Chasing the Populists Tail?

The Freedom Convey in Canada, and the anti-lockdown protests everywhere, has raised questions amongst FB friends about ‘tail ending’ such grassroots movements. It’s an old description that I hadn’t heard in years. It means politically conscious individuals who champion spontaneous revolts, but without providing a critique to take protests further. It becomes an opportunistic impulse to connect with an audience, but then terrified of losing them at the expense of political principles.

Tail endism is, of course, derived from Lenin’s 1902 book, What is to be done? Lenin was writing about the limits of ‘bread and butter’ trade union issues in Russia. He argued that without the intervention of a vanguard party, spontaneous trade union revolts would remain at just that. Although Lenin was using trade union agitation as examples, his term ‘economism’ was not solely about the limits of relying on ‘bread and butter’ issues for political gain (as the radical left in Britain often believed). Rather, it was a broader point about the dangers of going along with dominant ideas to avoid being isolated and unpopular. It’s a misinterpretation that’s made a return regarding the honking Canadian truckers, France’s unruly Gilets Jaunes and the regular protests against lockdown in London.

The apparent ‘economism’ here is that, keen for a revolt against technocratic elites, there’s a danger of being blind-sided by rather questionable elements. A desire to connect with such spontaneous, non-conformists could mean sacrificing non-negotiable principles and beliefs. When that happens, a considered and independent political position is off the table. Even worse, it could appear like a huge capitulation to right-wing loons. Whilst there has been favourable coverage of populist protests, they’re not without criticism either. We’re fully aware that lockdown protests attract conspiracy theorist cranks and mad anti-vaxxers. It’s recognised that, yes, some who voted Leave are staunchly anti-immigrant. And that’s something to be challenged, not dismissed.

But all this ignores where the real and damaging tail-endism occurs today. It’s not radical democrats, blindly ignoring the fringes of populist revolts, that’s the problem. It is the Labour Party left and other radical activists. It is their misguided tail-ending of the new Establishment that has utterly bankrupted the Left. And with their lamentable track-record, that takes some beating. Take identity politics as a key example. Unless you were a Marxism Today journalist, identity politics was once viewed as a way to undermine class identities and collectivism. It was the decadent indulgences of time-rich students. Now, pretty much the entire Left, bar some brave feminists, are hysterically on the trans-ideology bandwagon. Let the pile-on against Graham Linehan and the sackings commence.

The banal thinking here, like on so many of these issues, is that trans rights is a blow against conservatism. Postmodernist thinking winds up the old stuffed shirts and, as progressives, we should embrace and support it, lest anyone accuses us of being ‘right-wing’, too. It’s led to a fairly indistinguishable blob on the anti-Brexit left. It’s difficult to see where Blairites end and Momentum activists begin, where ‘communist’ university lecturers differ from Guardian columnists or where anarcho animal rights activists differ from Carrie Johnson. A well-worn satire on the Left was the endless splits and factions, the ’57 varieties.’ Today it is governed by a staggering conformity around identity politics, environmentalism and craven Europhilia. You only have to read a Stewart Lee shopping list to witness that.

The key here is not just a uniformity of thought, but crucially a lack of any political independence –of working class independence - from rainbow-flagged Police chiefs, from public school civil servants and, crucially, from the capitalist class. Believing that faux-left ideas are now ‘on the right side of history’, 21st century tail-endism has jettisoned any genuine sense of ‘us and them’. In fact, ‘us’ includes Remainers, the BBC, university lecturers, police officers, Channel 4, Guardian journalists, Harry and Meg, Greens, Big Tech, intolerant trans activists, whilst the ‘them’ is anyone outside of that haut-professional and identitarian tent. So the ‘hegemony’ is with the former, whilst the ‘enemy within’ is the same old ‘enemy within’ as before: the labouring classes (and possibly GB News presenters).

There were always limits to when the old Left tail-ended the spontaneous revolts of workplace disputes. And equally, there are caveats aplenty to the new populist revolts springing up everywhere. But the biggest problem here is not conspiratorial lockdown sceptics or a Canadian truckers’ blogs. It is tail-ending woke-state authoritarians and the wider new Establishment. It is a capitulation to those who believe that freedom is a mere virtue signalling trope.