This year’s “Marxism: A Festival of Socialist Ideas,” organized by the Socialist Workers Party in Shoreditch, London, focused on promoting the recent announcement by Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters of a new left party to challenge Labour.

The festival’s lunchtime rally on Saturday—“Party Time: What Kind of Left Do We Need?”—saw hundreds of SWP members behaving like a glee-club, greeting Corbyn’s arrival on stage with chants of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!” to a backing track of the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army”.

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Lewis Nielsen, SWP national secretary, hailed Independent (former Labour) MP Zarah Sultana’s announcement two days earlier that she would co-lead a new party with Corbyn. Describing it as “the starting gun” for a mass mobilisation, Nielsen declared, “The genie is out of the bottle.”

To cheers and applause, he stated: “Millions of people in the country are ready to answer the call to fight. Everyone in this room can be part of leading that call and leading a struggle which says tomorrow will be better than today. We will beat the far right. We will stop the cuts on working class people. We will stand with Palestine, and we will build a different world.”

Corbyn was visibly a man under enormous pressure. He avoided any mention of the new party and made no reference to Sultana’s announcement. The previous day he had posted on X, “The democratic foundations of a new kind of political party will soon take shape,” adding “discussions are ongoing”.

It is nearly a decade since Corbyn was catapulted into the Labour leadership with a huge mandate to fight the party’s Blairite wing. Instead, he beat a constant retreat, capitulating to the right-wing on all fundamentals: membership of NATO, retention of Trident nuclear weapons, insisting that Labour councils enforce Tory cuts, and refusing to challenge the mass expulsion of his supporters slandered as “antisemites”.

Corbyn’s aim was to block the leftward movement of the working class and its younger generation and corral it behind the Labour Party. In 2015, he identified his mission as preventing Labour’s “Pasokification”—a reference to the implosion of Greece’s social-democratic PASOK and its eclipsing by Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left).

“It’s very interesting that social democratic parties that accept the austerity agenda and end up implementing it, end up losing a lot of members and a lot of support,” Corbyn told the pro-Labour Mirror newspaper in July of that year, “I think we have a chance to do something different here.”

He would carry out, in other words, the “Syrizification” of the Labour Party—its transformation into a left-populist party “For the many, Not the Few”.

Andrew Murray, the longtime Stalinist who would later become Corbyn’s chief political adviser, responded in 2013 to Ken Loach’s now-defunct Left Unity group, rejecting its claims to be a Syriza-type movement in Britain. He insisted, “The British working-class will support a ‘British Syriza’ when they regard the British Labour Party in the same way as the Greek working class regards PASOK. That is not where we are at present.”

That is precisely where things now stand. There is enormous anger in the working class toward the Starmer government’s right-wing authoritarian measures, attacks on the poor and disabled, support for genocide and war, and mobilisation of the police against striking workers. Workers and youth are breaking from Labour, a historic shift to the left decades in the making.

While the far-right Reform party led by Nigel Farage has gained support among older disaffected Labour and Tory voters, the far broader and more powerful shift is to the left, against the immense concentration of wealth among the billionaire oligarchy, against war and genocide, and in defence of the democratic and social rights of the working class.

This explains the furious efforts by sections of the labour and trade union bureaucracy and pseudo-left allies such as the SWP to cobble together a new political vehicle confining workers and youth to reformist politics and preventing the development of a socialist and revolutionary movement against the capitalist system.

Corbyn himself spoke only vaguely on Saturday about “mobilizing people in order to bring about change”. His reluctance to endorse Sultana’s new party is rooted in a well-grounded fear that any challenge to Labour’s stranglehold over the working class could escape their control. Corbyn’s key allies in Labour’s Socialist Campaign Group, Dianne Abbott and John McDonnell, told the pro-Tory Telegraph they will not join.

Andrew Feinstein, the former African National Congress MP who challenged Keir Starmer at last year’s general election, has emerged as a public spokesman for the new party initiative. He was reportedly a key player in orchestrating Sultana’s surprise announcement, seeking to force Corbyn’s hand.

