LABOUR leader Jeremy Corbyn yesterday at the TUC conference had no answer to the Tory onslaught on the trade unions.
In particular, he ignored the way that the Tories made minor below inflation pay awards to the police and the prison officers yesterday afternoon – while Congress was sitting – so condemning every other section of public sector workers to remain with the 1% pay cap that is daily slashing their wages as inflation rockets ever upwards.
This Tory provocation, this throwing down of the gauntlet while the TUC was meeting, passed without any real comment or condemnation by the Labour leader. He had no answer to this attack. He did not make a rousing call to action by the Labour movement to get mobilised and to drive the Tories out of office and out of power so that the working class can advance to socialism.
In fact, he did not mention the word socialism at all.
Far from mounting a massive mobilisation, a real campaign to get rid of the Tories, he told the Congress: ‘We don’t know when a general election will come’ adding that his advice to the TUC is that everybody should join a trade union, advice that the TUC is already very familiar with.
On the EU he was doubly evasive, condemning the Tory Henry VIII ‘power grab’, saying that he was sticking up for democratic rights. In fact he was sticking up for the EU, and capitulating to it.
He is now a left talking prisoner of Labour’s right wing who refuses to tell the TUC Congress that he is now in favour of remaining in the EU’s single market and in the Customs Union indefinitely.
In fact, he is stabbing Labour’s election manifesto and election campaign in the back when he insists that Labour is in favour of remaining in the single market, i.e. remaining in the EU. Labour’s Brexit position won millions of working class votes in the general election!
Workers are not idiots and understand that the permanent transitional stage which Corbyn and Starmer have embraced is stabbing the referendum result in the back, and is a declaration that Labour, under Corbyn and Starmer, now wants to remain permanently in the EU.
In his speech he made much of the plight of the youth under the gig economy and the way that they have been forced into individual slavery, without rights, by ruthless employers. He said that their ‘Rights were sacrificed to ever more ruthless forms of capitalism’ and that the gig economy is for the benefit of unscrupulous employers who are super-exploiting the youth and severely damaging even their mental health.
The youth are the most revolutionary layers of the working class and are attracted to the struggle for socialism, to expropriate the capitalist class and go forwards to a planned socialist economy where modern technology will be planned to raise living standards, not used by monster employers of the Sports Direct type.
But Corbyn did not mention socialism at all, and provided no perspective to mobilise the considerable energies of youth. He certainly did not call for the expropriation of the capitalists and socialism, he even indicated that a Labour government might not be able to do all that much.
The truth is that Corbyn has sold out to the right wing of the Labour Party. They are terrified that the working class has begun breaking free of the control of the bureaucracies of the Labour and trade union movement, and turning to revolution.
This fear dominates the ruling class and the trade union bureaucracy. This is why Corbyn did not make a call to action, because it would be answered by millions. He kept quiet and even intimated that a Labour government might take years and might not be able to do much.
Workers must now push forward to build a new and revolutionary leadership that will mobilise millions for revolutionary action to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government and socialism.
This the way forward. This is the revolution that, once it has begun, will spread throughout Europe and replace the EU with the Socialist United States of Europe.
