18.07.2024

King rat: the best Corbyn’s assemblies could produce

Rats in a sack

Local assemblies are a recipe for chaos, confusion and ineffectiveness. Jeremy Corbyn continues to disappoint, writes Carla Roberts

Why did Jeremy Corbyn not last as leader of the Labour Party? Yes, there was certainly the determination of the pro-Zionist right in and outside the Labour Party to get rid of him, aided by the entire bourgeois media, which happily lapped up the many false and weaponised claims of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the party. Labour’s inconsistent and weak stance on Brexit too played a role in the 2019 general election defeat (though, yes, it is true that during that ‘terrible’ and ‘disastrous’ election, more people voted Labour than this year).

But a dreary opinion piece in The Guardian penned by Corbyn is a stark reminder that his defeat also had a significant, self-made aspect to it.¹ The man is clearly no leader. As an aside, the article, published on July 12, cropped up numerous times talking to people at the Durham Miners Gala, which took place the next day - and not in a positive way.

Corbyn assures us that it was local “people-power that led to my re-election” in Islington North. It was his friend, Teme Teme Wanga, and thousands like him,

who gave up their time to support our campaign in a variety of ways: knocking on doors to speak to voters, offering posters to residents and shops, sending messages in family or street WhatsApp groups, stewarding rallies, creating art, or making cups of tea for those entering data late into the evening.

His re-election had apparently nothing at all to do with the fact that he has been the Labour MP in the constituency for over 40 years and is probably Islington’s most famous resident. And he has been a very good MP, by all accounts, taking up the concerns of local residents, while making a point of supporting all sorts of local campaigning events, shop openings, street parties, etc. The official Labour candidate, Praful Nargrund, never had a chance - and not just because he is a keen advocate of privatisation in the National Health Service and is personally linked to a number of private healthcare and venture capital firms.² Reports about support for Corbyn and him running ‘neck and neck’ were always highly suspicious - and had probably been spread by both camps, each for their own reasons.

In any case, Corbyn is trying to tell us that his election is the “start of a new politics” - “a new way” of doing things, a “grassroots model” and an expression of “real community power”. And “once this has been replicated elsewhere, this can be the genesis of a new movement” that “will eventually run in elections” and would be “capable of challenging the stale two-party system” (my emphasis).

Wait, what? First we have to “replicate everywhere” the work he has been able do in over 40 years as a local MP? How long would that take, especially without having the facilities and name recognition of Corbyn?

It gets worse. He consciously rejects building a new political party at this point in time: “To create a new, centralised party, based around the personality of one person, is to put the cart before the horse. Remember that only once strength is built from below can we challenge those at the top.”

Programme first

So instead of building a political party that could coherently organise people on the basis of a shared socialist programme (leaving aside for now what this would look like), we have to build “local people’s assemblies” first - which might or might not turn into a party. (Corbyn is very unclear on this issue in his article, though Collective, the proto-Corbyn outfit set up by his allies, says it does want to “eventually transform into a new political party”³).

In any case, we would argue that it is in fact Corbyn who has it exactly the wrong way around. Socialists and communists consciously put the programme first - the organisation flows from that. Unless you are clear about what you are fighting for and what concrete changes you want to see in society, you are bound to get lost in hyper-activity for the sake of hyper-activity.

But Corbyn assures us that the decent results for many independent candidates support his localist outlook: “Look at where other independents challenged the main parties most effectively. They built on community power to stand up for themselves and against those who had ignored their demands for peace and humanity.”

That is astonishingly dishonest. Clearly, it was the very centrally and nationally organised campaign, Muslim Vote, that successfully managed to mobilise the Muslim population to get four pro-Gaza MPs elected, with another dozen or so candidates ending up in a good second place. Muslim Vote is not a party, but it almost acted like one. And we would not be surprised if it turns into a political party before long, especially if Labour continues to fail so spectacularly to stand up to the genocidal campaign of Israel against the Palestinians.

Incidentally, Muslim Vote has called on Corbyn, the Green Party and other “independent groups” to emulate the New Popular Front in France in order to challenge the Labour government in future elections.⁴ George Galloway too has repeated the call for Corbyn to lead some sort of “popular front movement or party” (perhaps because, while some candidates of the Workers Party did quite well on July 4 - when they stood in areas with a large Muslim population - most of them did as badly as the rest of the left).

