Mapping the Conservative Left: Why Some Socialists Sound Like the Right

Red-brown, Third Way, campist, anti-woke: four tendencies, four remedies, and why Stop the War and the BSW are not the same problem.

Aug 25, 2025

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TL;DR: The conservative left is not one bloc but four converging tendencies, and naming them separately is what makes the phenomenon tractable. Red-brown formations fuse left economics with far-right culture: Sahra Wagenknecht's BSW explicitly contests the electorate with the AfD, dividing workers into national and immigrant; George Galloway's Workers Party pairs nationalisation with opposition to "gender ideology" and a promise to end mass immigration. Third Way social democracy capitulates differently, abandoning systemic change while hardening on immigration and law and order, as Blair's Labour did and Portugal's PS still does, manufacturing the discontent that Chega then harvests. Campism supports any regime that opposes Washington regardless of what it does to its own workers, which is how Stop the War came to treat Ukraine as a proxy war and deny Ukrainian agency altogether. The fourth strand, backlash against "wokism", fragments solidarity into competing individual claims that capitalism absorbs without difficulty. All four grew from the same soil: the post-1991 vacuum, the neoliberal pincer, 2008, deindustrialisation, and a media environment that rewards performance over organisation.

Revised and expanded, August 2026. First published 25 August 2025.

Germany ran the experiment twice, in one country, in the same years, on the same electorate.

In January 2024 Sahra Wagenknecht left Die Linke and founded a party on the proposition that the left’s real problem was cultural: too much immigration, too much climate policy, too much of what she calls “lifestyle leftism”. Die Linke took the opposite line, refused to trade anti-racism for votes, and gained 60,000 new members doing it. Two strategies, one country, results you can count.

That settles one question. It does not settle four, and the reason is that “the conservative left” has become a single label for four different formations. They have different social bases, different causes, and different points of vulnerability. Wagenknecht’s BSW and Keir Starmer’s Labour are not the same object. Neither is the Stop the War Coalition, and neither is the layer of activists who have decided that anti-racism and trans liberation are a distraction from class. Each of them ends up somewhere the right finds useful. Only one of them got there by trying.

The error is treating the destination as the diagnosis. It produces the wrong remedy every time: arguments calibrated for a Third Way retreat aimed at a red-brown project that has already decided, arguments about geopolitics aimed at people whose actual objection is to trans people existing. What follows is a taxonomy, and then the test that tells the four apart.

1. Red-brown: the tendency that means it

The most dangerous form is the one that is deliberate.

Wagenknecht’s Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, founded in 2024, is the paradigm. It combines conventional left positions on inequality and social spending with hard restriction on immigration, scepticism about the green transition, and cultural traditionalism. The strategy is not concealed. Wagenknecht has said she intends to contest the electorate with the far right, using arguments she concedes are very similar to the AfD’s. The party demands limits on immigration in order to “protect local workers and national cultural cohesion”. It treats Green transition policy as a threat to traditional industry. It positions itself against what it calls lifestyle leftism, which is the polite name for opposition to LGBTQ+ rights and to anti-racist organising.

The political content is a division of the working class into national workers and immigrant workers, which is to say an alliance with employers against part of the class. Red Mole traced the full arc of that manoeuvre, from Gordon Brown’s “British jobs for British workers” through to the BSW, in From ‘British Jobs’ to BSW. The piece calls Germany a controlled experiment the fortress left lost, and that is the right description.

Britain has its own version. George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain pairs economic populism with cultural reaction: nationalisation alongside opposition to “gender ideology” and a promise to end mass immigration, with transgender identity dismissed as fashionable nonsense and “traditional family values” offered in its place. The 2024 manifesto put both halves on the same page. Galloway’s move to Russia has not changed the formula, and the Workers Party’s role in the Odesa commemoration shows how the cultural politics and the geopolitical alignment travel together.

Not every party that carries the name belongs in this box, and the distinction matters. The Belgian PTB is regularly held up to British audiences as a model of working-class electoral politics. From Ceaușescu to Corbyn sets out why that recommendation should be resisted on its own terms, which are not Wagenknecht’s terms.

Red-brown formations are not confused. They have made a calculation about where votes are and what they are prepared to trade for them. Arguing with them about evidence is beside the point, because they are not mistaken about the evidence. What defeats them is the demonstration that the trade does not pay, which is precisely what Die Linke’s membership figures provide.

