A bunch of New Labour survivors are presenting the idea that the Labour Party’s commitment to winning public office means that this is the only way in which the Labour Party should look to change society; they contrast this with Corbyn’s ambition to build a movement. In this article, “A hijack or a mutiny? Labour, leadership and the left”, Jeremy Gilbert dissects this claim by studying the rules and referring to the Labour Party’s history.
He also at the nature of movements and parties; the road to elitism and concludes with the statement, that the party has not been hijacked by arrivistes and entryists, but that this is a mutiny; the membership, even those who joined before 2015 want to turn to the Left and rebuild Labour’s campaigning movement.
Bea Campbell, in an article called Corbynism, also writes about movements and Parties and examines rump New Labour’s inability to evolve; she pointed me at the Gilbert article. She says,
The surprising dullness of candidates challenging Corbyn during the first leadership election campaign, and their performance since then, is indicative — it is a kind of mute inability to connect with the impact of 2008 and the neo-liberal implosion; it renders them the living dead.
As summed up by one of the speakers at the CLPD rally, it isn’t a choice between electoral politics and a movement, we need both; something that was understood in the ’70s and ’80s. It was also understood more recently when the local Labour Party supported, maybe incubated the movement to “Save Lewisham A+E”. …
