05.01.2023
Unconscious cancel culture
Robust debate is vital. Tina Werkmann explains her departure from the Labour Representation Committee and Red Line TV
On January 2 2023 I resigned from the national executive of the Labour Representation Committee and the editorial board of Labour Briefing. I only agreed to join both organisations to help set up Red Line TV, which was an attempt to discuss the political issues of the day in an entertaining and challenging way. But, having resigned from the TV show - for reasons given below - I saw no reason to stay in the LRC.
Some comrades might find it ‘uncomfortable’, perhaps even a little ‘tasteless’ to air our grievances in front of the ‘political public’. I am not comfortable about it myself. But that said, I am convinced that the crucial political questions at play here should be discussed openly. Only in this way can we learn lessons from the ignominious defeat of the Corbyn project and its disastrous aftermath.
The LRC is now a living corpse. For some unfathomable reason, there are still monthly NEC meetings. These are borderline Kafkaesque. Sometimes statements are being discussed at length that are then not published anywhere. Or occasionally pop up months later. The statement on the war in Ukraine was an example of this.1
Similarly, motions about this or that activity, or an attempt to revive the LRC might be passed - without anybody actually responsible for implementation. I am not aware of any LRC branches that do anything, let alone meet. It’s like the LRC merely exists in order to … well, exist. A strange Potemkin village.
Both the LRC and its magazine, Labour Briefing, proved unable to galvanise any forces during or after the Corbyn years. This seems to have surprised comrades like Matt Wrack (general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union) and Ben Sellers, who quit the LRC NEC a few months before me. But it really should not have startled anyone. The LRC perfectly reflects the politics of the soft left Labourite Corbyn project.
That project - need we remind comrades - totally failed, almost from day one of Corbyn’s leadership. The key aim Corbyn shared with those leading the LRC was the attempt to build a ‘broad party’. This hopeless strategy led to the Corbynites appeasing the right, over and over again, to the bitter end. Comrades will recall how in his final days as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn tried to reward Tom Watson with a seat in the House of Lords. Yes, the same Tom Watson who was a key leader in the campaign to get rid of Corbyn.
You really could not make it up.
Momentum, of course. hoovered up most of the young and unorganised forces who were enthused by the Corbyn project. Momentum leader Jon Lansman and those around him pretty much had the same Labourite politics as the LRC - but much more drive and hugely more money, thanks to the tens of thousands who signed up for Corbyn and went straight into Lansman’s private database (which eventually got turned over to Momentum).
Struggling financially
Of course, these tens of thousands of members have dwindled to a couple of thousand (most of them entirely inactive and many no doubt unaware they still count as ‘members’). The recent decision of the ‘new’ leadership to continue to ban those who have been expelled from Labour will ensure that Momentum cannot be revived, and we hear that it is struggling financially - there is a bloated legacy bureaucracy that cannot be paid anymore. Good riddance.
True, the LRC published statements condemning the anti-Semitism smear campaign and sometimes reluctantly joined the actions taken by campaigns like Labour Against the Witchhunt and the Labour Left Alliance. But it also remained very much an integral part of the official Labour left, which was run into the opportunist ground by Momentum and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. The LRC continues to participate - largely uncritically - in the shockingly undemocratic Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance, which chooses soft left candidates for internal Labour elections. More principled groups like the LLA remain banned from the CLGA.
Most of the candidates chosen in those shady backroom deals - and their organisations - effectively did nothing to oppose the witch-hunt against the left. Scandalously, some even participated in it. A couple of mealy-mouthed statements that the ‘left’ members of Labour’s NEC put out tended to oppose the “unfair expulsions” in the latter stages of the witch-hunt. However, they did not dare mention the anti-Semitism smear campaign. Ditto the misnamed Socialist Campaign Group of MPs. At least not until it was way too late.
