With World War 3 upon us any day now and the United Kingdom gearing up to join the USA and France in carving up Syria for the Western bourgeoisie, one of the only voices in British politics to stand up against the prospect of more war is Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Where our current Prime Minister Theresa May seems all too eager for my country to join a war we need not be part of without the approval of Parliament, even having the gall to claim that to not do so would mean ceding foreign policy to Russia, Corbyn is questioning the legality of our involvement in the war and calling for Parliament to assert its authority on the issue.
Now you might be thinking, "surely you, an unabashed Marxist, would have no problem supporting Jeremy Corbyn", right? Well, not necessarily.
Do I agree with his stance on war in Syria? Absolutely, I don't want us involved in the war. Do I want Theresa May gone? Again, I absolutely do. But do I think Jeremy Corbyn is a long-term alternative to the current system? My answer would emphatically be no.
Here's the thing, Corbyn presents a much stronger social-democratic alternative here in the UK than Bernie Sanders does in the United States (sorry Berniebros but liberal social democracy going up against hegemonic capitalism just doesn't cut it for the left) in the sense that presents a more overt program of nationalization than Sanders does. But of course, I don't want social democracy anymore than I want the continuation of neoliberalism. What I desire instead is socialism in its authentic form: joint ownership of the means of production, an economy dominated by worker-owned cooperatives rather than capitalist enterprises, horizontal democracy, a needs based economy rather than a profit based one, and to compliment this an entirely new democratic system not beholden to the interest of party politics or capital. As I'm partial to DeLeonism, such a democratic framework might look something like how the Socialist Labour Party envisioned what they called "Socialist Industrial Unionism".
Anyways, with that out of the way, I do not believe Corbyn is capable of bringing about such a system, nor is it obvious that he desires one. For starters, he and his fellow social democrats seem convinced that simply borrowing money will lead to a real transformation of the economy, and I never hear them talk about any mechanism by which the means of production can be put into real democratic ownership. The closest I've seen is John McDonnell talking about putting infrastructure into public hands by nationalizing everything at once, which of course he intends to fund by more borrowing. It's funny in the case of McDonnell because I'd expect someone who's been a Marxist for a long time to have more creative solutions. I have heard that the Labour Party has a page on cooperatives, but I don't see Corbyn himself talking about expanding the cooperative sector at all. Just making sure the rich pay more in taxes most of the time, which to me is besides the point, yet he wraps it up into socialist-sounding rhetoric, which a lot of leftoids seem to do these days in order to bring more people into their cause. Not to mention that he has supported Venezuela, a country which still has the means of production in private hands and where the economy is still dominated by private enterprise, and has never in the 28 years of the Bolivarian Revolution changed that. I have never seen him go out of his way to support, say, Rojava, where there are far-left militias actively fighting ISIS and trying to establish a democratic confederalist society in one of the most backwards places on Earth, nor talk about how socialism worked for Grenada, Burkina Faso, Chile, Kerala, The People's Republic of Kampuchea and the many other successful socialist countries that weren't the USSR or China. That to me shows he isn't particularly invested in socialism, unless somehow I've missed something.
Also, while it's not on the same level of importance as economics, his alignment with liberal wedge issues presents a problem for the far left. I mean, this is the guy who wants to ban after-work drinks because, supposedly, they represent sexism, and he's called for Theresa May to suspend the MP Phillip Davies over supposedly sexist comments because he dares speak about issues men face as opposed to espousing bourgeois liberal feminism. It's all so leftoid, far too leftoid for me, or far anyone serious about socialism, to fall in line with.
Now to be fair, he does still seem to present some threat to the interests of the ruling class, at least judging by how often the media seems to unfairly attack him. For instance, more recently, he is accused, largely by the right-wing section of the corporate media, of being a traitor or unpatriotic for expressing skepticism of Russia's involvement with the poisoning of the ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, and he is also now demonized for his anti-war stance on Syria. Although he does decidedly find support among left-leaning outlets, even they sometimes turn on him for not being progressive enough, or over his supposed anti-Semitism (which they extrapolate from the fact that a few Labour party members seem to be anti-Semites) and sexism (itself extrapolated from when some of his supporters allegedly assaulted Jess Phillips). But even then, his threat to the ruling class interest comes largely from his departure from the neoliberal line that both Labour and the Tories had followed after Margaret Thatcher's government through his social-democratic program, which in my view isn't substantial.
What's more, the nature of the modern liberal capitalist system for me entails that someone like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn would not be able to do much. As agents within the system, they would find themselves limited by the constraints of the system, unable to pursue a more radical agenda because the establishment, still entrenched within the system, would oppose them. This is because, while they appear to challenge the system, they - in true leftoid fashion - do not go far enough, they do not wholesale deconstruct the political system they instead choose to operate within.
In my view, it would be more beneficial for the left to start gathering around more radical ideologies - things like classical Marxism, syndicalism, DeLeonism, even anarchism -, build revolutionary parties, build up, support or lead socialistic organizations, and in general assert their own political identity instead of just getting behind the leftoid mass of the new Corbynite Labour movement or waiting for the next election to bring about real change. However useful a bulwark against the current system he may be in the short time, because he doesn't go far enough the left needs to look to other roads to socialism through the constructing the current system. If they fail to do this, they will be stuck.