People Get Ready! Preparing for a Corbyn government
by Christine Berry and Joe Guinan
(O/R Books, £12)

THE CENTRAL thesis of this partisan programme of political action for a Corbyn government is that responses to capitalist private ownership of the economy have traditionally divided along two main lines — state socialism with ownership and control of capital held by the state and social democracy, which leaves it largely in private hands but seeks to redistribute the returns through taxation and transfers.

The book’s authors Joe Guinan and Christine Berry are the kind of policy wonks that give this necessary activity a good name. Their dissection of neoliberalism, and of New Labour’s accommodation with it, is sharply worded and perceptive.

They catalogue with passion and clarity the damage done by decades of privatisation and financialisation.

Their alternative economic model is grounded in what they categorise as a neglected third tradition of economic democracy, which they define as the extension of the political principles of popular sovereignty into the realm of economics.

They quote approvingly notions of the “democratic economy” — redesigning basic economic institutions and activities, companies, investments, economic development, employment, purchasing and banking — to serve the common good.

Where this optimistic prospectus dovetails with traditional notions that a transition to a higher form of society proceeds through a gradual process of adaptation is in their assertion that such a democratic economy is emerging “all around us” in the spontaneous response to social pain.

Worker ownership, co-operatives, municipal enterprise, community land trusts, public banks, benefit corporations, social wealth funds and a host of kindred institutional forms represent ways in which capital can be democratised and held in common by small and large publics.

But there is much more to this book, including valuable chapters spelling out some of the forces that will resist a left-led Labour government, the measures necessary to gear the government machine to implement its programme and, most importantly, the necessity to mobilise public opinion and Labour’s core constituencies.

Despite the sharp realism which illuminates much of the authors’ writing, and a formidable raft of references, there remains an unsettling sense that the authors have not accounted for the nature of the beast that Labour in government will challenge or the measures that will be necessary to decisively defeat its opponents.

Or, indeed, the unruly, primeval and contradictory nature of the class forces that will be stirred into action in support of and against the breach in ruling-class power that decisive change entails.
This is linked to the enduring notion that a decisive change can come about as the product of a gradual process of reform and adaptation.

The authors might answer this critical point by reference to the historical examples they draw upon — among them the US-backed coup that overthrew Allende in Chile and the economic pressures which disposed of the socialist-communist government of Mitterand in France.

But in the real-life circumstances of Britain, a sober assessment of the balance of class forces suggests that things will get low-down and even dirtier. We have seen already the extent to which the constellation of forces — from Tory minister to mogul media, racist right to Blairite plotter, City speculator to Israeli spook and big business boss to MI6 bureaucrat — are ranged against the current Corbyn opposition.

A Labour government will take office with a probable majority of MPs on both sides of the House – either out of sympathy with, or in direct opposition to, the kind of measures necessary to drive through its policies.

Such a government will need to mobilise a powerful array of extra-parliamentary forces to build a coalition that includes at its core not just the trade union movement but the working class, with all its contradictions that have been thrown up by the Brexit vote.

This first substantial breach in the architecture of capitalist rule has given us an insight into the forces we must isolate and defeat.