20.06.2007

Left pragmatism led to Blair and Brown

As far as most people are concerned, the question raised by the Labour Party's deputy leadership election was not 'Who will win?' but rather 'Who cares who wins?' Mary Godwin comments

Despite the fact that there was no shortage of official gimmickry from the party itself and from individual candidates, trying to persuade members to get interested and involved (including the exciting chance to participate in 'virtual hustings' by emailing their questions to candidates), it was a totally lacklustre non-event.

Given the lack of any real political meat, the pundits and commentators inevitably concentrated on personalities and had some fun trying to explain how the electoral college voting system (comprising MPs/MEPs; individual members; and affiliated organisations) would determine the outcome. Most MPs, for example, had three bites of the cherry. We say 'most', because in the Blair era you cannot really be sure whether every Labour MP is also a member of an affiliated trade union. In practice the redistribution of second and third preference votes eventually produces a lucky winner.

So much for the scribblers and psephological freaks, and their fascination with chickens' entrails, but what about ordinary members? They cannot complain about not being 'included' in the process, but this 'inclusivity' is a bit like Blair's idea of democracy itself. The sort of democracy that led to the US-UK assault imperialist on Iraq on the basis of lies and the continued occupation despite the opposition of the overwhelming majority.

The real problem for electors in this donkey Derby was the candidates themselves, for there can be no real choice when you have six people who are politically almost indistinguishable from one another. There was a sort of grim amusement to be had from watching six more or less Blairite, more or less rightwing candidates doing what they could to bolster their non-existent leftwing credentials in an effort to create broad appeal by empty (and very restrained) posturing.

Take Alan Johnson, for example: "Three successful terms of a Labour government has [sic] shifted the political centre ground to the left. We vacate this territory at our peril" (Candidates booklet for members of affiliated trade unions).

Just what, if anything at all, does this mean and who is Johnson trying to kid? The tectonic shifts in the political landscape since Blair's victory in 1997 have given us a Labour government that in many significant respects is to the right of Margaret Thatcher's Tories. Neither Johnson, a hardened rightwinger, nor any of the other candidates (who have all actively participated in this process) can afford to acknowledge this obvious truth, because the right is where "political centre ground" now is. We already have a Tory government, which is what makes poor David Cameron look like yet another floundering loser. Only a significant change in the objective dynamics arising from a serious economic setback or some other catastrophe seems likely to rob Labour of another victory at the polls.

The Labour left is, to be charitable, in intensive care. No more eloquent proof of this fact need be sought than the abject failure of the John McDonnell campaign. McDonnell came nowhere near getting enough nominations even to have his name appear on the ballot paper for the leadership election that never was: ie, not even 45 (12.5%) of Labour MPs were prepared to stick their heads above the parapet and back a leftwing candidate.

We have reached a point where the hopes of the left (some hopes) rested on an apparatchik poseur like John Cruddas, a 'tribune of the people' flaunting his diaphanous pink toga. If Cruddas, the 'outsider' in several senses, emerges as the winner (by no means unlikely, given proportional representation), there will no doubt be some on the Labour left who will claim this as a victory. Let them delude themselves until he duly emerges as Brown's pliant and willing instrument.

For Marxists and revolutionary socialists the question arises: how did we get here and what has been the left's response, it's political method in the face of the seemingly unstoppable lurch to the right represented by Blairism?

One thing of which Blair cannot be accused is hiding his strategic agenda under a bushel. The 'third way' has perhaps been forgotten by many, but it was an unambiguous signpost to what was to come (see 'Third way to nowhere' Weekly Worker December 17 1998). Marxism has finally been discredited; socialism is dead - such was the thesis. Old-style social democracy on the left (the 'first way') and neoliberalism on the right (the 'second way') are both exhausted and sterile ideologies. There is no alternative to capitalism and so a 'third way' has to be found, a way which Blair memorably described as "pragmatism with values".

Nearly 10 years later we can see where all this was leading: not a 'third way' at all, but the 'second way' rehashed - neoliberal Thatcherism, but with tons of 'pragmatic' and 'value'-laden spin, by means of which values are turned into their opposite.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this election was the way in which some in and near the Labour left responded. Ken Livingstone, as we know, backed Cruddas, but even he lamented the sameness of all the candidates. Essentially Cruddas represented not even the best of a bad job, but the 'least worst' option - the least of six evils.

Of course, Livingstone could have been honest and said that none of the candidates was worthy of support because none was leftwing. But that would not have sat easily with his public failure to back McDonnell's bid for the leadership.

Fake lefts like Cruddas, on the other hand, are supportable because nobody really takes their leftwing pretensions seriously. Why is this important? Because the political method of the Labour left was, is and ever shall be rooted in appeasement of, and compromise with, the right. It is not just a question of tactics or of a particular modus operandi; it is the historically rooted essence of left social democracy in the Labour Party and in the wider labour and trade union movement.

Small wonder, then, that Labour Party leftists like Bob Pitt, a paid servant of Livingstone's mayoral apparatus, trumpet the Cruddas candidacy and regard anyone who fails to do so as a political dimwit. Comrade Pitt and his ilk see it as axiomatic that the job of the Labour left is to appeal to and reassure the right. Especially now, since, after all, that is where the party, the trade unions and society as a whole are at. Standing openly on leftwing convictions and principles (as McDonnell did, in his admittedly flawed way) just dooms you to become another loser. Anything else is not serious politics, because at the end of the day the Labour Party right and left need each other. This is the Labour left's own timeless version of "pragmatism with values".