2. Third Way: the tendency that stopped trying

The second strand looks nothing like the first and arrives in a similar place.

Tony Blair’s governments pioneered the model: acceptance of neoliberal economics combined with authoritarian positions on policing and immigration. Detention without trial, expanded deportations, “British values” deployed in terms the Conservatives could have written. This was not drift. It was triangulation pursued as strategy, and it ended by legitimising the positions it was triangulating against.

Portugal supplies the contemporary case, and it is the clearest one in Europe. The Socialist Party governed as a neoliberal party, hollowed out public services, and hardened steadily on immigration and policing. The discontent that produced was then harvested by somebody else: Chega broke through to roughly a fifth of the vote. Creeping Fascism in Portugal Today traces the sequence from the collapse of the Geringonça to that breakthrough, and treats it as a warning for Britain rather than a curiosity.

The radical left’s own version of this failure has its own literature. How Podemos and Sumar’s Collapse Reveals the Strategic Dead End of the ‘Conservative Left’ sets out what happens when a formation built on anti-establishment energy converts itself into a governing partner without building anything outside parliament.

Gramsci called the mechanism transformism: the absorption of potentially oppositional forces into the existing order. The conservatism here is not in adopting far-right positions wholesale. It is in the defensive crouch, the acceptance that capitalism is permanent, and the increasingly desperate appeals to tradition and national identity that follow from having nothing else to offer. What defeats this tendency is not argument at all. It is the existence of a formation to its left that can actually hold people, which is why the failures of the radical left and the drift of social democracy are the same story told from two ends.

3. Campism: the tendency that keeps the vocabulary

The third strand is the one that still sounds most like the left, because it has kept every word.

Campism organises politics around the relation to Washington. Any regime or movement that opposes American power is credited, whatever it does to the people who live under it. Cold War campism did this with Moscow. Contemporary campism does it with Russia, with China, with the Islamic Republic, and did it with Assad for a decade.

Britain’s Stop the War Coalition is the working example. Its 2023 AGM resolution gives the Russian invasion three words of condemnation and NATO an entire explanatory clause. It opposes arms to Ukraine on the grounds that weapons prolong the conflict, and it opposes sanctions on Russia as collective punishment, which between them exhaust every coercive measure available and leave only a negotiated settlement on the aggressor’s terms. Stop the War’s Ukraine Betrayal documents the curation that makes this possible: for Palestine the Coalition platforms the Palestinian Ambassador, for Ukraine it platforms a pacifist whose organisation may have fewer than a handful of active members, and it has not found room for either Ukrainian trade union federation.

The convergence with the Communist Party of Britain runs through the same channels. Taiwan Is Not Israel shows the Morning Star reproducing Beijing’s “breakaway province” formula, complete with the settler-colonial vocabulary borrowed from Palestine solidarity and pointed at 23 million people. On Iran the same reflex produced the campist playbook: question the scale, attribute the agency to foreign powers, find a reactionary element and treat it as representative, then frame solidarity as support for intervention. When up to 100,000 people marched in Munich in February 2026, sections of the online left concluded that a protest the German state tolerates must serve German interests, and Woman, Life, Freedom was written off as Kurdish separatism. Jina Mahsa Amini was Kurdish.

Campism has a factual method as well as a political one, and it is worth naming because it is falsifiable. Chris Nineham’s March 2015 review for Stop the War put the Odesa death toll at “a minimum of 48, many hundreds according to locals”. The 2 May Civic Investigation Group spent a decade reconstructing that day and the European Court of Human Rights ratified its outline in March 2025. The figure has never been withdrawn. The full record is here.

The theoretical roots go deeper than the current conjuncture, and The Truncated Canon makes the case that they were laid by an editorial decision in 1942: a canon that taught generations to defend the workers’ state while omitting the texts in which Trotsky argued that national self-determination was itself a weapon against the bureaucracy.

Campism’s online subculture is the part most visible to anyone under thirty. Digital neo-Stalinism substitutes aesthetic nostalgia for analysis and is largely disconnected from any organisation that could correct it. Francisco Louçã warned about this before it arrived at scale, and his warning came true in Portugal first.

What defeats campism is not a better geopolitical argument. It is the voice of the people it claims to speak for, which is why handing the argument to Ukrainian and Russian socialists does more damage to the position than any amount of Western commentary.

4. Anti-woke: the tendency that thinks it is winning back the class

The fourth strand is the one most often misdescribed, in both directions.

