Mao once said: “Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer, which we use to crush the enemy.”
Now I think it’s possible to respect that position. There’s a clarity to it.
If you’re a serious Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, then you accept that political violence is necessary – even desirable. Those who genuinely conceive of Man’s end-state – the total transformation of social relations – as an achievable goal, accept the cost (viz. Slavoj Zizek: “The Khmer Rouge were, in a way, not radical enough”).
But Corbyn and the Corbynistas have always supposedly been about ‘love.” Corbynism is billed as an inclusive, youth activist-led movement, which is above all progressive.
He doesn’t really come from the serious (and terrifying) strand of the Far Left that took Marx’s metaphysics and turned it into a strategy of political violence and domination.
Between 1908 and 1911, the Russian Duma (the precursor to the liberal Provisional Assembly set up after the assassination of the Tsar) started land reforms which aimed to create a larger property-owning class.
In opposition to this, Lenin advocated a violent vision of class conflict. He replaced a constellation of revolutionary ideals with a vision for spontaneous civil conflict on a massive scale: “The final destruction of Tsardom” would be “full-scale civil war”. The strategy of civil war as a revolutionary device could only be criticised “from the point of view of military expediency”, but “any moral condemnation of [civil war] is absolutely impermissible.”
But Corbyn is a product of the post-1968 New Left, which took the traditional analysis of society as a field of class contradiction (feudal serfs vs landowners, the bourgeoisie vs aristocrats, the bourgeoisie vs the working class) and applied it to conflicts around the world between colonial subjects and their oppressors, between the West and the Rest. And Israel and Palestine play an important role in that struggle. It’s a flimsy whataboutery that shies away from real commitment, that is always mired in incoherence.
And the latest set of scandals surrounding Corbyn’s association with anti-Semitism show that he is not really a serious Leftist at all. A serious Leftist, like Lenin, would accept that revolutionary theory and praxis must be universal and particular in equal measure in order to be concrete. Whereas Corbyn is an unserious devotee of a fundamentally unserious form of anti-Western polemic.
He is very, very far from Labour’s noble universalist social democratic traditions that were the foundation of Britain’s active membership of Nato and its active role in the United Nations.
