O, Jeremy Corbyn posted by Richard Seymour

A brief round up of my writings about the general election outcome -- the result of which, as bantering-left social media knows, is that Jeremy Corbyn is actually, really, the Prime Minister.

My first reaction piece was for Novara, in which I pronounced with a certain awe that we now live "in a different country -- one which we didn't know existed". In a longer react piece, I reflected in more detail on the changes and on the limitations facing the Left even as it has taken a giant leap forward.

For TLS, I wrote about how Corbyn had, as some wag put it, smashed the Overton window, totally changing our sense of the possibilities. Such that, frankly, we're looking at the chance of a big popular sweep, a left-wing Labour government elected on the back of broad radicalisation, 1945-style.

For Prospect, I wrote of the challenges that would face a Labour government without an organised and critical activist movement behind it.

There were also a couple of things on my Patreon. Here, I look with stunned delight at the meme wherein young people at clubs, discos and sporting events are chanting, "Oh, Jeremy Corbyn" to the tune of 'Seven Nation Army' by The White Stripes. Here, I revisit my previous view that the national question would be decisive in reshaping the electoral terrain, something on which I was decisively (gladly) wrong.

And, of course, I contributed to the Salvage editorial qualifying our hard-won pessimism for the first time, courtesy of the Absolute Boy.

I have to say that over the last year, my guesses have been confounded more often than they have been confirmed. I expected the Front national to come close to winning in France; Le Pen got far too big a vote, but lower than polls expected. I did not expect Brexit to win, and when it won, I expected it to play a big role in any general election, which it simply didn't. At first, I expected Corbyn's Labour to push only slightly above Miliband's polling, at best; at my most optimistic, I privately allowed the possibility of a win, but would only chance a guess at 36-7% with a loss of seats in public. That necessarily calls for a re-evaluation of some of my assumptions.