If only he hadn’t died a few years back, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the late Soviet general Gennady Yanayev had been acting as strategy consultant to Hilary Benn and his mates since last weekend.

In case you’ve forgotten the name, or perhaps weren’t even born 25 years ago, this is famously the guy who tried and failed to oust Gorbachev in an incompetently executed military coup way back in August 1991.

The attempt lacked any popular support, and fell flat within a matter of days. But that wasn’t the end of the matter. In the longer term, the ramifications of these events succeeded in bringing down a structure within which contradictions had been accumulating for decades. And as any good Marxist will tell you, today’s Labour Party is exactly that.

You can analyse this process within any one of several frameworks. You may want to depict what is unfolding before us as a straightforward ideological struggle between quasi-Marxist Corbynistas and Blairite neoliberals.

Or perhaps you’d rather contextualise it all as an inevitable a clash between croissant eating north London meterosexuals and white working class northerners, or a manifestation of the irreconcilable interests of the beneficiaries of globalisation and the losers. But the deep cleavages have been visible for years, and have now patently come to a head.

At the time of writing, the Eighteenth Brumaire of Hilary Benn was being met with stronger resistance than the assailants can have been anticipating, with the resistance on Monday night taking its stand at a gathering outside parliament.

As a Liberal Democrat friend of mine ruefully observed, the number of resignations from the Labour frontbench had already reached five times the total number of Lib Dem MPs. But Corbyn remained in office.

What is being done is ethically questionable, in that many of his fiercest critics have been unceasing in their efforts to destabilise him since the day he was elected, contributing to the very poll standings that form the ostensible justification for their onslaught.

This is precisely what the left didn’t do during the long decades of rightist ascendency, even in the period in which it still had the forces at Westminster to facilitate obstruction tactics,

It is also hypocritical, in that the Remain defeat in the EU referendum has been ruthlessly seized upon as a pretext. Corbyn’s support for Remain was always a conditional bargain, and he delivered his side of the deal. Look at his reward. Thanks a bunch, people.

The right would like to think that it can force him out in the next few days, thereby circumventing anything as ungainly as an actual electoral contest.

But two-bit constitutional chicanery based on an unfeasible reading of the rules isn’t going to work. Potential challengers need nominations, incumbents don’t. Corbyn has a legal right to be on any coming ballot paper.

But, as Yanayev analogy indicates, things are unlikely to settle down after a convincing left victory in September. Labour is never going to be the same again.

With the situation changing hour by hour, it is foolish even to attempt firm predictions on how things might pan out. But it is difficult to conceive how Labour’s explicitly socialist and social democratic left can stay within a formation numerically dominated by open advocates of austerity economics, imperialist foreign policy, and increasingly explicit nativist racism.

The Labour right’s feeble protestations of party loyalty – or even of respect for democratic decisions – are clearly meaningless. After their coming defeat, one rather suspects they won’t want to stay and play nicely.

Even if they do attempt to stay put, they will find themselves at increased risk of deselection, as the organisations of the Labour left regrettably find it impossible to hold back hotheaded young activists who are unconstrained by the settlement that has hitherto prevailed.

What the right does next is up to them, of course. It has long been speculated that financial backing for a new party, to be known as the Progressive Democrats or something of that ilk, has already been lined up.

Other commentators have raised the possibility of the emergence of a new pro-EU centrist party, regrouping the Lib Dems and the Cameroons. Whether or not that project gains any traction presumably depends on the outcome of internal battles in the Conservative Party, on which I am in no position to comment.

But meanwhile, best ignore the crocodile tears on World at One, the hastily typed ‘with a heavy heart’ template-based resignation letters, and the insincere protestations of Jeremy’s ‘basic decency’ by the very people who have avidly branded him an anti-Semite for month upon month. It may now fall to today’s left to rebuild the Labour Party, as it did in 1931. So be it.