The readmittance of suspended members does not mean that the right is in retreat, argues James Harvey

Reports that 50 suspended Labour members have been readmitted appear, on the face of it, to be only a rather small concession in the battle currently going on in the party. However, both the reinstatement and the reaction to it are significant.

Amongst the initial responses to the news were suggestions that the Starmer-Evans regime had backed down in the face of a combination of threatened legal action and pressure from the Unite leadership. Others, however, saw the reinstatement of a tiny minority of the thousands suspended as simply a Machiavellian manoeuvre by the party leadership to further divide and rule over the left. So, amidst this confusion, what can we learn from this reinstatement about the current balance of forces within the party?

Most importantly, this small retreat by the leadership does not mean a halt to the witch-hunt. Far from it. As many leftwingers noted on social media when they heard that the 50 had been readmitted, what about the rest who have been purged? When will they be reinstated? Asking the question answers it. Starmer will continue with his campaign to consolidate his control over the party and tame the left. There will be no let-up to the suspensions and the attempts to stifle opposition and party democracy – that much is clear.

But if the leadership uses the more obvious forms of coercion and disciplinary measures, more insidious are the attempts to police thought and control political debate by ruling certain ideas and criticisms as unacceptable. This is what lies behind the rulings of the general secretary and the party bureaucracy about ‘competent business’ and their threats to close down Constituency Labour Parties and suspend their officers if they step over the mark.

The reinstatement does not mean they have given up on that: the letter that was sent to the readmitted members asserts the right of the party machine to act as a thought police. Thus, it argues: “The NEC … has the power to issue guidance and instructions to subordinate Labour Party units” and claims that it was “grossly detrimental to the Labour Party for elected officials deliberately to act in opposition to the direction and guidance of the general secretary” (my emphasis). Furthermore, it issues a written warning about future good conduct and toeing the leadership’s line – in effect a threat of further action, which will hang over these readmitted members for a year!

So, if Starmer has not given up on the right’s clampdown on opposition, does this mean that he wants to drive the entire left out of the party, as some comrades argued at the recent Labour Left Alliance conference? Whilst Starmer’s witch-hunt has been severe and indiscriminate in many ways, his strategy has not been particularly systematic or consistent. For all his forensic training and supposedly judicious approach to politics, he appears to have no master plan beyond reacting to events and media pressure. Thus, there is no symphonic score: he is simply playing it by ear.

This is not to downplay the viciousness of the witch-hunt and outrageous slanders launched against the left by the Labour right and their allies in the media. Comrades who have been on the receiving end will neither forget nor forgive what has been done to them – and neither should the left as a whole. But if the allegations and lies about anti-Semitism give this witch-hunt an especially venomous form, such attacks by the pro-capitalist leadership of the Labour Party on the left have a long historical precedent going back to the foundation of the party. Consequently, not only is the current situation far from unique, but, given the nature of Labour as a bourgeois workers’ party, purges of this kind are inevitable on this site of class struggle.

Whilst battle continues to be joined in this way, the final outcome and the future trajectory of Labour still remains uncertain. However, if history is any guide, an important factor in shaping the direction the party will take is the response of the Labour left. Given its central strategic focus on the election of a left Labour government as a prerequisite for ‘socialist transformation’ and the absolute imperative for maintaining party unity at all costs, the Labour left has historically been organically bound to the Labour right, and thus always, in the last analysis, completely subordinate to the pro-capitalist wing of the party.

The compromises and capitulations that this entails have determined the response of the official Labour left to the current round of suspensions and expulsions. It also goes to explain the helpfully convenient distinction they make between a so-called ‘first’ and ‘second’ wave of suspensions and expulsions, which many on the official left, taking their cue from the right, argue are qualitatively different.

The second wave refers to the suspension on ‘procedural grounds’ of CLP officers and others who protested at Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension from the Parliamentary Labour Party, whilst the first wave concerns those disciplined on groundless charges of anti-Semitism and other trumped-up nonsense. The second wave only dates from November 2020: the much larger first wave, however, can be traced back to 2015 and the right’s first attempts to undermine Corbyn’s leadership of the party.

