Category Archives: Democracy and the Labour Party

Democracy and the Labour Party, The left

Labour Left Alliance | Fudge, muddle, clarity

James Marshall of Labour Party Marxists provides a rough guide to the issues and arguments that will dominate the January 30 Zoom conference

Another Labour Left Alliance conference; another massively overloaded agenda. Over the course of four hours (plus half an hour for lunch) we are going to debate the crisis in the Labour Party and decide what to do next. Doable, if the conference had been organised with a view to achieving clarity. Unfortunately that is not the case. The methods of the labour and trade union bureaucracy have been thoroughly internalised.

There is a mixed bag of eight motions – surely in a calculated attempt to dumb down, all limited to a maximum of 350 words, then nudged up to 400, by the LLA’s conference arrangements committee. This was strongly opposed by Labour Party Marxists. There is also the certainty of various amendments (with no word limit).

Movers, seconders, supporters, opposers have all been limited to five- and three-minute contributions. A sure-fire recipe for the adoption of mutually contradictory positions and in all probability utter confusion. Almost guaranteeing that outcome, the organisers insist that it is the conference chair who will choose all speakers bar movers and seconders. LPM is of the view that factions, platforms, local affiliates and other movers should have the right to choose their most competent, their preferred, advocates – basic practice with the best of our tradition (eg, the Bolsheviks). However, we find ourselves in a minority.

Background

Since the launch of the Labour Left Alliance there have been some hugely negative developments. Labour badly lost the 2019 general election, Keir Starmer easily won the Labour leadership and the ‘Anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism’ witch-hunt has not only seen Jeremy Corbyn suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party, but scores of Constituency Labour Party chairs and secretaries suspended because they dared defy instructions disallowing any discussion of Corbyn or the Equalities and Human Rights Commission report.

As a result many thousands of members have simply walked. An already weak and politically confused Labour left has been further weakened and further confused. That has – as was bound to be the case – affected LLA too. (Not that LPM has been immune – we have lost as many members as we have gained).

LPM did advocate that the LLA should be founded as an individual-membership organisation – structurally something along the lines of the British Socialist Party, the Fabian Society, the Independent Labour Party or the Socialist League. This proposal was rejected. So was our call for the LLA to commit itself to the perspectives of extreme democracy, of superseding the capitalist system that is threatening to bring about ecological collapse, of working class rule and making the global transition to a classless, moneyless, stateless communism. That would not have saved LLA from the crisis of the Labour left. But politically it would have put us in a far, far stronger position.

Instead, the majority went for a loose, federal structure; a delegate conference, which does not and cannot elect or hold the leadership to account; and lowest-common-denominator politics, which, in truth, amount to bog standard left Labour reformism.

Showing its steep, downward organisational trajectory, the LLA January 30 conference will not consist of delegates. A first. On the contrary, anyone who has signed what amounts to an LLA petition has the right to speak and vote on January 30. No dues paid, no commitments required. And, of course, given the LLA structure, votes are not binding on either the LLA’s organising group (OG) or its steering committee. So January 30 will be a four-hour talking shop … but, yes, okay, it is good to talk.

A quick tour

There are, as already said, eight motions. We shall visit them one by one in the order in which they are due to be debated.

Motion 1.1, ‘The witch-hunt and the Labour Party’, comes with nine signatures: Tina Werkmann, Roger Silverman, Daniel Platts, Pam Bromley, Carol Taylor, Matthew Jones, Ken Syme, Tasib Mughal and Robert Arnott. In essence a steering committee motion.

What should have been a routine, uncontroversial motion, is, unfortunately marred by far too many bungled, misconceived formulations.

Here is the opening paragraph:

The campaign to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn started even before he won the Labour leadership election in 2015. Millions were inspired and over 350,000 leftwingers joined the Labour Party. This posed a real problem for the ruling class – Tony Blair had worked hard to transform the party into a safe ‘second eleven’ that could be trusted to run capitalism.

The campaign against Jeremy Corbyn started even before he won the Labour leadership election in 2015 – that is beyond doubt. But the campaign to “get rid” of Jeremy Corbyn? As what? As a candidate? As an MP? As a living, breathing human being? A quibble, perhaps – but what about: “Tony Blair had worked hard to transform the party into a safe ‘second eleven’ that could be trusted to run capitalism” (my emphasis). This is straight from the ‘reclaim the Labour Party’ narrative of the official Labour left.

Blair certainly “worked hard” to transform the Labour Party into something resembling the old Liberal Party of William Gladstone. In other words, capitalism’s first eleven. But, before him, apart from Keir Hardie, George Lansbury and maybe Michael Foot, every leader of the Labour Party had been a thoroughly trustworthy servant of British capitalism. That is certainly the case with every pre-Blair Labour prime minister: Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. Capitalism was safe in their hands.

So delete “to get rid of” and replace with “against”. Delete: “Tony Blair had worked hard to transform the party into a safe ‘second eleven’ that could be trusted to run capitalism”. Hopefully such amendments will be accepted with good grace.

Then in the third paragraph we are told this:

The ‘leaked report’ shows that in the process they displayed an inability to recognise real anti-Semitism, while eagerly trying to get rid of activists like Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Ken Livingstone and Chris Williamson, none of whom can be accused of even a trace of anti-Semitism. This campaign quickly snowballed out of all control. Thousands of members have been thrown to the wolves in the process.

Well, what the ‘leaked report’ showed was not an inability to recognise “real anti-Semitism”. Rather that the Labour Party bureaucracy under general secretary Iain McNicol deliberately sat on what we are told were the few cases of real anti-Semitism, in order to discredit Corbyn and provide media ammunition. As to the idea that the “campaign quickly snowballed out of control”, this is a badly misconceived formulation.

The ‘Anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism’ campaign was and remains an operation run out of the offices of the CIA, MI5, Shin Bet and the London Israeli embassy. The Board of British Deputies, Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, Labour Friends of Israel, Jewish Labour Movement, the baying media, the Labour right – and finally Labour’s governance and legal unit under pro-Corbyn general secretary Jennie Formby – were all considered assets.

The campaign was well planned, well directed and never ran out of control. The aim was always much bigger than the defenestration of one man, Jeremy Corbyn. The aim remains to smother, outlaw, kill criticism of Israel and US-UK wars in the Middle East in ‘defence of Israel’.

So another amendment is needed. Firstly, delete “The ‘leaked report’ shows that in the process they displayed an inability to recognise real anti-Semitism”; replace with “The ‘leaked report’ shows that the Labour Party bureaucracy under Iain McNicol sat on cases of real anti-Semitism.” Also delete “This campaign quickly snowballed out of all control”; replace with a cropped “This campaign quickly snowballed.”

Another mistaken formulation – the idea that Starmer and Evans are trying to “get rid of the entire left” – is dealt with below, in the discussion of motion 2.4. As we shall argue, it is wrong – so another delete.

Finally, the movers of motion 1.1 come to what they call their demands/principles. We read:

In order to avoid making the same mistakes again, we believe the Labour left must learn some lessons and maintain certain demands/principles:

– Appeasement never works.

That is the first of the comrades’ demands/principles.

True, in British history the word ‘appeasement’ is forever associated with the policy of Neville Chamberlain’s government and its Munich Pact with fascist Germany (and Italy), agreed in September 1938. In the name of “peace in our time” Germany was allowed to slice off the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. The capitalist class, the royal family, the mainstream press, the BBC and most Tory MPs fully supported this attempt to appease the Hitler regime.

