A few more words about Richard Seymour’s great book, Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics. Let me say that I love this book. I love it not for the argument the author makes, but because he has eloquently put the matter almost exactly where is should be: namely, does radical politics have any future at all?

He appears to say, ‘Yes.’

But I think the implications of his argument is, ‘Probably Not. At the very minimum, the Corbynistas have a very heavy lift to radicalize the moribund Labor Party.’

And, that makes me very happy.

*****

According to Richard Seymour, Jeremy Corbyn appears to enjoy the support of the great majority of the Labour Party’s membership. At the time of his writing, 66 per cent of the party’s members thought Corbyn was doing a good job. Yet for all that, writes Seymour, Corbyn’s position is extremely tenuous. Labour’s share of the vote under Corbyn barely nudged above the 30 per cent mark in the last election.

In the Labour Party, poor polling is enough to demand his head.

In his party, Corbyn is surrounded by people who are quietly waiting for him to be forced to resign. The wider Left and unions from which he might draw strength are weaker than they have been for generations. Further, says Seymour, even if Corbyn were to win an election, it is doubtful he would be able to implement the sort of mild redistribution Corbyn supporters promise. Such a program requires cooperation from business and even the financial sector. Even if Labour doesn’t raise taxes on the wealthy, a Corbyn administration could be expected to face fierce currency attacks from speculators, investment strikes and capital flight by the owners of capital and downgrading on its debt by ratings agencies.

The Labour Left owes its present position not to its own strength, says Seymour, but chiefly because the domination of the Party by the old guard collapsed. Moreover, Corbyn has not yet begun to significantly change the way Labour does politics. If he fails to change the party quickly, he will not get another chance.

So what would Corbyn’s success look like according to Seymour?

This is not an easy question to answer. Traditionally, success meant wielding state power. Blair’s Labour was successful in shaping public opinion, but their efforts suffered from the fact that they accepted the Thatcherian status quo. The idea that success means wielding power seems to have lost a significant part of its meaning when wielding power offers only negligible opportunity for changes at the margins of policy.

Corbyn’s project, like that of Blair, is in most respects a traditional electoral one, subject to even stricter limitations:

“One way to define success, of course, is to start from failure. The fundamental condition shaping everything that Corbyn does, or could conceivably do, is the weakness and decline of the Left and the labour movement on which Labour has traditionally pivoted its hopes. This decline is registered at the level of organisation, in falling union density and activity, in declining membership in left-wing groups, in the makeshift and transient nature of most social movements, and in the relative sparsity of left-wing publications. It is registered at the level of ideology, in the way that it has largely been unable to shape the terrain except in a reactive and defensive way. The anti-war mobilisations of the 2000s, of course, provide a striking contrast to the general retreat on other fronts. It is registered at the level of policy where, for several decades, every major shift in the dominant party system has been about shutting down options, with party elites converging on the neoliberal centre. Left-wingers have usually been excluded from government in this period, but where they have taken office they have usually administered the orthodoxy. And of course, it is registered at the level of economy and society, where inequality and competition are the rule, and collectivist and egalitarian norms have been progressively rolled back on almost every front.”

Those who are expecting Corbyn to transform Labour into an instrument of radical change are likely to be disappointed, at least in the short-run. Labour has never been a party of the radical Left. There are powerful forces that resist that path. Corbyn can probably realize some limited organizational changes. In the long-run he might even get Labour to the point where they start to think of themselves as vaguely socialist — over a generation or so. But his near-term survival depends on vote metrics. The only thing that could blunt the complaints of his party opponents would be electoral success. The most difficult task facing Corbyn, because of the resistance of his own parliamentary party, is an actual change in the policies proposed by the party.

Moreover, changes in the internal life of the party, its ideology, its electoral performance and its policies are not necessarily mutually compatible. It may in fact be terribly disruptive: “It may not be possible to reconstitute Labour as a party with a thriving Left without paying a cost in terms of party peace,” Seymour argues:

“The Labour Party has not suddenly become a democratic organisation just because they got their man elected. The power has not shifted to the grass roots. It is still with the party machine, and a largely right-wing parliamentary group. The institutions of Labour are ranged against Corbyn and his supporters, and they are backed up by their connections to the state, the media, think tanks and businesses. Nor, for that matter, has parliament become more democratic overnight. The same imperviousness to popular pressure that has enabled successive governments to implement unpopular privatisations and pursue unpopular wars persists today. The establishment is ancient, deeply entrenched, recalcitrant and difficult to shift. And the political class that has emerged from the Thatcher era is callous, indifferent to popular will and determined to cling on to power.”

Radicalizing Labour is a daunting objective

Labour, Seymour warns, has never been a radical party and is unlikely to become one. “[The] greatest challenge Labour is faced with concerns the seemingly intractable strategic dilemmas over just how radical it can be.“ Corbyn’s radical supporters have not actually won anything simply by electing their guy. The clock is ticking down on their brief time at the helm of the Labour Party. They have only a small window in which to devise a coherent strategy to turn their political lottery win into reality. If they fail, Corbyn’s formidable opponents will have the opportunity to stage a comeback.

If any of this angst presaged a radical change in the direction of British politics, we might have profited by Seymour’s thorough treatment of the prospects for a Corbyn era. Instead Seymour offers a decidedly disappointing prediction: Corbyn, even if successful will only provide a gentle push at the boundaries of debate within British politics:

“On the three main planks of the economy and public spending, foreign policy and a ‘kinder politics’, Corbyn’s agenda is not exactly the Communist Manifesto. It is not even one of the more radical Labour manifestos. In all, it constitutes an attempt to gently push the boundaries of debate to the left, to open new possibilities, and to push back against some of the nastier forms of right-wing politics. Yet, even these objectives could overwhelm him.”

