Party apparatus

Corbyn’s defeat was not some swing in the pendulum of alternating power between the left and the right. Corbynism did not represent the beginnings of a revivification of the Labour Party as a progressive force. Instead it was both a last-gasp attempt to wrest the party away from the neoliberal trajectory it has been pursuing with ever greater velocity since the rise of Blair in the 1990s and a definitive historical experiment, designed to answer the burning question: can the left win inside the Labour Party? Could the party be transformed into a vehicle for socialist advance, having elected its most left-wing leader since George Lansbury in the early 1930s? The answer is now in, and it is flatly, I think, a resounding No. There is unlikely to be a next time, but even if there were, the same fundamental weakness in any such project would reappear as abundantly and as fatally as it did for the Corbyn experiment: the left cannot fight and win against the political establishment and the media establishment, still less the concentrated power of capital beyond those guardians of the social order, while it is also fighting the right-wing majority in the upper ranks of its own party.

That ‘right’—a term which we must shortly abandon for an analysis more attuned to the heterogeneity of forces at work—inside the party now inhabits the same ideological universe as the Conservatives (and the Liberal Democrats) and feels happier with the Tories in government than with Labour under a left-wing leadership. Blair articulated the collective sentiments of the Labour right very clearly during the 2015 Labour leadership campaign, after Corbyn unexpectedly became the front runner: ‘Let me make my position clear: I wouldn’t want to win on an old-fashioned leftist platform. Even if I thought it was the route to victory, I wouldn’t take it.’footnote³ And neither, it turned out, would much of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Thus electoral sabotage, to engineer a shift back to power for the right following defeat, is a default strategy that will eventually succeed against a traumatized party membership. And the willingness to force it through will never change because a breach with the social-democratic past is baked in. The right’s commanding position within the party apparatus gives it all the tools it needs to mount blocking and sabotage campaigns.

A leader such as Corbyn can never launch the honest conversation about the past history of the party that is required or articulate a thoroughgoing critique of present party practices, such as the role of Labour-controlled councils in austerity or gentrification of the cities.footnote⁴ A left-wing government, should it ever come to pass with a small majority, would immediately be held hostage by the Labour right over its legislative programme. Additionally, the plp’s attacks on the left and their smear campaigns of the leadership, magnified at every turn by a hostile media, carry much greater weight with the public than they would if they came from political opponents formally outside a left-party vehicle. Labour’s ‘broad church’ and calls for unity are always on the terms of the right; the left must accept the right’s dominance, but the same loyalty to party over factions will never be reciprocated in those brief and highly irregular moments when the left grows in strength. Something has to give. So far it has been the Labour left’s backbone.

Rise of social liberalism

Social liberalism is a historically variable philosophy. In its more heroic earlier period it emerged as a break with economic liberalism, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This was the ‘new liberalism’, seeded by philosophers such as T. H. Green, D. G. Ritchie and L. T. Hobhouse, which undertook the work of rehabilitating the state in liberal thought as the necessary co-ordinating force without which the good society, once expected to emerge naturally from the market, would remain still-born.footnote⁸ It eventually fed into the Fabian-led political alliance between liberalism and the labour movement, and provided much of the intellectual heavy lifting for the social-democratic compromise—Keynesianism, the 1942 Beveridge Report—that emerged piecemeal in the first decades of the twentieth century, even under Conservative governments, before being institutionalized as a new historic bloc after 1945.footnote⁹

For Gramsci, a historic bloc refers to the intra-ruling-class compromise that, when successful, is projected downward to include large enough sections of the subaltern classes to guarantee effective social peace. Hegemony ensues when that social peace is governed more by consent and persuasion than by coercion and violence.footnote¹⁰ Still, the force of law always stands behind this social peace, nipping dissent in the bud before it can generalize—for example, arresting leading cadres of the direct-action opposition, as in the case of the activist group uk Uncut.footnote¹¹ In extremis the force of law can become the law of force, but the more this is generalized and sustained, the more the hegemony of the historic bloc is weakened. The dismantling of the social-democratic historic bloc begun by Thatcher in the 1980s was one such moment, when an old hegemony was receding, a new one emerging and in the interregnum, the law of force could be clearly (perhaps too clearly) seen; no more so than in the heavily militarized policing of the 1984–85 miners’ strike.

