17.04.2025

Socialism and star power

Owen Jones gets it wrong: the bourgeois media’s idea of leadership offers the left no shortcut to power, argues Paul Demarty. We need a party that is democratic, principled and mass

It is safe to say that, for Keir Starmer’s Labour government, opinion polls do not make a pretty sight just at the moment.

For months, each successive survey has found, for all practical purposes, a three-way tie between Labour, the Tories and Reform - each lurking at around 23%-25%. On its face, this is remarkable. Though it is largely an effect of the perverse electoral arithmetic of our ‘first past the post’ system, Labour has a huge, crushing majority. Any plan it could come up with should be, theoretically, straightforward to push through and get started. The Tories were electorally eviscerated (deservedly so by any measure), and have remained largely anonymous at the dispatch box.

Yet the government has struggled at every step. It barely had a honeymoon period at all. There have been palace coups (Morgan McSweeney’s defenestration of Sue Gray), petty corruption scandals, a split over attacks on pensioners, endless flip-flops, among other disasters. The yellow press has been having a field day - and so, of course, has Reform, which threatens to make inroads in the same long-time Labour seats nabbed by Boris Johnson in 2019.

In such circumstances, a far-right revival is only to be expected. But so is some life to Labour’s left. We saw that towards the end of Tony Blair’s government, with a mass anti-war movement and then some limited electoral success for the Respect front put together by George Galloway and the Socialist Workers Party. At the moment, there is nothing much. George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain suffered a washout and seems moribund. The Greens, if we can count them, poll modestly ahead of their 2024 showing, but seem to have hit a ceiling. The various attempts to build something on the ruins of Corbynism have floundered, not least on Jeremy Corbyn’s reluctance to take the reins.

Crisis of leadership

What are we supposed to make of this? Writing in The Guardian, Owen Jones, having rehearsed the aforementioned situation, has his answer: “The main hurdle is obvious: an absence of leadership.” We cannot blame everything on a biased media, which, of course, “doesn’t help”, because

witness how Citibanker-turned-equality-guru Gary Stevenson is reaching millions through YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. Despite the likes of Elon Musk gaming algorithms in favour of the Trumpian right, it is easier for the left to reach the wider electorate than ever. The left has just failed badly to harness social media platforms for its own advantage.

The job of such a leader is “appealing to older, overwhelmingly white voters, who live in towns and hold more socially conservative views, and younger, more diverse citizens in urban communities, who tend to be more socially progressive”. That entails:

shift[ing] the debate from the ‘culture wars’ to economic justice. The former is intended to drive the left into defensive territory and, as Ronald Reagan astutely observed, in politics, “if you’re explaining, you’re losing”. But if the left drew attention to inequality and disintegrating public services, and made the case for taxing the rich, the right would be forced to explain itself instead.

This is hardly an astonishing argument coming from Jones - long ago a gadfly on the Labour far left, but since the surprise breakthrough success of his book Chavs a wholly mediatised figure. ‘Leadership’, conceived in this way as a matter of ‘cutting through’ to various atomised electoral constituencies, comes naturally as an idea to media people, who as a collective do most of the arbitration on the question of who is a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ leader. Notoriously, Jones spent a good chunk of the Corbyn years trying to replace Jeremy with someone ‘better’, to no great effect.

It is still worth considering, however, simply because it is the default model of leadership in bourgeois electoral systems. It is not the only model of leadership available to the left, of course. To take a (not unproblematic) example: when Leon Trotsky opened the 1938 transitional programme with the famous formulation that “the world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat”, he was not talking mainly about a crisis of individual leaders, but parties; and the working class in his mind was not a bunch of random demographic categories, but an organised force, even in the absence of good leadership. If the Jones model of leadership is to be rejected, the questions follow: in the name of what, and why?

Jones’s prescription is unabashedly a matter of ‘one-man management’, and the first troublesome matter is: who gets to be the big man then? How is that to be decided? Jones is too coy to seek the mantle himself, of course (and I doubt he overestimates his popularity with small-town social conservatives). He names Mick Lynch, the outgoing Rail, Maritime and Transport union general secretary, who entertained us all greatly during a recent strike by his cruel and unusual treatment of various TV news anchors. But it seems unlikely that Lynch, who has earned his retirement, is terribly interested.

Who else then? Jones seems baffled that nobody seems keen to grasp the opportunity, considering it a matter of the left “run[ning] at full pelt away from an open goal”. We leave aside the question of why for now. Imagine that there was a bit more initiative on the part of the big beasts of the left. Lynch throws his railwayman’s cap into the ring; Galloway his fedora; Corbyn his pruning shears. The default result would be three people fighting on separate, but similar, platforms for the same votes. All, moreover, would be generals without armies - the disunity itself would be enough to make sure of that.