This difference is important, because it allows the official Labour left to set up a distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ – distinguishing those they wish to defend from those they are prepared to throw under the bus. It was this false distinction that operated in the cases of Chris Williamson, Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Marc Wadsworth, Moshé Machover, and countless others. From Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell down, the official left either stood quietly aside or even shamefully joined in when good leftwingers were falsely accused and driven out of the party. Furthermore, the faintly triumphal tone of the official left, and their camp followers in the Momentum leadership, in response to the reported reinstatements shows that this distinction remains. It still seems that some purged comrades are deemed worthy of support, whilst others are clearly not.

This distinction tells us something fundamentally important about the official Labour left. Its retreats are not simply the product of disorientation and demoralisation in the face of the unremitting attacks from the Labour right and the media. Neither are their equivocations and failures to stand up to the witch-hunt merely the product of individual weakness. Rather this failure to mount a principled defence of leftwing victims of the purge flows inevitably from the nature of the official left’s politics of compromise. In presenting this small success of reinstatement as a major victory, they effectively abandon the vast majority of purged members to their fate.

Behind the rhetoric of solidarity and militant struggle, this response shows that their real aim is not to take the fight to the right, but rather to maintain their cosy position as party loyalists and their role as tame, officially licensed ‘critics’ of the leadership.

Last weekend’s conference ended up adopting two totally contradictory positions. James Harvey of Labour Party Marxists reports

If you want to understand the confused politics and contradictory strategy of the Labour left, the January 30 online discussion conference organised by the Labour Left Alliance was a good place to start. Everyone who spoke at the event – entitled ‘Labour in crisis: what next?’ – argued that we urgently need a strategy to organise an effective fightback against Starmer and the Labour right. The picture they painted was of a real attack on party democracy and freedom of debate by the leadership, and the resulting widespread disorientation and demoralisation on the left.

The majority of comrades who attended and spoke clearly regard themselves as the real, militant left in the Labour Party – in contrast to the tame official left, represented by groups such as the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs and Momentum. Indeed, everyone was at great pains to stress this distinction and place themselves firmly in the camp of extreme opposition to the Starmer regime. However, if all were agreed that Labour is facing a huge threat from the right, there was no real agreement about either the character of this crisis or the strategy that the left needs to adopt.1

Roger Silverman of the Workers’ International Network (WIN) and the LLA organising group set the tone in his political opening by suggesting that the one-sided civil war unleashed by the Labour right had finally reached boiling point. The split, initiated by Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner, was already underway, he argued, but the official left lacked both the policy and the perspectives to fight back. In the context of this major crisis, comrade Silverman believed that the conference could prove to be “a landmark” in the struggle for a “mass workers’ party – a socialist Labour Party rooted in the trade unions”.

Unfortunately, it failed to live up to this billing. It was far from the landmark event Roger promised. Instead of clarity and coherence, what the conference actually revealed was the political and strategic muddle that lies at the heart of the Labour left. The dominant moods of the conference appeared to be of compromise, consensus and contradiction. This was most clearly exposed in the final section of the conference, which discussed how to “transform Labour into a party of the class”. Here participants, when presented with three very different analyses and strategies, finally managed, by clear majorities, to support two of them!

The first successful resolution called for “building a socialist alternative inside and outside the Labour Party” (my emphasis). Its argument, framed in rather apocalyptic terms, suggested that “the acute nature of the economic and social crisis of capitalism … meant the ruling class has had to resort to increasingly autocratic methods”, which included closing down free speech and democracy in political parties. In moving the motion Matthew Jones recognised that historically the left has been subordinate to the right within Labour, but he argued that we are now in a “qualitatively different situation”, in which the Starmer/Evans leadership wants to drive the left out of the party altogether. Given this situation, and with thousands of left activists now leaving the party, there was already a de facto split and so, comrade Jones suggested, it was necessary to “promote the self-organisation of the left inside and outside” Labour.

