The Socialist Challenge Today by Gindin Sam; Panitch Leo;

Author:Gindin, Sam; Panitch, Leo;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Merlin Press
Published: 2018-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Corbyn’s challenge: from insurgency to transformation?

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.

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