My first morning at the Labour party conference of 1980 had been as dire as my Marxist brain imagined. Then, after lunch, Tony Benn stood up. He promised to abolish the House of Lords, enact an industry bill “within days” of coming to power to take ownership of key private industries – and to return all powers ceded to Brussels. Even from high up in the balcony of the Blackpool Winter Gardens, I could see Benn’s eyes were on fire.

Three years later, Labour bombed in the 1983 general election. Its manifesto, though only a pale reflection of Benn’s leftwing programme, was dubbed “the longest suicide note in history”. Today, with a mass influx of left-leaning members and a slump in the polls, parallels with the early 1980s are being drawn. They are almost all false.

First, because we are at the other end of the neoliberal era, and as an economic model it is broken. Labour lost in 1979, and saw its membership almost halve because it had clung to a failing system – Keynesian economics – long after it ceased to work. All the momentum, in ideas, in broader society and among the elite, was towards the free-market, authoritarian project we now call Thatcherism. In that situation, to make traditional-left Keynesianism work, as Benn suggested, would have meant an all-out clash with both the market and the state. Labour’s poll ratings – which collapsed in Foot’s first year – were a signal that its electoral base was not up for that.

By contrast, today neoliberal capitalism is busted, discredited and on life support. The whey-faced remnants of “old Toryism” may have crowded around the cabinet table, but their free-market philosophy has come apart. The fact that people are flooding into a left-led Labour party, not out of it, is evidence of a search for answers among broad sections of the population.

The next most obvious difference is the absence of what we used to call the “industrial struggle”. It has been invigorating to see the Deliveroo drivers on wildcat strike, together with migrant hotel cleaners, train guards and junior doctors all in a single summer. But the leftism we carried with us into the Winter Gardens in 1980 had its origins in the syndicalism of ordinary workers in the 1970s. To the shop stewards I met in the years between Benn’s 1980 speech and the miners’ strike, Labour politics were a sideshow.

The unions had achieved control of many workplaces and – it seemed – could go on calling the shots. In the year Benn made his electrifying speech, the steelworkers’ union had just won a double-digit pay rise in an all-out strike. To the wider left, of shop stewards, feminists, black community activists, a group such as Militant – which had moulded its entire practice, and even its clothing to conform with the dreariness of internal Labour life – seemed irrelevant. Its claimed membership of 2,300 in 1981 – out of 348,000 - sounds about right.

Today, work is much less central to the left project, and for a variety of reasons. It is precarious, hard to organise. Also, the things the left wants to achieve have become more social, less industrial. There is, on the left, an implicit understanding of political philosopher Toni Negri’s claim: that the “factory” is now the whole of society, and the subject of change is everybody – especially the networked youth.

I do not recall many of the miners and engineers who fought for Tony Benn as deputy leader in 1981 being existentially devastated when he narrowly lost. They knew this was just a warm-up for the decisive battle, which would happen in barricaded pit villages four years later. This generation, by contrast, understands that the most revolutionary thing you can do to neoliberalism is to put a party in government that dismantles it.

And that, in turn, reflects another big difference: the rule of law is stronger now. Everybody involved in the Bennite movement sensed that Britain’s legal institutions were so weak, its police, security services and judiciary so politicised, its constitution so malleable, that the scenario in Chris Mullin’s novel A Very British Coup was not paranoia. Today, though the secret state is large, it is under much stronger legislative control. Should a leftwing Labour party come to power – either on its own or in coalition with left nationalists – it is likely to be able to govern relatively free of politicised sabotage from the state.

There are clear parallels, though. As with the SDP, there is a prospect that a few entitled Labour MPs will split, and that the media will get behind the narrative that they are the “true” Labour party. Disunity has already damaged Labour in the polls, just as it did with Michael Foot.

But the differences are what should make these, for the British left, days of hope.

Michael Foot was a dire leader not because he was too old or too leftwing (or wore a duffel coat), but because he was a compromise candidate, constantly torn between the interests of the unions – who were largely on the right – and the membership, which had moved left. His 1983 manifesto was actually well crafted, but they were the right ideas at the wrong time.

Whatever you think of Corbyn (I support him and will campaign to keep him as leader), today is the right time for the idea that neoliberalism is over; that the state should shape, control and sometimes suppress the market; that austerity is self-defeating; that more expeditionary warfare cannot put right the chaos and injustice Blair and Bush injected into the Middle East.

Once we had revived our local Labour ward in Sheffield in 1980, its monthly attendance rose from the 12 pensioners and councillors that had kept it alive under Callaghan to maybe 30, one-third of whom were Trotskyists or sympathisers of the Communist party. And that was it. We achieved stuff – above all in supporting Sheffield city council when it resisted cuts. But ultimately the social forces that were driving Thatcherism were stronger. Thatcherism was the main event.

The main event of 2016 – in England and Wales at least – is that 300,000 people have joined the Labour party. Sure, some of the same people are still around, including me, but it feels like a much bigger moment than the Benn insurgency. Anybody who thinks it is being driven, or “twisted”, by re-enactment groups from 20th-century Marxism is going to the wrong meetings.