Jeremy Corbyn
I admire Corbyn greatly, as everyone who reads this blog knows. If he had become Prime Minister, he would have made Britain a better place–a lot better–because he wanted to do virtually all the right things, and he has stuck to his principles for decades.
However, Corbyn did have one major flaw, and he made one major mistake.
Corbyn was, and is, nice in the wrong way.
If you have principles, and you get into power, it is your duty to see those principles through. Corbyn had a mandate from Labour party members.
Labour party MPs did not agree, and the majority of them did everything they could to sabotage Corbyn, over and over again.
Corbyn had remedies: He could back mandatory re-selection (allowing party members in ridings to re-select their candidates) or he could have just kicked them out of the party.
Kicking MPs out of the party is what Boris Johnson did, and while I don’t much like Johnson, he was right to do so. He was elected leader on a platform of hard Brexit, and those who voted against him needed to go. He got rid of them.
Corbyn should have done that and implemented re-selection. Corbyn repeatedly said that his principle was that the Labour party, and the country, should be run by the grass roots. MPs who were going against the vast majority of the party needed to face the discipline of the party members.
This is also true because the MPs have a role in selecting who is allowed in the ballot for the next leader. As it stands now there may wind up being no left-wing candidate for the overwhelmingly left-wing party membership to vote for.
An ideological movement’s first job in a democracy is to control one of the two main parties. If you do so, you will eventually wind up in power. It is that simple. No party rules forever.
If Corbyn fails his movement and his principles, it will not be because he lost a couple elections. It will be because he had the chance to change the Labour party, and he really didn’t, because he blinked when it came to dealing with other MPs.
That’s failure, and that’s an actual indictment of Corbyn in a way that losing elections isn’t. He had the power to enact his principles in a way which would have greatly increased the odds of Britain becoming a better place, whether or lost he won elections, and he didn’t do so.
For that, I blame him.
(There have been a lot of articles about the British election and Corbyn over the last week. We’ll move on to other topics after this. But understanding what happened and why is important.)
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ven
Yes. Throughout his life, he has tried to play the role of conciliator. And he didn’t stand up firmly against the anti-semitism charges and he allowed Blair off the hook on a war crimes vote.
Blair has just vomited out a report on the causes of Labour’s defeat being beyond Brexit, and about personal dislike / distrust for Corbyn increasing since 2017, blaming his early involvement in discussions with the IRA, his ‘far left’ policies and people’s disbelief in his ability to deliver. In all of the latter, he obviously doesn’t mention the media, but makes the case for Labour to go back to the centre, if they want power.
In the long term, given Party funding dynamics and media interests, I’m not sure the Left can actually sustainably gain power. Returning to your other article about voter responsibility, perhaps the best we can do is lay out our stall and principles, and let them choose; if they choose others, so be it. The moment that you are in politics just to gain power, you make compromise after comprise, until there is nothing left except a Blair / Obama.
ven
One other reflection Ian, is that the number of MPs in the PLP against him, including his deputy leader, would have made it impossible in practice to kick them all out. He would have had a civil war on his hands (OK he did anyway), and I’m not sure the unions would have supported him in that.
bruce wilder
I went back to one of the other Labour/Brexit to re-read the Mandos comment at:
https://www.ianwelsh.net/why-labour-lost-in-britain/#comment-108093
It is a succinct case from an anti-Corbyn perspective and interesting to me for the contrast with Ian’s argument.
The contrasting narrative assumptions are telling. Ian simply endorses Corbyn, on both character and policy preferences. Mandos “reports” rather than endorses, and uses a double-negative construction to introduce as justified views the anti-Corbyn, anti-Momentum perspective without critical judgment of the way the anti-Corbyn MPs and pundits have operated. (Mandos argues for the partial validity of the anti-semitism slander.)
Particularly telling is “the whole deselection business”, which Mandos reports centrist “left-wing voters” took as confirmation that Momentum was “totalitarian” in its politics for pushing open selection. (In fact, Momentum as a group officially rejected deselection as a strategy early on, not that facts matter.)
People have a lot of arguments against changing or challenging the neoliberal status quo that are not even facially credible in their presumptions or ethical in operation. And, yet, they carry on without even being embarrassed.
450.org
I also think it’s time to rename the party. The name Labour is a lot like the name Whig. Its relevance and significance as a name has passed. It’s time for a more appropriate and relevant name. Any ideas for a new name — something more relevant, pertinent and inspiring?
450.org
With this latest vote coupled with Brexit, the UK is no more. We should revert back to calling the isolated island England. England’s fate is the fate of Cyprus. It will become a hang for international oligarchs and a place to launder and hide their ill-gotten gains. A significant percentage of the under class will die early deaths in the next twenty years and those remaining can look forward to a life of service to the rich like walking their dogs, babysitting their brats and carrying their bags up to their hotel suites. There is no coming back from this vote. So it is written, so shall it be done.
Phil Perspective
A number of the Blair-ite idiots did leave eventually. They formed Change UK. I don’t think any of them got a significant number of votes though I’m unsure whether the amount they did get allowed any Tories to sneak through, like the LibDems allowed re: Kensington. The bigger problem was the Change UK idiots defected pretty late, to try and purposefully hurt Labour.
