You were right all along and I should’ve seen it back when Corbyn as the Labour leader banned socialists who supported Palestine for supposed “antisemitism” while keeping all the Blairites, neoliberals and imperialists like Starmer. I thought “he has to do that to stay electable and to survive in British parliamentary politics” but the truth of the matter is he was perfectly content to strangle the new party in it’s infancy the moment he felt attacked from the left, and suddenly being electable or survival of the party didn’t matter at all.
For context, he announced a new party with Zarah Sultana, she quit the Labour party for this, and the moment she went out of line (by launching the membership portal without checking with him first) he immediately threw a public tantrum, threatened legal action, sent a mass mail to all subscribers that the portal is “unautharised” and “if any direct debits have been set up, they should be immediately cancelled” and so on.
The portal was doing great by the way, it had 20,000 paying members within 3 hours of announcement which is completely unprecedented and he wrecked it and completely killed the momentum.
Now it seems Zarah has been completely sidelined, there is no mention of her in any communications, and today Corbyn officially registered the party with the Electoral Commission with himself as a sole leader and a transphobic, socially conservative landlord as Nominating Officer.
This is a complete betrayal and I feel sick thinking back to how I kept supporting him. He’s a wrecker, I was being a lib and I was wrong.
I know a succdem when I see one.
As far as I am concerned, nice talking crackers in positions of power have to actually Do Stuff for me to keep considering them worthwhile.
If all they do is sort of say the right thing, but never actually get anything done, they’re worse than our outspoken enemies.
ETA: AOCorbyn?
Succdems gonna succ and never learn, example 3426542762
For context, he announced a new party with Zarah Sultana, she quit the Labour party for this, and the moment she went out of line (by launching the membership portal without checking with him first) he immediately threw a public tantrum, threatened legal action, sent a mass mail to all subscribers that the portal is “unautharised” and “if any direct debits have been set up, they should be immediately cancelled” and so on.
TBF unilaterally putting herself in direct control of membership and financing is a pretty hostile move and could be seen as hijacking the party. It’s not like stepping out of line ideologically. But how he reacted makes me wish she was hijacking.
She didn’t unilaterally put herself in direct control of membership and financing. The money went to the independent trust set up for this specific purpose and agreed on. She unilaterally decided to launch it but Corbyn’s response was just pure wrecker shit.
Not saying he actions werent, but don’t you think her not getting the authorisation widening the rift and forcing a response is also wrecker shit?
No, because what she did resulted in an unprecendented influx of supporters, she did not wreck anything.
Corbyn still didn’t release membership numbers for the new portal so I doubt it’s looking good, and that’s because he fucking wrecked it.
Should’ve dealt with Zarah behind the closed doors, instead he sent a mass mail to all supporters alleging a fraud, reported Zarah to the authorities, and then “launched” with a nearly identical email less than a week later.
Perhaps, but wouldn’t have her waiting a week to avoid the split and to run a combined registration effort between the two would have registered even more members been far better?
If Corbyn’s a wrecker and Sultana isn’t why do you think she jumped the gun instead of waiting just a week?
So all she did is press launch ahead of schedule? That seems wild to freak out about. Is it just because he wanted to announce it himself?
Do you have sources for this? I’ve seen some of the conflict between the two but I haven’t seen anything explaining the reasons behind what happened.
There’s a few aspects to the Your Party stuff that I’m not super fond of but I don’t think I wanna throw the entire thing under the bus without seeing some kind of clear evidence that this is a case of discrimination and not something else entirely.
I didn’t say it’s a case of discrimination…
Okay, well whatever you wanna call wrecking a party because he feels threatened by a Muslim woman - not really focused on semantics here.
I just wanna see sources that this is, in fact, some bullshit factionalism at work and not something else. Stuff I’ve seen so far leaves way too many question marks over a lot of things and I’d like to be better informed.
Okay, so what I think I’m reading is that there is a lot of internal debate about how to get things done and that internal debate is causing people to lose faith in the party? I’m not a big fan of the article because it uses far too many “reportedly” or “we have heard” arguments but assuming all their information is correct that’s what I’m seeing.
I can’t help but feel we are just jumping to conclusions to a pretty insane degree here. I can understand the backlash surrounding Adnan (though I do think however many bad-looking tweets isn’t enough to tell the whole picture), and if his involvement led to the party taking an anti-trans stance that would absolutely be a red line for me, but we literally just don’t have the info yet and I think making sweeping statements like this doesn’t help anyone.
