Beyond Parliamentarism: Historical Bases and Prospects for Corbynism
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- Published on Wednesday, 21 October 2015 22:30
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1177 .... October 22, 2015
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Beyond Parliamentarism:
Historical Bases and Prospects for Corbynism
Shannon Ikebe
Who would have thought? Britain, of all places -- that island so often lamented to be devoid of revolutionary history and thought, the land of Fabianism without Marxism, the home of Thatcher and Blair and the City -- now has one of the most radical leaderships of a major social democratic party in the advanced capitalist world. The election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the British Labour Party is an expression of enormous discontent and anger at ever-worsening conditions since the crisis of 2008. Very few anticipated anything approaching Corbyn's victory at the beginning of the race, not least Corbyn himself. But now, with the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to identify... the confluence of tendencies that led to this perfect storm in the summer of 2015 -- and an analysis of the history of the Labour Party can illuminate situations and strategies for the British left in the coming years.
While its historical memory has been obscured by the successive dominance of Thatcherism and Blairism, Britain had a vibrant left in the 1970s, with a strike rate that was among the highest in Europe. High levels of labour militancy and other forms of extraparliamentary mobilizations also strengthened socialists within the Labour Party; its strength within the party as a whole is manifested in the party program in 1973, which called for nationalization of the 25 largest companies in Britain, as well as the election manifesto in 1974 that publicly proclaimed its goal to "bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favor of working people."