Welcome to the age of Platform Politics- explaining the election result and its implications

So just after the election Alex and I did a talk at the Anti-University of East London event on this subject, which will be central to our forthcoming book (among many other things). The video is HERE

A week or two after that I wrote a long essay on the subject and the implications of the election, but I had already promised to write on this subject for Fabian Review, so I produced a short edited version for them which was published here last week. I did an even shorter version for IPPR but I don’t think that’s been posted yet.

The full length version is on open Democracy HERE.

 

Radical Democracy or Retro Social-Democracy – which Corbynism?

Here’s the latest for the Guardian  where I talk about the different ways of understanding what ‘Corbynism’ might mean as a political project.

There were a couple of points that got edited out for space. One is that the first use of the terms ‘Corbynism’ I can remember was by Alberto Toscano, who was using it, years before Corbyn became Labour leader, to designate a sort of highly principled but totally ineffectual (outside of very local contexts) Marxist activism. How things have changed…

The other was my now obligatory reference to John Medhurst’s That Option No Longer Exists, in order to point out that the division between radical decentralisation and centralising social democracy isn’t some kind of split between that hard and soft left, or whatever, but is as much as anything an expression of an ambiguity that always existed within Bennism:  pro workers-control, but anti-PR; naive about the socialist potential of a sovereign parliament and tribal Left Labourism, but scathing about the corruption of the British constitutional institutions in general. I think that ambiguity is still there within Corbynism, rather than being a function of its relationship to anything outside of itself.

Finally it’s worth saying. Really we don’t want ‘Corbynism’ at all, because the best thing about Corbyn is the way he keeps saying that this movement is not about him. We need 21st century socialism, of which the pro-Corybyn political movement can only be one essential component.