Corbyn mania: Jez we can?

If Jeremy Corbyn is elected to the leadership of the Labour party, can he make it a party of the working class?

If Jeremy Corbyn becomes prime minister, can his Labour party lead Britain towards socialism and a fairer, more just society for British workers and the world?

Our party’s position on the Labour party is clear: nothing can make Labour a party of the working class! Labour is a party of imperialism; it serves, and has always served, the imperialist ruling class. No leader, however sincere and however ‘socialist’ in outlook, can change that.

But after the collapse of the Labour party, with its total rout in Scotland and its tattered remains getting a drubbing at the polls in the 2015 general election, many British workers – who have for years clung on to the hope and illusion that Labour can really represent their views, needs and interests – are clutching onto the straw offered to them by Jeremy Corbyn’s surprise bid for the party’s leadership.

True, the usual rag-tag band of ‘left’ social democrats, revisionist communists and Trotskyites – who have always touted their connections to left-Labour – are backing him to the hilt. On the one hand, they are only too willing to act as his foot soldiers, and, on the other, they are happy to tout his prospective leadership of Labour as ‘proof’ that Labour “really is the party of the working class” after all!

Yet only a fool would fail to see that the groundswell of popular support for ‘JC’ amounts to much more than this. A rising tide carries all ships. And we believe that it is the rising tide of mass discontent with capitalist austerity, and imperialist war, rather than the vessel of Jeremy Corbyn himself, or the much discredited Labour party, that underlies the Jez We Can phenomenon.