Extra-parliamentary movements create and could revive Labour, not internal party logic

Evidence

Nevertheless, it’s crucial that we recognise that this is a time of opportunity for the left. Laurie Penny5 is right that the Labour Party does not have the answers at the moment. Yet the Labour Party’s current lack of an agenda can be seen as a good thing, for two reasons. Firstly, at least this means that Labour has lost the managerialist neoliberal agenda that defined it for the last fifteen years. The de-New Labourisation process will take a while, but it will be expedited much quicker with Ed Miliband as leader than it ever would have been with David at the helm. … It’s worth remembering at this point that the failures of the Labour Party, its succumbing to capitalist realism, is not just the consequences of the internal logic of the party. It was extra-Parliamentary forces that gave rise to the Labour Party in the first place; it was the defeat of those forces that drove the Labour Party into its craven placating of business in the New Labour era. If Labour is to be anything more than a zombie party once again, it will be new forms of extra-parliamentary organisation that revivify it. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1469

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Fisher’s running ‘capitalist realism’ thesis and his diagnosis of New Labour elsewhere in this collection. — connects to: Party regeneration hinged on internal party action and opportunity, not external conditions — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 59; Labour’s trajectory is driven by the strength of outside-parliament movements — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1469; Labour’s crisis paralysis reflected capitalist realism’s saturation of the party’s infrastructure — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1796 (+2 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the claim that party revival must come from outside the party — testable against Corbyn’s later rise and implosion.

Broader Connections

• Labour’s trajectory is driven by the strength of outside-parliament movements #corroborates (0.95) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1469
• Rank-and-file reform movements could not overcome orthodox regional party machines #complicates (0.80) — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 458
• Habermas’s hopes for mass extra-parliamentary action proved unrealistic #contradicts (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2347
• Labour’s crisis paralysis reflected capitalist realism’s saturation of the party’s infrastructure #complicates (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1796