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Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in September 2015, and (following a vote of no confidence and a leadership challenge) re-elected to the same post in September 2016. In February this year, many of those who had re-elected him expressed disappointment at his effectively unconditional support for Theresa Mays invocation of the Article 50 process to leave the European Union; perhaps to placate them, Corbyn subsequently called for a demonstration in support of those who would suffer the most from EU withdrawal, but then failed to turn up.

Part of the public rationale for Corbyns three-line whip on the Brexit vote was that if the party opposed it, then that might lead to a loss of support in predominantly working class constituencies in the North and the Midlands that had voted Leave by large margins: constituencies such as Copeland and Stoke-on-Trent Central, where the party nevertheless went on to lose vote share in by-elections later the same month.

But despite all this despite Brexit, which Labour Party members and voters had overwhelmingly voted against, and despite what was arguably the worst by-election performance for an opposition party since the late19th century Corbyns supporters in the Labour Party are still for the most part Corbyns supporters in the Labour Party, and theyre not going anywhere and neither, therefore, is the man himself.

Asked whether Corbyns continued leadership of the party was a good thing, the answer from sidelined deputy leader of the Labour Party, Tom Watson, was pragmatic: "It doesnt matter; that is the situation."This impasse will not endure forever: Prime Minister Theresa May has called for an early General Election, and Corbyn (who has been asking for one since December last year) has given his support. But in the six weeks that we have left until the Labour Party is overwhelmingly (and perhaps irreparably) crushed, it may perhaps be worth reflecting on how it got into this appalling mess.

The best way to find out what a particular group thinks is to survey a random sample of about a thousand of its members and this is exactly what Ian Warren of Election Data has done, by commissioning a YouGov opinion poll of the Labour Party. Warrens poll found striking differences between party members who joined before Corbyn became leader and party members who joined afterwards. Among the former group, 28% approve and 62% disapprove of his leadership, but among the latter, 69% approve and 20% disapprove. The poll also found Corbyns leadership to have the approval of only 47% of those members who voted Labour in 2015, but of 73% of those who voted for other parties at that time. Both of these findings support the view of Corbynism as ahostile takeover of the Labour Party.

The party has long beenattractiveto such takeovers because, since the early 20th century collapse of the Liberal Party, it has consistently been one of the two most dominant parties in the British parliament. However, it was recently made morevulnerableto takeover by rules changes that gave anyone who joined the party or registered as a supporter an equally weighted vote in its internal elections.

Corbynism is the exploitation of that vulnerability in order to increase the influence of a particular faction within the Labour Party. This faction is sometimes referred to as Labours "hard left" wing, to distinguish it both from the partys "centrist" wing (think Tony Blair or Harold Wilson) and the "soft left" that lies between the two (think Ed Miliband or Neil Kinnock). However, it is perhaps more useful to refer to it as the partys "Bennite" faction. This emphasises its long-term leadership by Tony Benn, father of Melissa Benn, the author;Hilary Benn, the decidedly non-Bennite MP whose sacking from the shadow cabinet prompted the 2016 leadership challenge against Corbyn;and Stephen Benn, the 3rd Viscount Stansgate.

Although originally a centrist, Benn converted to Marxism in the 1970s, acquiring a devoted following among the more radical elements that were by then flowing into the party membership. He was never successful in his attempts to become party leader or deputy leader, but Benn was responsible for the partys adoption of its most radical manifesto ever: a programme of industrial nationalisation, unilateral nuclear disarmament, and withdrawal from the EUs predecessor organisation, the European Community. When Michael Foot, a representative of the partys "old left" (think Aneurin Bevan or Richard Crossman) led Labour into the 1983 general election on this manifesto, it received its worst defeat since before the Second World War. Foot resigned as leader of the Labour Party and was replaced by Neil Kinnock, a left winger who had not supported Benn.

With the party under Kinnocks leadership, Benn and his associates such as Ken Livingstone, who had become leader of the Greater London Council in 1981, and Jeremy Corbyn, who was elected to parliament for the first time in that fateful 1983 election were unable to prevent the expulsion of their allies in Marxist-Leninist groups such as Militant (originally known as the Revolutionary Socialist League), and were increasingly sidelined from the late 1980s onwards. Their defeat seemed cemented in 1995 when Tony Blair amended Clause IV of the Labour Party constitution to replace its commitment to public ownership of industry with a commitment to unspecified "democratic socialist" ideals, subsequently rebranding the party as "New Labour" and (together with his then-ally, Gordon Brown) leading it to an unprecedented run of three general election victories in 1997, 2001, and 2005.

However, the balance of power shifted with the partys demoralising 2015 defeat under its "soft left" leader, Ed Miliband. Following Milibands resignation, Corbyn at the time, a largely forgotten Bennite secured sufficient nominations from fellow MPs to gain a place on the leadership ballot. In accordance with rules changes agreed under Miliband, the ballot was put to members, registered supporters, and affiliate members of the party, whose ranks were swelled by large numbers of people joining specifically in order to vote for Corbyn. Corbyns victory was convincing, although it is noteworthy that despite the influx of new members he was not the first choice of 50.4 per centof party members.

After winning this internal election, Corbyn swiftly moved to install his allies at the top of the party. His long-term friend, John McDonnell another Bennite, who once described Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky as his "most significant" influences was appointed to the most senior shadow cabinet position, and a number of Marxist-Leninists from outside Parliament were given important posts within the party. Labour centrists often refer to Communists as "Trots", i.e. Trotskyists (that is, supporters of revolutionary proletarian internationalism as represented by the Fourth International). However,the prevailing ideological climate of Corbyns circle tends more towards the other primary stream of European Marxism-Leninism, i.e.Stalinism (that is, support for the totalitarian Soviet state as well as for unclear reasons its gangster capitalist successor state, the Russian Federation).

The antifascist blogger, Bob from Brockley, explains as follows:

Corbyn has had a weekly column in the Communist Party of BritainsMorning Star, and he has used that column to promote a basically Cold War second camp worldview, most recently in promoting Kremlin lies about UkraineAfter leaving Oxford, Seumas Milne [whom Corbyn appointed as the Labour Partys Executive Director of Strategy and Communications] cut his political teeth in a group called Straight Left, whose USP in the small but crowded market of the far left was that it thought most other Communist groups were insufficiently appreciative of Stalins achievements.

