Monument to political thinker Machiavelli. Photo: lindasaurus. Flickr. Creative Commons.In ‘The Discourses’, the infamously astute republican thinker Niccolo Machiavelli argued that the strength and vitality of the Roman Republic, compared to other republics, lay in the fact that it successfully institutionalised the inevitable antagonism between the people and the nobles. Thus, each held the threat posed to the republic by the other in check, and republican liberty was preserved. Machiavelli mercilessly mocked the pieties of republican thinkers who imagined a harmonious transcendence of this antagonism. He recognised that a sustainable balance of opposing forces could produce something stronger and more resilient than efforts at harmonious unity could realistically hope to achieve.
Machiavelli’s insight is one that the Labour Party, in the midst of its current travails, would do well to remember. The history of the Labour Party is also one of antagonism between opposed forces. Simplifying somewhat, we can see the current implosion as a recurrence of a tension that has structured the history of the Party from its inception. This tension plays out between a Left that is focused on Labour as a transformative social movement, and a Right that is focused on the acquisition of Parliamentary power (with plenty of folk in between). When the Party functions at its best, the role of the Left is to keep the Right honest, to block its tendency to surrender too much in its electoral pursuit of power, to prioritize short-term tactics over long-term strategy. The role of the Right is to keep the Left focused on the point that principle is impotent in the absence of power, that sacrificing electoral success (or deluding yourself concerning the prospects of such success) for ideological reasons surrenders the field to an enemy who will not advance the interests of the people that the Labour Party is meant to serve. There are, sadly, relatively few points in its fractious recent history in which the organisation of the Labour Party has successfully institutionalized this antagonism. Yet this institutionalisation is vital to its ability to succeed as a political party.