Feinstein told the SWP’s rally that the “new movement party” in formation would “ensure our activists, our social movements, our communities are represented” in Westminster. Its aim? To “fundamentally change the structures, rules and functionings of Parliament, of our councils, of the state, so that they all serve the many and not the few.”

In other words, a party that subordinates the working class to the capitalist state, promoting the fatal illusion that it can be captured and made to serve the interests of “the people”.

“Welcome Yanis”

“Marxism 2025” gave clear warning of the type of pro-capitalist party the SWP is preparing to build. Its listing of Yanis Varoufakis as a keynote speaker, at a session headlined, “Fighting oligarchy: the relevance of Marx”, was an exercise in rank apologetics and cover-up that would be tolerated only by an organisation rooted in the most complacent layers of the “radical” English middle class.

Varoufakis, Finance Minister in Greece’s Syriza government in 2015, played a central role in imposing the austerity diktats of the European Union, European Central Bank and IMF against the Greek working class. His warm welcome shows what the SWP is preparing to do in Britain.

Varoufakis appeared via Zoom in conversation with the SWP’s chief theoretician Alex Callinicos, who appeared on stage before a packed session on Saturday afternoon. The ostensible topic of their debate was Varoufakis’s smug doom-laden tome, Technofeudalism: what killed capitalism.

Knowing he was among friends, Varoufakis noted in opening that it was the 10th anniversary of the Syriza government’s referendum, which had asked the Greek people to vote “Yes” or “No” to austerity. The vote’s outcome was “a historic event which reverberated. It impacted the left, not in a good way, as it turned out, but it has a capacity of remaining one of the most valuable lessons of the left that the Marxist left, I think, could have learned.”

Offering a potted history of the 2008 global financial meltdown (“for those of you who are too young to remember or to care”), in which “capitalism buckled under”, Varoufakis recalled how “the most fragile part of our system was Greece, the Greek state”.

The plan of Europe’s oligarchy was to “turn Greece into a dystopic laboratory of immense austerity… and then take this model from Greece to Ireland, to Portugal, to Spain, to Italy. George Osborne played his role in bringing it to your shores. Eventually, it came all the way to Germany.”

He recalled Syriza’s early days: “We used to have meetings like this, you know, 100 people, 500 people, 400 people”, and then suddenly they went from “a tiny little party” to 36 percent of the vote, and “on the 5th of July 2015, [the day of the referendum, that] became 62 percent”.

“I can tell you, I could see it in the eyes of the powers that be… people like Christine Lagarde, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, I could see it because, by that historical accident, I was elevated for a few months to the position of Finance Minister of the Republic. They were panicking.”

And then came his astonishing description of the night of the referendum, when Greek voters returned a resounding “No” to austerity:

“A few hours later, my comrade, the Prime Minister [Alexis Tsipras], comes to me… We had an almighty clash. I resigned… I don’t want to bore you with this. Those of you who remember, remember. Those of you who don’t remember, well, you may look into it. This was an interesting episode. It was completely unplanned, spontaneous, a small party that made some radical claims and made some radical promises to the population at that particular cusp in the process of history, managed to gain an overwhelming mandate for essentially, revolution. It was our own weakness that betrayed it. That’s a very big lesson for those of us on the left. Comrades, the enemy, when the enemy strikes at us, it will come from within our midst.”

Here, Varoufakis portrays Syriza (and himself) as hapless victims of Tsipras’s unforeseen defection to the forces of reaction. Varoufakis’s resignation as finance minister is presented in a noble light, an act of conscience against Syriza’s plans to betray the will of the Greek people and enforce the EU’s scorched earth program.

But neither Syriza’s treachery, nor that of Tsipras and Varoufakis, were accidental or unforeseen. The International Committee of the Fourth International charted Syriza’s path to betrayal in hundreds of articles, on-the-spot reports and political statements, seeking to mobilise the Greek working class against this rotten political trap.

As finance minister for the Syriza government, elected on January 25, 2015, Varoufakis acted from the outset as a loyal servant to the EU-ECB-IMF Troika. In February, just weeks after coming to power, he signed an agreement with the EU to extend its first austerity program in Greece.

