Category Archives: The left

Democracy and the Labour Party, The left

Class unity requires left unity

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Stan Keable of Labour Party Marxists looks at Andrew Murray’s rejection of the new LU party

Ed Miliband
Ed Miliband: next Labour government will not advance class struggle
Among the left strategies considered by the CPGB’s Mike Macnair shortly before Left Unity’s founding conference was “Fordism”, named after Michael Ford’s polemic on Left Unity’s website arguing for socialists to work patiently in the Labour Party rather than form a new party outside Labour.

Comrade Macnair wrote:

“Michael Ford” – a pseudonym for a “senior figure in the labour and trade union movement” – has written a critique of the Left Unity project in a two-part article, ‘Left Unity’s modest flutter’, available on LU’s website. The author is pretty clearly (from the content of the article) an ‘official communist’, and widely rumoured to be a Morning Star/Communist Party of Britain supporter who holds an appointed position in a trade union headquarters.

The article in effect lays out the working orientation of the Morning Star/CPB, which is held much more widely among Labour and trade union left officials than the formal size of the CPB would make it appear. The project is essentially of moving Labour slightly to the left, through alliance with ‘official lefts’ in the unions and the parliamentary Labour Party. At the same time, the Ford article also displays, in passing comments, that lurking within this is a ‘party concept’ of the sect type shared by the SWP.1

‘Michael Ford’ was indeed a pseudonym understandably adopted temporarily by the CPB’s Andrew Murray to avoid bringing down even more opprobrium on the Unite union, his employer. Comrade Murray came out publicly as the author on November 27 in a House of Commons committee room.

The meeting, chaired by John McDonnell MP, was organised by Red Pepper magazine under the title ‘Ralph Miliband and the politics of class’ – for the dual purpose of launching the 50th edition of the annualSocialist Register, subtitled ‘Registering class’2 and commemorating the political life of the socialist and Marxist father of the present leader of her majesty’s loyal opposition. Needless to say, neither ‘red Ed’ nor his brother, David, showed any interest in the meeting. Their father, Ralph Miliband (1924-94), was a founding editor of Socialist Register, along with John Saville (1916-2009).

In a footnote to his Socialist Register contribution, ‘Left unity or class unity? – working class politics in Britain’, comrade Murray explained how the article began life as Michael Ford’s ‘Left Unity’s modest flutter’:

This essay has evolved out of a polemic written against the ‘Left Unity’ project in Britain in spring 2013. The original text was published at http://21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com and it was republished, to its credit, by Left Unity itself at www.leftunity.org. The original was published pseudonymously in order to avoid the union, Unite, which I serve as chief of staff, being dragged into any public controversy on the issue at the time. At the time of writing (July 2013) the plan appeared to be to convert Left Unity into a new Left Party as of November 2013.3

While Ford’s polemic has “evolved” into Murray’s essay, his basic positions stand. Left Unity, he says, “fails to seriously address the issue of the Labour Party and working class support for it; ignores the failure of previous new left parties and indeed the real state of the contemporary left … and draws a causal connection between economic crisis and socialist politics which is at best questionable.” All sound criticisms, in my view, of the wishful thinkers of the Left Party Platform majority and leadership of Left Unity, who imagine they can win mass working class allegiance by challenging New Labour with old Labour politics, and tackle capitalism without winning the working class majority to Marxism.

Failures

Murray’s strategy of “reconstituting the working class”, in contrast, runs through building and channelling resistance to “the Tory-Liberal coalition’s policies of social misery” into yet another ‘next Labour government’ – ‘ignoring the failure of previous Labour governments’, to paraphrase Murray’s criticism of LU. As I pointed out at the November 27 meeting, the workers’ movement needs a Miliband Labour government managing capitalism like it needs a hole in the head.

Such a government would demoralise and demobilise our movement and, as before, lead back to an even more rightwing Tory government. Yes, we need socialists in parliament, but as tribunes of the people’s struggles, not as administrators of capitalism’s austerity. There is no concrete reason why the Labour Party cannot be won to socialist politics and the anti-working class, pro-capitalism right wing driven out. No doubt they will split anyway if the left gains ground – as they did before to form the Social Democratic Party in 1981, which went on to merge with the Liberals. The struggle to reconstitute the working class must be carried on in opposition to capitalist governments of any stripe, not in support of the wars and austerity programmes of our rulers, until our class is strong enough to take over.

Interestingly, Murray himself is extremely doubtful about the possible benefits of a Labour administration: “No-one … can confidently assert that it is likely that a 2015 Labour government will master the economic crisis in the interests of ordinary people …” But he very tentatively expresses false hopes that it might inadvertently aid the reconstitution of the working class: “… such a government could certainly generate – even in spite of itself – an arena of struggle over its direction which could bring benefits in itself in terms of strengthening the movement, and could create circumstances for the working class to recover a measure of confidence.” I am sorry to remind readers that there is no evidence for such a pipe dream.

Murray is also doubtful as to whether the fight to win the party for working class interests can be won. “It is certainly possible that the working class movement will learn through experience, over the next few years (and probably not much longer either way), that the struggle to ‘reclaim Labour’ is not going to work.” Perhaps the working class will fail to develop sufficient “‘social weight’ to sustain its own political project”, in which case socialists must “redouble their efforts” and, after “a definite period of unchallenged bourgeois political domination”, a “new mass socialist party, resting on a serious and durable foundation” may eventually be built. Or perhaps, on the other hand, “the effort will be thwarted by establishment manoeuvres, with what has been termed the ‘Blairite undead’, supported by a frightened elite, obstructing democratic and constitutional efforts to transform Labour which might have otherwise succeeded. … Under those circumstances, the creation of a new class party might be higher up the agenda.”

