Labor Can’t Be Treated as a Mere Voting Bloc — It Has Power to Reshape Society

The left in western democracies has been pretty much in free fall since the onset of neoliberal globalization. This is quite ironic since resistance to capitalism from civil society has actually grown during the same period. This resistance is also reflected in the U.S. political landscape, where the Democratic Socialists of America are surging in support through grassroots efforts in major urban areas. Voters are clearly signaling that they are fed up with the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, whose leaders continue serving, above all else, corporate and financial interests and have displayed immense hypocrisy on foreign policy issues. The stunning results on June 23 in New York’s primaries — which came on the back of advances already made by Democratic Socialists in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and in Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District, to mention just a few — speak volumes of the ideological bankruptcy of the Democratic Party in the U.S.

But on the rare occasion that left parties have managed to score national electoral victories, as in the case of Greece in 2015, public disappointment and discontent have soon set in as leaders failed to mount a coordinated attack on neoliberal policies and structures, let alone turn class relations on their head.

In the interview that follows, world-renowned radical economist Costas Lapavitsas addresses the structural roots of the left’s political crisis and explains what needs to be done for the left to become again a viable and meaningful alternative to the capitalist dystopia that has engulfed western societies. He highlights, in particular, the case of the U.K., where Member of Parliament Andy Burnham’s “Manchesterism” aims to become the future of the Labour Party’s economic vision. Burnham just won a decisive victory for Labour in the Makerfield by-election, soundly defeating the far right, and setting up the stage for a Labour leadership showdown. Lapavitsas is a professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and a former Syriza Member of Parliament. He is the author and co-author of scores of books, including The Left Case Against the EU, The State of Capitalism: Economy, Society, and Hegemony, and Reindustrialize Britain: A Strategy for Wealth Creation.

C.J. Polychroniou: We live in a world of profound social, political, economic, and ecological challenges. Capitalism is in disarray, the postwar international order is disintegrating, and authoritarian rule is expanding globally. Yet the left is weak and fragmented, experiencing dramatic electoral defeats almost everywhere. What are the structural roots of this crisis, and why has the left failed to build a mass movement in the 21st century?

Costas Lapavitsas: We need to be careful about generalizations here. The left is not the same across the world, and lumping together the Brazilian left, the Indian left, the European left, and the U.S. left produces confusion. Even within Europe there are significant differences. Let me focus on the European left, and within that primarily on Britain and Greece, which are the cases I know best and represent extreme versions of the problem.

It is true that this is a moment of historic weakness, perhaps the deepest since the left first began to emerge as a political force in the 18th century. The narrative about its decline usually focuses on leadership failures and ideological drift. There is something to this, but the deeper problem is structural and intellectual. And the rise of the far right across Europe and beyond feeds directly on the vacuum that a weakened and directionless left has left behind.

The organized working class that built the labor movement, created the welfare state, and gave the left its mass base in the 20th century was a product of industrial capitalism, with manufacturing at its heart. Neoliberalism, beginning in the 1980s, systematically undermined it. Employment was created in service sectors — retail, hospitality, logistics, care work — where bargaining power is weak, turnover is high, and collective organization is extremely difficult. Union density collapsed and collective bargaining coverage shrank. When a steelworks, shipyard or engineering plant closes, a community loses more than jobs. It loses apprenticeship routes, trade-union organization, technical skills, and often the institutions that gave working people collective confidence. The destruction of manufacturing was simultaneously the destruction of the organizational capacity of labor, and ultimately of the left.

The intellectual dimension is equally important. The European left gradually moved away from the political economy that had historically been its theoretical foundation — from the serious examination of capital-labor relations, investment, profit, and the structural sources of economic power. In a word, away from production. In its place came rights-based politics and anti-austerity politics. Both have genuine moral force, but neither constitutes an anti-capitalist program. What is necessary for that is analysis of the supply side of the economy, radical alternative strategies for investment and ownership, a solid framework for altering the capital-labor relation in favor of workers. Without these, the left can identify injustice with clarity and moral passion but cannot propose a concrete path beyond it.