But what does ‘appeasement’ mean? The Cambridge dictionary defines appeasement as “the action of satisfying the demands of an aggressive person, country or organisation”. With this in mind, the statement “Appeasement never works” transforms the rejection of what is, what can be a legitimate tactic into a timeless principle. A basic error.

Vladimir Lenin’s celebrated pamphlet ‘Left wing’ communism, an infantile disorder (1920) goes to some lengths to patiently explain to the fledgling communist parties that not only should they participate in reactionary parliaments and trade unions, they should also be prepared to make all manner of concessions, compromises and retreats. Put another way, ‘appeasement’ can be made to work in the interests of the working class and the cause of socialism.

Imagine for a moment being held at knifepoint by some boozed-up loser. Not wanting to get stabbed to death, you appease them. You politely hand over your mobile phone and whatever cash you happen to have on you. It works: thank god the robber staggers off down the road and you live for another day.

Soviet Russia did much the same with the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, the Ottoman empire). Under the terms of the March 1918 Brest-Litovsk treaty huge tracts of territory were surrendered in the name of securing a ‘breathing space for the revolution’. Of course, the cost went far beyond losing land, industry and people. Brest-Litovsk divided the central committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) into three factions and lost them their Left Socialist Revolutionary allies too … and therefore their majority in the soviets. Nevertheless, in my opinion, on balance Leon Trotsky’s decision to throw in his hand with Lenin and sign the Brest-Litovsk treaty was probably the right thing to do.

Corbyn’s appeasement of the Labour right, the Zionist movement, etc, proved an abject failure. That is for sure. Despite that, appeasement should not be rejected as a matter of principle. So delete “Appeasement never works”.

Next

Motion 1.2, ‘Lessons of Corbynism’, comes from LPM and should be read in conjunction with LPM’s ‘Theses on Keir Starmer’s Labour Party’. It should be pointed out that it was LPM which proposed this LLA conference. Against some opposition we won the vote on the LLA’s ‘ruling’ OG.

Our intention was to debate out areas of agreement and disagreement between the various factions, strands and trends. Hence we submitted our hardly overlong ‘Theses’.

Presumably, there are those comrades who fear debating out areas of agreement and disagreement between the various factions, strands and trends. The conference arrangements committee decided to go with neither the word nor the spirit of the OG resolution, but, instead, imposed a bureaucratic 350-word limit on motions and five- and three-minute speaking restrictions.

As a result, the two LPM motions are mere shrunken fragments of what began as a coherent whole. More than a pity. Anyway here is LPM’s first motion:

  1. Declining capitalism is reaching its ecological limits. The threat of nuclear war is increasing. Lasting, meaningful reforms that benefit the working class can no longer be gained. Reformist programmes of transforming capitalism into socialism through winning a parliamentary majority have been replaced by the ever more hopeless illusion of a nicer, kinder, fairer capitalism. Humanity faces the stark choice posed by Frederick Engels: socialism or barbarism.
  2. The failures, cowardice and treachery of the official Labour left, its constantly repeated pattern of becoming the official Labour right, must be explained in materialist terms – not put down to individual oddity, personal weakness or some congenital tendency to betray. The official Labour left remains 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 capitalist government makes the official Labour left a breeding ground for careerists who, starting with good intentions, slowly or speedily evolve to the right. The way is smoothed by the lure of elected positions, generous expenses, lucrative sinecures, sly backhanders, mixing with the great and good and, eventually, entry into the lower ranks of the bourgeoisie.
  3. The official Labour left serves to keep hopes alight that the Labour Party can be won for socialism, 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’. So long as the left does not cause too much trouble and 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 and supplies a steady flow of high-profile converts to capitalist realism above.
  4. Both the official Labour left and the official Labour right share a common sense that politics is about winning elections. Policies are selected which can be sold to the electorate. Ultimately, though, the mainstream media determines what is sensible and what is dismissed as sectarian craziness. Anything that appears to obstruct electoral victory is avoided like the plague. Hence, while the Labour right attempts to restrict and muddy debate, impose bureaucratic controls and sideline awkward minorities, the official Labour left behaves in exactly the same anti-democratic manner.

The importance of agreeing this motion is obvious. Firstly, the official Labour left is engaged in a permanent kabuki dance with the pro-capitalist Labour right. It is no longer even reformist and therefore it is categorically incorrect to describe it as socialist. The LLA must choose between the socialist left (the principal example being LPM itself, of course) and the official left.

Secondly, the struggle for socialism cannot be put off to the far-distant future. It is an urgent necessity. Calls for reforms must be linked to the perspective of socialism.

Thirdly, our movement needs democracy and the fullest debate, as the human being needs food and air. Starved of democracy and the fullest debate, our movement withers and eventually dies.

Second session

Here things begin with the motion on trade union work, proposed by 12 comrades: Pam Bromley, Steve McKenzie, Carol Taylor-Spedding, Bob Allen, Vince Williams, Jonathan Cooper, Maggie Gothard, Ross Charnock, Craig Murphy, Peter Grant, Alec Price and Anna Hubbard.

From an LPM viewpoint the motion is motherhood and apple pie. We agree, we agree, we agree. No socialist worthy of the name could disagree. (But would that apply to Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Len McCluskey, Diane Abbott, etc? Hardly.)

Motion 2.1 should quickly be voted through. There ought to be unanimity.

By contrast, 2.2. is a confused mess. The motion in support of proportional representation is put forward by Andrea Grainger, Liv Singh, Chris Donovan, Shiraz Hussain, Richard Crawford, Reuben Ramsay, John Bernard, Barry West, Jon de Rennes, Graham Burnby-Crouch and Jenny Almeida.

Things begin badly, when the motion states: “That the UK, Belarus, USA and Canada are the only western democracies to not have a form of proportional election system.” Well, it is good to know that Belarus counts as a ‘western democracy’. A sloppy formulation then.

As for the UK, USA and Canada, they can only be called democracies with some very considerable reservations. ‘United Kingdom’ should give the game away: monarchy and democracy are opposite principles. Nor can the House of Lords, the established Church of England, the standing army, MI5, corporate domination of the media, etc be called democratic. As for the US, it is at best a semi-democracy. We have certainly seen over recent months how an indirectly elected president, the Senate, the Supreme Court and state rights are used as checks and balances against democracy. The founding fathers wanted an oligarchic republic with the least democracy they could get away with.

Of course, LPM does not object to PR. Quite the reverse. But the motion is too muddled, too overegged: ie, “That our electoral system forces all far-left, leftwing and centre-left activists into one party, which inevitably leads to massive internal party conflict and division, which damages morale, demotivates activists and weakens our movement.” It is hardly the situation that “all” far-left organisations are ensconced in the Labour Party. Nor is it necessarily the case that “internal party conflict and division … damages morale, demotivates activists and weakens our movement”. It can be the exact reverse.

It might be worth voting for the motion simply because of its call for the LLA to “apply to join the Labour for a New Democracy group, which is bringing together different pro-PR groups in the party” – a motley collection of Labour centrists and official lefts. It would be interesting to see whether or not the LLA would be made welcome as an affiliate. But, no, while it is a good idea for the LLA to “publicly endorse PR”, it is delusional to imagine that PR is “a progressive solution to problems in the British left.”

The comrades cannot see beyond narrow electoralism.