Although the resolution seemed to hedge its bets, the clear implication was that Labour was finished as any type of vehicle for the left. This was an unparalleled crisis and in these ‘end times’ for social democracy there was no longer any perspective of transforming Labour in any form. However, during the debate comrades who supported building such a socialist alternative “inside and outside” the party failed to clearly define what such an alternative would entail. The suggestion seemed to be that it would encompass the ‘entire left’, with the programmatic basis of any such a new formation deliberately left vague. This left the strong suspicion that the “self-organisation of the left” would simply be yet another recycled ‘broad front’ of lowest-common-denominator leftism, similar in form to the Socialist Alliance or Left Unity. Whether they understood it or not, comrades who supported this motion are transitioning out of the Labour Party, although the discussion showed that for many of them the final destination still remains elusively and deliberately just beyond the horizon.

In or out?

Just as these comrades seem to be on their way out, the movers of the successful Rotherham Labour Left motion were digging in even more deeply. Influenced by Socialist Appeal, this motion opposed the setting up of any new formations outside Labour, calling instead for LLA comrades to “keep organising in the Labour Party” and “avoid support for ‘competitors’ to avoid being ineligible for membership”. Although critical of Corbyn’s appeasement of the right and the failure of the official left to stand up to the witch-hunt, their Labour loyalism – and belief that the existing type of ‘traditional’ organisation of the working class provides ready-made instruments for the socialist transformation of society – coloured their analysis of the way forward for LLA supporters. The motion’s focus on rule changes for leadership elections, the demand for a recalled party conference and a new clause four were clearly designed to keep the troops safely busy within Labour rather than straying away for presumably more fruitful pastures new outside.

Both the historical experience of the Labour left and its contemporary self-imprisonment as a tame official left show the ultimate bankruptcy of such positions. As explained by the movers of the Rotherham motion, this strategy of Labour loyalism fails to deal with the contradictory nature of Labour as a bourgeois workers’ party – a failure further compounded by their sowing illusions that the parliamentary strategy and the election of a ‘socialist Labour government’ is the only way to socialism in Britain. But perhaps even this is now too much for these comrades to hope for, given that the height of the ambition of these latter day Millerandistes seems now to be limited to getting a ‘Marxist’ MP into the shadow cabinet – “a coup” in the words of Rotherham Labour Left’s Daniel Platts!

The Labour Party Marxists motion dealt with both the defeatism and loyalism of the two successful motions in its central argument that the transformation of Labour requires a Marxist party. Stressing that Labour remains a bourgeois workers’ party, the motion argued that Corbynism “acted to divert mass discontent away from what is objectively needed – the urgent superseding of capitalism”. Its strategy was to “draw the sharpest line of demarcation between the socialist left and the official Labour left”, especially on socialist participation in capitalist governments or capitalist shadow cabinets.

However, this explicit rejection of the coalitionist road to socialism does not mean that LPM is turning its back on Labour. It called for a struggle for the complete transformation of the Labour Party, forging it into a permanent united front of the working class – a process that can only be realised if socialists are organised in a mass Marxist party. Such a party, the motion argued, would seek to transform Labour, but the creation of such a mass Marxist party remains its central objective, and its strategy for achieving socialism does not rely on Labour.

Despite the very clear political differences between all three motions the resulting discussion was very confused, reflecting the different experiences of the participants. Some comrades, who had only become involved in Labour during the Corbyn period, were frightened by the very idea of ‘Marxism’ and worried that such radicalism would alienate our potential supporters. Even those comrades who claimed the title of ‘Marxist’ were rather defeatist and determinist in their assessment of both the current economic crisis and the future trajectory of Labour, playing down the possibilities of conscious socialist politics and a developing class struggle. In contrast to the clear politics and strategy advanced by LPM, many speakers in the discussion, whether they advocated remaining in Labour or building a socialist alternative outside, argued for the softest forms of broad front and compromise as the way forward.

LPM had called for this conference as a way of clarifying the political and strategic differences within the LLA, especially given the capitulation of the official Labour left and the growing demoralisation and disorientation of the left in Constituency Labour Parties. Unfortunately, however, the conference failed to really bring out these differences. As the votes for two rather contradictory motions showed, this discussion conference ended up facing two ways – one foot in and one foot out. There was no real analysis or taking stock of the failure of the Corbyn project: whilst the official left was rightly condemned for its complicity in the witch-hunt, its organic and symbiotic relationship with the Labour right was glossed over. But, above all, the conference failed to adopt a clear direction or present a strategy for the way forward for the LLA.