The historic task of the left today is not simply to redistribute existing wealth more fairly but to rebuild the conditions under which wealth can be created democratically, through productive investment, skilled labor, and institutions capable of directing economic development in the interests of the majority. That requires organized labor rooted in production and armed with serious political economy. Rebuilding the power of the left is impossible otherwise.

In Britain, this broader failure has a specific current expression. In 2024 the Labour Party won with a large majority but has little to say about ownership, reorganizing production, or the capital-labor relation. Disillusionment with the Starmer government is steadily leading to a leadership challenge and a growing debate on what has been called “Manchesterism” or the “Productive State.” Does that represent a genuine break with the neoliberal settlement, or a better-managed version of what we already have?

Starmer’s Labour is a vivid illustration of everything I described in the previous answer. It won on the back of popular exhaustion with the Conservatives, but without a transformative program. Starmer then proceeded to squeeze out the left, including Jeremy Corbyn, who had given voice to youth radicalism in the 2010s. His economic framework rests on the assumption that Britain’s problem is one of distribution and inefficiency, to be corrected by more competent management of the existing settlement. There is no sustained push toward public ownership, strengthening labor against capital, dealing with the productive crisis that has been deepening for four decades. It is managed decline dressed as pragmatism.

A crucial debate is now opening up around Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, who has just been elected to Parliament, and is likely to challenge for the leadership of the Labour Party, replacing Starmer as prime minister. His rise has given a tremendous boost to “Manchesterism,” the policies he has been applying as mayor. The fundamental point is that the neoliberal model for public services has failed on its own terms. Burnham proposes to return them to public control and de-commodify them.

That is a genuine advance on the existing political, economic, and social settlement, and the left should engage with it seriously. But public ownership of services, however necessary, is not the same as confronting Britain’s productive crisis. It stabilizes the cost base without rebuilding the engine of wealth creation. A country cannot live indefinitely by moving money around, selling houses to each other, and providing financial and legal services. At some point it must produce things that its people and the rest of the world want.

A genuine break requires going further and adopting radical measures to restructure the economy in the interests of workers. They should include democratic oversight of the Bank of England, capital controls to prevent speculative finance from vetoing policy decisions, trade regulation, and a large-scale public investment program directed at reconstructing the manufacturing base. Manchesterism has opened the right debate and the left needs to deepen it.

Syriza in Greece rose on the back of a mass movement and then failed to deliver radical change. You were directly involved as a Member of Parliament. What accounts for the capitulation, and what has happened to the left in Greece since?

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Capitulation is exactly the right word, and the consequences for the moral and political standing of the left have been devastating. The demonstration that a radical left government, when tested, would fold and implement the very policies it had been elected to oppose did enormous damage to the credibility of the left across Europe.

But understanding why requires going deeper than the act of betrayal itself. Syriza had absorbed the turn away from serious political economy toward rights and anti-austerity politics, and that intellectual weakness proved fatal when it collided with the hard institutional reality of the Eurozone. It profoundly misread the EU and thought that its democratic mandate would be respected and that it could force the lenders to retreat. This holds for both Alexis Tsipras and Yanis Varoufakis, who must share the blame. The EU defended the lenders’ interests, supported by the most powerful section of the Greek ruling class. Syriza had nothing to fall back on — no preparation for default, no framework for exiting the euro, no strategy to reconstruct the productive base of the Greek economy.

The consequences for the Greek left have been devastating. Syriza has imploded, convulsed by internal crises and reduced to a minor party. The broader left has fragmented into multiple small formations, none with significant electoral weight, competing for a diminished radical electorate. The Communist Party retains its organization and discipline but remains sectarian and closed, incapable of leading a broader left renewal. The result is a Greek left that is weak, divided, and largely absent from the central political debate.

