Left politics and popular culture in Britain: From left-wing populism to ‘popular leftism’
| Author | Jonathan Dean |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0263395720960661 |
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395720960661
Politics
2023, Vol. 43(1) 3 –17
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0263395720960661
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
Left politics and popular culture
in Britain: From left-wing
populism to ‘popular leftism’
Jonathan Dean
University of Leeds, UK
Abstract
This article analyses the cultural traction and media visibility yielded by left-wing ideas and people
during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as British Labour Party leader (2015–2019), while also offering
some more general reflections on the relationship between left politics and popular culture. I
begin by noting that the cultural and media aspects of Corbynism have largely been neglected in
the scholarly literature. I then go on to caution against the temptation of subsuming the cultural
aspects of Corbyn-era left politics under the label of ‘left-wing populism’. Instead, I defend a
conception of ‘popular leftism’ as distinct from ‘left-wing populism’, via an engagement with Stuart
Hall’s classic essay ‘Notes on Deconstructing the Popular’, as well as Sarah Banet-Wesier’s recent
work on popular feminism. The second half of the article maps key features of ‘popular leftism’ as
a distinct cultural/political formation that has emerged ‘in and against’ neoliberalism. In particular,
it focuses on media visibility, affective tenor, and tactical and intellectual dynamics. While popular
leftism’s entanglement with neoliberalism has proved problematic for its transformative capacity,
I nonetheless conclude that its emergence is testament to the importance of popular cultural
production and consumption in shaping recent iterations of left politics in Britain.
Keywords
labour party, left politics, neoliberalism, popular culture, populism
Received: 4th May 2020; Revised version received: 3rd July 2020; Accepted: 25th August 2020
In 2018, the left-wing journalist and commentator Ash Sarkar appeared on ITV’s flagship
daytime show Good Morning Britain and – during a tetchy exchange in which host Piers
Morgan, addressing Sarkar, made reference to ‘your hero Obama’ – retorted that Obama
was not her hero as she is ‘literally a communist’. Clips of this incident were soon circu-
lated across a range of media platforms, left-wing media outlet Novara began selling
T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan ‘Literally a Communist’, and Sarkar herself went on
to be interviewed by a number of media outlets – most famously Teen Vogue – about the
contemporary relevance of communist thought. The incident, which coincided with the
height of ‘Corbynism’ (the movement surrounding left-wing former Labour leader Jeremy
Corresponding author:
Jonathan Dean, School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.
Email: ipijde@leeds.ac.uk
960661POL0010.1177/0263395720960661PoliticsDean
research-article2020
Article
To continue reading
Request your trial