Yet by the 1990s, in order to secure its rule, economic liberalism had to tilt from brute coercion and start to reproduce itself with a greater role for consent. Social liberalism was to become a key ideological resource in this, fashioning a rapprochement with economic liberalism after decoupling from social democracy. Vis-à-vis this transition, Blairism was perhaps not quite the intellectual vacuum Anderson accuses it of being in his recent panoramic survey of the long British crisis.footnote¹² As the embodiment of liberalism’s triumph within the party, Blairism transformed the political cultures of both the Labour Party and subsequently the Conservative Party, insofar as the latter tried to remake itself under Cameron on the New Labour model. This reversed the earlier pattern of Thatcherism influencing New Labour, but the crucial difference was that liberalism’s resurgence was lashed to a catastrophic surrender on political economy. On the broader cultural terrain, as Žižek noted, multiculturalism became the logic of multinational capitalism, and New Labour was part of that international trend.footnote¹³ The openly reactionary values of racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia exemplified by Thatcherism and coupled oddly with international capitalism, were to be officially replaced with public commitments to diversity and equal opportunity in order to neutralize significant sources of discontent within the framework of global economic liberalism.

Economic fractures

Thus social liberalism offers economic liberalism an alternative partner in the battle for political power. At this point the ‘social’ in social liberalism undergoes a fundamental change. No longer is it about the role of the state as a corrective to capitalism’s tendency to increase social stratification. Its role is to guarantee a level playing field of competition, not impose social obligations on capital. The ‘social’ in social liberalism becomes a rosily optimistic alternative interpretation of the consequences of capitalist markets. Two liberal optics in particular come to the fore and define the political terrain going into the new century. First, the atomization of community and society is embraced and, contra conservatism, is understood as the dismantling of hierarchies and barriers that prevent fairness and social mobility. The element of meritocracy that was mobilized by Thatcher(ism) came into contradiction with its regressive nationalistic cultural inclinations; but in social liberalism, meritocracy found a more credible champion. Hence under Blairism the ideology of meritocracy swept across the policy discourse of institutions, not just in politics but in education and the cultural industries as well.footnote¹⁴ After 2010, the alliance between the social-liberal wing of the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats in the Cameron–Clegg coalition government marked a joint party-political inflection of the dominance of economic and social liberalism (now without the Labour Party). Under austerity, the ‘social’ was increasingly linked to a combination of meritocracy and charity, with the voluntary and third sector stepping in to fill the gulfs in social provision. Hence photo ops of Tory mps beaming with pride at their local foodbank.

Second, and more difficult for the left to gain a critical purchase on, the international dimension of the capitalist market was celebrated for its cosmopolitanism. Of course, Marx also recognized the progressive potential of capitalism’s drive to break up national seclusion, tearing up ‘feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations’ and establishing a ‘cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.’footnote¹⁵ But liberalism is one-eyed about the progressive side of capitalism and, in its new alliance with economic liberalism, has little to say about the destructive aspect of capitalist development. The key political debate on this question was of course around the European Union which became, following the shock defeat in the 2016 referendum, the totemic governance structure of Reason itself for much of the liberal middle class. The referendum crystallized long germinating trends. ‘The sheer magnitude of the fracture between the globalized middle class and the anxious majority is clear’, wrote Rob Ford shortly after the 2016 vote. Along with Matthew Goodwin, Ford has been an ambivalent chronicler of the ‘older, white, socially conservative voters in more economically marginal neighbourhoods’ especially in Labour heartlands.footnote¹⁶

