The Making of Jeremy Corbyn
Jeremy Corbyn drew on the historic struggles of the Labour left and
new social movements to power his successful party leadership bid.
by Hilary Wainwright
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/03/tony-benn-corbyn-thatcher-labour-leadership/
The sudden electoral success of a handful of radical left leaders —
Greece’s Alexis Tsipras and Spain’s Pablo Iglesias in the European
periphery, and now Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, a heartland of market
politics — is more a testament to the hollowing out of the political
system than a demonstration of a viable political alternative.
Indeed, even while celebrating Corbyn’s victory — made all the more
delightful by its totally unexpected character, not to mention the
angry panic it has provoked among the establishment — I can’t help
but be haunted by the fate of Tsipras, whose victory was cheered
with equal exuberance less than a year ago.
The differences, to be sure, are immense: Tsipras led a young party
of which he had been a founder; he faced little opposition from
within his party; and in public meetings he acted with the charisma
of a conventional populist politician. In the end, though, his
problem was that he and his party were in government, not in power.
Moreover, as is now clear, Syriza did not have a strategy to build
enough power to counter its opponents — both elites throughout the
European Union and capitalists in Greece.
But Corbyn, if still years away from a general election, faces a
lack of control over the party he ostensibly leads, despite his
unprecedented electoral mandate. Party elites refuse to cooperate
with — indeed, positively sabotage — a figure who for decades
challenged them from the backbench as one of the most rebellious
left-wing members of parliament.
Three key questions arise. First, how could someone so openly and
determinedly of the radical left triumph in the leadership contest
of a party that has always contained — and, under Tony Blair’s New
Labour, seemingly crushed — the Left? Second, do the circumstances
of this extraordinary victory point to sources of power that could
be mobilized to transform the Labour Party in the direction of
Corbyn’s “new politics”? Finally, can Corbyn’s insistence that there
is an alternative translate into a practical electoral strategy?
What’s clear is that for Corbyn to succeed, the majority of working
people would have to believe his government could not only end
recent austerity, but could enlist huge portions of the populace to
enact a programmatic alternative to both New Labour and the Tories —
everything from stopping privatization and introducing democratic
forms of public ownership to ending casual and precarious work and
legislating decent pay and working conditions for all.
In other words, Corbyn’s prospects turn on whether he can reverse
the traditional logic of electoral politics, whereby the people cede
their power to their political representatives. Corbyn’s “new
politics” is about political representatives using the platform of
the state to empower popular forces.
How Corbyn Won
Institutionally, Corbyn owes his victory to a series of reforms:
first those pushed through by the Campaign for Labour Party
Democracy — the organization championed by Corbyn’s close friend and
fellow socialist, the late Tony Benn — and, more recently, the
changes to the leadership election process enacted under Corbyn’s
predecessor, Ed Miliband.
He needed all the help he could get. After all, while Labour was
founded as a workers party, its institutions were designed in part
to ensure that radicals never won power.
From the time of Labour’s formation in 1906, the party’s members of
parliament were responsible for choosing a leader among their ranks.
Ralph Miliband, author of Parliamentary Socialism and father of Ed,
described this primacy given to the legislature as “parliamentarism”
— by which he meant not simply abiding by the conventions of
parliamentary politics but deferring to them absolutely. The trade
union leaders, who had created the party with the sole purpose of
gaining representation in parliament, shared this devotion.
A shared interest, and a potential source of tension, was thus built
into Labour’s DNA. On the one hand, the immediate desire of trade
unions to improve the material position of their members within the
limits of capitalism meant that winning parliamentary seats to
consolidate and extend worker rights was paramount (but also as far
as politics went). On the other hand, the links between Labour and
workers’ industrial organizations were built into every level of the
party, creating a potential channel for radical struggles and
demands that challenged the nature and existence of capitalism
itself.
