Corbyn

by Richard Seymour

  Insofar as the young generation of radical activists have had a party orientation, therefore, it has taken the form of a weak identification with an alternative centre-Left party such as the SNP or the Greens. Otherwise, where they have been active it has tended to be in movements like Occupy and Radical Independence in Scotland, or single-issue campaigns such as Climate Camp. Corbyn emerged to articulate their discontents following several years of quiet demoralisation, as the UKIP Right held the initiative while the movements of 2010–11 went eerily quiet. As one Labour organiser put it, many activists had in the interim put down their copies of The Coming Insurrection and picked up the writings of Antonio Gramsci. They were thinking about how to build a movement as a ‘system of alliances’, as Gramsci had put it. One in which all who had lost out from the system, who were not represented in parliament, and whose voices were generally not heard in the media, would fuse into an effective political bloc.

  Corbyn’s advantage in this respect is his ability to personify the things that Britain’s diverse progressive currents have in common, and to federate them. No other political format has as yet been up to the task. The Greens have assembled broad electoral support and increased their membership in recent years, largely by reducing the influence of its middle-class, right-leaning layers. However, precisely because of the existence of those layers and their record where it counts – for example, its management of Brighton council – it is distrusted by some on the Left. The SNP has succeeded in galvanising most left-of-centre voters in Scotland, but of course is limited by its strict national scope. Plaid Cymru, though it currently has a left-wing leadership, has thus far failed to make much impact on the Left.

  Corbyn’s offer, in this context, was simple and unique. In joining the Labour Party or registering as supporters, they could bypass the need to patiently build an alternative party or start a new one. Instead, they could take the leadership in an existing mass party with union backing, money, and a record of electoral success far greater than any of its rivals, and drive it to the left. This did not mean turning Labour into a radical-Left party. It did not even mean giving Labour a radical-Left agenda. Corbyn’s prospectus for a Labour government may be one that only a hard-Left leadership could secure today, but it is also one that would once have been advocated by the party’s mainstream. Barring foreign policy, there is nothing in principle that Roy Hattersley couldn’t support in Corbyn’s agenda. It did mean pushing back against neoliberalism on several fronts, by rolling back privatisation, defending public investment, supporting welfare and placing local services back under local authority control. It did mean reversing Labour’s usual foreign policy nationalism, and breaking with the previous bipartisan consensus on Trident.

  What Corbyn’s leadership did mean, for his supporters, was putting the Right on the defensive for once. It did mean turning Labour into a party where the radical Left could organise with resources and significant networks of activists. It did mean having some influence over policy, and beginning the task of opposing the austerity narrative in its fundamentals rather than some of its specifics. It did mean a once-in-a-lifetime chance to shift the balance of British politics to the left. Already, there is a new sense of optimism among activists who note that it was under Corbyn’s far more oppositional leadership that government was forced to retreat on cuts to working families tax credits, and later on the government’s unwholesome arms deal with the Saudi dictatorship. Labour had been running scared from opposing the government on key policies. Now Corbyn has demonstrated that opposition works.

  The strategic problems looming for Labour’s nascent new Left, however, are legion. First and foremost, since Labour is in the marrow of its soul a constitutionalist and electoral party, it is naturally built-in to the culture of the party to be obsessed with electoral outcomes to the near exclusion of other considerations. Already, Corbyn’s most vitriolic backbench opponents are hoping for a drubbing in upcoming local elections, to expedite his overthrow. A defeat by 2020, which may be unavoidable whatever type of leadership Labour has, will undoubtedly be taken as a defeat for a socialist programme and the basis for a return to right-wing leadership. And yet, Labour was already in decline before Corbyn took the leadership. The sources of decline were deep and worsening over time, and will certainly not be reversed in Scotland, where the decisive damage was done during the independence referendum. If activists are to have any success in their longer-term objectives, they may have to be willing to at least tacitly accept that the short-term is going to be grim in electoral terms and that they are going to have to fight tooth and nail with the party establishment – who are far from innocent of Labour’s current weakness – to prevent it from using these weaknesses to restore their dominance. There is no easy, cost-free route to changing the political consensus, much less building a robust left-wing organisation capable of doing so.

