The author, Richard Seymour, is one of the most astute anti-capitalist writers in the English speaking world today. In this book, he discusses the Jeremy Corbyn phenomenon. Seymour is very sympathetic to Corbyn but there is little rah-rah in the book. It is an attempt to give a sober assessment of the historical and contemporary forces surrounding Corbyn’s rise to power and his prospects for future success. It was published before the Brexit vote provided the Labour establishment its latest excuse to try oust him.
The first part discusses Corbyn’s election campaign. Against an almost uniformly hostile British media and a Labour establishment feverishly alarmed by the prospect of his victory, Corbyn overwhelmingly crushed his three challengers, all of whom were backed by the party’s discredited right wing establishment. How was he able to do this? Seymour describes some of the factors.
Corbyn offered a pro-refugee and pro-immigrant stance to the British public in an epoch when a significant number that public has become hostile to immigrants and refugees. Toward the end of the book, Seymour praises Corbyn’s “incomparable courage” on these issues. Relating to immigration, Corbyn also was attacked prior to his election for supporting the Islamic activist Raed Saleh against efforts by the Cameron government to deport him. The government charged Saleh with invoking the blood libel against Jews in a speech but Seymour reports that a court acquitted him of doing so and that the charge was based on a mistranslation of his words.
In the next part of the book, Seymour presents a short history of Labour governments prior to Tony Blair’s reign. He argues that this history shows the power of big business and the banks to shape any British Labour government’s agenda. This was shown by Labour Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald’s embrace of austerity in 1931 and the kowtowing of Labour Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and James Callaghan in the 60’s and 70’s to international currency speculators and the IMF. Even when conditions were most ripe for implementing social democracy—during the post WWII Atlee regime—the Labour government still used the military against strikers and aimed for balanced budgets. The Labour governments of the 60’s and 70’s (Wilson & Callaghan) tried to stop the decline in the competitiveness of British capitalism by keeping wages down with the cooperation of the union bosses. This strategy—the “incomes policy”--did not always work and collapsed completely with the explosion of strikes during the “Winter of Discontent” of 1978-79. That collapse helped pave the way for Thatcherism.
The victory of Thatcherism and the severe weakening it caused the British left in the 80’s provided the opportunity for Tony Blair to lead the Labour Party substantially to the right. Seymour shows that Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s New Labour regime (1997-2010), while electorally successful, laid the groundwork for the serious long term decline of the Labour Party. Seymour notes that in general elections from 1997 to 2010, the Labour Party lost five million votes. The New Labour years saw voter turnout drop significantly, particularly among traditional Labour voters. The party was saved from having to deal with this problem by the weakness of the Conservative Party, which clung heavily to the unpopular hard right of Thatcherism until David Cameron re-branded it in a more centrist direction after 2005. In addition, party membership plunged from around 400,000 to 156,000 from 1997 to 2009. The party’s grassroots fell deeper into apathy and power in the party became more and more concentrated among Blair and his top goons. New Labour under Blair and Brown kept entrenched the basic Thatcherite policies that had spread inequality and ravaged Britain’s manufacturing base. They implemented public-private partnerships in public services, a policy deeply unpopular with the electorate, allowing big business to leech off tax dollars while reducing the quality and increasing the cost of public services. They entrenched the British economy’s overreliance on the City of London’s financial sector.
Seymour argues that it is erroneous to believe that under Ed Milliband’s leadership (2010-15), Labour was too far to the left. In fact Miliband more or less continued the Thatcherite lite policies of New Labour. He also continued New Labour’s attempts to appeal to working class voters through reactionary social populism, beating up on immigrants, welfare recipients and the like. Seymour notes that Ed Balls, Miliband’s shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, declared before the 2015 election that were Labour to win that contest, he would reverse none of the spending cuts implemented by Cameron’s chancellor, George Osborne. Seymour also notes that studies like the Beckett report (overseen by veteran MP and party establishment figure Margaret Beckett) and the British election study show that a perception of Miliband as being too left wing was not in the minds of many British voters in 2015. In fact, according to Seymour the Beckett study found that left wing policy proposals made by Miliband showed popularity. Miliband was annihilated in the election but David Cameron’s Tories hardly had much of a mandate either, winning only 24 percent of the eligible electorate.
According to Seymour, leaders of the right wing of the pre-Blair Labour Party like Roy Hattersley should find nothing much to object to in Corbyn’s mildly social democratic domestic platform. The British public seems to mesh with a lot of Corbyn’s domestic agenda. Polls show that the majority of the British public are against spending cuts to, and privatization of, vital services, favor increasing taxes on the rich and are favorable to such proposals as renationalizing the railways and utilities and eliminating the Trident nuclear weapons program. However Corbyn has not done well in most polls so far; under his leadership, Labour still remains around 30 percent in the polls, which Seymour notes is where it was when Ed Miliband was last leader. Seymour also notes that the poor and young voters, Corbyn’s strongest base of support, are underrepresented in polls because it is assumed they are least likely to vote.
Seymour seems to thinks that Corbyn’s chances are not good. His leadership is based on an agenda of reviving social democracy, the organizational basis of support for which (the unions and other left political groups) have never recovered from the battering they received during the Thatcher years. He leads a party whose establishment is hostile to him as are many of his fellow MP’s. This establishment and these MP’s, helped by the corporate media, are constantly looking for opportunities to sabotage him and remove him from power altogether. He leads a party that was literally annihilated in Scotland during the 2015 election, getting shellacked by the (mildly social democratic) Scottish National Party, and where its chances of making up any ground in the near future seem impossible.
Seymour argues that Corbyn’s battles will just be beginning if he somehow manages to hold onto the leadership and win the next general election. The years after World War II were a propitious time for social democracy in Britain but in the globalized, hyper-competitive world of 21st century capitalism, big business is not going to be amenable to even the modest social democratic measures proposed by Corbyn and his shadow chancellor John McDonnell. Seymour alludes to the recent experience of the Syriza government in Greece, which was elected to end the austerity policies which have imposed such horrendous suffering in that country. However, Syriza was compelled to continue and deepen austerity by the pressure of the German and other European banks, operating through the troika. Similarly there is the possibility that a Corbyn government would find its social democratic agenda annihilated by the pressure of big business and other powerful forces.
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