‘Just as the Labour Party has been a compromise between working-class objectives and the existing power structures at the national level, so the traditional Labour Left has been a compromise between socialist objectives and the existing power structure at the party level. It has made important efforts to reform this party power structure, but with odds continually against it.’
Raymond Williams
As the theme of this book has been the struggle between the transformative and the integrative tendencies in the Labour Party, it is worth concluding with an analysis of where Corbynism fits into that dynamic.
The 2017 conference marked a turning point. With 1,200 delegates it was the largest conference in Labour history, the opposite of the purposefully smaller Blair-era conferences. The sign that the pendulum had swung the other way was seen in the overwhelming votes for the agenda set by the left – the right simply could not get a look in. They left the conference demoralised and disaffected, much as socialists had done in 1995 when Clause IV was ‘modernised’.
The subsequent narrative that was spun by the leadership and Momentum after the conference is worth considering. Corbyn proudly announced that Labour was the new ‘political mainstream’. Momentum followed it up with a message to supporters ‘We are the mainstream now.’ They were not alone in thinking this: Theresa May admitted that Corbyn had moved the political goalposts, that arguments the Tories thought they had won over the free market and the role of the state were suddenly contested again.
Being mainstream can be a double-edged sword. You can be mainstream through compromise, allowing yourself to be integrated into a safe, controlled cul-de-sac. Or you can be mainstream through rupture, through destablising power or fundamentally shifting the balance of forces in your favour. Labour looks set on a transformative path, but the siren calls of the integrative forces of ‘common sense’, of conciliation or attempts to calm genuine mobilising anger, are ever present. Can the Labour left defy their critics and do what was previously thought to be impossible?
Any serious reading of history can lead to only one conclusion: the socialist left will have to break down the traditional institutions of government and power in order to make any headway at all. The current Corbyn project is to pursue moderate tax-and-spend proposals with the hope that the economy doesn’t crash upon the arrival of a left government. If there is capital flight, currency speculation or establishment resistance to left policies, then Labour will be faced with a challenge it has rarely taken on before in directly confronting the power of capitalism.
This means forming a different conception of what a Labour Party looks like in Britain. A preparation for a struggle, from the food banks, unemployment lines, the workplaces and the universities to take on the 1% with a transformative strategy that can move us beyond not just the inequalities of neoliberalism but also the profiteering of capitalism itself. Only if Labour’s support base is not only sympathetic but active and mobilised, able to counter all of the threats and obstacles, can a positive outcome be achieved. In short, it means the Labour left doing something it has always talked about but never done – building a mass extra-parliamentary movement. Getting elected as a socialist MP or councillor only matters if there is a genuine movement behind you, forcing the wider political terrain to the left. ‘No left MP can be effective if there is no mass opposition outside Parliament’, as Michael Foot discovered to his cost.1
The recent sudden breakthrough is reminiscent of the prediction Mark Fisher made in Capitalist Realism, to the effect that the apparently hegemonic position of neoliberalism is precisely what makes it so vulnerable to rupture: ‘The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism.’2 The movement behind Corbyn is that tear in the fabric – the onrush of the many desperate to tear down the power and privilege of the few.
The greatest challenge to the left still lies ahead – will it transform society or be seduced and integrated back into the status quo? Blair was right about one thing: the class compromise on which Labour was founded in 1900 is increasingly unsustainable; that is why political polarisation is happening inside Labour, in the wider society and across the world. What is clear is that for the first time in a generation, there is an alternative.