10.06.2009

Why we voted Labour

Peter Manson reports on the controversy in the CPGB over the leadership's offer of conditional support to No2EU and ultimate call for a Labour vote

Meeting on Saturday June 6 in London, an aggregate of CPGB members voted to endorse the Provisional Central Committee’s tactics in the June 4 European Union elections, while criticising the PCC for the confusion that arose over the manner in which the tactics were adopted.

As readers will know, the CPGB line adopted by the leadership had been to offer conditional support for the ‘No to the EU, Yes to Democracy’ platform. If the lead candidate in any electoral region had publicly accepted our two conditions - against Fortress Britain and for open borders; for republican democracy, including the right to bear arms - we would have recommended a critical vote for No2EU in that region. In the absence of any such acceptance, we called for a Labour vote.

Opposition to this line had been based on three, partially interweaving, positions. First, while it was correct to raise the criticisms we did, Nick Rogers argued that it was a mistake to “transform these demands into conditions for electoral support”. A motion from comrade Rogers contended that the CPGB should have voted for No2EU unconditionally - ‘with gritted teeth’, despite its revolting nationalism - in view of the potential of No2EU to form the basis of a left-of-Labour pro-party organisation.

Second, Lee Rock and Bob Davies contended that support for the element of republican democracy relating to the abolition of the standing army, its replacement by a popular militia and the constitutional right to bear arms should not have been posed as a condition. According to a motion in their name, it was not “a key principle upon which our intervention could best have been made” and risked “developing a method which harbours a sectarian attitude … towards organisations outside the ranks of the CPGB which include militant revolutionaries”.

Third, that an “unconditional and blanket vote” for the Labour Party could, in the words of a motion signed by James Turley and, among others, comrades Rock and Davies, “only serve to strengthen the position of the anti-working class, neoliberal leadership”. This motion, however, approved of the “effective tactic” of conditional support for No2EU.

All three of these motions were defeated by margins ranging from four to one (on the question of arms) to a little over two to one (on voting Labour). However, in combination these strands of opposition to the PCC position amounted to over 40% of the vote and the motion from John Bridge calling for endorsement was in consequence passed by this narrower margin.

Background

In opening the debate and introducing his motion, comrade Bridge began with the economic crisis and the promise of austerity, whoever wins the next election. So far there had been little by way of working class resistance to cuts and closures and this demonstrated the falsity of the view common on the left that “what is bad for capitalism is good for us”.

It was against this background that the reaction to the MPs’ expenses scandal should be considered. While the level of corruption involved has been relatively petty compared to the millions capitalist barons award themselves, the anger is real and justified. However, it has undoubtedly benefited the right and in particular the Tories. Indeed that was the calculation of the Telegraph in deciding to go ahead with a story which it knew would provoke a crisis within the political establishment.

There is a “whiff of France 1934” about the current situation, said comrade Bridge, in that the right is on the move - the European election results were sure to reveal a swing in favour of the Tories, UK Independence Party and the British National Party. So, far from turning to the left, many people were either looking to their right or - what amounted to the same thing - moving in the direction of apolitical ‘politicians’ of the Esther Rantzen type.

Who will win the coming general election? Probably the Conservatives. But David Cameron will be forced by the economic crisis and downturn to go further than Margaret Thatcher in his attacks on the working class. Yet, faced with this situation, the left continues its advocacy not of a Marxist party, but of yet more halfway houses or Labour Parties mark two - formations that cannot possibly provide answers to a system in decay.

No2EU was worse than Respect, continued comrade Bridge, to the extent it represented a shift to the right - the Socialist Party in England and Wales simultaneously adapted to and denied the Communist Party of Britain’s repulsive nationalism. However, Bob Crow trusts SPEW and was prepared to offer it concessions in exchange for its participation in the platform set up by the CPB and his RMT union.

As for the CPB, its British road to socialism programme (now renamed Britain’s road to socialism) was previously based on anti-American left nationalism. Now it is based on anti-EU left nationalism. Brian Denny, who devised No2EU’s platform, is on the extreme nationalist wing of the CPB, and that is what SPEW has bought into.

While No2EU is obviously to the left of Labour on questions such as privatisation and trade union rights, it makes Gordon Brown look progressive on immigration controls. Clearly SPEW is unhappy with several formulations in the platform - it has been constantly looking over its left shoulder since it signed up.

However, in response to the MPs’ expenses scandal and the pressure from, among others, the CPGB, SPEW general secretary Peter Taaffe has looked to Trotsky’s Action programme for France for answers in the shape of a “more generous democracy”. While we welcome the fact that, at long last, comrade Taaffe has joined the CPGB in proposing a raft of republican-democratic measures, it was shameful that he has omitted a central component - one that is certainly prominent in Action programme for France - abolition of the standing army and the right to bear arms.

For communists this is not a controversial question and should not be so for any self-professed Marxist group. Yet it is for SPEW, along with the Socialist Workers Party. However, this right is enshrined in the US constitution and was unproblematically upheld by the First, Second and Third Internationals.

