06.08.2015
Confusion and disarray
In light of Corbyn’s success the left needs to seriously examine why it gets the Labour Party so wrong, says Jack Conrad
Once Jeremy Corbyn got past the gatekeepers in the Parliamentary Labour Party and secured 35 nominations, his present front-ranking position was eminently predictable.1 Thanks to the 2014 Collins report, the leadership contest is ‘One member, one vote’. There was, additionally, the introduction of the £3 registered supporter and individual votes for all affiliates. Mimicking US primaries - in order to keep the right permanently in the saddle - power was to be handed to the opinion-forming Murdoch empire, Trinity Mirror, The Guardian, etc. Of course, the whole modernisation package, agreed at the March 2014 special conference, spectacularly backfired … against the right. Because of a serious miscalculation, in particular by the Burnham camp, Corbyn sneaked through with ‘borrowed’ votes … and thereby changed the character of the entire contest.
Getting Corbyn onto the ballot was an historical accident that came about from above. But, once he was there, his campaign was bound to attract wide support. Who - apart from craven careerists - would vote for the three Blairite candidates? Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall are inseparably trite, anaemic and transparently insincere in their sincerity. Corbyn, on the other hand, is that rare thing in Westminster: he is a conviction politician. Instead of going with the flow, carefully triangulating his message and concocting a stream of believable lies, Corbyn actually says what he thinks.
Corbyn is backed by the Unite, Unison, CWU, TSSA, Aslef and BFAWU unions. And, of course, many tens of thousands have flooded into the Labour Party with the explicit intention of voting for him. Nor do the results of the constituency nominations - which would on balance tend to reflect more conservative opinion than the new membership influx - come as any surprise. Corbyn stood way ahead with 152, followed by Cooper, who has 111, Burnham with 109, and the far-right Kendall on just 18. The bookies, who once rated Corbyn as a 100-1 outsider, now have him as the 11-10 favourite. Psephologists reckon the final result, due to be announced at the Brighton special conference on September 12, will see Corbyn on 53% and Burnham on 47%.
Needless to say, that result should not be taken for granted. There are still a few days left for the Corbyn campaign to sign up yet more Labour Party members, supporters and affiliated trade unionists. They are very much needed. The single transferable vote system is unlikely to benefit Corbyn. Most of the second and third preferences will go to one of his opponents. More than that, Corbyn faces a tsunami of negative media publicity. The press is already full of silly stories about communist infiltration, former wives, Hamas friends and Lenin caps. Worse, far worse, will come.
As an aside, it is worth asking why. After all, the Sun, Express, Telegraph, Mail, etc, are partisans of the Conservative Party. According to their version of political common sense, a Corbyn leadership will make the Labour Party unelectable for 20 years. So how to explain the muck-racking, the black propaganda, the reds-under-the-bed nonsense? If they really want a Corbyn victory, they ought to be running stories about what a nice chap he is and how Burnham, Cooper and Kendall are horrible creeps. True, a few deluded Tories have signed up as registered supporters. However, besides the attempt to discredit the Labour Party as a whole,there is inchoate fear. Read the comments of the Tory grandee, Ken Clarke,2 Mathew D’Ancona, former Spectator editor,3 and TheDaily Telegraph’s Allister Heath. Here we find the thoughtful wing of the bourgeoisie.
Ever since October 1917 the more astute servants of the ruling class have known that capitalism was under mortal threat. The 2008 economic crisis might not yet have resulted in a revival of the socialist politics of the working class. However, it has generated a widespread rejection of neoliberal capitalism. Therefore, “Britain needs as many pro-capitalist parties as it can get”, argues Heath. His reasoning is interesting. Given “the free-market counterrevolution of the 1970s and 1980s” and then the collapse of the Soviet Union, it seemed to him that socialism had “finally been killed off”. But the battle of ideas was “never won”. Hence:
It would therefore be a disaster for Britain, were Jeremy Corbyn to become leader of the Labour Party. He is an unreconstructed socialist and an early 1980s-style Labour Party would have a disastrous effect on opinion, even if Mr Corbyn himself never even got close to winning an election.
It would become acceptable again to call for nationalising vast swathes of industry, for massively hiking tax and for demonising business. The centre-ground would move inexorably towards a more statist position. How would the Tories react if Mr Corbyn were to call for a minimum wage of £10 or £12 by 2020, against their £9? Or if he called for the nationalisation of electricity or rail companies?