What makes this especially striking is that the stabilization program imposed on Greece after 2015 has been an economic failure for most Greeks, entrenching poverty and precarious employment for working people. It is in this context that Tsipras is now attempting a comeback, leading the Greek Left Alliance, a new party revolving entirely around him. There is no return to radical politics, no reckoning with the 2015 surrender, just very mild social democracy — redistribution at the margins, a slightly softer neoliberalism. Capitulation has produced a politics permanently diminished by the original act of surrender, incapable of serious challenge to the structures that produced the crisis in the first place. It is not the answer the situation demands.

Left establishment parties routinely invoke organized labor as the agent of social transformation but treat it in practice as just another electoral constituency to be won over. This seems like a real structural failure, an inability to see labor as a mechanism for reshaping the economy.

It is true that much of the left now thinks of labor primarily as a voting bloc, thereby implicitly accepting the existing structure of production as given and asking only how its proceeds can be more fairly distributed. The classical radical socialist tradition understood something different. Organized labor is the social force whose position at the point of production gives it the potential to challenge how investment decisions are made, how surplus is allocated, how technology is deployed, and in whose interests the productive apparatus operates. Power in the workplace is inseparable from power over production, and power over production is ultimately power over the shape of society.

Rebuilding labor as a social force for anti-capitalist change rather than treating it as merely a political constituency means fighting for public ownership, for sectoral collective bargaining, for workers’ representation in investment decisions, for an industrial strategy that shifts the balance of power in favor of workers at the point of production. None of this is possible without a serious political economy that puts the capital-labor relation back at the center of left politics where it belongs.

There is a real hunger on parts of the left, including in the U.S., for something beyond resistance to austerity, beyond defending rights that are constantly under attack, beyond saying no to whatever the right proposes. The resistance that exists in trade unions, in community organizations, in radical left movements is necessary and should be supported. But resistance without a realistic alternative cannot prevail. People want to know what a transformative left program looks like in concrete terms.

The far right has taken policies historically associated with the left, such as protected industries, managed trade, and economic sovereignty, and made them its own. What does the left do about that? Is anti-capitalism as a political stance, but without a concrete program for production and ownership, sufficient to contest it?

The far right’s appropriation of economic sovereignty is one of the most significant political developments of our time, and the left has largely failed to come to terms with it. Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen, and others have not simply stolen left rhetoric but also filled a vacuum that the left created by detaching itself from organized labor and abandoning serious political economy. The right moved in with its own answers, which are crude, nationalist, and often demagogic and racist, but answers nonetheless. When people see factories close, wages stagnate, and public services deteriorate, they will demand explanations. If the left does not provide them, others will.

The far right is not genuinely concerned with the interests of working people. Protected industries under far right governments means protected profits for domestic capital, not restructured capital-labor relations. Economic sovereignty under the far right means directing state power in favor of a particular fraction of the ruling class, not challenging the capitalist class structure itself. Managed trade means using tariffs as leverage in inter-capitalist competition, not subordinating trade policy to the needs of labor.

The content of far right economic policies is reactionary, even when the form borrows from the left’s historical vocabulary. The answer clearly is not to match its nationalism or its demagoguery. The radical anti-capitalist left must address the underlying grievances with a program that is genuinely transformative as well as anti-capitalist — one rooted in production, ownership, and the reconstruction of working-class power.

Such a program starts with public ownership of strategic industries and utilities (energy, water, transport, communications) — removing them from the logic of financial extraction and subordinating them to social need. It requires capital controls to subordinate financial flows to productive priorities and prevent mobile money capital from vetoing democratic decisions about investment. It means sectoral collective bargaining that rebuilds the power of labor at the point of production rather than merely at the ballot box. It also means a large-scale public investment program directed at rebuilding the productive base that deindustrialization destroyed. And it calls for managed trade in the genuine interests of workers rather than of domestic capital competing against foreign capital.

Above all, however, it means rebuilding the training skills and organizational capacities of labor, erecting the institutions that would give it strength at work and more broadly, and paying it good wages. Without strong, skilled, and well-remunerated labor, there is no sustained wealth creation. That is the foundation for effective anti-capitalism in practice.

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