the War Coalition, accusing those calling for peace of

of “actively giving succour to authoritarian leaders who directly threaten democracies”. The conflation of pacifism with support for a hostile external enemy is nothing new; it is a club that has been used to bash progressives for centuries, though it is somewhat jarring to hear it from a supposedly left-wing party. Take the example of the First World War, a tragic and ultimately pointless conflict that saw imperial powers send waves of working-class men to kill each other in droves on the fields of Europe, for no apparent gain. During the war leftists in all nations who called for the end to the conflict were derided and condemned as traitors.

For the crime of opposing militarism from both sides of the conflict, activists, including Vladimir Lenin in Russia and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, were labelled by their respective governments as saboteurs in the pay of the enemy. In this regard, nothing has changed. Today anti-war activists are regularly condemned as fifth-columnists by media commentators, government figures and opposition politicians alike.

Just as was the case during the First World War, the immediate cause of today’s Russo-Ukrainian conflict was the reckless ambition of one belligerent state, but longer-term causes include decades of sabre-rattling between arrogant imperialistic powers.

It is perfectly valid to whole-heartedly condemn Putin’s actions and pledge full support to the Ukrainian people in their hour of need, while at

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The US and UK governments consistently took the most alarmist and belligerent positions against Russia; neither were ever seriously interested in discussing Russia’s security concerns, instead ramping up the transfer of troops and weapons to Ukraine and other countries on NATO’s eastern flank. Far from a vindication of the US and UK’s strategy, the fact that war eventually broke out raises the question whether this could have been avoided, had Biden and Johnson showed the same nuance and pragmatism as their European counterparts. As for the UK government’s approach, British progressives should call this out for what it is: a shameful and downright dangerous bluff to drum up nationalistic support at home, at a time when Johnson’s government finds itself increasingly scrutinized for its endemic corruption and incompetence. But rather than point this out to the electorate, Starmer has evidently discovered for himself the value of militarist fervour.

Under Starmer, Labour has thrown its full behind the government’s strategy, even trying to out-hawk Johnson at times in a bid to appeal to nationalistic voters. As I will argue below, opportunistic attempts to outflank the Tories on foreign policy are not only morally bankrupt from a supposedly progressive party, but are completely irresponsible.

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in their hour of need, while at the same time recognizing that years of Western arrogance played a role in creating this mess. But in a time of war, such analysis is condemned as unpatriotic - anything less than blind support for one’s own government is equated with support for the enemy.

We may expect such attitudes from traditional conservatives, but that the Labour leadership has jumped upon this militarist bandwagon truly is a disgrace.

As mentioned above, Starmer has repeatedly stressed Labour’s support for NATO, the organisation that has underpinned Western military cooperation since the beginning of the Cold War. Britain’s postwar Labour government, indeed, played a central role in the very creation of this alliance. However, some brief analysis of the nature of NATO itself will reveal it to be completely incompatible with progressive values. Following the defeat of the Axis powers at the end of the Second World War, the division of the post-war world between the Soviet-dominated East and US-dominated West was by no means inevitable. Many socialists in western Europe, including the Bevanite Left of the UK Labour Party, supported a united, socialist Europe, aligned with neither superpower of the Cold War. In Keir Starmer’s article, he points to a Cards on the Table, a 1947 pamphlet written by Denis Healey, then Labour’s International Secretary.

According to Starmer, Healey “demolished the argument of those on

the left that Britain could somehow be a third force, aligned neither with the Americans nor the Soviets”. Far from demolishing the arguments for non-alignment, such non-aligned nations sprang up all over the world during the Cold War, even formally establishing the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1961, an organisation of 120 member states that exists to this day. The governments of Austria and Finland both signed agreements during the Cold War promising neutrality, and both nations have enjoyed decades of peace and sovereignty ever since; a possible Finland or Austria-style arrangement has been suggested to ensure Ukraine’s security in the future. Emmanuel Macron, too, has frequently called for increased European security cooperation, and less reliance on the US. While Macron is far from a progressive internationalist, it goes to show that European non-alignment, far from being “demolished”, survives to this day as a proposal shared by European politicians from across the political spectrum.

Defenders of NATO often claim the alliance is purely defensive in nature; Starmer characterizes NATO as a “defensive alliance that has never provoked conflict”. This is demonstrably untrue; Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, and Libya in 2011 are all cases in which the supposedly defensive alliance has attacked sovereign states, bombing innocent civilians in all instances. The other great claim often made in defence of NATO is

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radical postwar Labour government, the creation of NATO was, quite plainly, a mistake. Along with the procurement of nuclear weapons, participation in the brutal Korean War, and the suppression of the socalled ‘Malayan Emergency’, British membership of NATO was part of a fairly appalling foreign policy that left a blemish on Attlee’s genuinely progressive domestic agenda.

If NATO is not the way forward to guarding the peace, then what is the answer? For Britain, an independent, values-based foreign policy certainly seems the best way to avoid becoming embroiled in conflict. A decoupling from US foreign policy would help prevent the country becoming involved in atrocities such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq. At the same time, rather than maintaining ‘blocs’ or spheres of influence, based on mistrust and rivalry, security in Europe must be based on mutual dialogue and cooperation between all parties. The end of the Cold War in 1989, and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, should have provided a promising opportunity to end the global East-West divide that had split the world in decades prior.

