“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” So said Antonio Gramsci. And there are few more obvious signs of political morbidity than the collapse, intellectual as well as organisational, of those moderate sections of the Labour party that did not back Jeremy Corbyn.
His victory was both remarkable and total. So now, every member has a duty to engage with the Corbyn-led debate about the future of the left and his rethink of our political method. As Peter Mandelson’s memo put it, the old labels and past fights need to be forgotten. Because last week the awful consequences of our failure to renew was made plain when the Tories rammed through savage cuts to tax credits alongside an ugly assault on trade union rights.
First of all, we need to accept that the old ways are dying. The command-and-control, disciplinarian message of 1990s political management is incompatible with the coming age of individualism and authenticity.
More than that, part of the attractiveness of the Corbyn campaign was the perception that an open conversation was central to his politics. This tapped into the same raw hostility towards the closed political habits of a technocratic elite that has emboldened so much European populism on both left and right.
For Podemos in Spain or the Five Star Movement in Italy, the pluralism of the movement has been a vital recruiting tool. All of which means that the messy, open, often contradictory process of Labour party democracy can no longer be regarded as an unwelcome impediment to pure policy delivery. Discussion of politics and development of policy need to become one and the same.
Social media also played a large part in Corbyn’s victory. And here the virtues are more circumspect. Because at a time of weakening ideological ties among much of the public, Twitter and Facebook increasingly intensify tribal sentiment among the already convinced. This is a new landscape of algorithm politics: Google’s skill at offering you what it knows you like is now directing you towards what you want to hear, from people like you.
But, as we found to our cost at the general election, the social media echo chamber doesn’t always win you actual votes in ballot boxes.
The truth is, some traditional values – leadership and policy – still matter. But once again we need to move on from the 1990s. Just as the modern Labour party rarely seeks to revive the political solutions of James Callaghan and Harold Wilson, we also have to move on from the Blair and Brown prescriptions. More than ever, the party needs to reconcile itself with the achievements and flaws of that great Labour government. Then, finally, we can stop obsessing about Blair and his legacy.
Not least because the social and economic context has changed so dramatically. Globalisation and the digital revolution have upended the world of work. Five million workers are now self-employed. The relationship between productivity and wages has been severed, with miserable consequences for household income. Only 8% of under-25s belong to a trade union – and the vast majority of those are in the public sector. Above all, the identity politics of nationhood and belonging, Englishness and Scottishness, has completely transformed our political culture.
For the Labour party to remain relevant and electable requires a new politics of patriotism, alongside a political economy up to the job of tackling inequality. This cannot be a miserabilist rant about the state of contemporary Britain. It needs to have, as Eric Hobsbawm used to say, ‘the future in its bones’: a socialism that embraces technology and modernity and sees the function of the state as supporting and empowering citizens in an age of insecurity.
The quickening pace of globalisation, changes to the labour market, the rise of robots and supercomputers, and the urgent need for social security reform are here to stay. And we need credible answers, which embody our values, to all these challenges.
Despite some reservations about Jeremy Corbyn’s policies, I am convinced there is room for greater intellectual convergence across the party. Progressives never bought into the so-called Washington consensus of neoliberal economics. But given the chronic wage stagnation and falling living standards for so many people, we now need to be much more forthright about the limits and failures of markets.
Across time and place, capitalism takes on multiple forms, and Labour has now to lead the thinking on what forms of corporate governance, finance and ownership are fit for the digital age. When the British chancellor flies to Beijing to offer government securities to Chinese investors to support the French state in building a UK nuclear power station, our economic model is bust. On housing, asset inflation, pension and mortgage policies for the self-employed, land tax rates and even basic income guarantees, there are radical options to explore.
But what we also found out at the general election is that even if Labour is asking the right questions – about inequality, labour market reform, the squeezed middle – we will not be trusted to deliver the answers if we fail to convince on the economy, welfare and immigration.
To be radical, you first need to be credible. If the Labour party doesn’t rid itself of its morbid symptoms and start to convince the public it is interested in government, then we could see something else Gramsci was familiar with: the grisly spectre of Conservative hegemony. And it will be the trade union members and working poor who will suffer most.