Lets not get carried away, though: whatever the political background of the Labour leader and his circle, there is no need to assume that all those who voted for him are current members of revolutionary Communist organisations. Some sort of Communist influx has undoubtedly occurred, especially within Momentum(the "grassroots" pro-Corbyn organisation founded and owned by Corbyns old friend, Jon Lansman, and now riven by conflict between its Trotskyist and Bennite wings.As Colin Talbot has argued,there are very large numbers of aging ex-Communists who may have "turned to Corbyn as the political equivalent of going out and buying a Harley".

But Corbynism appeals to a wider (but notthatmuch wider) group of mostly middle class people whose primary cultural identification is with "the Left". Such people are keen to support Corbyn because they see him as one of their own: a vegetarian pacifist who has never been interested in the tedious work of winning elections and scrutinising legislation but who has (as he told Nigel Nelson in the middle of his first leadership election campaign) "always [been] passionate about justice, the environment, and war and peace", and who, in his youth, "got arrested in most countries [he] visited for demonstrating".

Although Corbyn was originally elected with broad support from existing members of the party, his power base within it now primarily consists of people who joined it in order to re-shape it in his image and their own. These people might best be thought of as "socialism fans", and are quite different from traditional Labour Party members and voters. They are people who joined the party not because they agreed with its goals and wanted to help it achieve them, but because they identified with the culture of Leftism and sought an active form of cultural participation much as theatre buffs might join an amateur dramatics club, or history enthusiasts might join a medieval re-enactment society.

The difference between those who joined the party in order to help its representatives get elected to local and national government and those who joined the party in order to place and keep Corbyn at its helm is as stark as (and in many ways parallels) that which George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier describes between, on the one hand, "the warm-hearted, unthinking Socialist who only wants to abolish poverty", and, on the other hand, "the foaming denouncers of the bourgeoisie, and the more-water-in-your-beer reformers and the astute young social-literary climbers and all that dreary tribe of sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers" who flock to "Socialist" organisations and drive away ordinary working class people who might otherwise be inclined to join or vote.

It is not just that members who voted for Corbyn in 2016 (i.e.after and despitethebad opinion polls, the dreadful showing in the May elections, the loss of the referendum, and the vote of no confidence from those it was Corbyns job to lead) are as Warrens YouGov poll shows far more likely than those who voted against him to engage in low-investment forms of political activity, such as sharing campaign messages on social media, and far less likely to engage in high-investment forms of political activity, such as delivering leaflets or knocking on doors.

It is that they have a very different idea of what the Labour Party is for. They view it not as a party of parliamentary government or opposition but as an opportunity to engage in demonstrations, protests, marches, and rallies as well as thrilling social media battles against insufficiently radical Labour MPs (and their supporters). These are the people for whom Corbyn was speaking when he said: "Were all in power. We just dont realise it. We have the power to speak, to influence, to demonstrate, to demand."

Engagement with the business of parliament is irrelevant perhaps even an impediment to the socialism fans enjoyment of such "power". Thus it seems unsurprising that, of those who voted for Corbyn in the 2016 election, only 11 per centconsider "understanding what it takes to win an election" to be among the two or three qualities most necessary for a Labour leader (compared to 55 per cent of those who voted against them), while 30 per cent and 31 per cent respectively consider "mov[ing] the party to the left" and "tak[ing] on powerful interests" to be among them (compared to 2 per cent and 6 per cent of those who voted against him).

The conflict between socialism fans and people with a more direct interest in electoral politics plays out again and again in social media. For example, when Owen Jones last month asked Corbyn supporters on Twitter what they thought of the prospect of an early election, he was told that "transforming the Labour Party" was "never a short-term project". The Corbyn supporter who supplied this answer seemed indifferent to Joness objection that the "decimation of Labour" would be the result.

A few days after I observed the above exchange, a Labour Party who had once held the post of Political Education Officer within his CLP used the relatively less public platform of a Facebook group to inform me that itdid not matterwhether the party lost votes as it turned towards socialism, because votes for a party that was (on his view) insufficiently socialist were no different from votes for the Conservative Party or the Liberal Democrats. As he continued: "I want Labour to be firmly socialist", "I think New Labour must be permanently exterminated", and "the important thing is having Labour as a socialist party and eradicating New Labour for good".

One might wonder what end could be achieved by transforming Labour if it could not then be elected to government? But that is the wrong question: the eradication of Blairs legacy is an end in itself. This is recognisably the same politics advocated by Corbyn-supporting journalist Paul Mason in conversation with the more sceptical Carole Cadwalladr:

"In America, he says, what the Occupy generation chose to do was to occupy the Democratic party and thats effectively what [we] have chosen to do here: to occupy the Labour party. We, on the left of the party, didnt want this fight. But its like what General Sherman said in the American civil war: Youve chosen war. Were going to give you all the war you can take"Iwant to lay waste to the whole neoliberal hierarchical tradition that Blairism and Brownism represented."

We see more of the same in the following, by the influential left-wing author, Richard Seymour, who laid out his vision on Twitter:

1. Regarding "pessimism", a few points of order. The most plausible outcome of Corbyn's leadership has never been socialist triumph.

2. The party apparatus and the wider terrain (media etc) was always going to be set against him.

3. The electoralist goals of Labour would always conflict with the goals of regrowing the grassroots, winning socialist arguments.

4. Because the latter work on a long timeline, whereas elections are short-term, responsive to news cycles, parliamentary squabbles, etc.

5. Even winning an election wouldn't be triumph, because it's a question of what kind of country you govern -- political economy, etc.

6. The best hope for Corbynism was/is that it would transform Labour, democratise it, make it a mass campaigning party.

7. A party capable of organising social power beyond electoral arena -- but that means taking short-term losses, esp middle class votes.

Winning elections is not an objective; losing votes is not a problem; the goal is totransform Labour: to take it out of electoral politics, to refocus it on the exercise of "social power", and above all, to democratise it, i.e. to put it under the control of anyone who wants to join it, rather than those of its representatives who have been elected to parliament or to local and regional government by the general public and who do the day-to-day work that this involves. If that goal is ever achieved, it is hard to imagine what the party would do next. Those who share a desire to take it over do not necessarily share much else in common, besides a hatred of Tony Blair. In fact, the most likely outcome would be a series of splits, for example between those who wish to abolish private property and those who only want to nationalise the railways.