Bennism

‘Republican Labour and the LLA’ (2.3) is proposed by Robin O’Neill, Peter Morton, Steve Freeman, Ken Syme, Tina Werkmann, Paul Collins, Leigh Bacon, Carol Taylor-Spedding, Lewis Nesbitt, John Henry, Larry Hyatt, John Beeching, Dave Hill and Kevin Ware.

Here we have a factional declaration … and there is nothing wrong with that. It is, though, an opportunist attempt by Steve Freeman, the main author, to hitch the “driving force in the struggle for socialism” to the ideas of Keir Hardie and Tony Benn. We are told that Republican Labour “has its origins in the ideas of Keir Hardie and developed more fully by Tony Benn, with reference to, for example, the struggles of the Levellers, Chartists and suffragettes”.

Well, maybe some of the comrades are old-time Bennites. Others – most – are attempting to dress their republicanism in the sheep’s clothing of Bennism in order to make it acceptable to the “mainstream consciousness of the Labour left”. As a marketing device, doubtless clever, but surely it falls into the category of ‘false advertising’ – after all, it attempts to conceal the motion’s factional origins. But, perhaps I am being unfair, perhaps the comrades have undergone a latter-day conversion, perhaps they now count as true Bennites.

Anyhow, in May 1991 the right honourable Anthony Wedgewood Benn presented his Commonwealth of Britain Bill to the House of Commons as an early day motion (the movers have the year wrong).2 Inevitably, it sank without trace. Nonetheless, Benn bravely proposed to replace the monarch with a president, devolve powers to Scotland, Wales and the English regions, replace the House of Lords with a House of the People with equal quotas of men and women, separate church and state, etc.

Whatever our particular criticisms, it is clear that Benn had undergone an unusual journey from right to left, instead of the usual left to right. In 1964 he was the technocratic postmaster general in Harold Wilson’s first Labour government. By the 1980s he was the established leader of the Labour left … and still moving to the left.

However, just like his hero, Keir Hardie, Benn was a committed Christian: my “political commitment owes much more to the teachings of Jesus – without the mysteries within which they are presented – than to the writings of Marx whose analysis seems to lack an understanding of the deeper needs of humanity”.

And Benn remained firmly within the frame of left reformism: he was a “quintessential House of Commons man”, not a revolutionary. His republicanism was correspondingly a reformist republicanism. Something fully in line with his Christian, ethical and national socialism.

According to Benn, Britain became a colony when it joined the Common Market on January 1 1973. He even described Britain “the last colony of the British empire” and called for a “national liberation struggle” to free the country from the “embryonic western European superstate”.

The LLA ought to commit itself to militant republicanism. That would be a big step forward. But we should have as our foundations not the muddled ideas of Hardie and Benn, rather we need the scientific clarity of Marx and Engels.

Nonetheless, LPM welcomes the call for LLA to “set up a working group to examine how we can and should give more emphasis to democratic republican issues in theory, policy and practice and invite contributions from all sections of the Alliance.”

We would also vote for this: “1. The working group will circulate a report within two months for further discussion and policy decision-making at a future meeting”; and “2. One or more educational meetings will be organised on the theme of republicanism and its relationship to socialism” … if they were presented separately. But we cannot vote for the Hardie-Benn rubbish.

Fudge

Motion 2.4. ‘Building a socialist alternative inside and outside the Labour Party’ is crass, reductive and frankly politically worthless. Sponsored by Matthew Jones, Tina Werkmann, Roger Silverman, Ken Syme, Sandy McBurney, Tasib Mughal and Pam Bromley, it is in essence based on this contention:

We have to understand the attack on party democracy and the membership structure of the Labour Party (LP) as part of a wider trend of attacks on democratic rights by the ruling class on a world scale. The depth and acute nature of the economic and social crisis of capitalism – given another twist by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic – has meant the ruling class has had to resort to increasingly autocratic methods, as social inequality has increased to grotesque levels. The LP cannot afford membership democracy when its leadership and elected representatives are being instructed to take responsibility for increasingly savage measures against the working class.

Doubtless, democratic rights are under attack. But the blunt conclusion that the Labour Party “cannot afford membership democracy” because of austerity is vastly overstated.

Remember, individual membership was introduced in 1918, towards the end of World War I. Capitalism was mired in horrendous slaughter, the economy had been largely militarised, young men forcibly conscripted and strikes outlawed. Yet individual membership went hand in hand with Sydney Webb’s Fabian clause four. Both a step forward and a means of exerting control over an increasingly restive and increasingly militant rank and file. The Labour leadership could not afford not to give “membership” and “membership democracy”. Nor could they afford not to give that membership a binding rule-book commitment to ‘socialism’.

Similar observations can be made about 1917 Russia … but in spades. Acute economic, military and political crisis triggered a popular revolution and far reaching concessions by the bourgeoisie, from the Provisional government down to the factory floor. There were soviet elections, local government elections, the election of officers, the election of managers. And everywhere there was debate, debate, debate. There is, in other words, no one-way line of development.

Throughout the 1920s the right sought to wreck and undermine the Labour Party as a united front of the working class. Most members of the newly formed Communist Party in 1920 came from the affiliated British Socialist Party. Many BSP members were already individual Labour Party members. Like those of the Fabian Society and the ILP, they were dual members. Despite that, the CPGB affiliation applications were turned down one after another. The right wanted to halt the Bolshevik contagion.

With that in mind, a concerted witch-hunt was launched. CPGB members were barred from standing as Labour candidates; constituency parties that stood or supported communist candidates were closed down. CPGB members were then purged; CLPs who resisted were closed down. It went on and on throughout the 1920s and happened again in the mid- to late 1930s. On a smaller scale, there was the purge of the Bevanites in the 1950s, the Healyites in the 1960s and Militant in the 1980s.

So attacks on the democratic rights of the rank and file amount to an almost a permanent feature of Labour Party politics. However, there have also been advances: eg, mandatory reselection in the 1980s. Certainly, to primarily explain present-day attacks with reference to the “economic and social crisis” and Covid-19 is reductive in the extreme.

After all, the main explanation of today’s witch-hunt surely lies in the realm of international and national politics – specifically (a) Israel and the UK alliance with US imperialism, and (b) the election of Corbyn. The same goes for Tony Blair’s attacks. It was politics that drove him and his cronies to undermine conference and roll back the gains of the 1980s. Only in the last analysis does economics come into it.

Hence, this claim is equally dubious:

That the degree of economic, social and political crisis of capitalism means that democracy and free speech are increasingly being closed down, including in political parties.

That the intention of the Starmer/Evans leadership is to drive out the left from the LP and largely destroy the membership structures and democratic mechanisms of the LP. This is effectively a means of splitting the LP.

There is no one-to-one correspondence between attacks on democratic rights, including free speech, and the “economic, social and political crisis of capitalism”. Things, as already argued, can work in the opposite direction.

What was Corbyn’s leadership election victory caused by? Not just the accident of the “morons” – the Labour MPs who ‘lent’ him their votes in the nomination process. No, there existed mass anger with Blair’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, mass anger with David Cameron’s austerity, mass anger against Lib Dem lies over student fees. Hence, once Corbyn made it over the nomination threshold, there was a sudden mass surge into the Labour Party. Discontent found a focus, a means of expression. No matter how raw, no matter how volatile, no matter how diffuse, a real movement of the working class.

