Letters

Moving right

As the months progress, it is becoming more and more clear that the Labour Party under Ed Miliband is moving to the left. We can see real attempts to reconnect with the trade union base, communities fighting cuts, young people being robbed of a future and travellers fighting for basic rights. This situation and the ongoing disunity and political confusion of the left really gives communists an opportunity to get stuck in the Labour Party and fight for democracy and socialist policies.

All is going as CPGB majority comrades predicted, right? Of course it isn’t. Labour at a local and national level continues to demonstrate its willingness to attack the working class and repair its image and credibility in the eyes of big business, the rightwing press and the capitalist class.

Two recent statements by Miliband have hammered the last nails in the coffin of the hopes of a working class Labour revival and a shift to the left. Picking which side you are on in the desperate struggle at Dale Farm has to go down as a political litmus test for anyone even remotely linked with labour movement. Miliband and Labour did not offer support for the soon-to-be-destitute minority in Basildon. He did not even seek to support the United Nations offer of mediation, but followed the rest of the political elite by attacking the traveller families and supporting their eviction from a tiny piece of land.

At the TUC conference, Miliband could have offered a hand to the unions and their members in fighting the cuts and supporting working class resistance. Instead he chose to prove the rightwing press wrong in labelling him ‘red Ed’ by again attacking strike action and, with it, the electoral base of Labour. During his speech, he managed to come out with: “Of course the right to industrial action will be necessary, as a last resort. But, in truth, strikes are always the consequence of failure. Failure we cannot afford as a nation.” Later on, he said that the unions “can offer businesses the prospect of better employee relations, as you did during the recession” and, finally, “you know you will never have relevance for many workers in this country if you allow yourselves to be painted as the opponents of change”. In short, the Labour Party will not fight and is preparing to distance itself from and attack workers that do resist.

These two recent statements by Miliband, along with the mountain of cuts from Labour councils, the continuing attack on party democracy and Labour’s support for a severe austerity programme are concrete evidence of where Labour is and where it is going. It is brutally clear that Labour is not moving to the left, as predicted by the CPGB majority. It is not offering communists new space to battle inside Labour to organise, with workers joining to fight the cuts. The place of communists is to join working class resistance wherever it emerges and fight for a programme that can transform the disparate movements into a real force for change.

Majority comrades are simply left with exhortations to god to change the situation, as reality continually disproves their strategy and theses. Against the predictions of many comrades, the struggle against austerity is outside and against the Labour Party as much as it is against the Tory-led coalition.

The coming months will see the most serious strikes for a generation, with millions of workers taking action. Students will also be back out on the streets, supporting the strikers and demonstrating against attacks on education. The anti-cuts movement is consolidating its campaigns and committees up and down the country are preparing resistance against austerity.

If we want to continue fighting through the left for revolutionary unity, then it will be within this movement, in the unions, our community anti-cuts campaigns and student unions, not the Labour Party. Communists must not fail to grasp this basic fact of the period because, if we fail, then isolation and irrelevance beckons.

Moving right
Moving right

Jarrow heroes

Mark Fischer is certainly a hard man to please. After years of recounting the centrality of the Labour Party (which, if not dead in the 1930s, is certainly pushing up daises now), he castigates Ellen Wilkinson for taking up office in the most leftwing government that party has ever produced (Letters, September 8). This in the same breadth as lecturing the rest of left as to why their rejection of Labour today, when it is a thousand times more rightwing, is ill-conceived. It’s the 59th variety of ‘Vote Labour without illusions’.

Ellen had been a young revolutionary firebrand in 1919-20 - a vociferous supporter of the Soviet revolution. She had been one of three Guild Communist Group representatives, which went on to form the CPGB and had been a leading writer for the Sunday Worker in 1926. The CPGB did such a good job convincing her of the centrality of the Labour Party that she, along with thousands of fellow-travelling reds, joined it and took up positions in it. Mark clearly sees this as evidence of how reactionary she had become - damned if you do, damned if you don’t! I consider the whole strategy of the CPGB toward the Labour Party to have been ill-conceived then and even more so now, but that’s another story.

Ellen could be described as something of a left communist in the early 30s, advocating the democratic basis of the soviets for a future workers’ government, but, by the time of the Spanish civil war and the Jarrow march, her line was undoubtedly Stalinist.

My point in mentioning that it was Ellen, Jarrow’s famously passionate left MP, who organised the march, together with its self-declared ‘socialist’ town council, was to demonstrate it was not some anti-leftist diversion. There is actually evidence that Ellen in fact jumped aboard the march when she realised it wouldn’t be stopped, but that doesn’t challenge the progressive aims and composition of the marchers and the community they represented.

At the risk of repetition, Ellen and the starving Tyneside workers had not rejected the National Unemployed Workers Movement - they did not frame the march as “an apolitical alternative to the militant, communist-led mass movement that was the NUWM” at all - and had gone to Wal Hannington with the view that the NUWM should organise the march. But the NUWM turned them down.

Mark is aware of Ellen’s The town that was murdered - a book which made a huge impact on my father’s generation - so will know of the conditions that prevailed. The men were starving and desperate when they conceived the march. The TUC and Labour Party sent instructions that it must not be supported. At this stage, the Jarrow leadership adopted the prevailing CPGB popular front strategy and, from then on, they were being led up the garden path. But that takes nothing away from the heroism of those men, marching in utter wretchedness all the way to London and back. A little less ‘holier-than-thou’ purity and a bit more class sympathy in Mark’s comments and I wouldn’t have taken issue with him.