This could be charitably ascribed to the technical limitations of online Zoom discussions, but the format devised by the conference arrangements committee certainly did not help. LPM had argued for a conference with the space and time to fully explore the different political and strategic positions within the LLA. In particular, this would require more developed position papers rather than 400-hundred-word motions, and longer contributions than five-minute introductions and three-minute interventions from the floor. That this more expansive and serious type of conference format failed to be adopted was not a purely technical issue, but is rather a very significant political question of how we understand the best way to debate and clarify important political differences.

Moreover, in framing this debate about the crisis of the Labour left in the way that it did, the LLA illustrated all the political and strategic weaknesses that the left has acquired over the past 30 years or so. LPM will continue to argue its case within the LLA and other organisations of the Labour left, but, as this conference has shown, we are under no illusions about the scale of the task if we are to successfully rebuild and rearm our movement by developing a serious and coherent Marxist current within Labour.

A serious accounting for the failures of Corbynism cannot be avoided any longer. Our perspectives must go beyond capitalism. We have had enough silly initiatives and attempts to close or limit debate. Labour Party Marxists has submitted this contribution to the Labour Left Alliance’s January 30 conference

1. Labour’s December 2019 general election defeat and the subsequent election of Sir Keir Starmer as leader exposes the strategic bankruptcy of the official Labour left and all those who fixedly put a left Labour government at the centre of their strategy for socialism. With Jeremy Corbyn they had their “inspiring” leader, with John McDonnell they had their “inspiring” shadow chancellor, with It’s time for real change they had their “inspiring” manifesto. And yet Labour went down to a demoralising defeat.
2. Labour’s results were in parliamentary terms on a par with 1935. Except, of course, then Labour faced a national government. And in 1935 Labour’s share of the vote increased. In some ways the 2019 vote should have been expected in 2017. The reasons for the comparatively good results in 2017 can be guessed at:
   1. propaganda directed against Jeremy Corbyn proved largely ineffective: eg, he is a Marxist, pro-terrorist, part of the metropolitan elite.
   2. Corbyn genuinely enthused some sections of the population – he appeared to many, especially younger voters, as a ‘man on a white horse’.
   3. Brexit was not then the overriding issue it was to become.
3. However, what happened in December 2019 was no surprise. Opinion polls always showed a clear Tory margin. Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings skilfully played the election as being about ‘Getting Brexit done’. The Brexit Party’s support crumbled and predictably went over to the Tories. Labour lost votes in the north and the midlands. While its share of the poll was greater than in 2010 and 2015, nonetheless, compared with 2017, the vote dropped by 8%.
4. Boris Johnson swept to power in the Tory Party with the promise to deliver on the 2016 referendum result. He subsequently showed a ruthlessness utterly alien to the dithering Jeremy Corbyn. Labour’s step-by-step adoption of a hard ‘remain’ position, its call for a second referendum, the humiliating parliamentary defeats inflicted upon Theresa May’s government, crucially with the help of Labour MPs – all this ensured that Labour was never going to retain Brexiteer voters. Quite the opposite. They felt cheated, betrayed, by a Labour Party stupidly pledged to uphold the referendum result.
5. For many, Brexit served as a substitute for class politics. Needless to say, like Scottish nationalism, Brexit is a form of bourgeois politics. The same, of course, goes for ‘remain’. Hence the working class was unnecessarily split and placed under the influence of either ‘remain’ or ‘leave’ demagogues. Labour should have forthrightly rejected David Cameron’s referendum from the start. Labour should have organised an active boycott. Labour should, as it did from its foundation, reject referendums as a matter of principle (it was the arch-opportunist, Harold Wilson, who broke with that tradition in 1975).
6. Labour’s poor performance in 2019 is not only explained by Brexit. Jeremy Corbyn faced unremitting hostility from a mainstream media which did everything it could to feed, fan and impose the ‘Anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism’ campaign. But to have expected anything else would have been naive. The mainstream media “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function” (Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky). Without a powerful alternative mass media in the hands of the labour movement, Corbyn was forced to undergo trial by the bourgeois establishment’s newspapers, radio and TV stations. He was never likely to win.
