Corbynmania Sweeps Britain

On September 12, Jeremy Corbyn, longtime left-wing Member of Parliament (MP) from Islington North (London), was resoundingly elected as head of the British Labour Party. He won hands down on the first ballot, with nearly 60 percent of the vote. After a summer of predicting apocalyptic disaster should Corbyn win, with swarms of immigrants overrunning the sceptred isle and the economy collapsing as bankers fled the City of London, still the British ruling class almost universally fell into shock at his incontestable victory. In contrast, there was euphoria among many trade unionists and tens of thousands of young people who had flocked to the party in hopes of turning out the vile “New Labour” crowd of acolytes of the hated Tony Blair.

Leftist activists were ecstatic when Corbyn, chairman of the Stop the War Coalition and now Labour Leader, left the convention hall where the vote results were announced and headed to a Refugees Welcome Here march. In Parliament Square he mounted the platform, gave a brief speech and together with singer Billy Bragg belted out the Labour anthem, The Red Flag (“The people’s flag is deepest red, it shrouded oft our martyred dead”). They were even more enthused two days later when at a veterans’ commemoration of the Battle of Britain, Corbyn, a republican opponent of the monarchy, refused to sing the national anthem, God Save the Queen. The bourgeois media and right-wing Labour MPs, on the other hand, were aghast at the “insult.”

All week long, the press kept up a deafening drumbeat of anti-Corbyn mudslinging and red-baiting scare stories: “Unions threaten chaos after Corbyn win” (Daily Telegraph); “Corbyn union pals pledge strike chaos” (Daily Mail); “Why Labour’s Corbyn is a danger to Britain” (Daily Express); “Corbyn rocked by cabinet chaos” (London Evening Standard); “Corb snubs the Queen” (Sun). While the tabloids were having a field day, the proper Times of London dug up the old revelation of a “hot affair” between Corbyn and Diane Abbott (a black Labour left spokewoman who is now his shadow minister of development) that ended during a motorbike tour of East Germany in the 1970s (“The motorcycle diaries”). Even his wardrobe came in for ridicule (“50 shades of beige”).

The frenzied assault on Corbyn began well before his election. It has been spearheaded not only by the hysterical Tory press but also by Blair himself and his formidable New Labour machine – which includes the vast majority of Labour members of parliament. Barely 20 out of 232 sitting MPs actually supported the new party Leader in his campaign, and even as Corbyn and his allies occupy the front bench as the official Opposition in the House of Commons, his “shadow cabinet” is far from uniformly left-wing. Corbyn has been Labour’s most intransigently leftist MP, defying the party whip in more than 500 votes – especially during Blair’s tenure as prime minister (1997–2007) – and will have a hard time calling the Blairites to order.

The vote for a new Leader came because the New Labour party that Blair made crashed and burned in the May 2015 elections. Its mildly left-wing leader Ed Miliband resigned. Workers were clearly fed up with a Tory-like party, led by money-grubbing careerists and austerity-mongering technocrats. As such Labour had little chance of defeating the real Tories. Enough traditional Labour voters stayed home or switched their allegiance to give David Cameron’s Conservatives a comfortable majority. In Scotland, which has been solidly Labour for generations, enough voters switched to the bourgeois Scottish National Party (SNP) to elect 56 of Scotland’s 59 MPs from that party, wiping out Labour’s hefty contingent of Scottish MPs.

Thus the leadership vote was an elemental expression of outrage at what the Labour Party has become. Tony Blair is a certified warmonger, reviled as (George W.) “Bush’s poodle” for his tail-wagging support for the U.S.’ 2003 invasion of Iraq, supported by the “dodgy dossier” of “sexed-up” (doctored) intelligence purporting to document Saddam Hussein’s non-existent arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher regarded New Labour as her greatest achievement. Blair embraced her “TINA” doctrine – that There Is No Alternative to free-market capitalism – and continued her dismantling of remnants of the social-democratic “welfare state” institutions previous Labour governments had built up.

