Written by Jonathan Rutherford, Future of the Left
‘Instead of gazing idly into the obscure distance’, let us ‘look calmly around us, for a little, on the perplexed scene where we stand.’
Thomas Carlyle, Signs of the Times, 1829
We are living in the aftermath of the liberal market order which has been the governing consensus for over three decades. Its ideology and policy solutions no longer work in the emerging new world order characterised by great power rivalry and the rise of China. Its style of government, technocratic and incremental, has only reinforced the failing status quo in the West. In the United Kingdom, the Labour and Conservative parties which upheld this consensus are now trapped in the past. Their vote share is collapsing. A generation of politicians, schooled in a managerial politics, is unable to enact the change the country needs. They flounder in an unfamiliar and threatening world as the old multinational British state fragments.
Britain led the world in liberalising its national economy, deregulating the financial markets in 1986, and opening up to global flows of capital. In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organisation. With its vast pool of cheap labour, the manufacturers of western capitalist economies transferred their investments and factory production to the Guangdong Province and the Yangtze River Delta. The effects of globalisation lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty while laying waste to the old industrial heartlands of American and Britain. President Trump and the rising power of China emphatically brought liberal globalisation to an end. The so-called liberal rules-based order so celebrated by the Financial Times and The Economist is an illusion.
The war in Ukraine, and now the energy crisis caused by the Iran war have exposed Britain’s continuing dependence on global supply chains and its vulnerability to global capital flows. For Britain, indebted to the bond markets, there are no easy routes to national economic recovery and no political party willing to make the case for them.
We can identify political, economic and cultural elements of this change, but we do not yet have a way of describing the emerging world we are living in.
Post-industrial, postmodern, post-Marxist, post-liberal: these explanatory frameworks do not describe what is here now and shaping the future. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers calls this kind of liminal state a ‘boundary situation’, which pushes us to the margins of our living experience and forces into consciousness the open-endedness and instability of the world.
Thinking about the aftermath
The idea of aftermath is to exit the intellectual stagnation and political inertia left in the wake of the liberal market order and work on the threshold of what is passing into history, what it has left behind, and what this might portend. And to undertake this work while newly emerging social relations, institutional forms and political realities have yet to acquire commonly accepted, intelligible meanings.
The pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty (1931-2007) would argue that such an undertaking is a contest between an entrenched vocabulary, which has lost its usefulness, and a half formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things. In other words, cultural change precedes political change.1
Rorty is something of a liberal individualist whereas Raymond Williams (1921-1988) is a socialist and materialist and argues that this meaning coming into existence is collective and social. Williams explores what he calls our ‘living presence’ or ‘present being’. He tries to put himself inside social and cultural formations as they are unfolding. He is undertaking a kind of hermeneutics of culture which he describes as ‘a whole way of life’. There is no privileged vantage point from which to view the world with objectivity. We as individuals are subjects of our own histories which cannot be escaped. We are always already within and inside, struggling to make sense of an opaque world.
His best-known attempt to explain this cultural experience is his essay, ‘Structures of Feeling’ (1977).2 What is it like to live in a moment of cultural change and emergent meaning? Williams argues that the interregnum between the old and the not yet born is not marked by silence or by absence. Rather it is, ‘a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange.’
Williams calls this emergent property a ‘structure of feeling’. ‘Structures of feeling’ are made up of ‘impulse, tone, restraint’. They consist of the emotional elements of consciousness and relationships, ‘not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought’. ‘These are collective experiences in process, not yet taken to be social but understood as private, idiosyncratic even isolating experiences.’ They are on the edge of semantic formation. Although they are not fully realised or articulated they nonetheless exert pressure and set effective limits on experience and action.
The place where we live
Structures of feeling emerge in the ‘watershed’ between the individual and the social world. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) describes this as ‘the place where we live’, the intermediate area of experience which keeps inner and outer, subjective and objectively perceived realities separate yet interrelated.3 In Modern Tragedy (1979), Williams writes of how the deepest structures of the social order are incorporated into individuals. Social breakdown is lived and known in direct personal experience; ‘a disintegrating society extends its process into individual lives’. Structures of feeling have a powerful impact on the political process and yet they remain intangible and usually beyond the grasp of mainstream political discourse. Instead, they find expression in metaphor, allegory and the aesthetic life of playing, dreaming, thinking and feeling.
A politics that relies on positivism and the mobilising of empiricism, statistics and the rationality of ‘arguing better’, or with greater precision, will fail to make a connection. It presumes that language represents reality. Metaphor and allegory are useless, because they are not literal, but related to the imagination. This kind of politics is unable to recognise the way in which emotion resonates amongst people and shapes and defines public moods and social perception.
The left’s dominant traditions have a tendency to this positivism which is born out of a misplaced scientism, a blind faith in rationality and a belief, related to Christian eschatology, that history is governed by a law that moves inexorably towards the improvement of humanity. It has led the contemporary left to embrace some of the worst aspects of modernity - its instrumentalism, top-down managerialism, technocratic notions of progress, and the cultural aridity of utilitarianism, in which language is dissociated from feeling.