7. Would adopting a Lexit position have won the election for Labour? Hardly. Votes kept in the north and the midlands would have been lost in London. Nor would Labour have won the general election if Corbyn had organised open-air rallies, called for a general strike against austerity, opposed the witch-hunt, etc, etc. All such nostrums are illusory. Of course, opposing the witch-hunt would not only have provoked rebellion on the right, but also amongst the latest crop of cowards and traitors on the left too. Look at the disgraceful role of John McDonnell, Jon Lansman, Laura Parker, Paul Mason, Owen Jones, Novara Media, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, etc. The odds were always heavily stacked against a Corbyn-led government.
8. What if, against the odds, there had been a Labour government? Such a government would not have been able to deliver even the very modest promises contained in It’s time for real change. The Corbyn leadership was committed to reversing austerity, increasing the economic role of the state, repealing some anti-trade union laws and introducing some minor constitutional reforms. At best that amounted to an illusory attempt to run British capitalism in the interests of the working class. Meanwhile, wage-slavery would continue, Britain would remain a monarchy, subject to judge-made law, one of the Five Eyes, a core imperialist power, a member of Nato and armed with US-controlled nuclear weapons. To call such a programme “socialist” is to turn commonly accepted socialist language onto its head.
9. But a Corbyn-led government was never a prospect that the ruling class was prepared to countenance. Economically its programme was seen as irresponsible. It could, it was feared, trigger a crisis of expectations. More than that, Corbyn and his close allies were considered totally unreliable, when it came to international politics.
10. Because of all this, the left should have combined raising sights beyond the narrow horizons of capitalism with issuing sober warnings: expect an organised run on the pound, obstruction by the PLP right, MI5 sabotage, an army mutiny, US ‘pushback’, a royalty-blessed coup, etc.
11. While the chances of a Corbyn-led government were always slim, that cannot be said of the Labour Party’s rules and structures. Whereas Tony Blair carried out a (counter) revolution, all that Corbyn managed to achieve was a few tinkering changes. That need not have been the case. With a strong, determined, politically clear-sighted left, there really could have been a revolution in the party.
12. However, the left is organisationally and politically weak. Too often there was a determination to simply tail Corbyn, and Corbyn was determined to maintain unity with the openly pro-capitalist right in the trade union and labour bureaucracy. That meant dropping the open selection of parliamentary candidates, leaving Blair’s clause four untouched and refusing to confront, to call out the ‘Anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism’ campaign.
13. Not only did Corbyn refuse to protest, as one friend, one ally, one honest, anti-racist Labour Party member after another was thrown to the wolves. Corbyn and his regime became agents of the witch-hunt. The big lie that the Labour Party has a real problem with anti-Semitism was accepted. Instead of taking the fight to Zionist forces, such as Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement (formerly Poale Zion), and defending the Palestinian cause through promoting the boycott, disinvestment and sanctions campaign, there was a concerted drive to increase the number of expulsions and suspensions. Shamefully, disgustingly, to deny that the Labour Party has a real problem with anti-Semitism itself became a disciplinary offence under the Corbyn-Formby regime.
14. Not surprisingly, with the December 2019 general election defeat, many confused former supporters of Jeremy Corbyn variously concluded:
    1. that Labour can never be changed and therefore dropped out of active politics.
    2. that the fight for social change lies not in permanent organisations and patient education, but in ephemeral street protests, economic strikes, tenant campaigns, etc.
    3. that there needs to be a safe, acceptable, suitably centrist leader who can reach out to the Labour right, unite the party and “rewin the trust” of the so-called Jewish community. That always meant Sir Keir Starmer fully accepting the EHRC report, externalising disciplinary processes and carrying out an historically unprecedented purge of the left using the ‘Anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism’ big lie.
15. Other than getting himself into No10, Starmer has no master plan. He is no latter-day Tony Blair. Fawning before the Murdoch press, Blair committed himself to accepting Thatcherism, when it came to privatisation and anti-trade union laws, reuniting liberalism and breaking the historic link with the trade unions. Starmer is driven by prior forces – most notably the ‘Anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism’ witch-hunt – not of his own making. Conceivably, though it is far from certain, that could see him succeeding where Blair failed. That would probably lead Labour not to electoral unbeatability, but rather to the near irrelevancy it has achieved in Scotland, thanks to being completely outmanoeuvred by David Cameron in the 2014 independence referendum. By fronting for the Tories’ Better Together campaign, Labour brilliantly managed to present itself as a party of red Tories. Once a dominant force, Labour now counts as the third party in Holyrood.
