Notes on Noam Chomsky and Jeremy Corbyn.

Chomsky claimed the future must lie with the left of the party. "The constituency of the Labour party, the new participants, the Momentum group and so on … if there is to be a serious future for the Labour party that is where it is in my opinion" Corbyn's concept of democracy, of extending it down into as many branches of public life outside the party and empowering the people to empower themselves in clearly influenced by Chomsky's idea of decentralised and consensual democracy at each and every level of society. Chomsky is an anarcho-syndicalist.

The problem for Corbyn is that Brexit hangs over his leadership and that of the party. It could be that with the membership in control of selecting leaders, Corbyn is playing a long game beyond the election and would be re-elected if he hold up the Labour vote or even if he does not, as Momentum could shore him up.

Certainly, Theresa May's attempt to ram through an early General Election victory so soon after Brexit are in the manner of an attempt to justify an 'elective dictatorship' through executing a 'shock doctrine' style of campaign in which national interest is at stake and Corbyn's Labour is a threat to the national security.

Despite May's attempt to portray herself as a sort of 1950s school headmistress, strict but patriotic and given to choreographed Battle of Britain style pep talks, she is a British version of the new authoritarian nationalist security and surveillance states shored up by a pliant unfree media and semi-democratic component.

Emerging greyly from within the British Establishment through her time as Home Secretary, the Brexit process could see her using the security state to monitor counter elites without a party for conspiring and plotting by subterfuge and sabotage to undermine first Corbyn in Labour and then to plan blocking any form of Brexit.

Anti-Brexiteers have no party and no democratic means other than launching a bid for leadership within Labour and even, if Corbyn stands again for leadership if he loses the election, to try and launch a coup by dramatically setting up a new party and drawing MPs from a Momentum dominated party.

For Chomsky this would be an attempt at 'deterring democracy', both through trying to overthrow the referendum verdict and in preventing a Labour Party representing people outside the Westminster elites. But it's a consequence of there not being a voting system based on proportional representation, about which Chomsky says nothing.