Worryingly, Murray’s hedging of bets corresponds to similar mixed messages from trade union bureaucrats Len McCluskey (Unite) and Paul Kenny (GMB), who have threatened to disaffiliate or limit trade union funding of the party if Labour’s front bench does not modify its policies from neoliberal austerity to Keynesian capitalism. Whatever Murray’s subjective wishes, such disaffiliation is more likely to depoliticise the working class than form the basis of a new socialist party. And support made conditional on minor modifications to party policy is the opposite of the extreme democracy the working class needs in order to rebuild its own movement and master society.

Murray quite correctly underlines that, although trade unions “cannot be the agency for establishing socialism”, nevertheless they are “the essential arena for reconstituting the working class, which is the only such agency”. But he puts forward no proposals for democratising the unions, for asserting rank-and-file control of the leadership, just as he says nothing about democratising the Labour Party. In the unions, he argues for the “overdue development of purposeful leadership” and “above all the re-emergence of … self-reliant, politically oriented activists at all levels”. Quite right. But these attributes are a by-product of the fight for the independent politics of the working class – instead of tailing pro-capitalist political careerists – and for democratisation of our organisations: freedom of discussion; election and recallability of officials; and a worker’s wage for our full-time representatives, so they are in it to serve, not to dominate.

The newly formed Left Unity party (LU’s founding conference was on November 30, after publication of Murray’s essay in Socialist Register 2014), Murray argues, “risks being an impediment to socialists actually making the most of present opportunities for working class reconstruction and advance” – meaning, of course, “the People’s Assembly movement, uniting unions and community campaigns against poverty and welfare cuts … alongside trade unions willing to fight back in the workplace”. Although he charges LU with the sin of prioritising “a chimerical ‘left unity’ over class unity”, it is actually Murray, not LU, who is posing one against the other. Unity of the left is, self-evidently, one of the essential conditions for the reconstitution of the class. Not bureaucratic unity, in which minorities are silenced, but democratic unity – freedom of discussion, unity in action – in which minority views are heard, differences understood and lessons learned.

New ‘vanguard’

For Marxists, it is axiomatic that theory and practice go together. In Murray’s case, unfortunately, theory is accommodating to practice, at least with respect to the party question. As a member of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain and a self-described Stalinist, one might expect him to proclaim the unique leading role of the ‘official communist’ party to which he belongs. Instead he offers us a new concept: a “vanguard of a new type”, consisting of the three forces “united in the leadership of the Stop the War Coalition”, and now the People’s Assembly – namely his own CPB, Counterfire and Socialist Action, plus “the Labour left being additionally central”.

These are “all from different 20th-century traditions”. Their unity is “one not presupposing total ideological homogeneity – or even the ‘party’ in the sense which Marx and Engels used the term in 1848”:

These socialists do not agree, or even attempt to agree, about everything, have discrete organisational affiliations and do not subject themselves to a discipline more severe than respect for commonly arrived at decisions and comradely loyalty. The objective is unity for purposeful intervention on the key issues of the time – anti-imperialism, opposing the social calamity of austerity economics – and for building rooted movements for change, re-establishing the basis for mass socialist politics, while tolerating diversity of opinion about … the long-term prospects of the Labour Party.

So, to lead the working class struggle, instead of ‘left unity’ meaning democratic unity in a mass workers’ party organised around Marxist political programme to supersede world capitalism, Murray has lowered his sights to a much more limited horizon – a small group of sects coming to a bureaucratic consensus in order to lead “movements for change” on “key issues of the time”. And whoever dissents from the agreed consensus of these ‘leaders’ is obviously being divisive. Eg, Ken Loach’s “notably sectarian intervention” at the People’s Assembly. To turn the PA into an anti- Labour movement, Murray writes, “is a route to undermining its potential as an instrument of the necessary class reconstruction which can be the only underpinning of any advance”. So much for “tolerating diversity of opinion”!

The central aim of transforming the Labour Party into “an instrument for working class advance and international socialism” can only be achieved if the trade unions on which the party is based are also transformed, and this will require “the closest unity of the left inside and outside the party”.4 If the new Left Unity party is serious about overcoming capitalism, it will have to join the struggle to transform Labour. Similarly, if the Labour Representation Committee is serious about its constitutional aim of encouraging “all socialists outside the Labour Party … to join or rejoin the Labour Party”, it will have to take seriously, and encourage, all genuine steps towards left unity outside Labour as well as inside.

Notes

1. ‘Left Unity’s contradictory aspirations’ Weekly Worker supplement, November 28 2013. The original two-part Michael Ford article is athttp:// leftunity.org/left-unitys-modest-flutter; and http://leftunity.org/left-unitys-modest-flutter-2.

2. L Panitch, G Albo and V Chibber (eds) Socialist Register 2014Monthly Review Press.

3. Socialist Register 2014 p286. Murray helpfully gives a number of references to relevant articles in previous editions of Socialist Register: Ken Coates’s ‘Socialists and the Labour Party’ (1973); Ralph Miliband’s ‘Moving on’ (1976); Duncan Hallas’s ‘How can we move on?’ (1977); Leo Panitch’s ‘Socialists and the Labour Party: a reap­praisal’ (1979).

