Corbyn's Labour has more of a future than one run by the ex-Blairites, that is for sure. But thinking seriously about this question, 'what is Labour's future?'; involves more than asserting the will to make Corbyn's leadership work; more than the rehearsal of half-baked nostrums and theories from the past, and much more than manoeuvres, even of the most democratic kind, inside Labour itself.
Ultimately, the evolution of the Labour Party is rooted in the general, unfolding political crisis in British society.
British political institutions are more fragile today than at any time since the women's and the working class's franchise was won. The House of Commons is virtually powerless, corrupt and almost completely unrepresentative of the British population as a whole. (The current Tory government 'won' under 25% of voters.) The House of Lords is an international joke. Scotland is on the brink of separation. Against this background it is little wonder that Britain's vapid monarchy appears in better shape that the rest of its governance.
The Labour Party's development is part of this story. The brilliant Blair cost Labour 4 million votes in 2010 and 2015. His warmongering and flirtation with the City destroyed the credibility of Labour in large working class areas of Britain, most especially in Scotland. His Chancellor's PFI schemes cost the NHS £2 billion this year. It goes on and on ... But when a million marched against the Iraq war, and millions more through the years of Blair's reign, they managed to turn Blair out eventually, but they could not reform or revise the replacement leadership of his party. The Labour Party institution was still too solid and too safeguarded, as much by the affiliated unions as by anybody else, to allow such an upheaval.
And then things got a lot worse for Labour. In 2015 (and much earlier) they also lost Scotland, the base of their origins, their 'permanent' stronghold. This catastrophe questioned the meaning of the Labour Party in Britain's political system. Who did it represent? What was its purpose? And this is the structural weakness that meant a relatively small, active political current, that had emerged across society in the anti-austerity battle, was given access to the internal machinery of Labour in an act of desperation by the defeated and exhausted leadership of the 2015 election. Then this current of a couple of million people proceeded to topple the remaining Blairite epigones and installed Corbyn who has had no influence or power inside the Parliamentary Labour Party since he began as an MP in the 1970s. Without the anti-austerity and anti-war movement building up in the UK there was no possibility of change. But it was the dramatic vulnerability of the Labour Party, its weakness and fragility, its lack of purpose, of political energy, its inability to politically neutralise the movement given the front door key, the Party's would-be leaders left instead to watch in paralysed horror as it stormed the citadel, that decided its present fate.
Corbyn wants to build a new, reformed Labour Party from the political current that voted for him and that supports his political direction. For the moment the anti Corbyn bloc in Labour (the overwhelming majority of its MPs) cannot form an alternative party to Labour without ruining their own careers. But they are aware that they urgently need their own base to try to 'rescue' what remains of an alternative apparatus of government now in the hands of anti-capitalist mad men and women. They will try increasingly to use the 'views of the electorate' as their leverage against Corbyn. Coming elections (and Corbyn's failure in them) are seen as providing the ammunition for a future leadership coup. The 'electorate' will be systematically counterposed to Corbyn' Party mandate.
At this stage all that is completely certain is that there is no prospect of the Corbyn leadership winning over the Parliamentary Labour Party. Corbyn is not an organic development out of the last fifty years of the Party's history. There has been no long term, concerted, organised campaign inside Labour to reach this point (unlike the movement behind Benn in the 1980s.) There is no sizable group of MPs organised to promote a Corbyn future. His achievement is an accident, impelled by the combination of the weakness of the Party and the independent, emergent mass movement against austerity and war.
This means that Labour's crisis will deepen and is far from being resolved. Can the Labour Party, or at least some section of it, or as part of some wider alliance, emerge as a serious political, social and accountable representative of the new working class in all of its complexities? With a new programme for a new society built for the many, not the few? Or will the coming battle inside Labour mark its end; its decline into one of the the 'hollowed out' social democratic shadows apparent in much of modern Europe? We are now at the very beginning of the testing out of these questions.
In the meantime? In the meantime we need an independent anti-austerity, anti-war mass movement more than ever. We need Labour to start challenging the completely unrepresentative voting system and we need to help move the 75% into action and get the Tories out.
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