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Too left-wing or not populist enough? Using Laclau and Mouffe to rethink Corbynism and future left strategy in the UK

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British Politics Aims and scope

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Abstract

Jeremy Corbyn’s dramatic rise and fall created a problem for left political strategists in the UK. Contradictory explanations centre around two broad areas. First, ideology: Corbynism was either too left-wing or not left-wing enough; and second, democracy and populism: Corbynism was either anti-democratic and authoritarian populist or ‘left-populist’ and democratising. The centrality of these debates to the Corbyn literature implies that strategists today face a dilemma. Either consolidate the Labour party as a radical left-wing grassroots movement against the PLP, or a centre-left party that re-establishes PLP authority. Indeed, Keir Starmer is already interpreted to have aligned himself with the latter of these two options. This paper offers an original interpretation of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of populism to demonstrate that this is a false dichotomy which not only risks unnecessarily restricting Labour party strategy but potentially has severe ramifications for how we understand left-wing politics in Britain more widely.

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Notes

  1. Laclau and Mouffe developed their theory together and although only co-authored Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (2001) often reference their continued collaboration in separate publications. As a result, although Laclau is more commonly cited as a theorist of populism, I seek in this article to recognise Mouffe’s significant contribution to this theory as demonstrated by her Towards a Left Populism (2018).

  2. I am indebted to the participants of meetings hosted by the British Academy Transnational Populism network led by Paula Biglieri at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina and Mark Devenney at the University of Brighton, UK, for inspiring the development of this paper. I am also grateful to Chantal Mouffe, Wojciech Ufel, Paulina Tambakaki, Jonathan Dean, Lasse Thomassen, Leszek Koczanowicz, Alexandros Kioupkiolis, Nick Randall, and two anonymous reviewers for their generous and insightful feedback. All errors are my own.

  3. This begs the question whether the moniker ‘left’ is necessary when referring to Laclau and Mouffe’s populism. With regards to the democratic credentials of a political movement, it is more informative for Laclau and Mouffe to identify it as more or less populist rather than left or right populist.

  4. The logic of difference could also eventually result in an increasing state of totalisation, although it would need to pass through authoritarianism to arrive there, for it too can eventually conceive of society as a total closed system comprised of an ‘absolute system of differences’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, p. 182). This indicates that we should visualise the aforementioned axis between equivalence and difference not as a line but as more of a horseshoe shape, where slippage between authoritarianism at the pole of heterogeneity and totalitarianism at the pole of homogeneity becomes possible.

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  1. School of Humanities and Social Science, Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

    Clare Woodford

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Woodford, C. Too left-wing or not populist enough? Using Laclau and Mouffe to rethink Corbynism and future left strategy in the UK. Br Polit 18, 81–102 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-022-00212-z

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