Jeremy Corbyn & Crowds: a message from history.
Guardian journalist Aditya Chakrabortty has written a sympathetic but not uncritical piece about a moment in Jeremy Corbyn’s current Election campaign.
We’ll find out after 10pm on 12th December how Labour have done but the question of the crowds that Jeremy Corbyn attracts will abide longer.
Its fair to say that any Labour leader whether Gaitskell or Wilson has attracted crowds at Election times but Jeremy Corbyn is different in that he attracts crowds at Election times and at every other time too.
It could be the beard, its more likely to be the policies and the hope they inspire. Its not the great oratory. Corbyn used to be Tony Benn’s representative on earth. Benn made the inspirational speeches and Corbyn supported him. Benn is sadly no more and Jeremy Corbyn is a much better speaker than he was.
Chakrabortty raises the interesting question of what the crowds which Corbyn attracts represent and what they might do. Unusually for a journalist he is spot on in referring to the leading crowd historian George Rude’s work.
These days much work on crowds is about how many can fit in a particular space- risk assessment.
Fortunately Rude’s approach was historical. He looked at who those who were involved in the French Revolution of 1789 and after were for example.
But his work didn’t go without criticism. E P Thompson thought Rude too easily overlooked reactionary elements of crowd behaviour (not a feature of Corbyn crowds) and others suggested that while Rude identified who was part of the crowd, their age, occupation etc, we still had no idea about what they were thinking or why they were there.
Broadly speaking, we still don’t. So what will the crowds who come out to support and listen to Jeremy Corbyn do after 12th December? The answer is: work in progress. Political agency is about what people actually do not what theorists tell them they should do.
Perhaps Britain will become more like France with the gillets jaunes and this week’s massive trade union strike. Or perhaps the world will go on much the same. I hope for the former obviously but we’ll see.
Guardian article and extract
Local Labour councillor, Steve Sweeney, breaks into a grin as wide as the River Calder as he remembers organising a meeting for the Labour leader at Hebden Bridge in May 2017. Over a thousand came to that one rally, so impossibly many that Corbyn had to go outside to deliver his speech a second time. Some latecomers wanted in so badly they stood in the river. “I can’t imagine they caught a word.”
“Perhaps no historical phenomenon has been so thoroughly neglected by historians as the crowd,” wrote French scholar George Rude in his classic The Crowd In History. Whether at Bastille in 1789 or Peterloo in 1819, the “faces in the crowd” were considered not as a “living and many-sided phenomenon” but “an abstract formula”. The activists who thronged in driving rain at Sheffield last month to cheer Corbyn as he went on Question Time: Leaders Special were not doing anything half so dramatic, but they and others have been deluged in condescension.
To much of the press, they are little more than “Corbynistas”, bovine hordes lowing against the ideologically impure. Yet those grassroots supporters have called the past half-decade better than most in the Westminster village. As insiders laughed at his leadership chances, it was the growing crowds that showed he was a serious contender. When Labour MPs demanded Corbyn quit, his biggest support came from the crowds mobilising outside parliament.
Against press onslaught, Corbyn’s supporters have been his defence. When the polls look poor, his crowds have served as a reminder that anything is possible. For Corbyn himself, they show that he heads a “social movement”. Over the last few hours of this historic election, their role will be vital. And if Labour lose badly on Thursday night, then one big question on Friday morning will be who and what Corbyn’s crowds will accept.
One thing is clear: they are not to be taken for granted. The crowds this campaign would delight any other politician but by Corbyn’s standard they are typically smaller and older. Cold, wet evenings are no friend to the outdoor epic meeting, and the Labour leader is no longer the promising up-and-comer he appeared to be at Glastonbury two years ago. Yet senior advisers still puzzle over why his dire personal ratings have not enjoyed anything like the boost they got in 2017.
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