There is a great deal of excitement about the new initiative by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana to launch a new party as a challenge to Labour. But in many ways, this development is building on the efforts to generate a Labour left under the aegis of Momentum. Do you think there are lessons to be learned from that experience?
Tom Devenny
This has been one of the main faults of the British left since the demise of Corbynism in the 2019 general election. The focus has predominantly been on the various ways in which Corbyn, as a leader, was undermined by the British establishment or outright sabotaged by elements within his own party. This isn’t wrong, of course, and it is easy to sympathize with the feelings of activists who were exposed to the reality of democracy under capitalism for perhaps the first time. But for those of us who have been around the socialist movement a bit longer, most of that could be expected. They were not going to simply allow a lifelong socialist to ascend to the top of one of the most powerful and historic capitalist states or let a movement aiming at a fundamental redistribution of power and wealth seize control.
So the question for us should be, Did we do enough to build our own movement? Were we defeated, in part, because of the limits of the institutions we built and the politics we practiced? And here, I think, we come to the lessons of the Momentum experience.
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