Corbyns leadership can be advocated by liberal environmentalists and revolutionary Communists, as well as by mutually opposed sub-groups of the latter, because his own ideology is impossible to pin down beyond a commitment to a "socialism"that he defines only in the vaguest possible terms. "You care for each other, you care for everybody, and everybody cares for everybody else", (another gem from Nelsons interview) is his clearest statement yet of what the word means when he uses it.

What manner of policies for the governing of a country could one derive from such a position statement? Almost any which means that all those who wish to, can imagine that Corbyn would govern in accordance with their own preferences. But the defining feature of Corbynism is that it is only incidentally concerned with the outside world. It isprimarily a politics of coalition between members of the self-identified "Left", who will be able to work together only as long as there is no goal beyond the defeat of Labours centrist and soft left factions.

For example, the Stop the War Coalition, whose president was Tony Benn until 2014, whose chair was Corbyn until 2015, and which retains Corbyns full support, is felt by many people to be a front for Britains largest Trotskyist organisation, the Socialist Workers Party or SWP (of which the above-quoted Richard Seymour used to be a member). Itseems oddly unbothered by the savagery of Daesh/Islamic State. Meanwhile, theMorning Staris unbothered by the equally barbaric Kremlin-backed Assad regime and likewise retains Corbyns support.

What rational sense can this make? Its not just that these are groups that no reasonable and humane person would want anything to do with. Its that Trotskyists and Stalinists were at each others throats even before Stalin had Trotsky murdered and that Daesh and the Assad regime are at war. Similarly, Corbyn can insist that "women deserve unflinching support in the face of violence and abuse", yet ignore his own feminist supporters when they demand that he distance himself from Stand up to Racismover the well-documented willingness of the SWP (for which it is, of course, yet another front organisation) to cover up allegations of sexual violence by its own senior members. Because all the associatedspeakinganddemonstratinganddemanding(to return to Corbyns above characterisation of the kind of "power" that he and his followers appear to understand themselves to wield) is covered by the umbrella of an amorphous Leftism with no need for ideological coherence, relatively substantial numbers of socialism fans can be recruited to the support of often rather nasty groups even as the majority of the population is repulsed.

Corbyn, with his vague passion for "justice, the environment, and war and peace", is the ideal figurehead for thisculturaloraestheticLeftism and its cynically tactical coalitions - an apparently blank canvas onto which socialism fans can project their fantasies. Since 2015, his own saintly figure has been the focus of perhaps the largest coalition of all, devoted to the single issue ofgetting the Labour Party out of the government business by installing him as its leader and keeping him there. As the rest of this article will argue, it scarcely matters how particular Corbyn supporters might choose to define their politics, because they all speak the same language in support of this shared goal.

Here is a quote amalgamated (note the ellipses) from three comments that a single individual made on a mutual friends Facebook post on 27 February 2017. Between his posting of the second and third comments, I commented that the Labour Party is not primarily a socialist party but has "always had room for socialists provided that they can reconcile themselves to electoral reality".This comment of mine is referenced in the third of his:

"Acentrist-Labour would now be what was once considered right wing. Corbyn is hardly hard left, but mainstream politics has lurched so far to the right its normalised the right doctrine and neoliberalism. As Raymond Williams scarily predicted, the values and ideas are of neoliberal capitalism are so normalised it appears to be the only way, the way its always been. If the only viable choice is a right leaning Labour party, or an extreme right Tory party, dictated mostly by the right wing and corporate owned media, then really democracy and decency are already lost. Electoral reality is exactly what Raymond Williams warns about. This is the way it is, theres no room for change. Corbyn represents a genuine difference. If the choice is between Extreme Tory and Tory-Lite, then what is even the point? Corbyn has repeatedly been on the right side of history, and his policies have genuine popular appeal and yet its increasingly clear the media control what people see and hear."

Theres nothing special about the above, but thats the point: the most striking thing about it is its sheer predictability. Although not all attempt to understand contemporary politics by reference to the work of Marxist literary critics who died three decades ago, Corbynites say more-or-less the same thing on a daily basis, both on social media and off it. For example, the day after the above Facebook comments were made, the aforementionedMorning Starbluntly asserted that "people understand Jeremys message to be true" in an editorial published under the headline "The only political leader offering radical change". An article published later the same week inSocialist Worker the official newspaper of the aforementioned SWP argued that "Corbyns 'hard left' policies seemed normal inside the Labour party when he first became an MP in 1983" but "n]ow they are regarded as very left wing", and, as a result, "most of the media have waged a vicious campaign to undermine Corbyn".

Like those articles, the Facebook comments above are assemblages of what rhetoricians calltopoior "commonplaces": ideas or themes that are within a particular culture frequently revisited and rarely challenged. Within particular groups, people adopt the same ways of speaking, which imply the same ways of thinking. The following are clearly recognisable as thekinds of things that Corbynites say:

Jeremy Corbyns policies are what the public really wants.

Jeremy Corbyn only seems to be "hard left" because the Labour Party has moved to the right, leaving him behind.

Without Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party would be virtually indistinguishable from the Conservative Party and there would be no point voting for it.

Jeremy Corbyn isdifferentfrom other politicians.

Jeremy Corbyn brings change that powerful forces seek to prevent.

Jeremy Corbyn has always been "on the right side of history".

If members of the publicthinkthey dont want Jeremy Corbyn, thats only because of the malign influence of the media.

The only thing missing from the above list is the assertion that Jeremy Corbyn is actually very popular with the British public. If you havent heard such lines before, then you havent yet met the people who joined the Labour Party in order to get Corbyn into the leaders office and keep him there the people for whom Corbyns leadership is the only good thing about the Labour Party the people for whom supporting Corbyn is thevery pointof being in the Labour Party.

Taken literally, these ideas are a mixed bag. There is never any clarity as to what Corbyns "difference" from other politicians consists in, nor as to why it should be considered a good thing. The nature of the "change" he is said to bring is similarly nebulous. The grand-sounding claim about "the right side of history" only means that he voted against the invasion of Iraq. And whilesomeof Corbyns policy positions are potentially popular with voters, those are positions that are shared across the Parliamentary Labour Party, including by centrist MPs. As for the idea that Corbyn originally represented the mainstream of the Labour Party, that is true only in the limited sense that his entrance into Parliament was via the disastrous 1983 election, which the party fought on a manifesto that was largely the handiwork of one of its most left-wing MPs.

