Definition Of An American

One of an unexceptional group of people known collectively as Americans who scour the planet blowing up shit.

Unlike Hitler who only sort to impose his will on Europe an American seeks to impose his will on the world.

The Red Flag

The ruling class and the spectre of Leon Trotsky

From WSWS

Seventy-six years ago today, the assassin Ramon Mercader plunged an ice axe into the head of Leon Trotsky at his home in Coyoacan, Mexico City. Gravely wounded, Trotsky valiantly fought back against his killer. He died of his injuries the following day.

The aim of the assassin’s paymaster, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, was to silence the voice of his principal foe and so deprive the Russian and international working class of its greatest revolutionary leader.

Stalin failed. Today, the dictator’s name and that of his followers is reviled. He was, as Trotsky warned, “The grave digger of the revolution,” whereas Trotsky is forever associated with the incorruptible struggle against Stalinism and for international socialism.

Trotsky remains not only a towering historical personality, but also a figure of acute contemporary political relevance for workers the world over. This finds confirmation in the way that his name has been invoked repeatedly in the deepening crisis of the British Labour Party.

The right wing of the Labour Party, beginning on August 9 with an article in the Guardian by its deputy leader Tom Watson, is bitterly denouncing “Trotskyist entryists” and portraying all supporters of Labour’s current leader, Jeremy Corbyn, as unwitting dupes of these shadowy forces.

In the Corbyn camp, the response has been to express outrage and incredulity that such an accusation has been made—with Corbyn reassuring the Observer, “At no stage in anyone’s most vivid imagination are there 300,000 sectarian extremists at large in the country who have suddenly descended on the Labour Party [emphasis added].”

None of this has prevented Britain’s major newspapers from being inundated with articles on Trotsky, seeking to denigrate him and warn against any association with his ideas. Repeated references have been made to “Trotsky’s ghost” haunting the Labour Party and portraying the political struggle within it as one between reform and revolution.

Whatever the factional intentions of the Labour right, the emergence of Trotsky’s name to the centre stage has enormous objective significance. Indeed, whenever capitalism is gripped by crisis and an eruption of social and political conflict involving the working class, Trotsky’s presence is always felt.

Why is this?

Despite the declarations of his supposed “irrelevance”, the ruling elite and its media is acutely aware of the threat posed by Trotsky and Trotskyism under conditions of bitter social divisions, the political turmoil produced by the Brexit referendum and, above all, the threatened breakup of the Labour Party that has policed the struggles of the working class for more than a century.

Millions of workers and young people are looking for a means of fighting back against austerity and militarism. Corbyn’s pretence of being such an alternative, while opposing any break with the Labour Party, cannot last. The question of building a new and genuinely socialist party will inevitably arise.

The situation in Britain only expresses that which is developing the world over. The working class is moving to the left, but it has yet to build the socialist leadership it requires.

Next year is the 100th anniversary of the October 1917 revolution in Russia. Alongside Lenin, Trotsky’s name is synonymous with that epochal event that established the first workers state in the world. Today, world capitalism is once again in the grip of an escalating economic, political and social crisis that raises anew the question of whether humanity will be dragged into an era of dictatorship, barbarism and war, or whether the working class will succeed in establishing world socialism, ending class exploitation and national divisions.

Trotsky led the political fight against the degeneration of the Soviet Union under Stalin. His struggle and that of the Left Opposition, which culminated in the founding of the Fourth International in 1938, refutes the central claim of anti-communist propagandists that Lenin led to Stalin, and that socialism produced bureaucratic tyranny.

Trotsky is the author of the Theory of Permanent Revolution and of such epoch-defining phrases as “The death agony of capitalism.” He is the personal embodiment of the perspective of world socialist revolution. And as far as Britain’s ruling class and its counterparts internationally are concerned, this makes Trotsky the most toxic and dangerous figure in history.

Even after the passage of decades, Trotsky’s writings have immediate relevance. Not only did he pay close attention to the class struggle in Britain, he offered the most trenchant and scathing appraisal of the Labour Party and of its role as a defender of capitalist rule. His classic work, “Where is Britain Going?” was published in 1925, just one year before the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress betrayed the General Strike. His writings on the Fabian left and its impotence, cant and hypocrisy, provide a salutary warning against placing any trust in Corbyn and his backers in the union bureaucracy:

They are the main prop of British imperialism and of the European, if not the world bourgeoisie. Workers must at all costs be shown these self-satisfied pedants, drivelling eclectics, sentimental careerists and liveried footmen of the bourgeoisie in their true colours. To show them up for what they are means to discredit them beyond repair. To discredit them means rendering a supreme service to historical progress.