4. www.labourpartymarxists.org.uk/aims.

The left

LRC: Surviving, but still shrinking

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Stan Keable of Labour Party Marxists reports on the annual conference of the Labour Representation Committee

There were slightly more than 100 comrades attending the November 23 annual conference of the Labour Representation Committee in London’s Conway Hall. That is down by a third compared with last year. Bad news for what is an umbrella organisation of the pro-Labour Party left, but surely reflective of the general state of the left in Britain.

Ed Miliband is “inching to the left”, with his promises to freeze energy prices and repeal the bedroom tax, and his successful blocking of so-called liberal military intervention in Syria. And though this has undoubtedly increased Labour’s poll ratings and made the election of a Labour government in May 2015 seem credible, it has not resulted in any increased organisational strength of the Labour left, which continues to shrink.

There have been particular problems with the LRC. Both joint national secretaries elected in November 2013, Andrew Fisher and Pete Firmin, resigned their positions a few months later. National organiser, Lizzie Woods, resigned from the organisation after a row at the April national committee. A meeting which has never been authoritatively reported. Her replacement, Ben Sellers, lasted only a couple of months before he followed suit, resigning from the LRC to join Red Labour.

Perhaps that is why the AGM was not presented with an annual report from the national committee or financial and membership reports either. Earlier in the year, individual paid-up membership was reported as about a thousand, but it should be remembered that the LRC also has significant organisational affiliates, including six national trade unions (Aslef, BFAWU, CWU, FBU, NUM and RMT), numerous trade union branches and regions, constituency and branch Labour Parties, Welsh Labour Grassroots, Campaign for Socialism (Scotland), and a variety of communist and socialist organisations.

The merger between LRC and Labour Briefing in 2012, making Briefing the journal of the LRC, has so far produced remarkably little change in the publication. The editorial board, of which I have been a coopted member for the past year, has so far declined to carry a report of each national committee meeting, on the spurious grounds that such a report would be “boring”. Consequently it is difficult for LRC members and Briefing readers to take ownership of the project, being ill-informed about the state of the organisation and of the discussions and decisions taking place on the national committee.

Apart from a couple of articles encouraging local branch-building by Ben Sellers as national organiser before he resigned, and the consistent campaigning of Sussex LRC, there has been little information about the hoped-for mushrooming of local LRC branches. The LRC remains primarily an annual conference and a national committee.

The officer problem which caused such a crisis in 2013 has been ostensibly resolved by dividing the tasks of the previous secretary post between four elected officers: political secretary, membership secretary, web manager and administrator. This has enabled Pete Firmin, who resigned mid-term as national secretary because the workload was too much for one person, to accept the post of political secretary.

As I have argued at NC meetings (they are normally open for all LRC members to attend), while sharing out the work is sensible and necessary, the organisation remains vulnerable to crisis when one or more of its annually elected officers chooses to resign mid-term, whether through personal circumstances or political change of heart. A better, more flexible solution would be to have officers elected by the national committee, making them accountable to it and easily replaceable at any time. Instead of having posts prescribed by the constitution and rules, tasks should be allocated flexibly as circumstances change. So far this rational, democratic solution has been rejected.

Moving the national committee statement entitled ‘Alternatives to austerity. Defend the welfare state. Defend the union link’, LRC chair John McDonnell MP argued that “we must build campaigns to make issues safe for the Labour Party to campaign on. They will only do that when they see there are votes involved,” he said. In an oblique reference to the failure of the Socialist Alliance, the hopeless ‘old Labour’ projects of Respect, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition and No2EU, and the confusion of Left Unity, which holds its founding conference this Saturday, he regretted that “no left alternative” has emerged. “People are still voting Labour,” he said. “We must nourish struggles within the party by building struggles outside.”

Two activists from the Boycott Welfare campaign, Clive and Robert, gave a moving contribution from the platform as guest speakers. Unemployed people and benefit claimants are clearly being badly maltreated by the system. Half a million have been already denied benefits under the workfare system, they reported.

The other platform speakers were the columnist Owen Jones and Mark Serwotka of the Public and Commercial Services union. Comrade Jones gave us his usual fare: rousing condemnation of the iniquities of the Tory-Lib Dem government and the promise that the left is winning the argument when it comes to public opinion. As for comrade Serwotka, he would not waste time repeating “how bad it is”. We need to talk about “what we’re going to do about it”. He noted that all the mainstream parties agree on the politics of austerity. “A Labour government in 2015 on its current outlook will be useless,” he said. Nevertheless “it does matter who wins”. Alongside coordinated industrial action, we need coordinated political action. “We need to discuss how to build a movement that can pressure the Labour Party and shift British politics massively to the left. Either Labour will be forced left or we will sweep them aside.”

This raises the necessity of PCS affiliation to Labour. Why should we have to “pressure” Labour, as if from outside, in order to shift the politics of our own party? Why not simply exercise our democratic rights within it? Instead of “sweeping Labour aside”, why not sweep the pro-capitalism, anti-working class, pro-austerity right wing out of our party?

Guest speaker Philippe Marlière of the Front de Gauche (Left Front) described how Nicolas Sarkozy, the “French Thatcher”, was “stopped by the voters” after 12 months, only to have the Socialist Party’s François Hollande break all his promises and continue austerity. He alerted us to the transatlantic trade agreement about to be signed between the EU and the US which, in the name of growth, will actually mean a massive loss of workers’ rights and ecological safeguards.

