So, returning to the lazy argument of Comrade Douglass, what difference does it make that on the side of “Leave”, in the 2016 Referendum, were the Stalinoid, “Traditional left leaders of unions and the Labour left”, whilst on the other side, the side of “Remain”, were “the whole of the establishment - from the Confederation of British Industry to the leaders of all three political parties, the heads of the armed forces, the police, the EU, the International Monetary Fund... Nato, the US president, etc.”?
If we ask, rather, the question, which of these two sides, if any, represented progressive development, as against reactionary regression, which was how Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky approached matters, then, the answer is clear. It is the latter, the forces seeking to remove the restrictions on further development of capital, the restrictions on free movement, and creation of ever larger single markets, the free movement of labour, and potential to break down the outmoded national borders that separate workers in one country from those in another.
Just as it was the industrial bourgeoisie, in the 19th century that represented progress, as against the old landed aristocracy, and its allies amongst the commercial bourgeoisie, and financial oligarchy, who sought a continuation of their equivalent of Brexit – The Corn Laws and the system of protective tariffs – so, too, today, it is the representatives of large-scale, monopoly capitalism/imperialism that represent progress, as against the sections of backward, small scale capital and the petty-bourgeoisie. That sections of the labour movement have decided to back the wrong horse, just as they have for the last century, is simply an indication of their own idiocy, an idiocy that has taken the cause of the working-class backwards rather than forwards.
In the 19th century, the leading role was still played by the industrial bourgeoisie that drew the working-class behind it, leading, after the defeat of Chartism, to the advanced workers seeking their political advance via the party of the industrial bourgeoisie, The Liberal Party. But, as Marx sets out in his Address of 1850 to the Central Committee of the Communist League, that situation was coming to an end, because, as the workers became the largest class in society, became organised, and became increasingly conscious of their own class interests, so too, in proportion, they would be forced into taking the leading role themselves, a dynamic of permanent revolution, and meaning that, in equal proportion, the bourgeoisie would become reluctant to mobilise that working-class, even to pursue its own ends, and would, instead, always pull back, compromise, and ally itself with its own class enemies against the workers. That reality was understood by Trotsky, as set out in the theory of permanent revolution, and in practice by Lenin, as set out in The April Theses, and Letters On Tactics.
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