The sense of being part of a movement has long held a compulsive appeal. When the term was first adopted by working class activists in the nineteenth century, the link with rapidly advancing transport technologies was deliberate. Today, as can be seen in the presence of groups like Momentum, the desire to identify radicalism with a fleeting concept remains. Yet despite a grassroots revival refashioning the UK’s two main centre left parties, they remain defined, not by an articulate vision of the future — but by the need to heal past traumas.
In an age of politics as tidal surge, the ebbing of purpose and vision can seem all the more acute. What comes after the tsunami when it has swept all before it? When power has been diffuse and has to be concentrated once again, how does the ‘new politics’ survive the grubby old world of centralised power and stasis? Is momentum, with its sense of constant movement and dynamism, up to the task?
Such questions should not lead us to understate the vast significance of the surges experienced by Labour and the SNP. 2015 was a year in which most punditry became dislocated from reality, in which polls went off the rails and political drama was rarely anything other than absurdist. Soundbites devoid of meaning were literally carved in stone and very little that was supposed to happen actually happened. A mainstream politics increasingly akin to consumer finance was swamped by the surreal, the unpredictable and the demanding. Amongst the political and media establishment there has been an inevitable struggle to comprehend the new insurgents as anything other than regressive and divisive: intent on re-fighting battles that have already been conclusively decided.
This is why the revulsion that Corbyn and his acolytes provoke is not simply partisan in character. For all that ‘Corbynism’ is shambolic and unadorned, it is a highly representative presence at the heart of Britain. Because what this new capacity for grassroots momentum demonstrates is a divide at the heart of the deeply contested story of British politics in recent decades. Thatcherism, inherently unable to renew itself, has crashed with the prospects of the future generation that it sold out. Corbyn, as the memes tell us, is an Obi-Wan Kenobi for destitute millennials from another age — representing an older, lost, struggle.
Increasingly, the addition of more democracy to high level politics creates the kind of volatility that the British system had hitherto been so successful at pushing to the margins. With most of the UK’s ties and sense of shared ownership, value and purpose now largely the domain of mass produced nostalgia and high-street chain stores, these surges are just one episode in the long crisis of Britain. Yet while the SNP’s surge was overwhelmingly the product of the failure of the Yes movement in the Scottish independence referendum, its impetus is not so different to that which imposed Jez on Labour’s professional leadership elite.
This link could be seen most clearly in May 2015, with the well documented desire of Scottish voters to ditch inauthentic Blairite politics for good, while noting, perhaps, that consumerism, military adventures and deference are remarkably weak ties with which to bind together a national community.
Part of the abandonment of Britain as a collective project is also played out in cultures that exist largely on the basis of recycling patrician distaste en masse. The austerity being plied in one of the world’s richest economies shows us a country of Stakhanovite heroes and Kulak scroungers, the latter parasitic on the greater project of an entrepreneurial, dynamic, British economy. All of this adds up to a Britain that, with its fragmented social fabric, is angry at all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons.
There is however a deeper factor linking activist-led revivals in both parties. The astonishing success of Scottish nationalism owes much to a visceral societal response to the dismantling of the post-war consensus. The very real emasculations and humiliations of this process led to a necessary movement for national revival. This process was more existential than narrowly political. If Scotland was to exist it had to be re-imagined and re-constituted. The result was so successful that it ran away with itself — with the fallout from the Great British fragmentation lasting long after the demonic lady who had inflicted the initial wounds departed. What many misinterpret as the return of an ancient ethnic feud actually stemmed from a desire, born of despair, to start all over again.
What the enormous proportions of today’s SNP obscure is that it grew out of a mass, multiform, decentralised movement, the likes of which Scotland had never seen before. The need for such a movement was obvious and had significant cultural and political traditions to draw upon. Yet it was also the product of necessity — independence never can, and never should be, the property of a single party, however popular its policies or likeable its leaders. The idea of independence, if it is ever to be realised, still requires a broad coalition, not just of several political parties, but of a whole range of voices drawn from across Scottish society. It must move beyond the narrow field of what we tend to define as political to remain viable. In the meantime, the SNP risks occluding its central aim in its entirely understandable desire to form governments, administer them competently, and to win elections. In doing so it reminds us that a political party, in the current system, cannot be a ‘movement’ other than in purely rhetorical terms.
This is why the ‘Yes movement’, so similar in its rise to the Corbyn insurgency, rapidly disintegrated. With no structural form, no immediate task in hand and some surprising fellow travellers, it is already more of a folk memory than a living, breathing, entity. The ‘movement’ now exists only to be invoked as an emotive appeal as the inevitably tribal work of political parties competing for votes gets underway. This is the essential weakness of contemporary surge politics — the tide can recede just as quickly as it gathered momentum. More prosaically, the task of getting activists and workers to stand still and dig some foundations is far harder than signing them up online for a three quid membership. Real political change is totally incompatible with such activities (often termed ‘slacktivism’) because real political change demands that the practices and aims of the movement become normalised and embodied in people’s day to day lives: in their workplaces, homes and communities. The early labour movement understood this and was able to build up a largely autonomous working class culture that would educate, protect, entertain and agitate, on the basis of collective agency. Slacktivism, on the other hand, encourages us to habitually outsource our agency and to wear the badges of political loyalty as lightly as a Twibbon.
The often shallow level of political activism today is mirrored by the consistent inability of the left to articulate a coherent vision of the future. Though anti-austerity narratives have driven progressive movements to a certain point, they remain fundamentally defensive. Simply standing against cuts to public services is not enough. Radical politics needs more than just sign-ups, petitions and a list of complaints. It needs to create alternative sources of power that are capable of articulating visions beyond the narrow ideological centre of electoral politics. Those curious as to why Toryism remains so pervasive in the UK should consider the success and resilience of its wider networks of influence and power. Contrary to popular belief class politics did not disappear in Britain. Capital, having won the battle long ago, assumed the matter of its dominance was settled.
However resilient it may or may not be, surge politics, rather than an arcane reactionary project, is a murmur expressing a far deeper, perhaps irrevocable, sense of alienation from centralised power. What has been observed of most elites down the ages still holds true: they hear the noise outside and assume that the masses have forgotten that only a continuation of the present order can make our lives better. What they fail to realise is that mass political agency is not simply an instrument, but rather an end in itself. This is why any coherent left wing project must start by aiming to rebuild alternative networks of power akin to those that have sustained the right for so long. It must do so, not by harking back to an industrialised past, but by articulating a vision of the kind of future it wants to build.