Czech spies, communist dystopias, and the desert of Conservative thought.
No, Corbyn wasn’t a communist informant. But the potency of the story offers plenty of insights into Britain’s political landscape.
If one were to look at the front pages of Britain’s biggest newspapers recently — The Sun, Daily Mail, The Express and The Telegraph — you’d be forgiven for thinking that the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition is, it turns out, a communist spy. This was the latest smear from the right wing media, who claimed that Jeremy Corbyn had knowingly met a Czech spy called Jan Sarkocy in the 1980’s, implying that he was an informant for the regime. With even the slightest journalistic integrity, this wild and utterly false story wouldn’t have been run; its based on only two sources, and has been denounced by the former director of Mi5 and the Director of the Czech securities archive, saying that there is no record of Corbyn being a collaborator. The two original documents contradict each other, and the source itself isn’t the most trustworthy. Aside from all the juicy state secrets that backbench and radical leftie Jeremy Corbyn would have been feeding him, Sarkocy also “ knew what Thatcher would have for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and what she would wear next day.”, and, even more impressive, he also organised live-aid. (It appears Bob Geldof was merely the front-man). Further incriminating evidence is apparently in the form of a Stasi file on Mr Corbyn, suggesting that not only was he a Czech informant, but also a key collaborator with the East German secret police. To no-one’s surprise, the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records has confirmed no such file exists. This of course is not out of character for our press, who famously ran a similar story against Michael Foot accusing him of being a KGB agent, for which he won a lawsuit against The Sunday Times.
Ignoring, for the moment, the questions this habit of spreading libellous untruths raises for our ‘free press’, it’s useful to ask why this story took hold in the first place, as I think the answer reveals plenty about the reactionary nature of the contemporary British right, and some uncomfortable truths about the failures of the left. It succeeded by confirming the suspicions of so many that Corbyn’s political instincts are those of the Soviet Union, that his vision of a radically different society shares more with Stalinism than social democracy. You can spot this belief everywhere; even the usually astute and reasonable Maajid Nawaz often argues Corbyn will turn the country into Venezuela. Time and time again, his ideas are lazily misrepresented as being closer to Cuba and Mao’s China than Norway or Sweden. And this belief seems to derive from their own perception of the man himself, and some of those he surrounds himself with, rather than any genuine engagement with the policy ideas he’s put forward or entertained as leader. Whilst even I have some reservations over the character of some of his top team — the apparent Soviet apologist Seumas Milne clearly warrants suspicion — we can be thankful that they won’t be the ones making the final decisions, and that power lays not just at the feet of the leadership, but is dispersed throughout rejuvenated party structures. This democratic tendency is in stark contrast to the top-down organisation present under New Labour, with Blair’s famous ‘sofa cabinets’ concentrating power into merely two sets of hands, and the expulsion and marginalisation of left-wing figures making centrist appeals to the sanctity of a broad-church farcical.
If Jeremy Corbyn’s government starts becoming increasingly authoritarian and over centralised, then I will be out there on the street protesting against that with you. But I don’t believe it will happen. Corbyn is not the dangerous left-wing fundamentalist the tabloids so often portray him to be, but instead an aged left-winger, whose ideology is best described as a sort of radical social democracy, opposing soviet state communism whilst embracing the new-left emphasis on decentralisation. And the ideas that are currently shaping the platform of the Labour Party are coming from a grass-roots that has democracy and technology in their blood. This pushes the Labour leadership, who are of course products of their generation, as are all people to a certain extent, toward a distinctly forward looking version of socialism. What the membership of Labour and the work of organisations like Momentum do is to provide the traditional party with a huge infrastructure of members and bottom-up organisation, thus reclaiming politics from the alienation of Westminster and it’s parliamentary charades. This can, hopefully, if it continues on its plan to become a palpable force for good in people’s lives — operating food banks, facilitating housing cooperatives, giving the public political education — reconnect people to the joy of politics, as anthropologist David Graeber calls it. The solidarity of collectively deciding how you want to live; the empowerment and autonomy that comes with it. This infusion of a mass movement that priorities genuine democracy into Labour demonstrates that the reds under the bed narrative is completely contrary to the truth — the direction, the momentum, of Corbynism is away from Stalinism and beyond the veneer of freedoms presented by capitalism today.
But I think the fact that so many on the right are quick to trot out this lazy attack-line displays many things about British politics today. It reveals their own preconceptions about socialism as an ideology. Refusing to believe that it is an adaptive and malleable social framework, and has undergone much evolution in the years since the brutal communist regimes, not only in the genesis of its social democratic branch of thought, but too in Marxist theory. This is the fallacy of socialist homogeneity, and it seems to afflict many of the top-billed commentariat, our politicians, and the general public.
