V for Vendetta author, an avowed anarchist, urges voters in the Labour leadership contest to ‘put all of their muscle’ behind the embattled leader

Comic book writer Alan Moore has endorsed Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader and has urged voters to “put all of your mind and all of your muscle” into supporting the embattled Labour leader – although he himself is an avowed anarchist who doesn’t vote.

In a piece written for the Northampton branch of Momentum, the grassroots movement set up in support of Corbyn’s leadership, Moore sets out his family’s history of voting Labour because a Labour government introduced the NHS and provided free education for children: “I was raised with the probably simplistic but heartfelt belief that it was the duty of our family and people like us to vote Labour since Labour, unambiguously, was the party of the working people.”

Moore, whose iconic use of a Guy Fawkes mask in his comic V For Vendetta was later adopted as a global symbol of protest and anti-establishment movements, says that although he insists “repeatedly and annoyingly” that he doesn’t vote, he feels his parents would have voted Corbyn: “Jeremy Corbyn is about the only current political figure that the working class that I grew up among could have recognised as such.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An Occupy protester wears a V for Vendetta mask in 2011. Photograph: Action Press / Rex Features

Moore reveals he is “somehow glad” his parents “never lived to have their hearts broken by the advent of Tony Blair and his rebranded Diet-Tory New Labour party. In the decades since then, had they witnessed this country’s purported left wing, I’m confident that they wouldn’t have had the first idea what they were looking at. The thing that they believed in and fought for has become unrecognisable and completely inimical to all working-class principles and values.”

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Both Corbyn and Bernie Sanders in the US have been dismissed by some as unelectable, a term Moore says is “shorthand for the phrase ‘You are henceforth only permitted to elect conservatives’.”

“And yet,” he adds, “from the laughably disproportionate torrent of ridicule and demonisation that politicians like Corbyn are being subjected to, one has to suspect that their opponents are increasingly afraid that they are anything but unelectable.

“If we sincerely believe that Jeremy Corbyn is unelectable, why bother saying another word about Jeremy Corbyn? In fact, why bother pointing out his unelectable status in the first place? It’s worth remembering that vested powers and authorities, throughout time and across the world, are always at their most vicious when they are also at their most frightened. To a degree, every media barb and embarrassing bout of … recriminations can be seen as a measure of your man’s unprecedented success.”

Moore cites several concerns, including environmental damage, international austerity, Donald Trump and “a horrific abyss that threatens to make the English civil war look like a Sunday-school outing” and says Corbyn has emerged to “propose a far more humane and workable direction for society”.

As an anarchist who prefers political action without “an elected intermediary”, Moore says that if he did vote, “I would try to vote with the way that viable human history appeared to be going rather than against it”.

He ends the letter urging voters to “put all of your mind and all of your muscle into supporting someone who offers a future that ordinary people could actually live in … It is time for this horrific and inhuman nonsense to stop, and if you’re going to vote then I suggest you vote for someone who looks willing to stop it.”

In a 2011 interview with the New Statesmen, Moore revealed he had only ever voted once, for Labour prime minister Jim Callaghan in the 1979 general election, and regretted his decision later: “I don’t like to vote because I don’t believe in the democratic process, and I don’t believe that it is democracy. Democracy as I understand it is demos – the people shall rule.”

• This article was amended on 20 September 2016. An earlier version referred to a general election in 1976. This has been corrected.