The obvious examples here are Greece and Spain, but even in the UK, among those sections of the population who either cannot be bought off (because there are no resources left to buy them with) or won’t be, that a left resurgence has emerged which seems unlikely to abate any time soon. My view is that at the moment there is no foreseeable way the Labour party could win the next General Election – to do that, we’d need to address the electoral system and the fact that it clearly doesn’t work, but I’ll come back to that later.To answer your question directly, I think that the most important thing to understand is that the results of elections are actually pretty incidental to actual political outcomes. In Marxian terms, most of those people are not capitalists. If you’d told people when women were given full suffrage at the end of the 1920s, that we’d basically have the same constitutional system as we had back then, and that the way we make decisions and allocate power was going to remain more or less unchanged for almost a century, I don’t think they would have believed it. Broadly speaking, there are four main political currents which can be identified as still active in the party: the “hard left,” the “soft left,” the old Labour right, and the Blairites. What might be a way out of such a dilemma? We need to make a better case to them that supporting a Left project is not against but can enhance their interests. Syriza has been defeated, even if they are still standing. Labour voters have thought they were voting for social democracy. It also produces a situation in which elections are almost entirely decided by the votes of a few hundred thousand swing voters in marginal constituencies (of which there are only 50–100, out of a total of 650), and in which any party that can secure over 40% of the vote is likely to enjoy a full parliamentary majority, untroubled by the messy politics of coalition and compromise.It is easy enough to see why this absurdly undemocratic system has proven so resistant to reform, despite repeated calls for the introduction of proportional representation over the decades. Such commentary is usually framed in terms of a fear that by choosing an “unelectable” leader, the party has condemned the country to permanent Tory rule. We don’t have to be pro-the City. This is a particularly notable phenomenon among the young, who across Europe, have seen the gradual erosion of social and economic entitlements since the 1970s, to the point where many now have very little left to lose.In the specific case of the UK, it is notable that most opinion polls and social attitude surveys have demonstrated the existence of a pretty consistent bloc of public opinion since the beginning of the 1980s, which in effect endorses a Marxist perspective on all important issues, and which probably consists of around 20–25% of the electorate.The question of who exactly comprises this 20–25% is not too difficult to answer. I don’t think that’s true at all. Under such circumstances, there is no question that the entire balance of forces within the EU would be significantly, and perhaps permanently, altered. And since then – since the 1970s – that agenda has remained in place pretty consistently up until the present. By their very nature, these swing voters in marginal constituencies tend to be easily manipulated, individualistic, with a “consumer” attitude to politics. What the conditions of possibility might be for such a better outcome, I hope I have helped the reader to judge for themselves.Of course, there is one possible development in the near future which would enormously shorten the odds of Corbyn leading a future Labour government. They are not Gramscians, by training or instinct, but, if anything, traditional Leninists.
My sense is that no-one really knows what happened – the election of Jeremy Corbyn was so unexpected that pretty much everyone is feeling their way. Indeed, it was the Conservative opposition’s ugly support for immigration restrictions, and its coded endorsement of anti-refugee sentiments, which did much to shore up support for Blair amongst the metropolitan left – and the soft left of the party – during the early years of his premiership.
Of course, the past is no necessary guide to the future, and there is no certainty that a Corbyn-led Labour party cannot win the next UK general election (which is more than 4 years away). Closer to home, the SNP victory was glorious in Scotland, but it is also one of the factors which terrified Middle England into electing a Tory government in May 2015, and the gradual detachment of socialist Scotland from the United Kingdom does nothing to help the beleaguered English left. Even more upsetting is the fact that they are apparently no longer willing to accept a form of party discipline which denied them all representation and subjugated them to the authority of the professional political class. The consequences of this, and of the political weakness of the Left across Northern and Eastern Europe, have been dire.