As the election results came in after the polls closed in June, expressions of shock were to be seen not only on the faces of the Tories and press commentators (who had all expected a large Tory win), but also on the faces of the Labour right wing. They had spent months arguing that Jeremy Corbyn and the ideas he stood for were huge vote losers and that a thrashing for Labour was on the cards come a general election. How wrong they all were.

This is the text of an essay presented at the Conference on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Pensamiento Crítico (Critical Thought) magazine which took place in Havana on February 21, 2017. Pensamiento Crítico was a monthly magazine published in Cuba from 1967 until 1971. Edited by Fernando Martínez Heredia (1939-2017), the magazine was part of an open discussion about Marxism within the Cuban revolution, in which many rejected the stale Stalinist approach taken by the Soviet manuals on “marxism-leninism”