As for the proposition that “the intention of the Starmer/Evans leadership is to drive out the left from the LP”, this is probably a considerable over-dramatisation. The Labour Party needs votes, needs local fixers and movers, needs functionaries and a career ladder that turns student union activists into government ministers. It also needs an official left which can inspire, spread illusions and supply its own quota of popular (especially amongst the rank and file) councillors, MPs and ministers.

What is going on today is an attempt to tame, whip into line, the official Labour left. But is this “effectively a means of splitting the LP”? Unlikely. Is it about destroying the “membership structures and democratic mechanisms of the LP”? Again, unlikely.

Anyone who knows the Labour Party at a constituency level must be aware of the considerable layer of active members on the centre and right. Some are councillors, some are friends of councillors, some want to become councillors. They will also know that there is a steady process whereby yesterday’s leftwing firebrand becomes today’s safe realist (eg: Jon Lansman, Owen Jones, Paul Mason).

As for Labour Party democracy, well, it would be a good idea. Remember, the election of the leader by the rank and file was an initiative of the right. In the name of extending democracy, the Collins review was meant to give power to The Sun, the Mirror, The Guardian to choose the Labour leader. That backfired with Corbyn, but worked a treat with Starmer. Meanwhile, the reality is that the Parliamentary Labour Party is to all intents and purposes autonomous. MPs are not servants of the labour movement. The leader can afford to ignore conference, the NEC and CLPs. Labour prime ministers have certainly done that time and time again.

Tens of thousands of leftish members – mostly muddled, confused and unorganised – will leave. But they constitute a formless, disparate mass, not a ready-made organisation. To think otherwise is illusory.

The comrades say the LLA should “promote by all means the self-organisation of the left inside and outside the LP”. Sounds very militant, very Malcolm X-ish. But concretely all they can offer is the mouse of the Labour in Exile Network. An organisation of experienced, committed, Labourites. Technically these exiles are outside the Labour Party, true, but they hardly constitute a “socialist alternative”.

In fact, the comrades deliberately leave their “socialist alternative” vague. Do they want a properly reformist Labour Party, a Marxist-led Labour Party, a Marxist party which can lead the Labour Party, but does not rely on the Labour Party?

Keeping quiet on such vital questions constitutes an opportunist fudge.

So, although we like the suggestion of promoting “the discussion of political theory and which lessons we need to learn from the Corbyn leadership of the LP”, what the comrades have to say amounts to diddly squat.

LPM again

‘Transforming Labour requires a Marxist Party’ (2.5) can speak for itself:

  1. 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 in the party. Neither the 2017 nor 2019 election manifestos 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, objectively serving as one of capitalism’s many defensive walls. Indeed, Corbyn and Corbynism acted to divert mass discontent away from what is objectively needed – the urgent superseding of capitalism.
  2. We must draw the sharpest line of demarcation between the socialist left and the official Labour left. The socialist 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 or shadow-ministerial ‘socialists’: ie, those who, in pursuit of their pathetic, middle class careers, sit in a capitalist or shadow-capitalist government. No-one who calls themselves a socialist should sit in a capitalist or a shadow-capitalist government. No socialist should call for ‘socialist’ representation in, or reinstatement to, a capitalist government or shadow-capitalist government. Those who do so betray the cause of socialism.
  3. Despite the failure of Corbyn and the election of Starmer, we remain committed to struggle for 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.
  4. However, transforming Labour can only be realised if socialists are organised in a mass Marxist party: a party that can operate within Labour, if necessary despite the rules; a party which seeks to transform Labour, but whose strategy for achieving socialism does not rely on Labour. The creation of a mass Marxist party is therefore our central objective. Without such a party, we are doomed to continue to suffer one Sisyphean defeat after another.

Despite the limitations of January 30 we can still say this:

Alone LPM wants to bring to the fore the ecological crisis. Alone LPM champions socialism and the transition to a stateless, moneyless, classless communism as the only feasible answer. Alone LPM champions revolutionary republicanism. Alone LPM sees the necessity of distinguishing between the official left – from Keir Hardie to Jeremy Corbyn – and the principled, socialist left. Alone LPM is committed to a mass, democratic and centralist party that can re-establish the Labour Party as a united front of the working class. Alone LPM fights against so-called socialists sitting in capitalist or shadow capitalist governments. Alone LPM disdains to conceal its views and aims. Alone LPM declares that its ends can only be achieved through the revolutionary overthrow of all existing social conditions.

Socialist Appeal

2.6, ‘The way forward (for the LLA)’, is drafted by Daniel Platts and comes under the name of Rotherham Labour Left. Politically, however, the inspiration clearly comes from the International Marxist Tendency (Socialist Appeal): ie, the minority rump of Militant Tendency.

It is good, despite the reluctance, that the comrades have presented a contribution – it will hopefully help to sharpen debate.

If it wanted, Socialist Appeal could easily dominate LLA. All it would take is sending in some 80 or 90 trained or half-trained cadre. But, of course, that would mean arguing things out with real Marxists. A risk the IMT dares not take.

The SA motion contains some useful tactical suggestions. Instead of a direct confrontation with the Starmer/Evans regime, go for CLP motions of no-confidence in Starmer, call for rule changes to allow a challenge to Starmer, a special conference, etc. Not that any of that will happen, but it avoids the head-on confrontational politics that has seen so many CLP chairs and secretaries suspended in what amounts to individual acts of political suicide. SA leader Alan Woods is far from stupid.

But what distinguishes the SA/Rotherham motion are its commitments to clause-four socialism and to staying in the Labour Party no matter what – a strategic conception that has its origins with Michel Pablo (Michel Raptis), secretary of the so-called Fourth International (1943-61), and the chameleon politics of deep entryism.

One would guess that, if it had been around in 1920, SA would have opposed the formation of the CPGB. If not, after the first, second or third affiliation attempt had been defeated, they would have advocated CPGB liquidation for a bottom-living existence confined to Labour Party committee rooms and narrow trade unionism.

SA inexcusably, dishonestly, pictures Corbyn as “a socialist” and the Corbyn influx into Labour as showing the “popularity of socialist ideas”. More to the point, SA is tied hand and foot to remaining in the Labour Party. Hence Rotherham’s point 8: “Keep organising in the Labour Party; avoid support for ‘competitors’ to avoid being ineligible for membership.”

While IMT is a typical oil-slick international, it wants to steer clear, avoid the danger of coming to the attention of, falling foul of, being targeted by the labour bureaucracy. Sadly, that amounts to the politics of surrender.

Democracy and the Labour Party

Theses on Keir Starmer’s Labour Party

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.
Witch-hunts and expulsions

Labour Witchhunt | Time for something different

How should the principled left respond to the Starmer witch-hunt? James Harvey of Labour Party Marxists points to an alternative which goes beyond the narrow limits of fight or flight

The announcement of Jeremy Corbyn’s new Peace and Justice Project tells us a lot about the current state of politics on the Labour left. The “project” to “promote social justice, peace and human rights in Britain and around the world” will be launched at an online event on January 17 and has received the backing of leading official left figures, including Unite’s Len McCluskey, Labour MP Zarah Sultana … and a lot of formers, eg, former ANC minister Ronnie Kasrils, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and former president of Ecuador Rafael Correa.