Indeed, fleeting moments when industrial struggles pushed the limits
of capitalism and gestured toward a vision of socialism can be seen
in the preambles of many trade union constitutions. These
aspirations were also present in Labour’s founding constitution,
which committed it to the eventual “common ownership of the means of
production, distribution and exchange.” But the actual power
structure of the party displayed a perpetual fixation on the short
term, and the imperatives of attaining immediate electoral goals
suppressed any latent tension between trade union and parliamentary
leaders.
This alliance effectively imprisoned the organized left. To be
outside the party orbit, as the British Communist Party found out,
was to be doomed to the political margins. Yet to throw one’s lot in
with Labour meant regularly putting on hold challenges from the left
for the sake of electoral unity. After each election, it was back to
square one for the Labour left.
In the 1970s and into the 1980s, the party’s left finally appeared
to be gaining some ground, the beneficiary of the deepening
radicalization of the trade unions, members and leaders alike.
Growing support for Benn in the early seventies stemmed from the
trade union backlash against the pre-Thatcher Thatcherism of Edward
Heath, the Conservative prime minister whose government fell in 1974
due to a resilient miners strike.
These increasingly left trade unions formed a rare alliance with
Bennite constituency Labour parties. The coalition won reforms to
democratize Labour at party conferences — including a 1981 vote
establishing the election of the party leader by an “electoral
college” of unions, Labour members, and members of parliament,
rather than just the parliamentary party. That year, Benn came
within a percentage point of beating Denis Healey, the
well-respected leader of the Labour right, in the deputy leadership
election.
Ultimately, however, the switch to an electoral college selection
process didn’t dramatically modify the power structure of the party.
Members now had some say instead of none, but the actual voting
mechanisms remained weighted in favor of the members of parliament.
Moreover, the inclusion of trade unions in the leadership election —
where they marginalized internally dissenting views by voting as a
bloc — effectively consolidated the alliance between union and
parliamentary leaderships on which Labour’s very existence depended.
In the 1950s and ’60s, conservative forces in Labour accepted the
unions’ right-leaning bloc of votes. But the unions’ move leftwards
in the 1970s and early ’80s led some on the Right, including Blair,
to reassess that position. They now wanted to sever the party’s
links with the unions altogether.
When Ed Miliband won the leadership contest in 2010, vowing to break
from New Labour, he triumphed partly because he managed to win more
support among unions than his Blair-supporting brother David. This
put New Labour leaders on further alert for opportunities to weaken
the union-party link.
A somewhat shadowy group of New Labour MPs and their media allies
saw their chance when a local parliamentary selection process in
2013 was tarnished by accusations of trade union corruption. While
strongly rebutted, alleged chicanery did enough damage to convince
Miliband to favor a rule change that ended the electoral college and
turned the leadership election into a “one person, one vote”
contest.
Under the new rules, MPs could nominate candidates but otherwise had
no more power than the individual member, affiliated union member,
or supporter (a new category in which people could vote after paying
3 pounds or, if they were members of an affiliated union, nothing at
all). At the time, Miliband declared that “300,000 trade unionists
active in the party is preferable to 3 million paper trade unionists
affiliated to the party.”
Corbyn’s election has proven Miliband more perceptive about trade
union members than New Labour’s mandarins, whose fixation on party
activists and unions as the source of Labour’s problems and whose
dream of a US-style politics led them to believe that increased
public involvement as “supporters,” US primary style, would pull the
party toward the center.
The reality soon became clear. As the Labour leadership election
meetings traveled around the country, Corbyn’s campaign gathered
momentum, and an unpredicted public — “a movement searching for a
home,” as some commentators put it — surged into the church halls
and community centers of every city and town, sometimes climbing in
through the windows to be part of the excitement, or waiting in an
overflow outside for Corbyn to make his second appearance of the
night.
The Roots of a Hybrid Movement
The scattered movement that came together around Corbyn has deep
roots. In the 1970s, Benn advocated in a pamphlet a “new politics”
that was at once international — a response to the worldwide
rebellion against the US war in Vietnam — and focused on the very
British problem of Westminster parliamentarism and the Labour Party.
“[T]he student power movement, the Black Power movement and the
discontent among trade unionists are very powerful and important new
forces in society and the Labour Party has got to enter into a
creative relationship with them,” Benn wrote.
