A Numbers Game

This Article Is Republished From The substack of the Marx Engels Lenin Institute

Having been a member of ‘mass’ organisations, I remain wholly unimpressed by the numbers being bandied about by Corbyn and his followers regarding their new party. The Labour Party under Corbyn was (allegedly) a mass membership organisation. In effect though the great majority of these members were there on paper only. They paid a few pounds a month and that was about it, they never went to any meetings and never engaged in any kind of political training. They were a name and a membership number, nothing more. Of those who were active the truth is that they weren’t all that much better. The political level of most of them was very low and all kinds of ideological confusion reigned amongst them.

This is inevitable given that ‘Corbynism’ was an attempt to revive social democracy when its time had very much passed and that ‘Corbynism’ was a completely nebulous concept. Factor in as well that imperialist Britain is one of the most heavily propagandist countries on earth and you find that even the ‘extreme left’ of opinion is utterly divorced from reality. In meetings of the Momentum organisation you found pro-NATO, pro-EU and wildly anti Russian & Chinese sentiments openly expressed. This is inevitable given the stage we are at but the problem was that no one was seriously countering any of it, in fact most of the ‘marxists’ now flocking towards Corbyn’s tattered banner agreed with such sentiments. The fact is that the left in Britain is as drenched in chauvinism and western supremacist thought as the right is, they just express it in different language.

This leads us to the question of leadership. Social Democrats love large, amorphous parties because they are in fact very easy to control from the top. Where you have large numbers of people who are still lost in a maze of bourgeois ideology and who are devoted only to Corbyn’s vague expressions of wanting ‘nice’ policies then it is very easy for a small number of professional operatives to manipulate this to their own ends.

This is exactly what happened with the Corbyn leadership between 2015 and 2019. Power remained in the hands of a tiny clique who were able to set the agenda and that agenda turned out to be one of relentless capitulation to the interests of the British ruling class. The membership was never able to resist any of this because they remained politically underdeveloped in the extreme and the level of discussion within the Corbyn era Labour Party was laughable. Again, all of this was by design.

The Communist approach in the imperialist countries in today’s conditions must be different. We must first face the fact that what the masses think of as socialism is social democracy which, at best, wishes to use the British state to trim the sharp edges off capitalism. This has been done precisely once, in the period 1945 to 1951, and this was successful because of the fear of revolution the ruling class had at that time. The biggest single factor in causing that fear was the presence of a living example of a successful workers’ state in the form of the USSR. This six-year period of social democracy, paid for by imperialist exploitation of British colonies and loans from US imperialism, has been allowed to define what socialism is for over 70 years now. Our approach must be markedly different. First we must ensure that every aspiring Communist goes through a thorough programme of political education. This is absolutely necessary in order to comprehensively dispel the mythologies that bourgeois ideology places in all of our heads. Without this foundational understanding of Marxism-Leninism a proper understanding of the world is impossible. Secondly, we must be clear to aspiring Communists that Communist parties in the west today must be parties (in Mao’s terms) of a new type. What this means is that Communist parties will be, by necessity, small at first as what we need to do is forge a rock-solid cadre-based party as our first step. That means we neither can nor should want to recruit everyone. We are looking for those workers who have already taken a few steps towards understanding the need for revolutionary change, the advanced workers.

Our aim at this stage must be to build organisations that have a clear understanding of three things.

1) That British imperialism is our primary enemy and that we must ally with those who seriously oppose it.

2) That only the working class, properly organised, can finally bring down the British ruling class.

3) That the entire legacy of ‘socialism’ in Britain is tainted by imperialism.

4) That only a highly educated and disciplined Communist Party can hope to win support amongst the working class but that this will take time and patience to achieve.

Corbyn’s new party is based on a mess of social democratic ideas and sees the working class purely as ballot box fodder at most. Communists must have a wholly different approach if we are to succeed.