11.11.1999
Opportunity
Party notes
Livingstone’s London mayoral candidacy in 2000 offers a window of opportunity to the left. Speculation is now rife that Blair’s rigged selection board will block him.
Even at this late hour, however, some members of the carefully chosen 13-strong selection board are meant to be wavering. They are being strong-armed by Blair’s closest advisors, who are pointing to an 18-year history of Livingstone’s congenital dissent and trouble-making, expressed most recently in his attacks on the prime minister and calls for the sacking of Gordon Brown.
Labour’s apparatus is clearly very jittery. It is anxious not to even allow Livingstone to get as far as the electoral college, which gives equal voting weight to London Labour Party members, the MEPs, MPs and assembly candidates, and trade unions.
The controversy surrounding Dobson’s privileged access to membership lists and financial backing also underlines the Blairites’ vulnerability. The contempt the apparatus is showing for democracy is recognised by Labour members - and clearly deeply resented by them. Commenting in The Guardian of November 8 on the flimsy explanations initially offered by the Dobson campaign camp as to how it came to obtain London membership records, Chris Willis was intrigued: “Frank Dobson claims the addresses were given to him by sympathetic MPs,” he noted. “Funny, that. I’ve had two letters from him, and my MP is Ken Livingstone.”
Both sides are clearly playing high risk politics. A crude exclusion of Livingstone from the electoral college stage poses the real possibility of a substantial split in the capital’s 69,000 Labour members. On the other hand, if the man makes the short list, there is no guarantee of the Millbank gerrymandering working and Dobson romping home as winner.
Livingstone himself has indicated that he will “mobilise a campaign” if excluded from the shortlist. He is sufficiently astute and sophisticated to understand that a failed attempt to run for London mayor as an independent - in the absence of major working class struggles or political unrest - could spell the end of his career in bourgeois politics.
There is no question that at this juncture any Livingstone bid for mayor must be enthusiastically backed by the left. We must pledge ourselves to do this whether he stands as an independent or formally as the ‘official’ Labour candidate. Surely it must be obvious to anyone that if ‘Red Ken’ wins the nomination, it will be a blow against Blairism. In its own distorted and inarticulate way, this will at the same time be a manifestation of mass discontent and disillusionment with the Labour government and its attacks on living standards and democratic rights.
Until now, this discontent has taken the form of a weary resignation and an alienation from politics in general, rather than militant action. A Livingstone candidacy could provide the catalyst. There are already plans from some - particularly in transport - to support alternative candidates to those of new Labour. At a meeting on November 9, the Campaign Against Tube Privatisation took the initial decision to stand a slate in next year’s Greater London assembly elections.
There is no question that Livingstone’s politics are simply inadequate from the point of view of the working class. Comrades who make this the beginning and end of their assessment are fundamentally mistaken, however.
The mass of people who voted for Ken - especially after an intense struggle with Blair administration - would have qualitatively different illusions to those of 1997, when a massive mandate was delivered. Whatever foolish notions cluttered their heads, they would be registering a left protest against the government and against the ravages of the market that New Labour is so keen to promote. More than that, Livingstone could provide the focal point to move millions into political action.
Given our severely weakened state, the left - inside and outside Labour - has no ability to influence the outcome of the struggle now taking place in front of us. But any revolutionary or communist who did not do everything in their power to promote such a development, to merge with any movement that resulted from it in fact, is a sectarian and useless to the class.
On a deeper level, the furore over Livingstone raises once more the question of the nature of the Labour Party itself. Over the last few years, we have speculated about its changing nature. This is a highly complex question, so those of our critics who have mocked us for not producing neat definitive answers reveal nothing but their own theoretical shallowness.
Labour - as a bourgeois workers’ party - evolved in a century that has seen the progressive political integration of the proletariat. The organisational vehicles for this have primarily been the Labour Party and ‘official communism’.
After the cataclysmic defeats of our class in this terrible century, culminating in the ignominious collapse of bureaucratic socialism in the USSR and Eastern Europe, we have seen the disappearance of the working class as any sort of independently organised political entity on the contemporary scene. The examples of this are legion - the demise of the Communist Party, the ongoing liquidationist crisis drowning the left, the removal of clause four from the constitution of Labour being just some of the most dramatic.
Historically, the relationship between left and right in the Labour Party has been essentially symbiotic. The right has presented the ‘reasonable’, ‘moderate’ and fiercely British face that has made Labour part of the political mainstream. The left has worn a more radical reforming visage, one with a more expressly ‘class’ appeal. It was this which anchored the party to its mass base - the working class. Now that the working class has temporarily disappeared, the right wing - which always had more coherence and weight in bourgeois society - no longer feels the immediate need for the left. Foolishly therefore, Blairoid commentators such as The Guardian’s Hugo Young are actually urging Livingstone to stand independently, as he has no “more than a nominal connection with what [New Labour] stands for” (November 9).
It has been an enormous strength of bourgeois politics that the left wing of social democracy has been able to divert proletarian anger and aspirations for change into the safe channels of the Labour Party. Politics are ever changing, as evidenced by the looming Livingstone challenge. For revolutionaries, this creates the possibility that a mass working class movement, independent of Labour, could rise and take very different political forms from the past. This is not something to observe passively. If we are communists, we will be active, fighting agents in the process.
Mark Fischer
national organiser