Jeremy Corbyn MP tilted at the illusions of those who have a rosy picture of Labour’s 1945 government. Its record was contradictory, he said. Alongside its undoubted social achievements, its foreign policy included not only the independence of India, but also the partition. It participated in the formation of Nato, and in 1949 Clement Attlee secretly authorised the spending of £200 million on nuclear weapons without consulting parliament.

Motions

Perhaps the most important issue confronting the LRC is the threat by Miliband to weaken the link between the Labour Party and affiliated trade unions. And conference heard Andrew Berry from Unison, Maria Exall of the CWU and Ian Hudson of the bakers’ union (BFAWU) robustly defending collective decision-making. Yet motion 5 from Labour Party Marxists, which sought “the end of individual ‘opting out’ of trade union political funds”, was voted down by a two-thirds majority. Sadly that majority included the LRC’s political secretary Pete Firmin, though Graham Bash, the de facto editor of Briefing, abstained. Those opposing us offered a variety of spurious reasons why collective decision-making and solidarity should not apply in the workers’ movement when it comes to politics. Eg, individual rights need to be respected, that or we endanger the precious unity of Britain’s trade union movement. A combination of nonsense and being in thrall to the status quo.

Moving the motion, I pointed out that a deal was being hatched behind the scenes between the bureaucracies of the party and of the trade union movement. A deal that would be rubber-stamped at the March 1 special conference. This view was underlined when Walter Wolfgang informed us that the special conference is programmed to last only two hours.

The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s motion 13, ‘Internationalist campaign in the European elections’, was, surprisingly, the only motion to which amendments were moved. This was the first conference at which amendments were permitted and incorporated into the pre-conference timetable, following a rule change proposed by Communist Students at the 2012 AGM.

Two amendments were moved, including the one from Labour Party Marxists. Moved by Patrick Smith of Hull LRC, this sought to carry out what had been decided in 2011, but not implemented: ie, “to initiate a short statement setting out our position and circulate it around Britain and Europe for signatures”. It also called for the LRC to channel its resources, during the coming EU election campaign, into organising “as much support as practicable for Labour candidates supporting our statement”. This should be done in preference to illogically advocating a blanket Labour vote when most Labour candidates will surely be following a version of British nationalist politics, arguing how “Britain’s interests” can best be served within the EU.

The internationalist policy adopted by the LRC conference in 2011 was sound. Motion 15, ‘Against British nationalism – for a workers’ united Europe’, stated: “That demanding withdrawal from the EU, or opposing British entry into the European single currency, is a British nationalist position which misidentifies the enemy as ‘Europe’ rather than the ruling class. This is not altered by tacking on a slogan like ‘Socialist United States of Europe’.”

In 2013, however, the Brent and Harrow LRC amendment was carried, deleting clause two of the motion: “That advocating withdrawal from the EU or anything like that undermines this fight [against British nationalism]. Britain withdrawing from Europe would not benefit workers in Britain and would almost certainly boost nationalism.” The successful amendment leaves the rest of the motion intact, but adds the promise of “an extensive debate” in the event of an in-out referendum. Jam tomorrow.

Working class internationalism favours maximum working class unity, the maximum merging of peoples, except only where temporary separation is necessary in order to restore trust. British withdrawal from the EU, or the withdrawal of any EU state, carries the reactionary logic of separate development and ‘national interests’ in place of common class interests.

The LRC is facing backwards on Europe, despite its pious declarations “to oppose British nationalism”, for a “Socialist United Europe”, a “European constituent assembly” and a “European workers’ government” – all proclaimed in the same motion, alongside this latest refusal to recognise that advocating withdrawal means nationalism.

Democracy and the Labour Party, The left

Labour: Inching to the left

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In view of Labour’s marginal shift, the new ‘broad left’ party proposed by Left Unity’s Left Party Platform is worse than useless, writes Stan Keable of Labour Party Marxists

Labour’s recent minor moves to the left are aimed at winning back some of its lost core support. Putting more space between itself and the Tories may aid the election of a Labour government on May 7 2015 – but a Labour government committed to running British capitalism will not bring socialism a single step closer.

Nor will deflecting socialists from the vital task of transforming Labour into a real workers’ party. But that is the apparent aim of those like Left Unity’s Left Party Platform, which wants to see the establishment of a ‘broad left’ alternative to Labour, even though prospects for recreating old Labour in a new mass party – however unlikely it already was – will always be undermined by marginal shifts of the type undertaken by Ed Miliband.

Transforming Labour into an umbrella organisation for all trade unions, socialist organisations and working class bodies of all kinds – a permanent united front of the class – is the central aim of Labour Party Marxists.1Not an easy task, and one that requires the organised unity of Marxists, not our present organised disunity – the proverbial 57 varieties of competing, and therefore ineffective, revolutionary groups. In the unlikely event that Socialist Platform or the Communist Platform is adopted at the November 30 LU conference, the new party should set about this strategic task – in line with the aims, too, of the Labour Representation Committee, to unite all socialist and workers’ organisations in the Labour Party.

Ed Miliband is right to deny the Daily Mail’s gross exaggeration that Labour has “lurched to the left” (October 12). But the party has certainly inched in that direction. Blairite ‘triangulation’ – the cynical electioneering technique of tailoring policies to compete for the floating voter and the political centre – seems to have been put aside for the time being and, while the promise to continue economic austerity under Labour still stands, Miliband has announced a number of measures designed to motivate the party’s core working class voters to get themselves to the polling booth.