The Corbyn revolt threatens to resurrect and revitalize the trade union-centered reformist party that Blair worked so hard to destroy. He sought to turn Labour from what Russian revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin termed a “bourgeois workers party,” with its working-class base and a pro-capitalist leadership, into a straight-out bourgeois party, much as the once formidable Italian Communist Party was transmogrified into today’s Democratic Party. Blair dismisses Corbynistas as living in an “Alice in Wonderland world, this parallel reality” (Guardian, 29 August) as he conspires with other leaders of British imperialism to force Labour to dump its new leader, pronto. But the Blairites have just suffered a huge setback.

Supporting Corbyn is a renewed Labour left wing, comprised of trade unionists, students, jobless youth, and black and Asian minorities. Many were participants in the mass protests against the endless Tory/Labour austerity cuts. They see Corbyn as their candidate, and several hundred thousand signed up to vote for him. Tens of thousands of new trade-union Labour Party members were enrolled; many more voters signed up as supporters – a new category permitted by a rule change in 2014, requiring only a £3 (US$5) registration fee. This really stuck in the craw of the rightists, since they had engineered that rule expressly to further dilute the power of the unions in the party.

Now the British left has been seized by “Corbynmania,” attracting a whole layer of people new to politics and extending to almost the entire panoply of socialist and ostensibly Marxist groups, including a number who mistakenly see themselves as supporters of Leon Trotsky. Jeremy Corbyn is by all accounts a decent and fairly principled social democrat, although under tremendous pressure as Labour Leader he is now setting aside some key positions (such as opposition to NATO). He has supported Palestinian rights and opposed U.S./British wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yugoslavia in the 1990s. He courageously voted, according to a count by The Times, against 13 counterterrorism bills. But he is still a committed reformist.

No Return to “Welfare State” Capitalism

Corbyn’s election as Labour Party leader has been described as an “earthquake” and even a “revolution” in British politics, which shows how insipid mainstream political life has been for years and why so many are turned off by it. While it has clearly shaken up the establishment and the scribbling classes in the press, it is basically a return to the social-democratic Labour Left of previous decades led by Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone. And while “red Ken” managed to get elected mayor of London as an independent over Blair’s opposition, this supposed “hard left” never could and never would be able to transform Labour into a socialist party. As Ralph Miliband (father of Ed) noted in the first sentence of his book Parliamentary Socialism (1961):

“Of political parties claiming socialism to be their aim, the Labour Party has always been one of the most dogmatic – not about socialism, but about the parliamentary system.”

From its inception as the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, the Labour Party has been a mainstay of British capitalism. Labour served in the government in both imperialist world wars and was a key component of the anti-Soviet Cold War beginning in the late 1940s. Even the most prominent Lefts, like Aneurin Bevan after WWII, were kept at a safe distance from the center of power. And while Corbyn is the first leftist to be elected Labour Party leader over the objections of the parliamentary party, he will serve the same function today of bringing potential radicals into the Labour Party with illusions about eventually pushing the party to the left.

Over the course of his political career, Corbyn has exemplified the values of the Labour left, extolling as an extensive program of capitalist reforms – a strong national health service, nationalized transport and utilities, union rights, equal pay for women, and social welfare supports. He was a campaigner for and protégé of Benn, the Labour left’s iconic leader who died last year. Corbyn has been a longtime columnist for the Morning Star, the now unofficial mouthpiece for the staid Communist Party. He has campaigned for gay liberation and in defense of the Irish victims of British imperialism. In addition to chairing the Anti-War Coalition, he is a member of the pacifist Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

In some ways, Corbyn has taken stands to the left of his mentor Benn, who supported British occupation of Northern Ireland and restrictions on immigration. But the reforms that Corbyn seeks are the same that the Labour lefts have extolled for decades, and in some cases well to the right of them. The centerpiece of his economic program (“The Economy in 2020,” 22 July) is the call for “people’s quantitative easing.” In other words, the Bank of England (like the U.S. Federal Reserve) would keep on creating money but instead of sitting in the coffers of the commercial banks, it would upgrade deteriorating infrastructure and go to a national investment bank to invest in hi-tech industries. Nothing the least bit “anti-capitalist” about that. 

