Tag Archives: Socialist Workers Party

Momentum

Momentum: Fight for political clarity

Gallery 1 Comment

Jim Grant of Labour Party Marxists surveys the left response to Momentum’s founding national committee meeting.

Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Rashōmon is based around the narrative concept of a series of self-interested characters giving their partial accounts of the same event –  a procedure borrowed by many subsequent works in all narrative media.

It seems also to have been borrowed, ingeniously, by Momentum: its inaugural national committee this weekend was undoubtedly an important moment, but the precise nature of its significance is something nobody can seem to agree on.

So, to the good news: proposals to ban leftwing literature from Momentum meetings were resoundingly defeated. That the impulse was there at all is, alas, hardly surprising – there is nothing a shiny new movement likes less than the reality of the haggard old Trots its meetings will attract, but it was still silly. Would Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament leaflets be banned? If not, then what about slightly more contentious campaigns (Cuba Solidarity, say)? Even on its own terms, it would be a bureaucratic nightmare, and a ridiculous price to pay for the slender benefit of keeping Socialist Worker at bay. (There is, of course, the small matter of elementary democratic principle to bear in mind as well.)

That Momentum is – for now – relatively open to the participation of avowed Marxists can be gauged from the fact that its steering committee (which will take care of things in between NC meetings) included a certain Jill Mountford of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. Any regular reader of this paper will know that our criticisms of the AWL are legion; but, given that Momentum is screamed at in every paper for basically being the Militant Tendency with better social media nous, comrade Mountford’s election is a good omen for left participants in Momentum more generally. They are not yet buckling on this one. Good.

The most contentious issue, however, is related to Momentum’s membership rules. On the table were three options: Momentum is only open to Labour members; Momentum members must have Labour Party cards, but a separate category of supporters would have voting rights on all matters not directly connected to internal Labour politics; and finally, that Momentum was open to Labour members, affiliated supporters (such as members of affliated unions) and those who support the “aims and values” of the Labour Party, provided they do not support any party other than Labour.

The third option was chosen by a decent majority vote, and its vagueness is probably responsible for most of the leftwing confusion in the period since the meeting. We have argued repeatedly that Momentum should orient itself very firmly in the direction of the Labour Party, and aspects of the agreed wording fudge the issue somewhat. Talk of ‘aims and values’ is plainly lifted directly from the wording of the Labour Party’s ‘registered supporter’ category, which proved under the pressure of Jeremy Corbyn’s insurgent leadership bid to be somewhat elastic, with many of those who had left Labour for the Greens and suchlike excluded on the basis of ancient Twitter postings.

In context, the Momentum agreement is pointing in the opposite direction: it is, after all, the most elastic of the options available. Momentum members will merely have to employ the appropriate due diligence of not openly supporting opposing candidates under their own names. Yet it is still not nearly as elastic as some would like. Again – good. Momentum has chosen not to be yet another self-perpetuating campaigning mechanism along the lines of the People’s Assembly, Stop the War and sundry Trot fronts past and present. It is an (admittedly unofficial) organisation of the Labour Party, and all who sign up will at least have to stand in some proximity to the larger body.

Dogma

So, unsurprisingly, opinions divide. Many are pretty upbeat about the whole thing: “I believe the lobbying and pressure from grassroots Momentum branches won the day at the new NC on Saturday,” chirruped a triumphant Stuart King, formerly of the International Socialists, Workers Power, Permanent Revolution and the Anti-Capitalist Initiative (and possibly still a member of Left Unity, but who knows?), on Facebook.

The AWL’s Ed Whitby, who was present, used his own blog to accentuate the positive. “People should join the Labour Party, and it is right that Momentum will strongly encourage this; but there are still many people coming to the organisation who for whatever reason haven’t joined yet. We need to encourage and persuade them, not throw up an unnecessary barrier.”1 (The AWL, of course, has a longer track record of conducting Labour work, so the result is probably easier to swallow for its members.)