It would also become far harder for them to reform trade unions: instead of being opposed by a relatively sensible centre-left party, a Corbynite Labour Party would herald a return to the ultra-confrontational 1980s. Class war, extreme language and nonsensical positions would all be back. Mr Corbyn may help the Tories win the next election - but he would poison the political debate and ensure that rabid, economically illiterate ideas dominated the airwaves. A Corbyn-led Labour Party would be a disaster for the pro-capitalist cause.4
We do not need to go along with Heath’s dubious history, his equating socialism with state intervention, etc. Nevertheless, it would be foolish to dismiss the general thrust of his argument. A Corbyn victory would shift the centre of political gravity in Britain radically to the left and give focus to simmering working class discontent.
Left
It is therefore more than a pity that a swathe of what passes for the ‘Marxist’ left in this country has been wrong-footed, has been surprised by the actuality of the Corbyn campaign; considers it a danger, even an existential threat. Taken together, perhaps the most notable Corbyn-sceptics are the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party in England and Wales and the Independent Socialist Network. Three organisations grouped under the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition umbrella - a Labour Party mark two project - whose 135 candidates in the May 2015 general election won a homeopathic vote for what were anyway thoroughly watered-down, reformist politics.
In defence of Tusc and building a “credible left alternative to Labour”, Charlie Kimber, SWP national secretary, warns that there is “a real danger that Corbyn’s campaign can turn people back to the worm-eaten project of transforming Labour”.5
A sentiment echoed by Peter Taaffe, SPEW’s general secretary. Though he does not quite express outrage at Corbyn’s success, he does say this:
[W]e do not believe that he will succeed in reclaiming Labour as a political weapon for the workers’ movement. Any attempt to foster illusions that his challenge could do this is a dead end. The process has gone too far, transforming Labour into a British version of the Democrats in the USA.
The expunging of clause four (part four) of Labour’s constitution, which enshrined the movement’s socialist aspiration, and the erosion of the trade unions’ role within the party, are not of recent vintage, but go back to the 1990s. They were preceded by the wholesale persecution - including expulsions - of the left for standing up to the Tories, fighting the poll tax, and so on. Labour councils have ‘passed on’ savage cuts, often without lifting a finger to protect workers.
Not surprisingly, this is an argument loyally repeated by Ed Potts, a member of the ISN steering committee. In a gallant attempt to save the ridiculous Tusc project, he too warns against being “swept up” in the excitement over Corbyn. 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”.6
Incidentally, though Tusc has only one lone trade union affiliate, the semi-detached Rail, Maritime and Transport union, it, in effect, owns the organisation because it has veto rights over policy. Note, Tusc has no branches, no individual members. In fact, it is less democratic than today’s Labour Party.
What about the “real owners” of the Labour Party? Would the election of Corbyn as the leader really benefit the “Blairites and pro-capitalists”? Hardly - unless, that is, you happen to think that a massive split in the Parliamentary Labour Party serves the “Blairites and pro-capitalists”. If that was the case, it is hard to explain why Tony Blair, Alan Johnston, Chris Leslie, etc have been issuing dire warnings about a Corbyn victory. It ought to be stressed that, as things stand at the moment, Blairite defectors have nowhere to go politically … apart from the Tory Party. They therefore fight tooth and nail to save their party from the left in order to save their careers. Meanwhile Unite, Unison, Aslef, TSSA, CWU and BFAWU are not backing Burnham, Cooper or Kendall. No, of course, they are backing Corbyn.
Then, firmly ensconced in Left Unity, but tempted by the Greens, we have Socialist Resistance, an organisation affiliated to the so-called Fourth International, otherwise known as Resisting Socialism. Despite being committed entryists in the early 1980s - the comrades were known as the Socialist League, aka Socialist Action - nowadays they too warn of fostering illusions in the Labour Party, an organisation which is branded “part of the problem” (editorial statement). Expectations are instead 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. Here lies the “strategic dilemma”.7 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 rather pointless Pyrrhic one.
What about the aged nostalgics of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain? General secretary Robert Griffiths wrote a three-part article in 2014 which, despite the Aesopian language, basically advocated a Labour Party mark two.8 Why? Because with the acceptance of the Collins review “the Labour Party decided to embark on what might well be the final stage of its mutation into a non-labour party.” What a profound insight. But nothing compared with Socialist Appeal. After breaking with Peter Taaffe 25 years ago over Militant’s ‘open turn’, Alan Woods and his followers abandoned the “discredited” Labour Party a year ago for the delights of Scottish nationalism and in England and Wales the Greens.9 Finally, there are organisations and publications such as the Socialist Party of Great Britain, Revolutionary Communist Group, Spiked, Salvage, Lalkar, etc. All dismiss the Labour Party as a rotting corpse.