But the power of commonplaces arises from repetition, not from rational consideration in relation to empirical evidence. Indeed, their very point is that they are never subjected to critique, serving instead as accepted starting points for trains of thought that reliably loop back to the point of departure. For Corbyns supporters, a good argument is an argument both founded upon and re-affirming Corbynite commonplaces, while a deceptive or mistaken or otherwise Blairite argument is an argument that does not.

One of the most interesting aspects of these commonplaces is their ability to circulate between groups that might otherwise appear to have fairly fundamental disagreements, including supporters and opponents of Britains membership of the European Union, as well as both Stalinists and Trotskyists. This is because they have their roots in the culture of the 21st century British Left which is shared across multiple left wing groups and left-identified individuals unaffiliated with any specific group rather than in any particular political analysis which is the sort of thing that socialists and Communists will feud over until the end of time (hence the virtually microscopic size of all British parties to the left of Labour).

Here, for example, is an editorial published nearly two years before the above social media comments inSolidarity, the official newspaper of the Alliance for Workers Liberty or AWL, a Trotskyist organisation formerly known as Socialist Organiser, membership of which is proscribed for Labour Party members:

"The huge support for Jeremy Corbyns campaign for Labour leader is a reminder that what seems like an overwhelmingly dominant right-wing consensus in bourgeois politics can be limited and unstable. It shows that large numbers of people, including working class and young people, still want a politics that is different to, and to the left of, the consensus of neo-liberalism."

We can read this and the more recent quotations we have already seen almost as a single text. Left politics, identified with Corbyn, are positioned as "different to", "offering radical change" from, or "represent[ing] a genuine difference" with regard to a "normalised" or "consensus" position described as "neoliberal"or "bourgeois" and identified not only with the Conservative Party ("Extreme Tory") but also with all Labour MPs not overtly affiliated with their partys left wing ("Tory-Lite"). This politics is not really "hard left"; rather, it is "popular", "understood to be true" by "people", and supported by "large numbers of working class and young people", such that any apparent lack of enthusiasm from the general public must be explained, whether explicitly or otherwise, by conspiracy theories for example, involving "a vicious campaign" waged by "the media", which has "control [over] what people see and hear".

The latter is particularly important because it functions as an alibi for the failure of the rest. For example, while I was writing this, a message was posted to a popular Labour Party Facebook group using a reference to Edward Herman and Noam ChomskysManufacturing Consentto support the argument that it is not the Labour leadership but the media that need to change. "Labour politics is fine," the poster concluded, and if "a political party that clearly represents the interests of the vast majority of the population cannot obtain the commensurate backing", this can only be explained through media bias.

To accept this line of reasoning is to accept then the Labour Party will never again win elections because it cannot change the media, but to assert that its future defeats wont matter, because they wont be the party leaders fault. If indeed one regards elections in which the general public participates as in any way important which many enthusiasts of party democracy apparently do not.

Such thinking goes all the way to the top of the current party, with Corbyns closest parliamentary ally, McDonnell, informing two journalists at theGuardian a newspaper that was intensely critical of Blair (especially over the war in Iraq) and that publishes numerous pro-Corbyn commentators that because their employer "became part of the New Labour [i.e.Blairite] establishmentyoufeel dispossessed becauseyour peopleare no longer in power" and therefore collude in the medias attempt "to destroy a socialist who is trying to transfer power from the establishment to the people".Corbynite commonplaces all the way.

But what is "the establishment"and who are "the people"? In practice, the former simply means whoever held positions of influence in the Labour Party before Corbyns election as its leader, and the latter simply means the Bennite faction of the Labour Party and its allies in various left-wing organisations, some of whose members are banned from joining Labour.

On the subject of organisations proscribed for Labour members, I turn now to an editorial published just after Corbyns re-election as Labour leader inThe Socialist, the official newspaper of the Socialist Party or SP: another Trotskyist organisation that formerly practised entryism under the name of Militant but subsequently shifted to competing against the Labour Party in local and parliamentary elections, latterly in partnership with the SWP as part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition or TUSC (from which the SWP recently withdrew in order to focus its efforts on supporting Corbyn). The editorial, which also writes of huge enthusiasm for Corbyns pro-worker platformargues as follows:

"The battle against Labours right is not simply a battle between two wings of a party. Behind them are the class interests of the different participants. The right ultimately represents the capitalist elite, which was delighted with the Blairite transformation of Labour into a party that could be relied on to act on their behalf, and is fighting to turn the wheel of history back to that situation."

Its worth thinking about this carefully. Its scope is the Labour Party itself (from which ex-members of Militant are banned), and its concern is with whether the party shall remain in the state to which it was transformed by Blairite Labour MPs for the benefit of the "capitalist elite" or shall be re-transformed by Bennite Labour MPs for the benefit of well, who, exactly? The idea appears to be that Corbyns leadership will deprive the "capitalist elite" of the tool that the Labour Party supposedly became under Blair. The Labour Party does not have to win elections for that goal to be achieved. Indeed, it could simply vanish or fragment into micro-parties indistinguishable from the rest of the British far left.

The image of heroic struggle within the Labour Party is given graphic form in a drawing on the cover of the issue ofSolidarityfrom which I quoted previously, which shows workers (standing on the left, of course!) cheering Corbyn on while senior Labour Party figures (including Blair himself with a badge that reads "Tony Tory") and obese, drunken journalists (naturally standing or sprawled on the right) hysterically condemn him as an "extremist" or a "disaster". The drawing is captioned "The Socialist who stood in a Labour leadership election", and accompanying front page headlines are "Back Corbyns campaign" and "Fight for working class politics", while the article quoted above carried the slightly different headline, "Back Corbyn, fight for working-class politics!"From Corbyns mouth come vague, policy-free statements of rejection: "I dont agree with austerity" and "I oppose attacks on the working class and the poor!"

This is, I would suggest, the sum total of the Corbynite project: the installation at the head of the Labour Party of a "socialist", i.e.a person upon whom Marxist-Leninists can pin hopes, and who makes statements aligning himself or herself against right-wing policies (such as "austerity") and with "the working class" and "the poor". What do actual "working class" or "poor" people think of this? They certainly arent very keen to vote for it.