In the decades since — which saw the destruction of Benn’s attempts
to radically reform industry as a government minister, Thatcher’s
bludgeoning of organized labor, and New Labour’s attacks on the
party’s left — a generation of activists have grown up for whom “a
creative relationship with the Labour Party” is inconceivable.
In a modest but often effective way — like their political cousins,
the indignados in southern Europe and Occupy in the United States —
they have defined their own politics, directly intervening in
society without the mediation of political parties. Some of these
activists — including from UK Uncut, Climate Camp, and Occupy London
— ended up constituting the creative linchpin of Corbyn’s campaign
(similar to many indignados’ active involvement in Podemos).
Then there is the older generation, Corbyn’s own generation, shaped
by the new politics that influenced Benn in the late 1960s and ’70s.
They were drawn into the Labour Party by Benn, repulsed by Blairism,
and on the eve of the war on Iraq held the local meetings, gave out
the leaflets, and booked the buses that brought two million onto the
streets in 2003. (Corbyn himself was an active supporter of Stop the
War, the national organization behind the antiwar demonstrations. He
became its chair in 2011.)
These elder activists found their voice again through Corbyn’s
reluctant candidature for Labour leadership. In a potent mix, they
provided the local infrastructure that was then amplified by the
younger activists’ outreach on social media. They were further aided
by large numbers of trade unionists who have been fighting
Thatcherism’s various iterations for the past forty years but never
received the party’s support.
So can this hybrid movement make the Labour Party theirs? Or is the
movement formed in the space that Corbyn opened up just squatting —
soon to find the electricity cut off and the bailiffs coming round
with police reinforcements?
For now, the two main sources of energy — party members and
credibility with the wider public — are flowing relatively well. A
recent YouGov opinion poll of Labour Party members, for example,
found that Corbyn’s support had increased to 66 percent since his
election. And although many of Corbyn’s opponents predicted a
December 3 by-election in the northern town of Oldham would be a
disaster for Labour, the party increased its share of the vote with
a local moderate candidate to whom Corbyn and his grassroots
supporters gave their full approval.
The campaign against Corbyn has been based mostly on the purported
lack of electability of the longtime member of parliament (MP),
though the Blairites are also fired by disbelief — how could the
Left still be alive after all those years of defeat?
But alive it is. The appeal of Corbyn, like that of his longstanding
ally and now shadow chancellor John McDonnell, does not spring from
the kind of charisma that sets a leader apart from supporters,
leaving them in passive awe. It is Corbyn’s closeness that is the
source of his attraction and strength. He celebrated and empathized
with people at his meetings, telling the recognizable stories of
their daily lives, or those of people like them, and demonstrated
with his leadership bid that it is possible to mold those shared
experiences into the foundation for a collective power, an active,
solidaristic hope (“Jez We Can,” his campaign slogan went).
Corbyn’s honesty and unpretentious style continue to resonate with
the general public. Despite all the personal attacks against him —
for not bowing properly, not dressing properly, not singing the
national anthem properly — the arrows have largely failed to hit
their target.
The most vivid example of Corbyn’s “new politics” has been his
conversion of Prime Minister’s Questions into a “People’s Question
Time,” crowdsourcing his queries so they come from Doreen in
Wythenshawe, Mark in Coventry, or Sharon in Leeds. Cameron has been
unable to dismiss these questions in his usual arrogant manner
without fear of a public backlash. In the first weeks of Corbyn’s
leadership, the People’s Question Time helped stabilize his position
and convince some doubters of his genuine commitment to political
renewal.
And then there’s his mandate. Blairites have to sleep with the fact
that their candidate won only 4.5 percent of the vote, compared to
Corbyn’s 59.5 percent. The other candidates were all far behind the
victor as well, with the second place finisher receiving just 19
percent.
Though there is no shortage of pushy MPs who fancy themselves a
moderate successor, none can rival Corbyn’s backing among party
members and supporters. Sober commentators judge him to be secure
for years to come and likely to survive possible electoral setbacks
for Labour in the London mayoral elections or the devolved elections
in Scotland.
