Round and about the far-left

  

The current crisis in Momentum has been the main talk on left-wing media over the last week and the left's papers are no exception but the Socialist Party (Militant) makes no mention of it's now obviously failed appeal to be re-admitted to the Labour Party.

However they have have allies in the tiny Communist Party of Great Britain who write in a report of their "aggregate that:

In the discussion that followed Vernon Price pointed out that SPEW was now making the correct demand that all working class organisations should be allowed to affiliate to Labour, so it does seem to have rethought things.

In reply to this, comrade Conrad said that SPEW had not engaged in any re-examination of its position on Labour - it had gradually “rowed back” into a “not so stupid” position. But for SPEW it was all about preserving its own organisation, not arriving at the truth. I added that for almost 20 years SPEW had insisted that Labour was now a bourgeois party, just like the Tories and Liberal Democrats, and it still refuses to admit it was wrong on that.

One interesting point to note about this meeting that it was a joint affair between the CPGB and the "Labour Party Marxists". The connection should be quite clear to the powers that be within Labour Party who are responsible for ensuring entryists of this type are kept out.

However their guru Jack Conrad (aka John Chamberlain) told the meeting:

...a Labour defeat would see renewed attacks by the right, who would blame it all on Corbyn, and there could possibly be a good number of trade unions withdrawing their support from him. As for Theresa May, she is looking for an excuse to call an early election - she knows full well that a general election in a few months’ time would almost certainly see the Tories re-elected with a hugely increased majority.

But most of the left, inside and outside the party, is in denial over this. Furthermore, the left groups have responded to Corbyn’s victory in a totally un-theorised manner. The Socialist Workers Party and Communist Party of Britain claim that the real battle is ‘on the streets’, not inside Labour, while the Socialist Party in England and Wales and Socialist Resistance have refused to engage in any self-criticism over their previous writing off of Labour as a site for struggle.

For the uninitiated Socialist Resistance are yet another tiny Trot faction that originated out of the implosion of the International Marxist group in the eighties. The IMG's most famous member was one Tariq Ali.

Socialist Resistance is an affiliate of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, the largest of such groups claiming to be the continuation Trotsky's Fourth International. Oddly there is a second group that is part of the USFI known as Socialist Action and was infamous for providing Ken Livingstone with his "lieutenants" when he became Mayor of London.

Socialist Action has been buried in the Labour Party for years whilst Socialist Resistance was once part of Galloway's mis-named Respect party before briefly wandering into the Socialist Party/RMT led Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. Now they too are burying themselves in Labour....

Meanwhile the media's current villains, the Alliance for Workers Liberty have issued a statement in which they openly admit their political orientation:

Yes, we are Trotskyists. We say what we think, and we organise openly for our ideas. We believe Momentum is a tremendous opportunity for the left.

Not that this should be news to anyone.

There are other groups "quietly" enconsed in Labour like Red Flag, the new name for the Workers Power group which is part of (believe it or not) The Fifth International. Then there is Socialist Appeal a 300 or so strong group who split from Militant and stayed in the Labour Party. They have their own "International" called the International Marxist Tendency.

All of these groups (and any I might have neglected to mention) have one thing in common. They seek to use the rise of "Corbynism" for their own benefit. All they are interested in is building their party. What happens to Labour is ultimately of no concern to them as they seek to supplant it and democracy in favour of a Leninist style "dictatorship of the proletariat" or to be more precise the dictatorship of the Party of the proletariat which means them.

Trotskyism is a threat to democracy let alone the Labour Party. The younger Corbynites seem to have finally got wind of this although whether they learn anything from this is doubtful since many of them are just as intolerant, just in a different way.