Slithery Starmer and Stalin

I chanced upon this Youtube video from “Not The Andrew Marr Show”, the other day, and was struck, in the section of it showing the slithery nature of Starmer, in his attempt to blame the Uxbridge By-Election defeat on Sadiq Khan, and ULEZ, a policy he was shown to have previously endorsed and encouraged, with the approach of Stalin, as described by Trotsky in relation to The Chinese Revolution. The other similarity, was the way Stalin, and Stalinism engendered a series of political clones, in the same way that Starmer is doing inside the Labour Party.

The similarities can be summarised as:

1. Public pronouncements by the Leader are phrased in vague terms so that, later, they can be reinterpreted.
   
   
2. Internal discussions, and requirements place responsibility on local representatives to carry out decisions, meaning, when they go wrong, the Leaders can deny blame, and use the local representatives as scapegoats.
   
   
3. The Leaders can publicly make 180 degree turns in position without justifying themselves, but again phrased in vague terms, ready to repeat the exercise.
   
   
4. The leaders, must always, never lead, but always tail public opinion, meaning they adopt positions after the event, including when that means that public opinion and events has, then, left them behind.

In China, after the betrayal of the revolution, by Stalin, had led to defeat and demoralisation, for lack of leadership, and support of the rising revolutionary wave, and, instead, had opposed the creation of soviets, arming of the workers, and so on, and, instead, subordinated them to the Popular Front and the KMT, the Stalinists publicly spoke out against “adventurism”, i.e., against the organisation of further coups and military attacks by groups of workers and poor peasants. However, in the internal discussions, and directions sent to local Communist Party officials, the pressure was precisely for such adventurist activities to be organised, partly as a means of diverting attention from the discussion of the betrayals and failures of the Stalinist leadership, being exposed by the Left Opposition.

It meant that, when these adventures occurred, the Stalinist press could report them without comment, leaving them free to take credit for any success, but also, to point to its vague public pronouncements, when they invariably went wrong, and to simply blame the instruments of the policy, at local level, rather than the leadership itself. All of that can be seen in the way Starmer now operates in the LP.

(See: “A Remarkable Document On The Policy and Regime of The Communist International”)