Marxist Moments

JEREMY CORBYN

          In my previous blog ‘A Crisis in Ideology’ I stood up for Jeremy Corbyn and his popular movement against the machinations of the Labour bureaucracy attempting to destabilise them by arbitrary means of cancelling the voting rights of some and kicking out a large number of others and refusing to give any reasons for either action. Clearly they don’t want Jeremy to win the leadership again and just as clearly they perceive that Owen Smith is a hopeless candidate. The best they can realistically achieve is a drastic purge of as many suspected Corbyn supporters as possible.

This is not clean politics and indeed not politics at all but backroom bossism. Who before Jeremy was elected leader suspected that the Labour Party machinery had become Tammany Hall? However, elements in the Labour establishment realise they have a lot to lose if Corbyn’s position as leader is strengthened by a renewed and perhaps much larger popular vote than before. They are entirely correct, I believe, to assume that should there be an election before 2020 Labour will lose disastrously (the precedent is the calamitous 1983 election result with the Leftwing Michael Foot as leader, by no means due solely to Falklands War jingoism), and this is something that the Party establishment know they will have held much responsibility for bringing about through their divisive and unprincipled plotting. In this case both Corbyn supporters and Corbyn enemies are aiming at the same thing: a Labour defeat in their mutual struggle over Party principles, or ‘aims and values’. Defeat is likely to mean the downfall of Corbyn as leader. For those on the Right of the Party it means a respite and a chance to re-group and make a renewed bid (futile if Theresa May sustains a hold over the Shires and the middle-ground voters) to claim the Centre as in the good old Blair days.  But for those on the Left who support Jeremy, it may mean a stronger consolidation of Leftwing forces in the Party especially when the voters see that any Tory victors will be likely to do themselves little credit when their power is extended, while a Rightist Labour will seem – ‘rightly’ – as entirely superfluous politically. Corbyn support amongst the ‘general public’ is relatively low but many of the policies Corbyn puts forward are highly popular. If the Conservatives don’t transform themselves into de facto legislative Corbynites when in power then the chances of their long-term success after the next election are dim.

But although we may want a Corbyn victory in the leadership now as being the only glimmer of hope for a better politics to come, the outcome of his winning all the way to Number 10 Downing Street is quite likely to be dismal.

Let us suppose that Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are successful all that way and end up in No. 10 and No. 11 respectively. Of course they will do their best to initiate a new government policy based on Corbyn’s ten-point plan, a sort of Keynesian wish-list of All the Things You Ever Wanted But Were Afraid to Ask. And of course a genuine attempt by a forceful government administration will do its utmost to see that these points – the result of much research into people’s needs and wishes – are put on the statute books.

But government finances – not only in Britain but also around the world – are hardly in a state to distribute Keynesian largesse being as they are deeply mired in debt, whatever the taxes Corbyn hopes to claw back from the biggies to support his programme: that alone could be mired in negotiating and legal battling for several years.  And something even more critical: the day Jeremy Corbyn is confirmed as prime minister will be the day of a massive capital strike. It usually happens to some extent whenever a Labour government is installed that capital flees the country in search of investment elsewhere. With Jeremy at the helm this would be a money Exodus of biblical proportions. There would be a flight of capital the like of which you would never have seen before. And watch out also for all kinds of international sanctions against a Corbyn Britain if people in other countries have not elected their own Jeremy Corbyns.

A Corbyn government might well dig its heels in in such a situation: by nationalising all the fundamental industries; by nationalising the Bank of England; by instituting credit and currency controls; by a higher tax-rate for the rich and for the big corporations. The results might well mean a burgeoning black market, rationing and queuing in the streets (some aged survivors of the postwar period will experience déjà vu), ‘digging for victory’,  and high utility and transport costs, as Britain is turned, in effect, into a garrison state. Such would probably not be the socialism that many would have been hoping to see.

And in any case it is unlikely that such a state of affairs could continue for long without the government being toppled (one way or another) and the ushering in of a crushing capitalist triumphalism that amongst other things would set back wages and working conditions a century, if not longer. And it might be another century still before a socialist movement could dare to look above the parapet.  Jeremy and his Keynesianism are impossible for a capitalism on  life support, and trying to bring it about would lead us to something worse than we knew when we first voted for him.

One thing seems certain: Jeremy could never bring about a major transformation or revolution when ensconced within a political party and overall set-up specifically designed to avert it. (Labour doesn’t even support proportional representation!)

Transformation can only come about from within the mass of the people themselves, co-operating with each other to bring it about. (Leaving aside the 20% made up of the minions of the 1%.) Not from within a compromised political and parliamentary party with a huge stake in preserving the status quo: that is, a system resting on the sole value of - capital, i.e. wage-labour-time under the time-punch-card-clock of capital. It is people who make and do the things that give society its existence and make it run, and it is people who must sooner or later co-operate with each other to control their own efforts and derive their own benefits, shared out with those unable to be active whether old or young or in challenging circumstances of one kind or another. Only the people can enact a people’s society. Serious distortions will crop up from the start if the whole process of revolution is directed by an exclusive political group, let alone a politburo of such a group, however apparently enlightened. Socialism has to start as socialism means to go on. Do we honestly expect that social transformation could occur from within a Party that runs a Stalinist bureaucracy to purge its own members in a time when comparatively little (that is, compared to the future) is at stake? Indeed, one day the purges could become real, in the bloody sense.

And are we so dependent on capital that we cannot face down - in the mass - a capital strike? But if we didn’t, the result would be the disintegration of the Corbyn government (assuming it ever came into power in the first place) and its immediate replacement by the grossest reaction seen in modern times. You don’t have to be in Brazil to have a Brazilian-style outcome. Not these days. And certainly not after Corbyn victories of one sort or another set the ball rolling.  But we are in a genuine epoch of revolution. Revolution is not something in the future: it is in the inescapable now, that is, at an early stage. Even if we ditch Corbyn and company for the political pinheads the resulting governing catastrophe will bring on more obviously revolutionary-type struggle in any case.

One way of facing a capital strike under a Corbyn government would be to bring his government down by revolutionary means, thus pre-empting the flight of capital by – ironically – abolishing capital! Certainly there will never been a genuine revolution but always class society as long as capital itself exists. ‘Capitalism’ can, after all, be government capitalism if the government owns all the capital instead of private corporations and individuals. That is the power that Joseph Stalin enjoyed.

Is all this pure fantasy? Futurology has something of fantasy about it by definition since the future contains so little of substance. But – as in the best science or political fiction – a reasonably acute futurology, for all the fantasy, may still point to the identification of very real possibilities.

I will be dealing critically with further points arising from my previous blog, while linking up also with ‘Where Is This Leading? (Part 1)’. This will be done in my next blog, ‘Where is This Leading? (Part Two)’.