Many Left Unity members are … less enthusiastic. It is hardly surprising: as its membership shrivels, LU is more and more dominated by the ‘carry on as before’ tendency; those for whom the desire to stand candidates in their particular locality automatically supersedes any attention to the goings-on in wider national politics; those for whom the narrow horizon of politics is fitting in as much low-level do-goodery into a given week as possible. No doubt LU will continue to ignore the great shifts happening all around it, in favour of trying to turn out what remains of its membership on whatever demonstration is looming.

The ne plus ultra of this political approach is, as ever, the Socialist Workers Party. A headline in this week’s Socialist Worker asks: “Is Jeremy Corbyn supporters group Momentum cutting off its grassroots?”2 Beyond being a great exemplar of Betteridge’s law (which states that any headline which takes the form of a question can be safely answered with ‘no’), it differs very little from any of SW’s recent ruminations on the topic.

“Momentum’s national committee rightly agreed to support the CND demonstration against Trident nuclear missiles in London on Saturday February 27,” writes the article’s author, Nick Clark. “And it also committed to build for the People’s Assembly national demo in London on April 16. But the committee’s agenda emphasised a focus on building the Labour Party.” For shame!

Comrade Clark’s bizarre conclusion deserves to be cited in full:

“Such a strategy risks allowing the groundswell of support that grew around Corbyn’s campaign to melt away. Corbyn’s strength came from the hundreds of thousands of people who voted for him because they wanted an alternative to austerity, racism and war. Sustaining that will mean building a broad-based movement.”

Might we naively suggest that people voted for Corbyn because they, er, wanted him to be the leader of the Labour Party? Does the SWP really expect people to take no further interest in the matter now that he is Labour leader, and – worse – actually think that is a good thing?

We will not find out from comrade Clark, who refrains from anything so vulgar as justifying the claims he repeats mindlessly, like a penitent monk. For that, we turn to Mark L Thomas, writing at greater length in the latest International Socialism, the SWP’s quarterly journal:

“The key to social change remains through collective struggle from below. Every advance in the struggle creates a greater self-confidence among layers of workers, so weakening the hold of rightwing ideas. This in turn is Corbyn’s best defence of his position against the Labour right … But if the mass of Corbyn’s supporters are simply drawn into bitter internal battles over Labour policy and candidate selections, in practice their focus will not be mobilising in workplaces and working class communities, but on arguing with the right wing … Paradoxically, this can weaken, not strengthen, Corbyn’s position.”3

Things are, alas, little better here – we have proof only of the bankruptcy of the SWP’s hyper-activist tunnel vision. For decades, we have been told with increasing desperation that every passing strike or demonstration is ‘really important’ and the ‘start of the fightback’. Well, comrades, the fightback has come – and you are reduced basically to complaining that it was not the fightback you had in mind. Would a little rethinking be too much to ask?

This sort of dogma is, as we have already seen, hardly limited to the SWP, which merely presents it in its purest and thereby most ridiculous form. Indeed, even organisations that take the Labour question more seriously as part of their operative activity slip into this paradigm all too easily. Thus we find the aforementioned Jill Mountford and Ed Whitby, along with AWL stalwart Sacha Ismail, in last week’s Solidarity:

“It would be false [sic] at this stage to push for anything like a clear, sharp statement of socialist aims, but we need to go beyond Lib Dem-style platitudes and commit to goals for changing the labour movement and developing workers’ political representation. Momentum also needs a clear orientation to supporting workers’ and social movement struggles, and taking them into the Labour Party.”4

It is, we note, never the right time to push for a “clear statement of socialist aims”; nor are we certain that “supporting workers’ and social movement struggles” goes beyond the platitudinous. Mountford wants Momentum to be ‘socialist’ in some sense, still: just not clearly or sharply so. So it is somewhat odd to find comrade Whitby ambivalent on this point in his later blog post: “The basic statement of aims was amended to refer more to socialism and the working class [but] it is still, in my view, far from adequate.” It is a difficult thing, indeed, to satisfy precisely the AWL’s demand for blurry, blunt socialism!