As well as his popular last-minute turn against endorsing a US attack on Syria, we have had pledges to build 200,000 homes a year, repeal the hated bedroom tax and freeze energy prices for 20 months – a hugely popular policy with the millions facing rising prices on fixed incomes or feeling the effects of years of public-sector wage freeze.

Although he rejects his ‘Red Ed’ label and denies the party’s “lurch to the left”, Miliband was seen on breakfast TV on his morning walkabout before party conference responding positively to what may well have been a planted question from a member of the public: “What about socialism?” With the Tory press asking whether his conference speech puts us back to ‘capitalism versus socialism’, Miliband is not afraid to say ‘yes’ in public to socialism – unlike the Socialist Resistance language police in Left Unity, who prefer to hide their socialist light under a bushel, so as not to frighten away timid supporters by using nasty words.

Elsewhere, of course, ‘Red Ed’ makes clear his commitment to so-called ‘responsible capitalism’ – a utopian illusion. Capital’s inherent drive for self-expansion, regardless of the consequences, can overcome all barriers except one – the working class, the class of wage workers which capital creates and reproduces, and whose work creates and reproduces capital.

But his energy price-freeze pledge shows that he is not worshipping the market, as both Blair and Brown did. They took working class support for granted, thinking we had no-one else we could vote for – and eventually five million Labour voters stayed at home and let Cameron into No10. Now Miliband is speaking out against the Tories and getting some people excited by the prospect of a few crumbs.

Whereas Blair courted Murdoch and the Tory press, Miliband is on the offensive to curb the excesses of the media, including harassment by phone-hacking, and has taken on the Daily Mail with a vengeance. The Mail has followed up its smear attack on Ed via his Marxist father, Ralph, with a similarly dishonest attack on Miliband and Labour via its newly adopted prospective parliamentary candidate for Chippenham, ‘Red Andy’ Newman, who it represents as an “apologist for Stalin”.2

In short, Miliband is working to a different agenda, almost certainly shaped by the deal being worked out behind closed doors to modify the Labour-trade union link, now that the Falkirk candidate selections showdown has subsided – a compromise designed to leave intact and unaccountable both the dominant Parliamentary Labour Party and the Brewers Green HQ, on the one hand, and the trade union bureaucracy which finances it, on the other. The compromise deal is being settled behind the backs or over the heads of the rank and file. The deal will be endorsed by the special party conference now planned for March 2014.

In Miliband’s October reshuffle, the three senior shadow cabinet ministers most associated with Tony Blair – Jim Murphy, Liam Byrne and Stephen Twigg – were demoted in what has been dubbed the “cull of Blairites” (but left MP Diane Abbott was ditched too, presumably for premature opposition to a military attack on Syria).

According to Atul Hatwal on the Labour Uncut website, the appointment of Jon Trickett as ‘deputy chair’ to lead on party reform tells us that Miliband is not going to appeal “over the heads of union leaders to the rank and file”, but “wants to do a deal with the union bosses”. The “reform pill” which the unions must swallow if Miliband is not to lose face is “the requirement for trade union levy payers to opt in to paying some of their political levy towards Labour”.3

In exchange, “the union block vote at conference will remain, the unions will retain a separate electoral college in the leadership election and the union reservation of 12 places out of 33 on the NEC (compared to six places reserved for CLP members) will stay”. And there will be “an extension and entrenchment of the electoral college at CLP level”, justified by “parallel management and voting structures”.

Writing on the Left Futures website, Jon Lansman reminds us that this kind of rotten compromise was circulated for discussion months ago by the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy “as the basis for just such an agreement between Ed Miliband and the trade unions”. The CLPD proposals involved “Meeting Ed Miliband’s aspiration” to impose (my word – SK) individual opting-in to affiliated membership, and “Meeting trade union aspirations for a continuing collective voice in the affairs of the party they founded, and sustainable levels of voting and representation.”4

This manoeuvre, politely described as “delinking the collective representation of trade unions in the structures of the party from the involvement of individual trade unionists in the life of the party”, may be a happy compromise between entrenched bureaucrats, parliamentary and trade union, who function as masters, rather than servants, of our labour movement. However, it leaves them as unaccountable as before, and sets up collective representation for further erosion. 

Notes

1. www.labourpartymarxists.org.uk/aims-and-principles.

2. Daily Mail October 12.

3. www.labour-uncut.co.uk, October 8.

4. ‘Labour’s reshuffle – and what it means for party reform’: www.leftfutures.org, October 8.  

The left

Russian Krasnoe TV interview

Russian Krasnoe TV video report of SWP’s Marxism 2013

Thanks to Russian Krasnoe internet TV (krasnoe dot tv/node/19020#comments-info), who interviewed Stan Keable about Labour Party Marxists, as part of their upbeat video report of the Socialist Workers Party’s ‘Marxism 2013’ educational event:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ptuqoql7Es

The left

Socialist Appeal: Waiting for the class to move

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Stan Keable of Labour Party Marxists reports on Socialist Appeal’s third Marxist summer school

Allan Woods
Allan Woods: appealing

Like Labour Party Marxists, the Socialist Appeal group (the remnant of the Militant Tendency which chose to remain in the Labour Party) is an affiliate of the Labour Representation Committee. When LPM was launched in June 2011 in response to Peter Hain’s Refounding Labour consultation document,1 we affiliated to LRC and, although I did not come across any SA comrades in London, I was aware that they were playing their part in trying to build the organisation, setting up local LRCs elsewhere – and they were always represented at national committee meetings.

