Since the failure of the Corbyn project in 2019, the capitalist left in Britain has been politically homeless. It has taken a rudderless Labour Party presiding over economic stagnation and crumbling public services, as well as playing second fiddle to the fake-populist Reform Party by copying its anti-immigrant and authoritarian rhetoric, to force left-wing groups to action. Like the proverbial buses, there have suddenly appeared on the scene two separate left-wing projects at once: Your Party and a rebranded Green Party. Both make radical claims but, even if somehow elected, any changes they bring about are doomed to be temporary and ineffectual.

This is not just because they choose to operate within the capitalist legal and electoral framework, but also because they are hitting against the objective limits of a world economy that is marked by declining profit rates and rapacious imperialism, where governments have to squeeze as much as they can out of the working class in order to compete. The situation is such now, that “developed” nations like Britain have to compete with “developing” nations for investment. These “developing” nations have lower labour costs and are more profitable. To compete against this, Britain has to cut taxes on the rich. During the last century, the creation of a welfare state helped to dampen class antagonisms, however this is no longer affordable and consecutive governments have borrowed and taken the national debt to giddy heights. This causes higher repayment rates on the debt which ultimately forces governments to impose austerity. While these leftist parties may bring a few temporary concessions, the situation necessitates austerity. Leading politicians, like German Chancellor Merz, now openly admit that “the welfare state, as we know it today, is no longer economically sustainable". The choice between far-right populism and left populism is simply a choice between immediate decline and managed decline, our misery is thus the inescapable result.

Your Party

The first of the two parties is Your Party, which is an attempt to revive Corbynism from the remains of his base in the Labour Party. However, due to its claim to be a “new kind of political party” where everything, including the name, would be decided by its membership, it is unclear what exactly the party stands for. On one side are the Corbyn true-believers who want to make a Labour Party Mark 2 complete with its bureaucracy, centred around the figure of Corbyn. Presumably they stand for more or less what the Labour Party stood for when he was leader. Namely, increasing funding for the NHS and other public services, strategic nationalisations, and increasing taxes on the wealthy. Rather than being “a new kind of politics” this is just Old Labour, which was also the politics which oversaw the retreat and demoralisation of the organised working class during the post-war period. On the other side is an uneasy coalition of Trotskyists and Social Democrats rallying around the former Labour MP Zarah Sultana who want greater intra-party democracy and more aggressive rhetoric. Sultana has had the fieriest words of all, at one point even calling to “nationalise the entire economy”. Although it’s not clear what exactly she meant by this, the call for widespread nationalisation is not as radical as it may seem. Nationalisation and capitalism can co-exist perfectly well, and may even be beneficial as nationalisation can prop up essential industries with low profit margins using taxes on the higher profit industries. Regardless of who ends up in control of Your Party, acrimonious infighting and skullduggery from both sides may have already sunk the ship before it has launched, with thousands of disillusioned supporters already departing for greener pastures.

The Green Party

Many people are flocking to the Green Party because it seems to be a much less dysfunctional organisation. And it has a much more charismatic leader in the fresh-faced Zack Polanski. Polanski has moved the rhetoric of the Greens away from its usual environmental focus to questions of affordability and the cost-of-living crisis. His big idea is a wealth tax of 1% to 2% on the richest inhabitants of the UK in order to reduce inequality. Drawing on the ideas of the popular YouTuber and former market trader Gary Stevenson, he is blaming the affordability crisis on the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth. Although Polanski identifies as socialist and anti-capitalist, his solution is essentially technocratic and believes that the government, through clever laws and policies (he has admitted that the civil service would have to work out the details of his plans) can fundamentally tip the balance of power in society towards workers. While the distribution of wealth may be grotesquely unequal, and this inequality may be a source of a temporary problems for the capitalist class, any reforms that they enact will be curtailed to ensure that the existing balance of power stays as it is. The evidence for this is the Greens’ record in local government, where in order to not fall foul of the law they have had to enforce draconian budget cuts on their electors. An experience of the Green Party as a potential junior party in a coalition government would then just be a repeat on a much larger scale of the same betrayal.

Reforms will never be enough. We need communism!

Whatever vehicle the left in Britain uses for its electoral and reformist aims, it will have the same effect. They may call for solidarity with migrant workers, yet by funnelling popular anger into the parliamentary morass, they rob the working class of the ability to actively create solidarity with all workers through our own struggle. They call for wealth taxes yet don’t question the system that robs that wealth from workers in the first place. Worse yet, they take from us the very words to describe our situation and the means by which we may free ourselves, by describing “capitalism” as merely a few of the most obvious injustices of the system, and “socialism” as a few superficial tweaks to a fundamentally oppressive system. Capitalism is not just a few bad apples, but the underpinnings of our entire society. It is the fact that we are fundamentally unfree. We have to sell our life away to the bosses to make their profits, and in return we get war, poverty and environmental destruction. That is capitalism, and attempts to reform it over the last century have all failed. The crisis of profitability means that any breathing space the system gains through reforms will be short-lived and put us quickly back on the path to war. Again. And again. In this process, the system is destroying our planet and erasing our future. The fundamental injustices, and tendencies of the system are inherent and cannot be reformed. The system needs to be overthrown. Socialism can only be built after the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism because socialism means the ending of the system of wage labour, production for profit, social classes, money and nation states. This can only be achieved by workers organising ourselves politically, destroying capitalist production and implementing communist production for human needs. The capitalist system is now a threat to humanity itself. The choice we face is either destruction of humanity under capitalism or the revolutionary reconstruction of society as communism. If this system is not overthrown, we may not even have a world to live in.

The above article is taken from the current edition (No. 74) of Aurora, bulletin of the Communist Workers’ Organisation.