The ‘People’s Assembly’ (even the name makes us cringe. Which people? What assembly?) are failing miserably once again.
The Trotskyites and revisionists who populate the leadership of this supposedly ‘anti-austerity’ formation have called a national demonstration for Saturday 7 June in central London. We will be there, in order to meet any decent anti-austerity workers who turn out – those who really do want to change society for the better.
But let us ask: Where were the People’s Assembly and its well-financed trade union backers on May Day? The answer is: they were cringing before the Labour party. They mobilised precisely no one onto the streets of London on the international day of working-class struggle, and the only union bureaucrats who turned up were there to make sure the platform in Trafalgar Square offered no solutions or leadership to the assembled crowd and that all official messaging was fully in line with Labour party requirements.
Yet these same flunkeys have the cheek to pretend to be some kind of ‘opposition’ and to call a demonstration against “the Tory policies of Keir Starmer”!
Do they think we are like the proverbial goldfish, that our memories should be so short? Are we supposed to have forgotten the selling out of every single working-class struggle over the last four years with the promise of jam tomorrow if we would just hold on and elect a Labour government? Are we supposed to have forgotten how every single trade union leader, every Trotskyite and revisionist group lined up behind the genocidal Starmer in July 2023 and endorsed him before the electorate?
Was there ever any hope that the jam we were endlessly promised was going to arrive? Of course there was not. It was evident for all to see that Starmer and Labour would remain what they have always been – abject and loyal servants of British finance capital.
At a time when the economic crisis of capitalism is so severe that even the smallest concessions to welfare spending and even the smallest nod towards preferring peace to war is met with hysterical denunciations and sabotage by the ruling class (see Project Corbyn, in which Starmer was a key establishment hatchet man), what possible reason was there for thinking that Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner, David Lammy et al were remotely interested in or capable of doing anything to reverse the terrible decline in living standards for British workers?
The ‘People’s Assembly’ charlatans should be organising a demonstration against themselves as prime culprits in misleading the working people of Britain up a blind alley of despondency, impotence and despair. They should be organising against the entire Labour party establishment. Against all Labour’s supposedly ‘left-wing’ social-democratic hangers-on. Against the trade union bureaucrats who cling to the Labour party, prepared to make any sacrifice of working people’s rights and struggles in pursuit of their petty privileges and in hopes of a future peerage.
“Real tough choices would be for a Labour government to tax the rich and their hidden wealth, to fund public services, fair pay, investment in communities and the NHS,” opines the PA ‘mobilisation’ text. “As Tony Benn, one of our founders, said: ‘If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.’”
But Tony Benn, like Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott and all the other darlings of ‘the left’, was a labour imperialist to his fingertips. “No war, because sanctions have not yet run their course,” were Benn’s words in 2003. Even as US secretary of state Madeleine Albright was confirming that half a million Iraqi children’s lives were “a price worth paying” to keep control over the middle east and the fabulous oil profits flowing to the Anglo-American billionaire ruling class.
Today the ‘Labour’ party is once again orchestrating two genocides – one in Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and across the middle east, and another in Ukraine. The Labour party is baying for blood. For militarism. For war. And for austerity.
And these gentlemen have the nerve to organise “against the far right”? They are the far right! They are the representatives and servants of the British imperialist ruling class. They are the enemies of the working class.
But times are changing. The working class will have no choice but to get itself organised to fight for its own interests, and when it does so it will smash the cozy coalition of ‘left’ imperialist collaborators.
The working class is the ruling class in waiting. Capitalism is in a terminal crisis. Our job is to finish it off. Not cheer it on, ‘gentlemen’!
