Captain Jack

The election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party yesterday was possibly the most important political event during my lifetime – certainly in terms of British politics. For the left, everything has changed; old analyses have proved wanting, old certainties false, old strategies redundant.

When I first joined the Labour Party in 1962 I was told that it was ‘a broad church’; indeed, in my local party I found socialists (for that’s what everyone unblushingly called themselves then) ranging from marxists of various stripes to the former Managing Director of Burma Oil. With the exception of NATO and nuclear weapons, on which the party was, as now, divided, virtually every party member I remember from those days would today have found themselves in agreement with virtually all of JC’s policy positions.

While Tariq Ali’s assertion that Jeremy is the most left wing Labour leader ever may well be true it is also certainly true that over the past thirty years or so the party has drifted, inexorably it seemed, to the right. Under Blair, of course, that drift was consciously accelerated as the Blairites attempted to cut the party’s links to its class roots and transform it into simply an election machine for their particular brand of neo-liberalism with a human face. Under Blair, consistent traditional Labour right-wingers like Roy Hattersley found themselves criticising Labour from the left, democracy and effective political debate were systematically bled from the party and it became more and more like the husk of a once living political entity.

After 1997, while Labour continued to win elections it steadily lost votes at each one. By the time that it lost the 2010 election Labour had lost 5 million votes and most of those were from its working class base. Labour also lost members – its membership more than halved between 1997 and 2010 – in particular after Blair’s decision to join the USA in the invasion of Iraq there was a haemorrhage of appalled members. As Labour moved to the right a growing space opened to its left, and it seemed that it was in this space that the task of the refounding a broad based and popular democratic socialist party would have to be begun.

Two months ago – it feels like half a lifetime, so dramatically have things changed – I wrote that a period like now, when, in comparison to ‘normal times’ a long underlying crisis emerges, provides an opening for socialists to explain our ideas to a more receptive audience but that “in order to seize the time one needs a party, or at least a popular movement, or at least a critical mass of some thousands of activists who can provide the energy, physical resources and imagination needed to mobilise that movement and build (or rebuild) that party. So what grouping on the left could provide such a critical mass? The Green Party could do it but won’t. Left Unity would do it but can’t.The various comic opera bolshevik sects don’t even want to. But perhaps – just perhaps – the inchoate movement coalescing around Jeremy Corbyn might.” 

So yesterday’s vote, showing that Jeremy had a commanding lead in all three of the party constituencies demonstrated two things; first that, those of us who had long ago given up on the possibility of the Labour Party being a vehicle of popular change have been proved wrong and second that the impetus to revivify the party has not come from the left within the party or even the ‘traditional’ labour movement, but from the streets and a new agency – the new young dispossessed, the ‘precariat’ if you will. It is Generation Rent, it is the generation of Occupy and UK Uncut. Due to the unique (and previously disempowering) structure of the British labour movement and the serendipitous accident that led to a modest but inspiring socialist candidate getting onto the Labour leadership ballot, this new force, rather than rejecting the Labour Party has stormed it, brushing aside the barriers erected by the apparatchiks and ignoring the received wisdom of the Great and the Good and the sneers of the commentariat. In the doing so, it has dragged along in its wake most of the those in the ‘old new left’ whose capability for independent and critical thinking have not been totally ossified by sectarianism and given the existing left in the party a huge transfusion of hope and confidence.

I went on the refugee solidarity march yesterday and marvelled at its diversity, its youth and its positivity. This was Generation Jezza. When, in yesterday’s sunshine, the huge crowd in Parliament Square responded with a great wave of cheers and applause at the appearance of an old bloke with a white beard on the stage in front of them (no, not this old bloke with a white beard, that one) I was reminded of those two lines of Wordsworth’s from the Prelude:

Bliss was it in the dawn to be alive                                                                                                But to be young was very heaven

The paranoia of Labour’s apparatchiks, both at HQ and in local Labour Parties, seems to be growing by the day in the face of what looks like an almost certain Corbyn victory. The party has announced  that it has purged, among a long list of others, whose crime seems primarily that they are believed to have voted Green in May, a ‘Jeremy’ of London on the grounds that he had written articles in 2001 and 2002, indicating his support for the Socialist Alliance – an organisation that folded in 2003 for God’s sake! However, the Erich Honecker Prize for Stazi-like behaviour must go to Guardian journalist Tim Dowling’s local Labour Party, which asked his 17 year old son to inform on a couple of his friends who were suspected of being ‘infiltrators’ (they weren’t, as it happens).