In the next period, the burning issue that must be clarified among advanced workers and youth internationally is that of Trotsky and his political legacy. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the world Trotskyist movement that is represented in Britain by the Socialist Equality Party, has dedicated itself to refuting what we have termed the “post-Stalinist school of historical falsification” regarding Trotsky and his life and work.

In the first decade of this century, and on the eve of the 2008 financial crash, British historians Ian Thatcher, Geoffrey Swain and Robert Service all published biographies of Trotsky. World Socialist Web Site Chairman David North conducted systematic work to expose the lies and falsifications they contained. Published in 2010 under the title In Defense of Leon Trotsky, North described their tendentious works as “pre-emptive biographies” seeking to “completely discredit Trotsky as a historical figure” on the eve of renewed revolutionary struggles.

In his introduction, North made the following observation of the motivations for all present efforts to denigrate Trotsky:

Leon Trotsky was, above all else, the great tribune and theoretician of world socialist revolution. The passions evoked by his name testify to the enduring significance of Trotsky’s ideas. Arguments about Trotsky are never simply about what happened in the past. They are just as much about what is happening in the world today, and what is likely to happen in the future.

Since these words were written, much additional ink and paper has been wasted on seeking to diminish and slander Trotsky. Yet despite these slanders and those that will follow, it has never been possible to erase his enduring presence. This is because Trotskyism is not only a spectre but a political movement. The organization that he founded, the Fourth International, is the conscious expression of deep objective tendencies that are once again bringing the working class all over the world into revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system.

The Big Fake

American and British media propaganda knows no bounds. Consider the video of the child supposedly caught up in a bombing raid by Russia in Aleppo. Forget for a moment that the US has inspired and funded the whole Syrian catastrophe and continues to do so by supplying ISIS with all the means they need to topple the Assad government - forget that and just look at the photo.

A boy has supposedly been plucked from the rubble of a bombed building and instead of being rushed to hospital where his wounds can be treated he is instead plonked in a chair for the world to gawk at. Does it make sense to you. 

Hooray I got it removed. So much egg on the BBC's face.

The Olympic Flame Should Be Extinguished

Rio 2016: The “Olympic ideal” and the reality of capitalism

From WSWS

“The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.” These words, which appear in the Olympic Charter’s “Fundamental Principles of Olympism,” are supposed to sum up what is referred to with sanctimonious reverence as the “Olympic ideal.”

There has never been a golden age of the Olympic games, which have for over a century served as an arena for the promotion of nationalism. The founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, was candid in acknowledging that he valued sport not only for its potential for advancing mankind’s development, but also for its use in preparing French men to become better soldiers in war.

With the opening of the 2016 games in Rio de Janeiro, however, the contrast could hardly be more stark between the supposed Olympic ideal and the reality of a capitalist system mired in economic crisis and social inequality and hurtling toward another world war.

The opening ceremony of the Rio games, held in the city’s iconic Maracana Stadium, was widely covered by the international news media. Less reported was a brutal attack by the Brazilian police against a demonstration organized a half mile away, called against what the protesters termed “the exclusion games.” Police used tear gas, pepper spray and stun grenades to drive the demonstrators off the streets, injuring several.

Earlier clashes were seen along the route taken by the Olympic Torch, which in one case was extinguished by a crowd of workers and youth in the coastal town of Angra dos Reis. They had turned out to protest the expenditures on the Olympics under conditions where public employees and teachers are not being paid and transit service and health care are being cut because of the deepening fiscal crisis.

In 2009, when the Brazilian government secured the 2016 games for Rio, then President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva proclaimed, “Our time has arrived.” During the same period, Lula was boasting that Brazil, whose growth rate had rebounded to 5 percent, was immune from the effects of the global financial meltdown of 2008.

Since then, the world capitalist crisis has devastated Brazil’s economy, driving the official unemployment rate to over 11 percent and sending real wages falling. Millions are threatened with being thrown back into extreme poverty in what is already one of the world’s most socially unequal countries.

