A few days ago, a fresh attempt emerged to forge a new left party in Britain, spearheaded by MP Zara Sultana and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Positioned as a break from Keir Starmer’s centrist Labour, it promises an explicitly anti-austerity, radical social-democratic programme – loud in its critique of the political apparatus yet silent on the exploitative logic of the economic system.
It is obvious that they don’t want to erase capitalism and imperialism, they want to erase the urgency of class struggle.
First and foremost, anyone who has spent decades inside the Labour Party – the foremost defender of British capitalism and imperialism – cannot suddenly claim working-class legitimacy. Remaining tethered to a bourgeois institution does nothing to advance the position of the working class; rather, it assumes that its future will be secured through parliamentary concessions from the bourgeoisie rather than through genuine class struggle.
Those who persist in this strategy, like Corbyn, Sultana, and their ilk, are either deluded in believing that polite negotiation can overthrow capitalist exploitation, or consciously misleading the workers. In either case, they act as class enemies.
Moreover, while serving as Labour MPs, they helped to prop up the party’s ‘left’ façade even as Labour repeatedly betrayed working-class interests. Domestically, it voted through austerity measures that plunged millions into hardship; internationally, it backed every NATO bombing campaign – from Kosovo to Libya, from Iraq to the ongoing proxy wars in Ukraine and the genocide in Palestine.
These betrayals lay bare the Labour leadership, collaborators and critics alike, as agents of the bourgeois state, utterly lacking any credibility to spearhead a genuine revolutionary project.
What passed for Labour’s ‘left’ until yesterday – and aims to be this new left-wing creature tomorrow – is nothing but a social-democratic faction of the ruling class. Its role is to manage capitalism’s contradictions – to ease its inefficiencies so that exploitation and oppression can proceed with a ‘human face’. Their calls for ‘reform’ of capitalism are not a pathway to emancipation, but a means to perpetuate profit-driven relations, ensuring the system reproduces itself more smoothly.
That the ‘progressive’ wing of British capitalism is, at this very moment, pushing to establish a new organisation must not be overlooked. As the crisis of profitability deepens for the British bourgeoisie, it is clear that workers will be forced to pay the price. A social-democratic veneer – a promise of retraining funds here, a modest ‘living wage’ there – is then needed to placate displaced workers, channel their anger into safe electoral outlets, and forestall genuine workplace organisation and action.
As a matter of fact, the Labour Party’s ‘left’ has served as British capitalism’s primary buttress against working-class resistance. Whenever workers escalated their struggles, left-wing spokespeople were quick to call for ‘responsible negotiations’ and ‘reasonable compromises’.
By casting themselves as sober intermediaries between capital and labour – a compromise which materialistically can never exist – they have objectively defended the status quo, protecting the interests of a relatively privileged minority against the masses of exploited and oppressed.
History shows that British opportunist organisations will swarm onto any new party that merely adopts an anti-capitalist appearance, hoping to swell their ranks without undertaking the long-term organising required to prepare the working class for the revolutionary seizure of power.
Lastly, this strategy failed catastrophically in the 2010s when some Labour apparatus, trade-union leadership, and assorted left groups pinned their hopes on Corbyn’s moral radicalism – only to find themselves ‘betrayed’ once he, surprise, surprise, capitulated to the imperatives of the parliamentary machine, i.e. British capital.
Today, history repeats itself as farce: we can be certain that purportedly ‘communist’ organisations as divergent as the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) will once again scramble to jump on the bandwagon.
Having first thundered their commitment to building a ‘revolutionary’ party, the RCP has already recoiled – unable to resist the siren call of a popular front with the bourgeoisie. They even penned a letter to Sultana, baring their full openness in exchange for her to ‘be bold’ and ‘anti-capitalist’. This plea for alliance with social democracy lays bare not only the total absence of revolutionary strategy but also of any scientific class analysis grounded in Marxist–Leninist theory.
The CPB has remained silent so far, but no attack is to be expected: its opportunist blueprint to forge an ‘anti-monopoly alliance‘ with the explicit aim of ‘winning a left government‘ even features as a central plank of its programme, betraying a continued faith in bourgeois collusion and electoral machination.
It is useful that, thanks to this political manoeuvre, the opportunism of so-called ‘communists’ has been unmasked – one can now clearly see who capitalists and their labour aristocracy allies line up behind. But the danger is immense: many sincere and desperate members of the working class will be deceived yet again. Exposing this lie – and preventing workers from aiding their class enemy – must be a central task of every revolutionary organisation. Communists must fight thebourgeoisie not only when it wears the mask of ugly theatrics – such as Elon Musk’s fascist-style salutes – but also when it comes adorned in respectability and urgency, whether in the figure of Zara Sultana or, on the other side of the ocean, Zohran Mamdani. No matter how fresh or radical these figures may seem, they will remain obstacles to the socialist-communist revolution unless the working class forges its own organisation, entirely independent of bourgeois influence.