[Labour PM Clement Attlee, who won a 1945 landslide, with George VI]
Events are constantly developing around the recent General Election in Great Britain, of the Labour Party's Jeremy Corbyn's surprising gains and the Conservative Party's pitiful loss. At this writing, a Conservative minority government has signed some sort of alliance with a British political party ensconced in Northern Ireland, a party that seems to have come out of the 50's for its reactionary views on women, lesbians and gays, and equally important, against the sovereignty of an Ireland free of British colonial occupation.
THE AUSTERITY PARTY FINDS CASH TO SAVE ITSELF
The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a group of reactionaries that the failed Theresa May hopes will save her premiership, are as delusional about the northernmost part of Ireland being British as the French who once insisted that Algeria was part of France.
The Conservative-DUP agreement has already raised many doubts before the ink was dry. For one, can the British government can be an objective mediator between the DUP and Sinn Fein (the political arm of the Irish Republican Army)? This is an interesting question, because cadres of the officially disbanded IRA question why the UK, the occupying power, should be a mediator at all.
Doubts raised that a five-year Parliament can last its full term given the guarantee of $1 billion of funding to Northern Ireland is just over two years: what is the alliance agreement for the final three years of the Conservative's fixed term? More money? Doubts that this funding can be fairly administered to both nationalist and republican sides within Northern Ireland while there is no power-sharing administration are also being raised. Given the discovery of this new funding, the other devolved administrations, like Wales, are asking where their extra funding is in these austerity times.
The Labour Party has rightly turned the Tory election talking point back on Theresa May: where is her money tree?
Despite these day-to-day fights, there are some broader lessons we as communists, radicals, militants, etc., can draw from this election to direct our futures forward.
Among these lessons, the last would be the persons of Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May, if they must be mentioned at all.
The winners are the electorate, which made a clear expression of its leftist tendencies. The earlier, so-called "Brexit" vote, however marginal, was a rare moment in British democracy or democracy anywhere in the Western world. Our so-called democracies are carefully stage managed by corporations and stockbrokers who hire politicians at enormous costs (viz., the recent Congressional race in Georgia for which over $50 million was spent). Rarely .. dare I say never are voters allowed to have such a direct voice in where the nation-state collaborates its finances. It was clear the neoliberals who head all the major political parties in the UK wanted to remain in the EU, which is reflexive of the desires of the financiers.
It was just as clear in the wake of the vote, that those Brexit voters had to be maligned as possibly confused or as the worst kinds of people with bad character. It was hard to find that the older Labour Party position - the position of the moderate to radical socialists, like Tony Benn, Dennis Skinner, George Galloway, Glenda Jackson, and, yes, Jeremy Corbyn - were to resist this neoliberal takeover of the state by the Common Market/European Community.
The post-election smear of the electorate, and in some sense Labour's old position, is to inoculate the UK from ever holding such a plebiscite again.
The waffling and sliding of the political class on "what kind of Brexit" is a clear attempt to circumvent the vote and find an accommodation to please Wall Street and its European partners.
The more recent General Election may have produced a hung Parliament with no party in majority, but the voice against austerity, for funding social services, for a return to free tuition, better public housing, and nationalization of British industry made a phenomenal advance, especially considering the neoliberal voices - Tory, Labour, and Liberal Democrat - which openly mocked Corbyn and his programs. "Where is the money tree?" became the key talking point of the spokespeople of the banks - that is, the capitalist parties functionaries - who have not asked this question of Britain's "coalition of the willing" wars in Western Asia and the Middle East.
The losers are the British establishment, which is not taking this by turning the other cheek. Their new talking point is "stability," which if there was ever a hint of fascism, that word must be coupled with the British prime minister's frequent call to give the police more powers "to do their jobs."
This is why neither Corbyn nor May or any political leader must ever be put on our pedestals.
THE MASSES MAKE HISTORY
Recall the late Kwame Ture's (Stokely Carmichael) lesson:
"Only the masses make history. Our people make history. Sometimes we get confused. The history books are confusing our conceptions having us think we make history when one African becomes the first this or that. So in the history books you read that the first president of this association was an African. The first doctor to come to this hospital was an African. The first African to do this. The first African to do that. The first African astronaut. It makes you think that our history is a history of individual advancement into the capitalist system. This is not history. History is made by an oppressed people only in fighting against their oppressor. This is the only way you make history."