You wanted proof of bullshit factionalism, it’s there. Have you seen leaked screenshots of Karie Murphy removing Zarah’s supporters from the party WhatsApp group? She removed Andrew Feinstein, Salma Yaqoob, and others without much explanation:
Yeah, I have seen them. I also have no idea what they mean or what they imply to be occurring.
Also, I wanted sources for why you thought Corbyn was a “wrecker” or how he’s betrayed people. Everything I’ve seen has just left me with a lot of questions about the entire thing that I want answers to. The article you linked only gave me more questions and the screenshots don’t really answer anything.
Like, there are far, far too many possible explanations for stuff that’s going on other than “Corbyn is controlled opposition and scared by a radical Muslim woman and we should immediately turn on him” for me to feel comfortable definitively coming to that conclusion.
Sorry but I don’t really understand what proof you want.
As a Labour leader, Corbyn banned anti-zionist socialists from the party but was soft on neoliberals and imperialists who obstructed him at every opportunity, this is public knowledge. At the time, the explanation went he needs to build bridges to stay electable, for the optics, and so on.
This time the situation is completely reversed: for the optics he should’ve joined in the celebration of the new party launch, pat himself on the back for amazing membership numbers, and reprimand Zarah behind closed doors. But here suddenly optics and electability went out the window, he sent a mass mail to all subscribers alleging a fraud, reported Zarah to the authorities, etc. Literally every commentator agrees an amateurish clusterfuck.
So it’s not about electability, it’s not about the optics, it’s not about adapting to the parliamentary politics, it’s not about playing the system. The only constant thing here is Corbyn siding with liberals against socialists regardless of tactics, optics, etc.
Here’s more: despite being critical of NATO before being elected, once he became Labour leader he didn’t make leaving NATO official Labour policy, when even the Greens openly called for UK leaving NATO. Now his team is removing people like Feinstein while a transphobic landlord is given top position in the party. Time and time again he’s capturing genuine left movements and pushing them to the right.
There is nothing to prove here, I’m just observing things Corbyn does publicly.
Ive literally never heard of this woman before this “split”
^From elsewhere in the comment thread: irritatingly myopic, self-evidently pathetic and unfortunately emblematic of “western leftists”. It is thinly veiled bigotry in multiple forms against the Global South even if Sultana was not Asian descent (why? Why the hell would you engage in pathetic factionalism when attempting to stem the genocide? Fucking western privilege hiding behind “party rules” is why.)
The above aside, a lot of us have gone through the motions about being wrong about supporting XYZ socdem when they repeatedly refuse to engage in the material conditions of what they are supposedly fighting against.
Remember, in the west people often become increasingly MLs because the likes of even Corbyn show the limits of social democrats/“democratic socialists” and the indignity they represent of the West against the Global South.
At the height of his power he staffed his party with liberal zionists during an ethnic cleansing because he refuses to understand what liberal zionism is which makes one question why when he has been doing this for decades. He had been part of a party responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity for decades, and when in opposition was running effective apologism for imperialism - there is no point being “against the bad thing” when you effectively neuter support of those from the global south fighting the bad thing because you have the privilege of idealism.
Just because one styles themselves as an agent for change which results in them being a vehicle for spreading the loot of imperialism more equitably in one of the imperials cores does not make said person any more effective as an anti-imperialist.
He is not alone this: take for example the anti-vietnam war “movement” of the west as a whole and how relatively little they supported the MLs fighting the genocidaires.
I think what may be worthwhile is using this as a point of learning to do a deep dive about Lenin’s work including on Kautsy and What is to be Done amongst others.
I think what may be worthwhile is using this as a point of learning to do a deep dive about Lenin’s work including on Kautsy and What is to be Done amongst others.
Indeed. And not just Kautsky. It is worth learning about figures like Bernstein and even Plekhanov who were saying very similar things to what we hear nowadays from people on the western left. Lenin’s polemics against them and against their erroneous ideas are still incredibly poignant and relevant because we still see far too many people make those same kind of errors today.
Reformism, economism, Menshevism, we don’t use these same terms today but these bad ideas never went away, they just got re-invented and re-packaged in different language. Every generation’s reformists think they have come up with something totally novel that nobody has ever thought of before, but they are just making the same mistakes that were made in the late 19th, early 20th century.
Anyway, here’s a link to The Renegade Kautsky. Go read it if you haven’t done so.
(Very much) Agreed, though I still find Plekhanov useful in understanding materialism and monist perspectives a lot better (I still have not finished In Defense of Materialism and it has been like a year, I just keep dipping in and out of it).