But instead of promoting peace and cooperation, US defense spending saw no dramatic cuts, and before long had begun to rise once again.

Ensconced in arrogant triumphalism, the US used the opportunity instead to build a new empire, starting new wars all over the globe. The West broke repeated verbal, if not written,

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that the alliance is purely voluntaryas Keir Starmer states, “no nation can be pressed into joining Nato, and no nation can be prevented from doing so by bullying and brinkmanship from others”. Again, this claim is blatantly false. Several NATO member states only joined the alliance after the US intervened early in the Cold War to prop up pro-American governments in the region; Italy, Turkey, and Greece come to mind, to name just a few. We are used to hearing stories of Soviet meddling after the Second World War in creating satellite states in Eastern Europe, but much less publicized is the CIA’s long, and by now mostly declassified, history of interference in Europe to ensure the creation of a pro-American postwar bloc. Interference in elections, and military support for reactionary regimes, were but some of the methods the US used to build the capitalist West that NATO would come to embody. Had the US not brazenly subjugated Western Europe (indeed, along with numerous other parts of the world) immediately following the Second World War, the Cold War, and human history as we know it, may well have gone very differently indeed. Far from a voluntary agreement of free states committed to defending peace, then, NATO can really be considered a coalition of pro-American puppets that does not hesitate to use military force to enact its will. There is very little about NATO that progressives can truly support in good faith. As much as we may like to idolize the genuinely

promises to Russia that NATO would expand no further East than the newly reunified Germany. Russia’s security concerns, raised repeatedly and subsequently ignored by the West for years, are legitimate.

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Far from being the mad ravings of a bloodthirsty dictator, anxiety at NATO expansionism is a concern shared across all strata of Russian society; these concerns did not start with Putin, and they will not end with him either. To safeguard peace in Europe we must pursue an inclusive dialogue that takes the concerns of all nations into account. The Organisation of Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), in which Russia participates, operates at nowhere near the budget of NATO, and receives very little praise for the immensely important work it has done for decades on issues such as arms control and human rights. Inclusive discussion through forums such as the OSCE, and an environment of mutual respect and cooperation on issues that affect us all, such as the threat of nuclear war and climate change, is surely a far more sustainable future for the world than endless sabre-rattling, militarisation, and constant attempts by one camp to gain the upper hand over another.

In his article, Keir Starmer claims that “Bevinite internationalism will guide Labour’s approach to Britain’s security”. ‘Internationalism’ is a noble-sounding word thrown around far too much by politicians who, at

best, have no idea what it means, and, at worst, wilfully misconstrue the concept to justify their horrific designs. Atrocities such as the invasion of Iraq, drone strikes across the global South, and perpetual sabre rattling with Russia and China, have all been carried out under the guise of ‘internationalism’. But internationalism in its true sense means the belief that we as human beings are divided not by nationality, but by class, and that the struggle for justice, equality, and peace is universal, and unites ordinary people all over the world.

The current Russian invasion of Ukraine is a horrific atrocity, and Vladimir Putin deserves all the punishment coming to him for bringing war to the people of Ukraine. But the problem facing humanity is not just this war- it is war itself. To explain simply, war always means the deaths of innocent people, without exception. We must never give up the fight for a world where we decisively reject the use of military force to settle disputes. The Labour leader states “there is nothing progressive in showing solidarity with the aggressor when our allies need our solidarity”. Equally, there is nothing progressive about immediately turning to military force, to militaristic organisations such as NATO, whenever these issues arise, while accusing those seeking peaceful diplomacy of “weakness” and “naivety”.

Some will say now is the time for solidarity with Ukraine and nothing else;

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Luke Hatch is a second-year studying Chinese at Wadham College.

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that to be discussing past injustices committed by the West, complex geopolitics, and abstract concepts such as militarism is irreverent. But as progressives we do not have the luxury to focus on one injustice and turn a blind eye to all others. We cannot pick and choose when to apply our morals and values; only consistent and unswerving commitment to peace, to equality, and in our stance against militarism everywhere, can future atrocities be avoided, and a lasting security established. To finish on a hopeful note, to everyone whose belief in the cause of internationalism and peace has been swayed by the current crisis, I would point to the thousands of ordinary Russians, young and old alike, who have risked imprisonment in turning out onto the streets of their cities to demand that their government put an end to the ruthless attacks on their Ukrainian neighbours.

The Leftist Case for Western Military Intervention

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Johannes Haekkerup

The West’s record of military interventions is tarnished and filled with failures, yet also with moments of genuine success in the struggle to create and sustain a democratic and free world. Interventions are successful when they rest upon two robust pillars: a genuine moral case paired with a realistic, feasible long-term solution and vision for post-intervention conditions. The great threat to the success of interventionism is the lack of clarity that stems from the absence of a coherent vision. Where, concretely, are the West’s red lines, and is the West willing to pay the price of its values? The incoherence causes both interventions that should not have happened and also prevents intervention in cases where it would be warranted.

