Are The Tories and Blue Labour Neoliberals? - Part 6 of 10

A look at the experience of what happened to Allende's government in Chile, when it tried to do that, shows the recklessness of such demands, without first having ensured, as the Bolsheviks did in 1917, that real power in society, already rested with the working-class, outside parliament, in the form of a network of organs of workers power, in workers councils/soviets, factory committees, workers militia, and so on.

As Trotsky described, in relation to the Chinese Revolution, it was the failure, indeed refusal, of the Stalinists to do that, for fear of frightening their bourgeois allies in the KMT/Popular Front, that resulted in the subsequent coup, and slaughter of the communists, and period of counter-revolution. On an entirely different scale, and in a different context, as I have set out before, the failure of Corbyn and his Stalinist advisors to break with the bourgeois forces inside the Labour Party, and to build the structures to defeat them, instead, simply creating superficial propaganda bodies and events, led to a similar result, and the counter-revolution that has put the reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalists of Blue Labour at the helm. The fact of Starmer's current dogmatic adherence to Brexit, however, seems, ironically, to be a lasting achievement, both of Corbyn's Stalinist advisors, and of Putin, and their endeavours to bring about Brexit!!!

The dogmatic adherence to Brexit by Blue Labour, at first sight, seems impossible to fathom. The Conservative Party, had always been a party, whose membership and core vote was based on the petty-bourgeoisie, even though, until the 1990's, they were always subordinated to the interests of the ruling-class, and had to suck it up, as, until the arrival of UKIP, they had no other viable home for their votes. In reality, UKIP was not even that, then, as it got nowhere in parliamentary elections, and only did well, as with the BNP, in conditions of a low poll, such as in local elections, and the European Parliament elections, where it was, also, aided by the operation of PR. But Labour has never faced that contradiction. It came into existence as a social-democratic party geared to promote the interests of large-scale industrial capital, and the ruling-class, and to limit the horizon of workers to a simply bourgeois-trades union consciousness of bargaining within the system, on the basis of “jam tomorrow”.

That working-class base of the Labour Party has never had any reason to support the reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalism that is the basis of Brexit, and, time and again, it has not done so. Despite the attempts of the likes of the Communist Party and its fellow travellers, in the 1975 Referendum, the vast majority of Labour voters voted to stay in the EEC. The Labour Party itself, had to drop the calls for leaving the EU, after 1987, as the working-class continued to oppose such a reactionary policy. Labour's core vote, and membership has been overwhelmingly opposed to Brexit ever since. In 2016, despite Labour's campaign for a Remain vote, led by Alan Johnson, who disappeared without sight after having been appointed by Corbyn, being almost as lacklustre as that of Cameron, around 60% of those that had voted Labour in 2015, voted Remain.

Following the referendum, and as Corbyn's Labour grew massively in size, attracting in large numbers of young workers, including many enthused for the first time, as well as those that had previously been drawn to the Liberals and Greens, it appeared to offer the only chance of opposing the actual implementation of Brexit. That is shown by the fact that, of those that voted Labour in 2017, an even larger proportion than those that voted Labour in 2015, voted Remain, around 70%. The support for Remain, and for re-joining the EU, is even greater amongst Labour's members, even after the right-wing Blue Labour coup has decimated its membership. Moreover, in 2019, that was even clearer still. As Corbyn, again, slid back towards the old reactionary agenda, in the form of the delusional idea of a “Labour Brexit”, or making Brexit work, all of those young workers that had been drawn to Labour, abandoned it again, in favour of more overtly pro-EU parties, such as the Greens, Liberals, Plaid and SNP.

Even 60% of Labour members, in the local elections and and EU elections, in Spring 2019, voted for these other clearly anti-Brexit parties, creating the conditions for Labour's disaster in the General Election. Of course, the fact that the Labour Right had tried, with all means, to undermine Corbyn, from 2015 on, and used their continued control of the party machine, access to the right-wing media, as well as to large amounts of funding, from various tax havens, and use of the fake, Anti-Semitism panic, which Corbyn capitulated to, once again, played a significant role, in 2019, to that disaster, in a way it did not in 2017. So, the dogged, irrational support for Brexit, now exhibited by Starmer, the main advocate of a second referendum, under Corbyn, seems unfathomable, at first sight.

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