450.org
England, because it’s no longer Britain or Great Britain or the United Kingdom, needs to catch up to America, and Russia, and proceed to direct oligarchical rule to get things done. We’re now at the point where we are forced to choose between two oligarchs, Donald Trump or Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg, despite the diabolical attacks from the Dems getting women to lie about Bloomberg’s treatment of women, is the kinder, gentler oligarch compared to Trump. And, in fact, is superior to Trump in many ways and one of those ways is on his approach to what Nader calls climate disruption. This Vox article explains it nicely. Remember, Greta Thunberg said, and I agree, every election from here on out until we are no more is a referendum on climate change. Since Bloomberg has a positive track record on climate change compared to any of the other candidates (as far as getting anything done) and he has a great plan in place to use Trump’s blitz strategy for good versus evil, I just may vote for him if he’s the candidate pitted against Trump in the next election and he very well may be despite the Dems trying to destroy him come hook or crook with their #MeToo bull.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/12/17/21023873/mike-bloomberg-climate-change-policy-power-natural-gas-coal
Ten Bears
To address the inevitable UK/US comparison, the underlying sentiment seems to be good bad or indifferent, like it or not, Britain elected Boris because he is an accurate reflection of the British people. Something I’ve been pointing to rollin’ up on five years now re. Our Tea Pot Dictator: good bad or indifferent, like it or not, we elected drumpf uck because he is an accurate reflection of who we are.
How we got here is moot in both the generally accepted vernacular and as elders in the oaks, but if we were to meet and attempt consensus I would venture it were a choice. We choose to be fat, ugly and stupid. That those of us who didn’t actually make that choice … oh well.
That we are being herded, like so many cattle, so many cars, is another conversation.
Dan Lynch
Ian said “an ideological movement’s first job in a democracy is to control one of the two main parties. If you do so, you will eventually wind up in power. It is that simple. No party rules forever.”
Excellent point. Well stated, Ian.
I’m thinking about how Ian’s hypothesis applies to the New Deal: at the 1932 Democratic convention, Huey Long teamed up with FDR to seize control of the Democratic party (it’s worth reading the story of that 1932 convention if you haven’t already). The party establishment backed Al Smith, but Populist Huey Long convinced Southern Democrats to support liberal Yankee FDR, effectively birthing what became known as the New Deal coalition. It was by no means a perfect marriage, but it was able to take power and get a lot of good stuff done.
Then at the 1944 Democratic convention, a feeble FDR allowed the business class to take back control of the party and dump populist Henry Wallace. Oliver Stone claims the 1944 convention was a turning point. There was enough inertia to keep the New Deal going for a while longer, but it was on the defensive, no longer able to shape policy.
So yeah, take control of a party if you can, but how many times in history has that happened? And don’t expect the business class to roll over and play dead. They’ll fight back, and they’ll eventually win, because they have most of the soft power (money, media, bribes) in a capitalist economy.
Willy
As a duly self-designated representative of the lowbrow wing, I think force of personality has a lot to do with it. Teddy Roosevelt liked to kill animals, ride roughly, and said “Bully!” a lot (whatever the hell that means), and was a big hit with the sheeple. Corbyn seemed weaker than Bojo. While policy wonks will scoff the haughty over this, for far too much of any given population, that’s about it.
450.org
Okay, I’ll start with the suggestions for a new name for Labour.
Service
The Service Party — because Labour is dead.
Service in England is making a comeback. With automation and AI, the few jobs left for the previous working class will be jobs in service to the diversified oligarchy.
Why do you think Downton Abbey is a such a great hit? Because it’s important to create propaganda to make service seem glamorous in some way since it’s making a comeback.
Probably one of the greatest movies ever made about service in England, its last breaths before this resurgent nostalgic popular comeback, is The Remains of the Day based on a novel by the same name authored by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Pursuant to that, maybe Anthony Hopkins can be persuaded to run for prime rib as the titular head of the newly named party.
Mark Pontin
Ian wrote: ‘(Corbyn’ has stuck to his principles for decades …’
No. Corbyn did _not_ stick to his principles. And that’s why he was not only defeated, but defeated so resoundingly.
Everyone in the UK knew that, like his mentor Tony Benn, Corbyn was profoundly Eurosceptic — someone who believed that the EU is an entity that from its beginnings was explicitly designed to further neoliberal ends (or more precisely ordoliberal ends, because it was German ordoliberals who did much of the work of structuring the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the European Economic Community (EEC) during the 1950s).
Videos exist from earlier in this century of Corbyn making the point vociferously that the EU is an anti-democratic, capitalist organization. He was right then and he’d have been right now.
And yet when he was called upon to straddle the opposed belief-systems of Labour working-class Leaver constituencies and Labour urban professional Remainer constituencies he didn’t have the gumption to speak up and make the case against the EU.
And if Corbyn didn’t have enough guts or gumption to stick to his beliefs about the EU — was simply mealy-mouthed — about the primary question that this election and the last three years of British politics have been about, why would Leave-voting former Labour voters believe he could carry through on _anything_ of that very long wish-list of policies that Labor tossed out there in the last month? They didn’t believe Corbyn. And that was because he was patently unbelievable in the ways that counted.
