​The British General Election draws near, the party propaganda machines are in full swing and the tranquillity of my winter evenings is increasingly punctured by the rapping and ringing of the clipboard-clutching ghouls who have wound 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 questionable 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 - a party for "selfish, grasping simpletons, who were born with some essential part of their soul missing", as the writer Charlie Brooker has put it. Unfortunately, however, many well-meaning working-class people are 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 itself is not above deceiving the electorate. Just look at this Labour Party video about 'the economy', with its villainous billionaire who refuses to invest his wealth (as if capitalism could continue if this happened) and 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 the misunderstandings and myths in this video, see here). This is not just bogus economics, but facile moralism and it beggars belief that nobody taking part in this production stopped to call some of its assumptions into question. Perhaps some did; but I have seen Labourites happily sharing this video on social media.
 
​As argued by this text contributed to a left communist web site by a group of recovering Corbyholics, Corbyn and Labour do not represent a 'progressive' electoral option (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” (a phrase coined by well-known socialist firebrand Tony Blair), since capitalism, the system which Labour seeks to manage and continue, depends precisely on the exploitation of the “many” (workers) by 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 such class division. Communism or socialism (the same thing, whatever the Leninists say) 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 historically 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.

BJ or JC for PM? Labour, Liberal, Tory, Green or Nationalist? Leave or Remain? These are the questions that will be debated ad nauseam around dinner tables and in media studios over the next few weeks. But the really important questions for working-class people are of quite a different order. Here are some of them. 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 possess as much wealth as half of the world’s population? Do you appreciate how crazy 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 planetary chaos in a slightly friendlier fashion. 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 in any case will have to be addressed on a global, not a national scale. Nor will a Labour government even make things just a little more tolerable, whatever the party may be promising. The last 'New' Labour government was arguably worse for ordinary people than the Conservative one it replaced, increasing wealth disparities at home and wreaking death and destruction overseas. Indeed, not only was the invasion of Iraq arguably the greatest crime against humanity of the twenty-first century, but Labour politicians continue to play their part in overseas wars. And let's not forget that the Labour government before that one, the 'Old' Labour of the 1970s, oversaw horrendous cuts in workers' pay and public spending. In its entire history, in fact, the Labour Party has attacked the working class and has never moved society one step closer to socialism.

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’ and forge ‘a new type of politics’ by voting for Corbyn and company. But we've 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 our strength in numbers to abolish capitalism once and for all. No leader required. But we don’t have forever to get the job done...

(First published in Star and Crescent)

These days, the name of Jeremy Corbyn is on everybody’s lips. Or so it seems to me. In a canteen yesterday, I misheard a fellow diner’s order of ‘spaghetti carbonara’ as ‘Corbynara’. And who knows, if Corbyn’s star continues to rise, we might yet see the day when the Labour leftist – who is already considered a savoury dish by many of his admirers – has a pasta named after him.

For the time being, though, Corbyn is under fire from his many adversaries. The right-wing press attacks Jezza at every turn, often in the most salacious, moralizing and trivialising terms. Article after article excoriates Corbyn as a scruffy love rat who once had a habit of eating cold beans from a tin. Such is the all-too-familiar viciousness of the British tabloid press. Yet the chorus of mockery isn’t confined to the redtops and the Daily Mail. In a recent BBC Panorama presented by former Sun journalist John Ware, Corbyn was subjected to a tabloid-style whacking, and even the liberal journalists at The Guardian have been putting the boot in. Raphael Behr, for instance, has provocatively compared Corbyn’s ‘populist’ politics to those of UKIP’s ultra-nationalist Nigel Farage.

In recent days, The Guardian has published some more sympathetic pieces about the Labour leader; but Corbyn is likely to be vilified by most of the media for as long as he remains at the helm of the Labour party. The British public now breathlessly awaits the further revelations that Corbyn is a paedophile, eats babies, or shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. But why is so much of the media so hostile towards Corbyn? And does this hostility mean that Corbyn is a radical? Can the politics that he represents really help to bring about socialism and a ‘fairer society’, as many of his supporters believe?