Within the broad traditions of the labour movement, this would be a simpler thing - the contest would be over the leadership of a party. The party would have democratic or pseudo-democratic means of picking leaders and, having decided, the winner would be able to count on the efforts of the supporters of all. However, we do not have a party for these men to fight over, unfortunately. Corbyn clearly hopes, one day, to rejoin Labour. Lynch has always fought shy of the question. Galloway has a tendency of cycling between pseudo-party brands for his own personality - the WPB being the latest.

The bourgeois media sees parties as an annoying obstacle to its own prerogative as the picker of winners. It prefers systems like that of the United States, where parties do not select their own candidates, the matter instead being devolved to primary voters who are not in any real sense members. Figures like Emmanuel Macron, who broke through an ailing party system in France to set himself up as a centrist Bonaparte, also tend to get admiration.

Suppose that, somehow, some figure does emerge to sweep other contenders aside with their sheer charisma, circumventing the sabotage efforts of the bourgeois media. A left that obediently followed such a leader would, immediately, find itself in a practical contradiction: the egalitarian impulse that in fact motivates socialist politics would conflict with the need to promote the great leader. It would not, in the course of its struggle, build up the cadres that could break this dependence; so it would succeed as an obedience cult, or not at all.

It is thus not terribly surprising that cultish left groups have an appalling record of success in the long term. We could mention the US Revolutionary Communist Party, which has for the last several decades been building a cult of its founder, Bob Avakian, or more dismally tiny sects like this country’s Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, which ended up with its few remaining adherents imprisoned in the south London house of leader Aravindan Balakrishnan.

Heel turn

One larger-than-life socialist personality who did succeed in creating a state regime around his person was Benito Mussolini. I do not intend, by bringing up the founder of fascism, to conduct a shabby reductio ad Hitlerum argument, but do so merely because the case is somewhat instructive. Mussolini was a major figure on the left of the Italian Socialist Party prior to (in the jargon of professional wrestling) his ‘heel turn’. In order to become a plausible candidate for power, he had to abandon any conception of socialism as an egalitarian project, which he had already done years prior, attempting to reconstruct socialist politics on the basis of Nietzschean ideas about the will to power. His conversion to fierce, irridentist nationalism during the war years ensured that, by the 1920s, he was hardly a general without an army - indeed, he had an army precisely of demobilised soldiers at his command.

Conducting politics as a search for a great leader, then, tends to determine, or at least constrain, the viable political options. Jones insists that his prescription “does not mean throwing minorities under a publicly owned bus”. But why not? If the great leader decides that some piece of shallow demagoguery about immigrants will serve the needs of the moment, on the ‘Paris is worth a Mass’ theory, then how exactly is Jones to resist? Either we have institutional machinery to dethrone the leader or we don’t; either such machinery is democratic or it isn’t.

The traditional socialist answer here - at least since the German social democratic movement decisively rejected the labour-monarchism of Ferdinand Lassalle and his successors - is to organise parties on a democratic basis, so that leaders are accountable to the party. This is a difficult thing to bootstrap, but if done well, the result is levelling up. Talented individuals have the space to excel, but not at the cost of the political coherence of the organisation. (Mussolini, after all, was expelled from the Partita Socialista Italiano for his warmongering.)

Competition

Leaders emerge at every level of the organisation, and enough of them that there is less danger of the emergence of personal fiefdoms within it. The multiplicity of leaders leads inevitably to competition over the political line, which draws the mass membership into decision-making, by creating more leaders. The institutional strength of the party permits the construction of serious alternative media platforms dedicated to substantive struggles over ideas and policy - not the vacuous horse-race punditry that so blights the bourgeois media.

Leadership, in this model, is not about ‘cutting through’ with a single dart of viral social-media content. It is about doing so after the Javier Milei fashion - with a chainsaw. Through partyism, the socialist left delegitimises the institutional structure of bourgeois politics that selects leaders - not merely (as we are largely reduced to today) by laboriously pointing out instances of bias and corruption, but by providing, indeed by being, an alternative.

The downside, of course, is that we are very far from providing such a threat. The appeal of the Jones approach - and he is very far from the only leftist who basically thinks of politics in this way - is that all the ingredients seem to be there already. It seems like the path of least resistance. Yet it is doomed - it subjects our movement to the tyranny of the media apparatus and, even if that can somehow be overcome, corrupts the very objectives that we suppose ourselves to seek in the first place.

The hard road, alas, is the fastest one in the end.