09.07.2015
Divisions come to the surface
Jack Conrad argues for a strategic approach towards the Labour Party
Not surprisingly, Jeremy Corbyn’s last-minute success in getting onto the Labour leadership ballot has brought out latent divisions within Left Unity. There are two basic positions, with various factions and individuals lining up on either side.
The pro-Corbyn camp, which includes most of the core leadership, considers Corbyn’s politics to be “shared politics”.\1 Looking at the standard list of left reformist campaigns, demands and causes, this is undoubtedly the case. Naturally, the pro-Corbyn camp urges Labour Party members and affiliates to vote for him. Indeed there is the spirited call to take advantage of the recently introduced £3 registered supporter category. The Corbyn campaign is seen as a component part of the left. Hence, the bigger the Corbyn vote, the better things will be for the entire left.
As an aside, Liz Davies has taken this approach to a thoroughly individualistic and irresponsible conclusion. Having been elected to Left Unity’s national committee and then its executive committee earlier this year, she has paid her £3 to the Labour Party’s HQ … and resigned from Left Unity. Comrade Davies was, 20 years ago, Labour prospective parliamentary candidate for Leeds North-East and found herself deselected in a rightwing coup fronted by Clare Short. After winning a seat on the national executive committee on the Grassroots slate, she resigned from Labour in 2001 and joined the Socialist Alliance. Now she has returned to the “fold.”\2
Obviously the Communist Party of Great Britain has significant differences both with Jeremy Corbyn and Left Unity’s leadership. Our Draft programme (2011) stands firmly within the tradition of the German Social Democratic Party, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and the French Workers Party. By contrast Left Unity is programmatically eclectic, untheorised and woolly. Corbyn and the Labour left are the same, only more so: “Ours is a movement to give people hope - the hope of a better world, with less injustice and more equality, peace and solidarity.\3;Yet despite having many criticisms we too unhesitatingly want a thumping Corbyn majority.
What about the anti-Corbyn camp (a description I shall continue to use, but it does need qualifying somewhat)? Socialist Resistance is not campaigning against Corbyn - no, to all intents and purposes SR shares the same politics. However, the comrades do not want to foster illusions in the Labour Party, an organisation which is now branded as “part of the problem” (editorial statement). Note, back in the early 1980s the comrades were known as the Socialist League, aka Socialist Action, and were committed to full Labour Party entryism. That is, heads-down Labourism. Nowadays expectations are invested in the putative anti-austerity movement. Either build a mass party along the lines of Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece or bank on a Labour Party that is going nowhere … even if Corbyn is declared the winner on September 12.\4 Here lies the “strategic dilemma”. After all, if he wins, the comrades reason - and they are not wrong - Labour’s right wing will go for the nuclear option and split the party. In other words, a Corbyn victory would be a Pyrrhic victory.
Tusc partisan
Ed Potts takes a similar approach, and, because it is more extensive, more direct and more thought through, I shall concentrate on his contribution. A member of the Independent Socialist Network’s steering committee, the comrade maintains - and he is quite right - that in order to fundamentally transform “our society”, so that it knows no classes, exploitation or oppression, we need an organisation which “agitates and organises” with that goal in mind.\5
Of course, in our view, what is needed are many organisations which agitate and organise for communism: trade unions, cooperatives, educational associations, youth leagues, women’s sections, workers’ militias, etc. However, we call the highest form of such an organisation a Communist Party: put another way, the advanced part of the working class, which is guided by the “theory established by Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, and organises according to the principles of democratic centralism”.\6 The ISN talks vaguely about a “mass socialist party”, but shies away from the principles of democratic centralism.\7
Anyway, according to comrade Potts, Labour has never fitted that definition and, he insists, nor can it. That is why he is a member of Left Unity, he innocently tells us. If the comrade wants to join the fight to arm LU with the minimum-maximum programme of Marxism, that is welcome news. He ought to begin discussions with our Communist Platform forthwith. However, maybe giving the game away, what he fails to mention is that in Left Unity the main focus of the ISN, a typical ‘anti-sectarian sectarian’ lash-up, is securing LU affiliation to the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. That or joint election activity under the Tusc umbrella. Sadly, what really unites members of the ISN is, firstly, mutual hostility to the so-called ‘vanguard’ sects and, secondly, commitment to Tusc.
