Beyond Parliamentary Socialism?
GB: Looking back on December 2019, is there anything you think that Labour could have done differently during the election? Or had the leadership run out of options by that point?
LP: I’m sure Labour could have done various things differently over the course of the election, although I think the die was cast by that point. Although it could have been rolled out differently, I think that the manifesto was a more coherent document this time around than it was in 2017, even though the slogan of 2017 really registered in a way this one didn’t. By virtue of being structured around the Green New Deal, the manifesto was both more coherent and more radical. So much of the 2017 Manifesto was oriented towards increasing Britain’s competitiveness, which may be necessary in a capitalist world, especially given the nature of the City of London, but it is also very compromised to stress that we need these policies to increase our competitiveness. Framing the manifesto around the Green New Deal in 2019 actually made it a more coherent radical progressive programme.
That said, I don’t think this came across, for reasons that various people have pointed to. James Meadway was right to suggest that, for many Labour voters who had voted Leave, the way each new item was rolled out separately could seem like a series of bribes to look away from being given the finger over how they voted on Brexit. I also think that during the campaign, Jeremy Corbyn’s weaknesses became clear. Of course, everything that happened in the run-up to the campaign to undermine his position on Brexit contributed to that – but to watch him being so tongue-tied in his debate with Boris Johnson, you couldn’t ever have imagined Tony Benn being as tongue-tied and looking as flummoxed as Jeremy did. Now, one of the attractive things about Jeremy is that he wasn’t a retail politician, and he was self-deprecating about that, which was one of his strengths. But by that point, his best weapons had been taken from him over the Brexit question. I think those were the two things during the election campaign that stood out to me as most problematic.
What were the most significant strategic errors and successes of Corbyn’s leadership of Labour?
Had Labour been able to stick to its position on Brexit in the 2017 election – and indeed made a virtue of it rather than being ashamed of it – I think the whole situation would have been different. In that sense, it’s incredibly ironic that the person in the shadow cabinet who played such a significant role in driving Labour off its 2017 position is about to be elected as leader. That’s not to say Keir Starmer caused this – he was merely the conduit of the People’s Vote campaign – but in 2017, the Party said, ‘the people have voted, this is an exercise in democracy, we have to accept it.’ You can go through the list of quotes from senior Labour politicians saying just this. But when the polls started showing that Remain might win a second referendum, and Peter Mandelson put his evil hand in, what happened was that, as always, the Labour left took the responsibility for Party unity on its shoulders.
Once Chuka Umunna and the independents got the wind in their sails, it looks to me like Corbyn got frightened that many more would follow, so he gave in to the second referendum appeal. I think that was disastrous. Now, it’s true this was a very difficult situation, and one can argue that many Labour voters elsewhere would have gone over to the Lib Dems – one can never know. But what we do know is that this was the worst outcome possible, so it would have been better to have gone with the other one.
It now looks to me like it would have been best for the Corbyn leadership to have agreed to Theresa May’s deal. I don’t know that this could have been done, what with May constantly bleating about how Brexit means Brexit, while offering the Europeans very soft arrangements. But in that moment when May did have the cross-party talks, it probably would have been best for the Corbyn leadership to have agreed to May’s deal, leaving the Tories divided. Labour would have been divided too, but the Tories even more. Of course, this is easy for me to say, and there were various moments during the winter when I felt that Labour simply wasn’t being heard in the debate in the media, and they might as well go for the second referendum. So, it’s easy to say all this now, but in retrospect I think the changed position over Europe was one major strategic error.
What about the wider left? What have been the strategic successes and failures of Momentum, the unions and the various social movements that have been part of the Corbyn project?
What was triggered by Corbyn’s leadership campaign was remarkable, and I’m not sure how much more could have been achieved given the nature of the Labour Party. The majority of the Parliamentary Party are not socialists – they genuinely believe that we should get along within capitalism as best we can. Given the nature of the Party apparatus and the mostly depoliticised nature of the union membership, what was achieved by Momentum, The World Transformed [TWT], Novara was remarkable. Of course, I wish that Momentum had played a much more active role in political education. I wish that, above all, [Len] McCluskey and [Andrew] Murray at Unite could have found a way to construct an equivalent to Momentum inside their union. I think Murray certainly was inclined to, but it’s a very difficult thing to do. However much one does want to say that not nearly enough was done, the achievements were truly extraordinary.
