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on 27th September 2010 at 15:54, Marie Lynam said:

Hello Michael

I see that your question remains without reply, and so, I feel impelled to do it although there are comrades much better placed to do this.

To start with, David Miliband was avoided, and this is something to feel happy about. The man was New Labour continued, with perhaps a few contortions, but certainly no reassessment or rectification.

Ed Miliband was supported by the Trade Unions. Yeah. But in the absence of proper political discussions in the working class base, in the workplaces and in organised public meetings of the Trade Unions. There is almost no inter-trade union life, and even less inter-trade union political concertation. Result? The workers vote for a name which they reckon will stand a chance to regroup them as a class, as best allowed in the circumstances. And it works, to the extent that Ed Miliband was the least objectionable of the lot.

There was Diane, but she had been promoted in the position of Candidate by the manoeuvres of the Labour apparatus. This was done in two instalments. First the apparatus made sure McDonnell would not get the right level of support, and then, David Miliband gave Diane a leg up so that the galery of candidates would have a less right wing face.

Diane is not prepared for what is coming, although she had leftwing positions on a number of issues, not least Iraq. I note that she is often criticised for her lack of projection when she speaks, and her lack of credibility, perhaps. Perhaps this is looking for qualities normally looked for in men?

The bourgeois media took part in these elections in the same manner as the Iraq invasion. You had to have gravitas. You must please the markets. You must not frighten the bankers, you must not be against war. Etc.

Hence the bourgeois media was v. very disappointed with Ed Miliband winning. When was the time when the Labour Party wrote articles, made TV programs and endless media comparisons to intervene in the choice of Tory candidates? By the way, how are these chosen?

We are told that many Trade Unionists voted twice and that the Trade Unions have far too much weight in the Labour elections. But it is the Trade Unions that created Labour, not the other way around. As for the bosses, they vote several times: once in the place of work where they decide the life of their employees and the economic priorities of the country. Then again in the functioning of the capitalist system, where the bosses decide without anyone having voted them in, particularly in the finance sector which takes it for granted that it has the freedom to pocket the taxpayer’s monies. And then there are elections, where the bosses and the capitalists vote without fail, to keep Labour down.

Hence, we are electing leaders a bit like the Palestinians elect theirs, in a the middle of an occupation. The invasion and the occupation of the media and the banks.

Imagine! The new leader of the Labour Party is what we could get, in the circumstances, a little like the Palestinians got Habbas.
Or the Afghans got Karzai.
As to the Irakis, I lost track ...

Hence the Labour left is not in a worse situation than before. It is slightly better off for having got rid of the Blair-Mandelson clique, though this is not final, by any means.

The Labour left is not determined, not entirely determined, by who leads the Party. I take it that there have been advances made at the Conference of the Party, and this is going to help the Labour left.

The task of the Labour left, and the LRC, is to continue to organise itself. No Party leader is quite in a position to stop that.

Warm greetings to you Michael, I hope others will chip in, and I will return to the subject.

Marie Lynam

on 28th September 2010 at 14:59, Robert Naether said:

Well i sat down listened to Milibands speech, waited until he got to welfare, once that was over i took my pen knife and cut up my Union card, and my Co_op membership, my Labour party card went back years ago when Brown took over.

Nothing in Labour for me anymore or for anyone else who is class as working class.

If he thinks he is going to get back in sorry to tell him I’ll have a £50 quid bet that in five years time labour will lose, it will not get enough of the middle class back and people like myself disabled will sit at home not bothering. It was a health speech mind you Blair would be nodding away agreeing with most.

Newer Labour.

on 1st October 2010 at 12:34, Michael Chewter said:

There appears to be little interest in this topic. It’s sad when the Labour Left shows so little interest in the party’s new leader. No wonder New Labour were able to take control of the party. The Left now seems virtually defunct.

on 1st October 2010 at 13:31, Marie Lynam said:

Hello Robert and Michael

The situation today is a transitional one. Something is going to have to crack, because capitalism cannot continue as it is now.

True, it is going to attack the workers. But it is a sign of weakness when it has to do this through intermediaries like New Labour and whatever New is coming from the Ed Miliband’s lot.

Not to forget the Trade Union leaders and the structures in the Unions that shelter under their wings a layer of terrible bureaucrats that do not want to hear any Marxist idea whatsoever.

Marxism is what can tackle all this. The capitalist class is furiously and desperately trying to remain on the stage of history. But there is no war - not even the most devastating war that capitalism is obviously preparing - that can build a society.

Society needs planning, and that is a fact. Technology and the market have unified the world, now production and the human relations need unifying in their turn.

Capitalism cannot do this. It does not invest in tomorrow. It has a golden opportunity today to start investing in carbon retention and disposal, or in producing electricity through the Sun and the Tides. But capitalism wants profits, not projects for your descendants!

Meanwhile, as we stay in capitalism, capitalism literally defecates on us, the public, and prepares to attack the workers who are the only organised force capable of defeating it. But none of these things are going to provide a way out for capitalism. If it starts a war, it will be buried. The first war brought 1917, the second war brought 8 new Workers States or so, and the next war will bury capitalism.

As far as the leaderships of Labour are concerned, even if they want to continue to help capitalism ‘recover’ until they are blue in the face (seeing that there is already quite an amount of blue in their veins already), they are not going to understand what is happening. The banks need taking over, and I bet you some totally unprepared Labour leadership is going to have to do it!

I bet you this: An ameliorated form of New Labour is coming, but the banks will need taking over, and this will trigger a revolutionary process; the banks will not take their demise lying down, and their friends in the war industry, the finance industry, the oil and car industries - through the kind agency of NATO and US soldiers - will try to bring that ameliorated form of New Labour down.

I bet you.

Greetings. Marie

on 3rd October 2010 at 19:20, Jas. Larking said:

The proof of the Miliband pudding will be in the eating. Let’s suppose, for a minute or several months, that Ed is truly Red ( a fine accolade). Would it, in the wake of years of ‘new labour’(it doesn’t deserve a proper noun)the correct time for him to give vent to a full-blooded Socialist cry when there is no proletariate or enraged intelligentsia to answer him? T’would be the lunatic baying at an uncomprehending moon!

The pain, so far, has been but a Tory prick-pin (or the other way around) on the bloated body of the post-working classes, grown fat and stultified on a capitalist diet of Astescoburys’s buy-one-get-one-free obesity accelorators, held rigid by a black & chrome monster machine.

But don’t fret. Soon Mr.Cameron will be unleashing his baying hoardes, his emancipated capitalist huntsmen starved of blood for so long who will slash through the flesh of the complacent working classes; then they will see how silly they have been to have fallen for Tony the whipper-in’s fatted bait!

The Crow may be hovering and cawing loudly above the huntsman but the slothful fatted fox has yet to awaken to the danger facing him!But ... when that fox has been starved a while and the huntsman’s sharpened blade cuts deep and red ... well, then is the time to see just how ‘red’ is Ed.

Larkin O’Round.