Hello and welcome to another episode of Politics Theory Other, a podcast from Tribune magazine.

Something a little bit different today, the following interview with Jeremy Gilbert

on the defeats of the Corbyn and Sanders projects in the UK and the United States,

was initially released as an episode of PTO Extra, which are shorter bonus episodes,

usually available only to £5 supporters of the show.

The interview with Jeremy was extremely popular and seemed particularly worth sharing

given the current state of the Labour Party and the defeat and demoralisation of the Labour Left.

So part one is now being made publicly available here.

We talked about why in Jeremy's view, it was never very realistic to believe that the new left

was yet ready or capable of taking power and implementing a radical policy agenda.

Jeremy Gilbert is Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London.

He's the editor of the journal New Formations, and his most recent book is 21st century socialism. His writing has

appeared in The Guardian, The New Statesman, Open Democracy, and many other venues. So earlier

today, I was reading an article by James Butler that's just come out in the LRB on the Corbyn

project, and its defeat and the reasons for that, and obviously there have been a lot of

obituaries of the Corbyn moment, the books by Owen Jones and so on, the What's Left book

that has been widely reviewed. But in that review, James says that it's an intellectual vice

on the left, as he puts it, to think that because the world is best understood in terms of

the operation of broad structural

forces, personal qualities are less important. I was struck reading that, because obviously

that seems almost the reverse of the argument you're making in the open democracy piece,

where you are very much focused on those deeper structural forces that caused the defeats of

...