Hence, when it came to the real election contest, or what should have been, all you heard from Livingstone himself and bag-carriers like comrade Pitt was a deafening silence speaking louder than any words. Endorsement of McDonnell was just out of the question, because McDonnell had gone for the wrong method: ie, telling the truth about his leftwing politics and thus alienating and scaring off the right.

In fact the refusal of Livingstone to back McDonnell because he had no chance of making an impact became a self-fulfilling prophesy. It is not unreasonable to suggest that, had someone like the London mayor - which, with its huge electorate, is a post not without power and influence - come out publicly for John McDonnell, that would have been enough to give courage to the likes of Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson to do the same and to build a momentum sufficient to shame an extra 16 or so Labour MPs into nominating McDonnell.

But for Livingstone, as with the union 'lefts', supporting McDonnell was far too risky. Endorsement of Cruddas, by contrast, was a safe, no-brainer option, because everyone knows his soft left platitudes are viewed as perfectly safe by the establishment.

The kernel of this approach by the left lies in the by now ingrained ideological conviction that all elections are decided by the centre ground, so the art of politics is reduced to occupying and fighting on that territory alone: leftwing electors are bound to vote for you in general because they have no choice. So the terrain of struggle effectively becomes the 'middle England' so beloved by Blair. Winning on this ground means taking on board elements of Thatcherism and the Tory programme (as Blair did) and fighting for the crucial few percentage points needed to gain the swing vote.

So 'pragmatic' politics is reduced to coming up with policies that are acceptable to Rupert Murdoch, the other big newspaper proprietors and the political editors and journalists on the TV networks. Before the advent of Blair, we heard it from the Eurocommunists. Remember, for example, Hobsbawm's article, 'The forward march of Labour halted' in Marxism Today, which located the Labour Party and the left's problem in the decline of manual workers and the futility of going on about socialism. It was Hobsbawm and others like him who basically mapped out the line which was taken up by people like Kinnock, whose 'dream team' marriage with Roy Hattersley united the two wings of the party. Ironic that an old rightwing warhorse like Hattersley now finds himself on the left of Blair's party.

If Blair's eventual victory in 1997 represented the triumph in practice of these ideas, can we say that the 'forward march of labour' - ie, the political advance of working class power - has resumed? To say so would be just a sick joke, as every reader of this paper or anybody with elementary common sense knows.

This flawed political method is by no means the sole property of the Eurocommunists or Tony Blair. Look at the Socialist Workers Party and the infamous speech which John Rees made at the Respect founding conference against the CPGB. We made the 'mistake' of insisting that the 's' in Respect actually ought to stand for socialism: ie, the socialist, working class politics set out in Socialist Worker's 'What we fight for' column. What did John Rees say about the principled socialist demands we put forward? They were apparently all very well for most of those "in this room", who can unite around such ideas. But what is important is "not what we think here, but what people out there think".

In other words, just like the Bob Pitts of this world, the Eurocommunists and the Blairites, Rees is saying that we have got to appeal to the right and in the process, where necessary, get rid of what Lindsey German, in the context of gay and women's rights called the left's "shibboleths". Why? So that we can "make a difference" - or, as the Labour right has always put it, 'Unless we get elected, what is the point of all these principles?'

The logic of this way of thinking is to end up with politics that are totally approved of by Rupert Murdoch and the capitalist class. Our position, by contrast was aptly summed up by Rosa Luxemburg in her polemic with Eduard Bernstein, who in his own day was trying to give German social democracy a kind of Blairite opportunist twist.

To paraphrase Luxemburg, we do not try to become a majority in order to advocate our principles: we advocate our principles in order to become a majority. In other words what defines us and distinguishes our strength is not our ability to sacrifice principles, as Eurocommunists and SWP alike have advised, in the name of that "pragmatism" which gets you applause from the bourgeois media: what we do is show we are strong by sticking to our principles and fighting to win acceptance of them.

We are not talking about two roads that lead to the same destination, but two diametrically opposed political methods which end up in radically different destinations. With the first method you end up in practice in the camp of the Blairites (that certainly was the case with many of the Euros). With the second you are helping to build the only force that really can "make a difference" - the independently organised working class..

We all know people, perhaps with the best of intentions, who have gone into the Labour Party thinking that the priority is to get elected. Eventually will come the time when, Clark Kent-like, they can divest themselves of their drab grey suit and reveal their real principles, introducing socialism from a position of power. This does not happen. It cannot happen. The reality is that you end up actually transforming yourself into the sum of all your compromises. Thus it was that the Eurocommunists, denounced by the bourgeoisie as revolutionaries in sheep's clothing, were all along what they really said they were - bourgeois or petty bourgeois socialists. Far from being Kremlin agents or super-hard revolutionaries, they really were the right social democrats they appeared to be.

Does this mean that the CPGB piously takes an ultra-leftist line of refusing to get involved in all sorts of campaigns, form all sorts of temporary alliances with other forces? Of course not. Witness our support for the McDonnell campaign. But the central point here, what fixes our tactical approach on a principled basis, is that we retain the right to criticise and to put forward our own communist politics at all times. Do we march alongside the Muslim Association of Britain, for example? Yes, but only if retaining the right to criticise political islam.

So, when it comes to intervention, there is a difference between principled engagement and sectarian isolation. As Trotsky famously remarked, left sectarians are just right opportunists afraid of their own shadow. Thus, before Blair the SWP denounced the very idea of contesting elections - to do so would inevitably mean adapting your politics to the need to win votes: you would become "electoralist". That was the SWP's disastrously wrong line just a decade ago. Now, of course, Rees and co do contest elections through their Respect front - and, sure enough, they have flipped into their opposites and, equally disastrously, have become the very personification of electoralism.