The Labour Party’s growth as a movement under Corbyn is the best hope yet of defeating the neoliberal project

The elites fear movements more that single-issue politics

With Corbyn’s second leadership victory, the wrath of the media is now turned on his supporters, especially those they can label as part of a movement such as Momentum.

Movement is a dirty word. Think how the media appended the term to ‘Occupy’ to signal something rather distasteful. There is no doubt that a lot of coverage relies on a greater or lesser unconscious reminder of our bowels.

Movements are dangerous for the elites. Movements signal a rising awareness. Where the elites and their mainstream media mouthpieces are willing to condescend to cover single issue groupings like Bring Back British Rail or Save The Whale, coverage of progressive movements must always be negative because movements happen when something more fundamental is at stake; the totality of our lives. And awareness of what is threatening our lives must endanger what causes that threat.

A movement that can rise above a single issue and reveal just how the whole range of neoliberal policies is destroying lives, communities, the economy, and the planet is an existential threat to those in whose interest these things are done.

We see the anti-movement bias in the coverage of Momentum and the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. That these supporters now represent a healthy portion of the Labour Party — and will no doubt soon swell the party ranks further — shows clearly where mainstream media and political bias resides. They feel under threat and so must attack.

It is to be expected of the extreme right in the form of the Daily Mail, Daily Express, and The Sun, but that it also emanates from traditionally liberal sources such as the BBC and The Guardian shows just how much the neoliberal project has captured the economic and political conversation. It underlines just how far to the right what are regarded as mainstream views now lie.

It was the Conservatives under Thatcher and then New Labour under Blair who created the environment in which movements were first banished from political discourse and then rendered not only obsolete but seen as regressive and unnecessary. We were suddenly all individuals and there was no need to consider ourselves part of a society. We went from citizens to customers because everything now was about buying and being sold.

Margaret Thatcher fatally weakened the unions — work continued under New Labour in its obscene haste to be regarded as the ally of big business rather than the working man or woman — and undermined for ever the idea that collective bargaining was a mainstay of fairness and economic justice.

With movements sidelined — in particular the unions — there were no voices raised against the neoliberal project as it destroyed our manufacturing and heavy industry, allowed corporations to dictate legislation in Whitehall, and savagely attacked the very planet that supports us. The miners in the mid 1980s as they battled Thatcher showed what might have been achieved had there been a less fearful and compliant TUC at the time. The battle’s ferociousness also revealed how high the stakes were for the right at the time.

Chris Hedges puts it perfectly on page 194 of Death Of The Liberal Class:

The decimation of our manufacturing base, the rise of the corporate state, and the contamination of our environment could have been fought by militant movements and radicals, but with these voices banished, there were no real impediments to the self-destructive forces of corporate power.

And the opposite is true: if movements and radical voices emerge, hope returns and there is a chance that some, if not all, of these neoliberal attacks on society may be reversed.

This is the hope that Corbyn’s second victory ignites and, on the back of John McDonnell’s speech at the Labour Party Conference today, it could be that the fatal blow against neoliberalism may not be that far away.