Not so today, unfortunately. An LRC national committee member told me recently that they had made a decision to go elsewhere about 18 months ago. This seems to be something of an exaggeration, however. A young activist at the group’s summer school explained that SA had put the LRC “on the back burner”, as it “didn’t seem to be going anywhere”, and was torn by “sectarian strife”. SA seems to have shied away from the conflicts which erupted in the LRC in 2012 in the form of its merger with Labour Briefing, which turned out to be a split at the top of both Briefing and the LRC itself, with the loss of Labour Party national executive member Christine Shawcroft, and the publication of two competing versions of the journal.

At the summer school, held at University of London College Union, over the weekend of June 28-30, I was not surprised to learn that this reluctance to engage in a real conflict within the revolutionary and socialist left is entrenched in SA’s proclaimed “anti-sectarianism”. Marxist unity is “impractical”, because the “sectarians” always split hairs and use up all their energy in pointless arguments – “We don’t want to waste time in endless debate with sectarians.” When the class moves, it will choose which ‘Marxists’ to follow.

Nevertheless, I was made very welcome by the participants and speakers, all of whom were friendly, and I was able to intervene freely in all of the sessions I attended. In each I noticed that, after the opening lecture, the first person in discussion seemed to give a prepared supportative intervention rather than raising any differences, and very few people challenged the speakers’ views. The only other political group represented, as far as I could see, was the Socialist Party in England and Wales, whose comrade had nothing to say except that the Labour Party was “an out-and-out capitalist party”, and quoted the Falkirk candidate selection row to prove it. So I enjoyed the role of fall guy for the ‘sectarian left’, and having my views ‘corrected’ by a succession of naive students (most of those attending were students).

Several told me that they read the Weekly Worker, usually online, and were fascinated by the goings-on in the various groups of the revolutionary left, especially the Socialist Workers Party, which the WW seemed to concentrate on. They also remarked on how accurate the paper was in detailing their politics. But why on earth bother? What is the point? Some told me how, in joining SA, they had escaped the “noise” of sectarian left arguments and been directed to the more beneficial systematic study of Marxist classics – including, of course, the “legacy of Ted Grant”, upholder of “the unbroken thread of Marxism”, and “the leading theoretician of Marxism” since World War II.

Leninism

I was hoping to attend the session on ‘The rise and fall of the Militant Tendency’ on the Saturday evening, but the timetable had been changed so I had missed it. As I arrived, the group’s leader, Alan Woods, was telling a lecture-theatre full of nearly 100 mostly younger comrades about “the real Lenin and Trotsky”. Fred Weston stood in for Socialist Appeal editor Rob Sewell, who was off sick, and on the Sunday I attended comrade Weston’s presentations on ‘Marxism and the Labour Party’ and ‘History of the Fourth International’.

It was only after Lenin’s death that Zinoviev, when he was siding with Stalin, coined the term ‘Trotskyism’, explained comrade Woods. “We are Leninists,” he told his young followers. “Trotsky said nothing that Lenin had not already said” – but, somehow, “in 1905, only Trotsky had the theory of permanent revolution: that the Russian proles can come to power before the Germans or the French.” However, before 1917 Trotsky had been a “unity-monger” – comrade Woods’s shibboleth against seeking Marxist unity today.

I was pleased to hear comrade Woods decry bureaucratic centralism and claim to uphold democratic centralism, freedom of expression and the right to form factions – but, unfortunately, there were always compromising caveats. “Freedom of discussion” leads to “clarity of ideas”; but this was undermined by what we might call the Callinicos principle: “We make a decision and move on”. For the Bolsheviks, “there was always freedom of factions”. But Bolshevism was “always a school of internal discussions”, and the right to form factions should apply “in certain circumstances”. Mixed messages.

Comrade Woods evidently misses the fundamental point that, for Lenin, Trotsky and both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, political differences – including factional struggles – had to be fought out in public, not internally, so that everyone can learn. This misconception underpins his repetition of the myth that “the Bolshevik faction” of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party “transformed itself into the Bolshevik Party in 1912”. The logical implication, of course, unspoken by comrade Woods, is that the party allegedly formed in 1912 was monolithic, and that the revolution was led by a party without factions.

Comrade Woods had not mentioned the ban on factions imposed in 1921 by the 10th party congress, so I brought it up in discussion time, and challenged the misconception of the 1912 Bolshevik party, pointing out that it was the liquidators, not the Menshevik faction, who had been excluded in 1912, and that the chair of that congress was in fact a Menshevik.

Reclaim Labour

Opening the Sunday morning session on ‘Marxism and the Labour Party’, Fred Weston described the party, like the trade unions, as a mass organisation of the working class, but underlined that “joining does not mean supporting its bourgeois leaders”.

SA’s ‘What we stand for’ column includes “Labour to power on a bold socialist programme”, and “Trade unions must reclaim the Labour Party!” As Weekly Worker readers will know, Labour Party Marxists prefers the term “transform” to “reclaim”, because: “From the beginning the party has been dominated by the labour bureaucracy and the ideas of reformism.”2 But, happily, comrade Weston made that point himself: “Labour has always been reformist” – so SA is not pining for an imagined golden age when Labour was a socialist party. It is “democratic fighting trade unions” which must reclaim the party, with “election of all trade union officials, with the right of recall” and the wage of “the average skilled worker”.