The brainchild of the Socialist Party in England and Wales and its myopic general secretary, Tusc is a Labour Party mark two project. Inevitably then, it is a Mini-Me. Tusc has just four affiliates: SPEW, ISN, the semi-detached Rail, Maritime and Transport union and the thoroughly detached Socialist Workers Party. Bizarrely, Tusc is actually far less democratic than even today’s Labour Party. Each of the four affiliates possesses the right to veto and there is no branch structure or individual membership.
Politically things are no better. In May 2015 Tusc stood on a manifesto which is barely distinguishable from the politics of Jeremy Corbyn. But perhaps that is being unfair … to Jeremy Corbyn. Tusc’s policy platform is thoroughly economistic, consisting as it does of a series of reformist platitudes. Democratic demands barely get a look in. And, of course, where Corbyn got 29,659 votes in Islington North, together Tusc’s135 candidates secured 36,368 votes - 0.01% of the total poll.
Presumably, not wanting to put that stunning achievement at risk, comrade Potts absurdly warns against being “swept up” in the excitement over Corbyn. Worryingly, he shows distinct symptoms of Corbynphobia. We are told in all seriousness that “buying into the Corbyn campaign” is to be “taken for a ride by the real owners of the Labour Party”. Who are these “real owners”? The “Blairites and pro-capitalists”, who are backed and “bolstered by the trade union bureaucracies”.
Evidently, this is not a well-founded argument. Would the election of Corbyn really benefit the “Blairites and pro-capitalists”? No, except if you happen to think that a massive split in the Parliamentary Labour Party - which leaves a rump of, say, no more than 40 or 50 leftish Labour MPs, but, presumably, keeps the trade union link intact - serves the “Blairites and pro-capitalists”. If that is the case, then their interests and ours temporarily coincide. Meanwhile, a big majority of Labour MPs, rightwing Labour groupings and think tanks - and, of course, the print media barons - are backing Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, or the unofficial Tory candidate, Liz Kendall. Give or take this or that odd feature, the ongoing leadership contest conforms to the classic left-versus-right pattern that has characterised the Labour Party since its foundation. No surprise then that left-led unions, such as Unite, RMT, FBU, Aslef and BWAFTU, are not backing and bolstering the Blairites. No, they are recommending Corbyn to their members.
Obviously, the political fact of the Corbyn campaign fatally undermines the nonsense about the Labour Party being dead for the left, including the nonsense response: ie, forming halfway-house parties specifically designed to occupy the space supposedly vacated when Tony Blair sacrificed old Labour on the altar of the ‘third way’. The Socialist Labour Party, Socialist Alliance, Respect, Tusc, Left Unity - all of them are based on the founding myth of Labour being just another capitalist party.
Comrade Potts tells us that the Labour Party has been gutted of “almost all structures”. Everything is “cooked up by consultations and focus groups”. It is certainly true that since the ‘dream ticket’ of Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley the Labour left has been on the defensive. Nevertheless, comrade Potts writes that, whereas previously “the membership” could “democratically control or influence their own party”, now that possibility has disappeared: there is no “effective way” to “drag” the party to the left. His faith in old Labour is touching, but ahistorical. The membership could never control the Labour Party. After the trauma of Ramsay MacDonald’s 1931 betrayal the status of the annual conference was somewhat enhanced. But by the 1960s it was treated with open contempt. Harold Wilson curtly informed the 1966 conference that the “government must govern”.\8 And, though he suffered conference defeats almost as a matter of routine, such votes could be safely ignored. The dog barked, but could not bite.
And what about there no longer being an effective way for the membership to “drag” Labour to the left? Here, at this vital juncture, comrade Potts seems to have conveniently forgotten the Corbyn campaign. Labour members, affiliates and supporters can - er - vote for him. It is an election conducted under expanded ‘one member, one vote’ rules. And if Corbyn was elected that would surely shift the balance of forces in Labour radically to the left.
