The modern left has a problem with labels, and they have moderates to blame.
“Socialism” has long been a political buzzword in the United States, where Red Scare-era fearmongering over leftist politics continues in full force to this day. The use of “socialist” as a blanket insult for any policies left of neoliberalism has produced an environment in the United States in which Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson can label the centrist Joe Biden a “liberal progressive socialist Marxist” without challenge. Insults like Sen. Johnson’s, like many accusations levied by those on the right, are enabled by a misappropriation of left-wing terminology by center-left actors in the U.S. and around the world.
The modern center-left in much of Europe and Latin America exists due to working class support for the institutionalization of socialism into a strange brand of center-left social democracy, replacing technical policies like wealth distribution and worker control of the means of production with softer policies like welfare and support for unions. Around the 1990s and early 2000s, however, a trend began across much of the international center-left that saw social democratic parties voluntarily shifting themselves even further to the right. They continued to use the same marketing, proudly latching onto their rose imagery and red branding and touting the “socialist” or “labor” or “workers” in their name, but their ideology had been fundamentally removed from the socialist movements from which they were born.
By continuing to lay claim to their socialist origins and heritage but refusing to advocate for the same policies, these “socialist” parties are not only endangering themselves by losing the support of the working class, but they are endangering the entirety of left-wing politics by forcing the splinter of the left-of-center front. In doing so, “socialist” parties’ drift to the center is damaging the legitimacy of the left and enabling the rise of far-right nationalism.
The Foundations of Socialist Power
Socialist parties began to emerge in Europe in the late nineteenth century with the advent of democratic social reforms, and while the exact platform of the party varied from country to country, the parties shared several key planks, including labor rights, suffrage expansion, and internationalism. The most powerful of these parties, the Social Democratic Party, or SDP, in Germany, was founded in 1875. Similar socialist parties emerged across Europe with similar platforms; the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, or PSOE, was founded in Spain in 1879, the Labour Party in Norway in 1887, and the Labour Party in the United Kingdom in 1900. By 1914, nearly every country in Europe had produced a large working-class political movement.
Workers’ parties began forming socialist-led and socialist-majority governments across Europe in the early twentieth century, but these radical governments were soon faced with a practical challenge to their authority: established powers and systems were still angled against them. Socialist parties were forced into awkward coalitions with anti-radical partners; the Labour Party in the UK was forced to rely on support from the Liberals in 1923, while the SPD in Germany was forced into a disjointed grand coalition with centrists and right-wingers in 1928.
Slowly, with established interests opposing their agenda, these parties drifted more to the center. Looming Soviet Communism throughout much of the twentieth century added to this shift as socialists were targeted across western Europe. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, however, and neoliberalism came to dominate western European politics, the drift to the center quickened. “Socialism” as a label started to replace socialism as an ideology.
The Alienation of the Socialist Base
European socialism was the first to fall victim to the shift to the center. With aggressive neoliberals, including Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, leading the non-Soviet world at the time of the USSR’s collapse, left-of-center leaders modified their strategies. Instead of driving to the left to capitalize on the disenfranchised working class, socialist parties’ moderate wings seized the opportunity to appeal to the “median voter”.
This was, notoriously, the policy adopted by the UK Labour Party under Tony Blair in the 1990s. While Blair’s “New Labour” brought the party to power in the 1997 general election, it cost the party much of its electorate, with its pro-market policies ultimately undermining its industrial voter base. Germany experienced a similar trend under Gerhard Schröder, whose “Agenda 2010” hollowed out the German welfare state and drove away much of the party’s base, enabling the fifteen-year reign of Christian Democratic Union Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The leap to the center in both the UK and Germany was driven by the Third Way policy of a Western alliance spearheaded by Bill Clinton and the New Democrats in the United States, but it was only part of a larger trend. Throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, socialist parties around the world have sought to rebrand themselves as moderate alternative parties grounded in “fiscal responsibility”, or as Jacobin magazine columnist Paul Heideman describes it, “marketization combined with lip service to social justice”. These changes have, without fail, led to disillusionment among the working class electorate, allowing radical nationalist movements to grow and prosper.
The United Kingdom follows this mold almost exactly. Once the 2008 financial crisis exposed the fundamental flaws of the New Labour platform, the Labour government was voted out of office, never to return. After prominent pro-Brexit members of the party blocked Labour from campaigning publicly as the pro-Remain option in 2019, the party suffered a crushing defeat in that year’s general elections. Corbyn was replaced by moderate Sir Keir Starmer, cementing the party’s rightward run.
A similar tragedy befell the Workers’ Party, or PT, the dominant left-of-center political bloc in Brazil. Under the presidential administrations of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff between 2003 and 2016, the PT steadily moderated its platform, leading to diminished public spending and an emphasis on “market credibility” and “managerial competence”. Once that managerial competence fell through in the late 2010s, the party could no longer rely on its base of workers for support, and lost the presidency to Jair Bolsonaro in 2018.
This collapse of the center-left has been universal; social justice rhetoric without the institutional force to support it simply cannot win elections. In each of these cases, parties made deliberate choices to moderate their platform to seek to appeal to a new set of voters than the set that put them in power in the first place. In each of these cases, the inevitable result was the alienation of their base and their removal from power.
Two Paths Forward for the “Socialist” Label
Recent history has shown that upon moving to the right, left-wing parties suffer catastrophic losses that strip them of authority. These parties can move forward from these defeats in one of two ways: they can either learn from their mistakes, or bury their heads in the sand.
The first path is far less common, and likely with good reason: once a socialist party has discredited themselves by failing to act on their rhetoric, it becomes exceedingly difficult to ride that rhetoric to a return to power. But this exact feat was accomplished by the PSOE in Spain in 2019. Despite continuing to embrace terms like “moderate” and “social democracy”, the PSOE was able to act on its platform, rather than simply speaking it. After successfully removing conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy in 2018, the PSOE embraced left-wing policies, raising the minimum wage and fighting to expand parental leave. While the PSOE has not embraced the socialist label or ideology, it has adopted pro-worker policies and rejected austerity, winning back its base and winning a major victory in 2019.
The second path, however, seems to be the preference of most “socialist” parties around the world, and the consequences are twofold. First, in countries with electoral systems that allow it, new left-wing parties arise to appeal to the disillusioned working class. This disillusionment led to the successes of Podemos in Spain and Sinn Féin in Ireland, as well as the presidential victory of López Obrador’s MORENA in Mexico.
However, the disillusionment of the working class does not send all workers to the left; it sends many to right-wing reactionary movements, who capitalize on declining working class power by blaming minority groups or globalization. This resurgence of reactionary nationalism arises like clockwork: parties like Vox in Spain, AfD in Germany, and Fratelli d’Italia in Italy; movements like Brexit in the UK; and politicians like Marine Le Pen in France and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
The abandonment of socialism is leading directly to the rise of authoritarian movements around the globe, enabling and empowering reactionaries who appropriate socialist rhetoric for ethnonationalist ends. The success of the PSOE shows that it isn’t too late for established forces to reverse the tide, but they must act quickly, before they sacrifice not just their electorate, but democracy itself.
