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.
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.