Our Bloc: How We Win (2024)

James Schneider, co-founder of the Corbyn-supporting campaign group Momentum, and later [Corbyn's Comms Director?], has written a very interesting short book, aimed especially at those of us who were Corbyn supporters and are now somewhat adrift politically. I really like how Schneider advises us dejected post-Corbyn campaigners that the Labour Party should not be used as an identity, but viewed as an ongoing arena of struggle. Viewed as such, there is less need for individual despondency.

"Our Bloc: How We Win" attempts to trace out political and strategic lessons to help advance those concerned beyond the stagnation of a post-Corbyn ambivalence on the British left.

In the book's open, James Schneider tersely lays out the crisis of hegemony continuing to worsen in the present-day neoliberal iteration of the state-capitalist system, a crisis owed to the inadequate responsiveness by British political leadership to mass needs and demands. He sketches this out from a place of potential, understanding that conservatives cannot deliver things that concretely ameliorate burgeoning social stress in British society without poking their own political base among wealthy elites. This contradiction is the left's vacuum to fill with it's own power and positions.

He does not provide an exhaustive account of political economy to spell out the roots of this crisis, nor does he provide a sociological account of right-wing resonance and electoral success. This is not the point of this text. Instead, Schneider comes to the reader with up front lessons to impart, as someone in possession of high-level experience with the left almost in power, or at least seriously contesting for it. He was closely involved with the Corbyn Labour insurgency as a founder of Momentum, a grassroots organization instrumental in breathing youthful ground-level life into the party under Corbyn's leadership. The intro is merely scene setting of the basic political terrain that made this first go at a political revolution possible.

What follows from this beginning is the real pulse behind this pamphlet length book. The concept of building a "bloc," in order to fight from a stronger position than what the Corbyn movement started. This bloc is a stitching together of trade unions, local councils, single issue organizations, direct action groups, blossoming left media, and party staff that can turn popular social majorities into powerful political ones. James argues for a movement in and against the state, against defeatism and melancholia, and tries to blend realism and radicalism like a learned and wise Gramscian strategist.

While his writing is more than just a rehearsal of admirable first principles and free-floating prescriptions, because his case is helpfully buttressed by first-hand examples and anecdotes, it does remain shallow on the stickier details of exactly how one builds what he calls for. He lands somewhere between striking the pose of a radical, detectable by anyone who's actually tried to organize real people, and someone who inspires full confidence that the details (particularly the microscopic and interpersonal) won't eventually arrive to torpedo the project. At the very least, one can tell he's cautious and knows the exact questions on which to be agnostic given the conjuncture. If you give him that grace as a reader, and perhaps as a fellow organizer, this is a useful and smart guide.

He discusses many ingredients necessary but maybe not sufficient for a tide shift. Among these are the uses of viral action to change discourse, to non-reformist reforms aimed at altering the Labour Party's internal practices to make them more democratic for the purpose of opening it up to contest, to structures intended to create connective tissue between movements shy of one another, and how to develop policy capacity without falling strictly into technocratic expertise, and more. He deserves credit for being clear that this is not exactly a surgical manual for victory, but a tactical menu of things that in combination will place the left in stronger fighting position to seize political openings.

I want to celebrate this text for nuance in the right places, for not collapsing into social democratic or anarchist binaries, as I think this absolutism is even more attractive an impulse during times of defeat when test cases in political theory seem ripely available for dogmatism. This is war of position and war of maneuver writing that comes off the page with humility and sincerity in its tone, the shared desire to build mass politics for the world we need is evident, and I feel conscripted into "our bloc" by the arguments James Schneider makes with his comradely offerings. Read it.

Another contribution to the socialism-as-left-populism current. Schneider channels Chantel Mouffe's work into the specifically UK context and comes to the conclusion that the left needs to work both inside and outside the Labour Party on a strategy he calls 'movement populism'. He sees the energy pushing for change as coming from segments committed to campaigning around issues, like Black Lives Matter, Disabled People Against the the Cuts, Extinction Rebellion and the Green New Deal supporters.

The central task is to build a mechanism that supports collaboration between these fragments which avoids traditional leftist centralism, making the coherence of the movement conditional on it being able to win internal arguments and sustain a broad consensus. The concept of 'bloc' obviously builds on Gramsci and his advocacy of strategies that aim for hegemonic influence over the direction that society and politics take. As such it prompts questi0ns about the application of this approach in an epoch were no fragment of society seems capable of sustaining hegemonic influence in the way that industrial workers had been able to do in previous epochs. The list of the groups who can be counted as being within the bloc that Schneider is talking about, minoritized ethnic communities, women, the disabled, LGBRQ+ and the people motivated by the climate crisis lack the obvious economic strength that militant trade unionists had before the ascent of neoliberalism.

Somewhere within the groups that Schneider appeals to there will need to be a segment that functions like a class fraction, with sufficient economic power to disrupt capital accumulation as well as the progressive political standpoint that will bring the other fragments into its bloc. There are hints out there as to who this might eventually be - perhaps networked younger workers working on solidaristic principles to disrupt capitalist domination of the digital world - but much of that lies in the future. Until then this is a useful contribution to the discussion and deserves a wide readership.

This is worth reading and it’s good to have something focusing on the possibility of change with an optimistic slant. It’s a good addition to the debate about what can be done to achieve power for the left and radical change. He has a strand of analysis which is about building from where you are now, and uniting movements with electoral politics. He focuses on the formation of a left bloc, a lot of which sounds positive, but I found lacking in concrete detail. Yes, it would be great to have all our progressive forces working together, but how do we get there from here? Thought it was weakest when asserting the things a left bloc could do (yes, but……) It didn’t light me up with inspiration but There are interesting things in this to add to the mix.

This book raises a valid question that I think that many left wing voters consider, is there a way for left wing politics to win in the UK.

This book makes the argument that increased cooperation between leftist community groups can strengthen the ability of socialism to take hold in Britain.

This book is an inspiring read and I found myself willing the suggestions in the book to come true. There is a question though about how to overcome the human nature aspect of politics, by which I mean, how do you bring together personalities and varying world views into a cooperative organisation.

This book might have dreamy aspirations but it is written sensibly and I feel that the author is providing a fair and balanced viewpoint on the current state of British politics.