There’s a line in Christopher Hill’s The Experience of Defeat, his masterly portrait of dejected radicals after the English Revolution, about the potential uses of political losses. According to Hill, defeat can work to force ideologues to confront the insufficiency of their beliefs and organizational systems and search for new ways to continue their cause. In short, movements that lose are forced to spend a lot of time recriminating.

The resurgence of the electoral left in the West that began with Syriza’s victory in Greece and saw socialists mount serious bids for government in the UK and the United States has since faced its own experience of defeat, followed by the grim years of the pandemic. Learning from these defeats is now the essential but daunting task, and one that can only be accomplished through sharing and evaluating a huge range of perspectives on what went right and what went wrong in the Left’s latest push for power.

Oly Durose’s Suburban Socialism (or Barbarism) offers us one such perspective on the British Labour Party’s 2019 election defeat. Durose, a mid-twenties Labour activist and political staffer, contested the suburban and staunchly Conservative seat of Brentwood and Ongar in 2019.