In contrast to all the above, and without claiming that it typifies the views of any particular group, I offer the following report of a working-class individuals discourse on Corbyn, simply to remind my readers of what the Labour Party might look like to those who turn to left-of-centre politics in hope of what George Orwell characterised as "better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about" as opposed to the revolutionarys "vague threat of future violence":

My Mum, brought up working class in a railway workers house, got a phone call today from the Labour Party about her direct debit being cancelled.

She gave them both barrels about how Corbyn was a traitor to the working class by dooming Labour to opposition and bringing about a further decade of Tory government. She said that she would not give another penny to the party until Corbyn had gone. She told the person on the phone that the best government she had ever known was the Blair government and that Gordon Brown saved the world only for this Jeremy Corbyn "tosser" to put it all at risk.

I would like to apologise to the poor bugger who made that phone call as well giving a big shout out to my Mum.

(Taken from the Labours Future Facebook group)

Unheard of talk! Blairs government the best that a "working class" person had ever known? Perhaps the National Minimum Wage and the Sure Start Centres and the extra billions for education and the National Health Service counted for something after all. And Corbyn a "traitor to the working class"? The latter accusation is more typically levelled at Labour Party centrists such as Blair and Brown the "Tory-Lite" leaders who (we are frequently informed) took the votes of working class people for granted while selling out their interests for the sake of "neoliberal capitalism".

Although Trotskyists, Stalinists, and Bennites alike tend to present Corbyn as the champion of "working class politics", it should be recognised that his programme has very little to offer working class people in the here-and-now. Even in the fantasy scenario of a Corbyn-led government, the hoped-for benefits to the working class would still be indirect: rather than implementing policies to the direct material benefit of actual working class people, a hypothetical Prime Minister Corbyn would according to the AWL implement policies to facilitate the working classs fulfilment of the destiny assigned to it by classical Marxist theory, i.e.the overthrow of the capitalist order and the institution of social ownership of the means of production and exchange, which an elected government could not achieve even "if it wanted to". In the real world and at the present moment, in which the proletariat does not yet acknowledge its revolutionary future role, actually existing working class people are of interest only insofar as representations of them can be conscripted in support of arguments over who will lead the Labour Party.

Meanwhile, those same actually existing working class people repay the compliment by taking little or no interest in the Labour Party. Asurvey carried out before the 2015 General Election and again in December of the same year found that both before and after the increase in party membership driven by Corbyns leadership campaign, over 75 per cent of Labour members lived in households headed by someone in an "ABC1" occupation, i.e.that less than one in four would ordinarily be classified as working class. In socio-economic if not in cultural and political terms, the new membership was indistinguishable from the old membership. The fight to transform Labour from a party seeking to achieve limited although concrete reforms through engagement in the work of local and national government into a social movement more interested in exercising "the power to speak, to influence, to demonstrate, to demand" is therefore probably best understood as a form ofmiddle class identity politics(the identity in question being "left").

The immediate beneficiaries of Corbynism are not working class peopleper se, but members of "left" political organisations or factions either (a) seeking power within the Labour Party, or (b) directly competing with it in their efforts to win votes in elections and/or to recruit members. Some of those people are working class, but most are not. TheMorning Starresponded to last summers challenge to Corbyns leadership with an editorial headlined "Justice must be won for the working class", in which it argued that "[t]he cumulative anger and frustration thats been building in working-class communities across these lands over the last few decades has found an outlet" in support for Corbyn and opposition to his detractors in the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Given thehistorically low vote shareof candidates for Corbyns Labour Party in the strongly working class constituencies of Copeland and Stoke-on-Trent Central last month, such assertions should not be taken literally. Retaining Corbyn as Labour leader wins no justice for the working class; it only consolidates power within the Bennite faction of the Labour Party and provides members of Trotskyist and Stalinist organisations such as the SWP and Communist Party of Britainwith a path to greater influence within the Labour Party and greater esteem within the wider Left. The anger and frustration that really troubles theMorning Staris that felt within the revolutionary socialist sects that take themselves to be the guardians of the best interests of the working class of Marxist theory and feel aggrieved that the UKs largest left-of-centre party is not run by the most left-of-centre people in the UK.

One of the defining moments of Corbynism was the release ofI, Daniel Blake: a critically-acclaimed BBC Films movie about a tragic working class welfare claimant. It was directed by Ken Loach, a long-term friend of Jeremy Corbyn and the creator of an hour-long promo video in support of the latters re-election as party leader.I, Daniel Blakehad such an impact on Corbyns followers that many of them renamed themselves "Daniel Blake" on Twitter in perhaps the quintessential statement of socialist fandom. "We are all Daniel Blake" was another popular slogan, and coincidentally the headline of an article that appeared in the same issue ofThe Socialistas the editorial quoted above. Following the unprecedented drop in Labours vote share in the Copeland and Stoke-on-Trent Central by-elections last month, Loach wrote in defence of Corbyns leadership in aGuardianarticle saturated in Corbynite commonplaces.

The article begins with Loachs recollections of his own visits to Stoke-on-Trent and Whitehaven (the centre of the Copeland district), promotingI, Daniel Blakewith Labour Club screenings organised by activists from Momentum, the privately-owned pro-Corbyn organisation briefly discussed above. Having pointedly criticised Labour activists outside Momentum by commending the behaviour of the Momentum activists in question as "a model of how Labour activists should work" and recalled audience complaints of "the failure of Labour governments and, importantly, Labour councillors", Loach cut to the chase:

"Now lets ask the real questions. What are the big problems people face? What is the Labour leaderships analysis and programme? Why is Labour apparently unpopular? Who is responsible for the partys divisions?

The problems are well rehearsed but rarely related to the leadership question. A vulnerable working class that knows job insecurity, low wages, bogus self-employment, poverty for many including those in work, whole regions left to rot: these are the consequences of both Tory and New Labours free market economics. The central fact is blindingly obvious: the Blair, Brown and Peter Mandelson years were central to this degeneration. That is why Labour members voted for Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn and his small group fight the Tories in front and deal with the silent mutiny behind them. Yet the MPs, unrepresentative of the members, are doing immense damage. How come the media dont put them in the dock? It is they and their backers in the party bureaucracy who have been rejected.