Meanwhile, the more radical-sounding stances are rapidly being watered down. Corbyn’s call for renationalizing the railways, which has 70% support in the opinion polls, including a majority among Tory voters, has been reduced to restoring state ownership as franchises expire, no earlier than 2020. “Renationalizing” energy companies would be by the government purchasing a majority of shares. In the past, Corbyn’s shadow chancellor of the exchequer (the equivalent of the U.S. treasury secretary) John McDonnell has called for nationalizing the banks. At most they are now talking of undoing the privatization of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) Group. As we have insisted, nationalizing such failing banks is a decidedly pro­-capitalist measure, but it will take nothing less than workers revolution to wrest control of the City of London “investment banks,” the key center after Wall Street of finance capital. 

At bottom, Jeremy Corbyn has embraced the same populist program of a return from “neo-liberalism” to the Keynesian economics of yesteryear advocated by “theoreticians” like Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century), who is now a McDonnell advisor,and bourgeois parties and politicians like SYRIZA in Greece or Democrat Bernie Sanders in the U.S. Unlike the latter two, Labour is still a workers party, and under certain circumstances one might give critical support to it or candidates like Corbyn, to expose the bankruptcy of their reformist politics. Yet decaying capitalism will not tolerate the concessions it reluctantly granted in the past to stave off the “Communist threat.” There will be no second coming of the welfare state.

Across the planet, ever since the onset of the world capitalist economic crisis in 2007-08 which continues to this day with massive unemployment, falling wages and stagnant production, there has been an upsurge of interest in radical politics. But if “neoliberalism” is past its heyday, it is still enjoying a profitable afterlife, as banks continue to rake in stratospheric profits (and bankers wallow in obscene bonuses) while even highly educated youth toil at minimum wages or are unable to find any job at all. The stark fact is that every single struggle against austerity and attacks on social benefits, from North Africa to northern Europe, has been defeated. The central reason is the absence of a truly revolutionary leadership.

That means a leadership with the program and determination to fight for socialist revolution, not in the sweet bye-and-bye but as the goal and ultimate outcome of today’s struggles, which is what Trotsky’s Transitional Program is all about. It is vital to reach out to the new layers energized by Corbyn’s victory in the Labour leadership vote, with their will to struggle and their rejection of politics as usual. It’s necessary to be attentive should possibilities open up within the Labour Party, but this will centrally involve intersecting them in struggle. Opportunities will soon arise, as showdowns loom over the Trident nuclear missiles, a vote on extending bombing to Syria and the trade-union bill now before Parliament. Key in every case is mobilizing workers’ power.

The sudden rise of the Labour lefts has already galvanized hundreds of thousands, and it could arouse many more in the fight against the Tory and Blairite imperialists and their hangers on. Yet this also creates new illusions in the arch-reformist pro-capitalist Labour Party that had largely dissipated. Whoever thought that Blair’s New Labour could be a road to revolution? Winning young radicals to become professional revolutionaries requires telling the unvarnished truth, that the Labour Party will never become socialist – not even under the most left-wing Labour lefts – and will be a key obstacle to revolutionary struggle. And we must aid in showing through experience the need for a genuinely revolutionary, Leninist-Trotskyist workers party.

Tories and Blairites Unite for Imperialist War...

David Cameron’s Tories act toward Corbyn with the bloodthirsty hauteur of a party of lords and ladies riding to hounds, setting their dogs in the media to hunt down the red fox. “Drunk on class prejudice,” as Unite union leader Len McCluskey described them, they are intent on destroying the labor movement as they “paint the millions of trade unionists and their families as ‘the enemy within’.” Conservative Party right-wingers view Corbyn’s election as a godsend, believing him to “unelectable.” Party hacks make fundraising pitches: “Labour’s new leader is a threat to our national security, our economic security, and your family’s security. We can’t ever let Labour back into power again. Donate now.”

They revile Corbyn’s close ally John McDonnell as “a socialist red in tooth and claw.” McDonnell was an official of the National Miners Union (NUM) and is chair of the Socialist Campaign Group. His earlier calls for nationalization of the banks, as well as saluting Bobby Sands and other Irish Republican Army martyrs, are being paraded in the media as evidence of lunacy, if not treason. He is excoriated for a 2003 speech praising the bravery of the Provisional IRA, and musing on a later occasion about going back in time to the 1980s to “assassinate Margaret Thatcher.” McDonnell dutifully made the groveling apologies.