Encouraging, for all its limits, this has produced a surge of support. Within days of the announcement of the launch some 65,000 people had registered as supporters. However, the politics of the new initiative, in themselves, seem a rather unremarkable restatement of the pious hopes and worthy aspirations for ‘peace and social justice’ that characterises much of the contemporary left. Who can disagree with “combating poverty, inequality and unaccountable corporate power”? Who does not want to promote “peace, global cooperation … climate justice, self-determination, democracy and human rights”? However, when faced with these pleas for a better world, there are two most important and interlinked questions for Marxists. Firstly, will there be democracy? Will control be vested in the members or supporters? Or will the whole enterprise be run top-down? Will there be genuine debate or click button democracy? Secondly, what are the politics? Will the Peace and Justice Project be willing to adopt the politics necessary to overthrow the system that produces and reproduces inequality, poverty and war. Or will the ‘soft’ left clamp down on the ‘hard’ left? … as we saw in Momentum.

The “socialist alternative” offered by the Peace and Justice Project thus far is essentially a repetition of the managed capitalism outlined in Labour’s 2019 election manifesto. Politically and economically this combination of very light-touch Keynesianism and utopian left reformism presented no challenge at all to the state and the current capitalist order. That many on the soft left regarded these extraordinarily limited politics as “ambitious and agenda-setting” and still think that they make up a radical programme to transform society shows how far socialist consciousness has shrunk in recent years.

The paucity of this approach is reflected in the passive organisational form of the project, which is rooted in flabby, incoherent movementism. Instead of a militant programme, we are offered the chance “to create space, hope and opportunity for those campaigning for social justice”. In place of a fighting, coherent organisation we are invited to “build a network of campaigners, grassroots activists, thinkers and leaders, to share experiences and generate ideas about solutions to our common problems”. Although many awaited Corbyn’s announcement with great hopes, the ‘project’ is rather underwhelming. Instead of a call to begin a real fightback all we are presented with are the rehashed politics of Corbynism – and yet another think tank! Far from announcing a new beginning, the Peace and Justice Project really marks the final political bankruptcy of Corbynism.

The reason why the announcement of this new project was so eagerly awaited lies in the hopes of many on the Labour left that the enthusiasm for the original Corbyn movement could somehow be recreated. The return of the ‘king over the water’, it was hoped, would wipe away the bitter memories of electoral failure in 2019 and the subsequent demoralisation and retreat by the official left. The acceleration of the witch-hunt by Starmer and the failure of the official Labour left to mount any real defence of purged comrades only adds to the sense of hopelessness and disorientation. The left in the Constituency Labour Parties is desperate for leadership and a sense of political direction. However, on the basis of the available evidence, any hopes that it is the Peace and Justice Project that will give such a lead have been well and truly dashed, even before its formal launch. Far from taking us forward, this project will only further add to the demoralisation and confusion on the Labour left.

Perspectives

Given this likely outcome, we need to take stock and look at the perspectives for both the Labour left and the party more generally. Starmer and the Labour right look set to press ahead with the witch-hunt and crush the Labour left as an effective force in the CLPs (despite the Corbyn leadership, the left in the parliamentary party amounts to little more than a nothing). The right want to ensure that Labour is once again secured as the safe ‘second eleven’ of British capitalism. The fright that Corbynism and the growth of a left mass membership gave these Labour lieutenants of capital must be expunged, if Sir Keir is to make it into No10 and fulfil, at last, his Pabloite project (ha!). But the ‘Anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism’ witch-hunt has a logic of its own. Starmer is not in control, he is controlled. The witch-hunt itself – not some prior project – is what could well lead to him breaking the trade union link and to the final de-Labourisation of Labour. Blairism fulfilled! … without a master plan, without any theory, without think tanks or focus group triangulation.

Starmer has already succeeded in outmanoeuvring the parliamentary leadership of the official Labour left. By their self-censorship and surrender to the witch-hunt, the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs have actually agreed to silence themselves. Like the Tribune Group in the late 1970s and 1980s they will be tolerated and may even have their uses for the party leadership as a neutered, although increasingly irrelevant, tame ‘left’. For the real left, however, the Socialist Campaign Group ought to be totally discounted as any kind of leadership.

Despite the strength of the left amongst party members and the wave of protests that has developed, the purge is being intensified and extended ever wider. Despite that, Labour still remains a significant site of struggle for socialists, which should not be abandoned. The character of this struggle is determined by the nature of Labour as a bourgeois workers’ party – that is, a party with a pro-capitalist leadership, inextricably and structurally integrated into the state, and a membership, historically and organically, linked to the organised working class through the affiliated trade unions. Consequently, as Labour’s history shows, the wider class struggle in society finds expression and is played out within the party, albeit often in a refracted and distorted form.

Like Blair, Starmer could succeed in driving large numbers of socialists out of the party and cowing the rump that remains into submission. However, Starmer is not operating in a period of relative stability, as Blair did in the 1990s. The economic and political crises of the early 2020s have an altogether different character, which hardly favours Starmer’s style of politics: ‘steady as she goes’ and reformism without reforms are hardly attractive options for working class voters in a period of declining living standards and mass unemployment. Furthermore, Labour’s (temporary?) extinction as a serious party in Scotland and the historical decline of social democracy and workers’ parties in other European states serves as a warning – for both the Labour right and the official left – that Labour’s position as a major party is by no means guaranteed.

The fundamental problem this poses for the official Labour left is that its politics – no matter how ‘left’ they appear – are thoroughly rooted in a parliamentary road to ‘socialism’ and thus can only function within the ideological framework of Labourism and through the structures of the Labour Party. This organic relationship explains the Labour left’s constant appeals for party unity, their affronted and genuine sense of outrage when their loyalty is questioned and the pathetic characterisation of Starmer’s witch-hunt as mere “factionalism”! Even if Labour disappeared from the scene in its current form, the politics of the official left, as the history of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition and other attempts to establish an alternative to Labour have shown, would simply recreate Labourism in another incarnation.

Alternative party?

However, for many on the Labour left the witch-hunt has called into question their place in the party and the future of their politics. This has produced an increasing debate about whether Labour is now dead and whether it has any future role at all in the struggle for socialism.

An example of these discussions will be an important online conference hosted by the Labour Left Alliance on January 30. During this debate, supporters of Labour Party Marxists will argue that Labour still retains its character as a bourgeois workers’ party and, despite Starmer’s campaign to purge the left, remains a site of struggle for socialists. Our demand for the refounding of Labour as a real party of the working class – a united front of socialist and labour movement organisations – is a recognition of the place Labour occupies in both historical and contemporary terms in British working class politics.

At the present moment many of the comrades on the Labour left who are calling for new organisations or a new party advocate either a Labour Party mark two – committed to a more left Labourism and the utopian parliamentary road to socialism – or various forms of broad party with a soft-left programme, modelled on such failed experiments as Syriza or Podemos. While LPM agrees that the witch-hunt and the resulting crisis of the Labour left poses key questions about the type of programme and the type of party our class needs, we reject both approaches.

Many comrades in the LLA frequently claim that they are Marxists who stand for socialist revolution. They should openly and unashamedly declare it by supporting the LPM’s argument that objective conditions demand the creation of a working class party that, in coming to power, breaks up the state and begins the transition to communism. Drawing on the best traditions and historical experience of Marxism internationally, such a party would organise the working class on a clear, principled programme and would operate according to the principles of full democracy, freedom of criticism and unity in action. Such a party is not only required in Britain – it is required in every country. Socialism is internationalist or it is nothing.

So, looked at in this way, although the struggle in the Labour Party is important and a battle in which we must play our full part, for Marxists it is the fight for a revolutionary programme and a revolutionary party which remains our central goal.

Democracy and the Labour Party

Labour Left | Flight or fight?

