There is still hope for the British left

Despite the defeat of Corbynism, the left in the Labour Party can still stage a comeback if it tackles the right issues.

It seems that a relentlessly pessimistic view of the past five years has settled among much of the left in the UK after the failure of the Corbyn project. Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci writing from his prison cell in 1929 famously coined the phrase “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. Gramsci enjoined us to be realistic, to fear the worst but hope for the best. In order for the left to advance, and with it the hopes of humanity, we have to understand our defeats, both in Britain and internationally, but also envision a brighter future. What we have seen in the past five years in Britain and elsewhere has been a crisis of neoliberalism and its Siamese twin, neo-conservatism. This explains the rise of Donald Trump and his British clone, Boris Johnson.