The winners are green shoots of a movement in Britain that emerged several hundred years ago and has been routinely co-opted by elites.
The losers, for all the disparity of their respective Labour-Tory platforms, are both equally tethered to the market system and are an impediment to building socialism or communism and radically rearranging our failed capitalist societies and its toxic neoliberal prescriptions.
The winners must be seen in a long view. So I trace the aspirations of this austerity-weary, EU-skeptical electorate back to the 17th century.
The English civil war saw a king executed and Britain's only experiment as a republic enduring for about 12 years. But the years of Oliver Cromwell's republic unleashed other radical movements that are rarely acknowledged by bourgeois historians.
As Christopher Hill chronicles in his WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN: Radical Ideas of the English Revolution, emboldened by the execution of the king, activists turned their sights on critiquing the utility of Parliament, unequal distribution of the land, and of the nobility. They had different visions of real, grassroots democracy that nurtured the Chartists, suffragists, slave abolitionists, and successive electoral reform movements of later decades well into the 19th and early 20th centuries. But their own communistic visions never materialized.
And this is the cautionary tale for radicals. We must appreciate our militant visions inspiring other movements, but we must beware of those movements becoming our own.
As elsewhere, the Establishment always managed to co-opt these movements or divert them. The insurgency during the Cromwell republic got so fierce to abolish Parliament and the elite class that the Establishment protected its interest ultimately by restoring the monarchy as the one institution immune from popular control that could protect the status quo.
This Establishment then reluctantly allowed mediocre electoral reforms within the established system.
The results are a predictable mixed bag, at best.
I'M SORRY, BUT WE'RE CAPITALISTS
Despite the radicals in its ranks, the British Labour Party has a long history of reformism. Its first Labour government, in 1925, alarmed the king who had second thoughts about allowing Ramsay MacDonald, Labour's leader, to take power. But George V's fear's were unwarranted. As The New Statesman editor, Kingsley Martin writes of that time:
"There was no cause for alarm. George V was immensely relieved to find that the first Labour prime minister had himself an Establishment mind[set] and had appointed an Establishment man to watch over Defense. The senior members of the Administration were flattered, overwhelmed, by the affability of the King and very ready to cooperate with the Establishment in keeping the Left Wing in order.
"When the second Labour Government (1929-1931) was confronted with the dilemma of either adopting a socialist policy ... or of joining forces with the Conservatives, MacDonald ... unhesitatingly chose the second course." [Martin, The Crown and the Establishment]
After World War II, Party stalwarts, like the radical socialist Kier Hardie, were marginalized to make the Party more acceptable to the British establishment (like his father, George VI was openly suspicious of the Labour Party). This same Labour government joined forces with the US imperialist mission to halt the liberation movement on the Korean peninsula.
Recalling this history is not to take away from the real, significant and radical gains made by the Labour Party, just to acknowledge its limitations and where further radical movement must continue if it is to realize its dreams.
Right now, New Labour elites seem to be dining on crow after the Corbyn-led electoral success, but I'm watching carefully, and they seem to be moving their forks around the plate but not taking any bites. They acknowledge Corbyn's gain but not sounding like their eyes have been opened, rather like the actor who lost the Oscar and needs to sounds gracious.This neoliberal wing of the Labour Party, which solidified its hold on the party in the 1990's, would still prefer a moderated Conservative in power over an emboldened moderate socialist.
What must Corbyn reasonably do to keep this wing supporting him, is a vital question for his radical base and for all radical cadres? The answer is this base must be crystal clear in its objectives and keep the long view. Coalitions are critical but we must not become them. We're communists. This long view reminds us again and again no shortcuts exist to building socialism, and that reactionaries never turn the other cheek and accept defeat. This base must be just as aware of New Labour's presence in that Party as we here in the US must remember that even after a failed election, Nancy Pelosi was put back in her leadership position. She proved her tone-deafness when in response to a question by a young, socialist-leaning activist she said, "I'm sorry, but we're capitalists."
If this lesson isn't learned by the winners, Corbyn could very well become prime minister, follow the reformist tendencies of many of his predecessors, and the masses that wanted much more will be left as frustrated and disillusioned as those 17th century insurgents who came so close only to have the monarchy restored.