For example, having been booted out of the now forgotten and unlamented International Socialist Network, Richard Seymour writes in the first edition of his glossy new publication, Salvage, that the Labour Party is undergoing an irreversible process of Pasokification. The May 2015 general election was “about the collapse of the Labour Party, of labour-movement politics and more generally of representative politics: precisely as I warned.” As a result, there is “no hope in the Labour Party. It has neither the political will nor the resources to reconstitute itself, nor would it have a clue how to do so if it did. The left has to accept reality, and move on.”10
Comrade Seymour clearly imagines himself to be a political sage, but life, in the form of the Corbyn campaign, shows differently.
Obviously the Communist Party of Great Britain has significant differences with Jeremy Corbyn. Our Draft programme (2011) stands firmly within the tradition of the German Social Democratic Party, the Russian Socialist Democratic Labour Party and the French Workers Party. By contrast, while Corbyn advocates many eminently supportable demands, there is an acceptance of the existing constitutional order. Corbyn calls himself a republican, but does not consider the abolition of the monarchy a priority. Nor does he propose to sweep away the standing army, the police, the judiciary and the secret service, and usher in a radical democratisation of society. Thankfully Corbyn does not line up with those calling for a British withdrawal from the European Union, but his socialism is fundamentally national. Yet despite having many criticisms we unhesitatingly want a thumping Corbyn majority. It would trigger a civil war in the Labour Party and, yes, shift politics in Britain to the left.
Umpteen times
It is perfectly understandable why some consider Corbyn’s campaign a confounded nuisance. After all, it makes a mockery of all the Labour Party mark two projects and exposes all the premature obituaries about Labour being dead, being just another pro-capitalist party, etc.
Yet the fact of the matter is that the death of the Labour Party has been announced umpteen times before. Three examples will suffice.
- Between 1907 and 1914 the Labour Party’s performance in parliament was so dismal that many concluded it had no future. Acting as the tail of the Liberal Party, Labour had few distinct political positions. Kier Hardie himself complained that the Labour Party “had ceased to count: the press ignores it, cabinet ministers give concession to the Tory Party and to the Irish, seemingly oblivious to the fact that there was a Labour Party in the House”.11 Ramsay MacDonald publicly questioned whether the party might be better off working as a ginger group within the Liberal Party. Under these circumstances the great industrial unrest of 1910-14 completely bypassed Labour. Ben Tillet, the dockers’ leader, wrote a pamphlet with a giveaway title: Is the Parliamentary Labour Party a failure? He ridiculed parliament as a farce, and the Labour Party as impotent and terrified by the militant struggle of workers.
- At Stalin’s prompting, in 1928, the official CPGB adopted the politics of the so-called third period. Capitalism was said to be in terminal crisis and the Labour Party had been fundamentally transformed. It was dead as a workers’ party. It had become a “third capitalist party”. There were attempts to get unions to disaffiliate and calls for workers to stop paying the political levy. All social democratic parties were damned as being a “twin” of fascism.12
- In the late 1960s and early 1970s many left groups took an ‘open turn’. The International Socialists, Workers Revolutionary Party and International Marxist Group all emerged out of the bowels of Labour. There were many radical-sounding editorials about the end of delusions in the Labour Party and building the revolutionary alternative.
We communists do not talk about ‘reclaiming’ Labour. It was never ours. No, the Labour Party, despite its working class electoral base and trade union affiliations, has been dominated throughout its history by professional politicians, who act fully in the spirit and interests of the capitalist class. 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 a defining socialist moment. 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. The Labour Party might have junked its old liberalism, but “what had replaced it was not socialism, but Labourism” (Ralph Miliband13). Shorn of its rhetoric, clause four was a Fabian blueprint for capitalism without capitalists.
Admittedly, clause four came about 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 sensible answer. Of course, Labour’s was a fake socialism. Nevertheless. ‘reforming’ clause four in 1995 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 forwards to a realisable future, not backwards to a dubious 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, educates and organises’ for the revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism.14
So, it is not enough - nowhere near enough - to get Corbyn elected or even bring forward the day when the Blairites and pro-capitalists are driven out. The Labour Party and the entire labour movement must be politically 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. In Chile cordones. In Iran shoras.
