For the UK left, it has been a time of defeat and retreat, of confusion and disillusionment and disarray, as we have received one pulverizing blow after another. The hopes of a few short years ago seem long gone and far away—as if in another country, another world and time, even.

It is easy to forget, though, just how far we have come, and how fast. We are so, so much stronger than we were in 2015. We have built our ideas, our networks, our know-how. And we now know our programme.

As with the Bernie campaign in the States, the Corbyn Project was always a long shot, an attempted short cut, a ‘great Leap over the institutions’ in an audacious attempt to grab the highest levels of state power.

What is amazing is how close we came, not that our attempts failed. But we must now do the serious work of learning the lessons.

Had we succeeded, it would have been—like Gramsci’s revolution against ‘Capital’—a victory over and against our own political understandings and strategies, bypassing the need for years, if not decades, of hard organising and base-building.

We did not succeed. There is no ‘royal road’ to socialism and the democratic economy. We now need to address the limitations and contradictions of our recent advances and what must be done to make up for their weaknesses and deficiencies.

One paradox of Corbynism was that the opportunity it afforded largely fell into our laps, rather than being the culmination of years of hard political organising.

It gave us the opportunity to develop a radical political-economic programme for what we would do if we were to actually win state power. In this area, we massively overachieved.

We went from a situation in which there was no blueprint for what a radical Labour government would actually do in office—the prevailing situation in 2015—to having the most detailed and comprehensive version of such a programme existing anywhere in the advanced industrial world.

But the fact that Corbynism was in some senses a political accident meant that the task became to reverse-engineer the movement and develop the political education required to underpin our radical programme. This was a stark inversion of the usual order of things.

And it is in this respect that we signally failed. Following the remarkable near-success of 2017, this political education and movement-building work was the imperative. Instead, we doubled-down on further developing the programme. It should have been both/and.

It was the failure to advance in these areas in the intervening period—essentially, two wasted years, in which (it has to be said) much of the left was seduced by liberal Remain fantasies and misdirections—that sowed the seeds of our December 2019 defeat.

And this defeat was catastrophic. It has dealt the fledgling movement a decapitating blow, forcing Corbyn’s resignation and severing the vital link between a radical party leadership and the mass membership it created.

The utterly debilitating Remain illusions of the majority of the party membership, which should have been sorted through via mass discussion and debate and a hard-headed and clear-eyed weighing of strategies, led us to Starmer, who represents a Restoration of the Bourbons.

We are now in a truly sorry state. The lack of political education and movement-building means that literally hundreds of thousands of Labour Party members are in disarray, leaderless and in danger of drifting away or sinking into apathy and despair.

But there is no time for this. The climate clock is unforgiving. Multiple overlapping crises—political, ecological, and of public health—are already upon us. We must reject the easy consolations of despair. ‘It is far too late and things are far too bad for pessimism.’

Hundreds of thousands of politically disillusioned, atomised and despondent individuals represents a collective malaise. But hundreds of thousands of engaged, determined left-wing *activists* is an army.

We have lost the election. We have lost the party leadership. But we have not yet lost the chance to build our movement.

We have a programme. We have a prospective base. What we need is a strategy. The balance of forces is forbidding, the playing field is severely tilted against us. But a strategy means asking what we can do today that changes the equation as to what’s possible tomorrow.

What can we do now, today, collectively, that would alter that equation? What extra-party (or at least extra-official-party) activity would completely change the current unfavourable balance of forces over a couple of years?

We must get concrete and specific about political education, community organising, local actions, ignoring the leadership and working at the local and regional level on our own campaigns, the democratisation of the trade unions, etc. ‘In and against the party.’ And outside it.

We can get to work at the local government level, with community wealth building projects—we are being shown the way by @MatthewBrownLab @MayorJD @jcullinane86 and other visionary local leaders. But we shouldn’t have to rely on their leadership; they should have to rely on us!

It’s now or never. We are running out of time. We must build, and quickly, the unstoppable movement we need to advance and implement our programme. For the world needs our programme—it is that or barbarism.

Here is the crux of the matter. We have developed a programme way, way in advance of the social forces and political groundwork that would have been required to carry it to victory. To be perfectly frank, we simply weren’t ready.

The opportunity in defeat is this. Excluded from power, we are now forced to take the time to do the hard work of building our movement that wasn’t done in the wake of 2017. We must use the coming years in ways that we didn’t use the past two.

Are we ready?

Good to hear @johnmcdonnellMP digging in on some of the strategic challenges we face here (from 16:30 onwards, h/t @KeirMilburn): https://www.facebook.com/ForwardMmtm/videos/314715862865581/