Ian wrote: ‘Corbyn had a mandate from Labour party members.’
Actually, he had two absolutely opposed mandates on the Leave-Remain question to straddle. He chose to succumb to the advice of Starmer, McDonnell, and the Managerial Professional types within Labor, centered in London.
How should he have straddled it?
Well, perhaps, firstly, he could have articulated the argument against the EU — marshaled the facts, which show that the EU has inflicted austerity on Europe that’s worse than anything the Tories have done to the UK. Sure, there’d have been howls of anguish from the MSM and Corbyn would have been demonized as a purveyor of hate speech against the EU. So what? The media demonizes Trump and Johnson, too, and Corbyn was always going to be demonized. Leaders lead and part of how they do it is by setting forth persuasive arguments.
Secondly, he could have followed that by saying that I’ve argued for what I personally believe. But because I also believe in democracy, I’m setting each Labour MP free to represent their constitutencies as they see fit.
Corbyn would still have been attacked. It may be that the split among Labour’s ranks could never have been straddled successfully enough to win this election for Labour. But if he’d had the courage of his Brexit convictions, then perhaps he’d have persuaded some voters who believed in the stock Guardian-type picture of the benign EU to think again, and he might have persuaded those who were already Leavers that he, Corbyn, and Labor were suitable repositories for their trust.
And then Labor’s loss of seats in parliaments and theTories’ gain would not have been so great. As it is, Boris Johnson looks more like a leader than Corbyn while UK Leave voters have their Brexit, whatever else follows.
ven
Mark
There is no point over-intellectualising this. What you say about Corbyn’s early views on the EU is correct. But the labour heartlands that voted against Labour, did so not because of some deep analysis of what he said then and now; it was because they bought into the media campaign against him personally, and because no one believed he and Labour would deliver Brexit. And there was no way he could have credibly said he was pro-Brexit, when most of his MPs (including most of his shadow cabinet) and young activities were Remain.
Mark Pontin
Ven wrote: ‘ it was because they bought into the media campaign against him personally, and because no one believed he and Labour would deliver Brexit.’
Those two things are one. Trump, Johnson, and — for that matter — Sanders have all been subject to media campaigns demonizing them. All three have fought back and don’t come off as wishy-washy. Corbyn by contrast didn’t even have the gumption to articulate a counter-attack on the ridiculous anti-Semitism charges and then call out his attackers as scum.
Yes, that can be done. Sanders has forged his own way as a socialist in American politics even unto the U.S. Senate, for instance, when by all the odds that should have been impossible. By contrast, Corbyn was a placeholder — someone who’d survived as a back-bencher from an earlier era in UK political history, where there’s always been more of a socialist tradition, and who through some fairly arbitary mechanics of history happened to get dropped into a position as leader of the opposition in 2015.
Yesterday’s man, anyway.
bruce wilder
Could he have let May have her Brexit, killing the issue?
Temporarily Sane
Yeah Corbyn was a milquetoast appeaser, unfortunately. He let the media tear him to shreds with a phony antisemitism scandal and never stood up for his MPs and Labour Party members that were thrown under the bus by the rabidly anti-Corbyn media. I mean they were saying stuff like a vote for Corbyn is a vote for Auschwitz 2.0. How that blatant and obvious smear campaign was legal in a country that considers itself a model democracy is beyond me. Now that Corbyn is toast watch the “antisemitism scandal” quickly disappear from the news. Bernie Sanders better watch his back…there are already murmurs that he’s “soft” on supposed antisemitism in his ranks.
If you want to destroy someone’s character in western society accuse them of being an antisemite or a sex criminal. Corbyn’s big mistake was taking the accusations at face value. Every time he apologized he looked guilty or weak and his enemies just kept piling on one ludicrous allegation after another. Never apologize, even strategically, for something you didn’t do. And don’t let a bunch of sucker punching neoliberal hacks throw your people under the bus.
Mandos
*rolls eyes* Oh please. It was a thread about why Corbyn lost badly. Of course, I “report” rather than endorse. If you want to know why Corbyn lost, at least a little bit of time might be given over to “reporting” what actual British people are saying, and a lot less time “endorsing” our own preferences? I’m not British, I have never lived in the UK, but I know people who have and who have voted Labour all their lives, and listening to them over this past couple of years more or less confirmed my suspicions about how all this was going to end, and lo, it did end exactly that way! What I or, alas, Ian “endorses” is irrelevant.
And yes, my double negative, with all its discursive weight, stands loud and proud: I have no reason to believe these people were not life-long Labour voters of various left-wing inclinations. And they experienced Momentum and Corbynism, or the political movement behind it, as an attempt at a purge that never gained sufficient traction to be completed.
But I guess if we all don’t “endorse”, but actually listen and report, we are engaging in politics “that are not even facially credible in their presumptions or ethical in operation.” This is how far we have fallen, and why we’re not getting back up.
Mandos
Here’s a thing y’all have to get drummed into your heads somehow:
Centrist and neoliberal politicians are popular and represent popular constituencies. They aren’t just cutouts for billionaires (some are) and they aren’t just astroturf (some are). That you (meaning many commenters on this blog) can’t conceive of it is a failure of your imagination. We’ll all be better off in terms of understanding the situation and what to do with it, when we do what I said in a long-ago post and accept and really internalize the fact that the Neera Tandens of the world are actually grassroots politicians of a sort.