A more explicitly leftist account of an emerging hard-right ‘structure of feeling’footnote¹⁷ conducive to old-style conservativism was provided by Winlow, Hall and Treadwell in The Rise of the Right. Ventriloquizing the English nationalism that was the subject of their ethnographic research, they found a deep hatred of the liberal ‘centre’:

The absurd and immovable commitment these politicians displayed to the vague categories of ‘openness’ and ‘diversity’ indicated quite clearly how divorced from the real world they had become. The trendy new language of multiculturalism, and the actual policies and political commitments that underpinned it, marginalized the very communities that during the 20th century had enabled the country to grow to become a genuine force on the world stage. The white working class were now dismissed as idiotic, slovenly and atavistic barbarians . . .footnote¹⁸

Nor is this a peculiarly English or British phenomenon, since the forces shaping politics are cross-national and international. Christophe Guilluy finds a similar cleavage and need to get beyond the terms of the debate of the main conservative-liberal interlocutors at work in France.

French society is not divided between enlightened partisans of progress and their uncultivated and blinkered adversaries. The true divide is between those who stand to gain from globalization, or at least have the means to protect themselves against occasional misfortune, and those who stand to lose from globalization, who are powerless to withstand its merciless onslaught.footnote¹⁹

Hence the genius of the 2016 Leave campaign slogan: Take Back Control. That could have been contested from the left in both the 2017 and 2019 elections with something like a promise for a constitutional convocation of the kind that has been successful in Venezuela and Bolivia, and a step towards a genuine popular sovereignty, a genuine taking back control. But such a vision would have required a more sweeping counter-hegemonic strategy than the left in Labour could manage. The question of immigration, linked to cosmopolitanism of course, posed a particular problem for the left, given its historic commitment to proletarian internationalism and support for those fleeing poverty, state terror and war. Although Corbyn tried to re-frame the question in terms of reining in the business propensity to use migrants as a means of acquiring cheap labour, this was a minority discourse, and certainly not supported by most Labour mps, for whom the thought of curtailing the freedom of private property to buy labour at the price it could find it, was frankly undesirable.

Conservative compensations

While conservatism also promotes economic liberalism, it too faces contradictions. Conservatism’s cherished institutions in which the ‘wisdom of the ages’ is preserved are threatened by capitalism’s revolutionary thirst for change. Economic liberalism’s commodification of the body undermines the Christian foundations of conservatism; its atomization of social relations erodes those smaller-scale units of social belonging, the family, the community, that conservatism favours; and its ever extending internationalism threatens the symbolic and economic foundations of the national imaginary which conservatism has made its own. As with liberalism, deepening economic inequality threatens core conservative values and institutions. In the present case, the supranational British state is in danger of breaking up as subaltern nations, and their state complexes (particularly Scotland and Northern Ireland) posit independence as a means or an end that will resolve these contradictions.

The close links between cultural politics and political cultures means that the latter can turn ‘structures of feeling’ at work in civil society into forceful organized outcomes, as with Brexit. However, there are important differences between the way this plays out with conservatism and with liberalism, stemming in turn from their different relations to economic liberalism. For the relationship between economic ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ (both state and civil society) in the case of conservatism is deeply contradictory rather than isomorphic; yet this is exactly what gives conservatism its creative flexibility and cultural energy. By being in contradiction with key dynamics of capitalism, conservatism is powerfully mobilized as a compensatory culture. It works typically through the Freudian mechanisms of displacement and condensation, which explains why it has such affective power. By contrast, liberalism is a more isomorphic extension into political and cultural discourse of at least the phenomenal life of capitalism—rationalism, equal exchange, the individual as free-floating atom, contractual relations, competition, internationally extended value chains, etc. Yet it is precisely this match between capitalism’s surface life and liberal political culture that makes liberalism less able to offer emotional compensation for the negative outcomes of capitalism. This gives conservatism something of an edge in abnormal times. Still, the contradictions can be enabling and disabling for both political cultures in their competition with one another, depending on what use they and their adversaries can make of them. The model therefore needs to be able to cope with complexity, dynamic change, structural contradictions and agency.