Discussions of the key role of the West’s morality in international politics are often dismissed because they are deemed either hypocritical to the point of worthlessness or irrelevant in a purely security-oriented world system. Both views miss the bigger picture. The West’s values matter because they are worth fighting for and worth asserting when they are genuine. Human rights, democratic liberties, freedom of expression, and popular sovereignty are not just abstract notions. These are values with real weight which bring real,

substantive improvements to people’s lives. Fighting against authoritarianism and subjugation is a legitimate and noble cause that should not be abandoned. The very second article of the UN charter is the commitment to eradicating aggressive expansionism as a means to settle disputes or change territorial boundaries, a commitment which, when genuinely followed, unquestionably promotes peace. The West’s interventions must start and end with the protection of liberal and democratic values and opposing expansionary violations of sovereignty.

Nevertheless, it is improper to leave a discussion at just cherishing this ideal vision. Discourses around these liberal values in interventionism should, unfortunately with good reason, ring partly hollow contemporarily because of their systemic misuse in the past. Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, the Latin American death squads, the civilian murders in the drone wars are just a few of sickeningly many examples of crimes that cannot just be dismissed as one-off unfortunate incidents. They are often rooted in perverse manipulation.

Whether it be warmongering hawks or the military-industrial complex’s nefarious influence, when the West commits these atrocities, it cannot reasonably claim morality. The moral

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be met with force. Economic and diplomatic intervention is weakening, as states secure self-sufficiency and immunize themselves from Western sanctions and the formal diplomatic institutions of the world are ignored.

Sometimes military intervention is the only option available that upholds liberal and democratic values. Let it be clear, the threat of military intervention is absolutely more powerful than intervention itself. Deterrence is the most effective tool against aggression, but a threat without commitment is an empty threat. The West cannot have it both ways, and any time it uses the threat of intervention it must be ready to take that action.

When red lines are drawn only to be walked over without consequence, it undermines all future deterrence. The key lies in having the moral framework which establishes red lines that the West is willing to intervene over.

Only then can deterrence contribute to the safety the world desperately needs.

If the choice is without doubt between ignoring oppression, suffering, and the violation of rights on one hand and military action on the other, the West should not hesitate because its values should point to only one answer. It is an unfortunate reality that often it amounts to a choice between two outcomes of harmful consequences, but it is arrogance to refuse to choose. The priority has to be to fight for the better outcome even if it comes at great cost, because stepping away is an abdication of responsibility which will only

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case must be genuine and not the result of manipulations. Further to this point, some might say they are justified as means to an end, but Western values have to be about not just the end but that liberties and freedom are respected always, not just when it is convenient.

However, these failures are not a reason to outright reject all military interventionism because it does not have to be this way. To intervene militarily does not compel democracies to subvert their own determined rights and principles. There is always a choice. Civilian murder and torture are not needed to win wars.

If rejecting these endangers troops, then it constitutes part of the price for preserving our values, because by breaking them we destroy the whole point of the intervention itself. Military intervention must be conducted on the basis that these acts cannot be allowed, and our leaders must factor that in when they make the choice. To do good on the international stage, the West must also genuinely act according to its principles. Always.

But why military? Can the West not choose to rely on interventions that do not require bloodshed and violence? War is without question a terrible outcome when compared to peace, and any decision which brings it must always be extremely thoroughly scrutinized, but economic and diplomatic tools are not always enough. In a world with authoritarian expansionist states and with the relative strength of democracies declining, force must sometimes

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result in more suffering. However, it must also be realistic in its capacity, as the West cannot fight every state which undermines some democratic values. Instead, it should focus on dealing directly with the most severe and direct breaches of the red lines of these values, and on the smaller breaches exert itself with political and economic pressure. What these both require is the West to be confident in its values and to be willing to take a stand when the time calls for it.

Discussing the morality of interventionism is incomplete if it leaves it at only analysing the West because it is not the only actor which uses and argues for military intervention as a solution to issues. Almost all uses of military force are justified and phrased in the language of intervention rather than expansion. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is argued by the Russian state to be an intervention with a strong moral case, and as such it should be analysed with the same framework as any Western intervention. The question then lies in determining, regardless of the origin of the intervention, whether it is moral. One response would be to stress the importance of UN mandates as a source of relatively objective evaluation of the merits of intervention, but as its Security Council operates currently it is divided by geopolitics.

With veto powers for three Western powers, China, and Russia, the only possible instances of UN-approved intervention is when the interests of all these actors align, which has become almost impossible.

Interventions are often aimed at solving conflicts between actors, each separately supported by one or more of the veto players, meaning any attempt to justify intervention by one side is doomed to fail through the veto of the others.

Without any other real alternative to the dysfunctional UN Security Council for universal moral evaluation of all states, it leaves the evaluation of the moral case of interventions as an ideological struggle.

To argue for intervention for democratic values is also to assert that interventions based on authoritarian anti-democratic values are morally wrong. It is not always so binary, but the overarching point remains that for any intervention the moral case must be built on values the intervening society believes is better, and which they believe the people affected by the intervention can agree to.

