Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics

Author:Richard Seymour
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

The Unavoidable Dilemmas of Social Democracy

For most of the twentieth century, Labour was the unrivalled, mass party of the British working class. Although it never achieved more than two thirds of the working-class vote, no other party of the Left came close to challenging its dominance. Further, barring the Communist Party, which organised a small minority of militants, Labour was the party where most socialists were organised. As such, if the labour movement and their socialist allies largely failed to achieve their far-reaching objectives, the question must be asked as to how Labour has organised and moulded them, and what opportunities it has given members to challenge the status quo.

Without exception, Labour has cleaved to its constitutionalist, electoral roots. It has disowned the radicalism of its members and union affiliates more often than it has allowed them expression. While it has depended on militant members to build and maintain its social movement base, it has excluded them from effective decision-making as far as possible, and in office it has usually taken the lead from civil servants and business. Insofar as it was a coalition between organised labour, socialists and liberals, it has been the union moderates, Fabians and professional liberals who have usually been dominant. It is too simple to characterise Labour as ‘the working-class wing of Liberalism’, but the liberal legacy has usually been dominant.

Labour’s climax, the high point of post-war reform, was achieved in a quite exceptional set of circumstances that were already breaking down by the time the Wilson era was afoot. The availability of business for a class consensus depended both on its need for extensive government intervention to keep capitalism alive and its ability, in the era of national capitalisms, to accept the state as an interlocutor with organised labour. The ability of social democratic governments to deliver reforms in the interests of workers, moreover, depended on an exceptional period of capitalist growth that will probably not be seen again, short of an economic disaster or war that destroys enough capital to create a space for rapid expansion. As soon as that growth no longer obtained, and once the scale of production was sufficiently institutionalised to expose large corporations to competitive pressures that previously had been experienced only by small business, the post-war compromise was doomed.

If it was to survive as a reforming party, Labour needed to find a way to channel popular discontent with the old order – of which it had become the caretaker – into a project to assail the concentrated and increasingly organised power of business. It needed to outflank a popular media that was increasingly dominated by Thatcherism. And it needed to demonstrate that it could offer a new way of doing politics that shrugged off the domesticating constraints of statecraft. Moreover, with the loss of the colonial empire, the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalisms and the evident shortcomings in parliamentary democracy, the British state was in need of an overhaul which Labour – being wedded to ‘Britishness’, and

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