  Second, as energising as the leadership victory undoubtedly was, and not disregarding the likelihood of left-wing gains at various levels of the organisation such as the NEC, Labour is still a party in which the power is overwhelmingly concentrated at the top. Like other parliamentary parties, it has become far more geared toward state administration even at the cost of its traditional representative functions. This is why thus far, Corbyn’s need to reckon with the Labour backbenches, not to mention the dissenters in his cabinet, has arguably done more to shape his policies than the as yet unformed activist base. Quite how they are supposed to deal with this is not clear. Should they seek to deselect MPs who don’t represent the membership? If they do, they run the risk of sharpening antagonisms well before they are able to win those battles. Should they attempt to reform the party’s structures? Where to begin? If what they want is a genuinely democratic Labour Party, they will be trying to bring about something that has never before existed, and which goes against all the dominant tendencies in parliamentary democracies.

  Third, what do they do with electoral victory? If Corbyn is, against all prevailing signals, able to win an election and tries to implement his agenda, that is when his problems will begin for real. There is no precedent in any of the core industrial democracies for success in reversing neoliberalism in this way. Greece is the only country in which a party has been elected to do this, and the result was that party’s comprehensive humiliation, a form of waterboarding-by-negotiation at the hands of the Eurozone leaders and finance ministers, resulting in their accepting the agenda of their opponents and – even worse – selling it as victory. The result was utter demoralisation. What do Corbyn’s supporters do if they find that the traditional prize of a Labour government is a poisoned chalice? Or, what do they do if they find that Labour is, for other reasons, no longer a hospitable place for them? How do they avoid being churned up in the party machinery or burned out in factional warfare? How do they ensure that they can come out on the other side with a chance of political survival? They would be unwise to get carried away by any illusions as to their current strength, as their opponents will exploit their overreach ruthlessly. They would be concomitantly wise to keep in mind just what kind of party they are trying to change, and the considerable odds against them. Labour, for all its genuine achievements and merits, may not be the kind of party they think it is. The next chapter explains why.

  3

  Labour Isn’t Working: Whatever

  Happened to Social Democracy?

  Labour’s history as a parliamentary party is a story of failure far more often than it is a story of success. Labour politicians are certainly justified in boasting about the achievements of the Attlee administration, above all the welfare state, but how many can find anything to boast about in the interwar years, from the underachieving MacDonald-led administrations to the National Government which, to all intents and purposes, pioneered austerity and its ‘we’re all in it together’ myth? Who looks back nostalgically on the Wilson/Callaghan era, from its lame ducks to its stagflation, or from devaluation to the social contract? The Blair/Brown administrati
ons may have had no reforming ambitions to match those of previous eras, but few now think of its hallmark policies – Private Finance Initiatives, the Iraq invasion, low taxes for the rich, regulatory freedom for the bankers – as raving success stories. And not only is the story of Labour overwhelmingly one of failure. It is one wherein the conditions for any success once enjoyed have long since passed. The doctrinal coordinates which once underpinned social democracy everywhere – from the ‘mixed economy’ to welfarism, from public ownership to Keynesian intervention – will no longer avail, because global capitalism would reject these policy nostrums, much as a body rejects an organ implant.

  So many of Corbyn’s supporters – admittedly less so the younger variety – want ‘real’ Labour, ‘old’ Labour, ‘traditional’ Labour, what Labour is supposed to stand for. The allure of this idea is difficult to overstate. If there are risks in being too impressed by Corbynism, there is an equivalent danger in being transfixed by an idea of Labour that has never been close to reality. The only remedy for this is a cold, unsentimental look at what ‘real’ Labour might be (or have been), and why it might not be a satisfactory basis for what is to come. Rather than demonising New Labour as a cuckoo in the nest tearing up the fabric of social democracy, it would be useful to look at where the germs of Blairism were already present, and how they came to the fore. We should at least make space for the possibility that the problem, one way or another, is Labour.