It was their Labour party, not Corbyns, that lost Scotland, lost two elections and has seen Labours vote shrink inexorably. If Corbyn can be removed, it will be business as usual, with scant difference between Labour and the Tories. If it is to transform society, the party itself must be transformed."

As we see from the above, the priority for Loach who in 2013 founded the rival Left Unity party and in 2015 campaigned for itagainstLabour is the transformation of the Labour Party (yes, that again). That on his account as much as on that of the Trotskyists and other Corbynites quoted in previous sections of this essay must (naturally) precede any significant external politics. What is at stake is not the day-to-day work of parliamentary opposition to the Conservative government, nor the short- to medium-term ambition to replace that government with a Labour government that would implement specific policies for the benefit of actual working class people (say, a higher minimum wage and an improved public health service), nor the still less glamorous equivalents in local and regional government, but the eternal and fundamentallyaesthetic imperative for difference between Labour and the Tories, i.e.for Labour to be led by the kind of person for whom a socialism fan would like to vote.

Exactly as in the examples quoted in the previous sections, a historic struggle is said to be in progress, with, on one side, Corbyn and his followers, and on the other, a coalition between the Conservative Party, past Labour leaders and cabinet ministers, and "[Labour] MPs, unrepresentative of the members": because the job of Labour MPs is to represent whoever currently constitutes the majority of the (now very middle class) Labour membership, rather than the ordinary voters whose representatives in Parliament they officially are. But this inversion of democracy is no problem at all, because, under Corbyns leadership, the party is not unpopular, but only "apparently unpopular", its true popularity presumably concealed in the voting booth and revealed only at screenings ofI, Daniel Blake.

Loachs essential argument is that the sufferings of working class peoplerequireLabour MPs and bureaucrats to submit and submit enthusiastically, for the quiet resignation with which they accepted the result of the September 2016 leadership election is here condemned as "silent mutiny" to Corbyn and his circle, who will rule over the party in the name of the working class that is, ofthem, Daniel Blake.

We can see how this plays out on the ground in in John Harriss short video documentary about the Stoke-on-Trent Central by-election. The film is well worth watching as a whole, but the part to which I would like to draw attention is the interaction between a Labour Party activist and a potential voter. Here, PV is the potential voter and LPA is the Labour Party Activist:

PV: What you go- what you gonna do for the community and that?

LPA: What do you think needs to be done for the community?

PV: Pff. I dunno. Like, some better shit, init, like, you know what I mean? Like, build fucking, like, I dunno, like, more youth centres, stop closing shit down.

LPA: Yeah.

PV: Like, help people that are vulnerable and that. Put people in better housing.

LPA: Yeah.

PV: You know what I mean? Stop sending people to jail for stupid shit.

LPA: Yeah.

PV: You know what I mean, like?

LPA: Are there any people that you think represent your views, do you feel like the Labour Party represents the, the

PV: Nah.

LPA: Why not?

PV: Coz theyre all full of shit, man, theyre all like upper class people thatve, you know what I mean? Theres no

LPA: Yeah.

See original here:
Jeremy Corbyn has attracted "socialism fans", not Labour voters - New Statesman

British athlete James Cracknell was recently caught citing North Korea and Cuba as examples of how to get a handle on obesitywhich both regimes have done by starving their people.

Cracknell posted a half-hearted apology, and I dont want to be too hard on him, because in all likelihood he is simply not very bright and just needs to refrain from speaking in public ever again. This is unfortunate for him, since he has ambitions of running for Parliament.

The problem is that Cracknell has clearly been educated and lives in an environment where the reasons for starvation in Communist regimes are considered to be vague and complex and maybe can just be chalked down to behavior modification. Cracking jokes about the Holocaust is a line not to be crossed, but insensitive offhand references to brutal communist dictatorships? No big deal.

This sort of thing is not new. As Elizabeth Nolan Brown points out, by way of The Federalists Bre Payton, there was once a craze about the Cuban diet, telling us how healthy it is to be starved by your government. (Id like to link you to the original article, rather than just a screen-shot of it, but it has not-so-mysteriously disappeared from the Web.)

If you want to find another country that is really doing something about obesity, you can look to Venezuela, which is providing a wonderful model for involuntary weight loss.

But a lot of people dont seem to want to look at Venezuela, because that would be uncomfortable. A few years back, a lot of them were praising Venezuela as a model of socialism, the same way they praise Cuba. Heres just a small sample: David Sirota in Salon proclaimed Venezuelas economic miracle thanks to Hugo Chavezs full-throated advocacy of socialism and fundamental critique of neoliberal [i.e., free market] economics. Left-leaning celebrities traipsed to Caracas to pay their respects. Bernie Sanders declared just a few years ago that the American dream is more apt to be realized inVenezuela than here. He concluded by asking, Whos the banana republic now?

Were seeing the answer to that. Today, Venezuelans are starving and the remainders of the Chavez regime are sending gangs of armed thugs into the streets to attack anyone who protests. And all of the people who praised the Venezuelan regime as a paragon of socialism? They suddenly dont want to talk about it.

This is just the tip of an iceberg of insensitivity, ignorance, and denial aboutsocialisms ongoing and historical track record. The bodies keep piling up, but the ideology that produced those bodies always gets a free pass.You know what this is? Its the equivalent of Holocaust denial for the Left.

There has long been a ritual, which I sincerely hope will continue, in which young people are required to immerse themselves in the horrors of the Holocaust. There is no shortage of books and movies and documentaries and first-hand accountsreally harrowing stuff that keeps you up at night and gets seared into your brain so you cant forget it. And thats the point. Youre supposed to remember it and have it haunt your nightmares so that you will never allow it to happen again.

But our culture never did that for the horrors of socialism, which is how you get a majority of young people having a positive view of socialism.

What have they missed that they can believe that? Heres what theyve missed: the artificial famine in Ukraine, the Soviet Gulags, the forced deportation of Lithuanians, the persecution of Christians, Chinas Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, the killing fields of Cambodia, North Koreas horrific prison camps and famines, the systematic impoverishment of Cuba, and now Venezuelas collapse into starvation and mass-murder. All of this should be absolutely required background knowledge for any educated person.

I didnt provide links for the second half of those examples. If you dont know them, your assignment is to go look them up, because youre precisely the sort of person who needs to learn about them.

