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Some idea of what may be the aim and policy of any new party fronted by Corbyn might be gained from a leaflet being distributed in Islington, his constituency, at the moment.
In a council by-election last November Corbyn endorsed the candidate Jackson Caines who stood as an Independent (we stood as well). He did quite well and will be standing again in the ward in next May’s full council election.
He and his supporters are currently distributing a leaflet attacking the Labour government’s record and declaring:
“In Islington we are a building a real political alternative; a grassroots movement dedicated to the redistribution of wealth and power to benefit working-class and marginalised communities.”
This echoes what Labour promised in its manifesto for the February 1974 General Election, to:
“Bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families.”
Labour won that election but were unable to bring this about because it was incompatible with the operation of the economic laws of capitalism. So what makes Caines and Corbyn think that a mere “grassroots movement” will be able to succeed better than a government with the power of the state machine at its disposal?
There is no mention of the imperative need to get rid of capitalism by replacing class ownership by common ownership so enabling production to directly satisfy people’s needs to replace production for profit.
Mind you, that could be a good thing as any such commitment to socialism would be hollow as the new party would in practice be campaigning just to try to make things slightly less bad or even just to try to prevent them becoming worse. The reformist treadmill.
They Communist Party of Britain seek to reform what they call the “state-monopoly capitalism” that they say exists today into the sort of state capitalism that exists in China which they falsely believe is “socialism”.
This is to be achieved by a united front of all non-monopoly elements, including non-monopoly capitalists, to elect a leftwing reformist government. They work to achieve this. This is combined with praise for China and nostalgia for the USSR.
Since the fall of the USSR, whose foreign agents they were, they have really had no reason to exist. But unfortunately they still do, sowing confusion as to what socialism is.
The truth that they are anti-socialists is confirmed by their practice.
As today’s demonstration was starting from a point a few tube stops from Head Office we decided to leaflet the start of this march. Unfortunately it was raining but we managed to hand out 200 or so leaflets but, as the Gaza one has run out, it was the one prepared for the Durham Miners Gala. We didn’t stay for long and so missed the arrests of those declaring their support for Palestine Action.
Robbo’s reply to Andrew Northall appears in yesterday’s Weekly Worker:
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1547/letters/
The letter that follows it, from a member of some Turkish group, makes the same point, with supporting evidence, as we do that Lenin’s distinction between socialism and communism is a distortion of Marx’s view.
In another article the WW group continue to accuse TAS of spgbism. Mike McNair writes:
“I remarked in my April 3 report of an online FCU meeting on March 30 that
‘… there is some danger of a ‘negative dialectic’ in which we in the CPGB understate the radicalism of our Draft programme, while, on the other hand, the TAS comrades drive themselves, in opposition to it, towards the position of the Socialist Party of Great Britain that all that can be done is to make propaganda for socialism until there is a clear majority for immediate general collectivisation.’I think this danger has, in fact, materialised – but with understating the radicalism of the Draft programme appearing within the arguments of TAS comrades themselves.
I should make the point that SPGB comrades have pointed out that (whatever their past views) their current position is to support trade union struggles, and so on – but not to have specific minimum demands in a party programme or election manifesto. Comrade Wrack says:
‘My argument is that the working class should not seek to come to power prematurely, before it can implement its programme. By that, I mean its maximum programme.
It is not enough for it to come to power and implement only a minimum programme that is compatible with capitalism, and then leave capitalism more or less intact.’On the one hand, this is close to the SPGB comrades’ view. There should be no shame in that; and, conversely, saying that the comrades’ position is close to the SPGB’s is not a misrepresentation or smear. It is perfectly possible that the SPGB comrades are right and the various tendencies that came out of the Second International left and Comintern are all wrong. I have given reasons last month for thinking that the SPGB comrades are wrong, in the form of the point that the working class needs to take power because declining capitalism threatens human extinction or generalised warlordism, in spite of possible ‘prematurity’ from the point of view of the rise of the working class.”
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1547/cold-war-economism/
The last point seems to be saying that, even though conditions aren’t ripe for establishing socialism (because most workers don’t want socialism) a socialist minority needs to seize power to prevent capitalism destroying civilisation.
We used to hear a similar argument from the original CND in its day that “we can’t wait for a majority to want socialism; we need to Ban the Bomb now before it destroys us all”. This of course begged the question by assuming that the Bomb could be banned while capitalism still existed. Mcnair is making a similar assumption.
A Marxian contribution without the vegetarianism :
Some Laborites are using the S-word again. After Zarah Sultana MP defected to Corbyn tweeting that the issue at the next general election will be “Socialism or barbarism”, a comrade has found this from another Labour MP:
“Labour MP Dawn Butler has told the Byline Festival that she is thinking about running for Mayor of London, as she declared that figures within her party need to start understanding that socialism “isn’t a dirty word”.
In an apparent criticism of the current leadership, she added that, “I think there are too many people at the moment in the Labour Party that don’t understand the Labour Party.