But if Labour lefts are given to fantasizing, especially since they have been consigned to the political wilderness for decades, their right-wing detractors are making serious threats. In the past, Corbyn called for British withdrawal from the NATO imperialist military alliance and to scrap Trident, the U.S.-controlled British nuclear-armed submarine program. The Sunday Times (20 September) quoted a “senior serving general” who was deployed in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and ’90s saying that if Corbyn ever became prime minister, the military would take “direct action” to stop him:

“There would be mass resignations at all levels and you would face the very real prospect of an event which would effectively be a mutiny….  The Army just wouldn’t stand for it. The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise the security of this country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul to prevent that.”

In addition, a “senior intelligence source” reportedly said that a Corbyn cabinet would be denied operational information.

The London Guardian pooh-poohed the notion of a military revolt against Corbyn as “far-fetched,” although their main argument was that “he is unlikely ever to become prime minister.” Yet the flagship paper of the “center-left” quoted the military chief of staff in a speech following the election of Corbyn as Labour Leader complaining about the “ever greater constraints on our freedom to use force” posed by the need for “parliamentary consent.” Many recalled the 1982 novel (and later TV series) A Very British Coup about the election of a left-wing trade-unionist from Sheffield (the stomping ground of miners leader Arthur Scargill) as Labour Leader and the successful plot by MI5 (Britain’s domestic spy agency) and military leaders to bring him down.

That fictional account was based on the very real preparations for a coup d’état against the Labour governments of Harold Wilson in 1965 and again in the mid-1970s, confirmed in a 2006 BBC documentary. The plots involved military figures with connection to the royals (Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India), press barons (Lord Cecil King of the Daily Mirror), an MI5 operation to defame Wilson (codenamed “Clockwork Orange”) and a 1974 military takeover of Heathrow Airport, about which the government was not informed, as a dry run. The head of MI5, Peter Wright, wrote in his memoirs that the plan was a “carbon copy” of the infamous “Zinoviev letter” forgery concocted to destabilize the first Labour government in 1924.

But in 2015, as the author of A Very British Coup, Chris Mullin, noted (Guardian, 10 August), the first attempt to bring down Corbyn will likely come from the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). It has already begun. The Sunday Times published a fly-on-the-wall account (“Knives Out for Comrade Chaos”) of conspiring amongst the Blairites on post-election night at a pub near Victoria station and later in the week in a flat in South Kensington. One after another former shadow ministers refused to serve under Corbyn. Their main thrust was to prevent him from democratizing Labour so that a party conference could overrule the PLP and National Executive Committee (NEC), which the right-wingers control.

The first clashes could come over bombing Syria and Trident nukes, which many Labour MPs support and Corbyn and most Party members oppose. As recently as this August, the new Labour leader spoke against Trident, which is up for a £100 billion renewal next year. The nuclear subs, left over from the anti-Soviet Cold War, are based in the Firth of Clyde in Scotland, and the SNP and supporters of Scottish independence oppose them. In 2003, the Stop the War Coalition, with Corbyn at the forefront, brought out up to 2 million people to oppose the invasion of Iraq. But it didn’t stop even one of Blair’s bombs from falling on Iraqi children, as British workers and unions were not called upon to use their power as workers to shut Britain down.

Rather than Corbyn’s pacifist politics of protest and of “unilateral nuclear disarmament,” revolutionary Trotskyists call forlabor strikes against imperialist warandnot one penny, not one person for the imperialist armed forces.

…and War on Workers “at Home”

Meanwhile the entire workers movement is facing a frontal assault by the government’s Trade Union Bill. This draconian piece of legislation aims to make it well-nigh impossible to have a legal strike. The bill would end closed shops and dues check-offs, require picket captains to register with the police by name (thus providing employers with a blacklist of union activists), require super-majority votes to call strikes and as much as 80% in “strategic” occupations like the National Health Service. The bill, which goes far beyond even Thatcher’s anti-labor laws, passed its second reading on September 14 after a six-hour parliamentary debate. But no amount of parliamentary haggling will stop its passage. The Trades Union Congress annual meeting at Brighton on September 14 voted for a “day of action” against the bill. Corbyn spoke there, saying that the Tories “are declaring war on organised labour.” Quite right. The question, then, is what to do about it. Corbyn’s response sums up the impotency of the Labour left: “We will fight this Bill all the way, and if it becomes law we will repeal it in 2020.” So the capitalist government is declaring war on the workers, and the answer will be … to hope for an election victory five years from now so that Her Majesty’s Parliament can repeal it! One couldn’t ask for a more succinct example of electoral cretinism, the senile disorder afflicting the British workers movement.

