The return of revolutionary defeatism
Nick Cohen says the reason Corbyn and pals are so chill about Brexit may be that old Leninist magic.
Labour has inherited the mental deformations of the Leninist style of doing business: the leadership personality cult, the love of conspiracy theory, the robotic denunciations of opponents, and most critically for our current crisis, the ineradicable fantasy that the worse conditions for the masses become, the brighter the prospects of the far left are. Disaster socialism is its alternative to disaster capitalism.
You know the one: don’t support reformist candidates because they will merely make things slightly better and thus kneecap more radical reforms. The idea is clear enough but…risky.
Labour’s leaders don’t sound remotely fearful, however. When asked about Brexit they deliver bland, mendacious slogans and make it as clear as a waiter trying to avoid eye contact that they would much prefer to talk to someone else. The easy point to make against them is that ending freedoms is what the far left has always done: there was precious little freedom of movement across the Iron Curtain. But, for anyone familiar with socialist history, it is the embrace of what Leninists called “revolutionary defeatism” that is Labour’s most striking characteristic.
Corbyn wrote for the Morning Star, the newspaper of the old Communist party, which managed to carry on being pro-Soviet even after the Soviet Union collapsed. His Stop the War coalition was founded by Trotskyists from the Socialist Workers party and Islamists, an alliance of believers in the one-faith state and one-party state, as some of us noted at the time.
A coalition of Trotskyists and Islamists – it mirrors the weirdness of The Women’s March over here, with hijab-flaunting anti-Semitic Linda Sarsour as its poster woman.
Lenin established the doctrine of revolutionary defeatism during the First World War. He had no time for “banal” socialists who were campaigning for peace. The true communist welcomed war and yearned for the defeat of his country. For a defeat, in Lenin’s case of Russia by Germany, would incite “hatred of one’s own government and one’s own bourgeoisie” and bring the revolution closer.
Or (as Nick goes on to point out) it brings something altogether nightmarish so close that you can’t get away from it.
Beyond the practicalities lies the morality. To wish suffering on people who are weaker and poorer than you is disgusting and it is no less disgusting when Jeremy Corbyn rather than Jacob Rees-Mogg is hoping that the misery of others will advance his political programme.
It’s not a good gamble and it’s not with your own money, so get away from the table.
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them,” said Maya Angelou. The dominant factions of the British far left have shown you since the 1970s that they are anti-European. All far-leftists have shown you since 1917 they believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that catastrophe should be welcomed as the midwife of socialist revolution. Why not believe them?
Call a different midwife.
Looks like I won’t be voting Labour at the next election. Wish there was someone I could vote for.
If your choice was between the Etonian mafia and Corbyn’s cohort, how would you vote? Electric chair or gas chamber? How kind of the executioner to give us a fucking choice.
I shall be spending the next few months doing what little I can in support of the campaign for another referendum. Probably a futile effort, or am I being defeatist?
True enough as it goes, but politics these days is all vacuous sound-bytes and substance-free slogans for the terminably short of attention.
Nogbert, I wouldn’t say you were being defeatist, but campaigning for a new referendum might be futile, only not for the reason you suspect. It isn’t that the govrrnment don’t or won’t listen, just that policies are now being made-up on the fly with an eye more to the ‘optics’ (shudder) than actual political expediency.
It’s a pretty amazing quirk of UK politics at the moment that approximately half the public opposes Brexit but has no major party it can vote for to express that wish.
So many of us are in the same boat as you, Nogbert. I’m in utter despair over the state of British politics and my only consolation is I may have lost my right to vote by the time the next election rolls around, which isn’t any consolation at all.
Hands up, I’ve never been a Corbyn fan although many of my friends and family back home are. I’ve been accused of getting more right wing in my old age and maybe that’s true or maybe I just think incrementalism might be slow and frustrating but it at least represents a push in the right direction. These morons on either side of the pond who think things becoming as dire as possible is good because it will force “the people” to rise up are deluded. All that happens is those with the most to lose are the most hurt as we are now seeing everywhere from the US-Mexican border to the lines at the Trussell Trust food banks.
What Corbyn doesn’t appear to realise – and I’m shocked that he doesn’t realise this – is that if he campaigned on remaining in the EU, that item in addition to his general leftiness would all but guarantee a win.
In response to Holms, I think that Corbyn knows very well that if Labour swung behind remain, the party would win. But he of course does not want to remain, and so he labours on at sitting on the fence and making the situation worse for everybody. When he first became leader, I was rather pleased, since he seemed an improvement on bright, beaming, bellicose Blairites, but now:
As I was walking’ all alane
I heared twa corbyns makin’ a mane,
The ane untae the t’ither did say,
Wha’ sall we gang an’ dae the day?
Oh, in ahint yon auld fail manse,
I wot there lies a new-built fence,
An’ awbody kens that it stands there,
Sae British, brutal, borin’, bare.
Ye’ll sit on the fence a’ day
I’ll flap aboot an’ twit Ms May,
An’ dream when t’neist election comes
That nane sall want thaim Tory bums.
An’ sae by doing’ nocht at a’
We’ll mek the haill great state to fa’,
An in that mess, we still sall fail
Tae re-nationalise British Rail!
Mony an ane sall then make’ mane,
But’ nane sall ken whaur we are gane,
O’er those white cliffs when Brexit’s here
Cauld winds sall blaw for ever mair.
Alternatively, not coming out for leave or remain is a strategic play to transcend the brexit noise and hope for a general election. Don’t want to pre-burn half the votes…
The libdems didn’t do so well out of campaigning remain…
As for the far left dystopia: Anyone who seriously believes full socialism can ever happen in the U.K. is pretty deluded…. At most we will get capitalism lite for a few years until the tories get back in to undo it again.
The real Tory nightmare is Corbyn getting the trains to run on time, opening the way to more socialism, but that won’t happen between brexit, oligarchic sabotage, and the inevitable labour infighting. This anti left propoganda isn’t even necessary.
Does Nick Cohen cite any evidence of anyone in the Labour party’s shadow cabinet or leader’s office actually expressing the views that Nick Cohen is attributing to them?
Which conspiracy theories does Corbyn “love”?
When did he say he wants the british population to suffer? I’ve heard him say he wants to end homelessness and redistribute more wealth to the poor and strengthen workers rights and so on. Seems like the opposite of what Nick Cohen is attributing to him.
Not being afraid of brexit is not the same as wanting a leninist revolution which increases violence and poverty.
There is a myth that Jeremy Corbyn is choosing to leave the EU. In fact:
1. He voted remain.
2. He campaigned for remain.
3. He lost.
4. He is not in government.
5. It is not at all obvious that it will be possible to stop brexit.
6. He advocates a soft brexit that will protect workers rights and minimise the harm caused to the population.
7. He is also open to the alternative of re-running the referendum (extremely risky) allowing the possibility of stopping brexit.
He’s by no means perfect but the idea that he’s deliberately welcoming disaster on the UK is in itself a paranoid conspiracy theory. The idea that he wishes suffering on others is not based on anything he is known to have said or done. It is based on Nick Cohen’s imagination.
The majority of card-carrying members of the UK’s far left (e.g. members of Momentum) are actually in favour of remaining in the EU. They are also in favour of democracy and conscious that a referendum was held and the electorate voted to leave the EU.
I don’t understand why people think Labour can guarantee a general election victory by advocating overturning the result of the brexit referendum. Why would the 52% of people who voted for brexit vote for a party which plans to ignore them?