This moment
has been coming for a long time.
In the early
twentieth century, British
politics grew up from being a battle between “liberal” and “conservative”
wings of the ruling class and became, by the mid-twentieth century about the
conflict between representatives of the working class and of the ruling class.
After the
working class had had to be armed to put back into its bottle the nazi djinn
released by a bourgeoisie terrified by the October
revolution, our Party formed our greatest
ever Government which built a welfare state that underpinned a generation
of progress for working people, leading to the pinnacle of support for our
movement (in 1979).
However, the
impossibility of reforming capitalism into a society which could sustainably be
organised in the interests of the working class in the long term meant that the
economic
crisis created for the ruling class by the power of our side was resolved
(in the absence of a socialist leadership of our class) – by Thatcherism –
through our
defeat and at our expense.
As we were
defeated domestically so the (terribly flawed and often horrendous, yet real) global alternative to
capitalism was destroyed by the failure of its bureaucrat leaders to
foresee that they could never win a global arms race with rapacious global capitalism.
The “fall of
the wall” began (or accelerated?) a process of decomposition of social democratic
parties (in Europe at least) which has been perhaps most pronounced in Greece but
has been universal.
Much of the political left deluded ourselves from time to time that this was a
positive development. Some still do.
Right wing
social democracy sought salvation in the Blairite “Third Way” and an ultimately
doomed marriage between social and economic liberalism, a dream that could only
be sustained for a while – whilst the economy permitted the ruling class to
afford it.
The economic
crisis which made the “Third Way” unaffordable led to Conservative
Government in the United Kingdom (as it has eclipsed social democracy through
most of Europe) and the reaction to the revealed irrelevance of the flaccid
careerists who had dominated the Blair/Brown Labour Party has led to the
leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.
Your blogger
welcomes Corbyn’s leadership as I welcomed
his candidacy even before it had become fashionable to do so (and if I
abstain from the national Momentum “organisation” created to give
organisational form to a fan club it is only because
I despise and despair of the careerists who flutter around it as flies
surround a cow pat).
However, I
understand and appreciate that just at the same time that a socialist has risen
(for the first time) to lead the Labour Party, so the class struggle has been
eclipsed as the organising principle of British politics because of defeats
previously inflicted upon our movement. The tragedy of the 2015 General
Election was not simply the first Tory majority in 23 years but that the
decision to call a referendum on the EU would reorganise our national politics around
an internal disagreement within the ruling class.
This has now
happened. The key political question in the UK is not currently whether you are
for the working class or the ruling class. It is whether you are for the
xenophobes and isolationists or the “globalising” exploiters. (For the
avoidance of doubt, your blogger takes the latter side as should all
internationalists and socialists).
Obviously
the task of socialists is to (re)build the working class movement (in part in
the hope that we can develop our national polity in the direction of class
politics once more). Any socialist outside the Labour Party is merely a
political tourist now – and within the Labour Party we must of course support
the socialist Leader of the Party.
However, we
cannot possibly offer uncritical support to a leadership which is plainly
unable to fathom the depths into which the national polity is sinking. To
suggest that Labour
can make “Brexit” work for working people is a lie that should not be told.
The sad but
simple truth is that we cannot prevent the marginalisation of Labour whilst our
politics is fundamentally defined by a dichotomy which is not class struggle
(any more than the working class in the occupied six counties have been able to
build a working class party under the shadow of a polity dominated by the
national struggle).
This is most
certainly not a failure of “Corbynism” (if such a thing exists) and the
solution is not a triumph of the residual Blairite careerists who form the
majority of the terminally unimpressive Parliamentary Labour Party (or of the
elements of the trade union bureaucracy who support them).
However, neither
the ragged remnants of right-wing social democracy flying the flag for “Progress”
nor the rag, tag and bobtail upon whom the current Party leadership are forced
to rely appear yet to have faced the reality of the change wrought upon our
national polity and the consequences of that change.
This would
be the point in such a blog post at which the reader might expect a (more or
less) trite answer to the problems previously identified.
I am happy
to disappoint.
I don’t know
the answers to any of the problems posed above.
Neither do
you.
We have some
thinking to do.