Election 2019: they're off ..

When I think back to my socialist-activist years at and after university, when I was marching with the International Marxist Group contingent every Saturday afternoon in London (demos were prime recruitment terrain), it would have been tempting to conclude that I was a political activist because I was a Marxist.

This would have been incorrect - totally upside-down.

Reflecting back to my mid-teens, I was rebellious that early because I didn't like the world I was in. It didn't care about anything I cared about, and offered me no future prospects of interest. I only discovered Marxism at university: prior to that I was some kind of anarcho-libertarian but certainly not someone who had activist inclinations. I just hated the toffs who ran everything.

Today I look at all those young folk in their teens, twenties or thirties who are university-educated (half the cohort!) yet have no practicable future commensurate with the elite lifestyles they think they were promised. No well-paid, exciting jobs changing the world; no commuting between continents; no elite cultural events at posh venues.

They don't have Marxism any more: that revolutionary model has lost all credibility and rightly so. Marx was the most discerning analyst of capitalism that there has ever been - but the Leninist model should never have been generalised outside of Russia and it didn't even work there, as it turned out.

Today's 'disaffected youth' follow equally-illusory SJW banners .. and this creates a problem for the Labour Party. Corbyn is an old-time left-social-democrat - he wants to campaign on social-services (the NHS et al), increased Government spending and state controls over the economy.

He wants, in other words, to engage with the Northern (somewhat Brexit-voting) traditional working class and its perceived interests. Actually, so does Boris Johnson who both needs those Brexit-inclined votes and - more strategically - seeks to lock those people into a future 'Red-Tory' bloc.

But won't a traditional-socialist campaign leave Labour's Momentum supporters - his mass army of activists - feeling rather neglected? As well as the wider mass of SJW-inclined voters who do have a credible alternative, the revitalised Liberal-Democrats?

I think this is a problem for Labour, which parallels their trying to ride two horses at the same time contortions over Brexit itself.