Even as the games unfold, the Brazilian Senate is moving ahead with the impeachment of ousted President Dilma Rousseff on trumped-up charges of budgetary irregularities. Those moving against the Workers Party (PT) president are, like the PT itself, implicated up to their necks in the multi-billion-dollar Petrobras bribery scandal. Nonetheless, they are backed by both Brazilian and foreign capital, which wants a full change of regime in order to proceed with sweeping austerity policies under interim President Michel Temer, Rousseff’s former vice president and political ally.

In the run-up to the opening of the games, the Brazilian government heavily publicized alleged terror plots that appeared to have little if any substance. In fact, the massive security operation accompanying the Rio games is aimed not at terrorists, but at the Brazilian population itself. An occupation army of some 100,000 troops and police—twice the number mobilized for the already militarized 2012 London games—has been deployed across Rio, many dressed in combat gear, carrying assault rifles and backed by armored cars and even tanks.

This operation has been supplemented by the United States military and intelligence apparatus, which, according to NBC, has “assigned more than 1,000 spies to Olympic security,” hundreds of whom have been sent to Brazil. In addition to the CIA, FBI and NSA spooks, detachments of Marine and Navy commandos from the US Special Operations Command have been deployed on the ground.

This is the culmination of a campaign of repression that has unfolded over the past few years in tandem with preparations first for the 2013 World Cup football tournament and now for the Olympics. Violent police measures have been used to drive tens of thousands from their homes in impoverished districts targeted for development, while thousands more homeless have been swept from the streets in what amounts to an exercise in “social cleansing.” Police have killed between 40 and 50 people a month in the city over the recent period, while extra-official death squads have murdered many more. So much for the Olympics and “human dignity.”

Against this backdrop, the vast wealth expended on the Olympics, all in pursuit of enrichment and private profit, is obscene. Corporate sponsors, including Coca-Cola, Samsung, Dow Chemical, General Electric, McDonalds and others, have paid hundreds of millions of dollars for exclusive marketing rights and are spending hundreds of millions more to exploit them. TV companies have shelled out $4 billion to broadcast the 19-day event, while marketing revenues are expected to total $9.3 billion.

A relative handful of individual professional athletes will make tens of millions more from product endorsements. The days when the Olympics were a celebration of amateur sports are a distant memory.

Within the games themselves, the overriding atmosphere of social inequality is ever present. While poorer teams are dealing with substandard conditions in hastily constructed Olympic villages, the US basketball “dream team” is residing on the luxury cruise ship Silver Cloud, moored in Rio’s harbor and surrounded by police and navy patrol boats.

Meanwhile, the use of the Olympics to promote nationalism and prepare for war is as virulent in the Rio games as at any time since Adolph Hitler convened the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

On Monday, it was announced that Russian athletes will be banned entirely from the Paralympics to be held next month in Rio in connection with charges of state-sponsored doping of athletes. Earlier, 118 members of the country’s track and field team were banned under a system relegating the decision to the federations of each individual sport.

Washington, the World Anti-Doping Agency, various NGOs and the Western media have waged a virulent campaign to exclude every Russian athlete from the Rio Olympics and prevent the country’s flag from even appearing there, as part of a broader effort to paint Russia as a “rogue” nation that must be stopped by force.

The campaign to bar Russia from the games is inseparably bound up with the growing US-NATO siege of the country’s Western borders, which has been steadily escalated since the US- and German-orchestrated coup that installed an ultra-right, anti-Russian regime in Ukraine in 2014.

The sanctimonious denunciations of Russia for having corrupted an otherwise pristine sporting event reek with bad faith and hypocrisy. The anti-Russian campaign intentionally obscures the wholesale corruption surrounding the entire organization of the games as well as the rampant doping practiced by nearly every country.

The controversy, which has run in tandem with the Democratic Party’s neo-McCarthyite campaign denouncing Vladimir Putin for interfering in the US election, has been pumped up as part of the attempt to prepare public opinion for a military conflict with Russia that could quickly lead to nuclear war.

While this year’s Olympic Games will once again provide a display of astounding athletic ability by participants from across the planet, the entire event is overshadowed by a social system that is founded on inequality and exploitation, and threatens the very survival of humanity.

The Guardian: Apologist for nuclear war

By Laura Tiernan of WSWS

Last week, Britain’s parliament voted 472-117 to renew the Trident nuclear submarine programme.

