Can Bernie and Jeremy Rekindle the Socialist Flame?

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

18 August 15

ho’d a thunk it? In the good old USA, Senator Bernie Sanders makes a surprisingly credible run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination despite calling himself “a democratic socialist.” But in supposedly sensible Britain, the Labour Party – which you may remember as socialist – now tears itself apart because someone who really is, a long-time but little-known backbench MP named Jeremy Corbyn, is looking in the latest polls like he’s heading for a landslide victory in the race to become party leader.

The Guardian, whose politics you may also have misread from its courageous coverage of NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, called anti-socialist Labourites to action on Thursday, running a must-read opinion piece by no less than former prime minister Tony Blair. “Even if you hate me, please don’t take Labour over the cliff edge,” read the headline. “If Jeremy Corbyn becomes leader, the party won’t just face defeat but annihilation. Stop him before it’s too late.”

“The Labour party is in danger more mortal today than at any point in the over 100 years of its existence,” wrote Blair. “The leadership election has turned into something far more significant than who is the next leader. It is now about whether Labour remains a party of government” rather than just a party of protest.

What is Corbyn’s sin? That he refuses to accept any part of the Tory-imposed austerity that destroys growth, kills jobs, runs down public services, slashes the welfare state, sells off public assets, and gives tax cuts to the wealthiest.

Even worse, he has a solid plan to end the entire nightmare. Like former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis in Greece, Corbyn offers the mainstream anti-austerity thinking of John Maynard Keynes – and of Swedish socialists around Gunnar Myrdal, from whom a younger Bernie Sanders learned. When times are bad, borrow or even print money to grow the economy and create good jobs on which working people can live. When good times return, pay back what you borrowed, taking a good chunk of what you need from the people with income and wealth to spare.

This is the beginning – but only the beginning – of what modern socialism should look like, and Corbyn spells it out in an 8-page pamphlet you can read for yourself. Hundreds of thousands of Brits are now joining the Labour Party to support this kind of thinking. Many are young and engaging in politics for the first time, and they prefer his straight-talk to the polished sound-bites of the robotic politicians running against him. “He talks like a human being, about things that are real,” the Guardian itself admitted. Or, as humorist Andy Borowitz said of Bernie Sanders, Corbyn “is gaining legions of new admirers by shamelessly pandering to voters who want to hear the truth.”

Blair and his camp-followers cannot deny the enthusiasm. But they blithely dismiss Corbyn as yesterday’s man wrapped “in a left-wing comfort blanket” singing “We’ll keep the red flag flying here.” They grossly misrepresent his policies as some know-nothing return to old-fashioned state socialism. And, like vintage red-baiters, they dismiss many of his supporters as part of some grand conspiracy, fueled in part by “the big unions” who he sees “in the grip of the hard left.”

Clearly, some of the new members need vetting, since even the Daily Telegraph urged conservatives to join Labour just to vote in someone they think out-of-touch and unelectable. But, from most reports, the bulk of Corbyn’s support seems real and enthusiastic. Is it enough to win a general election five years from now? No one knows, and it isn’t even clear that the 66-year-old Corbyn wants to run. His interest is policy, and his policy can both work and win elections, which is something that was not true of Ed Miliband’s less than full-hearted opposition to austerity.

If Blair and his supporters don’t get their way, the danger is that they will split the Labour Party, as an earlier right-wing faction did in 1981, creating the Social Democratic Party (SDP), most of which later merged with the Liberals. That’s clearly not a threat that will stop Corbyn, who fought Blair every step of the way on Iraq. Nor will it stop Corbyn’s supporters, who have come to see Blair and his New Labour for what they were and are.

Buying into the neo-liberal economics embraced by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand, and Bill Clinton, Blair & Co. went into business with business, the banks, and the hedge funds. They privatized much of the National Health Service, wrecking what had been Labour’s stellar achievement and demoralizing doctors, nurses, and even administrators around the country. New Labour similarly went along with charter-type “academies,” privatizing a large chunk of public education and demoralizing educators. They went along with the disastrous denationalization of the British railways that John Major had pushed through. And they rebranded Labour as Tory Lite. We do what they do, but we do it better and with more heart.

With Blair or without, it won’t work this time.

One final note: In my next column, I will look at one of the many misrepresentations of Corbyn’s thinking, that he has vowed to bring back the British coal industry. Stay tuned.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.