Lenin’s excitement at his rediscovery of Hegel as he grappled for meaning at the great turning point in international socialist politics in the autumn of 1914 finds its echo on the left of the British labor movement in the extraordinary summer 101 years later.

The election of Jeremy Corbyn, the most left-wing socialist and consistent anti-imperialist in the House of Commons, as leader of the Labour Party and therefore of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, is a break in gradualness on a grand scale. Despite having the support of fewer than 10 percent of the party’s members of parliament, he secured a quarter of a million votes (nearly 60 percent) in the election, winning nearly half of the first preferences of the party’s individual membership in the transferrable-vote ballot.

That party membership is now nearly twice the size it was at the general election in May, with around sixty thousand people joining in the week following Corbyn’s victory on a platform of opposition to austerity economics, foreign wars, welfare cuts, and nuclear weaponry.