The enormous enthusiasm generated by the campaign to elect Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the British Labour Party in the summer of 2015 signalled – amidst the delegitimation of neoliberal globalization – the staying power of the shift from protest to politics on the left. This confounded expectations that the disappointment of the high hopes invested in the Syriza government at the beginning of that year would have debilitating effects across the international left. And if it was surprising enough that Corbyn should have been elected as party leader, even more surprising was how far this came to be electorally validated two years later in June 2017, through Corbyn leading the party to the largest increase in its vote in any general election since 1945.
The Corbyn phenomenon raises all the old questions associated with the limits and possibilities of democratizing and radicalizing those old working-class parties through which social struggles from below had come to be channelled into the narrow framework of actually-existing capitalist democracies. It is important to recall Ralph Miliband’s sobering judgement in the 1976 Socialist Register that ‘the belief in the effective transformation of the Labour Party into an instrument of socialist policies is the most crippling of all illusions to which socialists in Britain have been prone’. Yet it is no less important to recall his observations on the inability of the socialist left in Britain to create any effective ‘organization of its own political formation, able to attract a substantial measure of support’.34 In the continuing absence of anything like Syriza’s sprouting from the intertwining roots of Eurocommunism and new social movements in Greece, it perhaps should not have been quite so surprising that as the crisis of neoliberalism brought New Labour down after 2008, the prospect of transforming the Labour Party would once again emerge as a plausible strategic option for the British left.
The sudden reinvestment of considerable socialist hope, energy and creativity in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership was epitomized by the filmmaker Ken Loach, who in 2013 had stood at the forefront of yet another futile attempt to launch a serious socialist electoral alternative (Left Unity).35 By 2017 Loach could be found making campaign videos for the Labour Party featuring a very broad range of working people demanding ‘the full fruits of our labour’. To be sure, even under Corbyn, it was still almost unimaginable that the Labour Party, absent Greece’s legacy of a revolutionary communist political culture, would echo Syriza’s rhetoric in calling for ‘the creation and expression of the widest possible, militant and catalytic political movement of multidimensional subversion’. On the other hand, for all the attempts by New Labour to distance itself from the party’s class roots, these remained far more deeply embedded in working-class communities and the trade unions than was the case with Syriza. What fuelled popular support for all the recent party insurgencies was a common reaction to neoliberal austerity and the complicity of centre-left politicians in it. Yet those who fomented the Corbyn insurgency were far more conscious, based on decades of experience, that making the shift from protest to politics really effective would entail a profound transformation in party structures.
The explosion of 1960s activism marked Corbyn’s early political development. Although the fact that almost the last place most of these new activists were initially attracted to was the Labour party already points to one of the most important differences between the earlier attempt to transform the party in the 1970s, spearheaded by Corbyn’s mentor Tony Benn, and the one spearheaded by Corbyn himself so many decades later, which became the catalyst for drawing hundreds of thousands new members to the party.
Corbyn’s own political formation took place as part of the last serious attempt to effect a radical democratic socialist transformation of the Labour Party amidst the terminal crisis of the postwar Keynesian welfare state in the 1970s. Although this had already been defeated by the time Corbyn was first elected as an MP in 1983, Corbyn was attracted by Tony Benn’s vision to counter the basically undemocratic market alternative to social democracy ‘now emerging everywhere on the right’ by connecting the Labour Party to the political energy fuelling the student uprisings, worker militancy and radical community politics. Benn’s message that ‘our long campaign to democratise power in Britain has, first, to begin in our own movement’ above all involved extending ‘our representative function so as to bring ourselves into a more creative relationship with many organizations that stand outside our membership’. The promise of Benn’s appeal was thus that ‘a Labour government will never rule again but will try to create the conditions under which it is able to act as the natural partner of a people, who really mean something more than we thought they did, when they ask for self-government’.36
The strategic orientation of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) to initially concentrate the democratic impulse inward produced intense opposition from the establishment forces in the party, who projected the decade-long intra-party struggle outward as an assault on the integrity of the British state. This blunted the processes of democratic socialist persuasion, education and mobilization not only so necessary for short-term electoral success but, in a longer term perspective, for the party to become an active agent of new working-class formation and capacity development. The defeat of democratic forces inside the party, well before the 1983 election, eventually led to the New Labour project of not only accommodating to Thatcherism but also stifling any trace of socialist sentiment as well as intra-party democracy.
