I don’t think this description is quite accurate. The PLP right is a consequence of the defeats and structural setbacks suffered by the working class after the 70s, not just in the UK but globally. They are no more ‘there’ to do anything than bruises and pain are there to https://twitter.com/willhuw/status/1330073256829849600

mark injuries or illness. The period after the 70s was a time when manufacturing was increasingly automated, and to the extent it persisted, left the metropoles and set up in countries with large reserves of less skilled and far more compliant labour. The leaders of labour in

the metropoles had no real progressive answer to these changes and a division between those willing to adapt to the new neoliberalism and those wanting somehow to cling to past trade unionist usages opened up. In the UK, the defeat of the miners under Scargill and the Labour/SDP

split marked this change with the PLP drifting ever closer to the Thatcher Reagan consensus until reaching its peak under Blajr. At that point the party at the parliamentary level was on its deathbed. Outside the party though the alliance between the neoliberals and reactionary

populists was beginning to fray, both because the neoliberal capitalists were (to borrow from and repurpose Thatcher’s famous dictum) beginning to run out of *other people’s labour*. Large swathes of public goods were no longer public and therewith the neoliberals whose political

rule depended on an ongoing coalition with the populist right began to fragment, with the centre of gravity shifting in the direction of the latter. The crash of 2008 was a kind of last hurrah for the political neoliberals because massive state reinvestment was demanded.

The leaders of labour style parties who wished to contest governance were dragged further right, and became open advocates of reactionary populist policies on ‘terror’ and immigration, and backed huge spending on war. They secured strong personal bases in the corporate world.

and in the UK the distance between PLP and its actual and potential supporters widened. This opened a breach for Corbyn who won easily but was perversely chosen to lead a parliamentary party now viscerally hostile to social democratic/communitarian change. That contradiction

became an effective split within weeks and the next five years of the narrative writes itself. Labour had to purge its parliamentary right or face what we now see — a smoking ruin. Corbyn, worthy as he was and is, was simply not up to doing from the left what the right was

willing to do — destroy the village in order to save it. We on the left talk a great deal about the socialisation of people and how the clash between the forces and relations of production positions humans in social space and in this shirt sketch we see how those dynamic forces

controlled by no person in particular but whole swathes of mostly privileged semi-conscious people in general has shaped them to act in the ways they have to produce the current system settings. The challenge for us all lies in engaging the masses in seizing control of public

policy by creating vehicles for mass collective agency based on the assertion of the needs of common humanity. We either get that done, or chaos and decline follows. #SocialismOrBarbarism indeed.