Corbyn’s road map to a communist Britain by Giles Udy
www.standpointmag.co.uk/february-2019-features-giles-udy-jeremy-corbyn-britain-road-to-socialism
Extracts (totalling 1,216 words) from an article (3,500 words):
Dramatis personae
As the 2003 Iraq war loomed, the fractious British Left, in a rare moment of unity, formed the Stop the War Coalition and brought a million people out on the streets. Few of the unwitting participants knew that the march’s organisers’ ultimate goal was the overthrow of parliamentary democracy; none could have guessed that, 15 years later, the movement’s first two leaders, the British Communist Party member Andrew Murray and left-wing activist Jeremy Corbyn, would be within reach of forming the first communist government in British history, Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, Murray appointed as his “Special Adviser”.
The crash of 2007 shook Western confidence still further. Left-wing commentators such as Guardian journalist Seumas Milne, an old communist comrade of Murray’s, openly voiced nostalgia for the “huge social benefits” enjoyed under Soviet communism in the USSR and Eastern Bloc. Milne is now Corbyn’s Director of Strategy and Communications.
In 1920 Lenin urged British communists to enter the Labour Party to subvert it from within. In 1936, Trotsky told his followers to do the same, but successive generations of Labour leaders resisted this “entryism”, most famously in Neil Kinnock’s 1980s campaign against the Trotskyite group Militant. Two young members of a group which tried to thwart Kinnock’s campaign were Corbyn and Jon Lansman, later the founder of Momentum. That failure, reinforced by Tony Blair’s New Labour reforms, convinced many leftists that the only option left was bring the government down by extra-parliamentary action. This was the context when John McDonnell, now Corbyn’s Shadow Chancellor, made his call for “insurrection”, a general strike and street protests in 2013.
Corbyn cohort’s understanding of socialism
While, to an onlooker, the upheavals within Labour today seem little more than party political infighting, what has been happening cannot really be understood without reference to the Marxist worldview which drives it…. For Marxists such as those around Corbyn and McDonnell, socialism has a very specific meaning.
When McDonnell told a gathering of supporters, “I am a Marxist. This is a classic crisis of the economy — a classic capitalist crisis. I have been waiting for this for a generation”, it was this that he was referring to. His praise for students “kicking the shit out of Millbank” (the Tory HQ) as being the “best of our movement” raised eyebrows too but, once again, such sentiments are logical for a Marxist. Marx and Engels defended the use of violence in pursuit of the revolution. Engels wrote that “nothing can be achieved without violence” while Marx declared that “only revolutionary terrorism” could “shorten the bloody birth throes of the new society”.
Programme of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB)
The Communist Party of Britain (CPB) has published its own 25,000-word programme, Britain’s Road to Socialism, which goes into considerable detail about the revolution that is to come.
The CPB lays claim to be the direct political successor of the Soviet-financed Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which was established in 1920, and adopted its new name in 1988 after the CPGB leadership began to abandon its traditional loyalty to the Soviet Union and the legacy of Stalin. Given that it had just 734 members in 2017 and gained only 1,229 votes in the 2015 general election, it is reasonable to ask why its manifesto should be taken seriously. The reason is simple: Jeremy Corbyn, since his election as leader of the Labour Party, has brought a number of former CPB members and other Marxists into his inner team.
The most important of these individuals who are now on Corbyn’s inner team are Andrew Murray and Seumas Milne. Both Murray and Milne, together with another old comrade, Steve Howell, whom Milne brought in as Deputy Communications Director in February 2017, were originally members of Straight Left, a pro-Soviet faction within the CPGB, disparagingly referred ever since to as “tankies” because of their support for the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.
Murray is said to have left the CPB for Labour in December 2016. In April 2017 Corbyn appointed him to head Labour’s general election strategy. The CPB had just announced that for the first time in its history it would not field any candidates and would instead support Labour. After the election Murray returned to his full-time job as Chief of Staff at the Unite union, which had provided almost half (£4.5million) of Labour’s election fund, in time to head off a centrist takeover of the union which might have threatened that funding in the future. In February 2018, Murray was back in Labour again, this time in a permanent role as Corbyn’s “Special Political Adviser” consulting on strategy and vetting senior appointments. Soon afterwards, Murray’s former wife, Susan Mitchie, still a leading member of the CPB, announced that the CPB would now be working “full tilt” to get Corbyn elected.
Although Murray was a party member for more than 30 years, sat on its executive, had been on the advisory board of its theoretical journal Communist Review and was eminent enough to be the party’s choice to give the annual oration at Marx’s graveside in Highgate Cemetery, his departure provoked none of the vitriol that would be customary after the defection of so prominent a figure in the dystopian world of hard-left politics where backbiting, splits and factions abound.
Murray also continues to write for the Morning Star, the CPB newspaper, so clearly he has not been blacklisted. The editorial position of the paper, which Corbyn, a long-time Morning Star columnist, calls “the most precious and only voice we have in the daily media” follows the CPB platform — the replacement of the capitalist system by socialism in order that a “fully communist form of society” might result. If either Murray or Corbyn took exception to that goal they would not write for it.
Hostility to police and security services
The Left has long looked upon the police and security services as enemies. Before Corbyn’s election propelled the hard Left from obscurity, both Andrew Fisher, his policy adviser, and McDonnell had called for the disbandment of MI5 and the disarming of the police.
These [views] are echoed in Britain’s Road to Socialism…. Leading members of the police, the secret services, armed forces, the judiciary and civil and diplomatic services will be purged and replaced by “supporters of the revolutionary process”. For those remaining, “civic education programmes” — political indoctrination — will “break down oppressive and reactionary ideas and practices”.
A new paramilitary force — “the state’s corps of military reservists” — would gradually replace the army. Linked with “large workplaces and local working-class communities”, its recruitment, education and administration would be overseen by the trade union movement, an echo of the political commissars attached to all Soviet military units.
All foreign military bases in Britain would … be swiftly closed and Britain would withdraw from NATO. “The subservient alliance with U.S. imperialism would have to cease immediately.”
Strengthening ties with “communist, left-wing [and] progressive” governments aboard
Instead, a left government would strengthen relations with “communist, left-wing, progressive, anti-imperialist and non-aligned governments abroad (who) may be in a position to extend diplomatic, political and economic assistance”. As the hard Left seems to entertain fewer scruples about the human rights record of regimes opposed to America or Israel (during the period Corbyn broadcast for Iran’s Press TV, the country hanged more than 1,300 people), we might well see closer ties with countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea (praised in the past by Andrew Murray), Iran and Russia.
About the author
Giles Udy, born 1956, is an English writer and historian of the Soviet Gulag system, and is a member of the council of the Keston Institute (Keston College), Oxford. He is author of a book, Labour and the Gulag: Russia and the Seduction of the British Left (London: Biteback Publishing, 2017).
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