The correctness of this basic demand has been proved many times - not least by the example of Chile and the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973. His Popular Unity government had stressed the ‘loyalty’ of the army before the military coup and CPGB ‘official communists’ had held up Chile as a model for how ‘socialism’ would be introduced in Britain - until the coup, when suddenly South American conditions were considered totally different from those in Europe. The problem, of course, was that Allende had opposed the right of workers in Chile to arm themselves.

This helps to explain why Trotsky mocked those reformists who labelled the communist call for a militia a “provocation” - which is exactly what CPB general secretary Robert Griffiths has done in response to the CPGB.

Comrade Bridge went on to say that the PCC had been slow to get its act together in proposing its recommendations for the EU elections, but he believed that the tactics it finally adopted were correct - including the condition for supporting No2EU that it should accept all the main elements of republican democracy, not least the right to bear arms.

The PCC was also culpable for the confusion over the date of the aggregate - it had been changed twice after the PCC first attempted to bring it forward in order to allow comrades to debate the issues before the election, but later reverted to the original date. Similarly it had failed to state clearly that an action was now in progress and criticism of the agreed line must be suspended until after the election. But the tactics proposed had not been “pulled out of a hat”. They were totally in line with our programme and past practice.

For example, it was wrong to claim, as had one recent Weekly Worker letter-writer, that the CPGB had stated we cannot vote for the imperialist Labour Party. Labour has been pro-imperialist from at least 1914 and yet remains a bourgeois workers’ party. It is a decisive strategic site of struggle. Just as we had previously opposed the left’s auto-Labourism in elections, so we have opposed the more recent auto-anti-Labourism of groups like SPEW.

In the last general election we offered conditional support to Labour candidates in order to expose the divisions between left and right. However, in the EU election it was impossible to differentiate between the two wings - every Labour list was dominated by the right. But the PCC rejected the notion of spoiling our ballot papers if No2EU rejected our conditions. This would have given an “abstentionist message” in conditions where an ‘anti-politics’ politics was already prominent.

In opposition to the auto-anti-Labourism of SPEW and the left, the PCC wanted to stress the necessity of a positive engagement with Labour and the futility of trying to set up a tiny Labour Party mark two - especially one based on overt nationalism.

Comrade Bridge concluded by emphasising that there was no intention of shutting down debate following a vote at the aggregate. On the contrary, a thorough debate - on the Labour Party, on our attitude to the left and on tactics - was essential, including in our paper.

Debate

Moving his motion on the right to bear arms, Bob Davies said he completely accepted its inclusion in the CPGB Draft programme and the need to put it forward in “certain situations”. However, unlike open borders, which is a principle, republican democracy needs to be defined and has particular elements which should be stressed according to circumstances. For example, we did not raise the question of arms in Respect or pose it as a condition for supporting Respect candidates.

He said he was worried that this question might now become an “acid test” for offering support in elections to left candidates, which would leave the CPGB “open to sectarian accusations”. It was wrong to “hold to ransom” leftwing candidates over one particular condition, he said.

Next James Turley opposed the call to vote Labour. Unlike comrade Davies, he had approved of the tactic of placing conditions on No2EU and supported the conditions chosen. But he disagreed that the current situation could be compared with France 1934 - there were “important differences”.

The PCC had originally stated, in an article written by Peter Manson, that if No2EU refused our conditions we “might as well” vote Labour - which demonstrated that the Labour vote was used not to “engage with the working class base of the Labour Party”, but as a means of attacking the non-Labour left.

Later, however, another reason to vote Labour had been put forward by Mike Macnair - in order to “defend Labour as the shadow of a bourgeois workers’ party” in comrade Turley’s words. However, an unconditional Labour vote was not only a vote for the status quo: it was a vote for the current direction Brown and co were taking the party. For comrade Turley a spoilt ballot would have indicated a “range of unacceptable options”, not any desire to abstain.

Nick Rogers then moved his two motions. The first criticised the manner in which the PCC had adopted its position. This had “maximised confusion”. His motion stated that the tactics adopted should have been “debated and agreed by the whole organisation prior to the election campaign”. Furthermore, the Weekly Worker editorial team had not published his own article critical of the tactics even though the PCC had not yet announced a period of united action behind the agreed decision. This, read the motion, was “an extremely serious error and flouted the CPGB’s commitment to open debate in front of the class”.

Comrade Rogers said that this was the first time for more than two decades that the CPGB had urged a blanket vote for Labour and the PCC should have expected the decision to generate controversy. He hoped the lesson would be learnt for the general election and our tactics would be debated in good time by the whole organisation.

Turning to his second motion in favour of a critical vote for No2EU, comrade Rogers said it was not unprincipled to call for an unconditional Labour vote. But, he said, the PCC had been “all over the place” in the reasons it gave for doing so. It began by saying the aim was to expose the Socialist Party for wanting to form a Labour Party mark two. This was childish and smacked of “third period sectarianism”. Surely it was better if a Dave Nellist or George Galloway was elected than a New Labour clone? Comrade Rogers said that we had been right to put forward programmatic demands on SPEW and the CPB, but wrong to make them conditions.

