Wednesday 30 September 2015

Look Left

It is good to see the Gramscian, Eurocommunist roots of New Labour explored at such length in The Guardian. John Harris has written a very interesting and important article.

Alongside Marxism Today on the newsstands and in the newsagents that even I can remember, sat the Living Marxism to which Brendan O'Neill clearly remains faithful.

When I asked on Twitter which Revolutionary Communist Party candidate had ever won a quarter of a million votes, as Jeremy Corbyn recently did, then Jon Holbrook told me that Spiked no longer held the RCP position.

Well, it seems from Brendan's post that, however glad you might be that you never married that first proper girlfriend, nor do you ever quite get over her.

Meanwhile, I love the way in which Jeremy Corbyn will not expel John Mann or Simon Danczuk, or even withdraw the Whip from them, no matter how desperately they beg for it.

He is forcing Lance Price and John McTernan to stay, too, or else go of their own accord. I do not know whether or not Philip Collins is still in the Labour Party, but Dan Hodges is not, and he ought not to be treated as if he were.

Mann criticises "former Trots and members of Socialist Action", but I doubt that the old Trotskyists in question are Alan Milburn and Stephen Byers.

Socialist Action began in 1982, when the International Marxist Group, which had been a mainstay of campus Trotskyism in the 1970s (everyone from Alistair Darling, to Kate Hoey, to the future Cameron Cabinet Minister Chris Huhne, had been in it), rather disarmingly declared its open and public adoption of entryism in relation to the Labour Party.

Members did end up on Ken Livingstone's staff when he was Mayor of London, and some of those are now advising Corbyn. But at least one of them had in the meantime been kept on by Boris Johnson, and has therefore gone from Johnson's employ to Corbyn's, a move that has been remarkably little noticed.

Johnson has also been, and remains, very close indeed to the old RCP gang that is now organised around Spiked and various other projects, and which routinely secures paid work on the right-wing papers that are now vilifying Corbyn. Unless he is also a Co-operative Party member, Corbyn has never been a member of any party other than Labour.

I should have to check any links between Johnson, or the Government, or both, and figures from the old Marxism Today wing of the Communist Party. But I bet that they are there. And I bet that both they and the Socialist Action brigade, although certainly not the Spikies, also have some kind of contact with Zac Goldsmith.

Forget Militant and its Tendency. Forget the International Socialists, who became the SWP, and who were at one time noted for their Romeo and Juliet student romances with IMG members. Forget the Tankie wing of the Communist Party. Forget, if you ever remembered, the Maoist communes. And take a proper look.

No comments:

Post a Comment