Jeremy Corbyn. Image, Momentum.
Labour’s current predicament is one of many dimensions. It is also not simply Labour’s dilemma, insofar as the turmoil engulfing the party is symptomatic of that which now characterises the basic notion of social democracy, that is, a negotiated compromise between social justice, growth and the market economy. When capitalism falters, elites protect their own material interests through political consolidation, responding to the weakening of the accumulation regime’s legitimacy by arguing that even the slightest shift to the left poses the risk of an economic crisis even greater than the one just concocted by the regime itself.
Crucially, the social democratic dilemma is in part rooted in a more encompassing crisis of democracy. Waning adherence to democratic ideals has facilitated the right’s decisive response to Brexit (and, indeed, the earlier response to financial crisis). Of course, this is a crisis which Labour has been complicit in creating the conditions for in Britain. The last Labour government did staggeringly little to reform the bastions of British undemocracy, by sustaining the Westminster model of governance and further emasculating local government, failing to reform the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system or Britain’s archaic electoral administration processes, failing to challenge the market structure of press ownership or political party funding rules, and barely touching the House of Lords.