Later the PCC had given another reason for voting Labour, he continued - bourgeois politics was in “existential crisis” and it was necessary to “come to the rescue” of the Labour Party. But in that case why bother with offering conditional support to No2EU in the first place if the overriding need was to defend the Labour Party?

Comrade Rogers went on to argue, in the words of his motion, that it was “a mistake not to also prioritise demands against No2EU’s blatant British nationalism”. Instead the core of our conditions had related to our opposition to halfway houses, he said. But wasn’t our call to vote Labour to defend the very idea of a workers’ party a kind of halfway house tactic?

Following the movers of the various motions, there were many interventions from the floor. Ben Lewis of the PCC noted the continued confusion, particularly over the difference between tactics and principles - he gave the example of the Bolsheviks and Lenin’s view that it had been correct to boycott the duma on one occasion but not on another.

Comrade Rock focussed on the right to bear arms. He said that if we thought this was such a key principle it should be in the Weekly Worker ‘What we fight for’ column, not “hidden away” in the Draft programme. He agreed with comrade Lewis that tactics could be appropriate on one occasion but not on another, but wanted to know why the PCC had never thought it appropriate to raise the right to bear arms as a condition before. He said that this condition had not worked, since it had not succeeded in causing the SPEW membership to question their leadership - they were at one on this question.

On the question of a “carte blanche Labour vote”, he thought that this “flies in the face of where people are”. To recommend such a tactic simply to send a message to SPEW was “crazy, inept, insane”. The proposal that we “might as well vote Labour” did not send out the key message that was needed was a Communist Party.

Mohsen Sabbagh stated that the right to bear arms was an essential component of republican democracy. It would be impossible to defend such a democracy if we failed to address the question of arms.

Mike Macnair, another PCC member, dealt with the question of the Labour Party. He reminded comrades of how on numerous occasions the possibility of a revival of the Labour left had been discounted, even though this had always shown to be false. Since Blair, it had become ‘common sense’ to write off Labour as any kind of workers’ party, but most of the left seemed to want to recreate Labour themselves. But each Labourite halfway house had represented a move to the right - so much so that No2EU was actually to the right of Labour in one precise area: that of anti-EU British nationalism.

The question was, could we push its candidates to the left? If not, then No2EU could not be viewed as even a small step in the direction of a Communist Party and in the absence of that voting Labour was the straightforward choice.

According to Yassamine Mather, the PCC had put forward three separate reasons for voting Labour. The first was that it was pointless to vote for a Labour Party mark two - but that was not a strong enough reason to vote for mark one, she said. The second reason, comrade Yassamine went on, was because Labour was a bourgeois workers’ party. But Labour had not just been in power throughout the 20th century: it had become part of the establishment. The dropping of clause four had “dramatically changed” the character of the party.

She described the third reason - the threat from the right to destroy Labour - as “perhaps the most convincing”. If this threat was real we would need to defend Labour, she said. But in that case this third argument ought to have been in the forefront of our arguments. But why would the bourgeoisie want to destroy Labour, when it had proved such a loyal servant?

I responded to this by pointing out that the ruling class would prefer two alternative bourgeois parties of government rather than one that was still linked to working class organisations. To defend the existence of the Labour Party in these circumstances was not to advocate a halfway house - we regard it as an important site for struggle for the type of party that is really needed, not as something valuable in and of itself.

I strongly rejected comrade Rogers’ claim that we had not prioritised anti-nationalist demands in our conditions for voting No2EU. Both our demands - against Fortress Britain, for republican democracy - had sharply challenged No2EU’s nationalism in a concrete way.

Tina Becker said that we were clear on the need for an alternative to the Labour Party and as part of the fight to win one we had to put organisations that claimed to want such an alternative to the test. No2EU had failed the test dramatically and so it was “perfectly reasonable” to call for a Labour vote. In her view the PCC had not thought up new reasons to justify its line, but had developed its original arguments.

Stan Keable took issue with comrades who had argued that it was wrong to call for a Labour vote simply to demonstrate SPEW’s opportunism. We were not in a position to influence the masses, he said - instead we do focus on our left opponents and this has nothing to do with sectarianism.

Carey Davies thought that both comrade Bridge and comrade Mather were right on the Labour Party. Labour had been an adjunct of capitalism, he said, but had now probably outlived its usefulness for the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, he did not see why we should “rush to the defence of social democracy”.

Commitment

After all the movers had responded to the debate, I pointed out that comrade Rogers’ first motion, ‘For CPGB democracy’, had hardly been referred to in the debate because everyone seemed to agree with most of it. However, I objected to the claim that the non-publication of his article had “flouted the CPGB’s commitment to open debate”, since his article was simply being held over until the completion of the united action.

But comrade Rogers did not withdraw this phrase and his motion was passed by a clear majority - although some comrades voted for it despite their disagreement with this one phrase. For my part, as Weekly Worker editor I am absolutely committed to “open debate in front of the working class” and look forward to publishing comrade Rogers’ article when he has finished reworking it, together with other contributions to this ongoing debate.