This is of course dissatisfying because it means opposing ideologies cannot easily come to agreements on the morality of actions, but the alternative is worse. To not assert democratic values as beneficial and better for peoples than autocratic values leaves aspiring democracies and movements all across the world alone. It destroys the necessary principles any defence of democracy rests on. In essence, a thorough discussion of which values are best is essential, and for this discussion to reach all societies. There is often a fundamental trade-off between the desire to protect and promote democratic and liberal values through interventions while also

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Lessons of Success - Korea and the 1st Gulf War The cases of the Korean War and the

First Gulf War represent two cases of clear morality combined with realistic prospects for long-term success in the post World War 2 era. South Korea and Kuwait were by no means democratic states, ruled by the authoritarian Syngman Rhee and Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah respectively. Yet, the interventions were not so much fought over the principle of democracy within each country, but rather the principle of popular sovereignty as a direct rejection of violent expansionism. They were both battles over the rules that govern international diplomacy. By denying North Korea and Iraq their expansion, the West established a red line that states’ independence and territorial integrity should not be dictated through violence but through institutions and diplomacy.

Both interventions were supported by the UN Security Council precisely because they were clearly moral.

The long-term stability of these interventions was also strong as it was an intervention between states rather than within them. Civil wars as the subsequent are inherently more difficult due to the troubles of establishing strong regimes and preventing instability. South Korea and Kuwait were fully-fledged states, and this meant the interventions could end with a clear ceasefire between them and the aggressors. The interventions were fundamentally defensive and not focused on regime change. This allowed the West to establish its red line and leave behind a relatively stable condition. Overall, these interventions should be

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ensuring they are supported by the rest of the world. The UN founding charter is a rough beginning, and Responsibility to Protect as a guiding concept are attempts to find a common ground, but they are inadequate when the Security Council is sharply divided on justifications for intervention. Thus, to ensure the West’s values are protected it must sometimes sacrifice the endorsement of China, Russia, and the unanimity of the UN, as illiberal expansionism otherwise can occur unchecked.

The importance of a realistic long-term strategy cannot be overstated, because if absent a genuine moral intervention can turn into a quagmire of suffering that ultimately causes more harm than good. Painful lessons have been learnt from interventions with a solid moral justification which nevertheless ended up creating unstable failed states, because of the lack of a feasible endgame. The long-run consequences must be included in the moral framework, because otherwise we see the West leave behind a destroyed people worse off than had they stayed away, exactly the sort of abdication of responsibility which is so harmful. These interventions are in the end immoral, because when the dust of destruction has settled the benefits from the protection of liberal democratic values amounts to little beside the instability and suffering caused throughout.

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evaluated as successes because the cost of these conflicts were less than the suffering North Korean and Iraqi aggression would have continued to cause both to the people who would have been subjugated, but also importantly through the complete undermining of the principle of popular sovereignty which might have galvanised authoritarians across the world and let to further aggressions.

Lessons of Failure - Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and South America These four interventions failed because they were either premised on uncertain moral grounds or lacked the long-term endgame that is required for an effective intervention. It is imperative to scrutinize and learn from these failures as they demonstrate how crucial having both factors in place are to advancing Western values.

Afghanistan and Vietnam are similar interventions in that their failure stems from the lack of a sustainable outcome rather than from a weak moral case. In Vietnam, the war was against the totalitarian and oppressive Viet Cong, in Afghanistan the similarly reprehensible Taliban.

The Vietnam war initially appears to be similar to the Korean and Gulf War case, with an expansionist attack on a sovereign nation, the Republic of Vietnam. Nonetheless, it is a false equivalence because the Vietnam war resembled a civil rather than inter-state war. The Republic of Vietnam was rife with popular discontent, and not a fully coherent state. It

was propped up by the Western intervention, much more so than in Korea where each side were nations in their own right. Both wars involved a common people at odds with each other, but the North - South Korean divide had existed for five years by the time the conflict started, and each side was an established state. Vietnam was different, because the war was less clearcut, and the divisions extended within each side.

The battle against authoritarian expansionism was largely the same, and therefore the moral case remained intact, but by being less-inter state it made the chance of quagmire much greater. Despite winning essentially every major battle, the Western forces could not create a long-term solution because the war was not as clear-cut as the inter-state cases. This meant greater and greater escalation with more casualties, more napalm, and no end in sight. The ‘forever-war’ dynamic was exactly the same in Afghanistan, where having overthrown the Taliban rulers, exporters and haven of terrorism throughout the Middle East, the Western coalition remained for twenty years, only for their created state to collapse in two weeks. However good the moral case for intervention, it has to be backed with a vision of the long-term outcome, and one that has a realistic chance of being realised, however the situation changes during the consequences of the intervention itself.