Moreover, the late November vote over airstrikes in Syria indicated
that Labour MPs are beginning to listen to their growing
constituency memberships. Only sixty-six Labour MPs voted against
their leader and for the airstrikes — in spite of media predictions
that the figure would be one hundred or more.
This was not a result of the harassment of which pro-Corbyn people
are being accused, but simply that government-imposed parliamentary
boundary changes (and consequent reductions in the number of MPs)
mean that MPs will have to compete against each other to be
reselected. Under Corbyn’s leadership it is the members who decide.
(Though it was Miliband who ended Blair’s habit of imposing
candidates on local parties through the national executive.)
In sum, even with significant intra-party antipathy and constant
attacks from the media, the new party leadership’s position is
stable due to strong backing from Labour members, growing
credibility among voters, and the resilience and energy of Corbyn
and McDonnell, sympathetic MPs, and young activists. Whether Corbyn
has enough space to begin setting the agenda, however, is another
story.
Sources of Momentum
Corbyn’s institutional attempt to sustain the energy of his campaign
— aptly called Momentum — intends to create that space (and subdue
hostile party forces in the process). The organization is led by the
same generational mix that drove the campaign: people formed by the
Bennite struggles for inner-party democracy in the 1970s and the new
cohort of direct action organizers schooled in the principles of
open, horizontal forms of organization.
Momentum is an effort to give an affirmative answer to the question
of whether there were sources of power activated in the lead-up to
Corbyn’s extraordinary victory that could be harnessed to transform
the Labour Party. The character and work of Momentum also bears on
the question of whether Corbyn’s insistence that there is an
alternative to New Labour and Tory rule can be turned into a
practical strategy for electoral office. Both hinge on whether and
how a different kind of Labour Party can be forged, capable of
winning a general election despite the greatly diminished might of
the industrial working class.
Gaining leadership of a party that has atrophied and whose campaigns
largely consist of direct, unmediated appeals to potential
supporters is very different from the “long march through the
institutions,” as the socialist activist Rudi Dutschke once put it.
These institutions were created in a very different society that no
longer exists, so a successful march requires changing society,
changing the Labour Party’s relation to society — and only then
beginning to remake the Labour Party’s own organizations.
The mismatch between these necessarily overlapping processes was
evident at a founding meeting of a local branch of Momentum in
Hackney, an eastern district of London once the site of large
factories with well-organized workforces. Now the largest employer
is Hackney Council; everyone else works in the City of London,
delivery and transport, shops, restaurants, or a large number of
small creative workshops and partnerships.
The meeting was a microcosm of the different strands of thinking and
practice in the making of Momentum, as well as their limits. Chaired
in the spirit of the new politics of consensus and openness,
everybody spoke who wanted to, but no one could speak twice. This
facilitated a process by which every position was laid out, and
those who were trying to explore new ideas and express uncertain
directions had the chance to speak as well. It was good-humored and
respectful, and the spirit was one of unity and common cause despite
sometimes-sharp differences.
Several older activists spoke with the certainty and precision of
experienced stalwarts back on home territory: now that we’ve won the
leadership, they insisted, it’s a matter of changing the party —
resolutions to conference, replacing right-wing MPs, and so on. The
familiar formula was expressed with great confidence that it would
produce the desired left turn in the party, ready for government.
Others spoke from campaigns based mainly outside the Labour Party:
Stop the War, the anti-austerity People’s Assembly, and others,
stressing the importance of building these movements to change
politics and hoping that Hackney Momentum would strengthen these
campaigns by enlarging a common base of support.
Still others brought to the meeting urgent problems requiring
immediate collective action, most notably an attack on schools. They
hoped Hackney Momentum would become a hub for mobilization. Some
were more tentative. A young man complained that the meeting was
dominated by a language — of socialism, of class — to which he could
not easily relate. An older woman stressed the importance of
learning from local people, of reaching out and finding out what was
going on in neighborhoods and streets and discovering people’s
needs. At the end, people met in clusters of shared interests to
discuss what Momentum could do.
