08.09.2016
An army for socialism
William Sarsfield reports on the latest aggregate of CPGB and LPM members
While attendance at the September 4 aggregate was a little thin on the ground, the general consensus at the end of the day was that it had been a useful meeting - particularly the main item on the Labour Party, introduced by comrade Jack Conrad. In the lead-up to the meeting, two comrades had contributed a discussion piece to this section of the agenda, addressing issues around the impact of Labour Party Marxists and possible organisational initiatives that could be undertaken amongst the Labour left.
Comrade Conrad took up this contribution at the end of his opening, but he began with more general observations, stating that “there is a lot to say on the Labour Party, but also very little at the same time”. This was because until we know the result of the Labour leadership contest on September 24 we are working to a political template that will soon be very out-of-date. So he began with what he anticipated would be a pretty uncontroversial observation in the room: “barring divine intervention”, he ventured, Corbyn seemed on course for another convincing victory. Even some of the mainstream press are now predicting a “crushing landslide” for the incumbent leader, conceding defeat in advance for their unrelenting smear campaigns against him and the left of the party. This is also despite the fact that the rightwing fifth column has pulled out all the stops to rig the leadership election.
Thousands of members have been suspended or purged from the party. Who knows how many? Perhaps not even the purgers themselves, who appear unconcerned by trifles like evidence, due process or perhaps logging numbers. In an echo of the casual irrationality of a purge from another time, today’s mini-Berias have levelled some truly perverse charges against some comrades. The rickety charges of “anti-Semitism” being thrown around are bad enough, comrade Conrad noted, but now an effusive Twitter appreciation of the merits of that post-grunge combo, the Foo Fighters, has been deemed ‘offensive’ and reason for the suspension of a Labour member.1 Registered supporters were hit with a spike in fees before being allowed a vote - and a miserly 48-hour period in which to register. Over 100,000 members were disenfranchised, when a January 12 cut-off date for joining the party was imposed, after which new members would not get a vote.
There was an irony in this, the comrade noted. A ‘probationary’ period before new recruits were allowed to vote in internal Labour elections was something that was lost when a raft of proposals from the right of the party (contained in the report of Lord Ray Collins2) was passed in 2014. These - alongside measures designed to weaken the influence of the trade union movement and (ironically) strengthen the grip of the Parliamentary Labour Party - introduced the new category of ‘registered supporter’, with the right to vote in leadership and deputy leadership elections.
So this was an innovation which - coupled with the happy accident of the ‘moronic’ largesse of some Labour MPs who ‘lent’ their votes to Corbyn - was actually an initiative of the right, a move they believed would consolidate its grip. Labour Party Marxists, along with correspondents in the Weekly Worker, had actually opposed this whole ‘registered supporter’ concept at the time, comrade Conrad reminded his audience: it was clearly an attempt to swamp the Labour left and trade unions with unorganised individuals who would be “completely open to manipulation” by the bourgeois press.
Of course, our opposition to the original organisational innovation notwithstanding, we say that people who have joined with the promise of a vote should now be allowed a vote. However, comrade Conrad underlined that the bigger point illustrated by this rather sordid tale of the inept intrigues of the Labour rightwingers and their media puppet-masters is the out-of-touch nature of the elite. Initiatives such as the ‘registered supporter’ wheeze produce the exact opposite of what is intended, introducing enormous volatility.
The right looks totally clueless, the comrade noted. Some - illustrating their essential nature as freebooting careerists - are trying to scurry back into line, “shitting themselves” at the prospect of having to face a vengeful membership, come the reselection that will be occasioned by the national boundary changes in 2018. However, we should not discount the possibility of the ‘nuclear option’ by the PLP, the comrade warned - a breakaway and successful legal challenge that sees the right attempt to claim ownership of the whole kit ’n’ caboodle: the party’s offices, its financial assets and the designation of official opposition in parliament (with the financial benefits that would entail), etc. However, this would surely be a suicidal swoop and end in electoral wipe-out for most of them.