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.

Democracy and the Labour Party

Labour Left | See you in court?

Political, not legal, action is the way forward, argues James Harvey of Labour Party Marxists

Whenever two or three leftwingers are gathered together to discuss fighting back against the current witch-hunt, it is usually not long before thoughts turn to consulting ‘m’learned friends’ and undertaking legal action to challenge suspensions and expulsions. For example, at a recent Labour Against the Witchhunt meeting a comrade suggested that a group of suspended and expelled Labour members should launch a class action against the party. Moreover, it is not just rank-and-file members who contemplate having their day in court: it is reported that Jeremy Corbyn is considering his own legal action over the suspension of the Labour whip.

Whilst the exact nature of any possible legal action remains unclear, initially it seemed that Corbyn would argue that Labour did not follow its own rules in suspending him from both ordinary and parliamentary party membership. Subsequent reports suggest that the aim of any action might be more political than a purely legal attempt to seek redress for any wrong committed by the party. The suggestion is that the real purpose is to apply pressure on the party leadership and bureaucracy through a pre-action disclosure application to the high court. Corbyn’s supporters believe that this application will place evidence into the public domain that there was indeed a deal to readmit Corbyn into the party, as well as showing that Starmer’s office reneged on that deal.

While these legal intricacies are doubtless of interest to readers of Law Reports, it is the politics that concerns us. Although the threat of legal action of this kind is often portrayed as the ‘nuclear option’, in this context it is actually something of a damp squib, applying somewhat limited pressure rather than bringing the whole edifice down. These threats of legal action from the Corbyn camp seem to be part of a negotiating strategy, which, they hope, will allow Jeremy Corbyn to regain his place in the Parliamentary Labour Party after a brief period of nominal penitence. As such this combination of legal manoeuvring and media management is pretty well much of a piece with the strategy of compromise and conciliation that Corbyn, John McDonnell et al have been following from the very first days of the witch-hunt. It is this rather dismal grand strategy of Labour’s official left rather than the specific tactical question of using bourgeois courts that is the central issue here.

Marxists have long understood the nature of the courts and legal system generally. Bourgeois law is designed to maintain the system of private property and defend the structures of the capitalist system. Judges play a key role in upholding the economic, social and political status quo: they are not neutral arbiters of right or impartial dispensers of justice. Even if there are widespread reformist illusions about the nature of the constitution and the state, and its potential role as a neutral instrument to further working class interests, historical experience, especially in relation to anti-trade union laws, has kept alive a healthy suspicion and hostility within the labour movement to the courts and ‘Tory judges’. Above all there has often been a marked reluctance to use the law to settle internal disputes or to conduct political campaigns against political opponents within our movement.

The involvement of socialists with the courts historically has taken various forms, but the majority of cases have either centred on the defence of personal or political reputation in, say, libel or defamation cases, or the seeking of injunctions to ensure natural justice is upheld in, for example, expulsion or other party disciplinary cases.

One of the most famous examples of the former are Marx’s actions for defamation in 1860 against the National-Zeitung and The Daily Telegraph as part of his political campaign against French police spy Karl Vogt; whilst other, less illustrious cases include Tommy Sheridan’s defamation action versus News Group Newspapers, and subsequent conviction for perjury in 2010. That both Marx and Sheridan failed in their legal cases, albeit for very different reasons, shows the pitfalls facing socialists who try to use the bourgeois courts either as a political platform or a tribunal to arbitrate on the truth of accusations made against them. Unlike Sheridan, however, Marx ultimately succeeded in establishing his revolutionary bona fides and historical reputation in the only court that mattered – the labour movement.

The defensive use of the courts to ensure that Labour followed its own rules and acted in accordance with natural justice was a feature of the campaign against the expulsion of the Militant editorial board and supporters of the Militant Tendency in the 1980s and 1990s. Although the various legal challenges slowed things up, the Neil Kinnock leadership – through its control of the party bureaucracy and alliance with the trade union leadership, which had a decisive majority at the party conference – was eventually able to carry out a purge of Militant’s editors and supporters.

Lessons

However, in response to the various legal actions initiated against the party, Labour’s leadership tightened up its disciplinary processes and established a system that met the objections about the lack of natural justice and fairness. The party bureaucracy has been able to amend its procedures to meet any legal challenges, whilst the courts, for obvious reasons, have generally been unwilling to find in favour of complainants.

The lessons from these attempts to use arguments about natural justice and ‘failure to follow party rules’ against suspensions and expulsions are clear: as the case of Chris Williamson proved, these legal tactics can, at best, only delay disciplinary procedure. Thus, while the use of legal measures is a question of tactics rather than principle for Marxists, both historical and more recent experience suggests that ‘relying on the courts’ is the wrong approach in the fightback against the witch-hunt.

The real weaknesses of the legal route are political rather than principled. The central problem of using the courts is that its advocates fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the witch-hunt and the aims of the current Labour leadership. The witch-hunt is an all-out war on the Labour left conducted by the right, with the goal of completing the Blairite project and breaking the party’s links with the organised working class. It will only end with the principled left being finally driven out of the party, whilst the official Labour left looks on largely in cowed silence.

If we cannot rely on the courts to fight that battle, neither should we put our trust in the fake left in the Socialist Campaign Group, Momentum, the Labour Representation Committee, etc. The seriousness of the crisis facing the Labour left is now clear to everyone – except, it appears, the leaders of the official left itself! The strength of the forces arrayed against the left cannot be overstated: they are drawn not only from the party leadership, the PLP and the Labour bureaucracy, but also from elements of the state, which want to restore Labour as a safe second eleven for British capitalism.

Whilst there is still a significant left amongst the party membership, as the recent elections to the national executive committee showed, it is becoming increasingly disorganised and demoralised by the lack of real leadership. In this struggle we must use all the weapons at our disposal, but the main one must be the political mobilisation of the Labour left in the CLPs and the trade unions. Campaigning organisations such as Labour Against the Witchhunt and the principled revolutionaries organised around Labour Party Marxists have pointed the way forward for a real fightback:

  • No compromises with the Starmer leadership.
  • Reject the EHRC report in its entirety.
  • No false appeals to ‘party unity’.
  • Drive out the pro-capitalist leadership.
  • Refound Labour as a real party of the working class.
Democracy and the Labour Party

Labour Left | On the road to … where?

James Harvey of Labour Party Marxists looks at the dismal record of the official Labour left

Sometimes a small thing can tell us a lot. On November 23, 13 left members staged a walkout from an online meeting of Labour’s national executive committee in protest at the election of Margaret Beckett, a supporter of Keir Starmer, as chair.

Ostensibly a protest about Labour’s right abandoning the ‘buggins’ turn’ precedent, which should have seen a left trade unionist, Ian Murray of the Fire Brigades Union, elected, this coordinated walkout was really a demonstration against the conduct of the Starmer leadership. In subsequent statements explaining the protest, the NEC 13 argued that the leadership was “promoting factional division within Labour” and that the NEC left would continue to act as “the legitimate voice of the membership and … demand that the party unite and reject the current factional approach of the leader” (my emphasis). One of the protesting CLP representatives, Mish Rahman, was reported to have said that Starmer’s latest action “fits a worrying pattern of control-freakery reminiscent of the New Labour years” and continued:

There can be no party unity until Starmer fully understands the need to work with the Labour movement and the many tens of thousands of grassroots members who can help deliver a Labour government. Our walkout today was to remind him of this, and to send a message that we will not put up with petty and repeated attacks on trade unions and members (my emphasis).

