Can Jeremy Corbyn Redeem the Labour Party?
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- Published on Friday, 11 September 2015 22:30
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1161 .... September 12, 2015
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Can Jeremy Corbyn Redeem the Labour Party?
Interview with Leo Panitch
"Of political parties claiming socialism to be their aim, the Labour Party has always been one of the most dogmatic -- not about socialism, but about the parliamentary system." That's how Ralph Miliband opened his classic 1961 text Parliamentary Socialism, a critical analysis of the party that most of the British left wanted to capture.
Miliband was skeptical of that plan, as was his later collaborator Leo Panitch. But during the great upsurges of the early 1980s -- which saw the growth of a radical Labour left represented by Tony Benn and others, as well as the miners’ strike of 1984--85 -- both thinkers resisted the "new revisionism" of intellectuals like Eric Hobsbawm... and Stuart Hall who viewed the "Bennites" and Trotskyist entryists rather than a staid leadership as the source of Labour's problems.
However, that supposed realism would win the day, eventually ushering in New Labour and the further rightward drift of the party -- the backdrop for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour leadership campaign.
With the results of the leadership election set to come in September 12, Jacobin's Bhaskar Sunkara spoke with Panitch, a York University professor and Socialist Register co-editor. They discussed the legacy of Tony Benn, how Ed Miliband's reforms to the Labour Party inadvertently laid the ground for Corbyn's insurgency, and whether Labour could be transformed into something it never was -- socialist. This interview was first published by Jacobin magazine.
Bhaskar Sunkara (BS): Jeremy Corbyn's success has reminded people of Tony Benn and his struggle to win control of the Labour Party a few decades ago. Politically, where does he stand in relation to Benn, who had a structural critique of capitalism and wanted to transform the Labour Party into a real agent for socialism? Is he in the same tradition?
Leo Panitch (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.