That surely explains why comrade Potts resorts to ultra-leftist posturing. The last refuge of the Tusc partisan? Comrade Potts tells us that Labour left MPs do no more than sustain the “status quo”. Left reformist MPs certainly serve to maintain the “hopes and morale of activists”.\9 Faith in the next Labour government is kept alive despite the abysmal performance of the last Labour government. But some of the Labour left MPs do provide tireless support for strikes, protests, mass movements and international causes, which, albeit in a limited way, do actually challenge the status quo: eg, free abortion on demand, the 1984-85 miners’ Great Strike, gay equality, the Stop the War Coalition, opposition to Zionist colonialism. Jeremy Corbyn instantly comes to mind. Ditto his campaign manager, John McDonnell. And there are Labour left MPs and Labour left MPs. Would comrade Potts’ dismissal include our CPGB Labour MPs in the 1920s? Did, for example, ShapurjiSaklatvala do no more than sustain the status quo? Given the number of times the comrade was arrested, hauled before the courts and imprisoned, the claim badly misfires.\10
However, basically, comrade Potts shares the exact same anti-Corbyn agenda as Socialist Resistance. To support Corbyn would be a “strategic mistake”. Why? Because it would foster illusions in the Labour Party. The comrade is prepared to grant that Corbyn will use the platform provided by his leadership bid to build opposition to George Osborne’s latest tranche of austerity. However, by the autumn, he says, everything will be over.
But will it? Once again comrade Potts contradicts his own argument. He is convinced that if by chance Corbyn wins, the right will:
- subject his nomination, support from the unions, votes gained from non-Labour sources, etc, to “intense scrutiny”;
- engage in “mudraking” and use every device to bring his legitimacy as leader into doubt;
- place huge pressure on him to accept some kind of middle-of-the-road consensus.
All of that is doubtless true - which shows that the internal struggle in the Labour Party will not be done and dusted come autumn. And, even if Corbyn loses, the fact of the matter is that his campaign will in all probability strengthen the Labour left. As I write, many thousands are joining the party. They are unlikely just to walk away. As with Bennism in the early 1980s, a reinvigorated Labour left is in the making. There could quite conceivably be moves from the right. Benn narrowly lost to Denis Healey by 49.6% to 50.4% of the vote in the 1981 deputy leadership contest. Labour’s right, in the form of the so-called ‘gang of four’, had already established the Social Democratic Party, Within a couple of months it boasted of having 33 MPs.
As with Socialist Resistance, comrade Potts thinks that conducting work in the Labour Party is a road to nowhere. To guard against yet another generation wasting their time attempting to reclaim “their party”, he wants to maintain a clear distance between Left Unity and the Corbyn campaign. That despite the political similarities. Tellingly, he adds that, if that is not done, then “all our arguments made so carefully over the years” about the need to “abandon Labour and build the alternative” will confront a reinvigorated Labour left.
Comrade Potts rightly complains that Left Unity has done little or no strategic thinking, when it comes to the possible scenarios raised by the Corbyn leadership campaign. Something that needs to be rectified as a matter of urgency.
History and future
Communists will patiently seek to win the widest understanding that there was never a golden age of democracy and socialism in the Labour Party. True, the old clause four (part four) of Labour’s constitution committed it
To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.
Mistakenly, this is often fondly remembered as the high point of Labour’s socialism. But, when it was first adopted, in February 1918 - during the slaughter of inter-imperialist war - the calculated aim of Sidney Webb and his fellow Fabians was to divert the considerable sympathy that existed for the Russian Revolution into safe, constitutional channels.
And, needless to say, clause four was mainly for show. However, even if it had been put into practice, Fabian socialism is antithetical to working class self-liberation. Industry, banking, transport, etc would be nationalised. The mass of the population, however, would remain exploited wage-slaves. Capitalism without capitalists.
Admittedly, the old clause four came as a result of mass sentiment. Because of World War I, because of widespread socialist propaganda, because of the Russian Revolution, capitalism was widely viewed as discredited, inherently irrational, warlike and prone to constantly recurring crises. Socialism was widely seen as the only rational answer. Of course, Labour’s was a fake socialism. Nevertheless, ‘reforming’ clause four in 1994 was a hugely symbolic moment. Tony Blair and his New Labour clique wanted to reassure the establishment, the City, the Murdoch empire, the global plutocracy that capitalism would be absolutely safe in their hands. A New Labour government would not even pay lip service to what was in fact a British version of state capitalism.
