313,209 Labour Party members and supporters with their leadership vote for Jeremy Corbyn, have driven back the right wing coup attempt that was underway, backed by all sections of the Tory media, to make Labour safe for the bosses by removing Corbyn and making Labour the private property of the Blairites.
The decisive vote could have been bigger since over 20,000 Labour members and supporters were purged by the Labour NEC and not allowed to vote. Blairite challenger Owen Smith received just 193,229 while Corbyn increased his share of the votes from the last leadership election to 61.8 per cent to Smith’s 38.2%.
What this means is that Labour’s right wing have been given a foretaste of what Marx called the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. In future any MPs who think and act as if the Labour Party belongs to them, or if they carry on with their coupism, will find themselves deselected by a membership who now have the power and will not give it up for anybody.
In fact the massive anti-Corbyn propaganda campaign rebounded since workers understand that an attempt is being made, because of the collapse of capitalism, to drive them back a century or so to some new Victorian era, complete with slum landlords and zero hours contracts.
All the witch-hunting made them all the more determined to vote for Corbyn. Corbyn must now take advantage of the situation that the workers have created. He was elected by 313,209 workers and youth; Theresa May, the Tory PM, was selected by a handful of the leadership of the 1922 Committee. He must call for a general election now!
May’s party is now in disarray, with its ‘Cameroons’ blaming her for keeping her mouth shut tight during the Brexit campaign, to the point where she was being accused of being an ‘enemy agent’, while she and the Brexiteers are planning to sign slave labour trade pacts with the US and Canada based on the TTIP and CETA that will turn the UK into a slave labour, zero hours paradise for US capital, and see the NHS privatised.
In fact, Corbyn must lead the army of Labour’s new members in a campaign for a General Election, and put forward a socialist programme, for the renationalisation of the railways and the nationalisation of the banks and the major industries under workers management, to build a socialist economy, that will provide council homes, jobs, and a living wage for all, making zero hour contracts illegal.
The working class and the youth are now on the march in the UK, and the WRP and the News Line are building the new revolutionary leadership which will be necessary to get rid of capitalism. The truth is that capitalism will not leave this earth voluntarily, it will have to be buried, and its gravedigger is the working class.
The working class that puts in a Corbyn reformist government will however see the ruling class react to it with the same kind of fury that General Pinochet responded to Salvador Allende in Chile.
This is the situation that we must prepare for by building the revolutionary leadership. There is a huge crisis of leadership in the workers movement and left Fabianism cannot resolve it. In fact, the just-finished TUC Congress showed the trade union leaders swinging to the right and openly proclaiming corporatism, their willingness to work with the Tory leader May. They proved this in practice by refusing to put into their emergency resolution on the junior doctors strikes a call for a TUC day of action, or a one day general strike. They called for nothing, selling out the junior doctors and leaving them to defend the NHS on their own.
This TUC leadership can only lead to disasters for the working class. This is why the WRP and the News Line is building a new and revolutionary leadership to lead the struggle for workers power and socialism. This huge issue will be discussed at the forthcoming News Line 47th Anniversary on November 12th in Camberwell.
What the working class requires is a new and revolutionary leadership to lead the struggle to put an end to capitalism. This is what will be discussed at the rally. Make sure you are there!