Since the onset of the 2008 economic crisis, left-wing politics in Britain, despite some initial optimism, has struggled to contest neoliberal ideology and the pursuit of an austerity agenda. As part of this struggle, however, a number of significant new voices have emerged which, taken together, could be seen as a partial reorientation of the discourses, objectives and forms of organisation shaping the trajectory of British left politics. In this paper, we examine, from a feminist perspective, three key, recently emergent, sites of anti-austerity activism – namely, Left Unity, the People’s Assembly and Occupy – in order to explore to what extent and in what ways the traditional British left is in the process of transforming itself. More specifically, we seek to discover whether, as some have claimed, the traditional left it is exhibiting a new found amenability to anarchism. In the paper, we argue that although we find a number of fruitful points of contact between anarchists and the traditional (socialist) left – as well as attempts in some socialist spaces to cultivate more democratic and participatory modes of activism – the ideological and organisational gulf between anarchism and the traditional left remains significant, at least in a UK context. We go on to suggest that if we are seeing a mutation of the left at present it concerns a noticeable (if partial and contested) ‘feminist turn’ in terms of the composition, ideas and practices of Left Unity, the People’s Assembly and Occupy LSX. In so doing, we highlight the importance of feminism (both as a strand of activism and analytical framework) for making sense of contemporary left politics.