Comrade Weston castigated SPEW for splitting Militant Tendency by choosing to leave the Labour Party. The pitiful votes obtained by SPEW’s Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition showed the folly of its attempt to find a short cut to mass support outside Labour. Militant had not been forced out of that party, he insisted. With a claimed membership of 8,000, only 200 or so had been expelled when Peter Taaffe and co decided to jump ship (a couple of older comrades told how they had been victims of Neil Kinnock’s witch-hunt). Although a ‘star chamber’ team of witch-hunters had travelled the country picking off Militant activists, they were only expelled where their local constituency party allowed it. Some had followed bad advice not to turn up at the disciplinary hearing and fight their corner. Later, after a couple of years, they were able to rejoin online without a problem.

What is SA’s perspective for Labour? Ed Miliband “does not want to win outright” in 2015, but would prefer a Lib-Lab coalition. We will probably get a Labour government continuing Tory policies, and intensified class struggle. Labour is rooted in the working class, and “will be changed by the radicalisation of the class”. When it, inevitably, fights back, the class “will try to use the trade unions to fight” and this will move the unions left, as it did in the 1970s. That in turn will move the party left, as happened in the 1980s. That is why the bourgeoisie fear Labour’s trade union link, explained comrade Weston. (Militant Tendency benefited from this leftward shift in Labour, not because it had defeated the other revolutionary left groups in argument, but simply because it was the ‘last man standing’ within Labour. Others had pulled out round about 1968.)

In a “downswing” period, like the present, participation in the movement is low, and the bureaucracy moves rightwards. But SA has “absolute faith in the working class”, which will, sooner or later, fight back. A “mass revolutionary party” will be achieved through patient work in the mass organisations (which comrade Weston counterposed to Marxist rapprochement). We have no crystal ball, said comrade Weston. Maybe we will win Labour, maybe splits will occur, to the right and/or to the left. If a mass left split occurs, we should go with it, and win them for Marxism. The Marxist party that arose would be in a position to win over the masses.

Fred Weston again substituted for the absent Rob Sewell in the session on the Fourth International. He said that Trotsky analysed the failure of the Russian Revolution, and did his most important theoretical work in the 1930s, struggling against the distortion of Marxism. Comrade Weston took us quickly through the Left Opposition; the International Left Opposition, which called itself an “expelled faction” of Comintern; Trotsky’s estimation, when Hitler was elected to power in 1933, that the communist parties were “dead for revolution”; and the formation of the International Communist League.

In truth, said comrade Weston, the Fourth International “had not taken off”. Strangely, he did not mention its 1938 programme, The death agony of capitalism. After World War II, the Fourth International was disorientated, and collapsed “because of its crisis predictions”. In 1946, Ernest Mandel and Gerry Healy were predicting “worldwide crisis”, and that the Soviet Union was “on the verge of collapse”. In 1951, Pierre Frank (France) and James Cannon (USA) were predicting “the coming World War III”, and some were claiming World War II “had not ended”. Even today, said Weston, the Lambertists claim that “capitalism has not developed the productive forces beyond their 1938 level”, desperately trying to defend the 1938 programme as dogma.

Until 1938, said comrade Weston, Trotskyism had a clean banner. Since World War II it has had a stinking banner, and we must cleanse it. And who better than the upholders of “the unbroken thread of Marxism” to do that?

Notes

1. For the LPM response see http://labourpartymarxists.org.uk/refound-labour-as-a-real-party-of-labour.

2. labourpartymarxists.org.uk/aims-and-principles.

The left

LRC – Fearful of putting people off

Gallery 1 Comment

Stan Keable reports from a recent LRC National Committee meeting

On Saturday June 29, the Labour Representation Committee’s four-hour national committee meeting in London was a friendly – and businesslike – affair. The venue was, once again, the boardroom at the headquarters of the Rail, Maritime and Transport trade union, one of the LRC’s affiliates.

Comrades were outraged at the capitulation of Labour’s front bench to government austerity policies. Jenny Lennox called it a “non-oppositional opposition”. There had been a “sea change” four months ago, according to Graham Bash, when the parliamentary party had voted against the Welfare Reform Bill, but now it had gone into reverse and rejected the principle of universal benefits.

Mike Phipps thought that Ed Miliband is listening too much to Peter Mandelson, trying to please the markets to gain so-called credibility, and is being pulled to the right by the ‘public opinion’ of an electorate influenced by the rightwing media – especially young voters who have never experienced a strong labour movement. Conclusion: we need an effective press officer (Andrew Fisher used to play this role well) to put across our policies, as “our ideas are popular”.

A series of suggestions followed about how the LRC could “use public opinion” to grow by publicising LRC policies which are already popular – like rail nationalisation, taxing the rich, a house-building programme, and so on. And to make our policies more acceptable, it was proposed, we should make a list of alternatives to austerity which are “easy to argue” and “things that don’t cost”. Extending this desperate logic into the field of Labour candidate selection, we had: “You are not going to get someone selected if they say what we believe.” And: “If candidates put themselves forward as LRC, they would not get selected.”

Everyone knows that the two Eds are promising continued austerity if Labour wins in 2015. When I argued that the workers’ movement will have to oppose any government that runs British capitalism, including the next Labour government, Jon Lansman countered (probably giving the view of most NC members), that we should “influence the next Labour government, not oppose it”.

