LP

Well, I certainly wish that Tony Benn were around to see this. Certainly, in talking to him in his last years, he wasn’t expecting something like this to happen, and he was a bit depressed about the prospects for the Labour left.

But it does go to show you that the kind of democratic socialist struggle that we are embarked on is a marathon, not a sprint.

Jeremy Corbyn exactly fits in the Bennite tradition and indeed was part of the attempt — of which Tony Benn was the prominent voice — to change the Labour Party into a vehicle for mobilization for socialist change in Britain. This effort goes back to the effects of the 1960s New Left, the anti-Vietnam activism, the beginning of the women’s movement, the general thrust for participatory democracy.

There was an upsurge in the Labour Party in the early 1970s and through the early 1980s, until it was defeated by an alliance of the Labour right — which eventually turned itself into New Labour under Tony Blair — and the “old left” in the Labour Party, the Michael Foot wing of the party, represented by parliamentarians and left-wing policy types and linked to the trade union bosses.

What Benn represented instead was a strong force inside the party saying that if you couldn’t change and democratize the Labour Party, you couldn’t change and democratize the British state. That was the central theme of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. It’s very significant that the brilliant young organizer of that campaign, Jon Lansman, is now a central figure in the Corbyn camp.

All these developments were reflected in the attempt to break the control of parliamentarians and career politicians over the Labour Party, an attempt to allow for constituency parties to reselect their MPs, an attempt to make sure that party congress resolutions would be taken seriously by the party leadership.

And this was also an attempt to allow for a mobilization at a local level. This was especially important for Corbyn who was part of the municipal radicalization in the 1970s which culminated with their great successes at the Greater London Council, under Ken Livingston.

Corbyn represents all of this. He also harkens back all the way to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at the height of the Cold War, he’s the vice chair of the remnants of that organization and opposes the renewal of the Trident submarine, the British “nuclear deterrent.”

In all these respects, Corbyn is very much carrying forward what was isolated, marginalized, and eventually defeated in the Labour Party — and in other social-democratic parties in Europe. And out of all those parties, this left insurgency only seems to have reappeared in the Labour Party and only in the last few months.