Global Research: Why I Defend Jeremy Corbyn but Don’t Support Him

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Excerpt:

Why I Don’t Support Corbyn
Anybody who has read my earlier essays on Corbyn will probably have already sussed my views on the man and more especially, the political party that has been his life-long domain (35 years or so in Parliament as a Labour back bencher).[2] Before that, a full-time trade union worker.
The major reason that most of the left advance for supporting Jeremy Corbyn appears to boil down to the fact that there is simply no alternative, that Corbyn is the best we’ve got to offer. That even a bad Labour government is better than a Tory one. But is this really true? This is, after all, the argument that has been used to justify voting for Labour, literally for decades. If true, then there is no alternative to the endless, first this then that approach to (no) real change. The end product of this view is an endless spiral downwards to the bottom, with the idea of socialism receding ever further into the distance with every election that passes.
At the end of 1890s, the newly formed Labour Party (formerly the Labour Representation Committee) decided to participate in Parliamentary democracy rather than act as an external pressure group for a socialist revolution and in doing so, set the agenda for the Left for the next century (and more). They talked of ‘reforming’ capitalism, slowly, bit-by-bit, squeezing concessions from capital, culminating in the 1945 postwar Labour government. Indeed it was the high point of the reformist approach and even then nationalisation was firstly a social democratic response to a nationwide demand for real socialism from the organised working class following the horrors of the 1930s and WWII, and secondly, to save an effectively bankrupt capitalist state, a capitalist state saved from collapse by a ‘socialist’ government. The ‘social contract’ between capital and labour was signed by a Labour government and capitalism was saved.
Yet at the same time, it was a Labour Party and Labour government that was profoundly anti-communist and anti-left, a ‘socialist’ party that banned relations with the rest of the left, expelling anyone who wished to see real socialist policies, prohibitions that still exist and are carried out to this day. A Cold War, imperialist party that supported colonialism and neocolonialism that helped subsidise the Welfare State. The working class was bought off with crumbs off the capitalist table on the backs of our former colonial subjects.
The illusion of socialism (social democracy) lasted 30 years. Enter Margaret Thatcher and the return to unbridled capitalism or neoliberalism as it is now known. RIP the Welfare State. What’s important is the role of the Labour Party and subsequent Labour governments in this process of defanging the class struggle.
Critical to the end of social democracy were two, connected events: first, the destruction of manufacturing through its export to cheap labour areas and the commensurate destruction of the organised, industrial working class that went with it, principally coal mining and the National Union of Mineworkers, a union which brought down a Tory government. Other areas of manufacturing were to follow over the subsequent decades.
This process was assisted by the discovery of North Sea oil and gas and the domination of the City of London through its virtually complete deregulation. The Age of Financialisation was upon us.
A parallel process took place in the USA and in 1991 the dissolution of the Soviet Union cleared the decks for what we now call globalisation or gangster capitalism as I prefer to call it.
One can say that it’s been downhill for the working class ever since and for the rest of the planet and its people.

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