In the local elections, there was a clear message. The more Brexity the party, the bigger the losses, the more anti-Brexit the Party, the more gains it made. UKIP, as the most Brexity party got all but wiped out. The Tories lost more than 1300 seats, whilst Labour lost 80. By contrast, the Liberals gained more than 700 seats, and the Greens 200. The anti-Brexit parties picked up not just seats, but also votes. Because, the majority of Brexit voters are Tories – about 80% of Tory voters back Brexit – most of the seats picked up by anti-Brexit parties came from Labour. On average, around 75% of Labour voters back Remain, and even in those constituencies that backed Leave, in the referendum, around 60-65% of Labour voters, back Remain. That is why, with Labour losing votes, and sometimes seats, in those areas, like Stoke, Bolsover, Sunderland and so on, to anti-Brexit parties, they sometimes went backwards compared to the Tories. The message to Labour was clear, change position, come out to clearly oppose Brexit, or suffer a further bleeding of your support to anti-Brexit parties. But, Corbyn has failed to do so, simply continuing with his pro-Brexit agenda.
Its unlikely that Labour's rank and file is now going to rebel and take control in time for the European Parliament elections. The only thing left then is to vote tactically, to vote for whichever anti-Brexit party has best chance of winning in each region. Labour cannot be counted as one of those parties. It would have been better had all the anti-Brexit parties formed a common slate to fight the elections, but they did not. However, Remainunited have created a website to help voters choose the best way of voting tactically in their region. It uses an algorithm and machine learning to take polling data, and calculate which anti-Brexit party has the best chance of winning in each area.
Although the European elections are conducted on the basis of a form of PR, it is not really proportional, because voters only get one vote to use to choose which particular party to vote for, with the parties then choosing which of the candidates on their own slate gets to be elected. It means that a split vote, in each region between the Remain supporting parties could still lose out, compared to if there is a combined vote for one anti-Brexit party, as the comparison of forecast results with and without tactical voting shows. It means that to stop Farage and the other Brexit supporting parties, the best chance for Remainers is to vote SNP in Scotland, Plaid in Wales, and Liberal in all of the English Regions, including London.
In his press conference launching Labour's Manifesto for the European elections, Corbyn came out with the same old, dissembling, disingenuous, vacuous nonsense that he has been spouting for the last two years. Although, nowhere did he state that Labour's position was to back Brexit, nowhere did he come close to saying that Labour's position is to oppose Brexit. Given his position that he wants to “respect” the referendum decision, and given his class collaborationist talks with the Tories for the last five weeks to try to save the Tories Brexit agenda, there can, in fact, be no doubt that Labour's position is pro-Brexit.
Corbyn tried to extend the “constructive ambiguity” tactic by claiming that Labour did not want to side with either the 52% or the 48%, but wanted to unify the nation. That is like Neil Kinnock in 1984, in the midst of the Miners Strike, who tried to argue that Labour was neither on the side of the striking miners, nor the scabs that were undermining the strike, but wanted to bring unity between the two groups, and to restore peace and harmony to all. It is total hogwash. There can be no unifying positions between Remainers and Leavers, because these are two diametrically, and fundamentally opposed positions, reflecting a fundamental contradiction of class interests in society. Remainers represent the class interest of the working-class, as an outward looking, international and progressive class; Leavers represent the class interest of the small private capitalists and their associated social layers, who are inward looking, insular, nationalist and reactionary. There is no possible unification of these two poles, only the victory of one over the other, and the most important battle of our generation is to ensure that the victory of the former is achieved over the latter.
Corbyn's framing of the argument made no sense. He tried to frame the argument in terms of a battle between the interests of the many as against the few, but that framework is rather meaningless in this context. If we look at the class forces lining up behind Brexit and Farage, and the right-wing of the Tory Party, it is not “the few” as Labour has framed the term over the last few years. If by “the few”, we mean the top 0.01%, the big shareholders in multinational companies, and their appointed representatives on company boards, they are not the backers of Brexit, apart from a few mavericks such as the Koch Brothers. Even people like Aaron Banks, are very small fry in this league. No, the super rich are by and large opponents of Brexit. They are supportive of the EU, because it provides the rational basis for the large corporations whose shares they own, to best be able to grow, and make profits. Indeed, its that fact that, in the past, has led Corbyn, and some of his Stalinist backers to oppose the EU, as being a “capitalist club”.