In the book that Colin Leys and I have just finished, the penultimate chapter, written long before the election was called, ends with a quote from Ben Sellers, from 2018:
If you’d asked me five years ago what the plan was, I would have said: build locally in CLPs, win policy arguments, organise at conference; get more representative MPs; win the leadership – in that order. I would have talked in terms of a 10-year plan at a minimum. Instead, we did it back to front, winning the leadership in an extraordinary summer. None of that gave us time to educate, organise and agitate in the rest of the party and movement.
I also felt back in the seventies, however admirable the CLPD [Campaign for Labour Party Democracy] and the Bennite decade-long attempt to democratise the Party in the way they hoped to was, and I did admire it enormously, that it would not be successful. This was because I always knew that it would split the Labour Party, and that since divided parties cannot win the election, it would be the left which would take party unity on its shoulders as the expense of giving up on the Party’s transformation.
This is not to deny the critical importance of having a democratised socialist party if you’re going to democratise the state. But so far, this has largely been impossible. My generation failed to create those kinds of mass democratic socialist parties outside the old social-democratic parties. So in that context, it is not surprising that the effort has bubbled up again inside the Labour Party. What is more amazing is that it simultaneously bubbled up inside the Democratic Party in the US. And in those places where you had proportional representation, a real realignment took place with the creation of new parties like Die Linke, Syriza, Podemos, etc. Of course, they’re all now in alliances with social-democratic parties at national or regional levels, so one really can’t say that the track that the British new left embarked on with Corbyn is to be dismissed after this defeat.
In a recent interview with Tribune, you say, ‘The lesson is that it’s very difficult to transform these parties. But there are encouraging signs – the size of Momentum, the role of left-wing unions in supporting Corbynism. There is a lot to be said for fighting to continue the effort in the coming years.’ What are the grounds for thinking this will be more successful this time?
It all depends on whether the left can build a stronger base, and it’s not clear that they can – particularly when it comes to political education. However impressive TWT and Momentum are, it’s clear that a significant number of people who were mobilised to join the Labour Party as a result of Corbyn’s leadership were ready to vote for Starmer. The fact that so few of them joined through their constituency Labour Parties, and many never attended a CLP meeting, tells us a great deal about the gaps that exist in organising and mobilising this group. It is true that Momentum had many more people involved – including at CLP level – than the CLPD ever did. But one could see that there wasn’t much political education going on in the CLPs, so the base wasn’t being created for what Corbyn was attempting to do.
What is now needed is for activists to get involved in their CLPs – however deadly boring going to their meetings may be initially – and really turn them into something most of them have never been: interesting centres of working-class life. There’s no sense pretending that most CLPs have ever been that. The other issue is changing the nature of union branches. It has always been clear that if you’re really going to change the Labour Party, you need to change at least a core number of unions – and I don’t just mean change them at the top.
At that point, one can think about making changes to the Party apparatus – expanding and deepening the campaign team, choosing new regional organisers, etc. Should all this happen, much of the centre-right of the party would still eventually split but the left would come away with the Party apparatus and with the bulk of the union ties. You would then have a very different Labour Party. I’m not optimistic that this will happen, but I don’t see any other way forward.
In that same interview, you say, ‘Every time there has been this attempt to transform the Labour Party – and it has happened many times – it has been the result of a great crisis of capitalism.’ Do you think we are entering such a moment now?
