12.11.2009

Marxist party or Labour Party mark two?

SPEW's Socialism event had a session on young people. Laurie McCauley reports and asks what politics the working class needs

In the session on ‘Young people: the fight for a future’, a rather small audience of 10 comrades was addressed by Ben Robinson of SPEW’s Youth Fight for Jobs campaign and Tracy Edwards, the PCS union’s youth organiser.

They correctly identified that the working class is under attack in this recession, and will face further assaults on wages and working conditions under the next government, be it a Labour or Tory one. The trade unions and the left are weak, and we are entering a period of rebuilding working class organisation. However, the speakers placed a lot of faith in union leaders like Bob Crow in achieving this aim.

But there is also the question of what politics the working class needs in order both to defend its immediate interests and to actually overthrow capitalism. We would argue the most effective politics for both is Marxism: an understanding of its own identity and role would lead the working class to abandon sectional interests and unite in the face of bourgeois attacks. Marxism also enables us to envision, and create, a society in which the majority rule. Instead, SPEW bases its appeal to youth on the twin demands of jobs and free education. While these are important, fighting for them does not lead automatically to socialist consciousness. And SPEW’s pandering to union bureaucrats can only be a handicap in the class struggle.

I also heard Peter Taaffe speaking on the fall of the Berlin Wall. He asserted that, had an enlightened Trotskyist leadership existed in the German Democratic Republic in 1989, the capitalist reunification of Germany could have been turned into a political revolution leading to socialism. A highly optimistic analysis. If one parachutes in your perfect Marxist party at critical junctures of history, then of course there could have been a revolution. But Marxism had been thoroughly discredited in the GDR, organising openly against the state was near impossible for most of its duration and, more fundamentally, any political revolution in the USSR or its satellite states would, had it not spread to the capitalist heartlands, been strangled soon after birth, as it was the first time round.

A forum on ‘How can the crisis in working class political representation be solved?’ had speakers from the Green Party, Respect, the Labour Representation Committee, RMT, Alliance for Green Socialism and SPEW councillor Dave Nellist. The upper hall at ULU was packed out for this session. The forum had been advertised as including an SWP speaker, but they were a no-show. The Green and LRC speakers seemed to have been invited solely to receive a barracking from the floor, the latter receiving short shrift now that, in SPEW’s analysis, Labour is a purely bourgeois, rather than, in Lenin’s deliberately contradictory words, a bourgeois worker’s, party. Of course, this supposed shift helps to provide justification for SPEW’s aim of founding a Labour Party mark two, though the politics Nellist proposed fell short even of a rounded social democratic programme.

Two days prior to the RMT conference on political representation, the SPEW national executive, along with other organisations and individual supporters of No2EU, had released a statement calling for a new electoral coalition to stand candidates in the next general election. There was little politics in this statement, and only a tad more in comrade Nellist’s speech. The aim is to unite all those opposed to cuts and privatisation - a welcome step forward in spite of its political weaknesses.