In May this year, Tony Blair's wrote an article in the New Statesman, saying that "Without total change, Labour will die." It's something that he is well qualified to speak about. As the only successful Labour leader in the last half-century, he did a lot of total change - such as replacing Labour's down-to-earth image with sharp suits, replacing the commitment to common ownership of industry with a technocratic, managerial agenda, and laying the groundwork for identity politics in the UK. His article called for the total destruction and rebuilding of the Labour Party. It was, however, a bit light on what form the rebuilding should take, apart from it being "progressive" - he used the adjective eighteen times. Labour are certainly in the dumps at the moment, and they will need a strong narrative and organising principle if they are to refloat. But whilst "progressive" might make for stirring rhetoric, it is not certain there is still enough left in it from which to create a new Labour Party. In fact, market conditions have shifted, and it is not entirely clear what 'progressive' even means any more.
Political "progress", at its most basic, conveys the sense of moving forward, from a compromised past or present towards a better future. Of course, what counts as moving forwards depends on what you value. As with most other political words in constant use, "progress" and "progressive" are messy, emotionally loaded terms that mean what you want them to mean. Progress in technology is undeniable, but progress in society and politics is much more ambiguous, as anyone interested in history can tell you.
Progress, in Labour party terms, is measured by the achievements of political organisation and activism, from trade union representation onwards. Conceptually, "progress" is partly a remnant of Hegelian ideas about history, via Marx, and partly a remnant of the historical left's religious utopianism. More historically - that is, not just in Labour party terms - "progress" in general has referred the changes seen when a traditional, hierarchical, role-based society changes to a liberal, individualist consumer society - universal sufferage, property rights for women, and so on. Technology is often the catalyst for this, expanding the range of what is politically possible - industrialisation and effective contraception, for example.
Nowadays, whilst the Left still uses the "oppressive, hierarchical attitudes" straw man argument, it takes a lot of careful selection of evidence to believe that the UK is still a hierarchical, role-based society. Despite lots of recent worrying developments, legislatively and in social reality people are largely free to determine their identities and run their lives as they will. Also, these worrying illiberal measures - non-crime hate policing, for example - follow directly from Labour's 'progressive' equalities agenda, not right-wing, patrician authoritarianism. The liberal right would ask what more progress is needed beyond the freedom to determine your own life. The woke left might argue that progress must continue until all outcomes are equal, with the necessary social engineering. A non-woke, left-of-centre, 'progressive' strategy would have to be somewhere between those positions. Of course, Labour could always stick with big government, welfare spending, mass immigration and open borders, multiculturalism and identity politics, which is what worked before.
But increasing personal choice is running out of road to provide a "progressive" way forward. There just aren't the oppressive structures stifling personal choice to kick over - not like we used to have. For example, it is still unspeakable heresy, to some people, to say that differences in male and female working patterns are due to differences in the general distribution of attributes and aspirations. But the overwhelming evidence is against that, for example in strictly egalitarian Sweden. Reducing inequality, as a result, has limited future scope as an organising principle. Part of the popular derision for wokeness comes from its selective, expedient anti-reality - how will employment outcomes for, say, people with very low IQs be equal to the highest performers, for example? The irresolvable conflict between individual choice and socially-engineered equity of outcome might well be the rock on which woke eventually comes to grief. The universalised remaking of humanity envisioned by radicals may look like it has come closer, but it rests on an extremely unstable base of divisive collectivist rhetoric. And it is not news that increased material choice does not satisfy all human needs, any more than collectivist equality does. Even though there are no longer the strict confines of the role-based hierarchy, the needs for stability, belonging, relationship and meaning have not withered away with prosperity. If anything, better opportunities and disposable income provide more time to consider their absence in an atomised society: reduced employment and COVID lockdown even more.
Similarly, technology is running out of road as a progressive narrative : More technology will not necessarily lead to more freedom or opportunity. It would be hard to sell an electoral narrative of "Vote for a clean bright future of technology and prosperity." Technological development does not produce the mass employment opportunities that it did in Marx's time. It is more likely, nowadays, to reduce employment. We are already living in the tech-driven future from 1970's science-fiction, and it reveals the biological limits of what is possible. If social media has shown us anything, it is that our primate tendencies for status competition and tribal aggression are not going to be smoothed away by utopian technocracy. For one example, twitter; for another, Jonathan Haidt has highlighted the serious mental health effects on pre-adolescent girls of smartphones and social media.
Progress has historically included the change from repressive authority to accountable government. Despite its brief post-Berlin Wall, post USSR moment, no-one has any enthusiasm for the "social democracy is the end of history" narrative right now. There are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic currently, and the huge developments in surveillance technology are not likely to lead to more freedom. There is nothing about this narrative that the left-of-centre can claim as distinctive goods of the left.
All the signs are that in the UK and elsewhere, the coming challege will be to somehow contain the effects of technological development and economic globalism so that individuals, families, communities, places and society as a whole can cope with the rate of change. As always, this is an will be felt most by those without the resources - not just material, but social, cultural, emotional, and so on - to cushion the blows.
There is currently an air of unreality about the UK's two main parties. However, it is inconceivable that the huge numbers of people that no-one speaks for will remain politically irrelevant forever. A government without credible, electable opposition is not good, and it seems a safe bet that something will happen in the next few years. But for Labour, it is difficult to believe that the 19th century idea of progress is enough to rebuild a 21st century left-of-centre UK political party.