Eight years in Vietnam and twenty in Afghanistan both amounted to outcomes worse than had there been

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is different from the other three because in many cases the results were actually relatively stable post-intervention outcomes, but the moral foundation for the interventions was flawed. These were failed interventions. However stable the final regime, if it does not respect democratic values the whole purpose of the intervention has failed. To illustrate the point, following CIA backed intervention in Chile against the democratically elected Allende government in 1973, the new authoritarian Pinochet regime was stable for nearly twenty years. An American backed coup in Brazil in 1964 similarly established a 21-year military dictatorship, in Bolivia it lasted 15. The point is that the interventions, albeit less directly militarily involved, were not failures because of a lack of stability of the regimes they created, but rather because of the absence of morality in these interventions. The case for South American interventions as advancing or protecting Western values is plainly wrong. The regimes established were brutal right-wing dictatorships which oppressed their people with little care for rights or popular sovereignty. Blinded by geopolitical paranoia of the Cold War, the United States pursued a strategy which crippled South American societies and undermined its own commitment to values. Rightfully it should be questioned how a state which supports these forms of regimes could ever truthfully be a moral actor.

Thus, the lessons of failure have to be that intervention must

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no intervention, because the vision for post-intervention was flawed, and because whichever plan there was it did not survive the conflict itself.

The intervention in Iraq in 2003 is the worst of these four failed Western interventions because it was both without a long-term strategy and was built on dubious moral ground which led to the immense suffering in Iraq still today. Saddam Hussein and his brutal regime was incontestably horrid, but that is not enough by itself to warrant military intervention. There are ill-willed despots across the world, and for that to be a sufficient red line would mean an almost constant state of war between much of the world and democracies, an indefensible condition. Yet, the real killer of the moral justification for the intervention were the lies about weapons of mass destruction (WMD). To fabricate intelligence for generating a moral case is already by itself an indefensible breach of Western values, but combined with the absence of any other key reason, the war in Iraq was inexcusable. To compound the issue, the regime change in Iraq had no feasibly stable outcome.

Nation and democracy-building in Iraq lacked broader organic grassroots movements, and it meant the created state was a hollow apparatus.

Democracy cannot be exported, it has to develop from local sprouts that can be supported, and the subsequent disintegration of the Iraqi state and absorption into Iranian influence is testament to the failure.

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only occur when there is a moral case and a long-term strategy. However, in circumstances when there is the moral case but no plausible long-term outcome vision with a likelihood of creating a stable democratic value respecting regime, should nothing have been done? Absolutely not. Diplomatic and economic sanctions should have been used, but on the question of military intervention, they were mistakes.

The Dilemma of Yugoslavia The interventions in Yugoslavia are controversial because they skirt the edges of the moral framework, even when considered in its purest essence without any manipulation. A point to be stressed again is the dangers of an inconsistent response and vision. The conflict began in 1991, and coordinated Western intervention continued to grow throughout the following years. Yet, these interventions were always one small step at a time. It started with peacekeeping, strengthening of the forces with armour and heavy weaponry, then instances of direct confrontation with separatist forces, and continued to escalate with airstrikes against Serbian-backed forces. If the West’s convictions held that intervention was justified as it began to take action, it should have done so with certainty. The conflict’s nature changed throughout the conflict, but the overarching core issues at stake remained the same: the sovereignty of each people to govern themselves and their rights to be free from oppression and torture.

Violence certainly escalated as the conflict continued, but the broad pieces for and against intervention were already in place when Western peacekeeping began.

To judge the merit of the intervention the moral framework should be closely considered. At its root, the core dilemma is whether the cause was just and respectful of the need for long-term stability. I believe the answer is yes. It would be simplistic to say the question of sovereignty and violence were straightforward and intervention could protect and solve them. The peoples of Yugoslavia were so mixed that sovereignty for one group or area in many cases would come at the expense of another. In Bosnia, the core dilemma was that Bosnian Serbs in Srpska demanded unification with Serbia, while the Bosniaks’ sovereignty entailed an independent Bosnian state, and Croats pushed for their own autonomy. However, where the moral case for intervention becomes clear is through the violence and genocide of the war. Under absolutely no circumstances could the genocide against the Bosniak people at the hands of the Serbs ever be moral, and the West standing by was facilitating this immorality. Western intervention could not be fully morally justified on the grounds of sovereignty, as any action would undermine one groups’ one way or another, but as the war crimes and genocide escalated it should have become clear early on that it would only get worse, and that these clear violations presented a moral case

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Lessons for the Contemporary - Eastern Europe and NATO I began writing this piece during the Russian build-up of troops on the Ukrainian border, and now as I reach its conclusion the gruesome invasion is happening, Ukraine’s fate

hanging in the balance. However this ends, and I fervently do hope it is with Ukrainian victory, the lessons of interventionism are more important than ever. The fundamental two questions the West must ask are: does Western intervention genuinely have the moral high ground and is there a plausible stable endgame. The answer is undoubtedly yes. The West should have a formidable military presence in Ukraine to stop the Russian aggression and its annihiliation of all the West’s principles, but the nuclear weapons of Russia make such a strategy too dangerous. With the nuclear constraint, the West must instead resort to military aid of the highest possible level to Ukraine as a substitute for its own boots on the ground or fighters in the sky.

