08.09.2010

Vote preference one for Abbott ... and fuck warmongering ex-ministers

In the ballot for Labour Party leader, which closes on September 22, the CPGB calls for critical support for Diane Abbott, no support for the four ex-ministers and the expulsion of all coalition collaborators. Alex John argues the case

Voting in the election for Labour Party leader, which started this week, closes on September 22. Members can vote for candidates in order of preference - in the event of no candidate achieving a majority of first-preference votes, lower preferences will come into play.

The CPGB is saying there should be no vote for Ed Balls, Andy Burnham, Ed Miliband and, of course, the preferred candidate of the right, David Miliband. Their pronouncements of regret (except from David) about having naively backed the invasion of Iraq, their new-found anti-cuts sentiment and apologies for having forgotten to listen to Labour’s core working class voters should cut no ice. All four of them were ministers in the New Labour government, which not only went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but left Thatcher’s so-called ‘Tory’ anti-union laws in place and undermined the welfare state through its academies, PFI and privatisation. They never dissented when in office. A vote for any of them cannot be counted as a left vote.

Diane Abbott calls herself a socialist, and is secretary of what little remains of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs, an organisation which is all but defunct. Witness the fact that Abbott, its secretary, stood against John McDonnell (its chair) during the first stage of this leadership election, while three of its dozen or so members nominated other candidates (two for Ed Miliband, one for Ed Balls). The last issue of the SCG paper, Campaign Group News, available online is dated October 2008.

Despite the grave shortcomings and ambiguities in her record and current policies, Abbott is the only candidate who can be considered of the Labour left. There are clear differences which separate her from the other four candidates - differences we should recognise as real and significant, and which the left should take the opportunity to exploit in the election.

• She is the only candidate who was not part of the Blair-Brown governments. A vote for her will be counted as a rejection of New Labour.
• She is the only candidate who voted against the invasion of Iraq at the time.
• She is calling for the withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan (although she is on record stating that this should be phased, rather than immediate and unconditional).
• She is the only candidate who is calling for the scrapping of the Trident nuclear missile system.
• She is the only candidate who is supporting John McDonnell’s Trade Union Freedom Bill.
• She has condemned the scapegoating of immigrants and is the only one who has not joined in the recent anti-migrant rhetoric kicked off by Ed Balls.

Under present LP rules, nomination rights were restricted to the Parliamentary Labour Party. Affiliated organisations (trade unions, etc) and constituency organisations (CLPs) could only go through the humiliating experience of backing one of the candidates already nominated with a “supporting nomination”.

With the rank and file thus hobbled, with MPs cowering under the discipline of patronage - and given the present political and organisational weakness of the left - its chosen candidate, John McDonnell, failed to gain the backing of the 33 MPs required to get his name on the ballot paper.

His campaign for MPs’ support was further undermined by the maverick intervention of Diane Abbott, dividing the tiny parliamentary left - seeming to ensure that neither would be nominated. The membership was thus robbed of the chance to vote for the most consistently anti-war, anti-cuts, anti-privatisation and pro-union-rights MP.

One cannot avoid the suspicion that she had been prompted to divide the left with promised support for her own candidacy. On the day before nominations closed, McDonnell withdrew and backed Abbott, asking his supporting MPs to do the same. Most of them did, but she still lacked sufficient numbers. The dominant New Labour elite moved shrewdly and swiftly, adding to her backers the names of Harriet Harman, Jack Straw and ... front runner David Miliband himself.

So Abbott, in addition to receiving the nominations of Labour lefts, was also the ‘preferred left candidate of the right’ - usefully sucking away some votes from the likes of the two Eds. Ensuring a black woman appeared on the ballot paper carried the added benefit of enabling the Labour establishment to pose as diverse and multicultural, while throwing a sop to the party’s soft left and its neglected core working class support.

Leftwing members of the party and of affiliated organisations find themselves in disarray. Some will abstain, to maintain their imagined political purity. Others will prioritise defeating the most rightwing candidate, front runner David Miliband.

The sensible tactic adopted by the CPGB is neither moralist (I can’t vote for someone I strongly disagree with) nor realist (I can’t waste my vote on someone who won’t win). It is about recognising, and taking advantage of, real divisions in the LP in order to build a Marxist left within the party - as part of the struggle to unite the left inside and outside Labour into a Communist Party. Cohering and building the left in the long term is a hundred times more important than defeating the right in the short term.

