Corbynism Was A Petit Bourgeois Farce

If Corbynism ended in the humiliating farce, with the man himself being made to look slippery and dishonest by Boris Johnson of all people, of the 2019 election defeat then the postscript has been one that resembles a religious cult awaiting the return of the lost messiah. As Corbyn’s dwindling band of supporters read the runes, study the political entrails and try to see if their leader will shuffle forth again to lead them out of the endless wilderness. Will St Jeremy of Islington stand as an independent or not? Will he continue to suffer the daggers thrown at him by his successor, and the ruling class’s chosen man, Keir Starmer? Well this week we may finally be one step closer to an answer with Starmer making the final move he needed to carry out in order to reassure his capitalist sponsors that he is a “safe pair of hands” and that is the final defenestration of Corbyn. The lost leader of the British left has been barred from standing as a Labour candidate at the next election and has issued a typically vague statement which is being subjected to wild spectulation on the British left. Is this it? Will the great messiah finally lead us back to the future? Can we get 1945 back again? The social democratic fantasias of the British left await a fresh injection of delusions from it’s godhead.

Whether he stands or not though the Corbyn experience must now be understood for what it was, a contemptible failure. It was always going to be a failure and to understand why we have to properly analyse what the Labour Party is and always has been. When Keir Starmer boasts about his pride of being part of the “Labour tradition” he’s actually telling the truth. He represents the traditions of the Labour Party at least as well as Jeremy Corbyn does. In fact they both represent them well and there’s no real contradiction between them, despite the current bickering. The Labour Party leaders, going all the way back to Ramsay Macdonald himself, have generally been lawyers, academics, bureaucrats or career politicians. They’ve all been either from the upper most section of the working class or the petit-bourgeoisie. This makes complete sense when you consider that the Labour Party has always been, form its beginnings, a party of what Lenin referred to as “the Labour aristocracy”. Drawing from work by both Marx and Engels he was able to point to a clear division that existed within the British working class from the 1840’s onwards, where a small section of the British working class began to directly benefit from the British ruling class’s industrial monopoly and their control over the world market. Engels commented.

The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.

Engels – Letter To Marx – October 7th 1858

What this means in practical terms is that the British ruling class were able to offer concessions to the skilled working class from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. This layer were the first to be organised inside the craft trade unions, formed the basis of the leadership of the British union movement and it’s federation the Trades Union Congress. These were conservative trade unions, in favour of a continued alliance with the Liberal Party and opposed to the advance of the union movement into organising amongst the unskilled, casually employed workers who were later to form the basis for “new unionism”. This layer has always been a small minority within the British working class, but as it formed the leadership of the union movement it set the policies and political line of that movement. Thus the very founding of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 came after the Liberal Party had broken the alliance the craft unions had with them after British capitalism lost it’s industrial monopoly (following the rise of Germany and the USA) and had started attacking even the upper end of the working class. This forced even the ultra conservative union leaders into forming a political party in a coalition with the Fabians and other middle class socialist organisations. All of these were wholly reformist in outlook, utterly committed to bourgeois parliamentarism and fanatically pro-imperialist in ways that would make your average fascist proud. This reflected the class basis of the labour party, based upon the labour aristocracy and the petit bourgeois intellectuals who derived benefits from British imperialism.

This is the Labour Party’s origins and it has remained completely true to them ever since it’s foundation. It’s leaders have all been dedicated servants of British imperialism, often pursuing brutal practices with a gusto that impressed the most chauvinistic Tory. But what does this have to do with Corbyn? Surely he’s the antithesis of this? The bemused Corbynite might ask. The Labour left has always has more often talked about “solidarity” and made gestures against the war policies of the British government. These are mostly gestures though and that is, in reality, what Corbyn has spent his career making. The Labour left is actually in partnership with the right on most issues and their job when it comes to questions of war is to ensure that opposition to it remains firmly inside acceptable boundaries. So they lead polite demonstrations, sign petitions and talk in the manner of fretting Anglican Bishops about “peace” but always make sure anti war sentiment is channelled into very safe modes of expression. The Labour Party today functions in much the same way as it has since the 1920’s as a partnership between it’s wholly pro-capitalist leadership, the union bureaucracy and the left both inside and outside of the party. The Labour Left MP’s are always put forward on platforms of the unions as if they lead something different to the party headed by Keir Starmer. Frequently you’ll get some left union leader or other identify John Mcdonnell or Zarah Sultana as a “real” labour MP. The MP in question will then tell the striking workers that they agree wholeheartedly with their position, that justice will be theirs if we can just get those damnable Tories out of the way! And how, pray tell, are the beastly Tories to be removed? At the next election the only option to do so will be Starmer who has told us all many times that he has no intention of doing anything to reverse many anti worker measures taken by Sunak and Hunt. Knowing this the Labour left and their collaborators in the union leadership perform a sleight of hand. They will talk endlessly about the Tories and their (very real) list of crimes. They will then leave the listener with the view that the problem does not lie with British capitalism but with the personnel running it. In this they are performing a valuable role for Keir Starmer, just as their predecessors did for every Labour Party leader from Macdonald to Miliband, in pushing all discontent towards a vote for the labour party at the next election as the only means of change. This is the game the Labour left has played for over a century, the personnel may change but their mission doesn’t. The left is tolerated in the Labour Party because it played this role very well and part of that deal was that the right of the party get to run things and the left go out and channel all left opinion that look like it stray away from the party back towards it again. In this they are aided by most Trotskyite groups in Britain and the revisionists in the Communist Party of Britain. The latter having inherited from the old CPGB (which collapsed in 1991) the wretched and reformist strategy outlined in “The British Road To Socialism” which turned the Communist Party into another means to push workers back towards the Labour Party. Social democratic politics dominates most aspects of the British left no matter how “revolutionary” it’s language. This is because they all seek to win over the trade union bureaucracy and the modern iteration of the labour aristocracy in order that their particular sect can get its hands on union funding for one of their various front groups. The Socialist Workers Party are the masters of this particular game and they work hand in hand with the labour left to make sure that anyone who might be radicalised by the decaying state of British capitalism is kept from going “too far”.

Jeremy Corbyn has playing his part in this game for over 40 years. He was happy to stay in the Labour Party, being well paid for playing his role as an effective policeman of the establishment. He fell foul of them though when the made the mistake of winning the 2015 leadership election. That broke the unspoken deal, that the left will retain its place in the party as long as it never wielded any serious influence. Corbyn made such an appallingly bad job of being leader in part because on some level he understands this. He knew that is role was to act as a recruiter to the party never to lead it. There are those (such as George Galloway) who lament that Corbyn was not ruthless enough with his enemies in the party. This is a foolish assessment. Corbyn (like most reformists) was never going to go after the likes of Starmer or Tom Watson because these people actually represent the political will of the British ruling class. They represent the power of British imperialism within the Labour Party and Corbyn knew that to take on them in a serious way was to take on the British ruling class itself. That is something that he and his wretched deputy McDonnell never had any intention of doing. They hoped to persuade British capitalism that they could be “good for business”, they fundamentally agree with Keir Starmer that British capitalism just needs to be run better, more “fairly”. This is reactionary utopianism whether it is Corbyn presenting it or Starmer.

For the sake of actually building any kind of militant working class struggle in Britain Corbyn and the tradition he represents need to be jettisoned. The century long trick pulled by the Labour left and its Trotskyite allies, of always pushing discontent back to the Labour Party, needs to be buried. We must not allow these con artists to pretend that a “nicer” version of British capitalism is possible and the circumstances that produced the 1945 reforms are long gone. It is time to stop pretending such times can return.