Corbyn’s ascendancy comes as something of a shock for those of us old enough to remember him from earlier decades. We knew Corbyn as a campaigning leftist politician, but few of us could have guessed that he would become Labour leader. His extraordinary rise is a consequence of his ability to attract the support of a broad range of leftists and party members, many of whom recently joined Labour specifically to vote for the man they believe represents ‘a new kind of politics’.

The media are hostile towards Corbyn largely because they – and their advertisers and owners – fear the ideological reorientation he seems to represent. Corbyn’s election as leader has restored the dreaded word ‘socialism’ to public discourse. And many of Corbyn’s ideas are certainly radical. For example, on foreign policy, Corbyn opposes airstrikes on Syria, and on education, the scrapping of university tuition fees. Sounds good. And it’s great to hear Corby talking of the need for a ‘kinder society’ in which refugees are treated with respect. To oppose such sentiments one would have to be an idiot or a Tory (or, as is often the case, both).

But even if a Corbyn-led government were elected – and the next opportunity for that is a full five years away – it is doubtful that any of Corbyn’s enlightened policies would by then be intact, let alone implementable. And we’d do well to remember that radical promises are easily broken. Before the 2010 election, Nick Clegg, of the Liberal Democrats, promised the end of university tuition fees, only to renege later upon his pledge. That’s how politicians roll. In fact, we don’t even have to wait for promises to be broken: earlier this year, Corbyn voted in support of Labour’s Compulsory Jobs Guarantee, a scheme involving an element of ‘workfare’ – unpaid work in return for benefits – something Corbyn has elsewhere claimed to oppose.

Here’s the thing. The political system in a country such as Britain has both a right-wing and a left-wing ‘face’. For the last five years we have been staring into the former, and view has not been pretty. Under the Conservatives, many British workers have seen drastic reductions in their wages and living conditions. Disabled people and welfare recipients (dubbed ‘benefit claimants’ in the tabloid media) have been particularly hard hit. In London, rents and house prices have reached insane levels, leading to a veritable social cleansing of the poor. While no mass movement has yet emerged to oppose them, these developments have left people bitter, furious and in many cases suicidal.

It’s hardly surprising that those seeking an end to this miserable state of affairs eagerly embrace political promises of a ‘fairer society’, or even ‘socialism’. And it is here that the left-wing ‘face’ of capitalism hoves into view. At moments when people become disillusioned with the system, left-wing political parties can help to contain and dissipate public anger. The ‘anti-austerity’ party Syriza has recently played this role in Greece.

There’s no reason to think that a newly ‘radical’ Labour party, were it elected, would do any better than Syriza. On the contrary, we’ve been here before. I vividly remember the celebrations in Glasgow in May 1997 when ‘New’ Labour came to power after 18 years of Conservative rule. As the parties spilled into the streets, one man bellowed ‘SOCIALISM NOW!’ into the night sky. But such hopes were quickly dashed. After 1997, Tony Blair’s party did not contribute to the creation of a more decent society, either at home, where inequality deepened, or abroad, where the ‘humanitarian’ bombs rained down, from Belgrade to Baghdad.

Corbyn, of course, rejects Blairism and New Labour. His ideal Labour party, by his own admission, would resemble that of the Wilson/Callaghan government of the 1970s. In fact, Corbyn was a close friend of a key member of that government, the late Tony Benn, a man who delivered searing indictments of the capitalist system when he no longer played any part in government, but who, as Secretary of State for Energy, was partly responsible for devastating pit closures and the repression of striking workers. Whatever fine phrases he uttered in the 1980s and 90s, as a minister Benn was hardly on the side of the British working class. In assessing the meaning of Corbyn, too, we should take into account the gap between left-wing rhetoric and the historical reality of the left in power.
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In terms of personal authenticity and genuine commitment to his constituents, Corbyn scores highly and his many radical statements show that it is possible to oppose and humanize the political discourse of the right. This is no small thing after many years in which the media and political parties in Britain have poured vitriol on immigrants, the poor and the unemployed. Ultimately, however, I think that it’s a mistake to support Corbyn or the Labour party, which is, whatever the rhetoric or intentions of its more radical members, a capitalist party. A genuinely ‘new kind of politics’ can only come about through the self-organization of ordinary people working to resist – and perhaps one day overcome – capitalism.