Vox Political: Thatcherite Entryists Organised Coup because Afraid of Corbyn Winning Election

Mike yesterday also put up a very interesting piece reporting the claim by Paul Mason, a journalist and now Labour activist, that the Blairites had timed the coup against Jeremy Corbyn because they were very much afraid that it was capable of winning the next election. Mr Mason was speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House, alongside Rhea Wolfson. Ms Wolfson is the lady, who was elected to the NEC with the backing of Momentum. But not before Jim Murphy, the head of the Scottish Labour party, had tried to stick the knife in her back by telling her constituency party not to support her, because through Momentum she was connected with anti-Semitism, if I remember correctly. She also agreed that Labour could win an election if they are able to mobilise the vast numbers of people who have joined the party.

Mason is the former economics editor for Newsnight. He said

“I think Jeremy Corbyn will win. Or, let’s put it this way, he will be in a position to form a government.

“That, of course, is what the Labour rebels were worried about on the day after Brexit. Remember the sequence of this. It looked like there was going to be an early general election with the Tories in disarray.

“They texted each other saying ‘this is our last chance, otherwise the guy has the chance of leading the party into an election and that election is winnable”.”

Mike states that if this is true, then it shows that everyone, who claimed to be opposing Corbyn because he was ‘unelectable’ was consciously lying. He challenges them to explain themselves, and urges everyone else to start doing some deselecting of their own.

Go to Mike’s article at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/08/28/labour-shadow-ministers-resigned-because-they-feared-jeremy-corbyn-would-win-general-election/

I’ve described the Blairites as ‘Thatcherite entryists’. It’s how several of the commenters on this blog have described them, and it’s exactly right. Blair and the rest of New Labour were Thatcherite to the core, and brought into the party a whole range of individuals and think tanks, who are really part of the free market right.

And if this is correct, then they are literally behaving as entryists. One of the goals of various Communist factions that have historically tried to infiltrate democratic, reformist socialist parties, like Labour, is not just to make them increasingly radical and therefore platforms for their own clandestine seizure of power, but also to disrupt and destroy them as rivals to their own parties. During the 1919 Council Revolution, the Communists of the Spartacus League attempted to infiltrate the Independent German Social Democrat Party, or USPD. The USPD was much further to the Left of the main German socialist party, the SPD, but they weren’t Communists. By infiltrating them, the Spartacists hoped that they could destroy the USPD from within, and radicalise its most ‘advanced’ members into becoming Communists and joining them.

The Thatcherites of New Labour haven’t quite gone so far as trying to get a section of the party’s membership to join the Tories, but they have appealed to the Tories and Lib Dems to join to stop Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters from gaining power in the party.

Despite the rants against them by the Blairite leadership, Corbyn’s followers are not ‘Trotskyites’. Neither are they ‘scum’ or any of the other unpleasant epithets they’ve had hurled at them. I put up a piece by George Galloway last week, in which he stated very clearly why the new members of the party, who’ve joined because of Corbyn, aren’t followers of Leon Trotsky.

But Tony Blair and his coterie, and their successors in Progress, Labour First and Tomorrow’s Labour, are Thatcherite entryists. They have absolutely no business being in the Labour party, and blocking the genuinely socialist, traditional Labour policies of a popularly elected leader with a mandate from the majority of members. They should leave, and find their true home in the Tories.

The German Workers Who Struck For Peace

Corpse of German trooper outside his dugout: a vivid image of the horrific carnage experienced by all the combatants in the ‘War to End All Wars’.

This year is the centenary of the beginning of the First World War. The BBC has already commemorating this by putting on numerous documentaries about the Great War, setting up on-line resources for schools so you can see what your particular bit of the country was like and did at the time. they’re also running trailers for forthcoming dramas where idealistic young nurses meet handsome soldiers in a saga of love amid the mass slaughter of the War. Documentaries about the World Wars are a staple of British television anyway. Dan Snow on the One Show has appeared several times striding across a World War I battlefield, while a few years ago Tony Robinson presented a Time Team special on the excavation of a system of WWI trenches in Flanders. Some of the coverage has already proven somewhat controversial. There was some comment a few weeks ago on television that something the BBC broadcast had provoked a complaint from the German embassy. There’s a difference of opinion here between German historians and the rest of the world. Most other nations see the War as being caused by Germany. German historians, on the other hand, believe that no single nation is to blame and that the growth of international tension and the web of alliances with which each nation surrounded itself led inexorably to the War. I really don’t know anything beyond the most general outline of events surrounding the First World War, and so leave it to people much better informed than I do to explain it.

