Labour Party Fringe (2) : Labour Party Marxists

   


The Labour Party Marxists are a front organisation for the Communist Party of Great Britain (Weekly Worker) and hold joint "educational" meetings.  Oddly enough one of their number, Jim Grant writes in the latest edition of the Weekly Worker that:

This year’s event looks set to see fierce controversy, in the hall and the hallways. It is now the job of an outsider-left leadership to keep the whole show on the road.

This is no small matter. Even allowing for the fact that the standard method for the right to roll back the gains of the left in this period is to keep the atmosphere at a perpetual level of crisis, it is a particularly fraught moment for a conference.

There's no love lost between the LPM and Momentum as Grant takes a swipe at Lansman:

Particularly obvious is the cooling of relations between the leader’s office and Momentum, with the outlines of a sharp disagreement discernible during the fiasco of John Lansman’s abortive tilt at the general secretary’s job.....

Lansman, by ensuring Momentum developed merely into a factional machine under his own tight control, played this role in an earlier phase - a small matter which rather puts his sudden democratism in perspective. Yet his internet irregulars are small fry compared to the institutional power of the major unions, so Corbyn has good reason to shelter with them instead, if shelter is forthcoming. So much the worse for the rest of us.

And here's the crux:

The bottom line is that the struggle for the transformation of the Labour Party must escape the shackles of unconditional Corbyn-loyalism" 

That's because the LPM want subordination to "a programme of Marxism".

The LPM distributes both a free 4 page propaganda sheet and produced a daily bulletin for conference delegates last year:




Their leading writer "James Marshall" writes:

In 2015 Labour members had the temerity to elect Jeremy Corbyn as leader, and our party is, as a consequence, riven by civil war and faces unremitting media lies, mockery and attack. Such a leader was never going to be acceptable for the establishment. Corbyn’s past statements on Marxism, the monarchy, Nato, nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union, Iraq, Zionism, Palestine, etc, rule him out as a trustworthy prime minister. No wonder, once he was elected Labour leader, there were stories of unnamed members of the army high command “not standing for” a Corbyn government and being prepared to take “direct action.

Not acceptable to the majority of right thinking people is correct and his "policies" based on slogans and wishful thinking from his student days are not only unworkable but would leave the country defenceless and promote another holocaust in the Middle East. Corbyn's defence policy is summed up in two words: "We surrender".

James Marshall in a seperate article outlines the military policy of Labour Party Marxists and:

.. a Jeremy Corbyn government would be best defended by abolishing the standing army and the formation of a popular militia.

Popular with who is my first question and do their supporters openly admit that this would lead to a civil war, the worst kind of war where neighbour would be set against neighbour. I doubt it. Marxists only ever see workers as a tool to achieve their ideological aims.

Their distorted and somewhat utopian view of history betrays them as their analysis of the Second World War shows:

...the looming clash between the German-Italian axis and the Anglo-French alliance had every appearance of being a classic inter-imperialist conflict. The correct slogan under these circumstances would therefore be ‘defeat for both sides’. Britain and France were going to fight not for democracy, not for national freedom, not for the anti-fascist cause. No, they wanted to preserve their position at the top of the imperialist feeding chain.

A classic Leninist proposition of "Revolutionary Defeatism" that worked so well for the Bolsheviks who ended up giving away swathes of Russian territory to the Germans. In any case the Nazi's HAD to be defeated whether the followers of the LPM liked it or not. Imperialist this country may have been but the British made huge sacrifices inspired by Winston Churchill to defeat fascism.

The working class must develop its own militia. Such a body grows out of the class struggle itself: in the fight to protect picket lines, in defence of Muslims from fasc­ist attacks, in guarding our print shops, meeting places and demonstrations. With a workers’ militia it becomes realistic to split the state’s armed forces. Fear of officers, sergeants and court martials must be replaced by rank and file mutiny. Certainly, army regiments, airforce squadrons and naval crews declaring for our side provides us with the military wherewithal needed to safeguard either an expected or a recently established Marxist majority in parliament.

There are already rumours swirling around of unnamed members of the army high command “not standing for” a Corbyn government and being prepared to take “direct action”

First I've heard of it. Sheer paranoia on their part. Gerry Healy's Workers Revolutionary Party spent year after year warning about the dangers of a military coup. Never happened of course. It was and is a product of a deranged mind polluted by ultra-leftism and cultism.

LPM conclude:

...let us put our trust in a “well regulated militia” and the “right of the people to keep and bear arms.

Two words: Bugger that!