I am more than pleased. First round victory. Given how vilified he has been by most of the UK press, this is remarkable. We can expect that such attacks will continue.
Some shadow cabinet ministers are resigning. This is good; if they can’t be onside, they shouldn’t be in the shadow cabinet. (Though one suspects they are getting out before being kicked out.)
I’ll have more to say on Corbyn going forward. Also of great interest are Sanders in the US Democratic Primary and the ongoing Canadian election. While Sanders and Mulcair are both problematic on foreign affairs in ways that Corbyn isn’t, both are a big upgrade from the status quo.
We may be at the beginning of a realignment of possibilities, where the electable spectrum changes radically. The last one, in the Anglosphere, ran from 1976 to about 1984, and destroyed the old left.
If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
Pelham
Agreed on Corbyn.
But on other fronts, I see that Podemos in Spain has now fallen to third behind the neolib parties, with just 15% support. And Syriza is running neck-and-neck with a neolib party in Greece while the real anti-austerity party that split off from Syriza barely registers enough support to get a seat in parliament.
Those are but two examples, but given the austerity horrors these countries have endured, they’re significant. Much remains to be seen, but I’m beginning to think voters in general are only beleaguered and disgusted enough to just flirt with alternatives for a bit before running back to our big neoliberal daddies.
Maybe what we need are not just individual candidates or traditional parties that people can flit in and out of but rather highly disciplined party organizations with required dues and the ability to banish those who get out of line and order thousands of members into the streets at a moment’s notice. These parties would be thoroughly democratic and would stand for just a few radical but highly transparent and verifiable principles or policies in the form of Big Ideas that have the mass and capacity to really inspire — such as public banking to replace the private financial system or truly universal health care with unrestricted ability to negotiate prices with the medical industry or a basic income for every citizen based on a certain percentage of per capita GDP (say, 50%). Incidentally, they would stay scrupulously away from the issues used to distract us, such as abortion, gay marriage and gun rights.
The idea is two combine two qualities: The sprint-like nature of truly new or radical ideas with the marathon nature of disciplined and committed organization. Together they might implement a Naomi Klein-ish sort of Shock Doctrine of the left, introducing a kind of politics that people in the so-called democracies aren’t accustomed to, one that could topple the playing board.
I know, it’s a pipe dream. But it’s the best I can do. And, I submit, it’s better than just hoping people en masse will somehow spontaneously make a radical turn of their own — and, crucially, make it stick.
Peter*
@P
I’m glad you saved me the trouble of pointing out your pipe full of Hopeium. If you want to see change, well maybe not change but surely hysteria and loathing, just start promoting Boycotting Elections and the PTB along with the True Believers will produce some reactionary fireworks.
The non-voting electorate is the only growing demographic so why not use that power to undermine this nasty system we misidentify as Democracy.
Pelham
@Peter
But how does one motivate the non-voting population? That’s exactly what I’m trying to get at. I don’t think non-voters will be inspired by anything short of a sharp departure from the neolib norm that somehow looks viable, energetic and sustainable while also being minimally divisive. The message should be fairly simple, with no more than a handful of radical goals.
As I say, a disciplined vanguard party is a pretty big leap. But do you think the criteria I lay out above are valid? If not, how would you motivate the non-voters?.
johnm55
Corbyn isn’t problematic on foreign policy. If knee jerk anti-Americanism, an inability to even consider that Putin could make the slightest mistake and sharing a platform with various anti-semitic islamo-fascists isn’t problematic then I’m not sure what is.
johnm55=pompoustwit
@johnm55
1. Americans have killed 2 million Middle Easterners since 2001 over false pretenses. If you want to end extremist muslims from gaining power, a good place to start would be to stop arming them, stop funding them, and stop making alliances with them (Saudi Arabia).
2. If Russia helped to overthrow Mexico, the US would do the same thing as Putin. You invoke a strawman arguement. No one except extremists think that Putin is a good guy, but he does what he has to for his own country, and pompous twits like you can’t stand that.
You’re just another idiot Manichean ideologue who only thinks in terms of black and white. You don’t understand nuance or subtlety.
Josh
Any thoughts on Watson as deputy leader? From what I’ve read, he’s a lot more hawkish than Corbyn, but on the positive side, went up against Murdoch and seemed to win, which I can’t imagine many U.S. politicians doing.