Precisely because this law is a declaration of war on workers’ right to organize, it can only be defeated through defiant class struggle and industrial action. Significantly, the Brighton meeting also passed a second motion, submitted by the left-led RMT transport workers union, calling for “generalized strike action” against the bill. (TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady expressed “reservations” that it was open to “ambiguous interpretation.”) The RMT along with the Fire Brigades Union, which are not members of the Labour Party, had voted to back Corbyn along with Unite, which is. This motion was clearly intended simply as another pressure tactic, but were a general strike to actually occur, which is what the TUC tops fear, it would be the first time in Britain since 1926.

A real general strike is not the one- or two-day affairs that pass for one these days in much of Europe, which are nothing more than glorified stop-work demonstrations. It is the highest level of workers struggle short of an armed insurrection. Even if called as a defensive action, it necessarily poses the question of which class rules. As Trotsky wrote just after the May 1926 general strike had broken out, it “demands a clear, resolute, firm (i.e., a revolutionary) leadership.” Noting that the TUC had declared the strike to be non-political, he continued:

“In the present strike there is no trace of such a leadership of the British proletariat…. And herein lies the chief danger: men who did not want the general strike, who fear nothing so much as the consequences of a victorious strike, must inevitably direct all their efforts to keeping the strike within the scope of a semi-political semi-strike, i.e., to deprive it of its power.

“We must face matters: the efforts of the official leaders of the Labour Party and of a considerable number of official trade union leaders will not be directed toward paralyzing the bourgeois state by means of the strike, but towards paralyzing the general strike with the aid of the bourgeois state. The government, through its most diehard conservatives, undoubtedly wants to provoke a civil war on a small scale so as to be in a position to resort to measures of terror even before the struggle develops, and thus suppress the movement.”

–L.D. Trotsky, “Problems of the British Labor Movement” (6 May 1926)

Although, and precisely because, striking workers fought militantly, after little more than a week a terrified TUC General Council, led by Labour lefts, ignominiously called off the strike.

The Labour Left: A Pressure Valve for Letting Off Steam

Writing at the end of 1925 Trotsky summed up the role of the British Labour lefts of the day: “The left wingers reflect the discontent of the British working class…. They transform the political helplessness of the awakening masses into an ideological maze. They constitute an expression of the forward move, but also act as a brake on it” (Ibid.). He noted that the lefts act “as a kind of safety-valve for the radical moods of the masses.” One might say the same of the Corbyn “movement” today, which is barely reformist politically and only seems radical by comparison with the openly anti-working-class New Labour crowd who shamelessly imitate the Tories.

The Labour Party was founded as a break from the bourgeois Liberal Party, and unlike the formally Marxist parties of the Second International which turned to the right, was reformist from the start. Its founding leader Keir Hardie was a lay preacher and a follower of populist Henry George and social democrat William Morris. The British ruling class prefers Tory governments, but in troubled times they are satisfied that Labour will protect their interests. In WWI, Labour leaders joined the cabinet of Lloyd George, and in WWII Winston Churchill and the Tories led a coalition government with right-wing Labour Party leaders Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin, who were key allies in keeping industrial peace and preserving Britain’s colonies.

After the war, Labour won a landslide electoral victory and Attlee became prime minister, with Bevin as foreign secretary in the anti-Soviet Cold War, as Britain played a key role in smashing leftist guerrillas in Greece and Malaya. Labour left Aneurin “Nye” Bevan as minister of health oversaw the construction of low-cost housing and led the creation of the National Health Service, the longest-lasting and most popular of the Labour Party’s “welfare state” creations. Bevan, a union organizer from a Welsh mining family, was the first hero of the Labour lefts, several of whom (including future prime minister Harold Wilson) resigned from the cabinet when Britain joined the U.S. imperialist slaughter in Korea in 1951.