Now when I cite all of this history, theres always someone who insists that it isnt fair to pin all of these crimes on socialism because those examples werent really socialism. The only real socialism is the warm, fuzzy welfare-statism of a handful of innucuous Western European countries. This is a pretty obvious version of the No True Scotsman fallacy, and a good way of disavowing responsibility for the disastrous results of a system you praised just a few years earlier.

But these crimes follow inevitably from the basic idea behind socialism: the idea that the good of society as a collective is more important the rights or even the life of the individual. Thats the social in socialism, and by throwing out the rights and liberty of the individual, it serves as a rationalization for an endless amount of carnage. Who cares if this particular personor a few million peoplesuffer, so long as you can claim that mankind collectively benefits?

Consider the name of the roving thugs who are beating and killing dissidents in Venezuela right now: they call themselves collectivos. That says it all.

Socialism has been tested out more times and in more variations than probably any other social system, It has been implemented in every continent, every culture, every stage of economic development. It has always led to disaster, to the extent it has been implemented. If youre lucky, your country gets off with a mere economic crisis, as in Greece. At the worst, your country is in for decades of living hell.

This, too, should be seared into our brains so that we never forget and never repeat it again. Because it hasnt been, somebody is always trying to make us repeat it.

Follow Robert on Twitter.

Read the original:
For The Left, Socialism Denial Is Holocaust Denial - The Federalist - The Federalist

The year 2017 marks several anniversaries for socialists across the world.

It has been 150 years since Karl Marx published Das Kapital, a book that criticized capitalism and helped spark the socialist movement. It has been 100 years since the Russian Revolution, led by Vladimir Lenin. It has been 50 years since the death of Che Guevara, who led many guerrilla campaigns during the Cold War.

While there will be leftists who intend to honorthese anniversaries, it is also worth remembering what an absolute failure socialism has been.

The University of Wisconsinhas numerous socialist groups on campus making the case such a trashideology should be tried over and over again.

These groupsspout the typical rhetoric of ending a system they believe only rewards the few and exploits the many. Socialism, in their eyes, will end oppression of the workers and create equality.

The only problem with this argument is socialism creates oppression and poverty, while capitalism generates income mobility and prosperity.

Consider what has happened since the publication of Adam Smiths The Wealth of Nations in 1776 and the rise of the Industrial Revolution. As economic analyst and American Enterprise Institute fellow James Pethokoukis has pointed out, since the 18thcentury, gross domestic product per person has skyrocketed. In real terms, the average income of Americans has increased from less than$5,000 to nearly $45,000.

Also, it isnt just Americans who have benefited from the power of free market capitalism. GDP per person in Europe has risen from less than$5,000 to more than$25,000. Throughoutthe rest of the world, there has been an increase from roughly the same starting point to more than$5,000. The implementation of capitalism in the west and the expansion of it across the globe is simply the greatest achievement in human history.

Capitalism has allowed for technological innovations that have vastly improved the quality of life.An August 2015 study published by Deloitte found technology has created more jobs than it has eliminated while simultaneously removing workers from repetitive and dangerous work.

Using employment data from England and Wales, the study found the number of people in the agriculture industry has decreased by 95 percent since 1871. The number of people who have jobs that provide care and nursing to others has increased from only 1.1 percent in 1871 to almost 25 percent by 2011. Jobs that use muscle power have been merely replaced by knowledge-intensive work.

Technology has lowered the costs of essential goods and services, expanding the disposable income of consumers and thus creating more demand. Do you have a smartphone or a laptop? Have you ever travelled via car or commercial airlines? Have you ever eaten or shopped at a restaurant or retail chain? If so, then you have benefitted from the free enterprise capitalism has provided.

Marx was always worried that capital would be concentrated among the very wealthy. In fact, a majority of Americans are able to obtain capital through stock market investments,according to Gallup. This comes from individual stocks, stock mutual funds, stocks in a 401(k) or through an IRA. The ownership of corporations is widely dispersed, meaning a great number of people benefit, not just a handful of millionaires and billionaires.

Not only has capitalism increased quality of life wherever is it adopted, but it encourages the establishment of democratic forms of government. The hypothesis of the link between economic freedom and political freedom was put forward by Nobel laureates Friedrich A. Hayek and Milton Friedman. When put to empirical examination, the hypothesis holds up very well.

In March 2010, the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization published a paper by economists Robert A. Lawson and J.R. Clark analyzing123 nations as far back as 1970. They found only a handful of cases where democracy and capitalism do not exist together. Furthermore, these cases have been declining over time. Other research has found similar results.

Wherever theres socialism, crisis often follows.

Just look to Venezuela, the latest example of the failure of an already disproven economic system.For years, socialism was maintained in the Latin American nation without reform under Hugo Chavezspresidency, but as Margaret Thatcher once warned,Eventually you run out of other peoples money.

The Venezuelan economy is now collapsing. Food supplies have dwindled, leading many people to rob supermarkets and food trucks. Soldiers and police have to guard loading depots from being overrun by starving Venezuelans.

One cannot blame the poor for resorting to thievery in this desperate situation, as government currency mismanagement has led to a massive devaluing of the bolivar, driving prices through the roof. People cant even fit enough money in their wallets anymore. The result is that nearly 75 percent of the population has lost an average of 19 pounds.

When faced with the choice between capitalism and socialism, the answer is always clear capitalism has proven to be the superior system. It has improved the lives of billions of people and given them opportunities socialism has not. There will always be dissenters, but no one can deny the tremendous accomplishments of capitalism.

John Graber ([emailprotected]) is a junior majoring in history and political science.

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While socialism breeds oppression, capitalism spurs democracy, economic prosperity - The Badger Herald

That isnt quite how the New York Times puts it, of course. In fact, the words socialist and socialism never appear in its otherwise unsparing account. But Venezuela under Chavez and Maduro illustrates the inevitable arc of socialism, from parasitism to gangster rule.

The uniformed men who shot Mr. Moreno were not government security forces, witnesses say. Rather, they were members of armed bands who have become key enforcers for President Nicols Maduro as he attempts to crush a growing protest movement against his rule.

The groups, called collectives or colectivos in Spanish, originated as pro-government community organizations.

