Corbyn's Labour
- Details
- Published on Wednesday, 28 October 2015 22:30
- Written by editor
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( T h e B u l l e t ))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1180 .... October 29, 2015
____________________________________________________
Corbyn's Labour
Andrew Murray
"Leaps! Breaks in Gradualness. Leaps! Leaps!"
— V.I. Lenin, "Conspectus of Hegel's Science of Logic," Collected Works, volume 38 p.123.
Lenin's excitement at his rediscovery of Hegel as he grappled for meaning at the great turning point in international socialist politics of autumn 1914 finds its echo on the left of the British labour movement in the extraordinary summer 101 years later.
The election of Jeremy Corbyn, the most left-wing socialist and consistent anti-imperialist in the House of Commons, as leader of the Labour Party and therefore of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, is a break in gradualness on a grand scale. Despite having the support of fewer than ten per cent of the party's members of parliament, he secured a... quarter of a million votes (nearly sixty per cent) in the election, winning nearly half of the first preferences of Party's individual membership in the transferrable-vote ballot. That party membership is now nearly twice the size it was at the general election just four months ago, with around 60,000 people joining in the week following Corbyn's victory on a platform of opposition to austerity economics, foreign wars, welfare cuts and nuclear weaponry.
Leaps, indeed. This may not be quite as weighty in the scales of history as the betrayal of international socialism by the German SPD, the event which sent Lenin off to the library and the renewed study of dialectics, a landmark in the development of Bolshevik political thought. But it is still a development of huge import, occurring as it has done in the first party of social imperialism worldwide, the home of Ernie Bevin and Tony Blair, the pioneer of neoliberalism as a powerful trend in the international working-class movement.