I warned several years ago that Britain was heading towards Bonapartism, and that Boris Johnson would be its figurehead. With his decision to close down parliament we have arrived at the point of the attempted Bonapartist coup. Labour and the TUC should unite to call an indefinite General Strike to stop the coup.
It shows that what I wrote yesterday didn't take long to be vindicated. All of the parliamentary cretinism, of manoeuvres to take control of the Order Paper, and so on, which were only a means of the Liberals trying to avoid backing Corbyn, were doomed to fail at this late stage. The only sure way of stopping a No Deal Brexit, now, is to bring down Johnson's Bonapartist regime. The legal parliamentary means of doing that is via a vote of No Confidence in the government, which not only the Liberals, but all of those Tory MP's who claim to support parliamentary democracy, would have to support. But, Johnson, and his advisor Dominic Cummings have already intimated in typical Bonapartist fashion that they would not necessarily take any heed of such a no confidence vote. It will need to be backed up by mass extra-parliamentary action, including a General Strike to defend bourgeois democracy against tyranny.
A no confidence vote, backed by mass extra-parliamentary action by the working-class, must force Johnson're regime out of office, and install Corbyn as caretaker Prime Minister. Corbyn's fist act must then be to Revoke Article 50. The next act should be to call a General Election. Labour should fight that election on a clear programme of keeping Britain in the EU, and of joining forces with the working-class, socialists and progressive social-democrats across the EU for a radical programme of reform of the EU, and of ending austerity, and implementing a programme or progressive social democracy, starting with a political struggle to extend democracy into the workplace, removing shareholders from Boards of Directors, and replacing them with elected workers directors; it should ensure that there is democratic working-class control over the trillions of Euros contained in workers pension funds across the EU, so that those funds can be used to make investments in real capital, rather than being used only to finance speculation, as they are currently; we should scrap the measures of austerity, and get the EU Council of Ministers, backed by the Parliament to introduce a programme of massive infrastructure spending across the EU, and to finance it by the issuing of EU bonds.
Labour must also make it clear that even if Johnson does push through his No Deal Brexit by this coup, it will not be the end of the matter. A No Deal Brexit will bring economic and social chaos that is bound to flow over into the streets, as the police and security services have already warned. The Labour Party and TUC should be making preparations to create create workers defence squads and a democratically controlled workers militia to protect workers from attacks either by the forces of a tyrannical state attempting to quell dissent, or from the forces of fascism that Brexit is unleashing.
Labour should also be holding talks with the EU to ensure that when Johnson's Bonapartist regime falls, a new government will be able to reverse Brexit. In the past, the EU has literally stopped the clock. Labour should ask the EU to again stop the clock on the October 31st deadline. Then a Labour government when it comes into office can simply pass retrospective legislation to revoke Article 50. Parliament does not like passing retrospective legislation, but these are not normal times. If Johnson wants to flout democracy with his coup to push through a No Deal Brexit, then Labour must be prepared to fight fire with fire, and itself be prepared to adopt unorthodox measures to reverse it.
Stop Johnson's Bonapartist Coup - A General Strike to Defend Democracy - Corbyn Into Downing Street Now - Revoke Article 50
No comments:
Post a Comment