Led by community organizers, presumably.

that have long been a part of the landscape of leftist Venezuelan politics. Civilians with police training, colectivo members are armed by the government, say experts who have studied them.

With Venezuelans starving and dying for lack of basic medicines, only armed gangs can keep the socialist government in power. Of course, the colectivos dont subscribe to the supposedly high ideals of socialism:

Colectivos control vast territory across Venezuela, financed in some cases by extortion, black-market food and parts of the drug trade as the government turns a blind eye in exchange for loyalty.

Of course, Chavez and Maduro were nothing but thieves, either.

Now they appear to be playing a key role in repressing dissent. *** As rising foreign debt and falling world oil prices have depleted the Venezuelan governments coffers, it has increasingly turned to colectivos as enforcers. From labor disputes with unions to student demonstrations on university campuses, colectivos are appearing almost anywhere the government sees citizens getting out of line, Venezuelans say.

Eladio Mata, a hospital union leader, says he was shot last year by colectivo members when negotiations deadlocked with the University Hospital of Caracas. *** In this country, its prohibited to dissent, Mr. Mata said.

Of course it is! That is what happens when you elect socialists. Just ask the students at Middlebury, Berkeley, Claremont, etc. They cant wait until they take power and steal enough money to hire colectivos of their own. That is what socialismall power to government, none to the individualcomes down to.

Mr. Rojas, who works with opposition politicians, said he had become used to the attacks, which have long been a fixture of his activism.

They attack your neighbors when they are in food lines and are identified as opposition members, they attack store owners by making them pay extortions, they attack bakers by taking away part of their production which they later sell on the black market, he said. They are not true collectives, or political actors they are criminals.

Just like Hugo Chavez and Nicols Maduro, and socialists the world over.

More:
Socialist Death Squads Rule Venezuela | Power Line - Power Line (blog)

BOOK REVIEW

by Arti Khosla

An Alternative Philosophy of Development: From Economism to Human Well-Being by B.P. Mathur; published by Routledge Taylor & Francis; 2017.

This is the latest book from B.P. Mathurs pen. A former civil servant, B.P. Mathur worked in several capacities with the government and had a ringside view of the administration, its strength and its failures. This extensive experience coupled with his idealism and knowledge of our spiritual heritage has inspired him to voice his concerns about several things not right about our economy, public policy and governance as such.

This book essentially outlines the authors disappointment with the current model of economic development in India that has not delivered. It is because, the author feels, the model of development we adopted is a blind imitation of Western ideas where emphasis is on persuit of wealth and individual profit. It encourages consumerism and wastefulness as also creates a vast chasm between the rich and poor. India went in for this model in 1991 when faced with a serious foreign exchange crisis. Liberalisation of the economy at the behest of the International Monetary Fund became necessary. Prior to that the country was following the Nehruvian model of socialism where state enterprises were considered as the commanding heights of the economy and though privatisation existed it played a secondary role. The reference-point for economic growth was the Soviet-style five-year plans.

In 1991 the country entered an era of free-market economy and GDP growth became a serious persuit. The economy grew at the rate of seven to eight per cent but this additional creation of wealth has not helped the poor. The benefit of growth has been cornered by 20 per cent of the people while 80 per cent are wallowing in poverty. India has today more millionaires and billionaries but at the same time a vast multitude cannot afford their two square meals a day. Thus the current model of development has resulted in more poverty, inequality, unemployment, environment degradation due to the culture of consumerism we copied from the West.

The author finds this model utterly unsuitable since it is based on the Western culture which is materialistic while Indian culture is essentially spiritual which values austerity, control over ones senses and promoting qualities of sympathy, empathy, comradeship and brotherhood. The author devotes a full chapter in Part 1V of his book on Indian culture with its salient features of tolerance, solidarity, family values etc. with which he is linking his alternative philosophy of development. In addition to the current model not being attuned to the indian ethos its failure is also due to poor governance.

In Part 1 of the book the author describes how we have failed to improve the quality of life of citizens of this country. Our education system at all levelsbe it primary, secondary or universityis totally in disarray. The health facilities for common people are in dismal conditions. We have failed to address rural distress. Agriculture has been neglected and has become an unrumenerative occupation. Low prices for their produce and rising debts have made thousands of farmers to end their lives due to desperation. Poor governance is of course responsible for this failure.

There is no denying the authors belief that good governance is a pre-requisite for development. The author details the requirements for good governance in chapter 14 under Part Three of the book. These are usual ones as recommended by successive committees and commissions on Administrative Reforms, namely, accountability, performance linked career development, decentralisation, eradicating corruption, depoliticisation of services etc.

While the present model of development with focus on GDP has been found irrelevant, the alternative model the author suggests should be one where progress is measured in terms of human capability, dignified employment for everyone, equitable distribution of income and wealth and ecological sustainability and social well being of the community. What that model should be. Gandhian economics? Or socialism? The author veers around to both these philosophies. Gandhian philosophy is relevant insofar as it stresses on individual dignity by providing gainful employment to each person and welfare of the poorest of the poor. Revisiting socialism (not of the Soviet variety) is considered desireable in creating an egalitarian society where life chances are not allocated by structural inequalities in social, economic and political constructions of societies. This mix of Gandhian economic model plus some ideas drawn from socialism as propounded by Karl Marx and others does not clearly indicate what in practice this model is going to be. The author himself does not seem to be very clear about how exactly we go about this alternative model.

The emphasis appears to be for the model of development which should resonate with Indian culture rather than blindly following as at present the one attuned to Western culture. The essential features of Indian culture are tolerance, accommodating others, oneness and solidarity of universe, family values, purusharth etc. Essentially it is steeped in spirituality. The authors grasp on all things spiritual is visible in this effort.

The author has quoted extensively from several economists, philosphers, scholars and nobel laureates to buttress his arguments. Similiarly he has supported his views on the dismal state of education, health, agriculture etc. by giving statistics and numbers. Some repetitions and contradictionsnot withstanding the book is worth the read by students of economics, policy makers and those generally interested in the affairs of the nation. The repetitions are inevi-table when one writes in a general flow rather than have a structured draft before him. One only wished that the print was not kept that small which is not easy on the eyes.

Aarti Khosla is a former Additional Secretary, Government of India. She is now a free-lance writer.

More:
A Mix of Gandhian Economics and Socialism - Mainstream