Amid jeering and abuse heaped by members of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) on their leader Jeremy Corbyn, 140 Labour MPs voted with the Conservatives in defence of Britain’s “nuclear deterrent.” The Trident vote revealed that there is a single party of war, cutting across party lines.

The media campaign surrounding the vote exposed the central aim of the attempted coup against Corbyn. Its aim is to install the Blairite forces who will ensure Labour continues to serve as the direct and pliant instrument of British imperialism.

As with every aspect of this campaign, the Guardian has played a key role.

On the eve of the vote, it provided a platform for Labour MPs demanding support for Trident, as well as those calling for an abstention—reserving its vitriol for Corbyn’s anti-nuclear stance.

The first of these sorties was launched by Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson. He spoke for the vast majority of PLP members in a July 17 article headlined, “Economically and militarily, we must renew Trident.”

Emphasising Labour’s history as a party of war, Watson declared, “[N]ow is not the time to step away from our historic role as a nuclear power. When [Labour Prime Minister Clement] Attlee built Britain’s bomb, he did so because he knew our role in the world would be shaped by our capacity to defend ourselves and our allies; the logic of that Labour party position holds even truer today.”

He made clear the predatory interests behind the Trident debate, calling on Britain to step up its involvement in the NATO build-up against Russia: “I am pleased that the UK is committed to deploying our troops as part of NATO’s Baltic forces. Putin’s Russia looms, a mafia state built on chauvinism. Britain must play its part in holding it at bay.”

Labour MPs Clive Lewis and Emily Thornberry, who are nominally Corbyn supporters, contributed their own article, “This Trident vote is a contemptible trick. That’s why we are abstaining.”

Justifying their refusal to oppose the government motion, the pair wrote that Monday’s debate would be nothing more than “a political game … There is nothing new in this debate—a vote in principle was agreed in 2007. It is being held simply to sow further divisions inside the Labour party.”

To portray the vote on Britain’s nuclear program as merely a cynical political manoeuvre by the Tories is politically criminal. Both MPs are well aware of the context in which the Trident vote is being held—a growing arms race by all the major imperialist powers that threatens a third world war. Thornberry is heading up Labour’s Defence Review, while Lewis, a graduate from Sandhurst military academy who served in Afghanistan, is currently Labour’s shadow defence minister. Both are privy to high-level military briefings, especially in relation to the current NATO build-up against Russia.

While claiming to offer a third way between outright rejection and acceptance of the government’s motion, they made clear that any concerns they have over the Trident programme are of a militarist character. Budget outlays on Trident “will matter if our already highly stretched conventional defence capabilities must be cut to pay for it,” Lewis and Thornberry wrote. “If we choose to retain a nuclear capability, there are many cheaper alternatives than building the full complement of replacement submarines.”

The next day, just hours before the Trident debate, Guardian commissioning editor Archie Bland weighed in with an extraordinary opinion piece: “Banging on about Trident—it’s Corbynism to a T.”

Bland’s objective was to portray Corbyn’s planned opposition to Trident as irrelevant, because the issue lacked “salience” with the broader public.

“Do you prefer your potatoes mashed or roasted?” he asked his readers. “Which are better, cats or dogs? Is it reasonable for your aunt’s next-door neighbours to play loud music after 11pm? If pressed, you will have a view about all of these things. … But a view isn’t usually the same thing as a deep concern. Political scientists call this salience: the idea that, as well as what you think about something, it is worth asking whether you think about it.”

According to Bland, the attitude of millions of people to the danger of nuclear war is on par with the minor inconvenience of rowdy neighbours.

“They don’t care whether Jeremy Corbyn is leader of the Labour party,” he continued. “They no longer care about the invasion of Iraq, which remains a shibboleth for a huge segment of Labour activists, even though it began more than a decade ago and all of the key players have departed from the stage. And they certainly don’t care about the particulars of Trident.”

The Tories would “breeze through” the vote on Trident “in a spirit of complete unity,” he concluded, while “Labour appears hopelessly divided on something that most people don’t care about.”

Bland’s article provoked hundreds of objections on the Guardian’s comment thread.

Undeterred, Guardian journalist Owen Jones took up Bland’s theme in his own column the next day, concluding: “Those of us who believe Britain could set an example by disposing of its nuclear weapons should have the humility to accept we have not convinced the majority of people in this country, including those whose jobs currently depend on Trident and who have not been persuaded about an alternative economic plan. We have to at least start from there.”

