Flickr/stopwar.org.uk. Some rights reserved.
E.P. Thompson, the great historian of the English working class, famously warned of the need to rescue our labour movement forebears from “the enormous condescension of posterity.” Today, with Jeremy Corbyn poised to take over the leadership of the Labour Party on a wave of popular acclaim, we can appreciate Thompson’s injunction all the more. Virtually the entirety of the Westminster political class and their hangers-on in the house-trained media have lined up to denounce Corbyn – and the economic ideas he represents – as a ridiculous throwback, a ghost or revenant from Labour’s troubled past who must be exorcized in order that the party may again, as a famous manifesto once put it, face the future. Centrist technocrats always fetishize the future – “our comfort zone,” as Tony Blair has proclaimed it – not least because, unlike the past, it holds no dangerous lessons. “History teaches,” Gramsci wrote, “but it has no pupils.”
In the last few weeks the struggle has been joined, not only for the future direction of the Labour Party but also for the recovery of historical memory. An ideological ice age is coming to an end, but as the neoliberal permafrost breaks up we should expect great efforts to preserve the power of the economic narratives that have served our masters so well for the best part of four decades. Every myth and threadbare cliché is being dusted off and put to service by a shrieking commentariat unnerved by the prospect of a major breach in the ruling consensus. The Daily Telegraph, abandoning earlier - and childishly obvious - attempts at reverse psychology, now editorialises that Jeremy Corbyn must be stopped, not least because “he offers a return to the 70s when he imagines Britain was happier and more equal. Those who struggled to bury their loved ones or climbed through piles of rubbish during the Winter of Discontent remember it less fondly.”