The socialist left and pro-Palestine campaigns will have to suffer the consequences of this spineless political capitulation for many years to come, for example, when it comes to the conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and the continuing cancel culture and attacks on free speech.
Red Line TV was an attempt - chiefly initiated by Graham Bash - to rescue the ‘tradition’ of Labour Briefing, a journal which he edited for many years. For health reasons, he has been unable to continue in that role. Because there was just nobody else who wanted to do it, the journal ceased publication. Admittedly, I had very little interest in continuing the Briefing tradition, which, despite comrade Bash’s sterling efforts to publish (slightly) opposing ideas on the Labour left, always tended to be a little on the dull side. I always thought it lacked a principled Marxist position, despite comrade Bash self-identifying as a revolutionary Marxist.
But I was very interested in developing and helping to run a Zoom show in a magazine format that could discuss the political issues of the day. I had worked closely with Jackie Walker in Labour Against the Witchhunt and had a particularly close political and personal relationship with Graham Bash during the Corbyn years. I think he is by far the best and most principled politician on the official Labour left and I respect him hugely. Also, for his unusual ability to think about issues and sometimes even change his views - an attribute scarce on our dogma-bound left.
I think our comradely disagreements over the role and perspectives of the Labour left initially made for interesting debates on Red Line TV. I enjoyed them immensely. But with the ongoing demise of the Labour left those differences became, perhaps inevitably, more serious.
I had felt for some time that Red Line TV lacked focus in terms of where the left should go now and how it should organise. I argued for an openly Marxist direction. But nobody on the editorial board (which also includes Norman Thomas and Mike Cowley) supported that.
Marxism, according to the logic of most of the Labour left which, unfortunately, also includes the comrades on the Red Line TV editorial board, is not for ‘now’. It is a tantalising Marxist wonderland that we must push to the back of our minds in order to build a “broad mass party” - which is usually to be “led by the trade unions”.
Of course, we need an active strategy towards the Labour Party and the unions. Both continue to be vital arenas of the class struggle; many advanced workers still see them as ‘their’ organisations.
But I think it is entirely wrong to subordinate our politics to the forces dominating both the unions and the Labour left. ‘The unions’ are characterised by bureaucratic leaderships that have very little interest in democratising their structures - who wants to see empowered members questioning whether a general secretary on a six-figure wage can really represent members who struggle on the minimum wage. Empowered members might also want to have a say in how their ‘representatives’ vote at Labour Party conference. The list goes on. Those in power in the unions have very little interest in shaking things up - unlike those below.
Campaigns like Enough is Enough exemplify the kind of organisations that ‘the unions’ will launch; politically tame and unprincipled, entirely undemocratic and without any possibility to challenge the political platform. For Marxists to rely on those forces to build “a broad mass party” is hopeless.
No, we should challenge them, politically and organisationally, as Marxists. Not pretend they have the answers - when we know very well that they do not. In the last analysis, that approach amounts to lying to the working class, rather than educating it.
This difference in political perspective became increasingly problematic for Red Line TV. Of the five members of the editorial board, I was the only one who thought we should not side-line Marxist politics, especially because most (if not all) of us self-identified as Marxists! But it became increasingly obvious that there were different interpretations of what Marx had to teach socialists. I was told in one editorial meeting that “you cannot go into a meeting with black people and start talking to them about Marxism”. My question of “why not?” was met with an eye roll.
Things came to a head after our December 5 show on ‘direct action’, in which radical anthropologist Chris Knight, a member of the Labour Briefing editorial board and another self-declared Marxist, stated at length and repeatedly that Marx and Engels really were just spontaneous activists, who only wrote stuff and “maybe a programme” when there was a “lull in the struggle”.2
What absolute nonsense. For a start, The Communist Manifesto was written in February 1848, when the huge revolutionary upheavals in Europe were taking off. Marx and Engels argued at length against the spontaneity of the anarchists, which led to the split of the First International. They wrote or critiqued party programmes for many organisations, including the German Social Democratic Party and the French Workers’ Party. I respect comrade Knight for the work he has done on the ‘human revolution’, but I think he did a disservice to Marx and Engels in that show and presented their whole approach in a false light. I challenged him during the show, but not to the degree I should (or could) have. It is quite difficult to make political points when you are the presenter.