He was a good Marxist theoretician but he absolutely shat the bed when it came time to put that theory into practice and organize for revolution. Just shows that you can be very well versed in theory but still fail to be a good revolutionary because you have not correctly analyzed your present political conditions.
I view the analogy with today like this: where Bernstein is your typical imperial core socdem, Kautsky is today’s “democratic socialist” or radical liberal with leftist aesthetics, and Plekhanov is either the academic Marxist or the “orthodox anti-revisionist” who has read a lot but lives in a fantasy of the past instead of present day reality.
What i’m trying to say is that many of the people of the past that you read about in Lenin and others’ writings are archetypes that we still very much encounter today.
Agreed (and I personally need to read more of Lenin’s work) - there are very much parallels as you have suggested and a lot to learn from Lenin’s critiques; in his day he was criticising people who considered themselves marxists and contributed towards marxist theory, or attempted to (Plekhanov and Kautsky, rather than Bernstein for the examples used here), and these days we have so called marxists arguing whether we are factionalising and not showing enough unity over socdems.
I do want to stress the latter is a phenomenon in the West partly because we do not have sufficient revolutionary marxist cells - the socdems clearly out-organise the marxists - and without leading sufficiently as a vanguard so people come into the ML fold at a greater rate we will always have recurring socdem tailism.
And I do want to add I am grateful for OP’s post because I would argue most westerners have fallen into this trap and to the OP’s credit they are making a point so we can learn from this. Stuff like this make Lemmrgrad that much more valuable so well done Red_Scare.
Corbyn’s party co-chair is a landlord and a transphobic one at that, says it all really - its just a vanity project.
I was also wrong, fuck him.
also obligatory: wdym he’s the truest communist, he split faster than any of us!
Ive literally never heard of this woman before this “split” and it makes me think this is the wrecker propaganda. Ive also never seen Corbyn criticized as “no better than Bernie” here in 5 years of extremely online shitposting.
Oh well if you’ve never heard of “this woman” then she must be a nobody.
“” yourself
Spectre posting something along those lines here a couple months back. I’ll see if I can fine it
Edit: here(https://lemmygrad.ml/post/8664906?sort=top)
Yeah that was the first time I’ve ever heard of zarah sultana, in the context of “oh no, wrecking”
seems like new anti corbyn propaganda to me, especially as OP goes all in on identitarian qualifiers + trying to make me out as sexist with scare quotes around “this woman” since that’s literally the exact sort of tack I’d expect anti corbyn propaganda to take after the endless antisemitism accusations. Here comes Corbyn the Misogynist because he’s “threatened by a young, brave, socialist, brown Muslim woman” 🙄 sigh
You’re right the identitarian qualifiers were not needed there, I removed that part cause it’s also not the point at all and my post stands without it. I’m not claiming Corbyn is a misogynist.
Can you explain why, when he was leading Momentum, by far the largest grassroots movement in the UK, and oversaw the largest surge of Labour membership in history, all completely loyal to him; and old Blairites in the party obstructed and sabotaged him, he didn’t pull a similar nuclear option? Why didn’t he threaten legal action, involve the membership, write to everyone alluding the pary is being stolen from him, etc? Why didn’t he purge the neolibs, Starmer at least proved Labour leader has the power to remove unwanted political elements from the party. Back then the explanation was either “oh Corbyn is just too nice, he’ll do everything to avoid confrontation” or “don’t hate the player, hate the game! he’s doing what has to be done to survive in parliamentary politics”. But neither answer works now does it? So what changed?
What he did was both confrontational and a complete self-sabotage, but what remains constant is he’s always punching to the left within his party.
(edit) and yeah “Ive never heard of this woman so this is wrecker propaganda” is I think misogynistic
To explain: I don’t know you and I’m not saying you are a mysogynist. But look at it this way, when a man challenges female authority most people will at least look him up before writing “who that even is” cause they don’t want to appear ignorant. When it’s a woman challenging a man, something to the effect of “I’ve never heard of this woman so I bet she’s been synthetically propped up by propagandists to wreck the party” will appear immediately. So regardless of your personal qualities and intentions, I think your comment came out misogynistic.
I’m sorry that you got your hopes up.
people would rather stay relevant and be considered “reasonable” in domestic liberal politics than stick to their purported principles…
He isn’t doing that. He is standing for his principals. His principals are to keep the working class distracted and divided by de-radicalizing the left by capturing them in electoralism. Stop making excuses for corybin. He is the enemy. He is a sheep dog.
socdems gonna sock’em