Mandos
That said, a strategy of coherent Leave-ism probably would have gotten Corbyn further than what he did choose, which is essentially to signal the belief that a hugely salient issue, Brexit and the ideologies behind it, is an irrelevancy, when the real irrelevancy for most people are the agonizing deaths of homeless people with benefits sanctions etc. Letting it be known that you think that the voters are dupes being targeted at the wrong thing has an undertone of moral contempt and people are just not going to vote for that.
I’m sorry to say it in such a harsh way, but I think it’s the only way to get it across.
The problem with a fully Leave position is not only that it is hard to avoid defection/demobilization of much of the younger activist base, but also, it is hard to articulate at all in terms of material benefits as seen through a left lens, especially for a non-Eurozone country. For a non-autarky like the UK, the only way to avoid economic free-fall after being cut loose from the EU system is to line up trade deals very quickly. All of the available “fire sale” trade agreements (the most obvious one being with the USA) are definitely going to preclude any of the left’s favorite prescriptions. Dislike of how the EU operates is not a sufficient and complete case that would be credible with a Remain voter of left-wing tendency.
ven
Bruce
He could have tried to support May’s deal, but any Brexit deal is going to be a bad compromise, and there would always be uncertainty as to whether a better deal could be negotiated. Plus the majority of his MPs and his front bench would have voted against; I’m not sure of the overall parliamentary numbers, as to whether it would have carried.
Mandos – I agree that he should have taken a firmer stand in rebutting anti-semitism charges; but when the Chief Rabbi and the leader of the Church of England both endorse these charges, and all the Blairite MPs do as well, it becomes untenable.
The fundamental problem for Corbyn is that he could never have looked like a leader, when the majority of his MPs were not throwing their support behind him, on whatever issue: bombing of Syria (on which he proved correct), Julian Assange, anti-Semitism, socialist reforming agenda. If his own MPs vocally say they don’t trust him, and the media amplifies this, where do you go?
If one looks at the cards that he was dealt, I’m not sure anyone could have done much better. Perhaps tactically, in the last 6 weeks, he took for granted the ‘safe’ heartland, and spent a disproportionate amount of time in marginal seats. Arguably now is the time for the Left to start grass roots organising in these areas, and select candidates to run in 5 years time, who are building local relationships; then they would have a transformed Labour Party. But not sure where the balance of power will lie after this leadership election.
Again you have to credit Corbyn; he is withstanding personal abuse from his MPs, by not resigning immediately, and giving the Left some opportunity to re-organise.
Hugh
So when the neoliberal Mandos talks with his neoliberal friends, surprise, surprise, the world is neoliberal as far as they can see.
Corbyn didn’t purge the neoliberals in Labour, he didn’t press Brexit in the election, and as a result he lost. So what this means in Mandosworld is that voters who voted for Brexit really weren’t endorsing Brexit, they were endorsing neoliberalism. And the neoliberal Blairites who were sabotaging Corbyn? They were popular being neoliberal, except when they weren’t, being Labour, or something.
John
Regarding new names for Labour….how about the Serf Party, or perhaps the Wage-Slave Party, or simply Precariat. 450’s point is well made …the working class in the 19th Century manufacturing sense, no longer exists in England and US. The precariat is fragmented and stovepiped into working situations where it is difficult to engender the solidarity of the old working class. Wage slaves for the big monopolies are the greatest threat…and the oligarch overlords at those monopolies understand that completely. The oligarchs would love to corrupt the idea of service to be surrounded by worshipful and submissive wage slaves.
450.org
I like all of those names, John.
Here’s a clip from The Remains of the Day. My, how times have changed, and my oh my, how things have come full circle. I don’t believe I’ve ever witnessed Jewish housekeepers. Or Jewish garbage men. Or Jewish landscapers. Note the passage Lord Darlington is reading. Many think it’s a passage from Mein Kampf. Actually, it’s a passage from The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century by Houston Stewart Chamberlain. It reads like one of Mandos’ many verbose, prolix diatribes that disguises all manner of evil in a cloak of articulate falderal. Considering this clip deals with anti-semitism, it’s relevant considering the smears against Corbyn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiVYNBQfF2Y
StewartM
Mandos:
So ‘centrist/neoliberal’ politicians are *popular* in opposing policies (like universal health care, higher minimum wage, etc) that polls show are very popular, and while supporting policies (like slashing pensions/SS) that poll very unpopular? How does that parlor trick work?
StewartM
As a non-Uk’er, looking from the outside, what is being said about Corbyn is that he’s a genuinely decent guy. He therefore reminds me of some of my UU-friends, who are also decent people with high morals, who believe in things like “shaming” the political opposition into doing the right thing instead of destroying them (politically, that is).
And that’s not the way politics works now, maybe not ever (well, it may have worked more 50 or 60 years ago when our societies were fairer and more equal, but not since we’ve elevated Ayn Rand sociopathy to the highest value). While the typical voters may be clueless about the intended goals are, the political leadership knows full damn well the damage that will be inflicted. They are not ‘shamed’ they either don’t care or even worse, embrace the extra ‘discipline’ on working people.
