Zarah Sultana just took aim at Corbynism – and people should pay attention

Say one thing about Zarah Sultana. Say she’s up for a fight.

In a new interview, Sultana says she was politicised by the War on Terror, the 2008 financial crisis, and trips to Palestine as a teenager.

She’s certainly impressive. She’s young, she’s a woman, she’s Muslim. She gets bonus points for not being from London and she isn’t afraid to get out in the provinces. She’s got a bit about her: fire, chat, patter, attitude, call it what you want. She refers to the working class as “my class”.

Of course, one person isn’t enough. You’d be right to have deep reservations about the ‘new left party’ as an idea, and electoral politics as a whole. The Left got absolutely mauled in 2019. There’s no other way to say it. And truth be told, quite a bit of it was the Left’s own fault.

Finally, we’re hearing someone who was close to that project putting their hand up to its errors.

Zarah Sultana: mythologies of defeat

In a wide-ranging New Left Review (NLR) interview, Sultana didn’t hold back. She told interviewer Oliver Eagleton:

I think we’re in a very different political moment. We have to build on the strengths of Corbynism – its energy, mass appeal and bold policy platform – and we also have to recognise its limitations.

This is refreshing. Defeats, like victories, generate a mythology.

In the case of Corbynism, the mythology tends to airbrush out the strategic errors and faffing which helped sink the ship, resulting in a landslide Tory victory. Instead, its dispirited supporters focused on the behaviour of the press, the establishment, the Israel lobby, the Labour PLP, and bureaucracy.

Clearly, these factors played a big part. But what also mattered was the response to the attacks from all those groups.

Corbynism, Sultana says:

capitulated to the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which famously equates it with anti-Zionism, and which even its lead author Kenneth Stern has now publicly criticised.

This controversial definition actively sets out to conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. You can read some of the criticism here.

A lack of ruthlessness

That Labour Party also royally messed up on Brexit, a fact which Sultana acknowledges:

It triangulated on Brexit, which alienated huge numbers of voters.

That electoral left also lacked the ruthlessness and the guile to operate in the trench warfare of party politics. Labour has long served as home for the Labour right, among the most grotesque, venal, amoral, self-serving people the country has ever produced:

It [Labour] abandoned mandatory reselection of MPs for the trigger ballot compromise, keeping many of the party’s undemocratic structures in place.

As we’ve seen, booting out MPs and scorched-earthing the left isn’t a problem for Keir Starmer. So why was it an issue for the labour leadership of 2015-2019 when it came to openly right-wing, pro-war, pro-market MPs?

Zarah Sultana: Labour was frightened and conciliatory

That leadership also failed to direct the vast number of people who joined Labour at the time into grassroots class-oriented activity. In the end, Corbynism’s actual base was too narrow, too nebulous, too liberal and, in my opinion, far too content to see itself as correct. What it should have done is meet working people where they are.

As Zarah Sultana told NLR:

It didn’t make a real effort to channel its mass membership into the labour movement or tenants unions, which would have enriched the party’s social base.

That movement also failed to face down it’s other mortal enemy: the legacy media. Let’s be blunt, the press in this country serves as an elite-owned Ministry of Information. You’d be a fool to engage with it on its own terms. As Sultana said:

When it came under attack from the state and the media, it should have fought back, recognising that these are our class enemies. But instead it was frightened and far too conciliatory.

This was a serious mistake. If we’re contesting state power, we’re going to face a major backlash, and we need to have the institutional resilience to withstand it. You cannot give these people an inch.

Name the enemy – and name the new left party

Zarah Sultana has many qualities. One of those is that she can do what the political right do so effectively: name the enemy. For the right, it is migrants, refugees, trans people, the nanny state, wokeness, etc.

For the left, it starts with billionaires and their personal media empires. That is to say you must campaign around the root of the problem. The root of the problem, if you’re any kind of socialist at all, is capitalism and class.

Sultana is right that the new left party is arriving into a very different political moment. It won’t have to deal with hundreds of Red Tory MPs who’d rather see the actual Tories in charge than have a some mild social democrats in power. It won’t have to fight its own self-serving bureaucracy. But it also won’t have the Labour Party’s electoral machine.

An insurgent left party could have a new-found freedom. It will be able to fight for a new and very winnable youth vote. And for anyone who hasn’t noticed, the frankly grotesque argument that criticism of Israel’s genocidal impulses is antisemitic doesn’t hold water like it once did.

Now, none of this translates to a Sultana-Corbyn government in 2029. But as the Coventry South MP points out:

The Labour Party is dead. It has destroyed its principles and its popularity.

All we can hope for it a strong, resilient left bloc inside and, more importantly, outside parliament after the next election. Part of building that is a frank audit of past defeats and future possibilities. Zarah Sultana, at least, is honest about that.

Featured image via the Canary