The protest comes at a crucial turning point for Labour’s official left. There has been a wave of protests from the grassroots following Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension from party membership and continued suspension from the Parliamentary Labour Party. Scores of Constituency Labour Parties and trade union branches have passed motions of support for Corbyn (when they have been allowed to discuss and decide on the issue). This reflects a groundswell of opposition against Keir Starmer and his general secretary, David Evans. Taken together with the reasonable showing for left candidates in the recent NEC elections, the scale of this opposition shows that, despite Starmer’s tightening grip on the party, there is still a sizable left that wants to challenge the “new leadership”.

The contrast of these protests from below with the abject surrender of the official left leadership could not be stronger. In the face of the onslaught from Starmer and a resurgent right these ‘leaders’ have shown that they really are “the dogs that didn’t bark”. However, the refusal of the Socialist Campaign Group and Momentum to fight back is not simply a product of careerism or cowardice, although there are undoubtedly far too many self-interested MPs and aspiring bureaucrats within their ranks. We need to face some home truths here. The political and strategic failures of the official Labour left go much deeper than that.

Left illusions

Let us begin by taking a closer look at the statements of the NEC 13 highlighted above. Laura Pidcock’s tweets about the “disrespect” shown by Starmer towards the left and Mish Rahman’s complaints that “party unity” is being undermined by “factional division” exposes the impotence and the self-limitation inherent in their politics. When they accuse Starmer et al of not playing by the rules or of launching attacks which undermine the party’s unity they speak as affronted Labour loyalists desperate for the party to come together again.

Like Jeremy Corbyn when he was leader, Pidcock, Rahman and their co-thinkers offer olive branches and concessions to the right when under attack. Yet they stood idly by when comrades on the left were suspended or expelled during the Corbyn period, a pattern of appeasement and collusion in the witch-hunt that has led to the blind alley in which the official Labour left now finds itself. Thus, all of their attention is focused on securing Corbyn’s reinstatement as a Labour MP: the thousands of socialists who have been purged are ignored and sacrificed in the interests of “party unity”. Similarly, they continue to give further ground when they preface their demands for Jeremy Corbyn’s reinstatement with calls to accept the findings and recommendations of the Equality and Human Rights Commission report in full. Far from digging in for a fight, the official left are only digging their own graves.

This focus on “party unity” is the official left’s original sin. Despite the protests and the token walkout, the Labour left and the Labour right are far from being at daggers drawn: they are symbiotically linked. However, whilst the Labour right has its assured place in the world as an integral part of the capitalist state, matters stand rather differently for the official left. They cannot exist without the right and can only envisage their political project being pursued through the election of a Labour government. Thus, instead of creating a clear demarcation between the supporters of capitalism and the partisans of working class politics, unity remains the Labour left’s entire raison d’être. The classic model of this parliamentary road to socialism remains the post-1945 Attlee government. Nostalgia for this ‘socialist Labour government’ is still widespread on the Labour left.

Strategically, because the party’s apparat remains firmly in the hands of the right, backed by the trade union leadership, and the left represents only a minority in the PLP, securing such a government requires unity with the Labour right – inevitably obtained at the price of political concessions and compromises by the left. The ‘socialism’ of the Labour left was, at best, the reformism exemplified in the nationalisation of basic industries, the welfare state and the redistributive Keynesianism that were only made possible by the conditions of the post-war boom. The Alternative Economic Strategy, advanced by the Labour left in the 1970s and 1980s, was largely a refinement of the post-1945 strategy that has now become even more absurd, given the very different political and economic situation that emerged at the end of the boom. Even the limited programme of a managed capitalism, which cannot even be described as ‘reformism’, advanced by Corbyn and the Labour left at the last election is equally utopian, given the nature and the depth of capitalist decline internationally.

The current crisis of the Labour left is a hangover from the failure of Corbynism and reflects the illusion that Labour can be transformed into a radical socialist party – a strategy that inspired many who joined the party during Corbyn’s leadership and which still continues to shape the politics of Forward Momentum, the Labour Representation Committee and the Labour Left Alliance. The experience of the Corbyn moment and the continued inability of the official left, at all levels, to mount a militant response to the attacks of the right shows that the Labour Party is irreformable in that way. Its structural and institutional ties to the state have been strengthened throughout the 20th century, as it replaced the Liberals to become the second eleven of British capitalism.

However, Corbyn’s election as Labour leader raised the fear that it might slip out of the control of safe, pro-capitalist politicians and present some type of a threat to the status quo. Starmer’s counterrevolution and his attempt to complete the Blairite project by eliminating the left as a political force within the Labour movement shows how scared the bourgeoisie were of the forces that might have been unleashed by Corbynism. Given the timidity and downright cowardice of the Corbyn leadership in practice, they need not have been so alarmed. But they are never again going to give the Labour left the chance to prove them right. Under Starmer Labour must once again be made into a thoroughly reliable pro-capitalist party, sound on foreign policy and defence, and willing to cooperate with British capitalism’s attempts at home to overcome the current crisis at the expense of the working class.

The pathetic response of the official left, and its outliers, with their calls for stoic forbearance and party unity in the face of a full-blooded civil war unleashed by the Starmer leadership, is merely a continuation of the disastrous failures of the Corbyn period. Self-imprisoned within the political and structural constraints of Labourism, they are inextricably bound into the politics of the Labour right. Here they stand: they can do no other.

Turning point

Unless Starmer secures his final victory, Labour will remain a bourgeois workers’ party and thus an important site of struggle for Marxists. However, if the aims of the enemy before us are clearly visible, the intentions and the determination of some on the Labour left are much less certain. Their record of compromise and collusion with the witch-hunt during Corbyn’s leadership, their continued concessions to the Labour right on the EHRC report and their failure to defend the thousands expelled or suspended from the party during this ongoing purge show that they are very unreliable allies in Labour’s civil war.

Labour Party Marxists will continue the fight for militant politics and a revolutionary programme within our movement. As revolutionaries we have a duty to tell the truth and make a clear distinction between our politics and strategy, on the one side, and those of the compromising, fake left in the Labour Party, on the other. That not only means a resolute, uncompromising defence of all those who have come under attack during the witch-hunt: it also demands that we now go over to the political offensive.

The strategy of the official Labour left has proved catastrophic against the witch-hunt and must be exposed for the failure it is. That failure ultimately has its roots not simply in the personalities and inadequacies of individual leaders, but is an inevitable consequence of Labourism and reformism, no matter how ‘left’ it styles itself. All the time that the Labour left calls for ‘party unity’ or attacks our enemies in the Starmer camp for ‘factionalism’ they are obscuring the real nature of this battle. We cannot afford this confusion and compromise.

Symbolic online walkouts and carefully crafted motions that try to avoid falling foul of the party bureaucracy are not enough. We are at a crucial turning point in this civil war: now is not the time for a Christmas truce! Step up the fightback and carry the war to the enemy!

Democracy and the Labour Party

Official Left | Dogs that didn’t bark

James Harvey of Labour Party Marxists gives the reasons why the official left’s response has been so feeble to Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension

After a few muffled cries of initial outrage, it has all gone rather quiet on the official Labour left front. Within hours of Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension, following his criticism of the Equality and Human Rights Commission report into ‘Labour anti-Semitism’, the usual suspects lined up to politely express their opposition to what Sir Keir Starmer had done to the former Labour leader. One of the first to rally to the defence of Corbyn was the former shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, who set the tone for much that was to follow. Calling upon the party leadership to lift the suspension, he argued:

On the day we should all be moving forward together and taking all steps to fight anti-Semitism, the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn is profoundly wrong. In [the] interests of party unity, let’s find a way of undoing and resolving this. I urge all party members to stay calm, as that is the best way to support Jeremy and each other (my emphasis).