Corbyn emerged, belatedly, out of the crisis of 2008 and the subsequent political crisis created by austerity, which delegitimated neoliberalism – though to the benefit of UKIP as much as the left. This current moment of crisis associated with the pandemic is different in that it doesn’t have its roots in the contradictions of the economic system. When I gave that quote, I was thinking of 1929–31, when [George] Lansbury – the socialist pacifist – emerged as leader of the Labour Party. I was thinking of the 1970s crisis of stagflation when the Bennite[s] emerged, and I was thinking of the 2008 crisis. This is a crisis of a very different kind. I think if I had to make a parallel, it would be the moment Lansbury was displaced in 1935, when the Labour Party endorsed rearmament and Clement Attlee took over. As Ralph Miliband put it in his book Parliamentary Socialism, it was at this point that a much ‘more responsible team’ took over leadership of the Labour Party, which was elected in 1945. The 1945 Labour government was certainly influenced by the radicalism produced by the crisis of 1931 and the sharp shift to the left in Labour Party policy that followed. The way things are going now, I think we might see that type of ‘more responsible team’ emerging. So, I think that’s the more likely parallel.
What should the left expect from Starmer? Expulsions and attempts to de-democratise the party, or a reconciliation with Corbynism?
I doubt we’ll see mass expulsions, at least not for as long as McCluskey is head of Unite. That said, I think this insidious antisemitism campaign is very much mixed up with an anti-socialist animus and could be used as a lever for trying to get part of the left out. But since most left activists aren’t primarily motivated by the issue of Israel – however justified it is to criticise the Israeli government’s policies – this can only go so far. With Starmer, I think we will see the kind of politics that the new Tribune group inside the PLP, formed just a year or so ago, represents. It is a very broad-based group of the centre left, extending to the centre right, and it will look to reviving a politics of compromise. Of course, one needs to compromise strategically all the time; that’s fine provided one understands what one is doing. But compromising for the sake of compromise with no strategic orientation, especially now we have a unified Tory party, only creates ideological confusion.
The 2008 financial crisis and its effects changed Labour Party policy in quite important ways, and I don’t think that will be easily undone. There won’t be much reason to undo it given the nature of the contemporary crisis – by which I mean ecological as well as economic, and political for that matter, given the state’s incapacity to cope with the epidemic as well as the ecological crisis. So I don’t think we will see a return to Blairism. And I think even Joe Biden will have to take on board a lot of the policies Bernie Sanders has been advocating in the US. So I don’t think it is all going to be undone, but Starmer will put the agenda forward in a way that is rather anodyne and without conviction.
What about socialist movements in the rest of the world – do you see any signs of hope now it looks as though the Corbyn/Sanders moment is over?
We’re in for the long haul. We should have said this all along. As Marx told the insurrectionists in 1851, we’re involved in a ten, fifteen, twenty-year process – he really should have said 150–200 years! I realise that runs against the time horizon posed by the ecological crisis, but any proposed solution to that crisis is implausible without building up the necessary political capacity; the degree of planning and collective consciousness involved that needs to be built for an adequate response to the climate crisis is huge. We have to understand that Jeremy was a shortcut, Sanders was a shortcut. But after two decades of protesting against neoliberalism, and after Occupy, these were shortcuts that were based on the recognition that you can protest for ever and the world won’t change. The disappointment of Syriza, of the Corbyn project, and now the movement behind Sanders too, is palpable. But at least it will show people that they need to be putting their shoulders to the wheel for the long haul.
But all the things that they have built – Momentum, the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America], Jacobin, The World Transformed, the new Tribune magazine – now need to be used to develop circles of socialist activists at every level. They can be engaged in electoral politics, but they can’t only be engaged in electoral politics. In the case of the Labour Party – because there’s a real party structure, and many of the largest unions are sympathetic to this approach – there’s much more of a basis for doing this than inside the Democratic Party, because it is simply an electoral network with no real structural apparatus. While DSA activists will still, and very rightly so, mobilise to try to get socialists on the democratic electoral tickets in electoral contests, ranging from local dog catchers to state senators, I am not sure the DSA has the capacity or the clarity to undertake extensive political education. Only the Bread and Roses Coalition within the DSA understand that what they have been engaged in really is a process of class formation, and that further engagement with electoral politics should be oriented to aiding that project. Others think that it is still possible to transform the Democratic Party but to some extent they are fostering an illusion. So I fear that the best people involved in the DSA will take various different tacks after the election.
Yet I still feel more optimistic than I have for a very long time about the prospects of this long-run struggle, because so many people have come on board. The numbers – even if the core activists are only around the five or ten thousand mark in the DSA and Momentum – are phenomenal, and these activists can become remarkable organisers as well as educators. I’m not dismayed precisely because I never thought this was going be easy.