However, a greater consideration is perhaps to think about how and why this situation arrived. Putin is one answer, but the war in Ukraine did not start in 2022 but in 2014, and the overall tension in Ukraine originates from the very beginning of Ukraine’s sovereignty after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The tragedy is that this would have been avoided if the West had its moral framework in order. When NATO expanded in the 1990s and early 2000s it was a statement of values. The sovereignty of the post-Soviet states and their freedom were paramount, important enough for the other Western countries to take them in and work together on their security. Why then did these principles stop at the Ukrainian and Georgian border? If the West’s

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which warranted heavy action. Once these absolute breaches of the moral red line were clearly committed and with no internal resolution in sight, the Western intervention should have been at its full level. The intervention was to prevent this, even in its stepby-step form, and these moral reasons made it justified.

As for long-term stability, the final Bosnian state as it came to be is an incomplete compromise on the sovereignty of the three peoples. It is a state that has functioned, and one that has done so despite long bloody years of war. If the West had launched a fully-fledged intervention as soon as the horrors of the conflict became clear and brought the invasions of Bosnia and Kosovo to an end, it could begin to focus its attention on healing the rifts of society and build a more secure state. In other words, the intervention in Yugoslavia resembled Korea and Kuwait more than it did Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, or South America because it had both a moral case and a feasible long-term vision for resolution. There was a moral justification based on the rights of citizens against genocide and violence, and the endgame was feasible and stable enough to mean the benefits of intervention far exceeded the cost.

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morals were in order, Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, states already then under threat of Russian expansionism, would have been given security guarantees that compelled intervention. Would it have enabled an even better deterrent? Absolutely. More importantly, it was morally the right thing to do. Once the West agreed NATO expansion was right, there was not sufficient justification for not extending the guarantees. Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994 as part to the Budapest Memorandum in exchange for security guarantees by Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, but these guarantees were far too weak. With a clear moral framework, the negotiations should have resulted in solid defensive commitments rather than vague guarantees, as it would have given the Western powers the clarity to negotiate with the Russians for a value-protecting security structure.

To make matters worse, the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 was a crossing of the red line. Still bearing in mind the nuclear constraint, if the West had not been in a moral muddle devoid of vision it would have treated it as the direct attack on democratic international norms it was. The West would have intervened as it has only just begun now, supporting Ukraine indirectly with all its power and sanctioning Russia to the extent it is doing. The nuclear threat prevents the direct expansion of NATO or conventional Western military engagement, but the sanctions, advice, military aid,

and importantly political will should have started in 2014 with the crossing of that line. It was all too little too late because the will to act decisively upon the moral framework was not in order.

Military interventionism can be a force for good when the moral framework is right as the lessons of success show. The lessons of the failed interventions are not to say liberal values can never be spread or be protected with force, but instead that the scrutiny of these decisions must always be vigilant because there is no guarantee that the moral framework is always respected. Every time it is ignored its value is weakened, which is why it is imperative that it is followed not just in some cases but always. To give up on interventionism is to let the torch of freedom extinguish. Authoritarian regimes will only grow more assertive with the option off the table. Democracies must be ready to fight for freedom. There must be a well-defined red-line somewhere, a time when democracies have to stand against expansionism, and this line should not lie at purely national self-defence.

By building the moral framework, the West can establish red-lines that protect democracies and their values, but also promote peace by stopping expansionism in its tracks. The West must be ready to intervene militarily because sometimes this is necessary for a freer, more peaceful world.

Johannes Haekkerup is a second--year PPE student at the Queen’s College.

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Socialism

Utopian or Scientific?

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In Defence of Utopian Socialism Hari Bravery

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Within the writings of Marx and Engels the idea of utopia “acquired heavily pejorative overtones,” dismissed as ahistorical, paternalistic and overly abstract, outlining future social systems founded on philosophical idealism that will never come to fruition due to its divorce from the material conditions of the historical present. However, it is significant to remember that the moniker of ‘Utopian Socialism’ was retrospectively applied by Marx and Engels to previous socialist thinkers (namely Cabet, Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen), thinkers whose ideologies actually had very little relation to one another, aside from a shared tendency to envision a perfected future society based on the principles of institutional design. Let me take some of the primary arguments used by Marxian socialists (the shared socialism of Marx and Engels, as opposed to ideas developed by later Marxists) to disparage utopian socialism and show why these are non-foundational.

The empirical criticism of utopian socialism as ahistorical offered by Marx and Engels is that utopian plans and blueprints are unnecessary, since satisfactory solutions to social problems emerge from the unfolding of historical process without themselves needing to be designed. This Marxian argument poses that utopianism is divorced from history, failing to

alleviate the suffering of the proletariat due to its “dogmatic abstraction” from reality. This perception of utopian socialism is best caricatured by Engels within Socialism: Utopian and Scientific asserting that for the utopians: “Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue its own power.

And as an absolute truth is independent of time, space and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered.’