I therefore proposed in the editorial meeting after the show that we should present and discuss some of Chris’ clips in the following ‘Have your Say’ programme. It was opposed by everybody as “unfair”. The other four members of the editorial board decided that we should not show those clips and instead invite Chris to “clarify” his views on Marxism. I think we should have done both, but reluctantly accepted that I had once again been outvoted.
Confidentiality
We had moved on to discussing the next show when Jackie Walker dropped what I thought was a bit of bombshell. Because I was so critical of Chris she felt obliged to state that “some people are refusing to come back on the show because of you, Tina”. When I asked who these people were or what they had said, I was told she could not reveal their names or reasons because of “confidentiality”. But the fact they did not want to come back on the show was “a serious problem” resulting from my “style”.
This concept of “confidentiality” is worth expanding upon. It is quite commonly used on the official Labour left, in the trade union bureaucracy and, of course, among the sects. We cannot possibly publish minutes of meetings, or let it be known which leading member said what or who proposed which amendments or why. The awful Chatham House rules, beloved by bureaucrats everywhere, spring to mind. ‘Confidentiality’ is used to hide the fact that there are political disagreements within our organisations. How could it be otherwise? Instead of arguing them out openly and in front of the working class, most of the left sees them as a sign of weakness.
Underlying this attitude is a deeply patronising and anti-democratic political outlook. Its premiss is that normal working class people simply cannot understand our disagreements, so best to pretend they don’t exist lest we befuddle the poor dopes.
When exactly will the working class be ‘grown up’ enough to understand those issues? Just before it is supposed to make the revolution? Afterwards perhaps? Or maybe most people will never ‘get it’ and therefore the enlightened few should run society on behalf of these bovine dolts … Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Jackie’s use of the phrase has the added problem that it smacks of managerialism. It is quite a common ploy that managers in the workplace will threaten trade union reps with ‘anonymous complaints’ made against them. Naturally, for reasons of ‘confidentiality’, they cannot reveal names, but the charges are always very serious. Any trade union rep worth their salt will tell the manager to put up or shut up.
Anything else is just not serious politics - and totally uncomradely. It was impossible for me to defend myself in the meeting because I did not know who had complained about me or why precisely. I challenged Jackie repeatedly to reveal the name, but she refused. I thought this was outrageous, but none of the other members of the editorial board raised any objections to her attack.
At this point, I (perhaps wrongly) walked out of the meeting and resigned from the editorial board when it had become clear that in fact the others supported Jackie’s actions. I could not see how to continue to front a political programme without being able to politically challenge guests. Or maybe challenge them ‘not quite as much’. That would make for a boring and pointless show, in my view.
I have since found out that Jackie was chiefly talking about ex-Labour MP Alan Simpson, who had been on the show three times and is held in high esteem by Jackie and Graham.
I must confess that I always found him a bit underwhelming politically. He is no doubt an expert in local and regional initiatives for alternative energy production and distribution. Those kind of initiatives and campaigns (for example to install solar panels on all newly built homes in Germany) are no doubt worthy. But by themselves, even if they are replicated by every local council and every government across the world, will not stop runaway climate change. They don’t even start to touch the capitalist mode of production, which, as Marxists know, is the reason for the impending climate catastrophe. All the local green initiatives in the world cannot offset the short-termism of the capitalist system in decline, which resorts to ever more irrationality the more unstable it becomes - with a World War III having now become a real possibility.
