One of the intellectual mentors of Corbynism, the late Leo Panitch, concluded his final book with the hopeful observation that the 2019 election defeat concealed a substantial rejuvenation of socialism in Britain: the fruit of a unique generational collaboration between the Labour left formed in the 1970s, and a new one that would carry the project forward.

How’s that going? Obituaries for the Labour left, whether its boomer or millennial strands, are, sadly, low-hanging fruit at this point. No match for the former director of public prosecutions Sir Keir Starmer and his right-wing coup, veteran leftist figureheads Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott are suspended from the party, sitting left-wing officials at all levels of government are routinely vanished from their candidacies on any formal pretext, and the Labour Party machinery has been reconfigured to make further growth of the Labour left — let alone a left-wing leader — impossible.

Worse, as I have complained before in Jacobin and beyond, what political propositions the Labour left and broader “Corbyn” ecosystem have managed to come up with in defeat have tended toward anti-political technocracy and are — to put it kindly — far from equal to the times. Things seem impossible. Yet recent events should act as a reminder that we’ve done impossible things before. Two such impossibilities occurred within the first year of “Corbynism,” and I propose that returning to their lessons presents a way out of the current deadlock.