26.07.2006
Astute timing but weak politics
The John McDonnell challenge affords the Labour left a chance of a comeback, Mark Fischer reckons. But what should be the role of Marxists in the party?
We welcome the announcement of John McDonnell that he will campaign to secure enough nominations to challenge for leadership of the Labour Party when Blair eventually stands down.
As evidenced by the enthusiastic reaction given to the initiative by the 450 delegates at the annual conference of the Labour Representation Committee on July 22, it has the potential to reactivate and invigorate the left of the party after years of torpor and decline. His decision to stand - although some had privately expressed a little unease about what was perceived as its fait accompli nature - was unanimously backed and people left the event visibly more upbeat about the possibilities for left advance.
For the moment, we should leave aside the question of comrade McDonnell's prospects for actually making it onto the ballot paper at the end of the day. In the view of this writer, in the absence of some sort of a sea change in wider society, it is almost unimaginable that the bureaucracies of Labour-affiliated unions would queer their pitch with prospective prime minister Gordon Brown by backing the rank outsider. Far more realistic is the potential for the comrade's campaign to leave something tangible and solid behind it in terms of resuscitating the structures of the left. This is likely to be its more lasting achievement.
Certainly, the timing of the announcement was astute. It sent a warning shot over the bows of the likes of Michael Meacher, the born-again Blair critic, who has over the past period been assiduously attempting to position himself as the 'natural' left unity candidate in any leadership contest. Also, it is sufficiently cautious in that it gives the McDonnell campaign a year or so to build a base for some sort of credible fight; at the same time, it is a sufficiently bold enough move to galvanise a left in the Labour Party that has looked a pretty sorry outfit over the past few years or so.
McDonnell provides a potential rallying focus for a section of the party that has become increasingly disorientated. Prominent lefties in the party - who have on occasion even featured in the letters pages of this paper wagging their finger at us over our insufficient engagement with Labour as a result of our pursuit of absurd, 'will o' the wisp' diversions like Respect - have privately confided that they themselves did not even vote Labour in the last election. This was more as a matter of personal conscience rather than an expression of any viable political tactic for the class as a whole, of course. (One such Labour Party comrade actually admitted voting Green - a perverse decision, given the petty bourgeois nature of that party).
So there are many positives about the McDonnell challenge. Apart from anything else, it could even provoke a more rational debate amongst the ostensibly Marxist left not in the party about the nature of the current period, its tasks and how revolutionaries must relate to the Labour Party. It could - but has not so far, it must be conceded.
The Socialist Party - a group that appears to believe that the fundamental nature of Labour as a bourgeois workers' party altered when it decamped - notes that, while "workers may wish John McDonnell good luck with his challenge", the left in the party would better off "[channelling] the energies of the labour movement towards building a new mass political alternative to represent working class people" (The Socialist July 20-26). In other words, instead of fighting in the mass social democratic party that actually exists, the left should simply walk out and join SPers in their lacklustre and poorly supported campaign for another social democratic party. Only much smaller. (The SP comrades might pause to consider whether the mere fact of the existence and form of the McDonnell challenge could have some implications for the viability of their 'theory' that Labour is now just a bourgeois party.)
Rather more sensible has been the response of John Rees for the Socialist Workers Party/Respect. He welcomed McDonnell's move and correctly noted that - in contrast to the peevish tone adopted by The Socialist - "it will be a boost for whole left, whether they are in or out of the Labour Party. Advances for the left of the Labour Party are advances for the left as a whole."
Yet, while Rees correctly calls for a "serious and fraternal discussion about the political future" of our movement, he too has a facile answer to this crisis of working class political representation: That is, "Building a political project [Respect] as an alternative to Labour" (Socialist Worker July 22).
The prospect of a year of discussion and work by the Labour left to construct some sort of viable political answer to Blairism is one that should engage and energise all Marxists, whether they are in Labour or not. Clearly, as this paper has comprehensively shown, neither SWP/Respect nor the SP's pet Campaign for a New Workers' Party offer anything politically that is qualitatively better than what the Labourites, left to their own devices, could formulate for themselves. And organisationally both are puny, of course.
Naturally, we will continue to engage with both projects to expose their weaknesses and fight to politically reorientate the genuine Marxists in them. With the McDonnell campaign, a new front of the same essential ideological struggle now opens up for this paper. The unadorned truth is - for all their occasionally haughty attitude to the extra-Labour left - the Marxists in this party display more or less all the problems and practically none of the merits of the left groups outside it.
Take the question of alliances and critical support, for example.
While John McDonnell may once have referred to himself as a Trotskyist (the comrade apparently has a past in the Militant Tendency), his politics are pretty standard left social democratic fare. It is perfectly principled for the Marxists inside and outside Labour to align themselves with him, to work hard for his campaign and fight to win votes for him - just as long as we maintain a critical distance, a refusal to blur the lines of programmatic differentiation between Marxism and the brand of left social democracy that McDonnell espouses. He should be backed critically, in other words.
At the time of the last election, for instance, this paper called for support for working class politicians that stood by the demand for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Frankly, it came as a shock to us that just four Labour MPs could bring themselves to support this principled demand - including, to his great credit, John McDonnell, of course. As our paper reported, "John McDonnell came out with a totally unambiguous 'Yes'. He said he had recently attended a meeting with representatives of both sunni and shia Iraqis and 'everyone was of the same view: as long as you have an army of occupation, it is just a nightmare scenario'" (Weekly Worker April 28 2005).
Will this firm anti-imperialist stance make an appearance in the campaigning material of the comrade? Marxists in the party should demand that it does and be prepared to be highly critical if it does not.
Unfortunately, the Labour left - either in its Marxist or standard reformist variants - resembles the rest on the left in having no genuine culture of rigorous, open debate or of ruthless self-criticism of mistakes and shortcomings. For example, the bulk of the proceedings of the June 22 LRC conference consisted of non-debates around motions embodying deeply uncontroversial left platitudes on trade union rights, the public ownership of rail, civil service cuts or the privatisation of the East London underground line.
Owen Jones - a prominent young activist in the McDonnell campaign - overestimates the potential new audience in wider society for left politics (see interview, below). But, either way, it is unlikely that the culture of the Labour left would present much of an attractive prospect for these potential recruits, given its lack of genuine intellectual life or transparent democratic ethos.
Marxists in the Labour Party must be at the forefront of fighting to ensure that the McDonnell campaign marks a new start on these important fronts too.