In short, Corbyn was not willing to be ruthless enough or to lie his way into power. That is why violent revolutions often end up with a “new boss, same as the old” because the people who *are* mean and ruthless enough to win aren’t nice or empathetic or even particularly moral people. It’s an unsolved problem stratified state societies have.
Mark Pontin
Mandos wrote: ‘Centrist and neoliberal politicians are popular and represent popular constituencies.’
Yes. Trump and Johnson — classic neolib centrists! I noticed this myself.
And in France where TPTB did manage to wedge Macron, a neolib ex-Goldman-Sachsite into position, the French are so, so happy with him and there aren’t half-a-million people on the streets protesting.
You’re funny, Mandos, I’ll give you that.
Mandos wrote:’ The problem with a fully Leave position is … it is hard to avoid defection/demobilization of much of the younger activist base … That said, a strategy of coherent Leave-ism probably would have gotten Corbyn further than what he did choose …’
On this, at least, we agree.
Mandos wrote: ‘ …. also, it is hard to articulate (Lexit) at all in terms of material benefits as seen through a left lens, especially for a non-Eurozone country.’
Oh, you’re wrong about that. It really isn’t hard at all to articulate leaving the EU in terms of material realities.
Germany, the notional winner and presiding hegemon in the EU, now has substantially higher homelessness rates than the UK under Tory austerity.
https://www.dw.com/en/homelessness-on-the-rise-in-germany-study/a-49797702
Sweden — which in recent years, contrary to Bernie Sanders’s pictures of it, has arguably moved towards privatizations and neoliberal policies more than any other state in the EU (it started from further away) has been running unemployment rates of around 6.9 to 8 percent.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/sweden/unemployment-rate
In southern Europe, youth unemployment in some countries was at 40 percent a couple of years ago and now ranges between 33 percent to 16 percent depending on the country.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266228/youth-unemployment-rate-in-eu-countries/
We’ve talked about the French.
In Greece, reputable studies estimate that EU-imposed austerity killed 50,000 or so people.
‘The burden of disease in Greece, health loss, risk factors, and health financing, 2000–16: an analysis of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016’
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(18)30130-0/fulltext
This at the same time that Mario Draghi was initiating quantitative easing at the ECB so Merkel, Sarkozy, and Hollande could pretend to their electorates that they weren’t bailing out Deutsche Bank and the other big German and French banks (93 percent of the so-called bailout to Greece never left France and Germany, because it went straight to those banks).
Today, more than a decade after the GFC in 2008, the US Fed is still having to create a billion dollars a day of QE to feed to the big banks and keep asset prices pumped up. But this in turn feeds the mass of capital frantically circling the planet looking to make a profit somewhere, anywhere — by buying up homes to turn into rentals at rates so inflated that they eat up unsustainable chunks of ordinary people’s salaries, buying up HMOs and doctors’ networks so they can fraudulently jack up medical bills, privatizing water supplies, creating an ever-larger precariat via the gig and zero-hours economy, doing anything anywhere they can to extract rents, and by and large doing anything but truly productive investment (which is regarded as for saps).
All this only widens the gaps and imbalances in societies, putting the basics of life beyond more and more people — a form of unsustainable looting by elites. It had already ceased to be sustainable looting back in 2008, when the system collapsed and the Fed had to create $26 trillion to preserve the illusion of a functional global capitalism.
But the illusion is all that remains. The neoliberal order is already broken, Mandos. Your claim that we all have to go through neoliberalism is true only in the sense that its rotting hulk will continue — with corrupt, incompetent elites pushing the TINA narrative — to hang around, blocking our route to anything else till we hack through it.
KT Chong
Jeremy Corbyn is not the Great Leader material.
He does not have what it takes to do what needs to be done.
bruce wilder
Mandos: I have no reason to believe these people were not life-long Labour voters of various left-wing inclinations. And they experienced Momentum and Corbynism, or the political movement behind it, as an attempt at a purge that never gained sufficient traction to be completed.
loud and proud, eh? just “reporting”?
yours is a fundamentally dishonest construction. if someone claims that she has been a life-long Labour voter, and you have good reason to believe that claim, state your reason and move on. otherwise the claim may be suspect and unsupported, which is relevant to the further claims made. it doesn’t take a special troll detector to recognize that someone with evil in their heart may well try to legitimate some destructive critique by prefacing it with a claim of long-time allegiance; it does not have to be a factually false claim to be misleading about the nature of the critique that follows.
the further claim made here — the critique of the influence of Momentum on the Labour Party and of Corbyn as a leader — is that self-reported subjective experience contrary to objective fact is the superior reality and a good reason to hold third parties responsible for policies and actions they have never taken.
If you had been reporting honestly, you might have said something like this:
bruce wilder
oops!
Mandos
Oh goodness, “fundamentally dishonest”, really now.
