Dan Evans on the challenges to a Corbyn government transforming societyArchived Message
Posted by johnhol on April 3, 2019, 1:49 pm
Begins:
If today Britain’s Labour Party has perhaps the most radical leadership in its history, the Left has long debated its viability as a vehicle for socialist advance. This was a particularly hot topic among the burgeoning New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, notably expressed in a series of polemics appearing in Socialist Register. In these exchanges, revolutionary thinkers like Ralph Miliband, John Saville , Perry Anderson and Leo Panitch all highlighted the party’s structural limits.
Miliband forthrightly denied Labour’s usefulness as a tool to transform society, arguing that “The belief in the effective transformation of the Labour Party into an instrument of socialist policies is the most crippling of illusions to which socialists in Britain have been prone”. Still today, his Parliamentary Socialism (1961) and The State in Capitalist Society (1969) are seminal critiques of the Labour Party and its record in power.
With the failures of successive Labour governments, this group’s views hardened. They argued that the Labour Party was an active impediment to socialism, and indeed that it would have to die before any real socialist movement could emerge in the United Kingdom. John Saville argued that “the destruction of the illusions of Labourism is a necessary step before the emergence of a socialist movement of any size and influence becomes practical”.
Across Europe today, we are finally seeing the demise of traditional social democratic parties. As Miliband and co. predicted, the death of these traditional parties has in many cases been followed by the emergence of a new generation of more radical leftist movements, unencumbered by the institutional conservatism and timidity of the parties that they have replaced (and in some cases usurped).
In the United Kingdom, however, Labour has avoided this fate, with ‘socialist renewal’ occurring within the traditional social-democratic party rather than outside it. Last summer, in fact, Jeremy Corbyn nearly won the UK general election. His anti-austerity platform and bold manifesto promising, amongst other things, wholesale nationalization of public services , energized millions of people- particularly the young, who have been especially impacted by the Conservative Government’s punitive austerity doctrine. Corbyn achieved the highest vote swing to Labour since 1945. Labour now has half a million members and is comfortably the largest political party in the UK and one of the largest left-wing movements in Europe.
Although Labour narrowly lost last year’s general election, the fact that so many people saw there was an alternative to austerity was viewed as a symbolic victory in itself. ‘Jeremy Corbyn is the prime minister!’ was the joyful refrain last summer , and indeed in many ways, denying the Conservatives a majority was a real victory of sorts and has changed the dynamic of British politics significantly, preventing the Tories implementing some of their dystopian manifesto.
But there has been little analysis of what would actually have happened if Jeremy Corbyn had won the general election. It still feels like many people believe he will seamlessly implement his manifesto and that will be that – we will all live happily ever after. This reveals a worrying ignorance about the historical limitations of Labourism and the terrifying scale of the challenges that a social-democratic Labour government would face as it attempted to implement its manifesto pledges.
The likes of Miliband and Saville wrote rich and hugely important works exploring the limitations of Labourism and the nature of the British state, analyses which used to enjoy a prominent place on the British Left. Corbynism possesses a strong intellectual, theoretically informed fringe clustered around this publication, Novara Media, and events like The World Transformed, which has engaged with pressing issues like postcapitalism, the future of work, automation, and new forms of industrial democracy. Nonetheless, despite this unprecedented intellectual vigour, ‘classic’ critiques of the limitations of Labourism and the nature of the state form remain marginal at precisely the time when they they should be front and centre within the British labour movement, with the party within touching distance of power.
It is absolutely vital that Labour and Corbyn’s supporters understand what they are up against politically before they take power. They must learn from the huge mistakes made by previous Labour administrations and the plights of other socialist governments worldwide. A movement which understands the limitations that the capitalist system places on them will be better equipped to overcome them. Socialists therefore have to plan not to just take power (i.e., to win the next election) but how to exercise and hold onto it.
Dissecting the tragic coup against the socialist Allende government in Chile, Miliband gravely noted “it is by way of electoral victory that the forces of the Left will find themselves in office. The really important question is what happens then.”