Adnan Hussain, MP for Blackburn, one of the four pro-Gaza MPs who are allied with Corbyn in the Independent Alliance parliamentary group, was as such one of the provisional leaders of Your Party. He subsequently quit Your Party but is still a member of the Independent Alliance and he still agrees with the new party’s basic position that capitalism can be reformed so as to benefit the many.
The Socialist (the paper of one of the remnants of the Militant Tendency) reported that he told a meeting in Blackburn on 30 August:
‘“Neoliberal policies have destroyed the unity of communities”, creating loneliness, isolation, and mental ill-health. He said that the new party will fight for the funding needed for housing, health, education, and transport, and to reopen youth clubs and community centres’.
Normal reformist rhetoric, encouraging the mistaken belief that capitalism could be made to provide adequately these essential services that people need.
That it is ‘neoliberalism’ that is the problem has been a constant theme of his tweets. For instance, this on 23 October:
‘Capitalism, unrestrained, measures everything, even human life, by its economic yield. Neoliberalism then sanctifies this as “freedom.” The result? A society where dignity is traded for productivity and compassion is seen as inefficiency’.
This suggests that it is neoliberalism — unrestrained capitalism, or giving capitalist enterprises freer rein to pursue profits as they see fit — that results in this, and that state intervention to restrain capitalism could prevent it. But it wouldn’t.
All the things he criticises — communities destroyed, people treated as things — have happened, but because of capitalism. Governments have had to give priority to profit-making as that is what drives the capitalist economy. Public services and amenities are paid for out of taxes and taxes fall in the end on profits. So, after the post-war boom came to an end in the mid-1970s, governments had to decide between maintaining these services and encouraging profit-making. It wasn’t a real choice as, capitalism being what it is, a system driven by profit, they had to give priority to profit-making.
Corbyn himself always criticises neoliberalism rather than capitalism itself. But it is not the ‘neoliberal capitalist order’ that is the problem. It is the capitalist production-for-profit system as such. Neoliberalism is not a system but a policy forced on governments, particularly since the 1980s, of reducing state intervention in the economy. A return to more state intervention won’t prevent capitalism measuring everything by its ‘economic yield’ or putting productivity before dignity and efficiency before compassion. No action by a reformist government can change that. In fact, any serious attempt to restrain capitalism from giving priority to profit-making and to spend more on meeting people’s needs would provoke an economic downturn as the search for profits is what drives the economy.
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