Fighting oppression on the basis of race or gender is not a deviation from socialist politics. Approaches that atomise those struggles, detach them from class analysis and reduce them to individual claims are a different matter, and they are genuinely compatible with capitalism. A capitalism with more diverse executives remains capitalism. Representation inside existing institutions, pursued as an end, leaves the institutions intact.

The trouble is that the critique has been picked up and used for something else. In Britain it has become the route by which anti-trans politics entered the socialist mainstream. How Trans-Exclusion Became the Conservative Left’s Fifth Column follows that entry through Counterfire and into Your Party, and Trans Liberation, Defined answers the challenge that the position cannot be stated concretely.

The backlash has a constituency, and pretending otherwise has cost the left dearly. How the ‘Manosphere’ Is Winning Young Men takes the recruitment of young men seriously as an organising problem rather than a moral one, and draws the lesson from Chega’s rise: liberal individualism has no answer, because the manosphere is offering collective belonging and liberalism is offering better individual choices. Reform’s Perfect Crime makes the parallel argument about working-class women, whom the left keeps assuming it already has.

What defeats this tendency is not denunciation. It is the thing the manosphere is imitating: an organisation that offers people something to belong to and something to do.

The test that separates them

Four tendencies, one label, and a diagnostic that tells them apart in a single question.

Ask what each does when working people rise against a government that Washington opposes.

The red-brown formation is indifferent. Its politics are domestic and cultural, and Iranian oil workers are not part of its electoral calculation either way. The Third Way formation issues a statement about human rights and changes nothing about its policy on arms exports. The campist formation questions the scale of the protests, attributes them to foreign agitation, and counsels silence. The anti-woke formation is not looking, because the question is filed under identity.

That is why the remedies differ. Against red-brown politics, evidence that the trade does not pay. Against Third Way capitulation, a formation to its left that can hold people. Against campism, the testimony of the people it speaks over. Against the anti-woke turn, an organisation worth belonging to.

Get the diagnosis wrong and you spend an evening arguing about NATO with someone whose actual position is about trans people, or about Ukrainian history with someone who has simply stopped believing anything can change.

Where they converge

The distinctions hold analytically. They dissolve at the point of action, which is the reason the single label persists.

In February 2023 the Rage Against the War Machine rally at the Lincoln Memorial brought together Ron Paul, Tulsi Gabbard, Jill Stein and the self-described patriotic socialists, with Russian flags in the crowd and Tucker Carlson promoting it. The people on that platform had arrived from different places. They agreed on the destination.

Convergence is the evidence that the four tendencies are worth grouping. It is not evidence that they are one thing, and the moment you treat it as such you lose the ability to do anything about any of them.

Where it came from

None of this emerged from nowhere, and the material history is the part most often skipped.

The collapse of the Soviet Union removed a model without replacing it, and left a generation of socialists with a critique and no alternative. The neoliberal offensive from the 1980s created a pincer: appear too radical and face marginalisation, moderate and become indistinguishable. 2008 produced mass discontent at exactly the moment the organisations that might have channelled it were weakest, and the far right proved better placed to collect. Deindustrialisation dissolved the communities in which class identity had been reproduced without conscious effort. Social media then supplied a substitute form of political participation that rewards performance and requires no organisation at all.

Fighting Campism Requires Understanding National Pathways makes the case that these roots are national rather than general, and that Germany, Portugal, the Spanish state and the United States each produced their own route into the same politics. That is the correct level of analysis, and it is a standing correction to any account, including the shorter version above, that treats the conservative left as a single European phenomenon with a single cause.

What follows

The four tendencies are not equally reachable, and treating them as one bloc guarantees that the effort goes to the wrong places.

The people who need arguing with are not the ones who have already made the trade. They are the far larger number who have drifted toward one of these positions without deciding anything: who repeat a campist line because it is the only anti-war position they have heard stated confidently, or who have concluded that anti-racism is a middle-class enthusiasm because nobody in their workplace has made the opposite case. That layer is not lost. It is unorganised, which is a different problem with a different solution.

The solution is not a better line. It is the thing every one of these tendencies is a substitute for: an organisation that connects the fight against racism, sexism and national oppression to the fight against exploitation, in the same rooms, on the same days, with the same people. Die Linke did not add 60,000 members by winning an argument about immigration. It added them by refusing to make the trade and being visibly there when it mattered.

The conservative left is what fills the space where that organisation should be. Naming its four forms accurately is the beginning of taking the space back.

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