The meeting indicated that there is a desire to come together to
create some kind of collectivity around Corbyn’s principles and the
need for change, but it didn’t look like it could lay the foundation
for agenda-setting initiatives quite yet.
A New Terrain
One of the lines of attack against Corbyn is that his leadership
means a “return to the 1980s,” when Labour supposedly veered too far
to the left. As a result, the story goes, the party lost a series of
elections until New Labour’s heroic rescue.
There is little basis in fact for this account, but there is an
interesting contrast to be made between Corbyn’s situation today and
that of his mentor, Tony Benn, more than three decades ago. Benn’s
campaigns took place at the moment when neoliberal policies were
taking their hold over British politics.
But the central institutions of the social-democratic postwar
settlement — a national economy, the welfare state, national
collective bargaining, and trade union involvement in corporatist
industrial policies — were still in place, if precariously so.
Changing the Labour Party in order to intervene in industry, expand
the welfare state, protect jobs, and improve working conditions made
a good deal of sense.
In contrast, Corbyn won the Labour Party leadership at a time when
neoliberal politics has come to dominate the Labour Party and taken
over the UK state, stripping it of its more social-democratic
features. Moreover, by eviscerating the welfare state and the
infrastructure of a progressive tax system, neoliberal economics has
all but destroyed the material basis for the provision of public
good, or even of a moderately just, regulated, and redistributive
national economy.
The prevarications of both former Labour leader Ed Miliband and his
presumed successor, Andy Burnham, prove the point. Their goals are
social democratic, but the world of a mixed economy, in which the
profits of a productive capitalist sector could be taxed and
redistributed to provide universal welfare, social security, and
public infrastructure for the benefit of all, within a relatively
closed, predictable, and controllable economy, no longer exists.
It has been replaced by a financialized global capitalism in which
capital flows shape politics rather than vice versa. And in the case
of eurozone countries, treaties or austerity packages imposed from
on high serve to prevent progressive reforms.
In the past, social democracy’s symbiotic relationship with
Keynesian macroeconomics worldwide shaped the internal debate in the
Labour Party and other social-democratic parties. The question was
about how far center-left governments should push the mixed economy
toward socialization. Meanwhile, capital was willing share the
spoils of rising profits, preferring this to worker unrest.
This context began to change as the postwar economy confronted deep
problems — the 1973 oil price hike, stagflation, an intensification
of global competition, financial instability, and the increasingly
militant demands of workers. Businesses’s response was swift and
punishing: a massive wave of factory closures and cuts that
devastated municipal government and public housing and,
consequently, working-class communities.
Capital killed the postwar accord — and it’s not coming back.
Victories can be achieved here or there — for example, against water
privatization or for protective legislation — but only when strong
extra-parliamentary movements pressure the state and win support
from sympathetic politicians.
Fortunately, in the UK and other countries ravaged by unfettered
capitalism, there are many signs of a new kind of resistance.
Typically this involves mobilizing all possible sources of
counter-power — economic, social, cultural — and different levels of
political power, local as well as national and, very occasionally,
continental. In particular, these efforts don’t just try to become
or to lobby an elected government. They seek instead to disrupt the
day-to-day oppressions and injustices on which the neoliberal order
depends and to create new, emancipatory relationships of mutuality
and democracy out of resistance, amid the wreckage of social
democracy.
Many non-state initiatives try to build a social economics based on
common or cooperative forms of ownership, challenging on a dispersed
and micro scale the logic of profit and private capital and
illustrating the potential viability of an economy based on
socialist principles.
Others work to create networks of cooperatives and collaborative
partnerships in energy, agriculture, food production, culture, and
more (sometimes backed by progressive municipal councils). Alliances
of workers and communities whose resistance saved public services
from privatization (for example, water) attempt to organize these
services along democratic and communist lines.
Precarious workers long neglected by traditional trade unions —
hotel and restaurant workers, delivery workers, self-employed
workers, and independent cultural producers of all kinds — build
economic power on their own. And sometimes unions, in turn,
introduce new organizational forms and branch out beyond traditional
methods.