Liberalism for example uses capitalism’s internationalist tendencies to play a leading role in developing cosmopolitan institutions and cultures. The threat posed by the eu in terms of creating new bonds of identity and identification that bypass the national imaginary and its institutions, where conservatism has always been strong and liberalism has been relatively weak, is precisely why conservatism has the means and the motive to react with fury to such endeavours. It was the conservative brand of Thatcherism Redux that proved best placed to marshal the various discontents of economic liberalism and, through the political arts of displacement, to find a way back from the wilderness years of 1997–2010. With the Cameron–Clegg social-liberal project rapidly compromised by harsh economic-liberal austerity, a revived attempt to combine an economy open to international capitalism (but uncoupled from the eu) with a political culture of nationalism has increasingly made the running—and gained rocket boosters after the 2016 Referendum. Its party-political representatives were ukip and what became the European Research Group wing of the Conservative Party, the two working together in a tacit alliance.

If capitalism’s supranationalism cuts against and contradicts appeals to national sovereignty and cultural homogeneity, it is easy enough to portray the insecurities it generates as stemming from eu ‘bureaucracy’, metropolitan elites and migrant labour, through the discursive processes of displacement and condensation of which ukip’s Nigel Farage was a master. Liberalism cannot in fact compete with the discourse of nationalism when the chips are down, for what does it have to counter the tangible appeals to place and people, the mythological history or the institutional bulwarks of the British state, in which conservatism has profitably invested so much power? For example, in its long moral-political struggle against the eu, conservatism grounded the discontents of an older generation of voters by mobilizing and reworking their version of the national imaginary around the Second World War, with the eu as the enemy without and the Germans once again trying to defeat Britain, this time through front institutions and without firing a shot.footnote²²

Electoral struggles

Elections offer a snapshot of the struggle for hegemony between the political cultures, as well as of the parties battling for the leadership of those political cultures, with their particular combinations of them. The distinction is important. Would ukip or the Tories triumph as the party-political vehicle for nationalistic conservatism after 2010? Would Labour, the snp or Liberal Democrats triumph as the party-political vehicle of liberalism, or alternatively under Corbyn, could Labour redefine itself as a return to social democracy?

In the 2014 European Parliament elections, ukip topped the poll with 27 per cent of the vote, Labour came second with 25 per cent and the Conservatives came third with 23 per cent. ukip’s electoral popularity had surged after austerity became the policy response to the 2008 global crisis following the arrival of the Coalition government in 2010.footnote²⁴ Thus liberal conservatism and social liberalism—the Coalition government—clearly sowed the seeds for its own defeat on the question of Europe. In the general election of 2015, ukip captured nearly 4 million votes, just under 13 per cent, eclipsing the Liberal Democrats as a third party. Yet the first-past-the-post majoritarian system meant that ukip failed to win a single parliamentary seat. It nevertheless saw big increases in its working-class electoral base, drawing support ‘along England’s more financially disadvantaged east coast, in Kent, Essex, Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, and also in the north east where its average share of the vote (17 per cent) was its highest across the country.’footnote²⁵

Yet the high barrier to new party representation in parliament meant that the votes ukip was now taking from both the Conservatives and Labour could be re-canalized, if the concerns mobilizing older, white, financially vulnerable and educationally impoverished voters could be reconciled with these parties’ broader political agendas. Of the two, the Tory Party was best placed to do so, since it had the Euro-sceptic European Research Group as a high-profile and increasingly powerful lobby within it. Labour, by contrast, had a parliamentary body and membership overwhelmingly oriented towards the eu, and that sentiment was to be ruthlessly exploited as a wedge issue by Corbyn’s opponents inside and outside the party. In 2017, Corbyn’s promise to respect the outcome of the Brexit referendum bought space for a renewed social-democratic prospectus to get a hearing. Labour won some 12.8 million votes, or 40 per cent of the total, against the Conservatives’ 13.6 million votes or 42 per cent. The two main parties squeezed ukip’s vote down to just under 600,000. Forty-five per cent of ukip voters from the 2015 general election voted for the Conservatives, and only 11 per cent went for Labour.footnote²⁶

