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On Labour for a Republic

Marie Lynam
7th June 2012 at 22:20
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Hello comrades

Just some comments about how I see the question of the Republic:
1 - The capitalist crisis is intractable, and the more intractable this crisis becomes, the more the labour leaderships cling go the capitalists’ coat-tails. These leaders fear a future that removes privilege, because it endangers their own.

2 - The capitalist system has become entirely incapable of modernising parliament and closing the Lords.
The capitalist system feels the need to modernise, certainly, to complete the cycle of its bourgeois revolution started in 1642-88. But from the 1770’s onwards, it did nothing but retreat and retreat from its own bourgeois revolution (and first republic), historically terrified by the French Republic.

The capitalist system is antagonistically opposed to modernising its State constitutionally.
It knows that the fight against inherited privilege is primarily bound up with the removal the monarchy; to say nothing of the fight to remove privilege itself, which will logically follow.

These questions are not emanations of the imagination, they are the essence of today’s crisis, economic, political, social and cultural. Less than 1% owning 70% of the land is absurd at all levels, not least the cultural one - and bound to make any system fail.

3 - Any attack on hereditary privilege is an attack on finance capital also, because capital depends on a few with the power to impose the privilege (their own) to fleece human labour power.
The idea of the Republic is therefore an onslaught on privilege - inherited or acquired.
Any attack on privilege is therefore an attack on inherited wealth and on capital. Inherited wealth and capital defend themselves from any such attack by being entirely obsequious to each other. They are nothing but an anti-Republican United Front.

4 - The more the Republic without privilege is postponed, and the less opportunity it has to ever be a bourgeois one.
The Republic may start by being bourgeois, but in conditions when the banks have to be controlled and the land recovered for the use of 100% of the population, its State will have to apply immediately, and all at once, the most vigorous control over capital, investment and capital movement. Capital now under Republican State control will have immediately, and all at once, to be used for the public good. The anti-Republican United Front will arm and bring foreign allies in to ‘liberate’ the nation.
The salvation of the Republic will be in its determination to enlist the support of the multitudes immediately and all at once. Immediate planning of the economy for the public good, with the monies now in public hands. That won’t be a bourgeois republic for long!

Today, people no longer see arbitrary power as the only possible relation between humanity and the need to live - between humanity and the natural world. There have been Democratic Republics. The only reason why they were rolled back is because they gave to the anti-Republican United Front - and its foreign allies - the time to discredit them whilst the multitudes could not see clearly the gains in front of them.
I can imagine how such ideas would fare in the CLPs!
For those who wish to use some of these ideas to become MPs, they will fail, because the Republic is not going to come from parliament.

Marie Lynam, LP, LRC, GMB - personal views

Tags: for a republican tendency in the labour party (1)

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