As Alex Nunns has shown, the emergence in the early 2000s of a new generation of union leaders began to lay the foundations for a fundamental break with New Labour: ‘From being the Praetorian guard of the leadership they became the internal opposition … [and] embarked on a structural battle with the Blairite machine.’ This in turn once again highlighted the importance of the old Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and its capacity for ‘navigating the party structures’.37 It also gave new life to the small coterie of MPs in the Socialist Campaign Group of the PLP (among them, John MacDonnell and Diane Abbot stood before Corbyn in the earlier leadership elections, and Jon Trickett had originally been expected to stand in 2015). One of the most important foundations for the Corbyn insurgency was laid almost a decade before when Michael Meacher, a close ally of Benn’s ever since he was elected as a young MP in 1970, took on as his parliamentary assistant one of the CLPD’s original young stalwarts, Jon Lansman. He was directed to stay away from Westminster and instead work full time to revive and deepen the alliance with left-wing constituency and trade union activists.
It was the ability of the new generation of union leaders to secure their members’ votes for Ed Miliband, on the basis of his disavowal of New Labour, which got him elected as leader in 2010. Yet as Richard Seymour observed: ‘It was an integral part of Ed Miliband’s strategy for reviving and rebranding Labour that it should seek a new synthesis of left and right.’ His accommodation to the Blairites who still dominated the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) countered ‘pressure from trade unionists and constituency activists to move further to the left than he wished to go’.38 Keeping his distance from Socialist Campaign Group MPs as well as the new union leaders (who his New Labour colleagues still called ‘the awkward squad’39), Miliband initiated a revision of the rules for leadership elections precisely to diminish the influence of the union vote.
The new system of one member one vote, oriented to encouraging a US primary-style vote for leadership candidates nominated from within the PLP, was initially opposed by the left. Yet the unintended consequence of this rule change opened the door for the move from protest to politics in Britain to take the form of almost 200,000 new members and 100,000 more ‘supporters’ signing up to elect Corbyn, beginning the process of making the Labour Party, with over 550,000 members today, the largest in Europe.
Of course, this did not happen spontaneously. It was in good part due to the actual momentum generated by Momentum. The emergence at the time of the Occupy movement of ‘a cheeky and assertive digital Bennite social media project’ called ‘Red Labour’ by an internet-savvy new generation of activists presaged the creation during the 2015 leadership election campaign, under the leadership of Jon Lansman, of Momentum as a new organization focused on mobilizing new members and supporters behind (and indeed in front of) Corbyn. With a data base that became its primary asset, Momentum activists not only played a crucial role in getting Corbyn elected as leader, but also re-elected again a year later in the face of the revolt supported by most Labour MPs. Even while soon surpassing the CLPD’s earlier successes in mobilizing the majority of constituency delegates to vote for the left’s resolutions at the annual party conference, the energy and creativity of Momentum’s young activists was especially evident in organizing ‘The World Transformed’ as a parallel event of radical art and discussion which sharply contrasted with the trade show atmosphere under New Labour.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the June 2017 election, very much more due to Momentum’s strategic electoral activity both on the ground in canvassing as well as through the internet, was the greatly increased turnout by young people to vote Labour. This was achieved despite almost two years of constant denigration of Corbyn by many of his own MPs being amplified across the whole spectrum of the mainstream media, as well as against the drag of a central party machine more concerned with vetting than welcoming new members. With the greatest electoral support coming not only from students but also from working-class voters under 35, especially from the semi-skilled, unskilled and unemployed workers among them, this suddenly gave the Labour electorate a remarkably young cast, with a potentially very important shift in the party’s class base.
The last time anything like this happened was a half century before, in the two elections of the mid-1960s, when a new generation of working-class voters belied the widespread notion that class political differentiation was a thing of the past by voting Labour in such large numbers. It was only after the profoundly disappointing experience of a Labour government desperately attempting to manage the growing contradictions of the British ‘mixed economy’ and its ‘special relationship’ with the American empire that a great many of the young working-class voters turned away from the Labour Party by the time of the 1970 election.
Labour’s remarkable electoral success in 2017, especially among young working-class people, was based on the common revulsion against austerity among both private and public sector workers. This stands in sharp contrast to the former’s impatience with, if not hostility to, the latter’s strikes against the austerity policies of the Labour government during the ‘winter of discontent’ just before the election of Thatcher. The much more sympathetic attitude to the plight of public employees today was powerfully captured by the positive reception to Momentum’s satirical campaign video (visited by no less than a third of all Facebook users in Britain) which – after featuring a home care worker, a firefighter and a policeman on the job turning to the camera to say ‘I am paid too much’ – ends with a man in a pinstriped suit and bowler hat turning to the camera just before entering his London mansion to say ‘I am not paid enough’.
