Corbynism and the Labour Party
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ALB wrote:Heard from a member of our Advertising Committee yesterday that the Morning Star is refusing our adverts apparently because we didn't support Corbyn's campaign to become Labour Leader. It's not clear whether this is an official political position by the paper or just a personal decision by somebody in their advertising department.
Apparently there's no foundation to this story. Because the contact at the Morning Star didn't respond in a timely manner to our enquiry an assumption was made (an incorrect one) that the paper was refusing our adverts.
I see Critisticuffs are organising a meeting/workshop on Corbyn at which they will dissect his programme:
Quote:# What does Corbyn want? #Wednesday 21 October 2015, 7pmMay Day RoomsJeremy Corbyn's successful campaign to run the Labour Party and his hope to lead the State inspired many people: a few hundred thousand registered to join or support the party and Corbyn spoke to packed meetings. The response of some on the left has been critical, or at least pessimistic, about Corbyn being able to implement his policies as somehow big business and its allies will prevent him from doing so. A variant suggests he will be prevented by the “Labour Party machine”. Others say that although he is generally going in the right direction, on some issues he does not go far enough. Still others insist that all real change must come from below and that the success of Corbynism will take people away from focussing on pursuing such change into the dead end of parliamentary campaigning.In this workshop we want to investigate what Corbyn actually says he wants to do in terms of social and economic policy laid out in his policy paper “The Economy in 2020”. His goals are not something we think is good at all regardless of whether they are impossible to achieve. It is not that it doesn't go far enough or represents a distraction from the right means of pursuing the same goals: his programme is fundamentally hostile to the interests of those who want to live in a world based on human needs being satisfied instead of one where poverty is made its organising principle.1. We will look at how Corbyn thinks about the way in which wealth is produced in this society. We will argue that understanding how wealth is created is crucial to any political movement that wants a better society: we will show that despite Corbyn also appearing to start from this premise he never addresses the issue.2. We will argue that as a result of his mistaken thinking about the nature of wealth in this society, Corbyn agitates for a programme that calls for the increase of wealth from which workers are widely and systematically excluded.3. We will look at the fact that Corbyn perceives the necessity to use the capitalist state to provide a “fair share” to workers in the society reliant on this form of wealth creation. Contrary to what Corbyn thinks, we will argue that any such programme of state intervention must guarantee that the poverty of workers continues as its first principle.4. Finally we will look at how and why it is easy for Corbyn to arrive at the view that the State he wishes to run can be transformed into an organisation whose purpose is the welfare of all the people in this society. We argue that Corbyn will find that such welfare must necessarily preserve the poverty he wants to abolish and that the role he wishes the State to have is not one it can realiseI imagine they will be saying that the "growth" Corbyn wants will be the growth of wealth in the form of exchange value and capital which implies the extraction of surplus value from workers and so their exclusion from ownership and control of the means of production, i.e their "poverty".
ALB wrote:There's a local council by-election in Northfield Brook ward (part of the Blackbird Leys estate) in Oxford on 22 October.Four members and sympathisers are distributing "write World Socialism across the ballot paper" leaflets house to house. In her leaflet the Labour candidate says that "Labour's values are her values" listing one of them as
Quote:fair wages for hard workIn other words "shit wages if you don't work hard" and "shit benefits if you don't work at all". It seems Corbynism has not reached Oxford Labour Party but, then, Labour's turn to the left under him will only mean a return to the conservative motto of "A Fair Day's Wage for A Fair Day's Work" (which Harold Wilson turned round to say "A Fair Day's Work for a Fair Day's Wage").
I thought i just give the viewpoint on Corbyn from Elvis Costello
Quote:And Jeremy Corbyn? Costello says he’s been amused by the way the rightwing press is portraying the new Labour leader as a major threat to British national security. “Corbyn can’t actually change anything, even inside his own party. So what are they so afraid of, if not another opinion? He’s just expressing views that are different from theirs – I thought that was democracy.”http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/oct/16/elvis-costello-interview-people-have-no-idea
The establisment is shit scared of jeremy corbyn's opinions. Wait till they hear ours.
Wonder how many 'lefties' leave the party nowWonder if they are still pleased they joined the Labour Party to vote for him? Watch this space!
Interestingly, they're now launching a campaign for the self-employed:https://twitter.com/LabourCSEWhich suggests they still wan to try and woo some Tory voters, could be clever politics.
jondwhite wrote:The name James Morbin sounds like Jeremy Corbyn.It didn't do him any good. Here's the result of yesterday's local by-election in Oxford:http://www.oxford.gov.uk/PageRender/decN/newsarticle.htm?newsarticle_itemid=57720Morbin got 9 votes for TUSC (1.4%). Labour romped home, increasing its share of the vote from 70% to 78%.There can't be much significance in this as the turnout was only 15% except perhaps that it's another example of UKIP coming second in an ultra-safe Labour seat/ward so that bubble hasn't burst. I don't think many Labour voters, at least at local level, care who their party's Leader is or what its national policies are.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/oct/23/unite-challenges-expulsion-of-alleged-trotskyists-from-labour-partyWho controls the Labour Party – seems as if it isn't the leader but the party apparatchiks – who decide who to expel…in this case 4 AWL members But i find it interest the AWL is no longer a politial party having deregistered while LU who inist they still are a political prty urges its members to enter Momentum – a Labour Party lobby group – joining with SWP and SPEW. I forget the name now and too lazy to check but one Labour Party mandarin said Momentum is spelled M-I-L-I-T-A-N-T.
That was a lazy piece of journalism in the Guardian. The version I read – it might have since been corrected – suggested that the AWL had dissolved itself as an organisation. Absolute nonsense. They'd simply deregistered as a political party with the Electoral Commission. In reality, the AWL have always had a smattering of supporters/members in and around the Labour Party.
From that Guardian article:
Quote:Where AWL admits it has stood candidates against Labour in the past through the Socialist Alliance, it said it only did this in seats that Labour was never going to lose.This is true of TUSC and Left Unity and was their deliberate policy because, in the end, they prefer a Labour government (sometimes genuinely, sometimes because they [mis]calculate "after Labour, us").I don't think it is the policy of either the SWP or ex-Militant to support the Momentum group within the Labour Party. According to this recent interview with Peter Taaffe, SPEW is still dreaming a Labour Party Mark 2, a new trade-union backed "workers party":
Quote:If the right continues to resist the will of the members for socialist ideas, then they must be taken on. The Corbyn campaign has within it, in reality, elements of a new party in the process of formation.Looks as if they are banking on Corbyn failing to change the Labour Party, so opening the way for them. They don't seem to have changed strategy.
The Times is reporting today that according to booksellers books like The Establishment by Owen Jones, Chomsky on Anarchism and The Labour Party: a Marxist History by Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein "have been flying off the shelves since Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader":http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/retailing/article4596928.eceSome sort of confirmation that the heightened interest in "left" politics sparked off by Corbyn's campaign and election opens an opportunity for us too to put our views across.
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