Bevan hated the crimes of capitalism, but was a reformist his whole life, following the disastrous popular front path of alliances with bourgeois forces in the 1930s and supporting Churchill in the 1940s. He played a key role in supporting the government in 1944 as British troops oversaw the massacre of leftist demonstrators in Athens, Greece. His dream was not for a revolution but for a Labour Party government. When he got it, Labour proceeded to administer British capitalism and imperialism. He offered verbal criticism at times, but no alternative for workers. In practice, the Bevanites served to reconcile would-be socialists to supporting British imperialism – drenched in blood from Egypt to South Africa, from the Indian subcontinent to the Caribbean – and defusing working-class unrest. This has always been the role of the Labour left.

In 1964, Labour came to power again. Prime minister Harold Wilson, a Bevanite no longer, dispatched British troops to Northern Ireland to fight the IRA. After a stint in opposition, he returned as Labour prime minister in 1974 when the Tory government of Edward Heath was toppled by a miners strike. Over the next five years, Labour governments, despite right-wing plotting against Wilson, remained reliable Cold Warriors, while waging a war on the working class at home. Amidst a world capitalist crisis following the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, profits in Britain’s mining and manufacturing economy were declining. Wilson and his successor James Callaghan pressured the trade unions to accept wage controls.

Through this “Social Contract,” the Labour government helped drive real wages down in Britain, until the workers exploded in the strike wave that began in the “winter of discontent” of 1978-79. From the perspective of the bosses, Labour had done its job. To put down the workers now a ferocious frontal assault was needed. This would be led by Margaret Thatcher, as the leader of a new Tory government beginning in 1979. The workers fought “Iron Lady” Thatcher tooth and nail, and might have toppled her government early on – but the bourgeoisie whipped up a patriotic frenzy around the Falklands/Malvinas conflict with Argentina. As Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, Labour participated to the hilt in this frenzy.

Labour leftist Tony Benn had been a minister (of industry and then energy) in the cabinets of Wilson and Callaghan. Reflecting the workers’ discontent, Benn moved further to the left, and closely contested right-winger Denis Healey for Labour Party leadership. The rise of “Bennism” during the Thatcher years was a result of most of the British left fulsomely supporting him – ignoring how when he was in the Wilson government their hero helped craft the laws Thatcher was now using in her devastating anti-labor assault. The Social Contract of Labour reformism not only restricted wages in a time of raging inflation but also imposed limits of all kinds on strikes. It laid the ground for the vicious anti-union bill Corbyn is fighting against today.

Many a rule and law from the days of the Wilson-Callaghan regime was invoked by Thatcher during the great miners strike of 1984-85. The strike was defeated for lack of a revolutionary leadership. The miners fought with great courage but needed a solid nationwide strike to win. National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) leader Arthur Scargill and the strikers were unsupported – or outright opposed – by legions of right-wing Labour Party pols and TUC bureaucrats. The only way to have won that key class battle, as authentic Trotskyists advocated at that time, was to extend it, breaking with the Labour/TUC traitors and demanding that transport, rail and dock unions go out on strike in a fighting “triple alliance” to prepare the way for a general strike.¹

Yet during the strike, Scargill remained loyal to Labour. Neither he nor Labour left Benn did anything to challenge the despicable violence-baiting Neil Kinnock for party leadership. Had NUM leaders spearheaded a breakaway from Labour at that time, it could have looked to the 140,000 striking miners as a base and capitalized on the widespread sympathy and solidarity among workers to provide a powerful pole of class struggle nationwide. But only a decade later did Scargill break to form the Socialist Labour Party, which had at most a marginal existence and a tepid program. The reformist Bennite Labour lefts were ultimately committed to the bourgeois order, and thus time and again have contributed to the defeat of workers’ struggles.

