Neo-Stalinism

New (21st century) currents of global Stalinism, red-brown alliances.

Labour after Peterborough

Labour’s victory in the 6 June Peterborough by-election has reduced the threat of a right-wing challenge to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership challenge. The Peterborough result was won by a vigorous and well-resourced campaign. But it gives no grounds for complacency. The Peterborough campaign was not left-wing. It focused heavily on demands for more money for the police. Labour won essentially because the Tory vote held up better than in the 23 May Euro-elections. Enough Tory voters thought that they will soon have Boris Johnson or another hard-Brexiter as leader, and so no longer have to protest by...

Corbyn is reactionary on Europe

Labour’s victory in the Peterborough by-election on 6 June was of course good news. It was also bad news. It seemed to vindicate the Labour leadership’s political cloak-work and shilly-shallying on the EU. In the 2016 referendum Labour fought Brexit. Now, behind the attempt to avoid alienating either the Remainers or the Brexiters, by fudging and mudging, the Labour leadership are committed Brexiters. They want Brexit, a soft Brexit, yes, but Brexit is Labour’s policy, no less than that of the May government — Brexit, and refusal to commit to a “people’s vote” that would include a Remain...

Sack the 3 Ms

It wasn’t just Alistair Campbell types, Blairites, who defected from Labour to the Lib Dems or the Greens in the 23 May Euro-elections. Many left-wing Labour supporters defected too, or didn’t vote, disgusted by Labour’s equivocation on Brexit. In July we will get a new Tory leader and prime minister, almost certainly a hard-Brexiter. How they will negotiate the difficulty, which destroyed May, of getting a parliamentary majority for any Brexit formula at all, we don’t know. They will be under pressure to steer a course capable of drawing back millions of Tory voters who on 23 May went for...

From St George to Xi Jinping

The Times (18 May) has splashed our denunciation of the wearing of the old Russian imperial emblem, the St George Ribbon, by some members of Lewisham Momentum. The incident is only a specially gaudy display of the general political trend of the section of the Labour supposed-left which gravitates around the Morning Star. The Morning Star is the continuation of the Daily Worker, which for decades from 1930 was a mouthpiece for the regimes of Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. It saw the old USSR as “socialist”. It based that claim largely on the fact that all sizeable industry in that regime was...

The story of the St. George ribbon

‪More on Lewisham Momentum and the New Stalinism here. ‬ And here ‬ At the AGM of the official Momentum group in Lewisham, south London, on 7 May, most of the organisers were proudly wearing, and handing out for others to wear, Russian military insignia: the ribbon of St. George. This isn’t the first time Stalinoid elements within the left have worn this symbol of Russian militarism: Eddie Dempsey (an RMT member who declared as a platform speaker at a “Full Brexit” event that the working class hated, and was right to hate, “the liberal left”) wore it while visiting pro-Russian gangsters in...

Behind Labour’s Brexit and antisemitism problems

Jeremy Corbyn’s victory as Labour leader in 2015 promised the possibility of a left Labour Party which would in government renationalise rail, gas and electricity, restore union rights and tax the rich. In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis and years of Tory austerity, that looked attractive to many tens of thousands of people who had never been active on the left before. Labour’s membership surged and the membership was optimistic. The Party’s right wing was on the back foot. Now all that is in jeopardy. The opportunity to re-shape Labour politically and open-up its structures democratically is...

Smears on social media

[An abridged version of this article appeared in Solidarity 501] After RMT activist Eddie Dempsey's denunciations of the liberal left were criticised , he was defended by the Morning Star, the General Secretary of the RMT Mick Cash, prominent Lexit activists such as Marcus Barnett, and, of course himself. Dempsey was also backed by rank-and-file Stalinist friends and associates. The worst elements of the new Stalinist milieu are ingrained internet trolls, people whose standard operating method is to lie about and abuse people they disagree with. We have been unfortunate to encounter this...

Morning Star: sack Sandy Hale/Alexander Norton!

Workers’ Liberty has published a dossier which deals with the actions of a poisonous, secretive clique, “Red London”. This briefing is important reading for any labour movement activist concerned to uphold basic, decent norms and comradeship inside the labour movement. “Red London” is a grouping organised around an anonymous Facebook page, known primarily for deploying unevidenced smears against people it politically opposes, rather than political argument. RL people also organise in the Labour Party, Momentum and in the RMT union. They are sympathetic to the Morning Star and some of them may...

Brexit can still be stopped

Brexit can still stopped. The first step, though, is to halt an emerging mood of retreat among anti-Brexit people. “People switch off from responding to every depressing political twist and turn of Brexit”, one activist wrote to us this week. Another: “people in my local [anti-Brexit] group feel down after Jeremy Corbyn’s responses on 28 and 29 January”. Yet others have said: “Face facts. Brexit is going to go through. No amount of agitation now will make much difference. The task now is to prepare the left for after Brexit”. Versions of the same sentiment appear among the not-politically...

Shun Red London!

We have published an online briefing which brings together images and other evidence to show how the Red London group operates and trace the development of the witch-hunt against the AWL. Red London is a Facebook page which deploys unevidenced smears rather than polemic against people they politically oppose. Its administrators are anonymous. The group also builds support for contemporary Stalinist state formations (e.g. North Korea, China), praises “High Stalinism” (the USSR in the 1930s and 40s) and is strongly aligned with the Communist Party of Britain, and its paper the Morning Star. RL...

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