Engels mocks the utopians’ conception of a socialist futurity so divorced from the mechanics of present society that the advent of socialist society is rendered historically arbitrary, failing to understand that the conditions for socialism only appear at a particular stage in the historical development of humankind, in contrast to the ‘scientific’ argument that socialist revolution is a direct result of specific historical conditions. This sentiment is repeated in Marx’s ‘For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing’ in which “it is precisely the advantage of the new trend that we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one,” annexing the past from conceptions of the utopian. Thus, for Marx as for Engels, it is the “drawing [of] a great mental

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On an epistemological level, the parallel Marxian argument that utopian socialism is invalid since it presumes an accurate knowledge of the future that cannot be acquired is a less compelling claim. The impact of unforeseen historical events and circumstances does not mean that all plans or structures for societal progression need be abandoned; human limitation and the unpredictability of historical process may render wholly accurate socialist forethought impossible, but something less than a completely accurate plan is still of constructive use. On a more simple level, these empirical and epistemological criticisms of utopian socialism can be resolved by the now common critical view of utopia as metaphor (see Melvin J. Laskey’s Metaphor and Revolution: On the Origin of a Metaphor). In such a view, utopia is intentionally separated from the historical present, intentionally flitting between the real application to a historical present and an abstract allegory for a possible avenue of human progression. This ambivalence is indelible

in the etymology of Thomas More’s coining of ‘utopia,’ simultaneously ‘ou-topia’ (‘no place’) and ‘eu-topia’ (‘good place’). If Marxian thought dislikes the idea of utopianism, it is due to a lack of applicability to the present, but application is not the purpose of utopianism – it is rather a space of academic debate, in which philosophical can be carried through to its logical end-point. Utopianism is an ideal, not a destination – this abstraction is what Marxian thought dislikes.

Further, in Engels’ conception, the utopian mode of socialist thought results only in “a mish-mash allowing such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society [...] as excite a minimum of opposition.” For Engels, utopianism – far from presenting radical visions of future society – actually diminishes political radicalism which is “rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook,” bringing socialism further towards a populist conservativism than if it did not exist.

Yet, what Engels fails to acknowledge is that his definition of ‘utopian’ essentially encompasses various, largely unrelated socialist thinkers. Utopian socialism under the Marxian definition is essentially a catch-all for early 19th century socialist thought. It is no wonder then that these thoughts, economic theories and philosophies would be diffuse - they were newly birthed and awaiting refinement by later thinkers.

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dividing line between past and future” that is the primary evil of utopian socialism. However, this argument can quite easily be dissected. The claim that the basic structure of the ideal socialist society develops automatically within existing capitalist society, needing only to be delivered (and not designed) by human agency, is unsupported by Marxian argument as well as by subsequent historical experience.

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There is a fundamental contradiction of Marxian anti-utopianism.

Marx and Engels assert that a given populace should be urged to change the social world radically through the implementation of socialism, but urge the population not to waste time thinking of the form of society that this upheaval will bring. Marx and Engels obviously had some broad vision of their own ideal socialist society, thus Marx and Engels both conceived socialist utopias. The refusal to flesh out those visions with the degree of detail that is found within the literature of the utopian socialism that preceded them becomes an arbitrary distinction; a utopia in the Marxian mind, not rendered linguistically, is just as utopian as the Fourier’s ‘Harmony’. The final line of the ‘Development of Utopian Socialism’ section of Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific asserts that “[t]o make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis,” yet in searching for this base point Engels is forced to Other previous socialisms, in essence discrediting the very works that led to the advent of Marxian socialism. In the place of utopianism as a community process, Engels offered socialism as a scientific system. I do not dispute the need for so-called ‘scientific’ socialism’s emphasis on the grounding of socialist thought in historical actuality through the provision of a material basis for socialism. An awareness to the mechanics of contemporary society is entirely necessary if socialist political thought is ever to be implemented, but the complete

disavowal of the majority of previous socialist thought as naïve and ‘utopian’ seems reductive. In their canonical formulations of utopian socialism, Marx and Engels often fail to do justice to the complexity and variety of utopian socialisms plural, instead using the catch-all label of ‘utopian’ to constitute scientific socialism as a distinct intellectual endeavour. In the words of Frank and Fritzie Manuel, “[m]ost utopias are born of utopias, however pretentious the claims to complete novelty may be – the utopia of Marxian socialism is no different, born from utopian socialist thought.

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In Defence of Historical Materialism

Alex Beard

Those who hasten to the barricades in defence of utopia when confronted with a critique such as Friedrich Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific tend to rather radically miss the point. This may sound perverse.

It is not as though Marx and Engels were not preoccupied with dressing down those they took to be utopian ideologues – not least in an entire section of the Communist Manifesto dedicated to non-Marxian socialism – nor is it the case that they did not establish a cordon sanitaire between their post-Hegelian materialist analysis and that of earlier thinkers. Yet the incompatibility that they emphasize is not so much between Marxian socialism and utopia as it is between Marxian socialism and utopian socialism. The distinction is, as we will establish, paramount.

The great Marxian innovation was to situate the social phenomenon that is detailed in The Condition of the Working Class in England, that is to say the birth of the industrial proletariat, within its historical context.

