‘Put war away with time, come into space’. So wrote Charles Olson in 1946, in a poem which hinted that we should remember the dead of war — in his case, the masses of ‘unburied dead’ of the Second World War — only in order to make a better, more freeing life for the ‘new born’ following in its wake.
Few would argue with Olson’s sentiments. But having passed the eightieth anniversary of VE Day this month, can we confidently say that life has continued to improve for those born in the decades since 1945? And do we really think that our governing elites have learned the lessons of the mid- twentieth century — an unprecedentedly bloody moment in history, when human instincts towards genocide and despotism reached a near-fatal climax?
On the one hand, we should allow ourselves some Olsonian optimism at this point, by gaining inspiration from the euphoric images, prose accounts, and film reels that were shared in the aftermath of VE Day 80 (many of which underline the historic reality of an anti-fascist ‘People’s War’ won largely by and from the European left). At the same time, we need to be realistic that in 2025 the world in general, and Europe in particular, now seems to be deep into the rehearsal stage for another geopolitical cataclysm.
Everywhere we look, from the war in Ukraine to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, from gathering tensions in the Taiwan Strait to the economic auto-crisis of the Trump tariff war, we see the spectacular demise of our old friend, the rules-based ‘liberal international order’ (no sniggering at the back). Given the calibre of the personalities being elevated by this shift in the balance of power, it would seem a long shot that we will get to the end of the century (make that the decade, or even the year) without one of these sparks kindling into a large-scale conflagration.
How should socialists respond to this convulsive backdrop? As the late Tony Benn recommended, we on the Left must keep two flames burning in our hearts — one of anger, one of hope — as we try to look this ominous new world order in the face.
Where the former is concerned, we must spare no mercy in attacking the liberal and neoliberal elites responsible for the new omnishambles in global relations. The figureheads of this caste are still guilelessly leading us towards catastrophe, to look no further than the obvious example of Keir Starmer’s undead leadership of the Labour Party and the British government. This already utterly forlorn hope is currently tending towards a combination of, on the one hand, jingoistic ‘national centrism’ and, on the other, a new ‘military Keynesianism’ which updates the authoritarian strain in neoliberalism, as Juliano Fiori and Grace Blakeley note in these pages.
In foreign policy as in their domestic affairs, such figures are failing us through their inability to grasp that merely tinkering with the default settings of the last several decades will simply not do. As Ed McNally makes plain in this issue, extending a recent intervention by Perry Anderson into the historiography of the First World War, European leaders like Starmer are behaving very much as politicians did in the run-up to 1914.
Like those short-sighted spectres from history, McNally suggests, Starmer and his European counterparts appear to be guided by an ‘eyes wide shut’ approach to governance and diplomacy. In this school of mechanical centrism, all decisions are meticulously, legalistically calculated. But there is little consideration of anything so vulgarly ‘ideological’ as the structural forces — post–Cold War geopolitics, the poly-crises of global capitalism post-2008, the volcanic rise of the far right from Texas to Tel Aviv — that have created the new international disorder of the 2020s.
While Starmer and his ilk remain largely stuck in the idea-space that shaped them (the Blairite ‘long nineties’), the Left must do as it often has done at moments of historical crisis, and somehow find a way of unchaining the tradition of visceral, militant socialism that is its birthright — rolling all our strength and all our sweetness, as it were, up into one ball.
Here, a resumption of the mantle of anti-fascist vanguard will be an essential first step. As so many of the historical articles in this issue bring home — from Elinor Taylor’s summary of how thirties anti-fascism pre-empted the leftist moment of 1945 to Emily Coatman’s timely paean to the ‘Judeo-Bolsheviks’ of wartime Eastern Europe — it is the radical left which most often led the charge against Nazism and its cognates in the darkest days of the twentieth century.
As such ancestral voices recommend — and as Fran Newton’s spotlighting of the British police’s view that far-right extremism is mere ‘cultural nationalism’ proves — we cannot rely on a dim-witted liberal establishment to take the fight to the surging twenty-first century right in any meaningful or strenuous way. Now, as throughout history, it is the radical left which must step into the breach, under the banner of an uncompromising anti-fascist leftism, which loudly proclaims that socialism will always be the only truly cogent alternative to right-wing populism.
As well as foregrounding such long-view narratives, anniversaries like VE Day 80 are an opportunity to take stock of history at close range. It is now over five years since the defeat of the populist left in the 2019 British general election, and it is unambiguously clear, as it has been for some time, that we have shifted into a radically different phase of political history. While the wider world has spun into chaos in the ways noted above, 2019 continues to cast a long shadow on the British left, acting as a psychological block on left optimism, a rallying point for centrist attacks on socialist ideas and individuals, and the source of various pointless intra-left beefs and grievances.
Somehow, this splintering, nitpicking, post-mortem mindset must now be energetically junked and exchanged for something like a more humane, radical-left version of the hardened, mass-appeal messaging currently acting as a terrifyingly potent vehicle for the racist designs of a populist right inching towards power (and at the same time, perhaps, fascism proper). Here again, it is a broad-church anti-fascism that seems likely to have the widest reach, the most dynamic sense of moral purpose, and the deepest sense of soul.
If this doesn’t sound like a very achievable imminent goal for the British left in its current state of disillusion and fracture (when and where is the meeting?), then perhaps we will have to begin by finding ‘revolutionary motivation … by looking backward’, to borrow a phrase of Susan Buck-Morss’s quoted by Charlie Lawrie and Tom Cowin in this issue. As Lawrie and Cowin argue in their excavation of Walter Benjamin’s notion of ‘revolutionary nostalgia’, the modern left has too often gone in fear of historical memory and gestures at commonality. Meanwhile, the Right has had no such qualms in using historical myths and rallying cries to bolster its electoral and organisational success.
We must remember that mythology is not always the opposite of rationality — let alone strategy. That is to say, as well as maintaining its eye for analytical sharpness, the Left urgently needs to dredge from the ruins of history — and somehow thrust into the public eye — its own populist stories, unifying myths, and remarkable examples of political heroism if it is to speak beyond the intellectual fringe and reawaken its popular appeal.
Eight decades ago, the flame of hope was lit all over Europe, after the blackest night the continent has ever endured. Far from yet another instance of heroic failure for the Left, the end of the greatest cataclysm in modern history was also a moment of crushing defeat for fascism, victory for Actually Existing Socialism (in all its diverse and often ambiguous guises), and the beginning of a period of rebuilding in Europe in which socialist ideas and influences frequently took centre stage. All of this is to say that the aftermath of the Second World War was ultimately, in most of the ways that count, a desperately hard-won heroic success for the European left.
How about we start again with that?