Obstacles
Careerists always require a ‘plan B’ and comrade Conrad confessed that he could not see a viable one. Which is intensely pleasing, of course … So deselection still looms for many of them and - while that act of retribution for the treachery of these people will be agreeable - comrade Conrad warned that major obstacles still remained to the left asserting itself properly in the party.
He noted first that despite the huge influx of Corbyn supporters into the party, the right maintains its hold over the organisation’s structures at a local as well as national level. Owen Smith has support amongst the old membership, and so the bulk of Constituency Labour Parties around the country remain in the hands of anti-Corbyn types - eg, councillors and others with years of experience in the party. From this position, they can attempt to strangle the life out of the new forces that are joining - with the active connivance of the Labour machine. They have the big advantage over the younger, rawer comrades of knowing the party rule book back to front - and how it can be used and abused to suffocate meetings in dull procedure, stifle initiative from below, rule critical motions out of order, etc.
Second, they are aided in this seedy enterprise by the nature of Corbyn supporters themselves - whatever their merits, they are also “naive, eclectic, easily tipped off balance”, the speaker noted. Earnest, committed and “our sort of people” though they may be, the comrade bluntly stated that their calibre simply was not of the same order as “the tempered cadre of the 1920s”, for example. In the later discussion other comrades agreed that this was a massive political weakness, favourably contrasting the left’s cultural levels and ‘hardness’ even of the 1980s to today’s situation. The huge defeats of the movement in the 20th century had produced “a degradation of cadre”, as one guest at the aggregate put it.
Third, there is the feeble nature of the group that has shouldered the task of moulding this human raw material into a fighting force, Momentum. Its website tries to lay out a stall as an organisation founded to “build on the energy and enthusiasm from the Jeremy Corbyn for Labour Leader campaign to increase participatory democracy, solidarity, and grassroots power and help Labour become the transformative governing party of the 21st century”.3 In truth, comrade Conrad bluntly stated, it has so far “totally failed” this test. A depressingly familiar example of this is the way the organisation’s first major public gathering seems to be shaping up. The World Transformed event has the taste of something styled to flatter the movementist, “pre-Corbyn idiocy” of the left.4
Lastly, we have the unfortunate problem that ‘shit sticks’. Amongst wide layers of the public, it has become almost axiomatic that the Labour Party is jam-packed with anti-Semites, racists and sexist online bullies. The establishment - via its mass-media outlets - has made this calumny common sense for masses of people.
In these fraught circumstances for Labour, a canny politician like Theresa May must be tempted by an early general election, comrade Conrad thought (a conviction that comrades challenged in the following discussion). A wipe-out of 1930s-plus proportions would beckon for Labour, he thought - with or without a split. Even if that scenario does not unfold, the comrade branded optimistic talk of Labour’s governmental prospects in 2020 as “totally wrongheaded”, having the effect of dragging leftwingers to the right. Witness how the urgent concern to corral the “centre ground” for Labour (a piece of “Blairite, triangulation bullshit”, the speaker gently suggested) has propelled ex-Trots like Paul Mason to the right at a dizzy pace. Ditto Owen Jones. And, more importantly, ditto Corbyn and McDonnell, of course - witness the backtracking on Ireland, the concessions to the ‘anti-Semitism’ provocations, Trident, etc. The pressure on them comes from the right, not the left.
Huge changes on the left are actually required - the question of who forms the next government is entirely secondary. Given the scale of these absolutely indispensable tasks - plus the fact that, as the Financial Times reports and the Virgin Trains ‘jam-packed’ fiasco illustrates - big business now has no compunction at all about opening up on Labour - it has discounted the possibility of the party forming a government in the foreseeable future. Comrade Conrad (who is no octogenarian) reckoned he could well not see another Labour government in his lifetime.
Our main emphasis must be on the wholesale reformation of the Labour Party from bottom to top. To put into practice Keir Hardie’s ‘Kautskyite’ maxim that Labour must be about building an “army for socialism”, rather than a narrowly parliamentary party. Intrinsic to this is transforming the left and the re-education of new generations of working class politicians, layers that will form the raw material not simply for a Labour Party that is a united front of the working class, but also for a reforged Communist Party itself - our key project.
Lastly, the comrade turned to the discussion document submitted by two comrades active in Momentum and Labour.
