Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics
Richard Seymour, Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2017), 327pp. $16.95.
There is today what Richard Seymour aptly calls a “crisis of globalization” -- a crisis that a resurgent Far Right has used to make political capital in de-industrialized regions. They are taking advantage of neoliberal globalization’s depressed real wages, reduced social welfare protections, and heightened inequalities both within and between countries.
Seymour shows convincingly that the “crisis of the left” occurred in large part because traditional social democratic parties across Europe and Britain abandoned the three pillars on which their parties had been built---state planning, strategic nationalizations of transportation and other economic sectors, and the expansion of social welfare policies. In Britain, neoliberal policies meant the consolidation of a center-right Labour Party leadership (under Tony Blair) whose primary focus was on keeping the left out of power.
How under these conditions did Corbyn win and what can we learn from his victory? First, Seymour shows that the democratization of the leadership process enabled him to defeat rivals whose arrogance and cynicism had led them to see both him and his supporters as harmless priests of a long buried and forgotten faith called socialism.
Then Corbyn, showing the statesmanship that all of his opponents lacked, withstood the assaults of “Project Fear” in which both Tories and the Labour “center” hurled big and little lies at him in ways that Donald Trump’s now convicted campaign manager Paul Manafort would have envied—a steady barrage of attacks on Corbyn as an anti-Semite, a misogynist enemy of women in politics, and of the British armed forces everywhere. And the attacks kept on coming—Corbyn as the dupe of a Trotskyite cabal, the stalking horse of assorted terrorists from Iraq to Ireland, a champion of unilateral disarmament who would leave the UK open to attack.
Corbyn kept his cool and made effective use of both established and new social media to bring his case to a changed electorate with which his mean-spirited and dispirited opposition had lost touch. He appealed to youth, to the better educated professional strata of the 21st century “precariat,” to independent contractors (from well-paid professional consultants to Uber drivers), and to the reserve army of the erratically employed in general.
Unlike Senator Bernie Sanders, Corbyn, because of the process by which he rose to his party’s leadership, could not be ignored by the mass media. In putting this in context, Seymour provides a rich narrative of the Labour Party’s history, including its early socialism, its post-WWII achievements, and the long period of its stagnation and decline. He shows that the leadership moved to the right even before Thatcher’s victory, in the midst of mounting class conflict caused by the changed economy in the 1970s. After that victory, it formed a third party to sabotage a left leadership that had emerged in response to Thatcher’s war against the British welfare state. While the third party did not get far on its own, its leadership formed parliamentary and constituency alliances with the Liberals while Labour itself floundered with a vacillating leadership and declining political base until Blair’s “New Labour” came and established a government that one might charitably call “Thatcherism with a human face.”
Seymour shows that the ruling class is not always able to adjust its marketing message to electorates and either buy off or isolate through media saturation serious potential opponents. We see from his account that effective leadership requires statesmanship, in and out of power — separating the personal from the political, avoiding provocations from all sides, not falling into the traps of either dogmatism/sectarianism on the one hand or addictive opportunism on the other. For socialist parties and movements, leadership/statesmanship is necessary in a way that it is not for the Trumps, Clintons, Blairs, Thatchers, Le Pens, Macrons, et al. The latter’s class backing and ability to tweak the status quo allow them to rely mainly on propaganda for their political outreach – to either pacify or inflame selected constituencies.
Seymour does not adequately emphasize, however, the role of the emerging Cold War, particularly the US rise as the de facto inheritor of the British and other colonial empires, its leadership in the creation of the NATO bloc, and its support for the creation of the EU, along with its control of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. These developments greatly limited what the postwar Labour government could do and strengthened those groups in the Labour Party that sought to move away from the left’s commitment to build a “Socialist Britain.”
While US policy was to support rightwing social democrats against left leaders like Nye Bevan, the two pillars of US policy toward its NATO allies were opposition to nationalizations of industry and to all expressions of “neutralism” in Cold War policy. If there was a US exemplar for its EU/ NATO allies, it would be Conservative parties in power and right-oriented social democratic parties as a loyal opposition.
There is a great deal of discussion on the US Left about the need to develop new strategies and use social media more effectively, but there is no clear policy or program to actually do this. Resistance to Trump has not been taken into account the ways in which his policies have grown out of those of his predecessors. In this regard, Seymour’s treatment of the proposals that have emerged from Corbyn and his allies is especially valuable. Such proposals exist in the US in various forms in the trade-union movement, the environmental movement, the civil rights movement, women’s rights and anti-militarist/anti-war movements. Connecting them in a coherent way with political leadership would be the next large step forward in the US. The Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party, despite enormous obstacles, has taken that step.
What can Americans committed to socialism and democracy learn from this important work? Perhaps the first lesson should be to look seriously at Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign, which many British and European observers compared with Corbyn’s campaign for leadership of the Labour Party. For Sanders, himself a longtime advocate of democratic socialism, socialists \no longer faced the dichotomy of either boycotting the Democratic Party or working for it on a lesser-of-two-evils principle. Rather it became one of using electoral politics to transform the party the only way any mass organization can be transformed: by bringing in large numbers of new people and new ideas, socialist ideas, to form a leadership cadre of candidates and policy planners. Sanders’ 2016 campaign already bore fruit in 2018, with the election of dozens of progressive Democrats, some with a socialist agenda, setting the stage for the possible nomination and election of a President who can be an American version of Jeremy Corbyn.
Norman Markowitz
Rutgers University
markowit.markowitz@gmail.com