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 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 remains a contradictory working class formation. To use Lenin’s well known phrase, Labour is still a “bourgeois workers’ party”.15 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 last general election. In point of fact the Labour vote marginally grew.
Transformation
So what sort of transformation should we fight for?16
The labour movement needs its own mass media. Nowadays that must include TV and radio stations. Once there was the Daily Herald; now there is nothing. Relying on the favours of the bourgeois press and media worked splendidly for the smarmy Tony Blair. But we should expect nothing but lies, distortion and implacable opposition. The dull-as-dishwater publications of the trade union bureaucracy and the confessional sects are a model of what not to do. They just turn people off. But a media which encourages debate, which deals with difficult questions, is another matter.
Labour needs to commit itself as a party to reviving the trade union movement. The fall from 12 million 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. Picket lines respected. 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 union members should be obliged pay the political levy to the Labour Party 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 an elementary principle of working class solidarity.
Unions which either have been expelled or have disaffiliated need to be encouraged to reconsider: eg, the RMT and FBU (both now supporting Corbyn). 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 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 leftto 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 voters. Membership of the Labour Party 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 hide criticism must be scrapped.
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, all the undemocratic 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 men and women of talent. The culture of the Labour Party could that way be greatly enhanced.
The Parliamentary Labour Party must be brought into line. The situation where the Labour conference votes for one thing and the PLP does another should be ended forever. There must be democratic control from below.
Labour Party ward and constituency organisations will continue to wither if they remain under the thumb of regional organisers and are expected to act as mere conduits for the Brewers Green HQ. Instead they can be made into hubs of local debate, organisation and action. Local autonomy enlivens, educates and lays the firm ground for working class self-liberation.
As is well known, Labour members feel deeply alienated by the undemocratic rules and structures put in place by Blair. The Joint Policy Committee, the National Policy Forums, the whole rigmarole has demonstrably failed. Instead of tinkering with them, they should be done away with. The NEC must be unambiguously responsible for drafting Labour Party manifestoes. And, of course, the NEC needs to be fully accountable to conference.
The happy-clappy rallies designed for TV producers are an insult to the intelligence. Labour’s officials and shadow ministers ought to report to conference as servants of the movement. So no more preening media stars, no more control-freakery, no more business lobbyists, promotions and exhibits. An authoritative, honest, no-holds-barred conference would certainly guarantee an immediate increase in CLP delegates.
As with the trade unions, Labour’s elected representatives must be recallable by the constituency or other body that selected them. That includes MPs, MEPs, MSPs, AMs, councillors, etc.
Likewise, without exception, elected representatives should take only the average wage of a skilled worker. When it comes to existing salaries, the balance should be given to the party. On current figures, that means around £40,000 from each MP (at present they are only obliged to pay the £82 parliamentarians’ subscription rate). That would give a substantial fillip to Labour’s finances. In ought to be a basic principle that our representatives live like workers, not pampered, middle class careerists.
Notes
1. See reports of our CPGB members’ aggregates and my recent Weekly Worker articles.
2. Huffington Post August 3 2015.
4. The Daily Telegraph July 31 2015.
5. Socialist Worker July 28 2015.
6. http://leftunity.org/ask-not-what-you-can-do-for-jeremy.
7. http://socialistresistance.org/7553/irreverent-defiance-is-part-of-the-answer.
8. See Robert Griffiths, ‘Is Labour still a Labour Party?’ Morning Star April 22-24 2014.
9. In Defence of Marxism October 27 2014.
10. www.salvage.zone/election.html (Salvage July 2015).
11. R Miliband Parliamentary socialism London 1973, p29.
12. R Palme Dutt Fascism and the social revolution London 1934, p150.
13. R Miliband Parliamentary socialism London1973, p61.
14. Leon Trotsky argued that “events” will expose the backwardness of Labour’s reformist leaders. “Much less time will be needed to turn the Labour Party into a revolutionary one than was necessary to create it” (L Trotsky Writings on Britain Vol 2, London 1974, p38).
15. Speaking on the need for the newly formed CPGB to affiliate to the Labour Party Lenin says this:
“[W]hether or not a party is really a political party of the workers does not depend solely upon a membership of workers, but also upon the men that lead it, and the content of its actions and its political tactics. Only this latter determines whether we really have before us a political party of the proletariat.
“Regarded from this, the only correct, point of view, the Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers with the aid of the British Noskes and Scheidemanns” (VI Lenin CW Vol 31, pp257-58).
16. What follows is based on the ‘Theses on the Labour Party’, adopted by the July 4 2009 aggregate of CPGB members.