Is Corbynism dead?
Aditya Chakrabortty had a piece in the Guardian on Thursday (link below) that argued that while Corbynism is dead, the multiple crisis of capital mean that the left itself is very far from deceased.
The latter point I agree with, the former point is more arguable.
Of course if you define Corbynism as an attempt by a Parliamentary focused left-wing to hold the authority in the top level structures of the Labour Party it is dead.
I would have very great doubts if such thing would ever be possible but certainly Corbynism did not achieve it.
But Corbynism was and is about much more than that.
This is rather bad news for numerous centrists, careerists and general unpleasant types who think that some old bloke with a beard and an allotment in East Finchley was what it was all about. It wasn’t, much as I admired Jeremy’s beard and acquaintance over more than 40 years now.
It was about Labour voters, working people, trade unionists, the disadvantaged, feeling that Labour should stand for a world ordered at least a little bit differently in terms of priorities to how the Tories did it.
I was obviously no great fan of New Labour but that was achieved for a time after 1997. The lives of many of the less well off got slightly better. It wasn’t the change I’d like to see but if you are at the bottom of society even a small shift can make a lot of difference to your day to day life.
Then came 2008 and Labour shifted to a there is no alternative to austerity approach.
That is what Corbynism rebelled against. It was of course a left social-democratic approach, not unusual in Europe but less so in the UK. There were grand plans of course and some might have worked or led to a collision with capital. More mundanely the lives of many ordinary people would have been just a bit better than they are under Johnson.
The point for Labour now is that, whether it is thought Corbynism is dead or not, if people who might vote Labour don’t feel that there will be a bit of a shift in the misery of their daily lives for the better then Labour won’t win.
The nature of how people see change happening in market capitalism, usually known as ‘reformism’ is not related to Corbyn, Corbynism or any living political figure. It is a function of how the system is supposed to work.
E P Thompson in the Peculiarities of the English noted how reformism developed after the defeat of Chartism and how deep its roots became:
The intensity of actual conflicts on the ground, and the truly astronomic sum of human capital which has been invested in the strategy of piece-meal reform. It is this sociological and institutional basis of reformism which has made it so secure.
Of course important as small changes can be this is not my politics. The problem with this approach is that without at the very least significant changes in the structure of market capitalism internationally, such changes can be and often are reversed (as we have seen since 2010). Again Corbyn and McDonnell knew that. The point at issue is whether such structural change is possible through the means of Parliamentary politics. I very much doubt it but obviously it’s a debate to be had while working together to try and change the world for the better.
The Corbyn era certainly has been buried. It was never going to survive its complacency over Boris Johnson, its failure to treat allegations of antisemitism with any urgency, or its years spent umm-ing and ahh-ing over Brexit. As one Labour adviser texted me: “It’s astonishing how little there is of any Corbyn legacy … it has simply dissolved away.” Barely any of the frontbenchers from a few months ago are left in the shadow cabinet, the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs is toothless, and almost all of Corbyn’s senior officials in the party bureaucracy have gone.
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