In 2017, the Conservatives had a net loss of 13 seats and Labour a net gain of 30 seats. Labour secured a share of the vote similar to that won by Blair in 2001 and a swing of 10 per cent, comparable to Blair’s 1997 landslide. Of course, as the right within the party were keen to point out, although Labour did better than expected, much better, it did not win enough seats to achieve power. ‘Labour Road Map’, a report by a rather anonymous group of ‘Labour activists’ claiming to champion a ‘pragmatic Labour vision that widely resonates and persuades the public’, concluded that these were ‘results without success’ in terms of winning parliamentary seats. Instead, the vote share indicated deepening levels of support in constituencies already held by Labour, especially in the cities and university towns, but not a sufficiently broad appeal to overturn Conservative majorities.footnote²⁷

In mitigation, the line between success and second place was often incredibly tight. Excluding Northern Ireland, there were 48 constituency seats where the winning majority in 2017 was less than 1,000 votes. Of these, Labour came second in 21 seats, losing Southampton, Itchen by only 30 votes (Figure 2, below). Had all 21 of those seats changed hands, the Conservatives would have been on 303 seats and Labour on 283. The total number of votes in play across those 21 seats was 8,584. In an election where more than 26 million voted, that is a statistically insignificant figure. The point about this is not to play fantasy political outcomes, but to remember that the 2017 Labour manifesto was popular, credible and—in a sense probably not meant by the Labour Road Map group—a ‘pragmatic Labour vision’ that ‘persuades the public’.

Another mitigating point is that the Corbyn leadership was working in a context in which it had inherited (rather than caused) the long-term negative trend of class de-alignment for which New Labour was responsible (including the catastrophic loss of Scotland). A comparison of the three general elections of 2015, 2017 and 2019 indicates that Corbyn was partially able to hold those trends in check in 2017. But once combined with Brexit, those trends in many ways came to a culmination in 2019 (Figure 3, below). In 2015 the Tories outperformed Labour (under Edward Miliband’s leadership) in the c1s very comfortably (41 to 29 per cent) and tied with them for the c2s. The des still voted substantially for Labour (41 to 27 per cent). In 2017, the Conservatives marginally increased their hold on the c1s, while Labour increased its share of the c1 vote by 11 per cent, a significant improvement. Nevertheless, the Tories increased their hold over the c2 vote by 13 per cent between 2015 and 2017, a warning sign that Labour could be on the cusp of significant shifts and that Theresa May’s strategy of corralling the Brexit Leave working-class vote almost worked. What stopped it, partially, was that Labour also increased its share of the c2s by 9 per cent. Of course these ‘abcde’ uk social categories—devised in the 1960s for use by the advertising industry—are not unproblematic, even on their own terms. In particular there is evidence that the c2 category is fragmenting between those located in the expanding service sectors of the cities and university towns, and those in the former industrial heartlands made up of small towns and villages in the north.footnote²⁸

In 2017, the Conservatives were also doing well amongst the des although Labour managed to stay ahead. But again, there were clear signs that the Tories had momentum in class groupings that had historically been Labour strongholds. What was happening in Bolsover, a former mining district and historically one of Labour’s safest seats, was telling. Left-Labour mp Dennis Skinner’s vote dropped by nearly a third between 1997 and 2015, from 35,000 to 22,542. In 2005 Skinner had taken 65 per cent of the vote. Then came Brexit, pressing down further on those longer-term trends. In 2017 Skinner’s majority shrank again. It was another clear warning sign that the former heartlands in the northern small towns were preparing for a historic shift. All it would take was a shift on a symbolically loaded issue for quantitative change to become qualitative.