I have challenged Alan on what I believe are his political limitations. Without wanting to do him injustice, his whole argument seems to be based on the idea that you could sort of ‘work around’ capitalism, perhaps to maybe one day lead to its ‘soft abolition’ by people power from below, or some such nonsense. Marxists understand, firstly, that the capitalist mode of production is the reason that nature is being systematically degraded and that secondly, its abolition is therefore an absolute necessity if we want to avoid climate catastrophe and that thirdly, this requires the conscious intervention of the working class internationally.
Simpson seemed to take my pretty tame questions in good spirits3, but apparently he is more sensitive than he let on. I don’t believe his refusal to come back on the show while I’m around says a lot about my “style”, as Jackie claims - though of course comrades are free to check for themselves - but it says a lot about Alan’s “style” and his reluctance to be challenged politically. A trait not uncommon on the left, of course, but one that I thought Red Line TV was supposed to challenge. Incidentally, now that I have resigned, he appears to be able to come to the show and is one of the participants listed on the January 9 programme.
Red Line TV dedicated a number of shows to the issue of ‘cancel culture’ and the need for free speech. Again, there seem to have been different interpretations of both. Jackie has since clarified on Facebook what she thinks I had done wrong:
If you are making people who are being interviewed (people who are fundamentally on our side) feel you are disabling their expression, in an unfair way, that is a problem. Interesting that when we did have people we were all opposed to, G(raham) actually said you allowed them to speak very freely.
I must admit to having been a bit shocked by Jackie’s statement. I have fought alongside the comrade in LAW to expose and fight against exactly this kind of political approach. The rightwing Jewish Labour Movement claimed ad nauseum that “Jews feel unsafe” in the Labour Party because of Jeremy Corbyn, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Marc Wadsworth, etc, and so they needed to be witch-hunted and their voices cancelled. Other people allegedly “felt” that the presence of Lowkey at TUC conference would have “offended” them, and so he was disinvited. The list of such absurd allegations goes on; we all know them by heart now. And here Jackie applies exactly the same method to Red Line TV. This is the internalisation of cancel culture - by somebody who really should know better, having been a victim of this rightwing culture.
She also implies that those deemed vaguely “on our side” should somehow get a free pass and not be criticised - instead, we should focus on those we all “oppose”. I fundamentally disagree. It is very easy to show why David Miller was entirely wrong to characterise the protest movement in Iran as a government-sponsored plot, as he did in our show on October 17.4 He was taken apart by Yassamine Mather of Hands Off the People of Iran in particular. There was really no need to push much further - he had already done the job himself.
Alan Simpson, on the other hand, is held in high regard by Graham and Jackie - wrongly in my view, as I have explained. If long-standing, self-declared Marxists believe that his vision of a ‘green local capitalism’ is a viable alternative to real socialism, we should discuss and debate this - at length. Not treat Simpson with kid gloves, effectively patronising him. He and his ideas should be rigorously confronted.
Why Marx?
I have much respect for comrade Bash, but I don’t believe Red Line TV can survive (with any measurable success) with what I think is basically an apolitical and opportunist approach.
The culture of the new education and discussion series, Why Marx?, will hopefully be more robust. It brings together comrades from different political backgrounds, some in political organisations, some currently ‘unaffiliated’. But we are united in our desire to discuss and debate issues around Marxism, even and in particular those issues where we disagree. Our aim is to help rebuild the Marxist left on a sound political basis, which - sooner rather than later - requires us to build a democratic, Marxist party with a principled programme. Our tasks are urgent and immense - which is why we need political clarity and democratic organisation.
The series on Zoom starts on January 26 and you can find an overview of the first eight sessions, reading recommendations and information on how to register on our website: www.whymarx.com/sessions. It also contains a short ‘mission statement’. This outlines our broad shared general outlook, though there are many areas where we disagree. Again, we don’t believe that’s a problem, quite the opposite. Join us in this important journey!
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The videos of Alan Simpson’s appearances on Red Line TV are here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJnonfyWz4s; and www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y-NY87IugA; and www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNf46VyB7k8.↩︎