Comrade Jeremy – no, not a spy, just someone who hates capitalism
Was Jeremy Corbyn a spy? It’s certainly delightful to imagine him in St James’s Park looking for dead drops, or screwing tiny microphones into the lids of jars of home-made jam to give to unsuspecting colleagues.
The truth is, of course, that on the “knave or fool” spectrum, Corbyn has always been far more the latter. Yes, he hung around with Soviet sympathisers. Indeed, he’s now hired some. “Labour Action for Peace”, the anti-nato group he helped lead, was “notoriously and idiotically pro-soviet” – and, we now learn, riddled with Eastern Bloc agents.
But while Corbyn might well have been a Communist source, he was almost certainly no formal “asset”. His ideology came from the same spring, but it flowed in a different direction: he was a socialist, not a Communist; Team Trotsky, not Team Stalin.
It is easy to see why the Czechs (and the Russians) would have been interested in him. While insignificant as a backbencher, he stood at the nexus of all the far-left groups that fought Thatcher and Reagan. But why was Corbyn interested in them?
The answer is simple. He did not want the Soviet Union to win: he wanted America to lose. And still does.
In 2011, Corbyn provided the foreword to a new edition of J A Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study. He argued that “since World War Two, the biggest imperial force has been the United States on behalf of global capitalism and the biggest, mostly Us-based, corporations”. He referred to the “military reoccupation” of Europe post-1949 “under the guise of Nato”, and how “the hard power of [US] weaponry, the malign influence of the CIA, and its creation of pliant and friendly governments actively suppressed and subjugated peoples in the poorest counties [sic] of the world”.
That last point may have some truth. But Corbyn goes on to deliberately contrast these US puppets with the Communist bloc: “The Soviet influence was always different, and its allies often acted quite independently. Cuba… developed a quite independent foreign policy and enormous respect and stature among the poorest people.”
It is some feat to argue that you had more liberty, during the Cold War, as a Russian satellite than an American. But this is the Corbyn view.
A few weeks ago, Andrew Marr challenged him to say one good thing about capitalism – hadn’t it lifted billions of people out of poverty? It was a point the Labour leader entirely refused to accept. But what about China, asked Marr, “Are you going to give us the Chinese economy?” “No,” said Corbyn, “absolutely not.” China, he insisted, “has grown massively since 1949 and then after the death of Mao and the Great Leap Forward and so on.”
He is being consistent. “Free market capitalism,” he wrote in Imperialism, “cannot provide for everyone, or sustain the natural world. Its very imperative is of ever hastening exploitation of all resources including people, and it needs armies and weapons to secure those supplies. The political appeal, unchallenged in the 1990s, of this concept is fast fading by a combination of Islamic opposition and the radical popular movements of landless and poor peoples in many poor countries.”
“Islamic opposition”? That, post9/11, was a truly ugly choice of phrase. But this is what Corbyn believes. Capitalism, imperialism and Americanism are destroying the world. Anyone trying to develop any kind of alternative is, by definition, worthy of praise and protection.
When a young Jeremy sang IRA marching songs in the pubs of north London, it was not because he glorified violence but because he identified the Irish Republicans as the victims of colonial and imperial repression. Any action in their own defence could be forgiven. Hence Corbyn picketing what he called the “show trial” of the Brighton bomber – and inviting convicted IRA members into Parliament even as that bomber’s final victim lay dying of her wounds.
You can see example after example of this. He supported Milosevic over the Kosovans, Hamas and Hizbollah over the Israelis. In 2015, he claimed Venezuela’s achievements “in jobs, in housing, in health, in education, but above all its role in the whole world” were “a cause for celebration”. The newsletter he ran for hard-left MPS responded to the fall of the Berlin Wall with the headline: “No cheers here for a united capitalist Germany”.
His great sin is not that he worked for the Soviets. It is that his hatred for Western capitalism blinded him to any of its merits – and to any of its enemies’ flaws. It blinds him still.
At heart, Labour’s social democratic tradition has been about reconciling capitalism and socialism – using the fruits of the former to deliver the ends of the latter. But Corbyn simply denies that Western capitalism has any virtues, or value, at all.