The left and lessons from Corbynism

Michael Chessum met Martin Thomas from Solidarity on 15 October to talk about his new book on Corbynism, This Is Only The Beginning.

Near the end of the book (p.210) it says: “Socialist was the movement’s prevailing adjective, but its immediate policy programme was… social democracy, and there was little or no collective discussion inside Corbynism about what a truly socialist or anti-capitalist programme might look like in the future”. Wasn’t that fundamental? And wasn’t the same lack also true of the “movements” of 2010-15 which the book describes as feeding into Corbynism?

Corbynism was an amalgam, with amorphous political aims. The mass movements which had built it — the student movement from 2010, the local anti-cuts campaigns, the pensions strikes of 2011, the Occupy movement — came together with the old Labour left and a whole series of other traditions and waves of social movements.

There were a lot of different political aims inside Corbynism. A large part of the movement didn’t know what it wanted. The movements from 2010-15 were searching for political expression. There was almost no collective discussion of what we wanted, rather, a mood of being desperate for the return of some alternative to neo-liberalism, to the political mainstream. That produced sometimes weird results in the years before 2015: the sudden popularity of Russell Brand, a surge for the Greens…

The organised left had gone through a period of defeat. The Trotskyist left and the orthodox Communist left did know what they wanted. But the Trotskyist left was not in a position to drive the debate.

The old Labour Left — people like the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and the old Labour Representation Committee — also had defined political aims, but again little capacity to shape debate.

Corbynism was built from the social movements, from outside. It had little space to debate and discuss ideas: certainly after 2017, internally it was extremely loyalist and intolerant of dissent. It became impossible to debate political aims, or to build tendencies or factions. A group of people in Corbyn’s office and the bureaucracy of the major unions set the programme, and the rest of us had no means to really shape that policy.

There were spaces for debate, like The World Transformed, but they were obviously toothless in terms of any decision-making. The people who created The World Transformed, many of whom came out of my [2010-11] generation in the student movement, took a decision to build a space for debate, but the cost of that was that they weren’t in the field of political battle in the Labour Party or Momentum.

But at The World Transformed 2016 the panels had almost no speakers from the Momentum left. Stewards tried to ban left-wing literature stalls even from the public street outside while the Morning Star was distributed free inside. I know the organisers of TWT were anti-Stalinists, yet even at TWT 2022 there were very few actual debates.

TWT was set up in 2016 off the edges of Corbyn’s second leadership campaign, with only a tiny bit of funding. Especially in its first year, Momentum and the Leader’s Office were still interfering in event. But the overall effect of that event — and every other event that followed — was overwhelmingly positive. If I was going to talk about the problem of bad political culture and creeping Stalinism on the British left, I wouldn’t start with TWT.

When people mostly from NCAFC [National Campaign against Fees and Cuts, the main student left activist movement from 2010] set up TWT, they marginalised themselves from the political battle. But what they produced was valuable. TWT is now an independent events company, with a more pluralistic culture than much of the left.

You have to remember that a lot of the worst party managers in the Leaders’ Office and the Unite bureaucracy were hostile to the very existence of TWT. [Jon] Lansman was hesitant to fund it, but backed it in the end, even if his allies in Momentum remained suspicious. Of course what TWT couldn’t substitute for was the lack of any democratic life inside Momentum and the wider project.

There was a low level of political culture in Corbynism. In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, you had a big organised left; Corbynism came from a moment when the organised left was weak. My generation [after 2010] was starting again after 30 years of continuous defeat. Much of the generation’s politics got flipped on its head, very early on, into bog-standard Labourism.

The post-2010 movements didn’t come from nothing: remember, e.g., the “new anti-capitalist” wave, the Social Forums. And the post-2010 movements had all been defeated and dispersed before 2015. The “Corbyn” influx into the Labour Party was mostly of older people, “returners”. Young Labour and Labour Students were smaller at the end of the Corbyn era than at the start.

Corbynism, Syriza, Podemos, the Sanders movement, were a long wave of results from the financial crisis of 2008. The shattering at a deep sociological level of the neoliberal consensus produced mass movements which shaped people and politics. In that sense Corbynism was made by the mass movements after 2010.

Yes, the movements failed. They peaked early in 2010-11. By 2015 the “movements” were no longer a movement. All the institutions, organisations, and campaigns had largely collapsed. But the people who had been politicised were still there, forming an amorphous soup which after the defeats could be swept up into Corbynism.

I’m not arguing that Corbynism was overwhelmingly young. With Young Labour, you had a classic exercise of position-filling. Young Labour was won by a left slate which was interested in winning internal elections and getting people to vote Labour in general elections, but did little.

But in broader political terms, Corbynism and the Labour left became the voice of young people. You could see that in the electoral demographics.

Young people in that period experienced capitalism in a particular way. Generational politics became a way of expressing class politics.

The youth revolt against neoliberalism has not all been left-wing. It could go to the right. Golden Dawn in Greece, Le Pen in France, have disproportionate support among young people. Why was Britain different? You have to look at the mass movements after 2010 to explain that.