Yet the Corbyn’s team ‘seemed unsure of what to do with its new recruits’ beyond the ‘highly impressive get-out-the-vote operation’, as Tom Blackburn, a leading Momentum activist in the classically industrial city of Salford, pointed out in an especially insightful article in New Socialist immediately after the election. Noting that ‘the Corbynite base as a whole remains somewhat inexperienced’ – especially in terms of their ability ‘to actively cultivate popular support for a radical political alternative, rather than assuming that there is sufficient support already latent, just waiting to be tapped into’ – Blackburn argued that ‘the leadership must now start to provide its rank and file supporters with clear guidance and encouragement if this project is to progress further.’ What this especially required was ‘clarity and honesty about the scale of the task facing Labour’s new left, and the nature of that task as well – to re-establish the Labour Party as a campaigning force in working-class communities, to democratise its policymaking structures and to bring through the next generation of Labour left cadres, candidates and activists.’
In this respect, the priority now needed to shift to transforming Labour into the kind of party oriented to accomplishing this, especially since ‘an unsupportive bureaucracy could simply withhold the resources and logistical support necessary to make radical community organising a reality nationwide. Members looking to open up local parties and experiment with new methods of organising can currently expect little support from an unreformed Labour HQ.’ None of this was to suggest that
the rank-and-file Labour left should just sit around and wait for help from on high before organising in their communities. Indeed, there is already a great deal of highly useful and relevant experience of grassroots organising among Labour members – the hands-on experience of anti-cuts campaigners and trade union activists is already substantial. Rank-and-file initiative can make substantial achievements. But for this sort of approach to solidly take hold nationwide, an attentive and supportive central party apparatus will be invaluable.40
The election of Momentum candidates as constituency and youth representatives to the party’s National Executive Committee, and the NEC’s appointment of one of the new generation of left trade union staff as the new General Secretary, may augur well for this (although the manner of the latter’s selection by prior agreement between the party and union leader’s offices does not). So does the establishment at party headquarters of a new ‘community organising unit’ to work with constituency Labour parties and trade unions to build alliances and campaign on key local issues. For its part, Momentum’s tactical caution to avoid being drawn into a media-fuelled hysteria over the ‘reselection’ of all sitting MPs, as had been the case with CLPD’s reform effort in the 1970s, did not divert it from winning support among party branches and conference delegates for concrete proposals for ‘a democratic selection process for the 21st century’, nor from getting many Momentum-backed candidates nominated at the parliamentary as well as the municipal council level.
Still, especially in relation to the intra-party Democracy Review41 that has been set up by the NEC, the fundamental changes Max Shanly called for in the youth wing of the party will apply even more decisively to the party as a whole: ‘The role of political education is to end one’s alienation from ideas – and alongside recruitment and retention, our task must be to build the political and organisational quality of our party’s youth in order to both understand and resist capitalism.’ Yet in the party as a whole ‘political education – the very bread and butter of the socialist movement – has been put on the backburner; when our members are taught, they are taught to follow, not to lead’. Changing this would have to go right down to the level of constituency parties in order to remould then into ‘hubs of ongoing discussion, education and culture’.42
This needs to be taken even further. To credibly stress the possibilities rather than the limits of changing the Labour Party requires posing a fundamental challenge to the way the party has traditionally been rooted in the working class via the trade unions. Indeed, what needs to be remembered in this new conjuncture is that the defeat of the last socialist attempt to transform the Labour Party, in which young people like Jeremy Corbyn and Jon Lansman first cut their teeth, is that it was the left-wing union leadership who, having supported it through their block vote at party conference, pulled the plug on it in face of the inevitable divisions it created inside the labour movement.43 The traditional relationship between the unions and the party reproduced a division of labour which proved incapable of nourishing and renewing working-class formation and the development of democratic capacities. In this context, the support Corbyn has so far secured from much of the union leadership needs to be turned into a challenge to the left union leadership to validate their role in the current attempt to change the Labour Party by changing their own organizations, not least through explicit socialist cadre development among their memberships.
In the face of the Labour Party’s constitutional structures and parliamentarist orientations, let alone the powerful forces which still sustain New Labour’s expression of contemporary capitalist dynamics, the struggle inside the party was always bound to be long and bitter, and its outcome very uncertain, even after important victories for the left in intra-party procedures and leadership selection. Indeed, it is to be expected that those determined to resist and reverse these gains, and more broadly to undermine socialist currents at the level of the leadership and the base, will always be prepared to ramp up their efforts and push them outwards as each new set of elections approaches in the hope that this will increase their leverage in the intra-party battle. Appreciating this, and learning how to counter it effectively, is one of the key reasons that political education at the base of the party, as well as the unions and the social movements is, however daunting and difficult, so crucial.