This is Only the Beginning. The Making of a New Left, From Anti-Austerity to the Fall of Corbyn. By Michael Chessum. Bloomsbury. 2022. 230pp.
After the collapse of the USSR at the beginning of the 1990s ‘socialism’ became discredited. It had supposedly been tried and had failed. Apologists for capitalism proclaimed that capitalism was the only game in town and even the end-point of history. After the financial crash of 2008 the tide began to turn and ‘capitalism’ came to be unpopular. An anti-capitalist movement of sorts arose, demanding that people should come before profits. Chessum was himself involved in this, both as a student activist and later as a Corbynite (he was a treasurer of Momentum).
The decade began with student fury at the breaking by the Liberal Democrats of their election pledge to abolish student tuition fees, when they entered into a coalition government with the Conservatives after the 2010 General Election. Universities up and down the country were occupied and the Tory party’s HQ in London ransacked. Then there was the campaign of direct action by UnCut against the premises of firms that were avoiding paying UK taxes by operating from tax havens. Then the campaign against the austerity measures imposed by the Coalition government. The movement had been given a boost by the Occupy movement of 2011 which identified a more general enemy than the government: the ‘top 1%’, the super-rich.
Chessum concedes that none of these campaigns was a success and writes of ‘the defeat of the anti-austerity movement’ (p. 104). What, for him, was positive were the new organisational form and methods of these movements: anti-hierarchical with actions being decided by groups of activists on the ground themselves and not directed by some leadership. This meant that not just the Labour Party but also the Leninist groups had no attraction for them and both stagnated.
Ironically, the second half of the decade saw the entry of many of the ‘anti-capitalists’ into the Labour Party, to elect Corbyn as Leader (twice) and then to try to change the Labour Party. That didn’t work out partly because, as Chessum himself experienced, the approach of those around Corbyn was also top-down. Corbyn resigned as Labour leader in 2020 following Labour’s poor showing in the 2019 general election and his opponents took back control of the party. So, another defeat. That’s where the book ends, but with Chessum confidently predicting that the anti-capitalist movement would find political expression in some other way. Hence the book’s title.
Obviously, it is a good thing that these days there are more people than there were in a recent past who recognise that capitalism puts profits before people and that something should be done about it. But what? Most anti-capitalists seem to think that, with enough pressure from below and with enough determined political will, people can be put before profit; that in effect capitalism can be reformed to allow this. But the experience of past attempts to do this have shown that it can’t be. Attempts to do this from below will fail just as surely as past attempts from above have done. It’s not a question of the method used but the fact that it is economically impossible to make capitalism put people before profit. Capitalism is driven by profit-making which must — and in the end always does — come first.
Chessum’s prediction that the movement would not die with Corbynism has since been borne out. When last July Sultana and Corbyn announced the launch of a new leftwing party, 800,000 expressed an interest. But the two made a mess of it and in the end most went on to join or support the Green Party. Chessum himself was among these and is now a Green Party councillor and Council Cabinet member for ‘Economy, Cost of Living and Empowered Communities’. Let’s see how he does.
Adam Buick
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