Finally, in 2019 the Conservatives secured 45 per cent of the c1s while Labour collapsed to 32 per cent. The Conservatives took 47 per cent of the c2s while Labour again won only 32 per cent. And the Conservatives increased their share of the des to 41 per cent, while Labour fell to 39 per cent. Labour’s changed stance on Brexit, promising now to hold a second referendum on a deal with the eu, could no longer stay the momentum towards nationalistic conservatism as the hegemonic solution to the problem of the 2016 referendum result. Of the 54 seats that Labour lost to the Conservatives in 2019, 52 were in areas that had voted leave in 2016—including Skinner’s.footnote²⁹

To Brexit we must add the fact that 2017’s close but not quite good enough result terrified Corbyn’s opponents inside and outside the Labour Party. Evidence from the leaked dossier on the right’s hyper-factionalism showed that Labour’s 2017 campaign was not helped by senior staff inside party headquarters, who were working for a defeat in the hope that this would trigger Corbyn’s downfall. According to the dossier, senior staff bemoaned on WhatsApp evidence of Labour doing well in the run-up to the election and were left distraught by the eventual result. As the Independent reported:

An election-night chat log shows that 45 minutes after the exit poll revealed that Labour had overturned the Conservative majority, one senior official said the result was the ‘opposite to what I had been working towards for the last couple of years’, describing themselves and their allies as ‘silent and grey-faced’ and in need of counselling.footnote³⁰

It is clear that these political currents in Labour will want to bury the memory of the 2017 general election and any evidence that there is popular support for a left social-democratic agenda.

Driving the wedge

Gramsci had noted that national newspapers—he cited The Times in England and Corriere della Sera in Italy—can have important leadership functions, even on political parties, acting as an alternative ‘intellectual High Command’.footnote³⁸ In assessing the role of the Guardian as an intellectual High Command to weaken the Corbyn leadership we might begin by noting how quickly they set the terms for the later monstering of the man and his politics. Three days after Corbyn won the leadership in 2015, leading Guardian columnist Rafael Behr wrote an article describing Corbynism as ‘a kind of Faragism of the left’ (the left and the right as mirror images of each other), as not competent in professional politics (a rich seam that would be mined ad nauseam) and as representing a ‘contempt for Parliament’, a trope that allowed liberalism to relive its worst Cold War days. The result was ‘bad for all moderate politicians’, we were told. Already, at this early stage, the Guardian had identified three frames that were to dominate its coverage of Corbyn.footnote³⁹

At this point many of the online readers’ comments below the piece were critical of Behr. The emerging gap between the Guardian’s editorial line and sections of its readership perhaps reflected the one that had opened up between the plp and the party membership. But there was one point of attack that Behr made, a fourth frame, which received less attention below the line, presumably because of its potential to be a wedge issue. This was his argument about Corbyn’s ‘obvious dislike for a European project he sees as the conduit for corporate interests and pro-austerity economics’. This frame—later elaborated as Corbyn’s dishonesty, secret desire for Brexit, stubborn refusal to back the obvious need for a ‘People’s Vote’, etc—combined with and supported by the others, and already in place before Corbyn’s leadership was three days old, provided the ammunition for a sustained assault. The Guardian specializes in wringing its hands at the state of the world, but when a policy came along offering to address some of those wrongs even only modestly, its response was to launch a vicious propaganda campaign to ensure it never came to pass.

Brexit was a double wedge issue, the gift that kept giving for Corbyn’s opponents. It helped force a rift between the cultural values of Corbyn’s supporters and their initial backing for an economic programme that broke with economic liberalism. It also created a fatal fissure between the membership and the broader electoral base in the northern constituencies. Another related issue that limited the political culture of the membership was their structural role within the party, a subaltern role that the members have deeply internalized. When the plp declared war on the membership, the membership did not respond in kind. Behr’s jibe about Corbyn’s supposed ‘contempt’ for parliament, an institution in which he has spent most of his working life, may have been provoked in part by hopes that Labour would become more of a social movement under his leadership.footnote⁴⁰ Corbyn represents a strand of left thinking that has a critique (which is not the same as contempt) of an exclusively parliamentary focus for the very good reason that such a focus cements politics into the historic bloc. As Stuart Hall noted, the Labour Party is exceptionally good at failing to connect with ‘popular feelings’ and this is intimately connected to its fetishization of parliamentarism to the exclusion of any political space or practice outside the ‘parliamentary mould’. Any political practice not emanating from or directed to the House of Commons ‘produces in its leadership the deepest traumas and the most sycophantic poems of praise for parliamentarism.’footnote⁴¹