Other people have been excluded for ridiculous reasons, like the person who a local councillor wanted to bar for not attending a fund raising barbecue, or for no discernible reason, like Win Francis, who is 90. Win joined the Labour Party in the 1940s and spent the next fifty years until she was in her eighties working for the Labour Party. The local MP, who did not live in the constituency, stayed at her house when not in London and she was the mainstay in her local ward in Sheffield. She left the Labour Party in recent years but never joined any other party and has just been informed she has been barred from voting.

While such negative behaviour isn’t entirely unexpected – the default position of bureaucracies is a negatively defensive one, so suspicion of enthusiastic newcomers, particularly when they appear in uncontrollable numbers, is unsurprising if depressing. However, Labour’s officials seem to be unaware of the damage that they are doing to the party’s reputation. Barrister and Labour Party member Peter Taheri has asked in an excellent article in the Independent ‘Does it not occur to Labour grandees that this exercise is reminiscent of the McCarthyite “Have you ever supported” question? Are they simply ignoring the fact that sane human beings do occasionally change their minds (hence the existence of swing voters)? Or has it escaped their notice altogether that so many people are – at last – once more excited, inspired and enthused by our brand of politics?’ He points out that perception matters in democracy and that if the results give off the stench of a stitch-up the damage to Labour could be irreparable. As he says, ‘so much harm could be avoided if the party grasps a simple principle: you simply cannot have a democratic election where votes are fished out of a ballot box once they have been cast.’

It wouldn’t be (quite) so bad if Labour’s apparatchiks applied the rules they appear to have mainly made up on the fly equally to all applicants for party membership.

In the red corner, I give you Jason Cobb, a Labour-supporting blogger (and former Labour party member) who has been banned from voting in the leadership race, apparently for criticising his local council. He was informed on by a local councillor who objected to some tweets in which Cobb accused some Labour councils of “social cleansing” in London as well as an article he wrote for the Guardian – in 2010 – in which he criticised Lambeth Council.

In the blue corner, I present journalist Dan Hodges. Hodges describes himself as a ‘tribal neo-Blairite’. In May 2012, although he was then a long-standing member of the Labour Party, Hodges announced that he was voting for Boris Johnson in the London Mayoral elections. Following the House of Commons vote on 29 August 2013 against possible military involvement in the Syrian civil war, and objecting to Ed Miliband’s conduct, Hodges wrote an article publicly resigning from the Labour Party. In 2014, Hodges declared his support for the Lib Dems in the European elections. He rejoined the Labour Party in July 2015, apparently without any questions being asked about his very public support for Tories and Lib Dems standing against Labour candidates in the recent past.

Equally, while criticising Lambeth Council in the Guardian in 2010 was enough to get Jason Cobb banned from voting in the current leadership election, Dan Hodges has encountered no problems as a result of his increasingly spittle flecked abuse of Jeremy Corbyn and anyone who supports him in his column in the Daily Telegraph. On 17 August he wrote (of fellow party members who have publicly supported the Corbyn campaign) ‘What amazes me isn’t that the Corbyn cultists are peddling this rubbish. The hard-Left have always spouted this morally superior effluent. What astonishes me is that ordinary Labour Party members are putting up with this crap. Why are people who have dedicated their lives to Labour letting a bunch of three-quid-dog-on-a-rope-rent-a-Trots lecture them on their own party? The genuine heirs of the Suffragettes and the Chartists and the Tolpuddle Martyrs shouldn’t be cowed by people who view a bar of soap as a tool of capitalist oppression.’