  If we are to understand anything about the prospects for Corbynism, we have to consider it as a moment in the degeneration of Labourism. It is the culmination of a series of defeats for a form of political organisation that seems to be inadequate in today’s world. And it is probably headed for a defeat of its own. Such a setback, if it is not too demoralising, may ultimately permit the rethinking and regroupment that the Left desperately needs. But only if the nature of the beast is recognised early.

  ‘The advanced wing of Liberalism’

  The Labour Party always ‘owed more to Methodism’, asserts Tony Blair in a critique of Corbyn’s leadership, ‘than to Marxism’.1 This shop-soiled cliché is solemnly incanted by Labour loyalists and pundits at every opportunity. If its purpose in Blair’s case is to implausibly situate him as a legatee of Christian Socialism, its wider function is to stress the British exception. Labourism is held to have a unique status relative to European social democratic parties, most of which owed something to the Marxism of the Second International in their origins.

  There are some elements of truth in the cliché. The Independent Labour Party’s foundation in 1893 was accompanied by a Labour Church service attended by several thousand people, expressing the deeply religious, ethical element of the emerging ideology of labourism. Religious nonconformists certainly played a role in Britain’s emerging trade union movement in the nineteenth century, and in the formation of Labour’s moral ideology when it emerged. Keir Hardie was a Methodist, Ramsay MacDonald the product of a Calvinist sect, George Lansbury was a stalwart Anglican. The Labour Party, meanwhile, was unlike the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in that, while it had small Marxist currents, it had no party-wide affiliation to Marxism of any variety.2 Yet, if all that is proven here is that religion had a role in forming the social life and ideological character of labourism, and that it did not pursue a Marxist agenda from its inception, this is not to say very much. What seems to have more enduring significance for the distinctive shape and trajectory of the Labour Party is its origins in Victorian Liberalism.

  Before it was the basis of a political party, labourism was the near-spontaneous ideology of a dense network of labour movement organisations, from cooperatives to working men’s clubs, gardening and brass band clubs to sports fans associations. In a difficult political environment shaped by the elimination of the Chartist movement after 1848 and the stabilisation of the British political system in the relatively affluent latter half of the nineteenth century, the labour movement had developed in the ruts and foxholes of working-class life.3 It provided a defensive infrastructure in which workers could live and associate without having to compete for political power. Politically, this tendency was dependent on the Liberal Party, from which a few mild reforms could be wrung very slowly, and which would even stand a few labour movement candidates known as ‘Lib-Labs’. Intellectually, labourism was not exactly endowed with the most riveting champions – such a Leftist intelligentsia as existed in Britain at the time was either anaemically moralistic or redundantly schismatic. There was little to choose from between the sermons of the ethical socialists and the braying sectarianism of Henry Hyndman and his followers (only Britain could offer an ex-Tory, patrician product of Cambridge as its first leading Marxist intellectual).

  When the franchise was achieved for a substantial number of male workers through the Second Reform Act of 1867, and later extended in a Third Reform Act in 1884, this was arguably more due to the stabilisation of British capitalism in the growth years after 1850 than it was due to persistent organisation on the part of workers. The political establishment was confident in its ability to extend the franchise while managing what Gladstone referred to as ‘millions of hard hands’4 who might otherwise pose a threat to the institution of private property.5 And in the short-term, the parties of property had considerable success in ensuring that the votes of workers went into their own campaigns. It was a Tory administration led by Benjamin Disraeli which implemented the Second Reform Act, and Disraeli proved to be adept at winning workers to Conservatism on the basis of an appeal to empire and social reform. And if the majority of working class voters cast their votes for the Liberals, this was to little beneficial effect.

