General Election 2017 – what does it mean?

It was widely believed at the beginning of the election that the Tories would win a landslide, as Labour trailed 22 points behind in polls, and 80% of Labour MPs opposed Corbyn’s leadership, openly declaring him to be unelectable, along with their colleagues in the Tory party and the bourgeois media.
Even during the election campaign the majority of Labour candidates refused to acknowledge or support Corbyn, and many openly opposed his manifesto.

But Corbyn surprised his critics, fighting a dynamic and engaging campaign, winning the support of youth in particular with more new voters enrolling than in the Brexit referendum.

Despite this Labour lost the election but increased its number of seats. The Tories failed to win an absolute majority and were forced to conclude a grubby pact with the DUP, who even they find socially reactionary, though politically they are cast from the same mould.

Corbyn has secured his leadership of the Labour party for now. Despite all the talk of Corbyn being a rabid left-winger he has fought on a moderate social-democratic platform akin to many across Europe, and he certainly has not threatened the economic workings of the crisis-ridden capitalist system, which is the root cause of the austerity agenda he claims to fight.

Meanwhile Momentum continues to attract all the fake socialists who continue to believe in pie-in-the-sky solutions to capitalism. The truth is, without overthrowing capitalism there are nothing but hard times ahead for the British working class and workers of all countries.

The communists support every struggle of the working class to fight for improvements in their conditions, but this support seeks at the same time to convince workers of the need for proletarian revolution, not to lull them into the false but reassuring belief that their needs can be met within capitalism. No amount of tweaking at the edges of economic or foreign policy is going to make this parasitic and dying system serve the interests of the working class or cure the chaos in which we now find ourselves.

The programme of the Labour party is, at best, a prayer that the ills of capitalism can be solved within the capitalist system. Our position is that, with the best will in the world, they can’t. Workers’ salvation lies not with Saint Jeremy or Stern Theresa, but with the workers themselves. 

Unpalatable as this truth may be, ultimately we will not be able to vote our way out of the crisis. Either the crisis will lead the working class deeper into poverty and war, or workers will organise themselves to defeat the crisis by overthrowing capitalism and building a socialist society that is capable of meeting their needs.