At the start of the year, I predicted that Labour would split. Paul Mason, whose Popular Front strategy for building a broad Left Alliance, inside Labour, I have been discussing in recent weeks, rightly argued against the Left leaving the Party, but rather naively argued that we could somehow build this alliance behind Starmer, against the Right.
But, as I have argued Starmer is the stalking horse of the Right, just as Kinnock was their stalking horse in he 1980's. The left cannot build an alliance behind him, because the Right have already done so, supported by the big battallions of the bourgeois media, and the right-wing bureaucratic establishment of the Labour movement itself. Starmer victory was the equivalent of the defeat of the Paris Commune, and what is happening since is the equivalent of the blood letting that followed it. No one can be in any doubt that Corbyn's suspension was done with Starmer's prior approval. He is not even being suspended for anything actually contained in the EHRC report, but merely for exercising his democratic right, of free speech to voice his disagreement with its findings. If anyone should be suspended its those who now want to deprive Labour Party members of that basis bourgeois-democratic right of free speech, just as they have been rushing to back Boris Johnson's own limitation of individual freedoms!
Paul Mason said that members of the Left should not be goaded into leaving. He is right, but this suspension of Corbyn is clearly a provocation by the Right, with Starmer at their head, trying to get the Left to leave the party so as to clear the ground for the Right to take over once more. It is the equivalent of the witchhunts of the 1980's. Then the Left made the mistake of leaving the Party. The Militant claimed they were all expelled, but they were not. The vast majority of their members could have stayed and fought.
We should not make the same mistake again. On the contrary, its necessary to respond by drawing in even more Left activists, to ensure that the half million new members who joined because of Corbyn learn the lessons of the last five years, including the lessons of Corbyn's own failures, to have democratised the party. We should respond to the provocation by doubling down on our efforts to democratise the party, to hold he Right and soft left to account, because "We are many, they are few". But, they have all of the machinery of the bourgeois media and state behind them, including the forces responsible for producing the EHRC Report, an unforgiveable intrusion of the bourgeoisie into the affairs of the workers organisations.
We can see where this process is leading by all those comments from the scabs that did abandon Labour to form the TIG's, and so on, whose purpose was to enable the Tories to win the last election, just as they attempted to do in 2017. As I said in response to Paul Mason weeks ago, the left cannot form an alliance behind Starmer, because Starmer represents a huge defeat for the Left, he is merely preparation for a Rightist restoration.
2 comments:
I'm not sure what Marxism your perspective is based on, it ain't Karl. Your piece here fails in so many ways, to do what Rosa and other comrades have done over decades: analyse self-critical where we are and state very clearly what we need to do the begin winning the struggle for socialism (as a stage in the process to communism, but that is way off). Militant, which you mention uncritically, were a sectarian 'socialism in one city' group of racist fools, the most prominent of which ran off to develop Spanish golf courses in his BMW (fucking Nazis) after causing mayhem in his home city, where we had to suffer the consequences. My own stepmother was a (Militant supporting) Labour councillor, now sitting by her pool in Capetown. The miners strike was a glorious defeat, rather than a crime against the working class led by another sectarian idiot (and probably MI6 plant) Scargill. Yes of course Thatcher, Johnson et al are nasty. We know that. The point is to defeat them, not give into them (apologise for antisemitism - They won that battle so easily, God knows how the Labour left would cope with the onslaught against a Corbyn government, Seamus would have crapped himself). Etc ...
I'm Jewish. I left the Labour Party back in June after being readmitted after being suspended for antisemitism. I had joined in the first place to support Corbyn's 2nd leadership bid. The allegations against me were 100% a pack of lies. The letter containing those lies was signed off by Jennie Formby under a system designed by her and other Corbynistas including Corbyn himself. And there's the rub. When leftists left in large numbers during the Militant expulsions, the left had yet to take the leadership and so many mistakenly thought they were preempting a purge. But now the left has had a leader of its choosing and it has been a disaster. Corbyn (and various leading leftists) began his betrayals immediately and not just with regard to the antisemitism smear campaign. In 2015 Corbyn told leftists in local government not to resist cuts. I think he supported immigration controls early on too. In 2016 he was elected leader again and took the opportunity to speak *against* open selection. Capiche? He was against the selection of MPs that would actually support him. And you've only to look at the leaked Labour report to see the extent of his betrayals of comrades and friends victimised by the antisemitism smears. It was Corbyn's own betrayals that brought precisely to where we are now. So what's left? The left has left nothing left to build on.
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