26.07.2006

21st century socialism

Owen Jones is the coordinator of the recently launched LRC youth group, the Young Socialists, and is on the John McDonnell campaign team. Mark Fischer collared him for an argument

A good start?

We've been absolutely inundated with messages of support from right across the movement. From trade unionists, ex-Labour Party members, people who have never been in the Labour Party who are telling us that, now that John has thrown his hat into the ring, they are going to actually join.

People are begging us to set up local campaign teams in their areas. There is now a real nucleus of a strong campaign, a movement, within just a week of the announcement being made. We are looking to build the maximum amount of organisation on the ground. This isn't just about a leadership campaign. This is why we have started now and given ourselves a year.

We are going to build a movement out there in Britain, but also get people back into the party in their thousands, to put pressure on the trade unions to back a McDonnell candidacy.

But are you emphasising the 'movement' and campaigning side of things because you think he won't get on the ballot paper?

Not at all. I'm absolutely convinced he's going to get on that ballot paper. Graham Bash has already made it clear in the Weekly Worker [July 20] that some people are confusing the end point with the starting point. This is not a parliamentary struggle. And after all, there is a collegiate system: one third of the vote from MPs, one third from trade unions and one third from individual members "¦

Which assumes he's on the ballot paper "¦

That's what we are working towards, but that's not the focus of the campaign now. If, for example, it was a week away from the leadership contest or the deadline for nominations, then we should be discussing the ballot paper and whether or not he was going to make it. But as we talk now, there is not even a vacancy for anyone to run for - Blair is still in post.

What needs to be the key focus is the revitalising potential of the campaign itself, a part of which is to actually get him on the ballot paper.

It has to be emphasised that for the first time in our history the labour movement will decide who actually runs the country. Labour is in office and the trade unions and ordinary Labour Party members will decide who leads it. This has never happened before. This is a real opportunity for us.

In the conference, you said it was a new development that mass protest movements have originated outside the Labour Party over the past few years. Frankly, I can't think of any that have ever originated in it - Labour has tended to reflect developments in wider society. Take your MPs. They will get terribly leftwing only when there is pressure from outside "¦

But this is exactly what I would argue is happening. Yes, the Labour Party tends to reflect rather than shape. Blairism itself was clearly spawned by the crushing of the labour movement by a ruling class offensive over two decades. Thatcherism smashed the working class movement and the political reflection of that is Blairism, in an atomised, crushed and demoralised labour movement.

But in the past few years, we have seen an increasing radicalisation of society. You've seen the labour movement moving to the left. And that has been reflected in parliament. If you look at the number of parliamentary rebellions and the range of people that been involved, they haven't happened because these MPs have had some sort of political conversion or that the government's legislation has got qualitatively worse all of a sudden.

What's happened is that there has been an increase in the political pressure from wider society. Take the anti-war movement. The reason why 138 Labour MPs rebelled - for the first time in their lives for many of them - was because they felt the hot breath of this mass movement from outside and their behaviour in parliament reflected that.

We can argue about the anti-war movement - I think that the fact that the British ruling class was split was not incidental to either the numbers mobilised or the behaviour of many Labour MPs. But surely you are not suggesting that the Labour left and broader working class movement is in a robust enough state to create a comparable movement from a standing start? So where will this pressure come from?

A year ago, we completely ruled out the possibility of running a left leadership challenge - simply because we thought we would be massacred. The reason for the change is what has gone on since party conference: we have seen a movement to the left on the ground. Take the first quarter of this year. There were four times more strikes in the first quarter of 2006 than in the entirety of 2005 "¦

In a period generally characterised by historically low levels of strike activity, of course.

After three decades of reaction, we should be surprised at anything else. Nonetheless, it is a fact and clearly there is some sort of change in the air. Splits in the ruling class come and go, but that takes nothing away from the fact that there were tens of thousands of people radicalised by their experience of opposition to the war on Iraq and that this has left its mark on wider society. This is the reality that we on the Labour left have to relate to and engage with.

Lastly, can we talk about how the McDonnell campaign is going to be 'packaged'? The Labour left constantly appeals to what could broadly be called 'old Labour' core values and programmatic nostrums - public, not private, ownership, the national health service, free comprehensive state education, etc. This is presented as 'socialism' - which it is palpably not, of course. Do you think that the McDonnell campaign is an opportunity to start a debate on broader political and theoretical questions? A chance for some fresh thinking? After all, the 'old' - either in the form of left social democracy or Stalinism - palpably failed as projects for the working class.

I completely agree with that. First, can I say that this is not an 'old Labour' campaign. There are no illusions in what 'old Labour' stood for or what it achieved. Jim Callaghan is a classic example of 'old Labour' and I don't think his legacy inspires anyone in this campaign.

You are absolutely correct about the left, both inside and outside the Labour Party. There is a complete failure to actually grasp the realities of the society around them and apply Marxism concretely. Marxism is a powerful tool; it is not a dogma: it must be applied by analysing the concrete conditions of the world that surrounds you.

It is therefore crucial that in this campaign, we look at these things critically and try to formulate innovative answers to contemporary problems. That is what the Labour Representation Committee has been doing for the past few years, not simply trying to make the politics of 1972 fit today.

So the LRC is Marxist?

No, the LRC is a broad coalition of a number of people from different Labour backgrounds. There's no getting round that: it is a united front. The position that LRC adopts is that it is not 'old Labour', it is 'real Labour'. What this means is that a real Labour government represents a political advance for the labour movement and its project of socialism. That's not stale, or tedious dogma.

This is socialism for the 21st century.