On February 11, before his meeting with EU finance ministers, Varoufakis was gushing in his praise for German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble (a “politician of intellectual substance”). He later described his own proposals to Europe’s bankers as “standard Thatcherite or Reaganesque”.

Like Tsipras, Varoufakis fully expected a “Yes” vote. With a gun to their heads, the Greek people were facing economic blackmail on a gargantuan scale, with the EU threatening to crash the economy if its austerity protocols were rejected. A capital flight was denying millions of ordinary Greeks access to their wages and personal savings. Syriza took no action to protect the population, ruling out nationalisation or any measures to block the withdrawal of capital, opposing any threat to the wealth of the oligarchy and Greece’s wealthy investors.

In the tortured wording of Syriza’s referendum, Greeks were asked whether to accept or reject the troika’s two-part proposal headlined “Reforms for the completion of the current programme and beyond” and “Preliminary debt sustainability analysis”. The people’s rejection was overwhelming—followed by a betrayal of historic magnitude.

“Yanis, it’s great to be speaking with you”, Callinicos began his own remarks at the SWP’s session. He continued, “You reminded us of a historic day, the historic day of the Greek referendum exactly 10 years ago, which for me, as well as for you, and for many, many socialist and working class and anti-capitalist activists around the world, was a really great moment, a moment that gave a glimpse of how there is an alternative to what was then the dominant version of capitalism, neoliberalism, that another world based upon solidarity and democracy and freedom was really possible, even if that glimpse only lasted a very short time, unfortunately, for the reasons that Yanis talked about.”

Callinicos’s support for the “reasons” offered by “Yanis” is no surprise. The theory of an unforeseen stab in the back by Tsipras conceals the SWP’s own prominent role in bestowing socialist and revolutionary credentials on what was, from its inception in 2004, a rotten pro-capitalist electoral alliance.

During the Q&A that followed, an SWP member in the audience politely challenged Varoufakis. “I love Yanis,” he assured those in attendance, but why did such a “highly principled person like yourself” who “gave us so much hope” not stay and fight? Instead of resigning, “could you have stayed on a bit more and fought back against all these iniquitous banks and tech companies?”

His question provoked a smattering of applause, but Callinicos, given first right of reply, refused to acknowledge, let alone answer, the question. Varoufakis was provided with a safe space to mount his own brazen defence: “Saying no and resigning, when the alternative is to be corrupt and to defect to the opposite side, is a revolutionary act,” he declared.

Presenting a binary choice between two forms of capitulation, Varoufakis omitted a third option, one posed directly by the referendum’s outcome: mobilising the Greek working class in struggle against the EU’s austerity diktats—a fight that would have reverberated across Europe.

In November 2015, the ICFI issued a statement, “The Political Lessons of Syriza’s Betrayal in Greece”, that should be studied carefully by every worker and youth. Subjecting the events in Greece—“an immense strategic experience for the working class”—to a Marxist assessment, the document is critical preparation for the explosive events now unfolding in Britain.

Of Syriza’s betrayal, the ICFI wrote: “Masses of people are being brought face-to-face with the bankruptcy and treachery of political parties that have dominated protest movements and what passed for left politics over an entire historical period. Following the theories of postmodernist academics such as Ernesto Laclau, these organisations declared the current epoch to be ‘post-Marxist.’ Rooted in affluent sections of the middle class, they insisted that the working class was no longer a revolutionary force, but had been superseded by a multitude of social constituencies defined by national, racial, gender or lifestyle identities.

“For decades, these parties palmed off their politics as radical or anti-capitalist, when they were, in fact, no such thing. Their first experience in government has exposed these pretensions as a fraud, providing political cover for pro-capitalist policies designed to advance the interests of the top 10 percent of society at the expense of working people.”

Not another Syriza!

In 2015, the SWP were shameless cheerleaders for Syriza. On January 31, Socialist Worker welcomed Syriza’s election victory with a frontpage banner headline, “As Greece rejects austerity, WE CAN DO IT HERE”, and a page 2 lead, “Syriza win means hope has arrived in Greece.” Writing of “jubilation in the streets”, the SWP, alongside its Greek co-thinkers in ANTARSYA (Antikapitalistiki Aristeri Synergasia gia tin Anatropi), corralled the most militant and critically minded sections of workers, youth and students behind a pro-capitalist government.

