International Socialism 140 Autumn 2013 The Future of the British Left

Summary

There has been a significant revival of interest among the radical left in “big picture” questions of socialist strategy that, as Mark L Thomas has pointed out, represents a return to “important debates of the left largely absent over the last three decades”.1 It is not difficult to identify the major factors driving this. Several years of deep capitalist crisis together with the almost total capitulation of social democratic parties across Europe to the austerity agenda have opened up a clear space to the left of these organisations—a development that has reinvigorated the radical left, but which has also forced it to confront fundamental questions of strategic orientation. Furthermore, the dramatic rise of Syriza in Greece—the political force that has most successfully moved to fill the space to the left of social democracy—has also, clearly, been a major factor informing the revival of this debate. Indeed Syriza’s electoral ascent to the point at which it is now widely seen as a possible party of government in waiting poses the question, in very immediate and pressing terms, of how, and to what extent, capitalist state power might be utilised for socialist objectives—one of the oldest and most fundamental controversies in socialist thought.