16. The marginalisation experienced by ‘official’ communism and ‘official’ social democracy alike in France, Germany, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Austria and other European countries serves as an object lesson. Even historically established parties can become history.
17. Under conditions where a declining capitalism is running up against ecological limits, where the threat of nuclear war is increasing, where lasting, meaningful reforms that benefit the working class can no longer be gained, where, as a consequence, reformist programmes of transforming capitalism into socialism through winning a parliamentary majority are replaced by the ever more hopeless perspectives of a nicer, a kinder, a fairer capitalism, it is clear that humanity faces the stark choice posed by Frederick Engels: socialism or barbarism.
18. We must explain in materialist terms the failures, the cowardice, the treachery, the constantly repeated pattern of the official Labour left becoming the official Labour right. It cannot be put down to individual oddity, personal weakness or some congenital tendency to betray. The official Labour left is still the natural home for many trade union militants, socialist campaigners and those committed to working class liberation. But Labour’s position as the alternative party of government means that the official Labour left is also a breeding ground for careerists, who, starting off with good intentions, slowly or speedily evolve to the right. The lure of elected positions, generous expense accounts, lucrative sinecures, sly backhanders, mixing with the great and good and eventually entry into the lower ranks of the bourgeoisie all smooth the way.
19. The official Labour left serves to keep hopes alight that Labour can be won for socialism, and that the next Labour government will actually introduce socialism. Meanwhile, the right puts forward what is acceptable to the capitalist class – and its media – in the name of forming a government that ‘really makes a difference’. As long as the left does not cause too much trouble, as long as the right is firmly in command, there is a symbiotic unity. The official Labour left is useful to the official Labour right because it fosters illusions below, while above it supplies a steady flow of high-profile converts to (capitalist) realism.
20. Both the official Labour left and the official Labour right share a common sense that politics are about winning elections. Therefore, policies are put forward because they can be ‘sold’ to the electorate. Ultimately it is, though, the press, the mainstream media, that decides what is sensible and what is to be dismissed as sectarian craziness. Anything that appears to get in the way of winning elections must therefore be avoided like the plague. Hence it is not only the Labour right which attempts to restrict, muddy and segment debate, impose bureaucratic controls and sideline awkward minorities. The official left behaves in exactly the same anti-democratic manner.
21. The Labour Party, as presently constituted, is not a “true mass organisation of the working class”. Doubtless, Labour still has a mass membership and relies on trade union finances and working class voters. But, in the last analysis, what decides the class character of a political party is its leadership and its programme. The election of Corbyn as leader did not produce fundamental change here. Neither For the many, not the few nor It’s time for real change questioned the monarchical constitution, judge-made law, the US-dominated international order or the system of wage-slavery. So, even under Corbyn, Labour was neither a democratic nor a socialist party. It was, and remains, a bourgeois workers’ party, which objectively serves as one of capitalism’s many defensive walls. Indeed, given the urgent necessity of superseding capitalism, Corbyn and Corbynism acted to divert mass discontent away from what is objectively needed.
22. We must draw the sharpest line of demarcation between the socialist, the Marxist, left in the Labour Party and the official Labour left. The socialist, the Marxist, left, must stand for extreme democracy, the only realistic road to socialism. There should, therefore, be no falling into line with nor reliance on ministerial/shadow ministerial ‘socialists’: ie, those who, in pursuit of their pathetic, middle class careers, sit in a capitalist, or a shadow capitalist, government. No-one who calls themselves a socialist should sit in a capitalist … or a shadow capitalist government. No-one who calls themselves a socialist should call for ‘socialist’ representation in, or reinstatement to, a capitalist government or shadow government. Those who do so betray the cause of socialism.
23. Despite the failure of Corbyn and the election of Starmer, we remain committed to the complete transformation of the Labour Party, forging it into a permanent united front of the working class and equipping it with solid Marxist principles and a tried-and-tested Marxist leadership.
24. However, such a perspective can only be realised through building a mass Marxist party – a party that can, if necessary, operate within Labour despite the rules, a party which seeks to transform Labour, but a party which does not rely on Labour.
25. Without making that goal our main, our central objective, we are doomed to suffer one Sisyphean defeat after another.