And three days later, assuming that Corbyn will win the election, rather than accept the result of what will be the largest exercise in popular democracy ever undertaken by a British political party, our Dan is considering – once more in the Telegraph – how best to undermine the result and purge the party of those with whom he disagrees. ‘How does Labour recover from this? How does Labour erase that image from the eyes and the minds of the electorate? Yes, Jeremy Corbyn could be deposed. But then what? Is he going to be expelled? Are his supporters going to be expelled? And if they’re not, then when the Tories say “they are still there. They are just watching, and waiting” what can Labour say?

Labour will be able to say nothing. Because the Tories will be right. People are right to prepare for the resistance. It’s right that Labour’s moderates ready themselves to take up arms in defence of their party.’

Unlike Dan it appears, I believe in free speech (even if it is as hysterically abusive as Dan’s columns) and the right of party members to be publicly critical of party policies. And, unlike him again I suspect, I don’t think that previous political associations, or even having previously voted for another party (or in Dan’s case, two other parties) should disqualify someone from joining or rejoining the party. So I think that he has every right to join the Labour Party and every right to vote in the current election. But so have virtually all the new would-be members and supporters who have been excluded by Labour’s thought police on suspicion of having voted Green in the last election or having previously been in another socialist organisation. As Peter Taheri says: ‘Registered supporters have declared that they subscribe to the aims and values of the party. Unless there is conclusive evidence to prove otherwise – such as someone serving as an MP or councillor for another party – supporters must be taken at their word. For the party to sift through social media profiles in pursuit of incriminating evidence is sinister. A week is a long time in politics; floating voters drawn to Corbyn’s message of hope must not be punished for past views. We should welcome voters with an embrace, not a presumption of guilt.’

Following the final deadline to sign up as a member or supporter of the Labour Party in order to vote in the leadership election, the Labour Party has announced that 610,753 people are eligible to vote. Labour had roughly 200,000 members by election day in May, meaning that membership, which now stands at 300,000, has risen by 50% in just three months. Over that short period, 120,000 people have paid £3 to become registered supporters and 190,000 have signed up to vote through their trade union. By any measure, that is an extraordinary and spectacular rise in support.

But even the dogs on the street know what has, for the most part, been the stimulus and inspiration for this remarkable upsurge of support; the Jeremy Corbyn election campaign. The hundreds of thousands who will be voting for Corbyn come from a number of directions; young people, who have been involved in single issue campaigns or who have never been politically active before,  but who have been inspired by someone who is transparently decent and straight forward saying that there is an alternative to continuing austerity, growing inequality ongoing subsidies to private landlords and low pay employers, trade unionists supporting a politician who is unequivocally on their side who wants to transform the current insecure low wage economy and create decent secure jobs, and life long socialists like me who were abandoned by the Blair ‘project’ and who have for years longed for the opportunity to be part of a mass popular party of the left which could be the natural home for socialists, feminists and environmentalists.

Almost two years ago, in November 2013, a new party, Left Unity, was established. It was set up because many of us on the left believed that the Labour Party, after twenty years of Blairism, was a hollowed out shell that could not be revived. Its objective was to help to establish a broad based socialist party free from the backward looking obsessions of the old far left sects. Its constitution laid down its aim:

to unite the diverse strands of radical and socialist politics in the UK including workers’ organisations and trade unions; ordinary people, grass root organisations and co-operatives rooted in our neighbourhoods and communities; individuals and communities facing poverty, discrimination and social oppression because of gender, ethnicity, age, disability, sexuality, unemployment or under-employment; environmental and green campaigners; campaigners for freedom and democracy; all those who seek to authentically voice and represent the interests of ordinary working people.

The tsunami of support that the Corbyn campaign is being transformed into a grassroots movement – a movement that, to my astonishment, looks well positioned to transform the Labour Party into the democratic and inclusive socialist party that I believe is so desperately needed and which Left Unity was established to work for. But the spontaneous explosive growth of that movement renders the efforts of Left Unity redundant. In the face of hundreds of thousands of people backing the effective refoundation of the Labour Party, the existence of a separate little organisation of a couple of thousand aiming to do much the same thing becomes a little absurd. It is clear to me that the right place for socialists (of all varieties) is in this newly revived Labour Party.

I have therefore left Left Unity, signed up as an affiliated member of Labour and will be joining up as an individual member in the near future.