What do you imagine the ruling class response to the current coronavirus crisis will be? It looks like we’re going to see a significant expansion in the size of the state, but obviously catered to the interests of capital and the Tory electoral base. How should the left respond to this?
The situation is very frightening – we are at a truly terrible moment in human history – but there are also some positive things that can be – and are being – learned from it. On the cultural/ideological level people are recognising that we can’t all be in it for ourselves – that this is a collective problem and only collective solutions will do. But deeper than this, we are now seeing governments all around the world adopting the policies that we have been arguing for. All over the world, states are undertaking massive deficit spending at levels that would shock even the modern monetary theory theorists. The size of the deficits is staggering. We can more readily now say, ‘Look at what Corbyn could have done – don’t Corbyn’s fiscal policies now look quite rational? Indeed, don’t they look small in relation to this?’
But we must admit that this can work because every state in the world is doing it – that is where the MMT theorists were wrong. Usually, what the bond traders are looking at are the spreads – what is the size of the Italian deficit compared to the German one. Insofar as deficits are exploding everywhere, the disciplining effect of the bond vigilantes is less powerful. Now, in a sense, this disciplining effect never exists for the US. The US deficit was already through the roof, it’s now going through the stratosphere. And the world is still rushing to get US dollars because it’s the one store of value in the world economy. This crisis is demonstrating that the argument Sam Gindin and I put forward about the internationalisation of the US state – that is, it being the state of global capitalism – is correct. The US state is the protector of capital at a global level, and property owners all over the world look to the US state as their protector, even as they wonder whether or not the US state can play that role.
Of course once the crisis ebbs, the arbitrage will begin again, assuming that bond markets are reconstructed the way they were. Yet I still think there is something we can take strategically out of this that really should give us a lot of solace and encouragement. The fact that Labour was elected in 1945 after the Second World War made it so clear that those who said ‘it can’t be done’ in 1931 were wrong. I think it’s going to be possible to make that argument in the coming years about the policies Corbyn and John McDonnell were advocating before this crisis. With every state on a wartime footing, it really allows us to make the case for planning; it really allows us to make the case, and even much better than Labour did in 1945, that the way the state is structured is inadequate for the type of planning needed for the challenges we face today.
We need to be making the case now – not for breaking up the banks, which is absurd – but for using this crisis to take them over. We must make the case for taking over the banks that need to be saved, as the Swedes did in the early nineties, but not to give them back as the Swedes did. We need to make the case that turning the banking system into a public utility is essential for the planning necessary for the Green New Deal. Whatever the state does to turn manufacturing firms towards the production of ventilators must become an example for why and how we can require existing industries to engage in conversion more generally. Even if this doesn’t involve nationalisation, we can make the case for the types of measures that were introduced during the war, when CEOs were brought in, made state employees, and told to convert auto production into airplane production. And given the collapse of oil prices and of the oil company stocks, we can make the case that the state should be buying them out with bare minimum compensation to the end of effecting the transition to the production of clean energy. So, there’s a lot that we can build out of this, and the fact that we had started to make the case for many of these policies before the crisis means we have a lot to build on.
How do you think we will look back on this political moment – the period between the last crash and the coming one?
I would like us to look back on this moment as the point at which we saw the emergence of a politicised generation. That is a remarkable development. A generation of young politicised people has emerged out of the denigration of the socialist ambition by so much of the left – not just by the Kinnockites, the Blairites and the Clintonites, of course, but also the postmodernist left, the identity politics left. So, to see this generation emerge is remarkable and that’s what we need to build on.
Of course, currently the project is more ambitious than it is strategically well founded, but the strategic instincts of this new generation are admirable. They know that we need to get into the state and change it somehow. There’s loads that needs to be done in terms of developing organising capacities: it isn’t just a matter of reading Jacobin or Tribune or listening to Novara, they must learn how to organise working people. That involves real skills and real commitment and a tremendous amount of patience, as well as a willingness to be able to sacrifice a lot. Easy for old Marxist professors in universities to say, I know, but I so think this is the new generation’s greatest challenge.