Noting the pressure on Tsipras to “compromise”, the SWP wrote, “The key question now is whether Syriza will stand up to the bankers and creditors”. The role allocated to the working class was that of a pressure group, with the SWP arguing for “strikes, mass mobilisations, occupations and democracy from below that can go further than Syriza offers”. This promotion of spontaneity, a hallmark of the SWP’s politics, served to block any understanding of Syriza’s reformist and pro-imperialist perspective of extracting concessions from the troika, leaving the working class unprepared for what followed.

Ten years later, the SWP has rushed forward with the same arguments to promote a new left party which they hope Corbyn will lead. Speaking alongside Corbyn in the previous session, Nielsen had declared, “When they throw everything at us, we need a force that won’t compromise, that won’t step back. We need a force that will mobilize the movement. Working-class people, the Palestine movement, the anti-racist movement, we will root ourselves in that movement. So, when they come for us, rather than calling off that movement, we will call on that movement to defend us. That’s the kind of party we need. So, we need an alliance, a network, an umbrella.”

A party or umbrella(!) led by Corbyn and his colleagues can be pressured from below to fight, insists the SWP. But fight for what?

The new party envisaged by the SWP is not even identified with socialist measures. Speaking on Saturday alongside Corbyn, Michael Lavalette, a decades-long member of the SWP and its offshoot Counterfire, placed just three conditions on the new movement: 1) “it must be rooted in the abandoned communities and the working class”; 2) its councillors and MPs must serve as “the megaphone of the movements and trade unions in our communities”; and 3) “We must never be in a position where any MP of this new party calls on armed forces to break strikes like they’ve done in Birmingham”(!)

This was Lavalette’s diplomatic reference to Ayoub Khan MP, a member of Corbyn’s Independent Alliance, who called on Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner to mobilise the military to help break the Birmingham bin strike.

There is a direct connection between the SWP’s refusal to spell out what socialist measures a new left party must fight for, and their entertaining a friendly discussion with Varoufakis on “technofeudalism”.  His book argues that capitalism has been replaced by a system of cloud-based rent that has “demolished capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits”. These “just aren’t running the show anymore”. Traditional capitalists, who employ wage labour, have become “vassals” to a new class of feudal overlord. “As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs”.

Humanity has been taken over by “a technologically advanced form of feudalism”, which “is certainly not what we had hoped would supersede capitalism”. The traditional proletariat, analysed by Marx, is being replaced by “cloud proles” and “cloud serfs”. He writes, “We no longer have capital on the one side and labour on the other”, and that Marx’s theory of the proletariat creating socialism “was wishful thinking”.

The political conclusions are spelled out clearly: “To stand any chance of overthrowing technofeudalism and putting the demos back into democracy” a “grand coalition” is needed, uniting the remnants of the traditional proletariat, cloud proles, cloud serfs, and “at least some of the vassal capitalists”.

In reply to Varoufakis’s anti-communist screed, Callinicos proposed a “fruitful discussion” on a “very interesting book”. Callinicos’s own appeal to orthodoxy during a rambling 15-minute presentation—disagreeing that capitalism has been replaced by feudalism and citing Marx’s description of the proletariat as the universal class of human emancipation—was resolved with his final words to Varoufakis: “I think we have the same enemies. I’d like that we can just agree to call them bastards.”

What the ICFI wrote in 2015 fully applies to Britain: “The Syriza experience points to the necessity of a fundamental political re-orientation of the working class, youth, and socialist-minded intellectuals. Faced with a global economic crisis unprecedented since the 1930s and a savage onslaught by the entire capitalist class, the working class cannot defend itself by electing new, ‘left’ capitalist governments.

“The only way forward is through a genuinely revolutionary policy, mobilizing the working class in Greece and internationally in struggle. It requires a direct assault on the capitalist class, the confiscation of their wealth, the seizure of the major banks and productive forces, in order to place them under the democratic control of working people, and the creation of workers states across Europe and the world. Such struggles require the building of Marxist parties to offer political leadership to the working class, in ruthless struggle against parties like Syriza.”