A recent NEC vote shows that the official left is prepared to join in the witch-hunt, reports James Harvey of Labour Party Marxists

As the toll of suspensions and expulsions in Labour’s civil war continues to mount, leftwing members in Constituency Labour Parties are increasingly asking: where are our leaders? When are they going to lead a fightback? Although the official left are keeping very quiet, we know where they are, and it is miles away from the front line in the fight against the witch-hunt. Whilst many are simply keeping their heads down or meekly issuing apologies when threatened with suspension, others have gone even further and are siding with the Labour right.

The most egregious example of this betrayal was the December 7 meeting of Labour’s national executive committee, where the official left – including five Grassroots Voice supporters representing the CLPs – effectively supported the witch-hunt by voting to implement the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s proposals on Labour’s disciplinary procedures. These GV NEC members campaigned and drew support in the recent elections as opponents of the witch-hunt and defenders of the CLPs, but at the first serious test they collapsed before the Labour right, betraying their mandate and leaving their supporters defenceless before the purge.

This capitulation is even more outrageous when you consider that, in the days leading up to the NEC meeting, we had two further examples of what such a surrender would mean. In the last week Moshé Machover, a leading Jewish anti-Zionist, and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, a key figure in Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL), joined the growing ranks of socialists who have been purged during Starmer’s witch-hunt. Their crime? Moshé’s long-standing argument that anti-Zionism does not equal anti-Semitism was deemed a ‘thought crime’ by Labour officials, while Naomi’s heinous offence was to speak out at an online CLP meeting against the accelerating purge of the left! The pace of the attack on the left is now so fast that it really is a case of ‘another day, another round of suspensions’.

This NEC vote is a serious setback, which will widen the scope of the witch-hunt and further restrict free speech and party democracy. However, it is just the latest episode in a long line of retreats, which has demoralised and disorganised the Labour left and sabotaged the chance to mount an effective counterattack. Taken together, this abject surrender, along with the Labour bureaucracy’s relentless pressure on even the mildest opposition, reveals the fundamental crisis now facing the official Labour left.

The nature of this crisis is encapsulated in the current debate amongst many left activists about whether it is still possible to stay and fight in the Labour Party under present conditions. This argument began in earnest following Starmer’s election and has now intensified following the EHRC report and Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension from the Parliamentary Labour Party. In response, leftwingers in the CLPs and trade union branches tabled motions of protest, which were met with bureaucratic manoeuvres and attempts to shut down discussion. David Evans, the party’s general secretary, issued a series of edicts preventing internal debate on Corbyn’s suspension or any aspect of the EHRC report. These curbs on free speech were further extended to other political issues – even the most innocuous solidarity with the Palestinian people was ruled out of order in one London CLP.

Although over 80 CLPs managed to pass critical resolutions, in countless others local party officers and full-time regional officials successfully shut things down – in some case literally pulling the plug on Zoom meetings! It has become commonplace for CLPs to be threatened with disciplinary measures whilst in some cases officers who allowed critical motions to be discussed, such as in Bristol West CLP, have been suspended. The result is that some comrades on the Labour left are asking if calls for staying and fighting still hold water. Does the purge mean, they suggest, that Labour is dead, and we should now build a new working class party?

Keep your head down?

Let’s rehearse the arguments. In a recent article on Labour Hub, Mike Phipps of the Labour Representation Committee puts the case for the left keeping its head down and riding out the storm. Comparing Starmer’s purge with Blair’s New Labour counterrevolution, he argues that the left has indeed suffered a serious defeat, resulting in fragmentation, demoralisation and loss of membership. Agreed! But what does comrade Phipps propose? A vigorous defence of party democracy? A real counterattack against the witch-hunt? No, instead he advises us to

choose our battles carefully if we are going to survive and, more importantly, maintain our relevance with the broader membership. Failure to understand this will increase the danger of our marginalisation (original emphasis).

