The politics of Ken Loach: Some questions for Labour

Geoffrey M. Hodgson

Ken Loach was a prominent celebrity at the 2017 Labour Party conference, being photographed in the main conference hall and elsewhere in close proximity to Jeremy Corbyn. But it seems that Loach was not then a member of the Labour Party. Instead he was a recent founder of a rival political party – Left Unity – which was set up to oppose Labour.

This is not a personal attack on Loach. Generally, he is a dignified and caring person. He is entitled to his views, but they are dogmatic and impractical. The question is why Labour now welcomes with open arms a member of a rival political party, with views far more extreme than those that Labour has traditionally professed.

What does Loach’s invitation tell us about the state of the Labour Party today? We need to look at his political views. We need to understand the politics of a celebrity that Labour now chooses to put on public display.

Ken Loach’s contributions to film and to public debate

Loach is a brilliant film director and his work has rightly received global recognition. Two of his films received the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. He has also received BAFTA awards.

His best work shows us in moving, dramatic detail how working class people can be trapped by the system, suffering poverty and the tragic loss of their human potential. Such were the personal and emotional stories in Cathy Come Home (1966), Poor Cow (1967), Kes (1969), Raining Stones (1993) I, Daniel Blake (2016) and other great films. Loach, with his gritty, realist style has awakened and re-awakened us over decades to the shamefully enduring problems of poverty, inequality, discrimination and exploitation.

Other projects by Loach are different in style. He was to direct Jim Allen’s controversial stage play, Perdition. Allen was a Trotskyist and a close friend of Loach, until his death in 1999. Presented as a courtroom drama, the play dealt with an allegation of collaboration between Hungarian Zionists and the Nazis during the Holocaust. This allegation has been strongly contested by historians.

The play was due to open at the Royal Court Theatre in January 1987, but it was cancelled 36 hours before the opening night. This same claim of Zionist-Nazi collaboration, citing the same contested sources, was repeated more recently by Ken Livingstone and it led to his suspension from the Labour Party.

From gritty realism to unrealistic politics

In contrast to the gritty realism of his working class dramas, Loach takes a less realistic line when it comes to history.

For example, Land and Freedom (1995) is set in the Spanish Civil War. The script was written by Allen. Scenes in Land and Freedom depict an ideological battle within the Republican camp. The Communist Party opposes others on the left, including anarchists and revolutionary socialists.

Against the Communist Party, Allen and Loach took the side of the revolutionary socialists calling for a socialist revolution and for the seizure of the land by the peasants. This unrealistic ultra-leftism mars the film. It brushes aside the argument that General Franco’s insurrectionary fascism would have been best fought by the broadest possible popular front, from liberals to communists.

A similar unrealism appears in The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006). The script was written by Paul Laverty. The film is set in Ireland in the period 1919-1923. It depicts the struggle for independence and the subsequent civil war.

Again there is a sequence where key characters discuss their strategic options. Again full-blooded socialism is mooted as the only way of liberating the country, from poverty and from British tyranny.

But a socialist revolution in Ireland in 1919-23 was even less likely than one in the 1930s in Spain. Ireland was a country of small tenant farmers. It had little urban concentration or industrial development. The small urban working class was not as well organised as in Britain. Socialism had a tiny following.

A socialist revolution in these circumstances was a fantasy of the film’s director and its script writer. Again the insertion of unrealistic revolutionary socialist preaching spoils the film.

Left Unity

Left Unity founded in 2013 when film director Loach appealed for a new party to replace the Labour Party. In March 2014 Loach condemned Labour for following other parties by upholding “the importance of the market economy”. Like other governments, Labour “cuts back on public enterprise and prioritises the interests of big corporations and private companies”. Loach continued:

“The demands of the competitive market are remorseless: reduce the cost of labour; privatise everything; remove protection from working people, and maintain a pool of unemployed to discipline those lucky enough to have a job. Trade unions are to be obstructed while the wealthy are courted in the hope that they will find a pliant, flexible workforce that is easy to exploit. … Labour’s … fundamental stance is limited by the same imperative: profit comes before all else. … The Labour party is part of the problem, not the solution.”

Loach called on true socialists to abandon Labour and join Left Unity. More than 10,000 people supported Loach’s appeal. In 2014, the party had 2,000 members and 70 branches across Britain.

Left Unity put up ten candidates in the 2015 general election, to stand against prominent Labour figures including Andy Burnham and Harriet Harman. Left Unity also contested some local elections. There is an unintentional irony in the u-word in its name.

Rejecting social democracy

At the launch of his party’s manifesto, Loach said that Left Unity is “against the logic of the market” which he believed had “failed in every respect”.

Loach decisively rejected social democracy. Referring to Labour and other similar parties, he said that “they’re mainly social democrat parties that think you can manipulate the markets to the advantage of ordinary people”.

For Loach, such manipulation is impossible: “The market demands cheap labour, it demands labour that can be turned on and off like a tap, zero-hours contracts, short-term contracts, agency work.” For him, the market offers us no other option. Hence social-democratic reformism and Keynesian intervention are both fatally flawed.

Nationalising the supermarkets

The 2014 Constitution of Left Unity supported a mixed economy, as a transitional arrangement within an over-arching national plan. But in its 2015 General Election Manifesto, Left Unity took a much more extreme line, reflecting Loach’s absolutist anti-market views:

“We need an economy run democratically … This means the principle of common ownership of all natural resources and means of producing wealth, and an end to the dominance of private financial interests such as the City of London over the economy. We stand for ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’. … We are for public ownership of the banking system, as well as all essential public utilities including transport, telecoms, energy and water companies, and the supermarkets.”