Should such a non-aggression pact come to pass - or, worse, a ‘popular front’ of some kind, perhaps as one of Corbyn’s necessary steps towards a party - we can guess what its programme would be like: subordinated to the most rightwing of the forces involved, as is usually the case. This is, after all, not the first time it has been tried. The disaster of the Respect Party springs to mind, where the Socialist Workers Party subordinated itself to the (perceived) demands of the Muslim organisations involved.

Real democracy?

But Corbyn pretends that what he is trying to do is all shiny and new: “Here in Islington, we are planting the seeds for a new way of doing politics.” He wants to organise a monthly “people’s forum”, which is supposed to be

a shared, democratic space for local campaigns, trade unions, tenants’ unions, debtors’ unions and national movements to organise, together, for the kind of world we want to live in. Listening to the voices of those who elected me. Discussing the concerns and hopes of our community. Empowering each other to do something about it.

Crucially, he says: “That is what real democracy looks like.” Getting together once a month to chat about local issues? Dear god. No, Jeremy, that is not “real democracy” - neither is being allowed to vote every five years. “Real democracy” would be the working class running every aspect of society, from top to bottom - what we would call socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transition to communism. To achieve that, our class needs to be organised around a clear programme that fights to achieve such “democratic control over every sphere of life: the state and politics, work and economy, international relations”, as the CPGB Draft programme outlines.⁵

And, yes, it needs to be organised in a “centralised party” to get there. Of course, we agree with Corbyn that this should not be “based around the personality of one person”. Especially not a person with such a weak grasp of political ABCs. No doubt personalities matter: Corbyn still enjoys a certain ‘messiah status’, although it has to be said that he is more like the invented version of Jesus, as the pacifist who ‘turns the other cheek’, than the far more realistic description of Jesus as a revolutionary communist who took up the battle against the Roman occupiers.

Corbyn’s entire time as leader of the Labour Party was characterised by his futile efforts to stop the right undermining him. Like a fool, he kept arguing for “unity”. Instead of condemning the anti-Semitism smear campaign as the big lie that it was, Corbyn launched an official enquiry run by Shami Chakrabarti - thereby giving, of course, credence to the weaponised accusations. The campaign to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism really exploded after that. Instead of clearing out the right in the way that Starmer cleared out the left, Corbyn bent over backwards, throwing allies and supporters to the wolves.

Nevertheless, should he officially put his weight behind an organisation like Collective, it would quickly attract tens of thousands. But Corbyn remains hesitant. Perhaps he really believes that Keir Starmer will let him back into the Labour Party, as happened with Ken Livingstone? There is zero chance of that happening, but for somebody like Corbyn, a Labourite through and through, it is a difficult habit to break. But his allies will continue to pressurise him into launching a party. The question is, what kind of party?

Centralised party?

We suspect that Corbyn rejects the idea of a “centralised party”, because he has the bureaucratic centralism and ‘follow the leader’ approach of much of the British left in mind. And we would agree with him about how useless such structures are. However, democratic centralism, as developed first in the German Social Democratic Party and then refined in the Bolshevik Party, is anything but the ‘one party, one view’ attitude of much of the left.

Real democratic centralism allows for vibrant and open debates, in full view of the working class, in order to convince the membership of the best possible way forward. Once you have had the transparent and democratic debate, you might vote on a particular line of action for a particular duration, and the membership is expected to follow that line - for example, when it comes to the material put out during a demonstration or the attitude taken towards a particular election or campaign. But political lines that are routinely imposed by the leadership without discussion, perhaps even against the wishes of many members, are likely to be ignored or, worse, undermined - and are therefore almost entirely useless.

Should local assemblies take off (which we seriously doubt), they would by definition develop independently of each other and with all sorts of weird and wonderful people, organisations and views involved. It would be virtually impossible to bring all those views together into a coherent party with a coherent programme - rats in a sack comes to mind.

Much more likely that Collective will do precisely what Corbyn says he wants to avoid: build a top-down organisation with minimal democracy and members’ involvement, on the basis of a minimal, sub-reformist programme that subordinates the fight for real socialism to the perceived views of the right.