Didn’t the lack of discussion on aims lead to de facto domination of Corbynite politics by variant combinations of Stalinism and of NGO politics? That was helped by many of the young activists going into NGO or other “doing comms” jobs, rather than becoming workplace and community activists like previous generations of young radicals.

Yes, the NGO-isation of the left is a major problem; and it’s even more a problem now in a period of collapse.

The organised left was in a long wave of defeats after the mid-1980s. Rank-and-file-ism as an option collapsed. I think Workers’ Liberty may be the only left group now which has an industrial policy [in the sense of encouraging young activists to go into workplaces important for industrial struggle].

In the 1980s there were big struggles in workplaces, and if you wanted to be political, workplace activism will have seemed a natural place to go. It shouldn’t surprise us that in a period since the defeat of the labour movement, people looked elsewhere.

All great waves of activity eventually ebb. What remains? What sustains the activist spirit for the future? Institutions.

If you look to workplace struggles, you can go into a job, be active in the union, and even in a period of decline be nourished by that activity. If not, you look to create other institutions.

The “alternative globalisation” (alter-globalisation) movement boosted NGO politics on the left, and Blairism created wide job opportunities in NGOs. The labour movement was at a low point, the organised left weaker, the labour-movement connections were more tenuous.

And so the Corbyn movement and Labourism interacted with NGO-ism. Momentum became a left-wing version of 38 Degrees — electronic list-building, digital campaigns, and little outside that.

You can see the legacy in Enough is Enough — huge email lists, big rallies, not much else. The NGO methodology is a big problem. Compared to that, even the SWP’s Stop the War coalition looks like a breath of fresh air and democracy.

Hopefully a lot of young people will observe the new strike wave and become trade unionists. However, a lot of left-wing young people have middle-class aspirations. With the decline in real wages in many areas, they may see their only chance of a decent standard of living in jobs where you get promoted. For jobs in NGOs and in trade unions, real wages have not gone down as they have elsewhere — so the bonus in becoming a bureaucrat is much greater.

Not so much in the book, but elsewhere, you have argued for a focus on winning Proportional Representation to spawn a new “broad left” party. But “broad left” parties in continental Europe, mostly based on the heritages of old Communist Parties, haven’t solved the political shortcomings that stymied Corbynism.

I don’t necessarily see the European left parties as a model. Proportional representation might create two or even three left parties: around the Greens, around the Trotskyist and social movement left, and around the Communist Party.

But the idea of the left taking over Labour and enacting a programme through it is fantasy.

And the idea of Marxists building a class-struggle left in the Labour Party, which might eventually provoke a split by the right out of which a democratic class-struggle left party would come?

Any new left party would have a bureaucracy, but the Labour Party has a series of specific problems which make it worse.

At present the left is absent from the national debate, in the UK as in the USA. In those countries the Labour Party and the Democratic Party have a monopoly in political representation, and the left is forced to share space with neoliberals. That pressure had an effect on Corbynism’s internal culture.

The hundreds of thousands of people who rallied to Corbynism didn’t want an absence of internal democracy or lack of space for debate. Why could a small group of people convince them to go along with it? They argued that Corbynism was under siege and needed to get into the bunker — and that story was convincing because at least half of it was true.

Now old Bennites are thinking about how to have another Corbyn moment but do it better next time. That is no recipe for transformative change.

The Labour Party bureaucracy and the union bureaucracies make each other worse. I’m in favour of the union-Labour link, but it very often pulls unions to the right in terms of militancy and policy, and acts as a brake on Labour members’ control of the party.

It would be much preferable to have multiple parties, and unions affiliating to various parties on the basis of politics. That would open up a real political debate within the labour movement. At the moment, we have this farce where we pretend we’re all part of the “Labour family”. Having a united voice for workers would be great, but Labour’s way of operating mitigates against obtaining the very intellectual and political clarity that would be necessary for that to happen. Instead, we get an endless bureaucratic fudge and a sentimental attachment to a party which has pretty much always been dominated by its right wing.

A new left party would not be free of those problems, but it would be better, and it’s an imperfect world. It could be a party which boosts the social movements rather than being a brake on them.

But I do not advocate leaving the Labour Party or splitting the Labour Party now.

You propose a focus on PR as a left tactic, but in practice now it pushes towards an alliance with the Lib Dems and a future coalition government, i.e. a move to the right.

A coalition government is not my politics. But what we have at present is a permanent centrist fiction in politics — that elections can only be won by competing for voters who are in one sense or another in the middle. The fiction only holds because, under First Past The Post, the left cannot put its own programme to the public.

The only reason why the breadth of opinion within the Labour Party exists is that it is forced to by the electoral system. A new left party is not going to happen immediately. But when it does, it could well bury the centre-left, because when it comes to actual policies, ours are just so much more popular.

The status quo creates machine politics, and not just in the sense of the party’s internal processes. Labour is a machine for taking people from social movements and industrial movements and neutralising them politically.