In a similar vein, the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs’ call to arms declared:

We firmly oppose the decision to suspend Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour Party. We will work tirelessly for his reinstatement. The fight against anti-Semitism and all forms of racism is central to the struggle for a society based on justice and equality (my emphasis).

These themes were reiterated in statements and comments in the days that followed. Thus, a group of seven trade union leaders argued that Corbyn’s suspension was “ill-advised and unjust” and had deepened division within the party. The general secretary of the Communications Workers Union, Dave Ward, declared that “nothing that Jeremy said warranted his suspension. It was a well-balanced and factual response to an equally well-balanced report” (my emphasis). These calls for Corbyn’s reinstatement were combined with yet more pleas for ‘party unity’ and an end to factional civil war within Labour. The union leaders’ statement is worth considering in detail:

The publication on Thursday of the EHRC report ought to have marked a moment of reflection and repair for our party. Instead, an ill-advised and unjust suspension has caused division.

We therefore call upon the leader, Keir Starmer, the general secretary, David Evans, and the NEC to work now with us as affiliated unions to repair this damage.

We speak as the leaders of unions representing working people who desperately need a Labour government. We cannot comprehend why the leadership would not only compromise the opportunity to unite our party behind the implementation of the EHRC’s important recommendations, so that they can be taken forward with the members’ full trust and confidence, but also undermine our party’s democratic processes and, ultimately, our party unity.

We therefore urge Keir to work with us on a fairer, unifying way forward (my emphasis).

If we look at these and subsequent statements, two key themes are constantly repeated: the need for party unity and an acceptance of the validity of the allegations made about the extent of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party. Thus, at the Momentum online rally – ‘Stand with Corbyn: defend democracy’ – and a similar online event organised by the Radical Alliance – Defend Corbyn: Defeat Racism; Build Socialism – leading Labour left speakers, such as John McDonnell, Ian Lavery and Laura Pidcock, confined their remarks to either a defence of Corbyn’s ant-racist record or appeals to activists not to say or do anything that might provoke further suspensions or expulsions. It was all very much a case of ‘Don’t mention the war: just keep calm and carry on’.

New witch-hunt

Yet, while the official Labour left fights a phoney war, Starmer and his supporters in the apparat are gearing up for a systematic witch-hunt and a gouging purge of the left that could include not just Jeremy Corbyn, but his close comrades in the Socialist Campaign Group, such as McDonnell and Rebecca Long-Bailey. With the threat of such wholesale attacks hanging over them, why has the response of the leaders of the Labour left been so supine and spineless?

One explanation lies in that little word ‘unity’ that peppers their statements. Instead of understanding that Starmer represents the openly pro-capitalist wing of the Labour movement, who want a neutered party that offers a reliable second eleven for the British state, the official left offers only timid compromise. For some this attempt at rapprochement might be simply explained by parliamentary careerism and a wish to come to terms with ‘the new management’. The public betrayal of Corbyn by his former protégé, Angela Rayner, immediately following his suspension could easily fall into that category. But at least she had the honesty to reject her former leader live on air: the majority of left MPs have simply remained silent and kept their heads down, hoping that the storm will pass.

However, careerism and cowardice are only part of the explanation for the nature of their response. The main focus of the Labour left throughout the party’s history has been the election of a Labour government and the safe pursuit of reformist politics strictly within the confines of the constitution. Unity with the openly pro-capitalist right and keeping their appointed place within the fold at any cost has been an essential element in that strategy, and so it continues today, even in the face of Starmer’s open declaration of war.

This explains what became the hallmarks of Corbyn’s leadership: namely his constant compromising with the right and a refusal to remove the plotters and fifth columnists working against his leadership within the Parliamentary Labour Party. Such saintly forbearance is undoubtedly admirable in private life, but for socialists and those committed to militant class politics in the Labour Party such passivity in the face of the enemy is inexcusable.

These original sins of the Labour left are not just revealed in acts of omission and capitulation to the right. Many leaders of the official left have been more than willing to sacrifice socialists and throw their ‘comrades’ under the bus in the interests of ‘party unity’. This explains why the statements quoted above all accept the underlying premise of the EHRC report and the slanders of the Labour right and their friends in the media about the extent and nature of ‘anti-Semitism’ in Labour. Far from having zero tolerance towards the libels linking the socialist left to anti-Semitism, Jeremy Corbyn constantly gave ground and allowed good socialists and campaigners for Palestinian rights to be sacrificed to appease the right. Corbyn’s former chief of staff even boasted of how committed and zealous the Corbyn leadership had been in dealing with ‘anti-Semitism’ in the party – or, to give it its real name, pursuing a witch-hunt at the behest of the Labour right.

Thus, the genuflections to the EHRC report are not simply diplomatic niceties, reluctantly conceded by the spokespeople for the official left. When they compromise and equivocate, describing the report as “well-balanced” and a way to “repair the party”, they know full well what they are doing. When they call for the implementation of its recommendations, they clearly understand that they are legitimising these attacks on the left and preparing the ground for a further intensification of Starmer’s purge.

The refusal of the Labour left leaders to take the fight to the right is all of a piece with their previous complicity in the witch-hunt: their pathetic response in the last week shows that we cannot rely on them to take us anywhere – except into a dead end of compromise and defeat. But, if they are clearly not up to the job, the reaction of many ordinary party members to Corbyn’s suspension shows the potential that exists. The online protest meetings, such as those organised by Labour Against the Witchhunt, and the reports of Constituency Labour Parties passing resolutions demanding Jeremy Corbyn’s reinstatement indicate a willingness amongst the party rank and file to carry the fight to Starmer.

But it is true that there is also a great deal of confusion and uncertainty about how exactly we can begin to fight back. The calls for calm and playing by the rules laid down by the right have demoralised many. Reports of party officials prohibiting any discussion of the EHRC report or Corbyn’s suspension are commonplace, as is the complicity of supposedly left MPs in closing down debate and restricting opposition to the diktats of Starmer’s new management. The result is that many socialists have either lapsed into inactivity or left the party altogether. Some are proposing establishing new groups outside the Labour Party or concentrating on other forms of ‘grassroots activism’. Such attempts at ‘new politics’ will inevitably peter out, in either a sectarian cul-de-sac or aimless activism.

Rather than abandon the field to the right, socialists should stay and fight. However, that fight should not simply be one in defence of party democracy and free speech. It is of necessity a fight against the pro-capitalist leadership and for an organised political current committed to a Marxist programme. Starmer has launched a civil war against the left, and, unlike John McDonnell, Len McCluskey and co, Labour Party Marxists will not turn away from the challenge. We will be arguing that socialists should not waste any more time awaiting the call (which will never come) from the official left. Instead we will be encouraging comrades on the left to organise through Labour Against the Witchunt against the purge.

The dogs of the official left who didn’t bark last week have shown they will never take the fight to the right. We cannot wait around any longer: we cannot afford to cede the initiative to the right. Now is the time for us to show our teeth and begin the serious, militant response that Labour’s crisis demands.