Again on Jeremy Corbyn

(Letter)

Boston, MA
6 July 2016

Dear WV:

I cannot understand WV’s enthusiasm for Jeremy Corbyn. The fact that he was elected head of the Labour Party by the membership is good news as it indicates the membership is rejecting the Blairites and their forthright class-collaborationism. But your enthusiasm for Corbyn the politician, though you do criticize him in a kind of respectful way, is a puzzle. Is he not just another “democratic socialist”, anti-revolutionary, reformist and representative of a political species with over a century of monstrous crimes against the working class?

Corbyn is a danger to working people. Like Sanders, he functions to demonstrate to working people that there is a capitalist welfare state solution to the oppression of labor. Can he be anything but a stumbling block to the revolutionary mobilization of the working class?

Jan S.

WV replies: As explained in the article “Let Jeremy Corbyn Run the Labour Party” (see above), the current leadership contest in the British Labour Party poses the class line. We stand with Corbyn and his pro-socialist supporters against the open lackeys of finance capital represented by Tony Blair and his ilk.

Unlike Corbyn, Bernie Sanders is no kind of “democratic socialist” but a capitalist politician. His campaign to be the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate corralled disaffected youth and workers back into the party of the class enemy.