With 13 committee members present, plus me as a non-voting observer (all LRC members are traditionally permitted to attend), there were at least an equal number of apologies, and comrades speculated that some may have absented themselves because of the unpleasant row at the previous meeting on April 13 (which I had been unable to attend).

Minutes of that meeting had not yet been circulated, and exactly what happened or what was decided was still unclear. However, we were told that Pete Firmin, then joint secretary, had prepared minutes, and they would be circulated that evening. (I recall a decision some two years ago that NC minutes would be routinely published on the LRC website, so I look forward to reading them.)

Not long after the April 13 meeting, comrade Firmin resigned his post, but without publishing his reasons, and a number of NC members complained about this lack of transparency – neither the LRC membership nor many of its leadership had been properly informed about the recent travails at the top.

Having been co-opted onto the editorial board of Labour Briefing – the version now “hosted by” the LRC – I have proposed that NC meetings should always be reported in the magazine – journalistically, not as minutes – so that LRC members can read about the decisions, debates and differences of their elected leaders in their own publication. But this was rejected by a majority of the EB on the grounds that it would be “boring”, “uninteresting” or would “put people off”. So much for transparency.

Pete’s resignation came on top of the withdrawal, on paternity leave, of the other joint secretary elected at conference, Andrew Fisher. Arrangements are in hand to divide and distribute the work previously carried out by the two, with responsibilities allocated temporarily until the November 9 annual conference elects new officers.

I made the point that the distribution of tasks and election of officers would be better done by the NC than by annual conference, so that the departure of individuals for whatever reason would not throw the organisation into crisis. Not only could absence due to resignations, births, deaths and illness be handled easily – instead of by crisis measures, as at present – but also the replacement of comrades who were tasked but failing to perform, or who had a political change of heart. However, such a change would require rule changes, so until conference it seems we will make do with a number of “acting” officers.

Meanwhile, despite the storms at the top, the LRC continues to grow, with a reported trickle of a few dozen new members in May. Our database now lists roughly a thousand paid-up members, a thousand “supporters” and another thousand lapsed members, many of whom may be persuaded to pay up and get active.

There was no sign at the NC meeting of anyone from the Socialist Appeal group. That is the wing of the old Militant Tendency which stayed in the Labour Party under the leadership of Ted Grant and Alan Woods. Peter Taaffe led the majority out of the Labour Party and went on to form the Socialist Party in England and Wales. According to current SPEW doctrine, Labour is no longer a workers’ party of any kind and what is needed therefore is a Labour Party mark two. Anyhow, I had noticed that the group’s monthly paper, Socialist Appeal, has recently carried nothing about LRC. One NC member advised me that SA had taken a decision 18 months ago to abandon LRC, but I had heard nothing of that. So that afternoon I made my way to the University College London Union in Bloomsbury, where Socialist Appeal was holding its third annual Marxist school, to find out. I will write about that next week.

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Democracy and the Labour Party, The left

Freedom of discussion is the safest place

Gallery 2 Comments

Open letter from Stan Keable of Labour Party Marxists to Marshajane Thompson and Cath Elliott, withdrawing support for the ‘Women in the labour movement’ online statement (www.womeninthelabourmovement.wordpress.com)

Dear Comrades Marshajane and Cath,

Please remove my name from the list of signatories to the ‘Women in the labour movement’ statement which you launched on March 12. I signed the statement because of its good intentions, but I have come to the conclusion that its effect will be counterproductive, empowering the labour bureaucracy rather than the rank and file; further restricting freedom of discussion in our movement – the real key to making it a safer place; and unintentionally feeding the current media witch-hunt against the left.

The statement was launched within days of the 2013 Unison Women’s Conference, which carried resolution No30 “Support rape victims not rape deniers”, moved by Cath Elliott, one of the initiators of this statement. Resolution No30 calls on Unison bodies to use the ‘no platform’ tactic against George Galloway and “any speakers who are rape deniers”. Whatever the intentions of the movers, this unfortunate policy will serve to prevent the clarification of differences through open discussion, and facilitate the arbitrary banning of speakers at the whim of the union bureaucracy. Some supporters of resolution No30 have already put the Socialist Workers Party into the ‘rape denier’ category.

The statement was launched in the context of what has been rightly called ‘the revenge of the pro-war left’. Whether intentionally or not, it cannot but lend credibility to the rightwing media witch-hunt being conducted against the whole of the anti-war left by the likes of Nick Cohen (who still excuses the 2003 invasion of Iraq) and the hypocritical Daily Mail, using the SWP’s mishandling of the Delta rape case to falsely smear the SWP and all left political organisations as inherently sexist and unsafe places for women. The truth is that our labour movement organisations, especially the left and including the SWP, are already safer places than society at large.

I signed the statement because I agree that our labour movement organisations should strive to set an example to the rest of society, to be better than the existing capitalist society of exploitation, inequality and oppression in which we live, and which we are striving to change. And I agree that our trade unions and political organisations should start from a position of believing women who complain of male violence – which, of course, does not mean the accused is presumed guilty.

However, the real way to make our trade unions and political organisations safer places is to thoroughly democratise them, to break the stranglehold of the bureaucratic caste which dominates and politically suffocates our movement. The bureaucracy must be made into the servants, not the masters, of our movement. For example, trade union officials should be elected from below, not appointed from above, and paid the average wage of those they represent. Achieving that will require open debate, not political correctness, not labelling, and not blanket ‘no platforming’ of those with backward or wrong ideas.

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