Many years ago, the journalist Claude Cockburn suggested that widely used journalists’ cliches should be translated to enable us to understand what they really meant. For example, he pointed out that the phrase ‘the country as a whole’ (as in ‘the deregulation of the banks/the construction of yet another runway at Heathrow/the closure of some more factories, is in the interests of the nation as a whole’) could be better understood when translated as ‘the rich and their hangers-on’. Ever helpful as I am, I thought I would follow in his footsteps in preparing a useful glossary of some current phrases and their real meanings to assist in understanding what politicians and the commentariat are actually saying.

Regeneration – demolishing council estates

Building vibrant communities – social cleansing

Hard choices – cuts

Brave decisions – cuts

Value for money – cuts

Reforms – privatisation and cuts

Deceptively large – small

Luxurious – small with an en-suite

Hard working families – middle class people with children

Problem families – poor people with children

Scroungers – poor people without jobs

Royal Family – scroungers

Something for nothing – benefits that we all pay for

Loony Left – socialist

Unelectable – socialist in the Labour Party

Extremist – a member of Unite

Dinosaur – anyone who can recognise a quote from Nye Bevan

Centre Left – regretfully right wing

Centre – right wing

Centre Right – really right wing

Migrant – human being

Refugee – frightened human being

Asylum seeker – refugee

 The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

As the Bard of Essex Ian Dury so cogently put it “There ain’t arf been some clever bastards”. Antonio Gramsci was undoubtedly one of the cleverest of those bastards, particularly as evidenced by his concept of hegemony, the ‘manufacture of consent’ that maintains the dominance of ruling class ideas and values in bourgeois society.

Gramsci saw that the capitalist state was made up of two interlinking elements, ‘political society’ – Lenin’s ‘special bodies of armed men’ – and ‘civil society’, which rules through popular acceptance of ruling class ideology.  His concept of civil society was very different to the narrow view common today, which defines it as the ‘third sector’ of charities, voluntary organisations and NGOs. Gramsci’s civil society is the public sphere where trade unions and political parties gain concessions from the bourgeois state, and the sphere in which ideas and beliefs are shaped and bourgeois ‘hegemony’ reproduced in cultural life through the media, universities and religious institutions to create and maintain legitimacy.

But nothing is fixed, everything is in a constant state of flux, even though we may not be aware of it in the moment. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci pointed out that the leverage that institutions like political parties exert can only be maintained when and where there is some relationship between what they are saying and doing and the lived experience of their traditional supporters – stretched too far and that relationship will eventually break. In as neat a description of ‘Pasokification’ as one could wish for, he wrote:

At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent and lead them, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression.

That is clearly what has happened in Greece, Spain and Scotland.  And it is, perhaps, just, starting to happen in England and Wales too. But while cracks in hegemony may have begun to open, its crisis is not consistent across civil society nor consistent within all social groups.  For example, Labour’s election defeat was not only the result of its annihilation by a party to its left in Scotland, but the erosion of its vote in many depressed northern working class areas was due to both the (deserved) disengagement by older working class voters and to some degree their drift towards UKIP.

At the same time though, the more or less spontaneous manifestations of popular rejection of the Tories’ austerity agenda, largely but not entirely on the part of young members of the precariat,  demonstrated by the Green Party’s surge in membership from fourteen to sixty seven thousand before the election and now quite spectacularly in the emergence of a widespread grassroots campaign for Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership bid, represents the most important crack in the ruling class’s ideological hegemony for a generation or more.

Earthquakes, while sudden, do not just happen spontaneously without cause. Continental drift causes the tectonic plates that makes up the crust of our planet to shift, split apart and slowly collide. The sudden cataclysmic rupturing of the St Andreas Fault, which will rip California apart, could happen tomorrow or in ten thousand years, but it will be as the result of a process that has been underway for millenia.

Political earthquakes are the product of long maturing crises too. The SNP earthquake is the product of years of Labour’s slow internal decay, caused by its arrogant sense of entitlement to its seemingly impregnable Scottish heartlands, grinding against the growth of popular alienation from Westminster rule since the disastrous imposition of the Poll Tax, and the steady growth of the SNP in the vacuum Labour created in its steady move to the right.