And, of course it is, just as Britain, itself, is a capitalist club. The difference is that the EU is a more developed, more mature, more rational form of capitalist club than is Britain. That is why Marxists defend it as against a reversion to some less mature, less rational form of capitalism, constrained within the nation state. It is why we oppose Brexit. In opposing Brexit, and supporting the EU, “the few”, actually undermine their own, individual immediate self-interests. As Corbyn correctly stated in his speech, you cannot tackle things like tax avoidance by large corporations on a nation state basis. In the 19th century, individual capitalists used whatever means they could to avoid conforming to factory legislation. But, as Marx says, what they required overall was a level playing field, which could only be achieved by the British state imposing a common set of rules, enforced by a centrally employed staff of Factory Inspectors. The same applies with tax avoidance.
When big corporations avoid tax, by a variety of methods, they simply show the extent to which the nation state is redundant. As those corporations repeatedly point out, they avoid tax precisely because the individual nation states do not, and cannot, construct their tax codes in such a way that deals with the reality of global production and distribution. The corporations act within the limits of the tax code of each nation state, and play each nation state off, one against another, so as to get concessions and inducements. The answer to that, as with the introduction of effective factory legislation, and its enforcement, in the 19th century, is to have those tax laws, and their enforcement under the jurisdiction of a larger body, such as the EU. By opposing Brexit, and supporting the EU, each of those large corporations, and their main shareholders, essentially undermine their own individual self-interest, to be able to avoid tax. But, that shows just how marginal that issue really is, in the grand scheme of things, to those companies, just as, in the end, as Engels points out, the introduction of factory legislation and so on, was marginal to the interests of the big industrial capitals in the 19th century. Far more important to these big capitals is the single market, and the ability to have the framework that the EU provides for making large profits, and accumulating capital, than the ability to avoid paying a few million pounds in tax.
The fact that the EU is in the interests of these large multinational corporations is not in itself an argument against it, or an argument that it is in some way against the interests of the working-class. As Engels pointed out, when the large industrial capitals embraced the idea of factory legislation, of limitations on working hours, and even the acceptance of trades unions, it acted to enhance their advantages over the small private capitalists, who relied on all of those previous penny-pinching means of getting the last ounce of surplus value from their workers. All those measures embraced by the large industrial capitalists gave them an advantage over their smaller brethren, and facilitated a more rapid centralisation and concentration of capital. But, just because those measures benefited the big capitals against the small capitals did not mean that they were in some way against the interests of workers, who thereby gained a shorter working-day, better working conditions and so on.
Corbyn said that the question should not be framed in terms of Leave or Remain, but in terms of what kind of society we want to create. He went on to correctly set out that, it was not the EU that had devastated old industrial towns across Britain, but Thatcher's government, in the 1980's; it was not the EU that created the housing crisis in Britain, but again Thatcher who sold off council houses, blocked councils from building more of them, and which, through financial deregulation, sparked an asset price bubble that pushed house prices way beyond what most new house buyers could afford. He went on to say that its not immigrants that created low wages and poor working conditions, but British bosses – he could have added that the worst offenders are again all those smaller companies that rely on cheap labour, and which are the real backers of Brexit, as they expect to be able to pull in even cheaper labour from outside the EU, without any of the current EU regulations.
All of that is true, but is precisely why the question of what kind of society we want to live in cannot be addressed without simultaneously addressing the question of Brexit. The real point here is not a question that divides into one of the many against the few. If we take all of those bosses that impose low wages, poor conditions, that bring in foreign workers, sometimes as illegal immigrants, its generally not the larger businesses, but the small businesses that rely on such labour, and on paying low wages and providing poor conditions. Its those small capitalists that are the backbone of the Tory Party, and its outrider in the Brexit Party. Those small private capitalists, that range up from the window cleaner, to the market trader, to the back street garage owner, or the backstreet sweatshop, up through the small engineering works owner are certainly not as numerous as the working-class, yet they can in no sense be described as “the few”.
There are around 5 million of these small firms in Britain, which when their owners and their families and retainers are taken into consideration, amounts to around 12-15 million people. They are not just the backbone of the Tory Party/Brexit Party, but also the core of the Brexit vote. There can be no common ground or unity with such elements, and the working-class, precisely because they represent the most reactionary segment of the ruling class. They have to be defeated. Stopping Brexit is the first skirmish in that great class battle.
It is vital that we turn out the largest anti-Brexit vote on May 23rd, and that we ensure via tactical voting that we maximise the number of clear anti-Brexit MEP's are elected. But, then we must tackle the issue of democracy within the Labour Party that has left us in this position whereby the leadership have ignored the wishes of 90% of party members, and 75% of Labour voters, to push through its own pro-Brexit agenda. Again, we have had parliamentary candidates foisted on us from above, and no real democratic say in the formulation of the Manifesto. Its time for the party rank and file to hold the leadership to account. For annual mandatory election of the Party Leader and Deputy Leader, and the Shadow Cabinet; for mandatory reselection of MP's as a starting point.
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