04.07.2013

LRC: Left in the dark

There are rumours flying around about goings-on at the top of the Labour Representation Committee, the left-Labour umbrella group. Harley Filben peers into an atmosphere of secrecy...

Joint secretary Pete Firmin has resigned his post due to overload; or he has resigned his post after a bitter spat; or both (his colleague, Andrew Fisher, is already off on paternity leave, making the group secretary-less for the time being). Relations with the RMT union have cooled, following debates on the ‘Women in the labour movement’ statement, thanks to its connection to the Steve Hedley-Caroline Leneghan affair (for legal reasons, I’m afraid, readers will have to Google that one).

LRC national committee meetings have ended in acrimony. Senior people believe the organisation is in crisis. Perhaps - after all, these are rumours, and your correspondent is not a few links down the Chinese whispers chain. ‘But, comrade Filben,’ you could ask, not unreasonably, ‘you are a journalist. Is it not your job to bother people for quotes and attempt, by digging around, to find the truth of the matter?’

Of course it is - but this article is not about what may or may not be happening on the LRC’s NC. I am also a member of the LRC. In that respect, I should no more be expected to play super-sleuth to work out what is going on in the organisation than the next run-of-the-mill member. We should be told, as a straightforward matter of political transparency.

Transparency is pretty low on the left’s agenda, however, and that includes the LRC. I receive regular enough mailouts from the Greater London region and Hackney branch, alerting me, for the most part, to worthy upcoming activity - this hospital closure, that strike and so on. I have been sent minutes of two Greater London LRC meetings, at both of which (for some reason) the comrades decided to congratulate Owen Jones for his participation in a Fabian Society meeting; but at neither of which, apparently, was the leading committee’s shrinkage reported. To lose one secretary may be regarded as misfortune - surely losing two is a matter of concern to the wider membership?

And what about that Owen Jones, anyway? A few months ago, comrade Stan Keable took him to task on the matter of Leninism, while conceding “activists in the Labour Representation Committee feel justly proud when we see our very own Owen Jones on TV demolishing rightwing politicians and standing up for students, workers, unemployed and disabled people” (‘Babies and bathwater’ Weekly Worker February 7). Those same activists were no doubt slightly wrong-footed when, in Facebook discussions on the piece, comrade Jones conceded that he had let his LRC membership lapse, and was more enthused about the Coalition of Resistance.

Now, according to some, he is back in the fold. Perhaps that is why this business with the Fabian Society has aroused such rapture in the Greater London ranks - but then it would be me starting rumours.

The LRC has this culture of secrecy in common with the rest of the left. It holds it, true enough, in a pretty benign form, as these things go. It is a pretty traditional ‘non-sectarian’ regroupment project for all those on the far left (and the not-so-far left) for whom the Labour Party figures, in one form or another, into the overall strategy for achieving socialism. It includes Stalinists, Trotskyists, left feminists and even people who tout the virtues of local ‘fairness commissions’, which in substance offer egalitarian cover to Labour councils carrying out cuts.

You keep all these people on board, in short, by making sure your circulars are about the next demonstration; by focusing on the ‘90% on which we all agree’ and so forth (even dodgier maths than the 0.01% of the world’s population who participated in the Occupy movement, it has to be said). You make sure there is a general sense of forward motion - which means you brush disagreements, disputes and setbacks under the carpet.

The LRC publication, Labour Briefing, came ‘in-house’ after a split at the latter’s AGM on obscure political grounds (the losing side decided to blame the CPGB for this, rather petulantly - although we had no more idea what was going on than the average Briefing reader). It refuses, in the name of unity, to take positions on matters of dispute on the left. Internal polemical bloodbaths sometimes surface in Delphic, 250-word letters to the editor, never to be seen again (except, perhaps, as a highly truncated debate at the LRC’s AGM).

The ‘dark side’ of this method can be exemplified by the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party, which - in the name of being ‘outward-looking’ and ‘interventionist’ - covered up a bungled and absurd rape investigation and opened up fratricidal war on all in its ranks who dared believe that anyone beyond the leadership had any right to know about the affair. There is a world of difference morally between the two cases, but politically they are functionally identical - underlying both is, in the first instance, a ‘not in front of the children’ attitude to the wider movement, which is elitist in the worst way and needs to be rejected.

Worse, it is disorientating to the organisations concerned themselves. One pictures them like Wile E Coyote, running off a cliff into mid-air - the viewer of the cartoon knows he will fall as soon as he notices there is no ground beneath his feet; likewise, the LRC or the SWP worry that, as soon as peripheral members and friends realise that the workers’ movement is in a state of utter disarray, what energy and verve the movement has will disappear, and we will fall to the ground, landing with an almighty bump.

The SWP has a theory for all this - the working class can move heaven and earth, if only it has the confidence to act for itself, independently of the bureaucracies that hold it back. Everything that might demoralise it in the short term becomes heretical - Socialist Worker paints a picture of the world, week after week, as boiling over with angry resistance. Every half-day walkout of provincial binmen is written up in glowing terms; every mass protest movement around the world has its motives chopped and changed until it fits the SWP’s image of what they ought to be protesting about; and, of course, ‘the socialists’ (ie, the SWP) are united and on hand to offer a strong lead to those manning the next barricade. The obverse of this is a refusal to admit failure, a refusal to admit disunity - in short, a culture of secrecy.

Beyond anything else, this opaque optimism has the ultimate flaw that it does not work. It is quite clear to the masses that there is not much fight in the unions, occasional tub-thumping speeches aside; that, were they to come into the fight, the enemy is powerful, well organised and on the offensive; and that the far left is numerically insignificant and not nearly as united as its press pretends (inasmuch as the masses notice we exist at all).

And when serious disputes do take place, no matter how thoroughly buried, they come out eventually. The explosive SWP crisis is one striking recent example; but perhaps a closer analogous case is the break-up of the Scottish Socialist Party. The SSP prided itself on somehow being above the petty disputes among different sections of the left, but in reality these were repressed rather than resolved. With Tommy Sheridan’s misbehaviour as the trigger, the whole organisation shattered spectacularly, falling into fragments so irreconcilably hostile (despite substantially identical politics) that whole groups of comrades simply will not speak to each other even now.

Better by far, surely, to make an honest account of differences and setbacks now than to fall into malicious hatred at a later date. We can build up from our present, parlous state to make a serious challenge to bourgeois power; after all, Wile E Coyote always picks himself up off the canyon floor, and resumes his hunt. So can we, but not if we falsify, even to ourselves, our present condition.