Hence, while calls for a return of the old clause four are perfectly understandable, they are totally misplaced. We need to win Labour’s members and affiliates to look forward to a realisable future, not backwards to an unrealisable past. Labour needs to be refounded on the basis of an explicitly socialist, as opposed to a Fabian, programme. Then the Labour Party can, yes, become an organisation which “agitates and organises” for the revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism.
So, it is not enough - nowhere near enough - to get Corbyn elected or even bring forward the day when the “Blairites and pro-capitalists” jump ship. The Labour Party and the entire labour movement must be programmatically rearmed and thoroughly democratised. We want to make Labour into a common home for all workers and working class organisations - the goal of the founders of the party in 1900. A goal we should get Corbyn and his campaign to openly espouse. To use Leon Trotsky’s formulation, we seek to refound the Labour Party as a “permanent united front”. In Russia their name was soviets. In Germany Räte.
Not that the goal of socialism relies on refounding the Labour Party. It is a mass Communist Party that is vital. Nevertheless, under present-day conditions to prematurely give up on the Labour Party is in effect to give up on the working class. Historically - in terms of membership, finances and electoral base - the Labour Party has largely relied on the working class, as organised through the trade unions. And despite Blairism, New Labour, the abolition of the old clause four, Labour still remains a contradictory working class formation. To use Lenin’s well known phrase, Labour is a “bourgeois workers’ party”. The relationship with the trade unions was weakened by the Collins review and the 2014 special conference. Nevertheless, there are still 2.7 million affiliated members and, apart from Scotland, Labour’s working class core vote stood up well in the May general election. In point of fact, the Labour vote marginally grew.
Programme
So what sort of transformation should we fight for?
Labour needs to commit itself as a party to reviving the trade union movement. The fall from 12 million trade union members in the late 1970s to some seven million today can be reversed. Labour Party members should take the lead in recruiting masses of new trade unionists and restoring the strength of the unions in workplaces and society at large.
Strikes must be unashamedly supported. There ought to be a binding commitment on councillors, MPs and MEPs to back workers in their struggle to protect jobs, pensions and conditions. Those who refuse must be deselected. By the same measure anti-trade union laws will have to be defied.
In line with this strategy all trade unions should be encouraged to affiliate to the Labour Party. All trade union members should be obliged to pay the political levy to Labour and thereby join as individual members. Strangely, there has been opposition to this within the Labour Representation Committee and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. But it is merely a concrete application of the politics of working class collectivism.
Unions which have either been expelled or have disaffiliated need to be encouraged to reconsider: eg, the RMT and FBU. Moreover, there are unions which have never had an organised relationship with the Labour Party: eg, PCS and NUT. In point of fact, out of the 58 unions affiliated to the TUC only 15 are affiliated. Winning new affiliates would be entirely positive.
It is right to support the Corbyn campaign, but the post of leader as currently constituted must be abolished. While the Labour Party is obliged to fulfil the requirements laid down in the thoroughly undemocratic Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act (2000), the Führerprinzip can be left to the Tories, Scottish National Party, the Greens and Ukip. The leader of the Labour Party ought to be nothing more than a nominal position. Instead of a Bonaparte with the power to appoint shadow ministers, it is Labour’s NEC that should have responsibility for electing chairs of the PLP, shadow ministers, etc.
Moreover, while it is perfectly correct to make Labour Party membership affordable for those who are students, unemployed or are otherwise on low incomes, we need to reverse the drift towards US-style primaries. There must be a clear distinction between those who are members - with the right to elect, be elected and decide policy, etc - and those who are supporters or just plain Labour voters. Membership ought to be something to value, to be proud of.
Naturally, refounding the Labour Party cannot be separated from the fight to democratise the trade unions. All trade union officials ought to be subject to regular election and be recallable. No official should receive a salary higher than the average wage of their membership. Moreover, rules which serve to blunt, restrict or smother criticism must be junked.