V. Arnold
I think the elation is premature; Corbyn is up against the machine; the question is; who will be crushed…
IMO, votes don’t change policy; money does!
So, in the end, it doesn’t matter who’s in office; but rather who’s in power…
We’ll see…
Mandos
This is yet another case of lefties shooting themselves in the foot rather than taking a longer view of political mechanics. The Left Platform, wanting an end to austerity NOWNOWNOW rather than accept that there forces aimed at Greece were at the time overwhelming, pulled the plug at a rare opportunity for a left-wing elected party to learn to operate the machinery of government. Having left, they appear to have no credible actual plan to make a Grexit anything other than extremely painful. In the meantime, the Eurocrats are going to apply just enough Eurofudge to ensure that just enough of the population buys into the bailout, or at least feels they have something to lose by rejecting it. In the meantime, the anti-austerity left will hardly register as a credible force, except what remains with Syriza.
Great job, Left Platform. But it’s not just the Left Platform.
Spinoza
@mandos
Why do you think leftists in the western, industrial nations seem so terrified of power? Is it the long shadow of the Soviets? Or The lingering stink of 60s New Left cadavers? Perhaps the influence of myopic anarchists on the movements?
I always cringe when I hear Chris Hedges talk about how, apparently, movements have changed America “without achieving formal political power”.
Peter*
@Pelham
You ask too much of me, P the idea that I could be inspiring and motivating anyone or at least any large group especially Amerikans is a pipe dream I merely want to start the task of dismantling Industrial Civilization so that the Earth and some remnant of humanity can survive. Undermining our corrupt political system by shunning its rituals is not designed to improve the system but to show people they have to learn to rule and provide for themselves so that when the collapse comes they have the skills that improve their chances of survival.
Katrina showed clearly what will happen when a major and inevitable breakdown in our systems occurs. The government will not be there to protect you even from your neighbors and especially if you are a minority or poor.
The Beast has grown too powerful and is inside too many people for even a reformist political movement to make any measureable difference in the accelerating destruction of the biosphere. Too many ‘good people’ depend on that destruction to maintain their lifestyles and will deflect, undermine or violently oppose any movement to reduce their consumption.
A Radical solution requires addressing the root of the disease and that root is civilization that depends on destruction, dominance and death to maintain an affluent lifestyle for some while feeding the billions of people it requires to produce never-ending growth and consumption.
Mandos
I think it’s kind of all of the above. I have sympathy for the left-libertarians but there’s a certain amount of perfectionism that sometimes seems to creep in. The truth is that unless you really think you’ve seized a revolutionary Moment as well as have the energy and organization to truly, uh, capitalize on it, the routes to achieving power exist within current institutions and when you’ve achieved power, you’re immediately enmeshed in existing institutional arrangements. The most critical ones for Greece were Maastricht and the larger frameworks of the EU itself . Even if your goal is to extricate Greece from them rather than reform them, you are necessarily going to have to build up that institutional capacity within them.
That’s why I’m a little bit disappointed by folks like Kouvelakis who (rightly!) criticized the KKE for having little appetite for leaving the sectarian bubble and seizing control of the state…and then move to a party formation that has no chance of taking power. Maybe there is something wrong with the analysis here?
Jeff Wegerson
See the left is pitiful. Look at Syriza and Podemos. Wait tell me what a strawman is again.
Labor in Britain and the NDP in Canada are established parties with real history. Not to say they can’t disappoint. But …
Ian Welsh
Terrified of power means not being willing to do what it takes to keep it. Reagan and Thatcher smashed the basis of power of the opposition. Compromising when compromise is not actually mandatory is stupid and weak and being terrified of power.
Of course, that’s not what is meant. What is meant is “why don’t they rule as slightly nicer neo-liberals? That would prove they are serious about power.”
Mandos
No: it means, you know, actually govern. Slightly nicer neo-liberals or not. Left-wing governments who come to power via conventional electoral means will always be forced to contend with the dilemmas posed by established institutional power. The left and right wings of politics are not symmetrical: the tools that Reagan and Thatcher used are not available to the left to anywhere near the same degree.
Mandos
Look: it takes TIME for the left to develop the institutional tools that the neoliberal right has. That means that left-wing governments are going to have to govern in the face of immensely powerful constraints, until they find a way to build those institutional tools. In Greece, it became obvious that the only path to this kind of power was via holding onto government, regardless of what bitter pill they were forced to swallow…which Greece was always going to be forced to swallow.