The whole framing of the Matter of Corbyn on this blog has been that anyone who thinks that Corbyn was a bad leadership choice must either be a icky neoliberal shill etc, could not possibly have the interests of the public in mind, ideological traitors, etc, etc, etc. Now, on the internet, no one knows if you’re a dog. So when I report my own personal experience, you can take it or leave it, but I make no apologies for prefacing it with what I know about them as people: that they presented themselves to me as life-long, left-wing Labour voters. I have no idea how they actually voted, and I have no reason to believe that they are not telling the truth.
If you’re reading some kind of “fundamental dishonesty” into that, you’re trying really hard.
They believe exactly that Momentum is a reincarnation of the Militant Tendency and felt that they were marginalized from Labour when it successfully pushed Corbyn to the top. I am also not going to believe a random internet person over the experiences of people I know in real life, and you are free to do the same, of course. I’m not going to disclaim what I heard from them with “Knowing that Momentum has not actually…” etc because it doesn’t matter: Corbyn lost in part because some Labour voters genuinely experienced his leadership and supporters that way, and not to pay heed to that is foolishness.
But on the internet, nobody knows if you’re a dog.
Mandos
Centrists and neoliberals, narrowly defined, have a large and deep popular constituency. Even if it is only 10-15%, that is more than enough to cast a deciding vote when it comes to primaries and general elections, if not to elect very many people running on their own ticket in an FPTP election.
During the Greek crisis, Schäuble had a large cheering squad inside Greece from a domestic constituency that views and continues to view austerity as a means of punishing the forces that prevent the small business entrepreneurship nirvana they’ve been denied. This is the case across Southern Europe — Merkelism has a large, popular domestic constituency.
Many people around here would do anything other than take a moment to imagine that what they see as milquetoast centre-left and center-right politicians are backed by real people. But they are.
Mandos
StewartM: It’s an established trope for economic left-wing blog commenters to protest that left-wing policy is popular. If there’s anything I’ve been trying to say in the years I’ve been around Ian’s blog, it’s that the popularity of a policy has at best a very weak relationship to voter motives.
Mandos
Mark Pontin: a case that EU countries and institutions have implemented bad policy is not a case for “Lexit” or that “Lexit” is anything other than an illusion. The fallacy here is that because the EU has chosen policies and is staffed by people with ideological predilections that have made a number of things much worse than they could have been, then leaving the EU would mean that you would have better policies and better success at those policies. In all likelihood, the opposite is true, in the sense of the old saying about the frying pan and the fire.
Making that case — the case that the conditions of Brexit would offer breathing room to implement better, more prosperity-inducing policy — is the one that needs to be made in order to defend the full Lexit position. It is a very hard case to make. The UK is the motherland of neoliberal globalization and it is dependent on low-friction flow of goods, capital, and labour. Tory Brexit has an alternative story that at least attempts to explain how the transition could be made smooth (by, for example, capitulating to US trade priorities in order to quickly obtain a deal). The Lexit case requires either that the population accept years of yet further privation, or that the UK already be self-sufficient in the consumer goods that the population expects.
Whether neoliberalism is broken or not is another matter. I have no trouble accepting that it is not sustainable. However, economic leftists are often too eager to jump the gun on proclaiming impending systemic collapse.
Herman
@Mandos,
Unfortunately for many people social collapse is already happening under current neoliberalism. This is why Ian and others on this blog try to argue against the Steven Pinkers of the world who say that everything is fine. Sure, maybe the system is working well or well enough for the middle class and above, but what about people who are not part of the affluent society? What happens when the rot inevitably works its way up the class food chain?
Large portions of the population are being ignored or they are told that their miserable lot in life is entirely their own fault and this is producing anger and despair. The results can be seen in increasing indications of social dysfunction like rising suicide rates, drug addiction, alcoholism and other problems.
I don’t think total collapse is going to happen in the near future but there will be crises and the left needs to be in a position to take advantage of these crises. The last major economic downturn was a huge missed opportunity because of the pitiful state of the left at the time. That being said, I support strategic politics in order to mitigate harm. I have even defended “lesser of two evils” voting on this blog. But I think that if we continue along this path indefinitely we will all be in serious trouble.
Where I agree with you is that there is a large popular base for centrist (left/right) politics and that voters do not necessarily vote based on policy. The lesson here is that, first, the left must accept that radical change is not likely until a crisis scenario presents an opportunity to win over more moderate members of the public, and second, that politics has to be more than just good policy papers. Left-wing politics must include a potent emotional element to succeed. The right knows this and acts accordingly despite all of their “facts don’t care about your feelings” rhetoric.
Hugh
“Centrists and neoliberals, narrowly defined, have a large and deep popular constituency. Even if it is only 10-15%’
Words, empty words. Centrist = conservative;
neoliberal = part of the elite management class or someone they have bamboozled;
large and deep = 10-15%.
Do you notice Mandos never talks about the predominant and destructive role of Germany in the EU? As Mark Pontin noted, Germany fucked over Greece causing tens of thousands of death and untold misery all to effect a backdoor bailout of German banks. Rather than building up Greek civil and banking institutions, Germany looted them. So what does Mandos say, well, it’s like those British neoliberal friends of his, there were some nebulous number of Greeks who liked the EU, and therefore neoliberalism.
