Colonel Rainsborough's Plaque, St.Mary's Church, Putney. Flickr/Jim Linwood. Some rights reserved.Britain’s Labour party today is facing one of its most extreme challenges, and at the same time one of its greatest opportunities. Can it grasp this extraordinary moment, reforming itself into a broad-based popular movement that can also successfully enter the national institutions of the state? Earlier this summer, at a conference devoted to restoring republicanism’s radical tradition (co-convened with Stuart White and Bruno Leipold), a number of us were able to discuss just why this radical heritage still matters – never more so, it now appears, than in September 2015.
The reason is that republicanism recaptures exactly what we have lost and wish to regain in our own political organising, giving a national horizon to our endeavours, and also explains how it might be most practicably done. We now confront a constant corrosion of individual and collective freedoms, all hard-won long ago: loss of protections for the vulnerable and poor at home and abroad; disenchantment and disempowerment in people’s sense of how they are governed and how they control their own lives; the confusion over whether it is possible to overcome the lethal power of entrenched special interests, especially the coercive ‘global governance’ of international bodies, along with the international financial regimes of banking and large multinational corporations; the insistent encroachment on individual liberties and public space by the invasive yet distant hand of government; the justified contempt for electoral politics of large swathes of youth; above all, the pervasive doubt as to whether tangible change is really possible – and if so how it can be achieved in today’s circumstances, where institutions have become so powerful and people so small.
Remembering republicanism
Jean-Jacques Rousseau by Jean-Baptiste Farochon, Louvre. Wikicommons/ Jastrow. Some rights reserved.The universality of our common aims can be found in a set of collective understandings about and practices of democratic freedom that have fallen into disuse and are rarely (if ever) discussed today. Republicanism brings into sharp focus an articulation of common freedoms strived for under extremely varying political conditions, in different times and places, with the shared commonality of facing unequal odds.
