Ways out of Labour’s crisis: the living must seize the dead!
Leave a comment10/03/2017 by socialistfight
The article itself is well thought out and very useful. This comment is on Danny’s comment on that article by the AWL’s Martin Thomas.
Well Danny’s first comment against “unlimited Labour supply” is reactionary, opposing the free movement of labour is to set worker against worker and to excuse and defend capitalism itself by a wrong headed version of capitalism/socialism in a single country or national socialism to allude to a term with more chilling implications than Stalinism. A recent Morning Star article referred to “surplus workers”. We do know how capitalism in crisis deals with that problem; wars and gas ovens.
His second comment is good, however. The demand for a programme of public works on trade union rates of pay is a very apt one as are other demands like an end to zero and low hour work contracts, bogus self employment etc.
By Martin Thomas
“Alongside the modern evils”, wrote Karl Marx in a preface to Capital, “a whole series of inherited evils oppress us… We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif!”
Political habits ingrained in the Blair-Brown years, timorousness bred by old years of defeat, and ancient ideological lumber, are pressing down on the new Jeremy Corbyn Labour Party.
The idea, from which the Labour right are now cunningly stepping back in order to help the soft left advance it, that we should go for some blander, younger replacement – an Angela Rayner, a Rebecca Long-Bailey – is foolish defeatism.
Both Rayner and Long-Bailey were hesitant Corbyn supporters. Neither has the long record of battling against the odds which recommends Corbyn. Even if either should get elected – and more likely a Thermidor of Corbynism would bring someone more right-wing into…
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Socialist Fight 