Unite — the UK’s largest trade union and a backer of Corbyn in the
leadership contest— has started community branches, organizing
unemployed people and supporting local community-based campaigns.
The union is also using direct action tactics learned from UK Uncut
and others to pressure suppliers of companies with whom the union is
negotiating.
People who relied on the welfare state and are hit especially hard
by austerity — for instance, disabled people and people facing fuel
poverty — are self-organizing, connecting to broader alliances and
pressing demands on MPs and councilors. Increasingly, citywide
networks and convergences are choosing the city as the level most
favorable to organizing both a platform and material strength.
And while they often favor parties and figures like Podemos and
Corbyn, the people behind these initiatives also value their
autonomy as a vital condition for efficacy and sustainability.
A Different Kind of Democracy
Were it to assist these kinds of initiatives — what could be termed
grassroots productive democracy rather than just state-led social
democracy — Momentum could bring about a far-reaching movement,
laying the groundwork for a Corbyn win in the 2020 general election.
The creation of such a movement could simultaneously set in motion
the dynamics for supportive and transformative post-election
alliances.
Scotland’s Radical Independence Campaign is an exemplar in this
respect: it was a non-party social movement that brought together a
diverse range of campaigning and productive civic organizations to
organize for a “yes” vote in the country’s referendum.
Especially pertinent for the Corbyn campaign have been the
initiatives of Common Weal, which was set up to generate and
disseminate grassroots economic alternatives. They developed a new
language of mutuality and collaboration — a “we” against the
competitive market “I” — furnishing living models of a socialism
that does not revolve exclusively around the state (even if it does
require the support of a different kind of state). This they share
with Corbyn, who has a plural understanding of social ownership,
regulation, and intervention.
They have also provided sustenance to the belief that there can be
something better than the current state of affairs — breaking the
fatalism that leads people to vote for the status quo or abstain —
and spurred in people a sense of confidence about their agency and
abilities, another feature of Corbyn’s socialism.
This new kind of democracy should incorporate labor as well. But for
that to happen, the division unions traditionally erected between
the economic and political must fall. It might have made sense at
the end of the nineteenth century, when trade unions seeking
parliamentary representation set up the Labour Party.
Now, however, as workers engage in struggles that push their unions
in a more directly political direction, there’s an opportunity to
erode the outdated demarcation. Activists — including those from
Momentum — can speed along the process, assisting in the creation of
economically transformative initiatives, fusing the political and
economic to bring about systemic change.
Something Different
Corbyn’s original campaign for the leadership contained within it
the inchoate method and tools of radical change. The veteran MP ran
within his own party, looking to rise to its highest post on his own
radical terms. But he also stepped outside the party, mobilizing
social forces that previously found Labour repellant.
Similarly, Momentum needs to reach beyond the familiar campaign
politics of the Left — not abandoning the conventional modes
entirely but combining them with economic initiatives and
self-organization endeavors that can develop the capacities and
create the resources through which to build power to transform
society (as well as win electoral office to manage the state).
As for Corbyn, he built the language of his campaign around the
experiences of his constituents and their stories of (often extreme)
deprivation. He’s given voice to their plight in the House of
Commons, using People’s Question Time to underscore the unjust
policies of the current government.
Similarly, in the run-up to the election, Corbyn could collect
positive, inspiring examples of people building an alternative: the
ways in which English, Scots, and Welsh are self-organizing, the
collective initiatives people are launching to take care of
themselves and their neighborhood — in short, the basis of new
sources of working-class power in communities and in new forms of
work.
Corbyn has already caused a seismic shift in Labour politics and
taken the media and the establishment, Labour and Tory alike, by
surprise. As one journalist from Sky TV told me when the insurgent
candidate was gaining momentum, “Corbyn has completely upset our
template.” The reporter delivered the remark with extreme
perplexity.
We shouldn’t be astonished if Corbyn and his young supporters,
unaccustomed as they are to political convention, ultimately deliver
even broader change on a national level.