The observations made in the crucible of Manchester capitalism were married to a Hegelian dialectic which had been turned by the young Marx, in the words of Engels, “on its head”.

As the historical process unfolded, so too did its contradictions. The

conquest of the bourgeois subject whose revolutions heralded a new era in world history had produced in equal measure an unpropertied gargantuan: the “part of no part” which undermined bourgeois claims to universal subjecthood.

Most latter-day broadsides on Marx and Engels, particularly from those who consider themselves to be on the left, emphasize their ‘historicism’.

Post-structuralist and postcolonial intellectuals, particularly, express a pronounced scepticism towards the idea that there can be such thing as universal history. They claim that the conditions to which Marxian theory pertains are specific either to Europe or to the past, often both. This is to fail to abstract from the nineteenth-century literature, and indeed from subsequent applications of materialist analysis to the cultural sphere. Few could reasonably dispute that we live, now more than ever, in a world in which the relations of production (that is to say capitalism) are universal, and little else (the rights that people enjoy, the wealth that people own, the access to resources that they have) is. Capitalist production being universal, so too is the proletariat on which it relies. And since the interests of this class are diametrically opposed to those of the bourgeois

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Consciousness, Not Utopia

institutions which expropriate its labour, it represents the sole means to universal emancipation.

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The proletariat is historically unique: it is the first popular class capable of being conscious of itself as a class, owing to the profoundly naked exploitation to which it is subjected and to its profound material poverty (in the sense of a lack of property).

Representing as it does a numerical majority, it needs only to gain consciousness in a moment of crisis in order that it can affect revolution and leave capitalist productive relations dead and buried, once and for all.

There are, in other words, historical conditions for its victory. In hindsight, Marx and Engels were almost comically optimistic in their predictions of when exactly this might happen. Nevertheless, it remains one of the vanishingly few things that almost all self-described Marxists can agree on. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the question of what the much-problematised “dictatorship of the proletariat” might look like, and how exactly it might come about.

When it comes to this, only the most hardcore of Leninists tend to come to the same conclusion.

If we are to believe Guy Debord, author of The Society of the Spectacle, then this academic discord might be less a defect of socialist scholarship than a necessary precondition of proletarian revolution. Debord rejects ‘representation’ of all kinds; the idea that, as in the Leninist instance, the

revolution might be ‘represented’ to the popular masses by an intellectual vanguard represents an alienation of power which can only result in the betrayal of the proletarian cause. The only means to socialism is class consciousness. And class consciousness can only be just that: a reflection by the working classes on their own material circumstances and the extrapolation of an analysis of the structure which governs them. This can, and is, aided by theory. But proletarians must never be mobilised in service of a cause which is not their own, for this is not a means to class power but rather a form of false consciousness.

And so we return to utopia. The Marxian objection to a utopian socialist like Robert Owen is that he disavows everything that is central to their cause. This is the case that Engels makes in Socialism: Utopian And Scientific. Not only Owenite society an intellectual abstraction rather than an extrapolation of historical reality, it obscures the role of proletarian as revolutionary subject altogether. In its guilt-laden pursuit of harmonious universality, it fails to recognize the universality of the proletariat, which is the only historical agent capable of envisioning (in the process of its becoming) a truly rational society. Even then, though – and this is absolutely crucial – it is important to remember that history is contingent. The envisioning of utopia might prove a means to revolutionary consciousness, but it must ultimately be subordinated by the proletariat itself to

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Utopian socialism offers a similar problem to Marxists as does anarchism to Guy Debord. A fetishistic obsession with the ‘truth’ of a society free of alienation and oppression, distracts both from the reality of really existing class relations and from the way that these relations are transformed in the historical context of revolution. Thus Debord: “From the historical thought of modern class struggles collectivist anarchism retains only the conclusion, and its exclusive insistence on this conclusion is accompanied by deliberate contempt for method. Thus its critique of the political struggle has remained abstract, while its choice of economic struggle is affirmed only as a function of the illusion of a definitive solution brought about by one single blow on this terrain–on the day of the general strike or the insurrection. The anarchists have an ideal to realize.”

instrumental in discerning: proletarian revolution represents the rational conquest of a universalising class over a system which produces profoundly irrational outcomes, and is sustained so as to benefit a small minority. After all, it is, as Slavoj Zizek reminds us, the capitalists who are the true utopians; there is no other explanation for the idea that their system can function without resulting in periodic collapse, vast amounts waste, and mammoth inequality.

Alex Beard is a second-year History and German student at University College. He served as OULC’s Publications Officer in Hilary Term.

There is no suggestion that the envisaging of post-capitalist societies must be entirely disregarded. Such a vision. must, however, only ever be viewed as one of many means to a concrete end. It is useful to socialists insofar as it helps cultivate the revolutionary class consciousness which is a prerequisite of class power. This is the project of materialist (or scientific), as opposed to utopian socialism. For this is the reality of socialist struggle, and one which Marx and Engels were Page 70

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class power, which will look different depending on the specificities of the historical circumstances.

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Edited by Alex Beard Designed by Naomi Man and Alex Beard

LOOK LEFT Hilary Term 2022