The British General Election draws near, the party propaganda machines are in full swing and my evenings are punctuated by the knocking and ringing of the clipboard-wielding ghouls who have found their way to my front door. My favourite canvasser so far has been the wiry, wild-eyed Liberal Democrat who opened his spiel with a personalised greeting, raced through some dubious statistics and finished off with a desperate appeal for a tactical vote. If I mention to any these guys that I’m a socialist, their assumption is that I’ll be voting Labour. But in fact none of the capitalist gangs will be getting my vote.
Most decent folks are aware that the Conservatives are a party of entitled crooks and chancers that shamelessly defends the economic interests of the ruling class. Unfortunately, however, many well-meaning workers have been taken in by the promises of other political parties to represent a socialist, communist or human alternative. They don’t. And that is as true of Labour as it is of any other party. In fact, the Labour Party, supposedly under newly ‘radical’ leadership, is a capitalist party – one that is quite as committed to bullshit and lies as its political opponents. Just look at this laughable Labour Party ‘economics’ video, with its villainous billionaire who refuses to invest his wealth (as if capitalism could survive for a day if this actually happened) and rosy-cheeked, salt-of-the-earth proles cheerfully circulating their own means of exchange by paying for goods and services in their local communities (for a full critique of misunderstandings and myths in this video, see here). It would be truly extraordinary if nobody taking part in this production had stopped to call some of its assumptions into question; perhaps they did. But I have seen Labourites happily sharing this baloney on Facebook.
Let’s get beyond the bullshit. If you really want to understand what Corbyn and Labour stand for, maybe have a look at this text contributed to a left communist web site by a group of recovering Corbyholics (I disagree with the article’s tout court rejection of voting and democracy, but that is not its main point). As the authors of the piece indicate, the Labour Party throughout its history has more than proven its dedication to the profit system, which requires the exploitation and often violent repression of the working class, as well as endless wars (in fact, Labour’s foreign policy has tended to be more brutal than that of the Conservatives). And as Adam Buick of my own party, the Socialist Party of Great Britain, points out, Labour cannot possibly bring about a society “for the many, not the few” (Tony Blair’s phrase, originally), since capitalism, the system which Labour seeks to manage and perpetuate, depends precisely on the division of society into the “many” (workers) and the ‘few” (capitalist owners and controllers).
Along with his sidekick John McDonnell, Corbyn has widely been called ‘Marxist’ or a socialist by his supporters, as well by as his conservative opponents. What an insult to Marx and the socialist tradition of which he was part! For Marx, a socialist society would not be one organised “for the many, not the few”. It would be a society that has entirely abolished the class division. Communism or socialism (the same thing, despite Leninist protestations) requires getting rid of the buying and selling system and creating a society of free access to goods and services. With the productive capabilities that exist today, there is enough for everybody to enjoy a life of abundance without undertaking any wage labour. Once a progressive force (for all its horrors), capitalism today is a system that generates totally unnecessary suffering for the majority of people and it is long overdue for abolition. It continues in large part because we, the working class, continue to give it legitimacy and because, whatever we might say to the contrary, we don’t really believe that there is an alternative to the market system.
Forget the question: Labour, Liberal or Tory? Here are some real questions: Do you really want to go on working almost every day of your life, just to generate profits for a tiny group of capitalists? Do you know that eight individuals now have as much wealth as half of the world’s population? Do you realize how fundamentally insane that is? Do you want to live in a society more and more characterised by poverty, addiction and despair? In which children are constantly dying of hunger or being killed in wars, all completely unnecessarily? Do you want to see the natural environment trashed in the pursuit of profit?
It’s no good voting for a new set of leaders to manage the present chaos. Nobody can create socialism for us. And even if they really wanted to, Labour could do nothing to solve the problems identified above, which are generated by the profit system itself and which will in any case have to be addressed on a global, not a national scale. Nor will a Labour government even make things just a little more tolerable. In terms of its impact on the working class at home and overseas, the last Labour government was arguably worse than the preceding Tory one and in its entire history the Labour Party has never brought socialism one step closer.
As always, capitalism’s left-wingers are telling us that this election is different and that this time there is a chance to make a ‘real change’, to create ‘a new type of politics’ by voting for Corbyn. But socialists have heard all this before. What is actually needed is for workers to come together to bring an end to the madness of the profit system. We should reject the Conservatives, the fake socialists of Labour and every other capitalist party – and use the force of our majority to abolish capitalism. No leader required. But we don’t have forever to do this.
SH
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