Make no mistake; Boris Johnson has organised a coup. Those who claim that it isn't, that it is fully in accordance with parliamentary procedure are simply lying. Disgracefully, its not just Johnson's right wing Tory cronies that have been doing that. It extends to the Stalinists of the Communist Party, and other Brextremists on the reactionary Left that have formed a Red-Brown coalition to try to force through the reactionary Brexit agenda. To claim that it isn't a coup, because prorogation is a normal constitutional procedure, is simply sophistry and semantics. Its like saying that parliamentary sovereignty means that if it could get a majority, a government could legally legislate to make itself permanent, and cancel all future elections. Just because a coup is carried out by using constitutional means to achieve it does not mean its not a coup! If anything it simply proves how cretinous it is to rely on parliament or constitutions to defend liberty or democracy. It especially illustrates the weakness of the British constitution, which is long overdue being overhauled.
For one thing, the unwritten nature of that constitution means that it is wide open to abuse by an authoritarian government, like this one. For another, it highlights the thoroughly undemocratic and pointless role of the Monarch within that constitution. We are told that the Queen could not have done other than to accept the government's advice to prorogue parliament, even though its clear a majority of parliament itself is opposed to it. But, if the Queen simply has to do whatever the government tells her to do, what use is she? We could have a trained chimp to do that, and in place of the hundreds of millions of Pounds that the Monarchy costs us, the chimp would be happy with a few bananas!
In the US, Libertarians have long since raised the idea that only those who pay taxes should get the vote, reversing the mantra of “No taxation without representation”, and they have suggested that electors should get votes proportional to the amount of tax they pay, in a similar way to the number of votes that shareholders get on company boards is proportional to the number of shares they own. If a Tory government, under the control of its extreme right-wing, were to implement such legislation, here, would anyone be fooled by the argument that, because it was passed by a majority of MP's, it was, thereby, constitutional? It would take us back to the kind of situation prior to the 1832 Reform Act, when only those who owned a sizeable amount of property got the right to vote. The response to that situation was not to rely on parliamentary manoeuvre, but was widespread social action, such as that which occurred at Peterloo 200 years ago last month.
In the next week, parliamentarians and the media will be pouring over all of the different manoeuvres and strategies that MP's might be able to take to either prevent a No Deal Brexit, despite the prorogation, as against those the government might use to counter those strategies. It will be treated as though its some kind of important football match, with the strengths and weaknesses of each team being assessed. A lot of focus of the Labour Party is also going into these manoeuvres and strategies. Marxists have a name for that. Its called parliamentary cretinism. The truth is this is not a football match; its about peoples lives and freedom. When someone is pointing a gun at you, you do not discuss the Marquis of Queensberry Rules with them, you pull out your own bigger gun. When your political opponent organises a coup, you do not focus your attention on the niceties of parliamentary and constitutional procedure, you mobilise your own extra-parliamentary forces to defeat their coup.
The first response of the labour movement to Johnson's coup should have been to call for an indefinite General Strike. We have seen hundreds of thousands of people already, more or less spontaneously, mobilising on the streets to oppose Johnson's coup. That is good, but it is disgraceful that the Labour Party Leadership and TUC have not been the ones using all of their resources to call for and organise those mobilisations. Moreover, experience tells us that simply protesting on the streets is largely ineffective. Two million marched against the Iraq War, but it went ahead. Even more marched to oppose Brexit, but Johnson has been even more determined to push ahead with it than May. The Gilets Jaunes protested every weekend for months, but without effect, and the same is likely to be true for the protesters in Hong Kong. Such protests are a means for mobilising forces, for raising morale, but little else. To be effective those mobilised have to take the struggle to a higher political level.
We need demands now, for the Labour leaders and the TUC to call an indefinite General Strike to stop the coup. That in itself will require large scale organisation, because as I wrote recently, in such a General Strike, we will need to keep emergency services functioning, which means that we will need to institute workers control over the necessary workplaces to keep them functioning; we will need to create democratic workplace committees to organise that workers control and so on. But, under these conditions, with the Brextremists having already enthused and mobilised fascists and ultra nationalists, we will need to organise defence of such strikes and workplaces against attacks by those fascist and nationalist thugs. We will need to create Workers Defence Squads, and a Workers Militia. We saw in Glasgow this weekend that those fascist and nationalist thugs have already started to organise and take to the streets as they attacked a peaceful march by the James Connolly society for Irish Unity. It is a foretaste of the way the ultra nationalists will begin to try to close down any opposition, as the effects of Brexit begin to be felt. Johnson's coup is not a one off accidental event; it is part of a wider strategy of ultra nationalism that the theorists of that ideology like Steve Bannon have been developing for some time, and it will not at all be confined to the parliamentary arena, as the mobilisation of white nationalists, and ultras in the US has demonstrated.
In this struggle, the Labour Party and wider labour movement cannot allow themselves to be limited by the bourgeois democratic constitutionalism of the Liberals, Greens, let alone the Tory Remainers. If the choice is between Labour supporting a Government of National Unity led by Ken Clarke, or some Blair-right MP, or a No Deal Brexit, then Labour should choose the latter. The Liberals and rebel Tories have the choice of giving support to a Corbyn caretaker Labour government or they have nothing. For Labour's 267 MP's, and its 500,000 members to allow the Liberals to impose on them someone other than Corbyn as its Leader, and as PM is a non-starter. It would be equivalent of allowing them to organise a coup within the Labour Party itself. If the Liberals and rebel Tories cannot accept a Labour government led by Corbyn, then they will have to take responsibility for their actions in allowing a No Deal Brexit to happen.
In the meantime, with Labour and the TUC organising a General Strike to stop the coup, and with workers taking control of workplaces, the issue of a No Deal Brexit will itself become rather a side issue. One of the first things to organise would be for the action of British workers to be supported by our EU comrades. If the Tories continued to press ahead with their No Deal Brexit, the chaos resulting from that would be clear for all to see. Labour could commit to passing retrospective legislation to reverse Brexit, and with the chaos of Brexit leading to even greater social unrest, Johnson's Bonapartist regime could not last more than a couple of weeks. When, in 1974, following a few weeks of the Miners Strike, Ted Heath called a General Election on the slogan of “Who rules?”, the electors came back and said “Not you mate!”, and Johnson would get an even more emphatic rejection.
A radical, progressive Labour government having thrown the Bonapartist Johnson out of office, and having mobilised support for its actions from millions of EU workers, would be in a good place to not only rejoin the EU, but to do so on the basis of continuing to mobilise, with other socialists across the EU, to also reject the conservative policy of austerity that has blighted hundreds of millions of lives for the last ten years. It would be in a good position to organise to radically reform the EU itself, throwing out the conservative-social democratic (neoliberal) aspects of the Lisbon Treaty, and replacing them with progressive social-democratic principles based upon an extension of planning and regulation, and of industrial democracy; for the creation of a European State as the basis of solidarity and cooperation across the continent.
Labour and the TUC should organise now, on the basis of an indefinite General Strike to stop the coup; and for Labour to commit to revoking Article 50, as soon as it takes office.
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