There are in fact still a lot of ordinary Europeans who like the idea of Europe and neoliberals use this to loot them. There are also some Europeans who distrust their local institutions and banking system and see the EU as a counterweight to them. Again these aren’t neoliberals. And then we get to the local rich, ruling and managerial classes, and why yes, these looters are much more neoliberal. Hoocoudanode?
Meh
Truthfully, the thing about Corbyn that turned me off the most was the incessant, tedious fawning from obvious lower middle class lightweights. Centrist pragmatists don’t trust the guy because modestly entitled geezers with nothing better to do than whine about how bad they have it love the guy and hope that he makes them materially better off without them having to actually bestir themselves. I work with the truly poor and underprivileged every day – that fawning lot, that ain’t them.
450.org
The media is doing the same thing to Trump that was done to Corbyn. Look at this scathing rebuke of Donald Trump from the “far-left” publication, Christianity Today. It’s all lies. They’re envious of Donald Trump’s success and popularity. The socialists at Evangelical Today want to take your guns and your money.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/december-web-only/trump-should-be-removed-from-office.html
Seriously, Neoliberalism gave us Trump. He is the net effect of twnety or more years of NeoLiberal policy. Mandos tells us we need more of the same as though it’s castor oil.
Jeff Martin
There are in fact still a lot of ordinary Europeans who like the idea of Europe and neoliberals use this to loot them.
And as Hugh notes, Greece is the paradigmatic case of this.
The somewhat frustrating thing for me is that the parallels between the Greek capitulation to the Troika and the Americans voting ‘against their material interests’ are real: in the latter case, there are tens of millions of downscale GOP voters who neither own, nor have any prospect of owning, small businesses, and who do not and cannot benefit from GOP policy, but vote as they do because they live out the consequences of Clinton’s railroading of NAFTA, and the Clinton-Bush shepherding of PNTR/China, plus the hectoring condescension from the Dems – and liberals have little difficulty in calling them deluded, victims of false consciousness (even if they cannot bring themselves to use the term), etc. In the former case, you have a supermajority of the Greek electorate that voted to withstand the Troika; but when the Troika threatened to collapse the Greek banking sector, leaving Greece with only the option of Grexit, the electorate blinked, preferring the bare social and legal ‘recognition’ that they were part of the European Club. The material hardships were coming, regardless of the path chosen. To pretend otherwise was delusional. To pretend that the sufferings that were coming from the Troika were somehow other than what they were because of the worthless Euro club membership – that was false consciousness on the level of the Tea Party agitating against their own material interests for the sake of the symbolism of not being ‘socialist’.
And are their petit bourgeois groupings in the Greece and the US, for whom EU austerity and GOP policies are materially advantageous? Sure. But even if they represent 15% of the population, I don’t see how that gets us to TINA; the problem is not that there are no alternatives, but that the potential social bases of the alternatives are fractured, shattered by neoliberalism and shut off from any institutional expression.
That’s a window on why TINA arguments are so offensive to many of us: what neoliberals are arguing is essentially self-interested and circular, eg., “we have systematically eliminated the possibility of any alternatives to neoliberalism, therefore neoliberalism (is what exists); therefore, neoliberalism! (is the only possible frame of reference).
StewartM
Mandos:
StewartM: It’s an established trope for economic left-wing blog commenters to protest that left-wing policy is popular. If there’s anything I’ve been trying to say in the years I’ve been around Ian’s blog, it’s that the popularity of a policy has at best a very weak relationship to voter motives.
Really? Gun ownership rights? Anti-abortion views? Anti-immigration histrionics? Political views have little outcome on elections?
Maybe it’s because conservative politicians are happy to deliver on these issues, because they are terrified of their base. And maybe it’s because Democrats like Obama were happy to say things like “renegotiate NAFTA” in 2008 on the campaign trail but then turn around and do the 180 degree opposite (Korean “free trade” deal, TPP) when in office. Maybe that betrayal and others are the real cause of Republican sweeps in 1994 and 2010, not the lack of voter motivation on left-wing causes?
If the progressive agenda wasn’t popular and didn’t have the potential to win elections, why would the Democratic establishment be so hell-bent on keeping Bernie (and Warren too) from winning? Maybe they’re afraid of a Democrat being elected who would actually do left-wing things and thus secure himself/herself of a successful administration? Hmm? And moreover, on the state level, minimum-wage increase referendums (ergo, that bypass your ‘centrist’ Dems who betray the people vote for them) pass by wide margins.
In short, the ‘centrist-neoliberal consensus’ you argue that exists really hinges on the ‘centrist-neoliberal’ Dems losing (deliberately?) elections by betraying time and time again what they said they were for and depressing Democratic turnout in the next election, guaranteeing the Repubs will take up the task of furthering their agenda. It is simply no more than that.
Mandos
Herman: I absolutely agree with you that neoliberalism is not sustainable, and the costs of its hegemony are working its way up the food chain as it were, and that the left — especially, but not only, the “economic” left — needs to try to position itself properly to take up governance as its tipping points become more obvious. That is the entire point I’ve been trying to make for a long, long time — that it has squandered time on a combination of misconceptions and in some cases, a strange form of political narcissism.