The picture painted by Bland and Jones of an apathetic populace is an outright lie. Their aim is to delegitimise opposition to Trident—and to block any challenge to the imperialist war drive.

When Bland writes that the public “no longer cares about the invasion of Iraq” he is confusing the indifference of his fellow columnists, such as Jones, who speak for the most privileged layers of the upper middle class, with the egalitarian and oppositional sentiments of millions of workers and young people.

A critical aspect of the Guardian ’s coverage is its determination to downplay the threat of nuclear war. But Prime Minister Theresa May’s unprecedented and ominous declaration, made in the Trident debate, that she would not hesitate to authorise a nuclear strike killing 100,000 innocent men, women and children, shows what is at stake.

Her chilling admission was passed over in silence by Labour MPs and the Guardian duly stepped in to cover their tracks. The result was a comment by Giles Fraser, “Theresa May is lying over Trident. At least I hope she is.”

Fraser, a former canon chancellor of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and therefore in the professional business of granting benedictions, claimed that “parliament has just committed well over £100bn on a weapons system that we won’t use, that we mustn’t use, and that even the Russians know we won’t use. They know this because the only situation in which we would think about pressing the button would be precisely the situation in which there was no longer any point in pressing the button.”

His imaginary schema was based on the premise that the British ruling class would not initiate a nuclear attack. In his entire column, the words Hiroshima and Nagasaki do not appear. But the bombs dropped on both Japanese cities in August 1945, killing over 200,000 people, were nuclear first strikes by the United States. Declassified papers made public in 2013 revealed that British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill personally endorsed these atrocities.

On February 15, 2003, more than 1 million people in the UK joined global protests to oppose the impending invasion of Iraq— the largest anti-war protests in history. This opposition has not gone away. According to a YouGov poll published last June, opposition to the Iraq War has in fact increased over the past 13 years. Polls conducted over the past decade have also consistently registered majority opposition to Trident.

The Guardian is not merely a newspaper. It is an organising centre of the nominally liberal bourgeoisie. Claiming to stand for progressive opinion, its role is to police public discourse, upholding at all times the strategic imperatives of imperialism.

The problem is not apathy, as the Guardian claims, but the absence of a revolutionary leadership, programme and perspective. The instinctive opposition of working people has been deliberately confined to the parties and institutions of capitalism—the very system responsible for war, austerity and the growing assault on democratic rights.

In 2003, the Stop the War Coalition—led by figures such as Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone, Tariq Ali and Jeremy Corbyn—channelled mass protests behind impotent appeals to the Labour Party, the United Nations and imperialist powers such as France and Germany, to oppose the US-led invasion of Iraq. Corbyn addressed the mass rally in London’s Hyde Park, calling on Blair to hold a parliamentary vote on the war. Blair did so four weeks later. A pro-war vote by Labour and the Tories resulted, with British military action commencing the next day.

Corbyn’s record since becoming Labour leader in September 2015 has been one of abject capitulation to the Blairite warmongers on every critical issue. In the name of “party unity” he has: (1) refused to challenge Labour policy on Trident at the party’s National Conference; (2) allowed a free vote on British military action in Syria that resulted in bombing raids; and (3) opposed war crimes charges against Tony Blair and his accomplices, helping to sweep the findings of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War under the mat.

Despite addressing rallies of thousands of supporters over the weekend, including a campaign launch in Salford on Saturday, Corbyn made no mention of Trident or the threat of war.

Catastrophic Identity Crisis

Theresa May Part 1

Because the first scene published yesterday of Liam Shakehands' new play Theresa May Part 1 was so popular he has given me unprecedented access to the second scene.

ACT 1 SCENE 2  A room in the Palace of Westminster

Enter Hilary Benn woad painted and packing many shooting irons. Behind follow Owen Smith and Paddy Ashdown with his pants up. They are woad painted also and on the warpath.

Benn:     [Taking out two pistols and cocking them]

                These two firearms which I see before me,
                With itchy fingers on their triggers poised,
                Can, in an instant, send our foe to hell.
                Two loud reports as both I squeeze at once,
                Then, as the smoke retreats, behold the view;
                Corbyn lying crumpled and deceased.

Smith:     Fine!
                These guns of yours are practical I'm sure,
                But did we not agree to stay our hand,
                Until the leader's ballot is resolved ?
                I might well win.