Then there is the trade union vote at Labour Party conferences. It should not be cast by general secretaries, but proportionately, in accordance with the agreed political make-up of each delegation. We have no wish to go back to the days when conference was dominated by four or five men in suits.
All socialist and communist groups, leftwing and progressive campaigns ought to be allowed to affiliate. Towards that end, given the first opportunity, anything that smacks of bans and proscriptions must be rescinded. A whole raft of new affiliated socialist and other such organisations would not only bring thousands of new recruits: it would bring in many highly valuable men and women of talent. The culture of the Labour Party could that way be greatly enhanced.
The Parliamentary Labour Party can be brought into line. The situation where the Labour Party conference votes for one thing and the PLP does another must be ended forever. Conference must control, conference must be sovereign l
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Notes
1. http://leftunity.org/a-politics-we-all-share-jeremy-corbyns-campaign.
4. http://socialistresistance.org/7553/irreverent-defiance-is-part-of-the-answer.
5. http://leftunity.org/ask-not-what-you-can-do-for-jeremy.
6. CPGB Draft programme London 2011, p50.
7. www.socialistproject.org/statement-of-aims-and-principles.
8. Quoted in L MinkinThe Labour Party conference Manchester 1980, p295.
9. R Miliband Parliamentary socialism London 1973, p27.
10. See M Squires Saklatvala, a political biography London 1990.
Programme for Labour
Here are the aims and principles of Labour Party Marxists
1. The central aim of Labour Party Marxists is to transform the Labour Party into an instrument for working class advance and international socialism. Towards that end we will join with others and seek the closest unity of the left inside and outside the party.
2. Capitalism is synonymous with war, pollution, waste and production for its own sake. Attempts to rescue the system through Keynesian remedies are diversionary and doomed to fail. The democratic and social gains of the working class must be tenaciously defended, but capitalism must be superseded by socialism.
3. The only viable alternative is organising the working class into a political party and replacing the rule of the capitalist class with the rule of the working class.
4. The fight for trade union freedom, anti-fascism, women’s rights, sexual freedom, republican democracy and opposition to all imperialist wars is inextricably linked to working class political independence and the fight for socialism.
5. Ideas of reclaiming the Labour Party and the return of the old clause four are totally misplaced. From the beginning the party has been dominated by the labour bureaucracy and the ideas of reformism. The party must be refounded on the basis of a genuinely socialist programme, as opposed to social democratic gradualism or bureaucratic statism.
6. The aim of the party should not be a Labour government for its own sake. History shows that Labour governments committed to managing the capitalist system and loyal to the existing constitutional order create disillusionment in the working class.
7. Labour should only consider forming a government when it has the active support of a clear majority of the population and has a realistic prospect of implementing a full socialist programme. This cannot be achieved in Britain in isolation from Europe and the rest of the world.
8. Socialism is the rule of the working class over the global economy created by capitalism and as such is antithetical to all forms of British nationalism. Demands for a British road to socialism and a withdrawal from the European Union are therefore to be opposed.
9. Political principles and organisational forms go hand in hand. The Labour Party must become the umbrella organisation for all trade unions, socialist groups and pro-working class partisans. Hence all the undemocratic bans and proscriptions must be done away with.
10. The fight to democratise the Labour Party cannot be separated from the fight to democratise the trade unions. Trade union votes at Labour Party conferences should be cast not by general secretaries, but proportionately, according to the political balance in each delegation.
11. All trade unions should be encouraged to affiliate, all members of the trade unions encouraged to pay the political levy and join the Labour Party as individual members.
12. The party must be reorganised from top to bottom. Bring the Parliamentary Labour Party under democratic control. The position of Labour leader should be abolished along with the national policy forum. The NEC should be unambiguously responsible for drafting Labour Party manifestos.
13. The NEC should be elected and accountable to the annual conference, which must be the supreme body in the party. Instead of a tame rally, there must be democratic debate and binding votes.
14. Our elected representatives must be recallable by the constituency or other body that selected them. That includes MPs, MEPs, MSPs, AMs, councillors, etc. Without exception elected representatives should take only the average wage of a skilled worker, the balance being donated to furthering the interests of the labour movement.