Writing shortly after the 2017 general election, Hilary Wainwright linked the prospect of a Corbyn government to a long running theme in her work, the need to counter the hostile retaliation of the established power structures with ‘power-as-a-transformative-capacity’.footnote⁴² These arguments are well rehearsed on the left, but it must have been alarming for the social-liberal hegemons to see the leader of the Labour Party mulling the importance of popular power as a counter to state and capital. Instead of consecrating the split between political power and material reproduction—a split that channels all politics to accept private monopoly control of vast productive assets—this threatened to start tackling the economic dimension of political power, and the political dimension of economic power, the first steps towards a realistic strategy of socialist transformation.footnote⁴³ Hence the scorn poured on Corbyn’s aspirations, the cries that Corbyn was not serious about winning elections, that he was not ‘professional’, that he threatened to turn Labour into a rag-tag protest movement.

Interestingly, in the 1990s, both Blair and Brown tried to revitalize local party constituencies, as the torpor of the old bureaucratic-Labourist tradition had whittled away at membership numbers. But the model of community activity that they had in mind was more along the lines of polite civic participation for a newly enlarged middle-class membership, rather than engagement in working-class struggles. In the mid-1990s party membership began to rise as disgust with the political and moral corruption of the Conservative Party grew. From around 270,000 in 1993, it rose to 400,000 in 1997 but then declined rapidly to 200,000 by 2009 as it became clear that Blair and Brown had completed the liberal revolution of Labour policy.footnote⁴⁴ By 2015 it was under 200,000, before Corbyn’s rise almost trebled that number, with party membership climbing to a high of 575,000 in July 2017.footnote⁴⁵

The necessary disconnection between party membership and activism produces a contradiction for the dominant model, namely declining numbers and vitality. Yet it is a price that has to be paid in observance to what we may call the pmq model. The weekly jousts between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition are vital for those inside the Westminster bubble, although for the vast majority of people, they are utterly irrelevant. But the importance of pmqs may be taken as a symbol of the domination of the Parliamentary Labour Party over the membership, evident in the relative ease with which mps have fought off mandatory reselection even when it was available as a trigger to the membership.footnote⁴⁶ While Momentum brought a welcome activist support base for the Corbyn leadership and innovative campaign ideas about the use of social media,footnote⁴⁷ its political positions on key questions, such as Europe or the anti-Semitism smear campaign, were weak, naive and uninformed by hard-headed analysis and political culture.

A new social democracy?

In February 2019, Labour’s Deputy Leader Tom Watson, who was busy undermining the Corbyn leadership at every turn, announced that he was setting up a Labour group of backbenchers dedicated to ‘social democracy’ to broaden the party’s appeal. You have to admire the chutzpah. It was part of the discursive framing of Corbyn’s leadership as ‘extreme’, as outside the progressive traditions of the political mainstream. The reality is that the majority of the plp abandoned social democracy and that Corbyn’s programme was a modest attempt at reviving that political tradition. It is, as Tariq Ali memorably put it, the ‘centre’ that is extreme.footnote⁵¹ If by social democracy we mean redistribution of wealth from the rich to the rest via high taxation, converted into socialized provision and welfare support, then neither the plp nor the various ‘Third Way’ apologists are social democrats anymore but hybrids of conservatism and liberalism re-aligned.footnote⁵² If by social democracy we mean imposing significant social obligations on capital and controlling its international power, then the power-bloc in the Labour Party will never allow it. If we mean re-empowering organized labour by dismantling some of the most restrictive trade-union laws in the Western world, then again, social democracy has few advocates at the Palace of Westminster. If we mean reviving public services by taking privatized utilities out of private ownership and driving marketization and corporate contractors out of public funding of services, then that is a vision too large and a shift too historic for the British state (or indeed the eu) to admit as a legitimate project.