For our pundits, this can be explained solely in ideological terms, unable to accept that socialist ideas could lead to anything but unbearable oppression, and harbouring a strong suspicion of Corbyn, McDonnell and they’re associates as a result. However, for our representatives I think it’s a little more complex. Even some of those on the Conservative side now seem to understand that they are essentially bereft of ideas, and without the governing bandwidth to implement them even if they weren’t. Theresa May’s big announcements on the issue of tuition fees has been reducing the usurious interest rates, a ‘temporary freeze’ of the exorbitant loans which currently sit at £9,250, and the welcome reversal of the Tory coalitions abolition of maintenance grants. Not to mention the counter-intuitive idea of reducing fees for arts and humanities against more economically productive degrees. Of course, none of these are policies or laws yet, but merely topics of a review commissioned into the matter of university funding. And their pathetic attempts to solve our nation’s chronic housing shortage — meagre investment and cutting stamp duty — cannot even begin to fix an issue that should be, in many ways, central to the Conservative vision. What happened to being the party of home ownership? How can they sell capitalism when no-one can get any capital? Where they have attempted large reforms or headline grabbing policies, such as the reintroduction of Grammar schools and the energy-price cap, they turn out hopelessly regressive and almost wholeheartedly unapproved of, or are ideas stolen from the left. Or, more specifically, Ed Miliband. But what should be making this all the more disconcerting for the Government is that the housing crisis is embedded within systemic failures of British capitalism — a weak manufacturing sector, rampant regional and individual inequality, predatory short-termism, and broken PFI contracts that fleece the taxpayer whilst providing a terrible service, among others. And with the Sisyphean task of Brexit both engulfing and dividing the Conservative party, sapping them of their ability to effectively solve these problems, the prospects for the government don’t look promising. The Tories are heavily restrained by their own principles, with them implicitly understanding that the issues facing the country today demand more market intervention and fiscal liberality than their anti-state, austerian ideals will allow. As such, it appears the Conservative party has fastened its own ideological straitjacket.
This is why they choose to spend so much time trying to discredit their opponent rather than fight them in the battle of ideas. It is easier to suggest that Corbyn is a traitor, and that his premiership would turn the country into Soviet Russia, or Cuba, or Venezuela, than to truly engage with Labour’s socialist platform and argue why it is wrong. Stephen Bush summed this up in the New Statesman, in his piece responding to the polls — received with horror and vindication by those on the right — that found 70% of young people don’t know who Chairman Mao is: “None of the solutions to these problems are easy for the Conservative Party. They are a lot less comforting than telling themselves that their problem is just that young voters are too dumb and too pro-Communist to be won back. Nonetheless, that is the real-world problem the Tory party faces. And the troubling thing for their electoral hopes in the future is not the fringe that believes that 18 to 24-year-olds just need to be told who Mao Zedong was. It’s the more sensible part of the party that indulges them.”
But this fallacy is pervasive in public discourse, too. In one episode of Question Time, Emily Thornberry was aggressively tasked by a member of the audience to ‘name one place where socialism has worked!’, articulating a rhetorical point that is reproduced all throughout debates centred around the merits or demerits of capitalism. This deeply embedded assumption that socialism is entirely sclerotic contains a lesson for the Left — that our communication of a coherent alternative has been drastically absent for many, many years.
Whilst forward-looking, decentralizing tendencies were no doubt present in the work and thought of the New Left, they had not yet germinated into concrete, cogent systems, and without the arm of the Labour party, caught up in the tide of Neoliberalism, didn’t have the means through which to operate effectively on the ideological plain. Ceding ground to the free-market led people to believe that the only change that could be made was backwards, towards the bureaucracy of nationalised industries and an excessively punitive tax regime. It is only with the financial crisis of 2008, and the rejuvenation of left activism and theory in response to the stark failure of capitalism at tackling issues of environmental degradation, economic and political inequality, that the Left is now in a position to win back some of the ground lost to the Right over the years and begin crafting a radically different kind of society — one that takes us beyond post-war social democracy and neoliberal capitalism by appealing to people’s impulse to ‘take back control’. At Labour’s recent Alternative Models of Ownership Conference, the Shadow Chancellor and Corbyn spoke at length about the need for a transformative plan that seeks to return power to where it should belong — the people. Not party apparatchiks or alienating bureaucracies, but local communities and direct involvement. By emphasising radical models of ownership — municipal, cooperative, worker-owned, peer-to-peer collaborative resources, common control of land, water, data, etc — and innovative means of decommodification such as Universal Basic Services, Labour under Corbyn is fostering a New Economics that places people at the centre, not the lethargic state or the misanthropic market, and in so doing is creating a technological, decentralised settlement, diffusing power across the nation and giving people a stake in their own lives. Such a vision is the opposite of the totalitarian dystopia so many envisage is waiting should Corbyn reach №10, so Labour’s great task from now until 2022, or whenever the next general election arrives, is to challenge this preconception; to demonstrate through policy and action that an Alternative exists, and that only they can deliver it.