Benn:       How goes your bid in that?

Smith:     Uphill in truth.
                New membership has complicated things.
         
Benn:        Ah well,the C.I.A will topple him
                  At once, if all else fails. Hurrah the Yanks.

Ashdown:  Look friends, while we endeavour to depose
                   This left-wing fool, if just by happenchance
                   I get to drop my pants and blissfully
                   Begin to roger to my heart's delight,
                   I trust you will not spill the beans.

Benn:        Forsooth!
                  We might partake as well. Why not?

Exeunt all with a skip in their step

Pussyfooting With The Blairites

I make no apology for publishing other people's articles. I can't write it all.

Corbyn and McDonnell plead with UK Labour Party right wing for “unity”

From WSWS

Labour Party Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell made an extraordinary plea for unity with the very MPs seeking to depose his closest ally, Jeremy Corbyn, in a coup.

Speaking Sunday to the BBC’s "Andrew Marr Show," McDonnell broke from the interview and, speaking directly to the camera, said, “Let me say to Labour Party supporters, Labour members, members of the Parliamentary Labour Party [PLP], we have got to stop this now. There is a small group out there that are willing to destroy our party just to remove Jeremy Corbyn. We have got to stop them. We’ve got to unite.”

McDonnell was responding to the latest provocative move by the Blairite coup plotters, who claimed via accusations from Labour MP Seema Malhotra that “members of staff working for John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn” gained unauthorised entry to an office she had used in Parliament. The Observer, the sister paper of the Guardian, which supports the efforts to oust Corbyn, splashed this on its front page—even though its article included a statement from Corbyn’s office directly opposing the claims.

A spokesman for Corbyn said, “As an office manager on the leader of the opposition’s floor, Karie [Murphy] has a key to open all offices. She accessed the office in question to confirm when it would be vacated. It is a month since Seema Malhotra resigned as shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, and the office is intended for the person holding that position.”

This latest manufactured incident followed yet more pleas for unity by Corbyn as he launched his leadership campaign Saturday in Salford.

The previous day, Labour MP Owen Smith, who is challenging Corbyn for the leadership, spoke at a meeting in nearby central Manchester. The events could not have been more sharply contrasted. In a city with a population of over half a million, Smith spoke in Manchester’s Friends Meeting House to just 300 people. Corbyn spoke to a capacity audience of 2,000 in Salford’s Lowry Theatre. The event was streamed live on Facebook with over 100,000 people logging in to watch and close to 200,000 having viewed it by Sunday evening. Ten simultaneous launch events across the country were held at the same time.

For weeks, Corbyn has been denounced by the right-wing acolytes of former Labour leader Tony Blair as being “unelectable” and “out of touch” with Labour voters, particularly in Labour’s “heartlands.” Using this to justify their coup against Corbyn, 172 MPs backed a motion of no-confidence in him. After trying to prevent a leadership contest taking place, Smith was chosen as the “unity candidate” who could supposedly combine a left feint with that mysterious “electability” of an inveterate opportunist.

The problem is that anyone who is fielded by the PLP is viewed with hostility by the broad mass of party members and seen as a pliant tool of those who have overseen Labour’s transformation into an openly big business, pro-war party and who are now intent on subverting Corbyn because he is pledged to oppose austerity, militarism and war.

On Saturday, the Guardian published a poll commissioned by Opinium and the Observer, which found that Corbyn is set to trounce Smith in the September 24 contest. Some 54 percent of Labour supporters said they support Corbyn, with Smith having the backing of just 22 percent.

Just 10 months ago, Corbyn crushed his three Blairite opponents, winning the support of more than 250,000 Labour members and registered supporters—more than all his opponents put together. All indications are that Corbyn’s support among Labour’s members has grown since then as a direct result of opposition to the attempted coup against him.

After failing to keep Corbyn off the ballot, the Blairites attempted to cut off 130,000 Labour members and supporters who had joined in the last six months from voting in the leadership contest. They were given just two days to register and pay a prohibitive £25 fee. Nevertheless, 180,000 people signed up. Labour’s membership under Corbyn’s leadership is now well over half a million.