The 2017 Labour Party Manifesto was modest when measured against some of these social-democratic objectives. An investment bank to fund infrastructure projects, an idea borrowed from such bastions of revolutionary socialism as Germany and the Nordic countries; ‘moving towards’ a 20:1 gap between the boardroom and the lowest paid; corporation tax raised but still amongst the lowest in the major developed economies; the City left entirely alone; the co-operative sector to be doubled in size, bringing it in line with the land of Free Enterprise across the Atlantic; energy, water and rail brought back into public ownership; a commitment to renewables and nuclear; the abolition of university tuition fees and the reintroduction of maintenance grants; a modest enhancement of trade-union rights; a very modest council and housing-association building programme (100,000 per year by the end of the parliament); some new rights for renters that fell well short of a declaration of war on the landlord class—and so on. Modest as the policy offering was, what the ruling bloc feared was not any single one of the proposals, or even all of them put together, but rather the shift in direction a Corbyn victory would mark, the momentum that might develop and the spectre of an excess of clamorous democratic demands being reawakened at the expense of the power and wealth of the dominant groups.footnote⁵³

The left’s relationship to social democracy, though, also needs rethinking. It tends to associate the term with the ossification of the later post-war period, a great lumbering behemoth clamping down on ‘industrial modernity’ according to Tom Nairn, skirting at times dangerously close to economic liberalism in The Break-Up of Britain,footnote⁵⁴ while for the revolutionary left, it was a byword for class compromise. After forty years of defeat, the purity of revolutionary theory uncoupled from mass practice is a strange comfort. The left cannot afford to be so dismissive of a political culture that had to be broken by capital, that must be unrepresented by the dominant political parties; that expresses sentiments with which millions of people can identify; a political culture un-represented and unrepresentable by the dominant bloc (including Labour).

The left should remember not the creaking institutions of social democracy that were generating discontent in the 1960s and 1970s, but the fact that social democracy emerged out of the conflict and strife of war, revolution, counter-revolution and economic catastrophe in Europe between 1914 and 1945. It was not born in peacetime. It is clear today, post-Corbyn, that it will take a revolution to get some social democracy—that is: mass mobilization, polarization and a significant growth in class consciousness. This Corbyn did not have. There was enthusiasm to be sure, there were crowds, there was the singing of his name, but it was a spectacle that had nowhere to go and the Labour Party was unable to tap or engage with that wider sentiment. Momentum was largely turned inward, defending the Corbyn leadership, as it probably had to do in an organization whose dominant factions were on 24/7 manoeuvres against him. Again, the cost of inhabiting a house with diametrically opposed visions is paralysis.

The kind of popular power as a transformative capacity that would be needed to break through into the existing institutions of capitalist democracy so as to begin to effect change suggests we are dealing here with the paradox of a revolutionary form and a social-democratic content. But for a period of time this might be a necessary and an enabling contradiction. It would open up crucial avenues of historical experience in terms of participation, agency, problem solving, experimenting, democratizing, solidarity building, and so forth. It would be a historical experience that would at some point likely pose the old questions but which, without the historical experience itself, can only sound abstract and doctrinaire; namely whether the revolutionary form should be adapted to the social-democratic content or whether the social-democratic content should be expanded to match the revolutionary form. In evaluating that dilemma, people would have to weigh up the known risks of seriously challenging the power and wealth of an extremely violent and sociopathic class, or of remaining within the existing mode of production and accepting the associated risks of economic crisis, war and ecological catastrophe. Now, take a look at the Labour front bench and the rows of gargoyles arranged behind them and ask whether a word of truth about the dangers facing us would ever fall from their lips, or whether a muscle in their collective body would ever twitch in the direction of addressing those dangers. After Corbyn the left in Labour needs to try something new, something different; something intellectually and politically post-Labour.