There have been lots of comments from supporters of greater democracy, openness and accountability in Your Party to the effect that Jeremy Cotbyn’s successful ‘The Many’ members of the newly elected Central Executive Committee (CEC) are not looking to form an inclusive leadership on the CEC with supporters of the Grassroots Left and independents.
Did anyone really expect anything else to follow from the victory of ‘The Many’?
This was inevitable. This is politics. To the victor the spoils.
There are fundamentally two diametrically opposed objectives and methods of work.
One is based on bureaucratic control and the suppression of members’ democracy. The other wants to empower the members through the branches and to let the party flourish.
Those who wanted to see Your Party flourish have been beaten. Those who want to use it for a small number of anti-democrats to become MPs and councillors have won and will kill the party in the process of trying to fulfill their ambitions.
Those of us who want to achieve a genuine socialist/communist party, committed to the abolition of capitalism, not to managing it, need to draw the lessons.
A genuine socialist/communist party cannot be built with liberals and social democrats. Our aims and methods of work are not the same.
Socialists/communists stand for a society based on the common democratic ownership of the means of production – the land, waters, minerals, crops, factories, machinery, science & technology, and transport. We stand for the democratic management, control and planning of these resources for the benefit of all, not to make a profit for a few.
This is the only way to end inequality, wars and climate catastrophe.
To achieve this we need to build a mass, democratic socialist/communist party with this goal.
Such a party won’t be built overnight. It will take immense patience, hard work and the ability to discuss differences about how best to achieve this goal.
But we must all be committed to that goal.
That is not the case with Corbyn and his supporters. No matter what they claim, they remain wedded to the present capitalist system.
They want to make it fairer. We want to abolish it.
We should draw the lessons.
Socialists/communists should discuss building our own party, not the party of Jeremy Corby, Karie Murphy and those who agree with them.
At the start, such a project would not attract large numbers. But from small acorns, great oak trees grow.
Let’s stop trying to build a broad party based on the impossibility of reforming capitalism in the interests of the working class.
Instead, let’s build a party that helps to put the working class in power, laying the basis for a classless, stateless society that cares for all.