The fluke nature of the 2015 leadership election meant that we were faced by an unusual strategic challenge: an advanced party of the left was isolated at the top of a major electoral party, surrounded by working class quiescence in the rest of society. And rather than a leftist opposition providing a catalyst for extra parliamentary opposition, the situation only seemed to be getting worse. Strike numbers continued to decline, and the anti-austerity movement vanished into the wind. With their demands increasingly being integrated into the program of a party that seemed like it could be in government before long, activists switched their mobilising energies from the streets to constituency Labour parties. Rather than the party catalysing autonomous class forces, it seemed to swallow them...
Our slogan became ‘Corbynism from Below,’ and we attempted to build a base that could support our counter attacking ambitions.
4 This took the form of a kind of absurd reverse Jenga: we had a left wing leader of the Labour party, now we need to reinvigorate the rank and file of the trade union movement; to organise tenants; to build fundamental community infrastructure.
5
This was an uphill task for multiple reasons: not only did we have to undo years of decay in the working class movement, but we had to do it whilst fundamentally unsupported by the dominant factions within our own project. Post-2017, the left Labourites and the class struggle social democrats in the leadership and the movement elite increasingly began to reach a strategic agreement about how the membership should be mobilised. They would be asked to join a union, vote for the left slate in internal elections, support left candidates locally, and work for a Labour election victory, but not to democratically shape the direction of travel or build antagonistic working class forces beyond the party...
The slow grind of conflict continued thereafter, with an increasingly sharp divide emerging between those who believed (often on the basis of the 2017 campaign) that the movement needed strong central institutions capable of directing a mass movement through the tribulations of a primarily electoral struggle, and those who believed that the process of deepening the class power underlying the project demanded a radical democratisation and embrace of extra-parliamentary methods. As time wore on, it became increasingly clear that the former was winning...
Corbynism had never, in all its four years, produced the kind of autonomous class power that would have been necessary to implement a transformative program. The whole movement had, for all of our more transgressive desires, remained strictly within the limits of bourgeois politics.
Corbynism from Below was never more than a minoritarian slogan. The movement was weak, and if the party fluked its way into government it would probably have been smashed to pieces within the year. At the end of the Corbyn era, the British working class was largely just as disorganised and weak as it was before. What gains there were remained squarely on the level of ideas – austerity realism had started to be dismantled, and millions had heard the fundamental arguments in favour of social democratic policies. That is, however, a very limited form of victory.
