“The Party as a Terrain of Struggle”: The Corbyn Programme and the Horizons of the British Left in the Twenty First Century

This article analyses the Corbyn programme as an “observatory of social relations” between actors from across the British Left. We adopt a conception of party programmes inspired by French political sociology, as the product of the link between organisational spaces, social actors and competing political horizons. This has been done by mobilising a wider, decentred programmatic corpus as well as by analysing interviews with the actors involved. It demonstrates that the programme articulates tensions running through the milieu of Corbynism around different horizons of ownership, of redistribution and of ecological transition. These can be viewed as conjunctural, specific expressions of the tension between the “traditional” and “experimental” conceptions of socialism carried by the different social actors in question: trade unions, social movements and think tanks.