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The Labour Party has never been a socialist party, but it has always had socialists in it, and for the first time they are in the driver’s seat. This has been crystallized by the party’s 2017 manifesto. Entitled “For the Many, Not the Few” it represents the peak accomplishment of Corbynism to date and offers the British people a first opportunity in a generation to vote for policies that would signify a fundamental shift to the left. Though moderate in language, the manifesto’s proposals are radical; building on the promise of Jeremy Corbyn’s two leadership campaigns with a vision that would end the era of austerity and shape a new economic terrain, one that shifts wealth and power from capital to workers. And the evidence suggests it is extremely popular. In the week it was launched the full, 128-page manifesto went viral online, being shared tens of thousands of times. It was much better received than the Conservative equivalent and has catapulted Labour in some polls to within five points of the governing party. After eighteen months of difficulty, Corbyn’s Labour has found itself on firm ground for the first time. But what does the manifesto propose — and how can its vision be realized?

The Promise The manifesto’s offer is threefold: to nationalize key utilities whose privatization has driven up the cost of living; to overhaul the world of work, halting the race to the bottom in terms and conditions; and to build a social economy where the essentials necessary for living a dignified life — from education and housing to social care and welfare supports — are improved and, in many cases, made free to access. Labour proposes to take rail, mail, energy, and the provision of water back into public ownership. It will increase the minimum wage to ten pounds per hour, scrap zero-hours contracts, ban unpaid internships, give workers’ rights to the self-employed, and trade unions a right of access to the workplace. Under a Labour government one million homes would be built, half of them publicly owned. Rent controls would be introduced. Tuition fees for university would be scrapped, there would be free child care for children over two, free school meals for every primary school child, and a national education service that invests £6.3 billion into improving schools. The National Health Service would be renationalized, driving out privateers, and its hospitals would no longer charge for parking. The elderly would have their pensions guaranteed with a triple lock and £2 billion would be invested in social care. Welfare cuts would be reversed. To achieve this transformative social program, the manifesto returns to the old-time gospel of the labor and social-democratic tradition: redistribution of wealth. The £52.5 billion raised to pay for it will come from taxes on corporations and those earning over £80,000 per year, as well as proposals such as a campaign against tax avoidance and fraud, the “Robin Hood Tax” on financial institutions, and a levy on private school fees. The vast majority of British people would benefit from a program paid for by the top 5 percent. To the many, from the few. In contrast to recent manifestos, “For the Many, Not the Few” is a decisive shift to the left in the party’s aspirations for government. In the two years since the last election Labour’s policy has developed from attempts to ameliorate the effects of neoliberalism to root-and-branch reform to defeat it. Where Ed Miliband’s Labour pledged to cap energy prices (a policy decried as Marxist at the time), Corbyn’s Labour pledges to intervene directly in the energy market through the creation of regionally owned and democratically controlled energy companies alongside the re-nationalization of the National Grid. Two years ago, Miliband and Balls sought to end only those zero-hour contracts which were “unfair.” Today, Corbyn and McDonnell seek their abolition entirely. Labour entered the general election of 2015 on a pledge to reduce tuition fees but are now committed to free higher education. If Brexit was a vague and contradictory call to “take back control,” Labour’s program is the route to achieving it, recovering an alternative long buried by Thatcherism. It takes its inspiration from the most radical aspect of social-democratic politics — decommodification — and aims to remove staples of daily life from the market, making them public, universal, and free at the point of access. In doing so, the party’s program would radically lower the cost of living, placing workers under less pressure to accede to the demands of their bosses to work longer or for less. It would revive the idea of entitlement that conservatives have fought so hard to discredit and put the brakes on a slide towards an economy where even public goods are provided on a pay-per-service basis. It could also change how people relate to the provision of necessary things, challenging the idea that this must be done on the basis of exchange, where what you receive always relates to what you can afford. For forty-one years Britain has been governed, by both the Conservatives and New Labour, on the basis that the market rules, and that the growing marketization of public life was a natural development. By seeking to subordinate the market to the interests of the people, Corbyn’s Labour has fundamentally challenged the logic imposed upon the party by the International Monetary Fund in 1976; a logic that led then-Prime Minister James Callaghan to declare to the party conference later in the year that the social-democratic option “no longer exists.”