Searching for Socialism: The Project of the Labour New Left from Benn to Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn’s rapid ascent to the leadership of the Labour Party, driven by a groundswell of popular support particularly among the young, was met at the time by a baffled media. Just where did Jeremy Corbyn come from? In Searching for Socialism, Leo Panitch and Colin Leys argue that it is only by understanding Corbyn’s roots in the Bennite Labour New Left’s long struggle to transcend the limits of ‘parliamentary socialism’ and democratise the party, as a precondition for democratising the state, can you understand his surge to become leader of the party.

Offering a lucid and gripping history of the Labour New Left from its origins in the inter-party struggles of the 1960s until today, Panitch and Leys show how the defeat of that project paved the way for the embrace of neoliberalism under New Labour, but also how new political forces came to coalesce for a renewed socialist political mobilisation in the twenty-first century.