Starting from my “TINA trauma” blog post onwards, I have tried, as usual probably unsuccessfully, to make the case that the time has been squandered in attempts at overthrowing or repealing the post-Thatcher/Reagan era up to a point where that entire approach and style of left-wing politics are no longer legible to the population at large. The Corbyn era has been just another episode of this. (On a positive note, there are some things that the Corbyn side managed to do better, like much better marketing and messaging — however, insofar as the message was, “overturn the neoliberal past”, it still didn’t work.)
So the question is, what is the “correct” positioning to take power when it become possible to take power? Ideally, one wants to — nay, has a moral imperative to take power before the most dystopian, unsalvageable collapse outcome is fulfilled. That’s not a goal anyone has an easy prescription or recipe for, and anyone who claims they do is either arrogant, dishonest, or mistaken. What I can say is: it requires an understanding of the costs and benefits of the institutions of the neoliberal order as they are, not filtered through either caricatures or wishful thinking. And that is precisely what is lacking.
Willy
Working it’s way up the food chain?
I think of 3 PhDs (engineering) I know who have to move around the country just to keep employed. I also think of 3 MBAs who pretty much work as temp-giggers. For all, as soon as their task is complete, despite any lies they’ve been told up their superiors about rewards for performance and loyalty, they’re fired. I also know regional managers, software engineers, elevator experts, retirement home managers, aerospace mod experts… who have to play by the same rules. Seems almost everybody I know who isn’t in tech, medical or real estate has to continuously look over their shoulder.
My father and three uncles all worked for the same company their entire lives with common college degrees.
From my viewpoint, the changes neoliberalism is bringing are happening with extreme rapidity, everywhere.
Jeff Martin
I may be a partisan of that older style of left-wing politics, but this is entirely possible. It is also possible that the elements of neoliberalism, some of which overlap with the older, left-wing politics, others of which overlap with the right-wing politics of the past generations (right-neoliberalism) are decreasingly legible to the population at large.
For example, whatever leftists in general might have to say about it, it is entirely possible generally, and dead certain in specific instances, that the anti-national(ist) tendency of neoliberalism is one such element now falling out of favour. And it is also entirely possible that moralizing against this will be as fruitless and vain as moralizing against neoliberalism has been.
Hugh
Neoliberalism isn’t sustainable, but TINA. So we need to figure out a better way of replacing it, but TINA. Take out the TINA, and you have a reasonable point of view, but with the TINA it is logically incoherent. But with Mandos, it doesn’t really matter. Wherever he starts he always ends up hewing to the neoliberal line.
Mandos
We will have to make choices, yes. So yes, a possible choice is to embrace the nationalism. I find that the nationalism is a little too easily exploited for the worst anti-human politics while only tinkering at the margins of other problems like capital mobility. So even if you were to ignore the moral aspect of it and the emotional forces that drive it, I think it’s a bad deal. But, morality aside again, it’s reasonable to take the position that the politics necessitates it. People seem to think I *like* TINA but it’s quite possible that some of the TINA would be quite at odds with things I’ve argued on nationalism and borders…
Mandos
My use of TINA is obviously rhetorical. I wish to encourage people to stop thinking in terms of repealing Margaret Thatcher or trying to shove the train back onto a divergent track the split off long ago and is now miles away in the distance, which is very much the mentality particularly of the economic left — unshocking the doctrine, as it were. It’s ultimately part of the psychology behind “Corbynism”.
bob mcmanus
https://salvage.zone/editorials/its-in-the-air-its-in-your-bones-notes-on-an-aftermath/
Salvage collective post-mortem on the UK election. Long and intellectual.
The following, in some support of Mandos, could also go into the previous or following post
The Italian autonomists in the 1960s + had the slogan “Workers make capitalism.” This has to do with agency, hope, and the inclusion of the petty bourgeois, technical, service, and managerial class as workers
Now, perhaps we can say that (atomistic) individuals create neoliberalism in the Everyday and social reproduction, even in opposition, even in withdrawal and despair.
Hugh
“My use of TINA is obviously rhetorical.” i.e. TINA means whatever Mandos wants it to mean. So neoliberalism is here to stay, except when it is not. How illuminating.
bob mcmanus
https://salvage.zone/editorials/its-in-the-air-its-in-your-bones-notes-on-an-aftermath/
bob mcmanus
The Italian autonomists in the last century had the slogan “Workers make capitalism. This was not only about hope and agency, but also about including technicians, service workers, housewives, and the new managerial class in the class struggle.
And so we might say that (atomistic) individuals and tribes in everyday social reproduction create neoliberalism, even in opposition, even in withdrawal and despair.
different clue
If atomistic individuals can come together at times into moleculistic or crystallinistic poly-individual groups, they might be able to do something better than neo-liberaloid behavior in their ongoing small-scale social and economic lives.
Same for tribes.
Those who understand that might quietly broadcast that moleculistic crystallinistic approach on a wavelength which other moleculistic crystallinists can hear. Such initial new-approach broadcasters might become microsocial human-nucleating agents around which other co-action-taking groups of persons or maybe even tribes can clump up around and take multi-personal or even multi-tribal actions with.
Neighborhood subsistence production/consumption of some things. Neighborhood and inter-neighborhood bartering of some un-monetized surpluses of this and that.
There could be big unmoney in the growing unmarket countereconomy.
Make Love, not Money.