My newsfeeds are full of communists and anarchists who think it’s of great significance that Jeremy Corbyn has opinions different to theirs.
A dialectical commentary:
1) if when faced with opinion you respond with opinion, as though the two were compatible and compete on some textureless terrain, then you have failed to grasp that politics is already inflected by the objectivity of interests. The only hope for communism is to run headlong through that objectivity, for only here must idiotic puritanism give way to true universality. At some point this might involve engaging with the fact that Corbyn’s own positions are part of that objectivity and can only be transformed in a revolutionary sense from this inversion of them, in which they can’t merely be cast aside as impure.
2) the politics of the hopelessness of the present are as idiotic as the politics of hope in the future. Both sacrifice what we live through. The struggle over whose inchoate abyssal strivings are most true leads only to subjectivism (see point 1).
3) The notion that a good society will be founded on good politics only makes half a critique: it says it knows good politics better than Corbyn but then refuses to notice that a “good politics” would not be good in any sense that Corbyn or those politicians recognise. Indeed such politics would be utterly fractured and smashed in Freedom! Or as Brecht once said, “Oh we who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness could not ourselves be friendly.”
4) those who oppose reformism as though its false prophecies outweigh the small gains it achieves – that is, those who seem to counsel immiseration as though it were a recipe for revolution without respect for lived experience – have made a grave theoretical error. The two are not equatable, and the history of 19th to 21st century politics has already been a history of their admixture in the state. Just as reform will never abolish present suffering, so too will revolution absolutely insensitive to its meaning be nothing but a programme of reform.