I wasn’t aware that Dave Riley had tried to block communist support for the march, as I was led to believe there was very little of that in any case. Riley actually said at the time: “If I had my way, I would organise the unemployed of the whole country, as well as Scotland and Wales, and then march on London, so that they would all arrive at the same time. The government would then be forced to listen to us, or turn the military against us.” That doesn’t sound like a moderate with a “begging bowl” to me.

At the time, the march was regarded as direct action. It held the hopes and fears of the whole of Tyneside - 90,000 of them signed a petition in its support. Mark suggests it was some tame affair, but Baldwin’s cabinet ‘exposed’ it, the fascists saw it as a prelude to armed insurrection (which is not entirely fanciful, as marching to London with arms had been discussed), Labour and the TUC condemned it, secret police infiltrated it, the Bishop of Durham “deplored” it, and the CPGB and NUWM tried to delay it and dilute it. Nobody says they were storming the Winter Palace, but it isn’t the knack-kneed effort Mark and other revisionists of the event have tried to rewrite it as.

Certainly some Tory leaders in poverty-stricken towns along the route welcomed the march, though it is clear that Tory Party central office did not approve. Indeed the cabinet tried to have it banned, but was advised that there was no legal provision to do so. Instead, they used the national publicity bureau to channel the government’s line into the press, to “expose the origin, motive and uselessness of the march” - interesting in the light of Mark’s own attempts along those same lines.

Secret police memos of the period show that there is little film footage of the march because the home office had prevailed upon “each film company” to refrain from filming it. On their return to Jarrow, all of the leaders and most of the marchers tore up their Labour Party cards and three years later Jarrow exploded in political riots.

One of the sessions at Communist University this year was called ‘They fuck you up, the left’. They do - and, in line with the fashion among current academics, they fuck up our history too, debunking all sorts of working class icons and moments. Mark has swallowed almost whole Matt Perry’s The Jarrow crusade.

I have never alleged the Jarrow march was a turning point or revolutionary spark. It was a brave attempt by a working class community in the teeth of recent defeats and massive betrayals by their own organisations to take up the struggle of their class. That they weren’t guided by Mark’s infallible communist leadership is true, but there were other ‘Jarrows’ in which the party did have the lead - how much better did they prosper as a result? They didn’t.

The Jarrow workers were right the first time, when they debated marching armed with guns and grenades in their pockets, picking up armed workers on the way from all the depressed regions and nations. Was there a political movement which would have matched that militant heroism at the time and seized that moment? No, there wasn’t, and that was why the marchers took the course they did.

Matt Perry actually concludes: “The Jarrow march was inescapably a working class protest and stands in the tradition of popular radicalism” (p180) - the part Mark doesn’t concede, to his discredit. As for asking me why I think the Jarrow march was highlighted as demonstrating ‘national character’ in some official chronology of British history - it’s a silly question, Mark.

Jarrow heroes
Jarrow heroes

0.1% in the know

Last week, Mike Macnair wrote extensively on the CPGB’s new Draft programme, first mentioning “dialectical logic” and stating that: “The underlying contradiction in the society is one between the interests of capital and the interests of the working class” (‘A hypothesis to change the world’, September 15).

Not once were there concepts in this lengthy article discussing technological development, or the equally important techniques we use, or human development. Michael Lebowitz writes, quoting Marx on human and worker development, of contradiction as the new within the old, growing dialectically, being, becoming and new being.

Indeed, as Bertell Ollman so eloquently quotes from Marx’s Capital in Dance of the dialectic, there are primary and secondary contradictions, a “cluster of contradictions inside capital”. The primary contradiction in capitalist society and previous economic formations, as Marx and Engels make clear, is that between the productive forces (the growing new technology and human techniques within the old system) and the relations of production (capital, private ownership and bosses versus workers, labour and the forces of humanity).

The technology is now finally there, but human development and our techniques are not. We have to build human society (your communism), the new future human being, the new worker, within capitalism - the new within the old. That’s dialectics! That means we have to focus on development within our communities - neighbourhoods, workplaces, schools, etc - so that we become able to run our own various, independent and cooperative, everyday, face-to-face communities.

From now on, revolutionaries have to set a caring, sharing, loving example in our various communities. However, look at the bitterness and sectarianism of much of the ‘left’. Do you, reader, set that example all the time, every day? No wonder ‘Marxism’ is so isolated from youth, workers and our communities. Marx stood tall in the streets during the summer riots amongst the confused youth and others. Where were the ‘Marxist’ leaders? In the gutters or their offices, or ...?

And this “new within the old” (Engels) happens in every nesting system in a cosmos of nesting systems, sourced in relations within and between atoms; planets, stars, spiral galaxies, eco-systems, trade unions, businesses, animals. Even you, dear reader, and the CPGB are systems!

Mike’s programme-fetishism clearly has no grasp of the dialectic or method, just like 99.9% of all so-called ‘Marxists’ who know little about Marx.

0.1% in the know
0.1% in the know

Phased out

The problem is not with Dave Douglass’s parsing of the cost of coal in the UK or, for that matter, why pits close and why coal is or is not imported to the UK (Letters, September 8). This avoids the real issue: coal kills, and kills more than any other form of energy ever known to have been developed by humans.

What Dave wants to do - and has been doing rather well, I might add - is defend the continued use of coal instead of developing a programme that phases out coal altogether (at least outside the uses in metallurgy, where it is not so easily replaced).

The world needs to relinquish the use of coal for energy production generally, where we can, and especially in electrical generation, where it does the most harm. We need a programme that can both replace coal with non-fossil forms of energy, such as nuclear, and at the same time defend the incomes and standards of living of those made redundant: namely coal miners and some lorry and train drivers.

As socialists, we can do this with a set of campaigns, beginning with the renationalisation of the energy sector.

Phased out
Phased out