Note here the common ownership of all “means of producing wealth”. There are no exceptions. Everything, from banks to supermarkets, would be publicly owned. Marx would have liked that.

Lenin would have also liked the suggestion that this fully planned economy should be run democratically. Lenin argued this in his State and Revolution in 1917. But as soon as his Bolsheviks came to power they had to abandon the idea. Such ultra-democracy is totally impractical.

A quick leap to the higher phase of communism

But Marx might have criticised the Labour Unity Manifesto’s conflation of long and short-term aims. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx wrote that “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” could apply only in

“a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour … and … after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly”

By contrast, Loach and Left and Unity put “to each according to their needs” alongside immediate aims in an election manifesto. It seems that they wanted to leap to “a higher phase of communism” right away.

Loach and Left Unity now want to abolish all markets and all private ownership of the means of production. This went much further than Corbyn and his team, who have argued for a “mixed economy”. But Corbyn’s embrace of Loach and his views might suggest that they share the long-term view that all markets and private enterprise should be abolished.

Even in Marxist terms, the position of Loach and Left Unity on markets is rather crude. Markets have existed for thousands of years. Marx never saw them as the key defining feature of capitalism – instead, for him, it was the system of wage labour. Following Joseph Schumpeter, I would also stress the role of finance.

Resemblances with pro-market economics

But remarkably, the views of Loach and Left Unity replicate some arguments by extreme pro-market economists. Against a majority view, economists such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek argued that a mixed economy cannot work. As von Mises put it in 1949:

“The market economy or capitalism, as it is usually called, and the socialist economy preclude one another. There is no mixture of the two systems possible or thinkable; there is no such thing as a mixed economy, a system that would be in part capitalist and in part socialist.”

Left Unity seems to follow the same logic as these uncompromising, pro-market economists. By contrast, many economists accept that there is a case for some judicious state regulation and intervention in a market economy, to deal with problems such as externalities and market instability.

In my book Conceptualizing Capitalism I go further, to argue that the state is necessary to part-constitute the legal framework of a capitalist economy. Hence some state intervention in a market economy is unavoidable. Given this, the practical question for progressives is where and how it should intervene. The literature on varieties of capitalism shows that many different outcomes are possible within capitalism, and defects such as inequality can be significantly diminished.

In particular, Loach and Left Unity overlook the successes of social democracy, particularly in Northern Europe. During the twentieth century they have built up strong welfare states, redistributed some wealth and regulated markets.

Of course, there have been strong and sustained attempts to reverse these achievements. But it is much more realistic to defend social-democratic gains against the free-marketeers than to urge a quick leap to the higher phase of communism.

Against NATO – for a boycott of Israel

The foreign policy of Left Unity is “anti-imperialist”. Like Corbyn, it calls for Britain to quit NATO. But unlike Corbyn, Left Unity does not support Brexit.

Left Unity calls for “a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it complies with its obligations under international law”. It does not call for boycotts or sanctions against other countries that break international law, such as Russia and North Korea, among others.

Loach supports the boycott of Israel, calling it an “apartheid regime”. Before his election as leader, Corbyn also pushed for boycotts of Israel. This selective targeting of Israel now seems a widespread opinion among Labour members, but it is not official party policy.

Rather than accepting that anti-Semitism as a problem within Labour, Loach argues that the claims are false: those that raise the issue are trying to undermine Corbyn’s leadership.

Loach is also noted for his support of the controversial founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange. It has been alleged that Wikileaks has received support from Russian agents, and that it acted to destabilise the candidacy of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election.

Supporting ISIS

Another remarkable incident tells us not so much about Loach, but about some of the people who join Left Unity.

In a 2014 conference of Left Unity, a minority proposed support for the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). True to their Leninist credentials, they argued that the left “has to acknowledge and accept the widespread call for a Caliphate among Muslims as valid and an authentic expression of their emancipatory, anti-imperialist aspirations.” They supported ISIS as a “stabilising force” with “progressive potential”.

The motion was heavily defeated. Supporting ISIS is not Left Unity policy. But the fact that anyone could make such a proposal, particularly while describing themselves as left and socialist, is deeply shocking. As Benjamin Jones argued: “this is just the latest flirtation in a long courtship between elements of the British far left and the Islamist far right.”

A warm welcome

In the 2015 General Election, Left Unity’s parliamentary candidates received a pitiful average of 288 votes – all losing their deposits. Later that year, after Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, Left Unity voted against affiliation to the Labour Party but resolved not to put up any more candidates against Labour.

Because of Corbyn’s leadership victory, several hundred members resigned from Left Unity and joined Labour. Left Unity is now a depleted party, without a viable independent strategy.

It seems that Labour is now welcoming their members, ignoring their extremist and unrealistic views and their fervent opposition to social-democratic reform. This is a suspicious unity of a dubious left.

1 October 2017

Minor edits – 3, 5 Oct 2017

This book elaborates on some of the political issues raised in this blog:

Published by University of Chicago Press in January 2018

Bibliography                                

Cohen, Nick (2007) What’s Left? How the Left Lost its Way (London and New York: Harper).

Hodgson, Geoffrey M. (2015) Conceptualizing Capitalism: Institutions, Evolution, Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Hodgson, Geoffrey M. (2017) Wrong Turnings: How the Left Got Lost (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

Mises, Ludwig von (1949) Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (London and New Haven: William Hodge and Yale University Press).

Rich, Dave (2016) The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism (London: Biteback).