Jeremy Corbyn: Tony Blair's nightmare!

We reprint below a Spartacist League leaflet dated 12 August 2015 and distributed at Corbyn campaign events up and down the country.

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“Corbyn could lose, be deposed, go wrong but I love that sound, that beautiful soft sound of Tony Blair sobbing”

— Derek Wall, “Green socialist”

Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for Labour Party leader has the right wing frothing at the mouth — from the Daily Mail and the Murdoch press to Tony Blair and his successors. Corbyn has drawn enthusiastic support from youth, workers, and minorities who are sick to the back teeth of the austerity, racism and war dished out for years by Tory and Labour governments. Here, for the first time in ages, is a campaign that speaks to the felt needs of working people.

Corbyn opposes Tory government attacks on benefits and the NHS, and is for decent pay and pensions for the public sector. He is for renationalising privatised services — rail, post and energy. All the main trade unions are backing Corbyn, not least because he is for repeal of the anti-union laws. He calls for affordable housing, desperately needed by the millions faced with extortionate house prices and rents. His campaign is for abolishing university tuition fees and restoring student grants. Corbyn opposes the government’s “war on terror” targeting Muslims. And to his credit, he denounced the Labour leadership for caving in to UKIP’s anti-immigrant racism in the run-up to the general election.

The Corbyn campaign outflanks to the left the bourgeois nationalists of the SNP who wiped out Labour in Scotland in the election. Unlike the SNP, Corbyn opposes NATO and is for Britain out of this imperialist military alliance. In contrast to some on the left who howled with the imperialists over Ukraine, Corbyn could at least state the obvious that, “It is the US drive to expand eastwards which lies at the root of the crisis in the former Soviet republic” (Morning Star online, 17 April 2014). He is also opposed to renewing Britain’s Trident nuclear missile system and has long called for British troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Corbyn is critical of the European Union and calls for cancellation of the Greek debt, which has starved the Greek people. However, whereas we revolutionary Marxists oppose the imperialist-dominated EU in principle, Corbyn wants to reform it, calling for a “better Europe”.

A principled and honest representative of the left wing of old Labour in the tradition of Nye Bevan, Michael Foot and Tony Benn, Corbyn is an eloquent spokesman for the cause of parliamentary “socialism”. All old Labour governments have loyally served the British capitalist class — carrying out attacks on the working class at home, supporting British imperialism in its wars abroad. Labour supported British imperialism in World War II, presided over the bloody partition of India, and in 1969 sent troops to Northern Ireland. Unity with the right wing of Labour has long been an article of faith for the Labour lefts, including Benn and Corbyn, while reformist groups like the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party in turn tailed the Labour lefts.

While the demands posed by the Corbyn campaign are supportable, they cannot be achieved through old Labour parliamentarism. Even to begin to address such issues as jobs for all, free quality healthcare and education requires mobilising the trade unions as fighting organisations of the working class, under new, class-struggle leadership. To regenerate the former industrial areas and to lay the basis for a decent living standard for all requires the overthrow of capitalist rule. Socialist revolution will shatter the capitalist state, expropriate the bourgeoisie and lay the basis for an internationally planned, socialised economy.

Victorious workers revolution in Britain will put an end to Westminster-based capitalist rule: abolish the monarchy, the established churches and the House of Lords! For the right of self-determination of Scotland and Wales! For a voluntary federation of workers republics in the British Isles! For a Socialist United States of Europe!

The Spartacist League fights to construct the revolutionary workers party, section of a reforged Trotskyist Fourth International, that is necessary for this task.