Under Starmer, I think the left need to: 1. Stay in the Party, exercise power constructively & creatively where we can. 2. #keepitfrosty - there’s very little to be gained by wrecking & obsessing over the leadership. If it goes badly, they can own it, if it goes well, great.
3. Refocus, build community power, do mutual aid even beyond Coronavirus, the Labour Party as an electiralist project is not ours for now, as a basis for connection & activity it still can be and it’s still where that power is most cohered.
4. Be generous open and learn, both towards others in the party and the left & community groups outside. 5. Maintain, defend & support what was institutionally good that came out of “Corbynism”: TWT, @NewSocialistUK & the Communith Organising Unit & much more still matter.
To be clear here, this isn’t exactly arguing for stay & fight - on the level of Party leadership we’ve been routed, there isn’t a fight to have there for some time. It’s stay & build something essentially external to the leadership.
If Starmerism doesn’t work, there will be an intermediate to win over, how do we do that medium term?
The other question is why, of course. The state & Labour are not going away, if we want to have anything more than oblique impacts, there needs to be the option for contestation on the level of the state & directly.
On mutual aid (etc), on its own, this take is not untrue. However: 1. Why not both? The Labour Party still remains where the most likely number of people able to carry these projects out are. Giving up on Labour means abandoning that connection.
2. In the mutual aid group I’m in by far the most effective people are left Labour members. I suspect this is widely the case, particularly outside places without a significant extra-parliamentary left (so most of the country).
3. A crucial observation of the second/third wave New Left, pure social movementism because it has no connection to contesting the state is very liable to technocratic, charitable or dynamic parts of capital’s incorporation. Not certain but a structurally inscribed tendency.
