4 - Is Corbyn a populist?

Summary

Populism is a difficult concept to pin down. This chapter follows the well-trodden path of opening with a statement highlighting that populism is an essentially contested concept, and that it has been conceptualized in a number of different – and often competing – ways.

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the nascent scholarship on Corbyn and Corbynism within the frameworks of four different understandings of populism. The first two notions – populism as an ideology and populism as a discourse – focus on populism as a substantive way of understanding the world. The third and fourth approaches focus on populism as a style, namely populism as a political strategy and populism as a socio-cultural approach to politics.

Naturally, the approach taken for this chapter involves covering a large theoretical landscape in a short space. Given the relative lack of academic attention given to the five years of Corbynism, this analysis only claims to be a starting point for a further unpacking of the relationship between Corbyn, the Corbynite movement, the Labour Party and populism.

This chapter argues that while Corbynism should not be labelled populist in a substantive understanding of the concept, elements of populism can be found in Corbyn's political style, with his emphasis on direct communication with supporters via rallies, his use of Momentum to reshape the Labour Party and to challenge the centrality of the PLP, and the importance of the moral and the authentic to Corbyn's own personal image, which holds the whole Corbynite experiment together. All of these contribute to a more populist style of politics, especially when considered within the context of the institutionalized British party-political system.

What is Corbynism?

Before an analysis of whether Corbyn, or the broader Corbyn project, was indeed populist, we should briefly examine the core components of Corbynism (for more detail, see Chapter 3). Ideologically, Corbynism represents a marriage between traditional Bennite economics and a newer, more radical “ ‘postcapitalist’ techno-utopian wing”, a worldview that sees technological advances, including automation and artificial intelligence, as providing an alternative to the current structure of work within a capitalist society (Bolton & Pitts 2018). The Corbynite project is based on a strong sense of economic nationalism, emerging from the Bennite legacy.