Comrade Conrad opined that to launch anything like a ‘Democracy Platform’ for Momentum now would be “disastrously premature” (this was discussed in the document in general terms, but with no launch date floated). It is essential to get the lie of the land in the aftermath of the Labour conference in Liverpool, the speaker emphasised. Momentum’s already obvious inertia could prevail and the organisation might simply disappear. On the other hand, such an initiative “could be worthwhile” - it was impossible to say at this stage. We will have to wait “for the dust to settle”.
The comrade restated the view of the leadership of the CPGB, that any suggestion of launching LPM as a wider organisation would also be premature. There has been a “trickle” of interest in the campaign thus far, so, while it was not necessary to “wait for a flood”, simply rebranding the existing small forces around the project would be playing with imaginary soldiers. More than that, it would be to waste the opportunity to make a more dramatic impact when we do deploy more forces.
Also, there would be no question of getting from A to B by watering down the basic principles of LPM. We would defend these as the basis for unity for any new, ‘wider’ organisation - even if we had the requirement to “accept” them, rather than agree. “We are fighting for our politics,” the comrade underscored. “Therefore talk of ‘broad platform’ or ‘broad front’-type organisations is something we are utterly opposed to.”
Debate
In the discussion that followed, comrades implicitly recognised it was hard to talk in detailed form about the post-conference situation in Labour - the contributions tended to focus on what was concretely on the table in front of them in the form of the discussion document. The two authors of the document emphasised that it was prompted by two concerns:
- The lack of visibility of the LPM as currently constituted, not an appetite for a broad, ‘popular’ front-style lash-up with others at the expense of principles.
- The desire to engage with others on the left we encounter to radically overhaul Momentum, transforming it into a useful vehicle for the fight within Labour. Having democratic structure in this organisation is a key element of this; hence the tentative discussion of a ‘Democracy Platform’ in the document and - as the two authors agreed with Jack Conrad - there was no question at all of some hurried launch of a broader campaign.
In the view of this writer, the discussion around the questions and criticisms raised by this initiative were extremely useful in clarifying issues and a considerable degree of agreement actually emerged. All sides emphasised that the real strength of LPM is not its qualities as a ‘news hub’ for people to catch up on detailed developments in the internal civil war: it is the strategic vision it brings to the table, the historical view of what the Labour Party started as, why it changed for the worse and the type of politics it needs to be useful to the working class again. We are “in the propaganda stage” of our development, comrade Conrad emphasised in a discussion contribution, “not agitation”.5 Plus, all LPM material has to be (a) produced despite a paucity of writers and (b) it must go through an editorial process to ensure it was informed and politically accurate commentary.
A comrade reminded the meeting that one of our previous publications, The Leninist, was a paper that did combine propaganda with agitational material, although the point was accepted that the main task of both the LPM bulletin and this earlier paper was strategic, propagandist intervention. At the end of the discussion, some practical suggestions were adopted which should facilitate more material - suitably edited - finding its way on to the LPM web site.
The last aggregate item was an assessment of this year’s Communist University, our annual school. Some practical gripes and suggestions were reiterated from the assessment session at the end of the school itself,6 but I felt the most important new point raised was the lack of fringe meetings at this year’s event. Despite their sometimes patchy quality, a number of speakers emphasised their political and cultural importance to us: they show in a modest way that we really do intend to make this an annual ‘festival of ideas’ for the left. The absence of a fringe at this year’s event was a weakness we must address for 2017.
Notes
1. See www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/labour-membership-appeal-leadership-election-compliance-unit_uk_57c54b46e4b094071b4c8d8e.
2. See Weekly Worker February 20 2014.
3. www.peoplesmomentum.com.
4. September 24-27, Liverpool - theworldtransformed.org.
5. At this stage in the meeting, the comrade cited the classic definition of these terms from Plekhanov: “A propagandist presents many ideas to one or a few persons; an agitator presents only one or a few ideas, but he presents them to the mass of people” (Quoted in VI Lenin CW Vol 5, Moscow 1977, p409).
6. See ‘Serious and open debate’ Weekly Worker August 25 2016.