“They don’t understand that we were born from the trade union movement. They don’t understand that we are a Socialist Party, and that’s not a dirty word, and they don’t f***ing understand.”Labour MP Dawn Butler Says She Is Thinking of Running for London Mayor
I wonder what the two of them mean by “socialism”. Maybe we should ask them?
Former member (now back in the CPB) Andrew Northall replied in last Thursday’s Weekly Worker to Robin’s letter. He puts the best case a Leninist can — that socialist minority seizes power and then uses its control of political power to educate the working class into becoming socialists and that when a majority have become socialists then socialism can be established.
It’s what the pre-Marxist Communists thought but which Marx moved beyond,insisting that the working class would have to emancipate itself — that a majority of the working class would have to want and understand socialism before political control could be successfully exercised to replace capitalism with socialism.
Anyway here’s his letter:
To give them their due, a revolt by a large number of Labour MPs did force the government to water down and postpone — but not abandon — its plan to cut disability benefits.
Meanwhile it appears that a majority of Labour Party members want the government “to move to the left”. But when have Labour Party members decided what the government does?
https://labourlist.org/2025/06/news-labour-polling-survation-left-move/
Another letter from a Party member in this week’s Weekly Worker:
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1545/letters/
Also, mention of us three or four times in Conrad’s attack on TAS:
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1545/one-step-back/
For example:
“In fact, as I feared, comrades Wrack and Potts have done little more than produce a soft-focus, banal, incoherent parody of the maximalism of the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s ‘What we stand for’.The TAS duo hate my coming out with any such a description. It is one of those ‘bad words’ they cite to excuse their break with FCU. Pathetic. The comrades plead that they do not reject reforms per se – indeed they don’t. Nor for that matter does the SPGB.”
I haven’t been able to find the alleged “soft-focus, banal, incoherent parody” of our “maximalism”, if anybody can.
The Daily Mail today is reporting
“a poll last week found that a new Left-wing party led by Mr Corbyn would attract 10 per cent of voters and pose a fresh challenge for Sir Keir Starmer.
The survey by More in Common showed, if the ex-Labour leader were to front a new party, it would be backed by one in 10 voters.
At the same time, Labour’s share of the vote would drop from its current 23 per cent to 20 per cent – leaving Sir Keir’s party on the same level of support as the Tories.
In a further split on the Left of British politics, the Greens would drop from 9 per cent to 5 per cent if Mr Corbyn took the helm of a new party.”Polls are what they are worth and generally come up with the answer those who commission them want but this doesn’t seem unreasonable, i.e., 10 percent and that support from such a party would come from people who currently would vote Labour or Green.
Of course the new party has not yet been formed and Sultana has only announced that she will “co-lead” moves to form such a party. If formed, it will have to work out how to deal with the Trotskyist groups who will “enter” it en masse. See how the SWP has reported it:
Andrew Feinstein announces left alternative at Marxism Festival
As to the Greens, it will depend on who wins the leadership election there and whether it’s the leftwing candidate Zach Polanski who claims that the Green Party already is a “socialist party” (some Trot groups are already in it). My guess is that he won’t as the Greens have more in common with the Liberals and won’t want to alienate voters in the ex-Tory seats they won in the general election. They are pathetic wishy-washy lot anyway. We’ll see.
Let’s hope that the new leftwing reformist party doesn’t include the word “socialist” in its name.
I know it’s a bit like kicking an opponent when they’re down but here’s another everyday routine acceptance that banks need deposits to function.
It’s from today’s Times and is about a government plan to reduce “cash ISAs” (savings with banks, etc whose interest is tax-free) to encourage savers to instead gamble on the stock exchange by getting tax-free dividends.
According to the news item, building societies (which are banks specialising in lending money to people to buy a house), “which rely on cash ISAs as an important source of funding, have also warned restrictions could affect lending”.
If, as banks, they could lend without funding how come that this could affect their lending?
It would be nice to think that this was the beginning of a wider movement against the Starmer governments war-mongering:
The trouble is that the man behind it, Steve Hedley, the union’s assistant general secretary, is an unreconstructed Stalinist who is still pro-Russia even though it doesn’t even claim to be socialist any more. (He once publicly denounced us as “Mensheviks”. See here:
But at least the sentiment is ok if not the motivation. Which cannot be said of the Trotskyist “Workers Liberty” which openly calls for more arms for Ukraine side.
“Both a rebuilt welfare state and arms and aid for Ukraine can be won by taxing the rich. In any case, the amount spent on arms or aid for Ukraine is tiny compared to the shortfall in hospitals, schools, and the benefits system.”
(https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2025-05-26/editorial-ukraine-and-ukraines-workers)Tax the Rich to pay for arms for Ukraine, that’s a new one.
I didn’t know that the new head of MI6 is the grand-daughter of a Ukrainian Nazi. Can’t held that against her I suppose. I’m not responsible for what my grandfathers were or did. But even so, in present circumstances. A propaganda gift to the Russian rulers and a reminder that Ukrainians weren’t always the “goodies”.
Latest news: TAS break off the “unity” talks with the WW group. Not surprising really in view of the latter’s rigid Bolshevik-Leninism.
Another letter from us in this week’s Weekly Worker, on our attitude towards reforms:
