What does Corbyn's campaign mean?

The British Labour Party emerged, like the German Social Democratic Party, at the turn of the 19th and the early 20th century, as a new mass workers party from the heart of one of the three most powerful capitalist countries in the world.

This fact, a fact in the British case underpinned by the enormous wealth of its Empire, gave a particular character to Britain's new party. Two key features of the Labour Party's political structure flow from the effects of Empire. The first was that a significant social layer of worker's leaders had already risen above the general conditions of the ordinary worker. This layer was concentrated in the trade union bureaucracies who had established the habit of privilege among themselves over decades. The prospect of advancing within the unions inevitably acted as a pull to the most articulate, active (and self-seeking) trade unionists from the ranks. The employers often found it helpful to use the trade union bureaucracies as a filter in their relationships with their employees and encouraged the growth of this more malleable layer.

Second, when social and economic concessions appeared to blunt rebellion, even political concessions, could be allowed to the working class and their organisations (albeit after some ferocious struggles) - based on the vast profitability of Britain's Imperial wealth.

Socialists, mainly outside the UK, described the British working class as capped by an 'aristocracy of labour', a group of workers who saw themselves as in a 'trade' or special sector, with particular skills. They acted as a material base for the expression of narrow, sectional interest, often crystallized by the trade union bureaucracy in 'special interest' arguments, and which provided a social basis for the bureaucracy to lean on both from social classes for their continued influence and survival.

Many British trade union leaders from that time publicly praised and defended Empire. They obviously understood where the butter for their bread came from. In 1921 Walter Citrine (the head of the TUC, known for his meticulous pamphlet on chairing meetings and later ennobled) accompanied the leaders of Britain's main industrial and transport unions to a meeting with Prime Minister Lloyd George after 'Black Friday', a one day General Strike. He wrote in his memoirs;
'The Prime Minster said, "Well gentlemen, the power is yours!" At that moment I knew we had lost.'

Although it was not inevitable, the trade union bureaucracy, its foundations in Britain's aristocracy of labour, proved the decisive force in the creation and control of the early mass Labour Party. Lenin, among others, saw the Labour Party as a party whose leadership, policy, structure (the dominance of the parliamentary party over the rest etc.,) was wholly, indeed irretrievably, rooted in the defense of capitalist, Imperialist Britain. The base of the Labour party, its voters, its campaigners, its participants in the clubs, coops and most of all the millions in the affiliated unions, were the real agency in the defense of the independent and potentially revolutionary interests of the working class.

Nothing remains the same. The Labour Party arrived at its zenith after WW2 with the creation of the NHS and the welfare system. It slid through the crises of the 1960s and 1970s gripped in the clutches of a cold war labour movement bureaucracy. But the post 1984/85 Miner's Strike period began to mark a change in the fundamental class character of the Party. First Thatcher smashed up the main industrial unions and their industries. Then Tony Benn led a movement for Labour reform, which peaked and was then destroyed. (Benn remarked a year or two later that if he, with a still powerful labour movement behind him, could not win the deputy leadership of the Party, he doubted that the Party would ever be winnable by the left.)  There followed a decade where Labour's leaders tried to turn to becoming Britain's Democratic Party to the Tories Republicans.

Blair's leadership and then premiership confirmed a qualitative shift in the class character of Labour. It still fostered within itself an old social democratic trend, and it still paid court to some, by now, diminished trade union leaders with lots of historically accumulated cash, but the relationship with them was much in the style of the of the US Democrats. The aim of Blair's Labour Party was not to rebuild the labour and trade union movement; it was to replace the Tories; to become a long term prospect for government, securely based on the newest sectors of capitalist development in the south of the country, combined with the support of state employees, the media and of at least part of the most globalised sector in finance, rooted in the City of London. The famous Clause 4 was dumped. The working class in Blair's society was, for the first time since the emergence of the early 19th century Chartists, to have no public, independent programme of its own.

Since Blair and now with the destruction of the Labour Party's base in Scotland, the British Labour Party has been in deep, perhaps terminal crisis. It has no identity. Its base of voting support is breaking up, both to the right and to the left. Paradoxically Jeremy Corbyn's successful campaign, while of immense value - and a real breakthrough since the demise of the Benn/Scargill left current of the 1980s - in reconstituting a left political, even activist current in Britain's mainstream politics, including in the unions, is a part of that Labour Party crisis. Whatever else it is, it is not a sign of the renewal of the British Labour Party.

The main approach adopted by British socialists towards the Labour Party in the first part of the 20th century was to try to bring its mass base into collision with its leadership, structures, parliamentary dominance and defense of the establishment. From the late 1960s onwards, socialists began to stress their independence from the Labour Party, summed up in the 1980s by Benn's thousands strong Socialist Movement, which combined the Labour Party left with the left outside the LP. From Blair and the Iraq war onwards, socialists in Britain, particularly in some key unions, believed a fight inside Labour was more likely to be a result of struggles and campaigns and even new parties built by a new left outside the Party than any internal Labour Party fight. And that appears to be what has happened.

An anti-austerity / anti-war left has emerged across Britain in the last ten years. In Scotland it has found some space in the SNP-led independence campaign. In England and Wales it has emerged from the mass movements created to oppose war and austerity, and partly found political expression in support for the Greens. It has now lit up the sky in the battered Labour Party by driving behind Jeremy Corbyn's candidacy, (backed by the remains of the anti Blair forces still inside the Party.)

It is worth repeating that Corbyn's campaign is immensely valuable in consolidation of an anti war, anti austerity current in society. But it will not 'win' the Labour Party. The Labour Party is run through Parliament. Jeremy's 20 MPs will not hold the line. The Labour Party leaders will do their best to ruin Jeremy.

But the most significant point here is not that Jeremy's campaign cannot 'win' Labour (despite all the utopian plotters now lining up 'the right' candidates for the delectation of the myriad Labour internal committees.) It is that while Jeremy's campaign is giving political expression to a new, vitally important current in society, that current is still a tiny minority. Even if Jeremy wins the leadership of Labour, even if he avoids or defeats internal attempts to remove him, it is the electorate that will in next May's elections and beyond, destroy him. Yes, Jeremy will argue that internal dissension, media bias etc is to blame and that will be partly true. But the main reason why Jeremy's possible leadership would drive Labour support in the polls to single figures is that the anti-war, anti-austerity political current in society has not yet conquered its first task - to show that today's economic, social and political crisis can be, has to be, overcome by new politics and new economics and new mass organisations.

Such a mass political current can, will and has already influenced mainstream politics, dramatically in the case of Jeremy Corbyn's candidacy. But it is only beginning to take its role in Britain's history.

Empire (but not support for Imperialist wars and takeovers) has long gone. The British 'labour aristocracy' is no longer a social base for a vast and homogeneous labour bureaucracy. The remaining labour bureaucracy is in decline and is changing as a political force. The current Labour Party, like many of the European Social Democrat Parties, is cracking and flaking as it hollows out. A new left is growing as an old society, and all its associated junk, sinks. It is emerging in action and without preconceptions, trying anything and everything. What do socialists do?

They show how a minority can become a majority. How a political current can become a mass organisation. How the paralysis of the past can be broken. How the huge new changes and their accompanying fears can be managed and dealt with. How new political and economic systems - and a new society - are entirely possible.