One immediate result of the War was the break-up of international socialism. Previously the European Socialist parties had opposed working class involvement in any conflict between the European nations. For them, it would be a fratricidal conflict, as the working classes in each country had more in common with each other than with their rulers. The war would be a bourgeois war, started by the European ruling classes for their own further profit and enrichment, with the working class troops solely the exploited means by which they sought to do so. When the War finally broke out, however, the Socialist parties all over Europe joined the other parties in backing their governments.

Karl Kautsky, the head of the German Social Democrats, modified his party’s view of the conflict. He considered that Socialists in each country should now see the war only as defending their homelands. They should also campaign for a just peace, which would maintain the integrity of the defeated nations and avoid any cause for resentment on their part. This would prevent any further War from breaking out. He wrote

Further, the Social Democracy in every nation is obliged to consider the war only as a war of defence, and to set as its goal only defending itself against the enemy, not of ‘punishing’ or belittling the enemy. As this conception seeks the causes of the war not in the personal depravity or inferiority of the opponent, but in objective conditions, it will strive for the security which they conclusion of peace brings not by humiliating or mutilating its opponent, which would only cause new wars in the future, but by replacing those condition which led to the war – that is, imperialist conflicts and the armaments race.

Patrick Goode, ed. and trans., Karl Kautsky: Selected Political Writings (London: Macmillan Press 1983) 95.

It’s a pity that the Allies did not follow this advice when imposing the reparations and conditions on Germany afterwards. This could have removed some of the feelings of humiliation and resentment felt in Germany, feelings on which the Nazi preyed and used in their campaign to seize power.

Some Socialist parties continued to campaign against the War, such as the Bolsheviks in Russia, and the USPD – the Independent Social Democratic Party in Germany. One of those who campaigned against the War was the radical deputy, Karl Liebknecht, who went on to found the Spartacist League and the German Communist Party. There were also a number of strikes in Germany against the War. When Liebknecht was tried by a court martial for treason on the 28th June 1916, 55,000 workers went on strike in solidarity.

In April 1917 there was a much larger strike due to the government cutting the bread ration by a quarter. In Leipzig, the striking workers demanded in addition to the removal of their economic grievances the introduction of a direct, general and equal franchise, the removal of the state of siege, lifting of censorship, the release of all political prisoners, the re-instatement of the right to strike and hold political meetings. the government was also to make a declaration in favour of immediate peace without annexations.

On the 28th January 1918 a further mass strike broke out. In Berlin alone 200,000 workers downed tools and elected an action committee consisting of eleven Revolutionary Shop Stewards from The Turners’ union, and three delegates each from the pro-War Social Democratic and anti-War Independent Social Democratic Parties. Their demands included the

speedy conclusion of a peace without annexations and indemnities, on the basis of the nations’ right to self-determination, according to the provisions formulated by the Russian People’s Commissars at Brest-Litovsk.

They also wanted the removal of the state of siege and military control of the factories, the release of all political prisoners, the introduction of a general and equal franchise and a thorough democratisation of all institutions of the state. The strike spread rapidly to towns throughout Germany, including Munich, Mannheim, Brunswick, Bremen, Cologne, Hamburg, Kiel, Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland) Leipzig and Nuremberg. In all of these towns with the exception of Munich and Berlin the strike collapsed after a week. In Berlin Military Command suppressed it by placing the leading armaments factories under martial law. In Munich Kurt Eisner, one of the leading USPD politicians and opponent of the War, Kurt Eisner, was arrested before he could call for a general strike to bring down the government. The moderate Social Democrats were thus able to retake control and the Strike ended a few days later.

See F.L. Carsten, Revolution in Central Europe 1918-1919 (Aldershot: Wildwood House 1972) 14-15.

I’ve blogged about the bitterness caused by the First World War across Europe, and the anti-War poems of some of the soldiers, who fought in it, like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Germany also has its great anti-War work from the time of the First World War, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The original German title is Nichts Neues Im Westen – ‘There is Nothing New in the West’. It’s also a bitter comment on the belligerent nature of Western civilisation. I think it’s also important At this time to recognise that Germany also had its campaigners for an end to the War and for a just peace that would establish friendship between nations afterwards. It’s a point that could easily get forgotten in the programmes, documentaries and debates about the War during this centenary.