We have seen the fruits of this passive approach throughout the witch-hunt and witnessed this week how it culminates in GV supporters voting with the Labour right on the NEC. A case of ‘choosing your battles carefully’? No, this is a sure-fire recipe for defeat and disaster, not survival. We do not “maintain our relevance with the broader membership” by keeping quiet: to remain silent during this purge means we are really abandoning the fight and going over to the enemy on the Labour right.

This trajectory is inherent in Phipps’ quietist approach, because his political strategy is completely focused on the election of a Labour government. Along with the rest of the official Labour left, this belief in a parliamentary road to socialism absolutely requires party unity (with the right) and the preservation of the Labour Party at all costs as an instrument for ‘socialist transformation’. Leaving aside the historical experience of Labour governments and the failures of the Labour left throughout the last 120 years to transform the party into any kind of instrument for militant socialist politics, Phipps’ advice for the Labour left in 2020 amounts to no more than a reiteration of its traditional strategy, combined with desperate appeals to cling on to party membership at all costs. It is a very long way from the demand that the left should stay and fight.

We strongly agree that comrades should stay and fight: it is an absolute duty that they should not quit and abandon the party to the likes of Starmer and his ilk. However, staying and fighting, is only the beginning of the battle! Recent experience has shown that, if you speak up against the witch-hunt or challenge the leadership’s lies and slanders about anti-Semitism, you will be suspended or expelled. Thus, Starmer’s purge and the increasing collaboration of the official left in shutting down debate and undermining party democracy are making it increasingly difficult for principled left activists to continue to operate within Labour.

The result is that for those comrades – like the supporters of Socialist Appeal, who make the Labour Party the central feature of their strategy – this crisis really is existential. If the space for socialism and democracy within Labour is closed off, what alternative perspective is open to these comrades? Burrow down and hope for better days ahead, perhaps?

But if clinging on to your membership card at all costs is an inadequate and ultimately impossible strategy, then the alternatives offered by comrades who advocate setting up new broad left parties and formations outside Labour are equally flawed. To repeat, we recognise that principled left members will face suspension and expulsion when they stay and fight. However, leaving Labour during this witch-hunt is a moral gesture, not a serious strategy for socialists. If comrades leave the party, where are they going? What is seriously on offer? Behind the rumours and the vague ideas for a regroupment of the left, two possible formations are frequently suggested: a Labour Party mark two, and a ’broad front’ modelled on Syriza or Podemos.

In the form of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, a Labour Party mark two is advocated by the Socialist Party in England and Wales and, since Corbynism’s defeat, is now being revived as an electoral front. Although former Labour MP Chris Williamson has recently joined Tusc, given its record of very modest success to date and its limited programme of economistic left reformism, it seems unlikely to be the future vehicle for militant socialist politics. As Labour Party Marxists has frequently argued throughout this crisis, sub-reformism of this Labour Party mark two type simply reinvents all the political weaknesses and strategic dead ends offered by the historical Labour Party mark one! It is a trap and a route to futility and disillusionment.

Despite the allure of the idea of the broad left front as an alternative to Labour, the experience of Syriza and Podemos does not augur well. Their record in government in Greece and Spain shows the real nature of the politics behind their radical phraseology. Their trajectory from ‘anti-establishment outsiders’ to parties of coalition follows a familiar reformist pattern, which comrades who claim to be revolutionary socialists should flatly reject as any kind of model. In a similar vein, nearer to home, the history of left regroupments in Britain over the last 30 years points to a similar pattern of failure to build a credible revolutionary party that offers a real challenge to capitalism. The history of the stillborn parties that emerged after 1990 is hardly inspiring; do the experiences of the Socialist Labour Party, Scottish Socialist Party, Socialist Alliance, Respect and Left Unity really offer us any party models or examples of a coherent political strategy that we can adopt today?

The witch-hunt has exposed fundamental flaws and fault lines in the politics of the Labour left. As the NEC vote shows, the leadership of the official left shares much in common with the right, leaving many of their supporters in the CLPs and the trade unions demoralised and uncertain of how best to fight back. These comrades are looking for a strategy to advance socialist politics. Stay and fight is the first step: we must not lightly surrender the Labour Party battlefield to the enemy. But it is only the first step: the current existential crisis poses much more fundamental questions for the Labour left about the Marxist programme and the type of party that we need if we are to carry out our movement’s historical commitment to the socialist transformation of society.