Since 2010 the most significant feature of real opposition to the Tory austerity policies, the most reactionary and vindictive for a century, has been, by and large, its absence. Labour had abandoned even the most timid Keynesianism and found itself increasingly, if rhetorically regretfully, complicit in the attacks on the the poor and the disabled (even though it had opened the door for some of them when in office). The trade union bureaucracy, unwilling to break with the Labour leadership clique, has largely responded to the Tories’ attacks with angry press statements and the organisation of a few token demonstrations. But the entire neoliberal project that has dominated the economic agenda since the early 1980s  has, since 2008, faced an ongoing chronic crisis which has emerged and re-emerged in different ways and different places.

Of course, capital is generally able to find a way out of crisis – even as profound as the interlocking complex of crises it now faces – if it is given the freedom of movement to do so. Thus the Tories, emboldened by the apparent lack of opposition to its economically illiterate 2010 austerity programme (and in particular by Labour’s effective capitulation) are preparing to launch a savage attack on the welfare state and the trade unions that will sweep away most of the gains of a century of reformism.  But economic crises also produce a response among those who are faced to pay the price for their resolution, albeit delayed.  When crises come, they develop in new and unexpected ways as their contradictions are condensed and dispersed, rupturing in surprising ways.

While a crisis doesn’t automatically produce a widespread or radical (or progressive) change in consciousness, it does change the terrain of struggle.  A period like now, when, in comparison to ‘normal times’ a long underlying crisis emerges, provides an opening for socialists to explain our ideas to a more receptive audience, but we can’t assume radical changes of consciousness will spontaneously emerge – certainly not in the same way at the same time among all oppressed groups. Rather, socialists need to be actively involved in struggle – organising and open to the possibilities of this particular conjuncture.  As Gramsci put it:

A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity) and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them. These incessant and persistent efforts … form the terrain of the “conjunctural” and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organise.

Or more poetically “Crisis thus appears as the moment of rupture at which theory can be transformed into a strategic art”

However, in taking advantage of the possibilities opened up by the crisis we need to be aware that the window of opportunity can both open and shut very rapidly and without apparent warning.  As the French socialist Daniel Bensaid said, in “strategy, time is the exact opposite of a uniform, homogeneous and empty dimension. It is made of clashes, sudden changes and moments to be seized.”

But in order to seize the time one needs a party, or at least a popular movement, or at least a critical mass of some thousands of activists who can provide the energy, physical resources and imagination needed to mobilise that movement and build (or rebuild) that party.  So what grouping on the left could provide such a critical mass? The Green Party could do it but won’t. Left Unity would do it but can’t (certainly not on its own). The various comic opera bolshevik sects don’t even want to.  But perhaps – just perhaps – the inchoate movement coalescing around Jeremy Corbyn might. While the Jeremy for Labour campaign might not be a Podemos, and certainly not a Syriza, its remarkable success in mobilising significant numbers of current and former Labour members or supporters, independent socialists and most crucially, battalions of young people, may well be a case of third time lucky after the dead end of the ‘Green Surge’ and the sadly drifting Left Unity project.

While Corbyn’s campaign has built up an astonishing and exciting head of popular steam it would be foolish (and tempting fate) to predict his victory at this stage.  As I write there is a month of campaigning to go, the hysterical red baiting and muck raking of an almost universally hostile mass media continues unabated and there are signs that Andy Burnham is sidling up to nick a few of Jeremy’s clothes. However, the significance of his campaign for socialists can hardly be overstated.

As all devoted Pot Black viewers will know,  when playing snooker there often comes a point where all the easy reds have been potted and all that remain are in a tight group, none of which will pot. In order to make any further progress, one then has to pot a colour and in doing so cannon into the group of reds to disturb them. There is no way of predicting where any of the reds will then go, but it is a chance that has to be taken. If Jeremy wins (or, indeed, if he very narrowly loses) we cannot predict with any certainty what will happen next. But what we can say with certainty is that his victory would be a game changer for the left, with the potential to be the most critical step towards the birth (or rebirth) of a mass pluralist party of the socialist/feminist/green left in our lifetime.