This is an edited version of a speech Michael Calderbank gave at the launch of Socialist Register 2023 at a recent conference organised by the journal Historical Materialism

Madeleine Davis opens her contribution to the 2023 Socialist Register by observing that Searching for Socialism (which Leo Panitch co-authored with Colin Leys and which tragically turned out to be Leo’s final work) fittingly represents a return to Leo’s most enduring and formative preoccupation – the analysis of labour parties in their role in class politics.

Her essay “attempts to take the measure of Leo’s contribution to thinking about the problems of British Labourism and the prospects of a Labour new left.”

Much of this analysis – made over the course of over five decades – was centrally concerned with one core question: is activity within the Labour Party a precursor of the creation of a mass base for socialist politics, or a debilitating distraction from that creation? 

Arguably this question was already bequeathed to the New Left from pre-war generations – the failure of the British Communist Party to build a mass base, or the Independent Labour Party’s ill-fated attempt to launch a viable breakaway from the Labour Party.

But the New Left/ Ralph Miliband-ite tradition (continued by Pantich, along with others like David Coates and Colin Leys) falls into three basic “moments”:    

i) From the first wave of the British New Left in the mid-‘50s to the second wave from the mid-‘60s to early-mid-‘70s.

ii) The emergence of a Labour New Left – championed by Tony Benn – in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s (followed by its marginalisation and near destruction under Kinnock/Blair)

iii) The unlikely rise and predictable fall of Corbynism in recent years.

i) From first wave of the British New Left to the second wave

The locus classicus for this whole debate is of course Ralph Miliband’s critique of the parliamentarism of the traditional Labour left, and the functional role it played for the stability of the British class system. Parliamentary Socialism was first published in 1961, and Davis argues that – at least at first – wasn’t intended to shut the door on the idea of socialists engaging inside the Labour Party (as it would later appear).It was originally conceived, Davis argues, as an intervention to support and empower the emerging New Left currents around the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament operating both inside and outside the Labour Party.

In fact, Davis quotes a piece written in 1958, only shortly before the book’s composition, where Miliband argues (perhaps surprisingly):

“What is mostly wrong [i.e. with Labour] is that contains only a minority of socialists. There are some who yearningly look for a short cut. There isn’t one. Now is the time to get in and push!”

This wasn’t necessarily to minimise or underestimate the extent of the institutional obstacles and limitations to making progress through an engagement with Labour – clearly the book devotes a powerful critique of the dominant assumption shared across the Party.

But it clearly implies that at least the experience of socialists engaging on this terrain of struggle will unleash a positive dynamic towards the politicisation and mobilisation of a socialist movement in Britain.

This is a perspective which would recur within New Left circles, and indeed in the Register itself, with Ken Coates’ contribution in 1973 (by that time in disagreement with Miliband himself), and Mike Rustin in the pages of New Left Review in the early ‘70s. It would be shared by many when the seemingly impossible happened and Corbyn got on the ballot paper for the leadership in 2015.

 Of course for Miliband himself – and for Panitch and others working in this tradition – the experience of the Wilson government in the ‘60s, the emergence of significant radical social movements in the wake of 1968, and the immense strain on the Keynesian consensus, saw the stress put decisively towards the negativeverdict about the desirability of engaging inside Labour.    

They were far from alone here.  New Left Review, for example, generated the Nairn/Anderson theses about the parochial insularity of British Labourism. 

Leo’s work from this period – essentially developing and deepening the Parliamentary Socialism thesis, is still incredibly rich – including for an understanding of Keir Starmer’s politics today, with the embrace of the Union Jack and God Save the King. So from his revised and published PhD thesis (published as Social Democracy and Industrial Militancy in 1976), he argues that the Labour Party is

“one of the chief mechanisms for inculcating the organised working class with national values and symbols and of restraining and reinterpreting working class demands in this light.  The Labour Party, in other words, acts simultaneously as a party of representation and as a major political socialisation and social control agent mediating between nation and class….”

Obviously, Labour is recognised to be a contested terrain, but embodies the institutional pressure towards the harmonisation and reconciliation of conflicting class interests so they can be integrated better into a conception of the singular ‘national interest’.   

Keir Starmer’s recourse to Tony Blair’s line that the “Labour Party is the political wing of the British People” is instructive here. It’s precisely being used as an alternative to the idea that Labour is the political wing of the organised labour movement.” Unions are now figured as ‘sectional’ interests – where Labour is tasked with governing in the interests of the ‘nation as a whole’.   This slippage is a crucial ideological move with anti-working-class effects.

Miliband in his 1972 postscript to the second edition of Parliamentary Socialism gave an excoriating account of the failures of the Labour government and influence of the parliamentarist left, and by 1976 wrote in the Register:

“The belief in the effective transformation of the Labour Party into an instrument of socialist policies is the most crippling of all illusions to which socialists in Britain have been prone.”

ii) The rise of the Labour New Left/Bennite Left – putting the thesis to the test

As Davis suggests in her essay, the timing of this conclusion is quite ironic in retrospect – as precisely this period was seeing the building of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy inside Labour and Tony Benn’s courting of extra-parliamentary support for his Alternative Economic Strategy, preparing for a showdown in Opposition in 1980-81. There was also the flourishing women’s movement and Greenham Common; black sections and anti-racist movements; movement for gay rights, etc.

