The Digger

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 e...

Two articles which grapple with the question and attempt to make some small sense of how and why the left has lost touch with its proletarian constituency. Is the Working Class Right Wing? Excerpt:  An increasing number of the proletariat and the declassed petty bourgeoisie have gone through a process which tends to reduce them to mere “plebs” [2]. It is, as we said above, a fact, confirmed by the advance of fascist electoral formations even in the old "red" strongholds [3] of European cities. However alongside this phenomenon, there is another one, usually much less emphasised by the mainstream media. It is, simply, the growth of abstention from one side of the Atlantic to the other. This is true for America’s Presidential election as well as, just to give a local example, Monfalcone. The municipal elections of early November took place in this town where both "indigenous" and immigrant workers are numerous. The abstention rate here was close to fifty per...

The Russia collusion narrative is on its last legs. Brexit has vaguely shown up in the MSM while the ‘gilets jaunes’ movement has been unceremoniously buried. As expected, Theresa May has survived Corbyn’ no-confidence vote in her government by 19 votes. Of the 256 Labour MPs 81 (the neoliberal Blairite wing) support a fresh Brexit referendum. The Maastricht model rules their undemocratic World Order.   And two socialist strategists; “pragmatic” reformist Leo Panitch and revolutionary socialist Costas Lapavitsas’ diverging tactics indirectly butt heads on Labour’s socialist path to socialism in the Brexit context. The differences in their respective understanding of the fierce and indomitable power of the anti-democratic, liberal-illiberal, neoliberal EU technocracy confronting socialists seem to lie at the core of their irreconcilably divergent opinions. If socialism in its final democratic form is to have a chance socialists must come down from their lofty ac...