The Spectre of Trotskyism

As the Corbyn revolt was getting underway, the Sunday Times (23 August) published an article by the former Labour NEC member and Speaker of the House of Commons Baroness Boothroyd under the headline, “The Trots have a gun to Labour’s head. And so the fight begins again.” Now the prestige paper of Australian press tycoon Rupert Murdoch, whose tabloid property The Sun was a big backer of Blair’s New Labour, is discovering a conspiracy of “Trotskyite and other hard-left groups who are disbanding as official political parties in a move that will allow them to infiltrate Labour” (Sunday Times, 27 September). We are surely in for a new round of “reds under the beds” (if not in them) scandal-mongering from the Tory press.

They have already singled out Corbyn’s chief of staff, Simon Fletcher, a supporter of Socialist Action who became Mayor Ken Livingstone’s right-hand man. But then, Alastair Darling, Tony Blair’s top aide, was of the same denomination, which entered the Labour Party back in the mid-1980s. The blatantly pro-imperialist social-democratic Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL) has formally appealed to the Electoral Commission to deregister as a political party in order to enable supporters to enter the post-Corbyn Labour Party, which still maintains the witch-hunting ban on membership in other political groups that was used to purge the Militant tendency in 1982. It seems a couple other small leftist groups have also deregistered.

But beyond this, there was almost universal, unmitigated celebration of Corbyn’s victory throughout the British left:

The Socialist Appeal (SAp) group and its International Marxist Tendency, led by Alan Woods, has continued the policy of entrism in the Labour Party of Ted Grant’s Militant tendency going back to the 1960s. The SAp declared: “The astonishing victory of Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership represents a political earthquake of monumental proportions” (Socialist Appeal, 12 September). A few days later, SAp launched the Labour Young Socialists (recalling the similarly named Labour Party youth group led by Militant in the 1970s) and a campaign to “Defend Corbyn – Fight for Socialism.”

Socialist Party in England and Wales (SPEW) and its Committee for a Workers International, led by Peter Taaffe, abandoned Militant’s entrism in the early 1990s. Now they write: “Corbyn’s leadership victory – A new era for the 99%.” SPEW had a little problem, as it had labeled the Labour Party an out-and-out bourgeois party. It got around that sticky wicket by declaring that “This is a new party in the process of formation” (The Socialist, 17 September). But its “What we stand for” blurb still calls for “Trade unions to disaffiliate from the Labour Party” (The Socialist, 24 September).

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) are the heirs of Tony Cliff, who broke with Trotskyism in the late 1940s declaring the Soviet Union “state capitalist” and refusing to defend it during the Korean War from 1950 on. Belatedly climbing aboard the Corbyn bandwagon, the SWP was jubilant: “Seize the time! Let’s kick out the Tories” and “A new hope” (Socialist Worker, 19 September). Its paper is now filled with people declaring they are joining the Labour Party to support Corbyn after the SWP earlier (at its Marxism 2015 conference) discouraged people from doing so.

Socialist Resistance (SR), the British heirs of Ernest Mandel and affiliate of the International Secretariat that masquerades as the Fourth International, headlined (International Viewpoint, 14 September): “Jez [Jeremy] we did – A political earthquake.” SR proclaimed: “Socialist Resistance enthusiastically welcomes the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party.”

Alliance for Workers Liberty founder-leader Sean Matgamna crowed: “The trade unions and the working class have retaken the Labour Party!” (“Organize Labour’s newcomers, remake the Party,” Solidarity, 16 September).

As for the various left alliances, according to the Weekly Worker (24 September) of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), people have left Left Unity to join the Labour Party and it will debate its future existence at an upcoming conference. The CPGB-supported Labour Party Marxists is encouraging leftists to join Labour and fight to democratize the party, as is, of course, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy.

And so on, and so forth.

This virtual unanimity of the British (not-so) “far left” reflects the fact that the entire milieu, even groups that had totally written off the Labour as any kind of workers party, is deeply imbued with Labourism as a tradition supposedly encompassing the entire workers movement. The chumminess and numerous alliances, coalitions and political blocs between the various groups underline the fact that their reformist programs are virtually indistinguishable. So it’s no accident that they will all be back together in Corbyn’s Labour Party, constantly maneuvering for position on various bodies. Rather than a revolutionary opposition, they will become (as some already are) an organic part of this “imperialist workers party.”