It’s certainly to the credit of the Milbandians that their critical, even damning, verdict on the limits of parliamentary socialism as traditionally expressed wasn’t just held dogmatically, where they’d refuse to countenance anything new or interesting ever emerging to put the thesis to test. It’s important to remember that Leo’s criticisms of Labourist illusions were balanced off against a consistent rejection of the dogmatism of many Leninist currents – and a consistent New Left emphasis on the democratisation of the state, empowerment of working class communities through building capacity and more meaningful spaces for participation and control.

They began to recognise potential in this direction – although perhaps belatedly – in the Labour new left, of which Benn was the most prominent champion. This was a qualitatively new development, raising questions which didn’t undermine the thesis necessarily but at least tested it in interesting new ways.     

Unlike the old Labour left – which vied with the traditional right – over who best represented the Party’s historical legacy (with many shared assumptions), the Bennite left sought essentially to wrench Labour out of its traditions  –  to open out to the active participation of extra-parliamentary forces and democratically empower Party members. 

Perhaps New Labour ‘modernisers’ also wanted to wrench new Labour out of its traditions – but in a diametrically opposed way which in that case involved the total subordination of the unions and Party members, and the full-throated praise of the market.

Panitch and David Coates mapped the ultimate failure and marginalisation of the Bennite left in The End of Parliamentary Socialism (recapped in the Pantich/Leys book) – and it was perfectly understandable to conclude that the ascendency of Kinnock and then Blair and the marginalisation of the Labour new left represented “the end of parliamentary socialism”.  These events in Britain were part of the broader crisis of European Social Democracy in response to the hegemony of neoliberalism.

iii) The unlikely rise and predictable fall of Corbynism

But – fast forward to recent events – it wasn’t hard to recognise in the highly unlikely ascent of Corbyn to the leadership an unexpected but welcome development. At the same time Leo was deeply interested in parallel developments in the US with Bernie Sanders, with Syriza and Podemos and the movement around Melenchon in France.

Leo recognised that this was actively engaging a whole new generation into struggle, and responded positively – he didn’t just shelve all his theoretical misgivings, but neither did he hold himself aloof or adopt a condescending attitude.

Madeleine writes that “the hopes [that a party of a new kind could after all emerge from Labour’s contradictions] went against the grain of the underlying analysis.”

This seems to me exactly right.  At no point did you get the sense that Leo had parked his deep scepticism to get carried away with the energy of Corbynism in the moment of its ascent.  While undeniably positive, engaging and supportive to a whole new generation of activists, he was always a sober realist, but at the same time alive to unanticipated developments and genuinely interested in the strategic quandaries which were being thrown up as contractions played themselves out.

One of the key lessons he brought home for me and others was the need for the new Labour left and the enormous danger of the Corbynite wing taking on its own shoulders the responsibility for guaranteeing Party unity, and therefore moderating or dropping its own demands. 

In Conclusion

The experience of Corbynism brings us back to the central question: is engagement in the Labour party a possible or even a necessary means to help to build a mass base for socialism in Britain?  And if not, what is it possible for us to build instead – given the barriers to the emergence of an alternative party, such as the First Past the Post electoral system, the major trade union leaderships’ reluctance to break away, etc.?  It’s like the film Groundhog Day!

We’ve had a further full turn of the wheel. In one sense, it’s as hard as it’s ever been to make that case that socialists currently outside the party should throw their lot in with Labour – at least not since the decision to go to war in Iraq.   At the same time, for totally understandable reasons, millions of people will go into the next election wanting to get rid of the Tories – something only possible if you elect a Labour-led administration.  So socialists who haven’t yet left or been expelled want to influence the Party’s internal debates.  A gravitational pull back to the Labour Party asserts itself despite everything

I agree with James Schneider that we need to avoid a sterile debate pitting ‘stay and fight’ inside Labour against leaving as though that was itself a political strategy.  The vision of a hybrid party-movement outlined in Our Bloc and his interview with Hilary Wainwright in Socialist Register 2022 is very attractive but there’s a substantial gap between the ideal and the prospects for its concrete realisation.

I’ll leave the last word to the late Ralph Miliband from 1966:

“The question is not at present one of parties and political combinations, but of a broad and sustained effort of socialist education, cutting across existing boundaries, free from formula-mongering, and carried on with patience and intelligence by socialists wherever in the Labour movement they may be situated.  Such an effort is not an alternative to an immediate involvement in concrete struggle but an essential element of it.”

Like then, this might not be a sufficient strategy to break the British impasse, but it remains necessary for all that. 

Michael Calderbank is a member of Tottenham CLP and a contributing editor on Socialist Register.