Left Unity

This work outlines a strategy for how the contemporary left should build progressive alliances. It takes a drawing lessons from history approach, focusing especially on the exchanges of ideas that took place among European progressive movements and authors between WW1 and WW2. These exchanges bridged ideological and partisan divides between socialists and liberals of various stripes, and included prominent British figurese.g., John Maynard Keynes, Clement Attlee, John A. Hobson, G.D.H. Cole, and Ramsay MacDonald as well as their contemporaries in Austria, the Benelux, and Weimar Germany. This work seeks to connect these interwar debates to the questions raised by the current crisis in social democracy, and the somewhat contrasting backdrop this provides to the Labour partys recent electoral and polling positions. Rather than letting the relationship between radicals and moderates on the left in current political discourse be defined by the reformist or revolutionary nature of their aims, the work makes the case for todays social democrats to adopt a cross-party and cross-class unity strategy.