A particular mention should be made of the peculiar and spectacularly opportunist stance taken by the Spartacist League/Britain (SL/B), section of the International Communist League (ICL). Historically, the SL/B was sharply counterposed to the Labourite left. Shortly after expelling ICL cadres who went on to found the League for the Fourth International, the SL/B gave critical support to a candidate of Arthur Scargill’s nascent SLP in a by-election in Yorkshire. This was a perfectly correct tactic toward a break to the left from Tony Blair’s New Labour. But rather than offering critical support as Lenin advocated, “as a rope supports a hanged man,” the SL/B did so in perfectly opportunist fashion, distributing the SLP’s propaganda rather than their own.

Recently, the ICL has taken another sharp turn to the right, notably over Greece, where it followed SYRIZA prime minister Alexis Tsipras’ call for a “no” vote in a July referendum that prepared the way for the imposition of vicious austerity measures. It followed up with an action program that makes no mention of socialism, revolution or even bringing down the SYRIZA government, and rather than calling for a workers government substituted the formula of “a government which will act in the interests of the working people and be subordinated to them.”² Even with the caveat that this could not be won in a parliamentary framework, this formula could cover a call by any British opportunist left group for a Labour Party government led by Corbyn.

Lo and behold, a few weeks later, the SL/B came out with a leaflet titled “Jeremy Corbyn: Tony Blair’s nightmare!” (12 August) which is a veritable encomium to the Labour left leader. It declares that “Corbyn opposes NATO and is for Britain out of this imperialist military alliance,” even though he was already and predictably backtracking on this issue. It proclaims him “a principled and honest representative of the left wing of old Labour in the tradition of Nye Bevan, Michael Foot and Tony Benn.” The ICL’s main claim is that “While the demands posed by the Corbyn campaign are supportable, they cannot be achieved through old Labour parliamentarism,” and require the overthrow of capitalism and socialist revolution.

This is hardly critical support in the Leninist sense of exposing the bankruptcy of the reformists. Instead it is fulsome support with a fig leaf saying Corbyn doesn’t go far enough. And it is based on prettifying, i.e., falsifying, Corbyn’s actual program. It would take a revolution to renationalize the railways? “People’s quantitative easing” can’t be accomplished without the overthrow of capitalism? Nonsense. Having abandoned revolutionary Trotskyism, the ICL and SL/B have become “critical” Corbynistas.

Authentic Trotskyists warn, as Trotsky did in 1926 and as British Trotskyists did in 1944-46, that the Labour lefts reflect the radicalization of the working masses in order to block it from revolutionary struggle. In the particular circumstances of Britain, they substitute for a class-collaborationist popular front. As large numbers of workers and youth move to the left, fed up with decades of wage cuts, destruction of union gains, dismantling of social services, and endless imperialist war, communists must explain that the Labour lefts are no alternative, that their actual program, far from pointing toward revolution, is an attempt to head it off by hoodwinking the masses. And the leftists now flocking to Corbyn’s banner are aiding that swindle.

A revolutionary opposition, both outside and inside the Labour Party, would underline that fighting austerity and regenerating the British economy can only be accomplished through workers revolution laying the basis for international socialist planning. It would stress that the haughty British ruling class is armed and dangerous and will use that force to smash resistance unless it is checked and defeated by a greater power, of a mobilized working class armed with a class-struggle program and led by a Leninist-Trotskyist party prepared to sweep away the cops, goons, strikebreakers and court orders, as well as the Labour leaders, left and right, who are the biggest obstacle to victory. For the workers to take power, they must bring down the dictatorship of capital. In no way can that be done by the thoroughly parliamentarist Labour Party, even if it resuscitates Old Labour’s famous Clause IV calling for public ownership of industry.

Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters believe, sincerely in many cases, in the reforms they extol. The growing mass discontent that his election reflects is real. Possibilities may open up to win some partial reforms, but only through hard struggle against the capitalists, their state and their labor lieutenants. The Labour Party remains a bourgeois workers party, and a Corbyn government, should he survive the all-sided attacks that have only begun, would be a capitalist government. Major class battles require revolutionary leadership. As Trotsky wrote following the failure of the 1926 general strike: “Without a party … the proletarian revolution cannot conquer.” ■