The aim of the Blairites is not merely to depose Corbyn, but to thwart growing anti-capitalist sentiment and yearning for fundamental social change among millions of people. However, every manoeuvre attempted so far by the coup plotters has backfired. Indeed, their attempt to package Smith as the new rising star “in touch” with voters has not even survived a week of contact with the real world, to the point that Smith felt it necessary to declare in Manchester, “I’m as radical as Jeremy.”

The support for Corbyn is only an initial manifestation of far more profound political developments, rooted in the deep social polarisation between the classes in the UK. Nearly a decade of savage cuts carried out by successive Labour and Conservative-led governments since the 2008 global financial crash has resulted in millions of working people being pauperised. Young people, who make up much of Corbyn’s support, have no future, with the avenue of a decent free education and secure employment now denied them.

But far from offering their supporters a programme of struggle against the Blairites, Corbyn and McDonnell have capitulated to them at every turn in the name of preserving “party unity.”

McDonnell speaks of a “small group” opposing Corbyn, but this small group consists of the vast bulk of the PLP to whom he made his unity appeal. These MPs ignore all such pathetic appeals and instead join enthusiastically in the campaign, slandering Corbyn’s supporters as “violent thugs,” “anti-Semites” and “misogynists.”

In Salford, Corbyn too urged his supporters to seek unity with the coup plotters, saying, “I know some people are angry at the actions of some MPs, but where we have disagreement in the Labour Party we settle it through democratic means—no coups, no intimidation, no abuse... Whatever the result on the 24th of September, we’re going be a united movement to take on the Tories…”

No coups? No abuse? Democratic means? What does this have to do with the reality of the vicious right-wing offensive mounted against those Corbyn now urges to turn the other cheek?

Corbyn acts as a block on the aspirations of those who support him. He is all that stands between the party’s right wing and a political reckoning. Under conditions of mass revulsion felt by millions towards all the institutions of the ruling elite, including Parliament and its parties, he insists that any change can be accomplished only via a Labour government and Parliament. "Many of us have sought office in Parliament," he declared, "in order to effect those changes—but changes come because people want those changes to come and Parliament has to influence how those changes come about.”

To claim that Labour can be made to implement anti-austerity and anti-war measures, as does Corbyn, means to lie to the working class.

In the previous week, three quarters of Labour MPs voted to retain the UK’s nuclear missile arsenal, with many advocating its use in future conflicts. Prior to this, the Chilcot report into the Iraq War was released, providing devastating confirmation of the illegal character of the war and the criminal role of those—Blair and his supporters—who organized and led it in support of US imperialism. Corbyn, despite his professed opposition to both the Iraq War and Trident renewal, said nothing about either issue in Salford—also, one must assume, to further the cause of party unity.

To take a single step forward, those presently looking towards Corbyn for leadership must consciously reject the limitations he and his supporters place on them and adopt a genuinely revolutionary socialist perspective and leadership.

Theresa May Part 1

A friend of mine, who is an extremely good poet, has set his mind to writing a play in a typically Elizabethan sort of way. I don't pretend to understand the intricacies of blank verse but he showed me his first draft and it left me salivating for more. Liam, my friend, has also given me permission to publish the opening scene on my blog for everyone to enjoy.

Frontispiece

Theresa May  Part 1

 by Liam Shakehands

ACT 1 SCENE 1 -The Cabinet Room

Enter Theresa May, Phillip Hammond and Boris Johnson.
They gather in secret conclave to refashion the world.

May:                Like our departed sister Margaret,

                        I, too, hold saintly Francis in esteem,

                        But hugging lepers and stripping off my kit

                        To wander naked round the seats of power,

                        I find distasteful and obscene.

Boris:             Yes Tess indeed! [Aside] Not a sight for sore eyes!

May:               Why harmony at all I ask myself,

                       When pleasing discord seeks the light of day

                       In this our craven world.

Hammond:     Aye Mistress May.

                       Dentures and teeth will likely gnash and wails

                       Shall sound in Wales and screams in Scotland too,

                       When I unleash austerity anew.

Johnson:         St. Francis of Assisi's for the chop.

                        F*ck him I say!

May:              Tut Boris no expletives!

                      We must pretend that Francis is our friend,

                      in order to mislead.

Johnson:       Crudeness, alas, I like.

                      Besides, few can utter f*ck in five tongues.

                      Like me.

Hammond:  You are a wizard with the words.

Johnson:       And with the deed. Five times nightly Boris

                     Don't you know. [He takes a bow]

Exeunt all