Despite Labour’s intensely factional politics, there’s a consensus quietly brewing in the party. It looks something like this: our economy and our politics are broken, but we can’t respond by resurrecting the models of the past. Instead, Labour must take seriously the sense of disempowerment that drove the Brexit vote and embrace more localised, participatory ways of running the economy and doing politics. Rather than imposing change from above, this new politics must be built through grassroots organising and imaginative local government, paving the way for national success. You could call this consensus “participatory socialism”.

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The limits of top-down statism are a particular concern among the soft left. Writing in 2018, Lisa Nandy argued that “the belief that a remote, monolithic state can solve our problems flies in the face of the reality for those people who most feel the absence of power”. She now says that Labour must rebuild trust by getting “back to being a party again that was built by and not just for working people in this country”. John Harris recently wrote that Labour cannot “leave the basic structures of the state untouched”. It must “be determinedly localist” and embrace “citizens’ assemblies and open primaries”.

These arguments are usually presented as a radical departure from Corbynism, which is caricatured as an unreconstructed return to the top-down state socialism of the 1970s. But this cartoon version of Corbynism never really existed. In fact, as Joe Guinan and I show in our book People Get Ready!, the Corbyn project has always been about reinventing 20th-century socialism rather than reviving it. The key innovation of the Corbyn project – recognised by the Economist, if not by the Labour party itself – was to imagine more localised and collective ways to own and run the economy. And Corbynites understood that this politics must be built from the ground up (although this understanding often clashed with Labour’s centralised, top-down party culture).

In 2015, Jeremy Corbyn said that publicly owned railways should be run co-operatively – involving passengers, rail workers and government – replacing “the old Labour model of top-down operation by central diktat”. John McDonnell consistently argued that old models of nationalisation “centralised too much power in Whitehall”, and that “democracy and decentralisation are the watchwords of our socialism”.

It’s true the leadership never made this agenda clear enough. The 2019 election campaign failed to tell a convincing story about popular empowerment, instead leading with a shopping list of spending pledges that seemed like more promises from untrustworthy politicians. Electorally speaking, Corbynism’s most innovative policies have not been tried and found wanting: they have been found difficult and left untried. It’s also true that Corbynites never squarely confronted the fact that you cannot democratise the economy without democratising politics (although there was growing talk of the need to transform the state from within). Clive Lewis’s leadership bid put this back on the agenda, and Rebecca Long-Bailey has adopted many of his proposals – promising radical devolution, House of Lords reform and enhanced party democracy, and even indicating she would consider electoral reform. As the journalist Adam Ramsay observes, this emphasis on empowerment is a distinguishing feature of her candidacy.

So why are Labour’s warring factions unable to agree that they agree on these policies? The oddities of Labour’s intensely factional politics mean nobody can admit a consensus exists– but look closely, and its outlines are there. This phenomenon didn’t start with the leadership contest, either. In her 2018 pamphlet The Everyday Economy, Rachel Reeves argued that “the way forward is … not to boost the power of the central state, but to bring capital under better democratic control”. Reeves positioned this as an anti-Corbynite idea. Yet many of the pamphlet’s specific proposals were drawn directly from the new thinking being nurtured by the Corbyn leadership.

Reeves argued that Labour should embrace “new forms of economic ownership” such as those explored in a 2017 report commissioned by John McDonnell. Her only real complaint was that “little of its agenda found its way into the last manifesto”. In fact, Labour’s 2017 and 2019 manifestos both included commitments such as supporting community energy and growing the co-operative sector. Reeves observed the potential for “Labour-controlled city regions and local authorities along with anchor institutions” to start pioneering these approaches – a reference to the much-lauded Preston model of community wealth-building, which Corbyn and McDonnell founded a dedicated unit to support. When different politicians are falling over themselves to claim the same ideas, perhaps it’s a sign those ideas are worth trying. Of course, Labour turf wars aren’t based on nothing. There are real ideological differences between Blue Labour types, who lean towards communitarianism and are suspicious of state involvement, and Corbynites, who believe the state is needed to address big problems such as inequality and climate change, but want to re-imagine what this means in practice.

But Labour can no longer afford to waste energy on a phoney war. If any leader is to move the party forward, they must be honest about the common ground that exists. Those who insist Labour is stuck in the past must begin to engage more seriously with its present: only then can we have a sensible conversation about its future.

• Christine Berry is a researcher, writer and consultant