Don’t mourn, organise. theclarionmag.org/2020/04/02/und… #labourleadership
The left needs a bit of humility and introspection about this. The left has had the leadership of the party for four and half years, and oversaw an unprecedented surge in membership. Whatever’s been built out of that wasn’t sufficient to convince enough party members...
...including, presumably, a good chunk who joined/rejoined as part of the “Corbyn surge”, not to vote for a leadership representing a sharp turn back to the centre. That is not the result of RLB having run a poor campaign. RLB’s poor campaign was itself a symptom, not the cause.
How quickly and how extreme the lurch to the centre will be will to some extent be conditioned by how effectively the left is able to organise to pressure and oppose Starmer. Getting that right also requires some introspection. Not a factional knife-fight, but serious debate.
This isn’t just a “why did we lose the 2019 election?” conversation, although that’s part of the picture, it’s a “why have we failed to build an active socialist movement capable of consolidating and growing itself, and how can we start to rectify that failure now?” conversation.
I also think the left-wing activists who now perhaps understandably pivot towards a kind of vulgar anti-electoralism are just going to pile disappointment and burnout on top of disappointment and burnout.
“Mutual aid”, “direct action”, “community organising”, or even “syndicalism” (my personally preferred deviation) are all fine on their own terms but you very soon get confronted with the question of formal/official politics, government, legislation, etc.
The mission of the revolutionary socialist movement should be to build organisations that operate across all fronts of class struggle, in appropriate proportion. That means avoiding crude electoralism, but also avoiding crude, anti-political, anti-electoralism too.