Populism, by contrast, gives political form to structures of feeling, creating a collective experience of ‘us’ against ‘them’. The rapid and disorderly change wrought on the country by the effects of globalisation caused a deep sense of loss for many – the loss of the familiar, of stability, of inherited ways of life, which in turn must be grieved for. The sociologist Peter Marris (1927-2007) argues that the more nakedly people are exposed to the anxieties of change, the more uncompromisingly they will seek to invent a collective identification where none has existed and project their internal conflict upon society in these terms.4
The revolt against change
Over a period of three decades, there has been a structural and sociological transformation of social institutions which has undermined the social interdependence of individuals. Regular work and marriage which once provided stability and a pathway into adulthood have declined. The sociologist Norbert Elias writes that what shapes, binds and gives meaning to an individual’s life is ‘the ineradicable connection between his desires and behaviours and those of other people, of the living, the dead, and even in a certain sense the unborn’.5 People can only live harmoniously together if their socially formed needs and goals as individuals can find a high level of fulfilment.
The level of fulfilment of these needs can be judged by a society’s capacity to reproduce itself and to pass on its social norms and values to each new generation. While a majority of individuals report well-being in their private lives, British society does not fare well.6 Birth rates have fallen to record lows7 while about 1 in 5 children and young people aged 8-25 have a probable mental disorder.8 The impact of smart phones, diets made up of ultra-processed food, the loss of strong family bonds, and the absence of a spiritual life that provides a moral framework have contributed to a decline in the wellbeing of children and young people.9 A mass survey by Our Future Health found 1 in 6 respondents reporting that they have been diagnosed with depression at some point in their lifetime and 1 in 7 with anxiety. In England the numbers of people taking anti-depressants has risen for six years to 8.7 million.10 Across the UK twice as many women as men are using them.11
The national mood is both angry and melancholic. The sense that something of collective value has been lost, be it a familiar past, a promised future, a sense of belonging or broader purpose in life, has been ignored or disparaged by the mainstream political parties. Their denial of loss, their refusal to mourn, their erasure of political conflict, has shattered their relationship with the electorate. For the great majority of people, politics is about the way they understand their own lives, family traditions, and personal ties. This emotional response begins with the question, ‘‘Where do people like me fit in?’’ And then, ‘‘Which party is for people like us?’’12 Large parts of the electorate no longer know the answers to these two questions.
Groundwork for a politics of the common ground
Future of the Left has set itself the task of researching, debating and communicating ideas about the nature of the emerging political settlement and the radically changing, disrupted society that is giving birth to it. It is committed to developing a politics out of which a national cross class, multi-ethnic and patriotic coalition can be built around the common ground to reconstruct the national economy and revive the fortunes of the country to the benefit of all.
Can we conceive of a way of understanding the structures of feeling of the aftermath, both in their subjective and objective forms, around culture, our human selves, technological revolution and communications, philosophy, art, the threat of war? And can we do this by grounding our analysis in the material realities of a failing economy, class conflict, the age and ethnic demographic transformation of society, the depletion of its public realm, the loss of trust in its institutions, and the growing threats of energy insecurity and war?
Society lacks the institutions to ask these kinds of systemic questions and create out of them a political narrative and programme of government. The academic life of universities has become siloed into over-specialised, self-referential forms of knowledge. Think tanks follow a narrow remit of policy making. The ambition of Future of the Left is to evolve into a researching, communicating and convening organisation that can take on the groundwork of economic, political and cultural for a new period and national revival.
Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity, Cambridge University Press, 1989
Raymond Williams, ‘Structures of Feeling’, Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, 1977
Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality, Pelican Books, 1988
Peter Marris, Loss and Change, Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1987
Norbert Elias, A Society of Individuals, Continuum, 1991
ONS, UK ‘Measures of National Wellbeing’ Dashboard, 2025, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/articles/ukmeasuresofnationalwellbeing/dashboard
How is the fertility rate changing in England and Wales? ONS, 28 October, 2024, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/conceptionandfertilityrates/articles/howisthefertilityratechanginginenglandandwales/2024-10-28
Mental Health of Children and Young People in England 2023, NHS, https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/mental-health-of-children-and-young-people-in-england/2023-wave-4-follow-up
The Global Mind Health in 2025 report, Sapien Labs, https://sapienlabs.org/whats_new/the-global-mind-health-in-2025-report/
NHS Releases 2023/4 mental health medicines statistics for England, https://media.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/press-releases/5171d616-95ea-4282-959b-15f8bfed6a0f/nhs-releases-2023-24-mental-health-medicines-statistics-for-england
Our Future Health, Revealed: what our data says about the UKs mental health, https://ourfuturehealth.org.uk/news/2025-mental-health-statistics/
Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists , Princeton University Press, 2016