Along with the Conservatives, over the last few decades, Labour has shared the Thatcherite assumption that the current economic model is the one we have to live with: there is no alternative. Four decades after Thatcher’s rise to Prime Minister, Seymour argues that Labour’s most pressing task still remains to demonstrate that there is a coherent alternative economic model based on state-managed wage slavery. That task faces daunting public opinion against a bigger role for the fascist state in the economy:

“Even so, strictly in terms of what people believe, polling suggests that despite the myriad discontents with the British economic model, at present more people are wary of state intervention than would support it. There is support for some limited regulation and intervention, and a degree of public ownership, but the majority of people, having lived for years with the assumption that state intervention cannot work, remain to be convinced that a more sustained interventionist thrust is called for.”

Corbyn’s supporters are promoting public meetings supporting radical alternative economic ideas, to educate activists. But, warns Seymour, public opinion and assumptions that Corbynistas are working against should not be underestimated. Polls suggest a fairly consistent trajectory of decline in support for fascist state economic management. People have been persuaded of ugly claims about the welfare system that have no basis in fact. Those who don’t work or need benefits are an unproductive burden enfeebled by welfare dependency. Nothing would be better for their souls than the whip of market discipline.

The prospect of another crisis moving the needle on this opinion is at best a wild delusion; if anything, it is likely to reinforce the present political trajectory.

Did Seymour ask the right question?

The problem here may be that Seymour is asking the wrong question. Seymour asks, “Can Corbyn Win?” I think the real question posed by this rather dismal chapter might be, “Should Corbyn win?” Which is to say, what do we gain, if Corbyn manages to overcome the formidable obstacles in his path to realize his program of mild redistribution based on (and thus limited by) cooperation from Britain’s business and financial oligarchs?

In first place, doesn’t this just hand the oligarchs a veto over Corbyn’s program? Why would these oligarchs accept redistribution of their profits to wage slaves when they are facing cut-throat competition among themselves within the world market? There is actually no evidence that these oligarchs, entrenched in positions of power in industry, finance, the media and the state would ever renounce their claim on as much of the social product of labor as they can carry away with an earthmover.

In second place, what evidence is there that a program of mild redistribution can even meet the most minimal requirements of Labour’s traditional core constituency, much less the needs of Britain’s increasingly black, brown and female labor force? Are the needs of these workers so minimal that marginal changes in the division of the social product between wages and profits will suffice? On what empirical research is such a conclusion based?

Third, is it just possible that the decline in popular support for mild social-democratic redistribution is driven not only by ugly anti-welfare sentiments and anti-immigrant chauvinism — or even by decades of New Labour’s pursuit of Thatcherite ideas — but by the collapse of self-contained national economies, as global trade grows in importance? Few governments today can manage their national capitals as occurred immediately before and after World War Two. The increasingly globalized production of commodities flies in the face of radical Keynesian assumption that nation states can control their national capitals.

Euthanasia of the Social-Democrat Consensus



Even if Corbyn succeeded in what he is trying to accomplish, there is no evidence that his efforts and that of a duly radicalized Labour Party would be sufficient to meet the needs of his supporters. But all is not lost by admitting this.

It would be an altogether different discussion, if Seymour had asked what are the prospects for putting the final nail in the coffin of social-democracy. If Seymour is to be believed, Corbyn’s challenge, although successful so far, is very weak, both conjuncturally and structurally. The Labour Party — and, indeed, British politics itself — is likely already dying. Every major trend discussed by Seymour is against Corbyn being successful.

Communists should really think about what it would take to kill the Labour Party and social democracy once and for all. There is, of course, nothing communists can do directly to kill the Labour Party, but communists would do well to think about how to detach themselves from this political zombie and let it implode in on itself.

Most of all we have to stop gas-lighting the working class as if they do not realize what is happening to them. This means, among other things, that:

government have indeed been using immigration as an instrument to drive down wages. Although we support the freest possible movement for workers, we realize the effect this has on the working class. Addressing the depressive effects immigration has on wages has to begin by being honest about the impact on economic competition has on wages. It is possible to have both free movement and decent subsistence for the working class. But this requires an entirely new approach based on a radical reduction of labor hours.

government have indeed been using welfare to create dependency among the working class. This by no means implies we want to subject the working class to the whip of market forces. Rather, we want to end wage slavery and the practice of leaving some to starve while others are overworked. Again, this can only be realized with a sharp reduction in hours of labor.

taxes on the working class are too high, while the wealthy have increasingly enjoyed massive redistribution in their favor through the tax code. There is no economic law that says workers must pay any taxes at all. We want to end the oppressive burden of taxes on the working class by exempting wages and salaries from all direct and indirect taxation. If the two parties think taxes are necessary, let them go after their donors.

there really is no alternative to an increasingly globalized economy. We have to accept that, in the future, national governments will be increasingly unable to control their national economies. Any program that rests on the assumption that nation states are in charge must be rejected. In the future, we should look to ways the needs of the working class can be met without assuming the state will provide welfare to those locked out of the labor market.

We can only be honest with the working class if we are honest with ourselves. To address the needs of the working class at this point in history, wage slavery must go.

There is no alternative.