Communist tactics in the Labour Party should be considered in the context of communist strategy. This is the subject of a discussion currently ongoing within the CPGB, and here I will give my own views.

Where should Labour fit into communist strategy? Do we consider a series of increasingly left Labour governments essential to overcoming capitalism, as does the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain in its programme Britain’s road to socialism? No. Is preserving and building the LP essential? No. A  Communist Party is essential, with individual membership (not affiliated organisations), a Marxist political programme and democratic centralism (freedom of expression, unity in action). Does that mean we must destroy the LP, in order to put a Communist Party in its place? No. No more than we want to destroy trade unions.

Our aim in relation to the mass organisations of the working class, Labour included, is to win the battle for democracy within them, break the stranglehold of the labour bureaucracy, bring it under the democratic control of the rank and file, and win the membership and the working class to the political programme of Marxism.

The LP was characterised correctly by Lenin as a bourgeois workers’ party. The party has always been dominated by a leadership and labour bureaucracy loyal to the capitalist state. The left has always been subordinate. But this is not inevitable. It is no more impossible to win over the mass organisations of the working class than it is to win over the class itself.

Part of the process must be removing the bans and proscriptions which exclude sections of the left from membership or positions within the LP and within trade unions, a process which began with the rejection of the CPGB’s application to affiliate shortly after its foundation in 1920, and relatively recently saw the expulsion of Militant (now the Socialist Party in England and Wales) under Neil Kinnock.

SPEW, once a significant part of the Labour left, having written off the party as definitively lost to the workers’ movement, is denying itself a role in what remains a strategic site of struggle. Instead, it demands that trade unions “disaffiliate from the Labour Party now” in the name of the futile project of a replacement party of the bureaucracy.

We should not seek to split the left away from the Labour Party. Rather, where appropriate, we should seek the expulsion of the blatantly pro-capitalist right wing. Deserving of such a fate right now are the three coalition collaborators, Frank Field, John Hutton and Alan Milburn. Also, if the left grows stronger, the pro-capitalist right may bail out, as they did in 1981 to form the short-lived Social Democratic Party (which went on to merge with the Liberals).

We should reject the argument that a leftwing LP will be unelectable. Getting elected should not be our primary aim. Taking office to run the capitalist state against our class is a tried, tested and failed option. Our communist strategy should be to build the workers’ movement internationally as a movement of extreme opposition to the existing capitalist states, until our class can take political power on a continental, defensible, scale.

What is essential is to defeat the politics of Labourism - ie, the separation of politics from economic struggle in the workers’ movement (the unions leave politics to the party, the party leaves workers’ struggles to the unions); the domination of the bureaucracy; British nationalism - promoting national (British capitalist) interests above working class internationalism; and the loyalty of the bureaucracy to the state we need to overthrow.

The Labour Representation Committee, despite the commendable display of tactical flexibility by its chair, John McDonnell, at first hesitated to follow him in backing Diane Abbott. A majority vote in an inquorate national committee meeting rejected a motion to support her. Subsequently, after writing to all five candidates and receiving replies from only two - Abbott and David Miliband - the LRC executive has given her critical support, subject to endorsement by the LRC national committee on September 11. However, many LRCers are giving their second preference votes to Ed Miliband and some are giving third and fourth preferences to Ed Balls and Andy Burnham. They are following the ‘anything but David’ logic, arguing that any defeat for David will be seen as a defeat inflicted by the left. Wishful thinking.

To its credit, the Socialist Workers Party has also called for support for Diane Abbott. Despite her “many flaws” (which are not elaborated), she “is the best of Labour’s uninspiring bunch … describes herself as a socialist” and “opposed the war in Iraq, opposes Trident nuclear weapons and has condemned the scapegoating of immigrants”. Unfortunately the Socialist Worker editorial concludes with a sentence that not only downplays the fight for democracy, but seems to dismiss Labour as a site for revolutionary intervention: “But the real struggle for the future of society will not take place in parliament - whoever leads Labour. It is the movement on the streets and on the picket lines that really matters to socialists” (September 4).

While the streets and picket lines are important, of course, it is the strategic defeat of Labourism and the reforging of a mass Communist Party that can unite all revolutionary trends in the workers’ movement - inside and outside the Labour Party, and including the SWP and SPEW - that will make the extra-parliamentary struggles of our class winnable.