I HALF expect the obscenely ambitious Wes Streeting to grow a beard for Movember. The man who answered the question in 2018 of who he thought would be prime minister a decade on with “I think it will probably be me” latched on to the victory of left Democratic party candidate Zohran Mamdani in New York this month with thinly veiled self-reference.

Mamdani is young, you see, telegenic, good with the media. Streeting might as well have said with typical immodestly, “Gosh, who do you think in my party has those characteristics contrasted to, for argument’s sake, the leaden and sinking Keir Starmer?”

Everyone from the centre-left leftwards wants a bit of Mamdani. Fewer when it comes to the other big left win in recent weeks, Catherine Connolly’s decisive victory to become Irish president.

Most British politicians maintain a rigorous ignorance of politics in Ireland and, for that matter, in our other close neighbour France, where over recent years a sustained advance has been made by the radical left in the form of France in Revolt (La France Insoumise) led by Jean-Luc Melenchon.

That said, maybe we will find Angela Rayner — touted as a possible replacement for Starmer — taking lessons on keepie-uppie in an effort to emulate the new Irish president’s terrific ball control skills which went viral during her lightening campaign that united the left and social movements.

But it is to the US that British politicians generally turn for inspiration — and then it is often with an excessive focus on technique. That was the treasure three decades ago for which one apparatchik after another of the Labour Party and its equivalents in Europe crossed the Atlantic to bring back to Europe from the court of the Clintons’ New Democrats, fresh from making George HW Bush a one-term president in 1992.

The doctrine of triangulation, of a post-ideological politics in keeping with the end of the cold war and even the end of history. Despite the vapidity of one liberal-centre politician after another trying to catch a bit of Mamdani stardust, we are in very different times. Neither his nor Connolly’s radical message can be detached from the success of their campaigns, crucial to which was a sense of insurgency.

It was not just left-of-centre policies or ideological values. The key battlegrounds were where the Establishment — in both its liberal and conservative embodiments — drew the brightest of dividing lines. So it was not only Palestine in general. The Irish government had already been forced to issue strong words of condemnation of Israel. It was over taking sides with the Palestinian struggle itself. That was most apparent in Ireland where Connolly refused to resile from her comments on Palestinian resistance over the years as a leftwing independent in the Irish parliament.

Similarly, her defence of Irish neutrality against a manic ruling-class push to increase arms spending and get Ireland into Nato. In New York, it was Mamdani’s championing of class confrontation in the richest city in the richest country in the world.

The Democrat mainstream can live with modest social programmes but not with a pledge to cap rents, introduce free bus travel and take a state role in selling groceries to cut prices — all to be paid for by a 2 per cent wealth tax.

While brilliantly rebutting the racist campaign against him in ways we can all learn from, Mamdani’s was not a victory for the politics of identity of a Muslim, democratic-socialist. Fighting against Islamophobia and for good redistributive policies are not identities. They are class politics. His campaign won 9 per cent of those who voted Trump last year.

Do we think that was done by identifying all Trump voters with his violent reactionary views or by mocking them as stupid or irredeemable?

That it was done while also refusing to yield a millimetre to bigotry and reaction provides an example of the kind that Labour Cabinet ministers who have gone along with Keir Starmer’s now regretted “island of strangers” speech and smearing of much of Birmingham as anti-semitic cannot follow.

The Irish presidency has a more ceremonial role than does running New York City.

Still, both are a reminder that for the left to advance we need to tap a sense of insurgency, of taking on the Establishment and breaking from the old political constraints and rules. That has been central to the advance of the radical left in France and to hindering Marine Le Pen’s fascists by being the force that truly confronts the Macron regime.

Napoleon famously said that morale is to materiel as three is to one. Hope is in short supply. Any amount should be stewarded, not squandered. Almost unbelievable shenanigans in the process of forming the Your Party left challenge in Britain stand as a most unwanted negative illustration of that.

We must all work on the left to repairing that damage and to trying to draw back together the optimism and enthusiasm that led to 800,000 sign-ups to the project. Another expression of that mass feeling and rejection of the corrupted political system is the growth in Green Party membership to 150,000 as its new leader Zack Polanski promises a left turn and does well in the media against the politics of reaction.

Turning things round and outwards does, though, require of us great seriousness and a preparedness to look with clear eyes at the recent past and previous left surges. What happened to them? Why did they fail and what do we do better?

The Greek radical left party Syriza obtained a much bigger victory than Mamdani or Connolly, and certainly than Polanski, 10 years ago when it won the general election in January 2015. It was able to form a government.

It pledged to rupture with austerity and to fight those imposing it domestically and through the European Union. Hope was incredibly high across the European and North American left.

But within six months there had been the most abject capitulation. That was despite the preparedness of working people to back the government against the forces of austerity as evidenced in an overwhelming referendum result in defiance of the massed ranks of European capital.

To recall this is in no way to prophesy defeat, treachery or what have you from the incoming Mamdani administration in New York and its programme to make the city affordable for ordinary people.

But crucial to avoiding that is not to pretend that history just started today. The opposite of the cynical “there’s nothing new under the sun” is the amnesiac and arrogant “everything is different this time.”

If we want to do better than before — and we must — then we have to learn from all our experiences (good and bad) and bring those to bear today. That is what socialist organisation is about — intimately connected with working-class and social struggles.

Here, I have to say that it has not helped that an awful lot of the transatlantic left went from elation and dismissal of glaring problems in January 2015 to within a year pretending that Greece didn’t happen and shifting attention elsewhere.

Same with the rise and decline of Podemos in Spain. Same with the collapse of Corbynism and the bad compromises that led to it after the relative success of the 2017 election. Then we had a brief period where a conventional social-democratic government in Portugal resting upon radical left votes in parliament was the way forward.

At each stage shared enthusiasm across the left was coupled with a rather unwelcome refusal to discuss seriously the evident limitations and dangers. So we were told that Syriza had both overcome old dilemmas about parliamentary reformism and revolutionary rupture. While left figures in the party deployed all sorts of theorisations — from the Marxist sociologist Nikos Poulantzas to corrupted readings of debates in the early Comintern — it was news to the Syriza leadership that they were not a parliamentarist reformist party.

These questions and the reality of the capitalist state and ruling-class organisation and of imperialism are not antiquarian or the stuff of desiccated sectarianism. They manifest in the immediacy and in the practical politics of a left political challenge, even more so any left administration.

Syriza was wedded to Greek membership of the EU while proclaiming a rupture with austerity. But the EU was wedded to austerity — especially in Greece — and it is not a bowling club but a powerful instrument of enforcing capitalist exploitation at home and abroad. So you had talk of insurgency but not against the central mechanism creating the conditions in which people felt insurgent.

Paul Holden’s book The Fraud looks at how questions of Nato and EU membership — vital to the Establishment — were used to undermine the Corbyn leadership. Despite the left surge in the Green Party, it remains committed to Nato and to its war in Ukraine. You might ask, can’t we just park those issues and get on with some domestic redistribution?

The problem is not just two particular issues and capitalist, imperialist institutions. It is that they are symptomatic of the fundamental question: you cannot evade having to confront capitalist power and that of their state.

To do that you have to prepare. Not in working groups but in and through the movements and organisation of the working class and oppressed. It is a politics of insurgency not as temporary electoral technique or PR image, but the real thing. Not at some grand moment in the future. But right now. In how we seek political representation, let alone holding office.