  In frustration with the recalcitrant, obstructionist attitude of the Liberals, the Labour Representation Committee was founded in 1900 with the support of the Independent Labour Party, the Social Democratic Federation and the Fabians. The wider labour movement was, at this stage, in exceedingly poor repair. By 1888, only one in ten adult men belonged to trade unions. The Independent Labour Party, the precursor of Labour, had attained only ten thousand paid members by 1895, a number that had been cut in half by 1901. Trade unions had suffered a string of defeats, culminating in the damaging Taff Vale judgment of 1901, in which a court found that in common law, unions could be liable to employers for loss of profits incurred by strike action. Even within the Liberal Party, MPs representing organised labour represented only a small minority, amounting to only eleven by 1898, largely due to the obstruction of working-class candidates by constituency associations dominated by middle-class members.6 The extension of the franchise had also proven to be severely limited, such that in the two general elections leading up to the First World War, only about 60 per cent of adult males were technically allowed to vote – the majority of those excluded being working class.

  The purpose of the Labour Party, then, was not to conduct the militant energies of a rising working-class movement into the state. Rather, as it transpired, it was to more effectively lobby the Liberals, a refinement of the existing strategy. Ramsay McDonald had anticipated that ‘the advanced wing of Liberalism’ would be forced to ‘sever itself from an old alliance and form itself into an independent Labour party’.7 Having done so, the leadership of the new party declared their vehicle ‘in the true line of the progressive apostolic succession from the Liberals’.8 And in practice, as the Victorian era gave way to a more crisis-prone Edwardian regime, Labour proved to be vital in propping up Liberal dominance. Ross McKibbin writes that ‘only with the support of the Labour Party and the Irish Nationalists’ could the Liberals continue to govern at this point, the ‘progressive alliance’ being pivoted on the questions of free trade, which Labour defended, and the repeal of Taff Vale, which the Liberals were prepared to support.9

  It was not until over a decade after the Labour Party was founded, with strike waves upsetting the political order from 1910 to 1914, that the labour movement came into its own. And there, the leadership came not from within the Labour
Party – which abjured the strikes with displays of civilised horror – but from syndicalists whose focus was on the development of working class capacities for self-government outside the British state.10 The indifference of these syndicalists to parliament could hardly be more at odds with the deferential attitude that most Labour politicians held toward the existing institutions of the British state, from the crown-in-parliament to the colonial empire. In fact, whatever else changed about the Labour Party in this era, one of its abiding attributes was to be the priority it accorded to the interests of the ‘nation’, and the deference it accorded to extant constitutional arrangements and military commitments. Those Labour MPs who, today, find simply unthinkable the break-up of the United Kingdom, the repudiation of Trident, and the end of the ‘special relationship’ with the United States are in fact authentic legatees of their party’s traditions.

  But it was through the locust years of the Great War, largely supported by the Labour Party leadership – and by the majority of European socialist parliamentarians, with some notable dissenters – and the epochal rupture of the Russian Revolution, that the Labour Party was decisively formed as a national, centralised political party. Labour, despite its nominal commitment to opposing the coming of war, refuting the nationalist ideology that would justify it, and agitating for a general strike to obstruct it, was almost automatic in its support for the war once the British state decided to enter it.11 Indeed, the fact of war instantly gave Labour an importance to Britain’s ruling class it had hitherto lacked. Labour had always been in favour of a collaboration between classes to secure reform rather than outright class conflict, and its sociological basis in the trade union leadership arguably conferred on it a mediating character – negotiating between the demands of members and employers was the raison d’etre of a union bureaucrat. By becoming an active participant in the war effort, Labour in effect institutionalised this mediating role – so that it was no longer simply registering the demands of the labour movement in an electorally acceptable format, but also conveying the demands of the state to the labour movement in the interests of the war effort.