Focus on labour

Still, we must agree with comrade Whitby that the Momentum decisions represent movement in the right direction. And there is a small nugget of truth even in the SWP’s Nick Clark, when he complains of “a focus on building the Labour Party”. However, it is clear that, left to its own devices, Momentum has a very clear sense of what building the Labour Party means, and that is to support Jeremy. At all costs, Labour must be returned to government in 2020, with the honourable member for Islington North at the helm.

So, although Clark’s crypto-Bakuninist ravings and the Corbynist electoralism of the Momentum mainstream may seem to be directly and diametrically opposed, they have in common one thing: the need to suppress political clarity. The object of working class struggle is the conquest of political power, and in fact the ‘instinctive’ class vote for Labour – as with other humdrum matters of official labour movement politics – is a distorted reflection of that reality. The existence of the Labour Party can be put down, ultimately, to the fact that even the infamously bureaucratic British trade unions of the 19th century knew that the workers’ movement needed an effective ‘political wing’ to make anything stick.

Yet there is a vast gulf between what the extant forces of the Labour left consider to be ‘taking power’ and what is actually required to break the grasp of the ruling class on society. For one thing, capital is organised internationally, as the recent Google tax scandals have neatly illustrated; ‘getting the Tories out’ and putting in a tax-and-spend budget does not change that by itself. Organising internationally, however, renders unavoidable the necessity to think at a very high level about the sort of world we want to create. More immediately, the very structures of the state are organised in ways favourable to capital and hostile to labour (in extremis, we have had off-the-record coup talk about Corbyn from army chiefs already). Again, a laundry list of worthy reformist policies gathered into a Labour manifesto is not adequate as a response.

In short, rigorous and effective political discussion is not some self-indulgent distraction from the ‘real work’ – be that getting a Labour government or nudging up attendance figures at some demonstration. The great promise of Momentum is that it provides an opportunity to fight for political clarity among greater numbers of people and, by focusing on the Labour Party – an organisation that, for better or worse, actually matters – the chance to make that clarity a practical force in society at large.

Notes

1 . https://edsunionblog.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/steps-forward-for-momentum-report-of-first-momentum-national-committee-6-february-2016.

2 . Socialist Worker February 9 2016.

3 . ‘A house divided: Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party’ International Socialism No149, winter 2015.

4 . Solidarity February 3 2016.

Momentum

Momentum – through the looking glass

Gallery

Jim Grant of Labour Party Marxists wonders if the bourgeois press thinks their readers are sheep 

We are barely two weeks into Momentum’s existence, and already the British media is terribly excited – bringing to bear the fearless pursuit of truth, attention to detail and scrupulous fair-mindedness for which it is famed.

There is, of course, nothing more suspicious than a group of persons associating together in pursuit of common political objectives. There must, surely, be some hidden agenda. And our brave hacks have done a stand-up job assembling as much evidence as possible to demonstrate that all those participating in Momentum have, unbeknownst to themselves, joined a lunatic Trotskyist cult.

Representative of this tendency is, first of all, Dan Hodges writing in The Daily Telegraph. Hodges cut his teeth as, according to his former byline in the paper, a “Blairite cuckoo in the Brownite nest” at the fag-end of the last Labour government; though he no longer calls himself a Labour member, his agenda has not significantly changed since departing (which really ought to tell you something about how closely his ‘values’ were aligned to the labour movement in the first place).

Anyway, for Hodges, “Momentum [is] spelt M-I-L-I-T-A-N-T”.1 It seems you cannot turn over a rock in the Labour Party without finding some swivel-eyed, ranting leftie beneath, and Hodges is fixated on one Jon Lansman, associated with such sinister ventures as, er, his blog (Left Futures) and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. Hodges’s ‘smoking gun’ is an article by Lansman noting that Jeremy Corbyn’s rightwing opponents have not gone away, and it will be necessary to defend the leftwing leadership “when they strike”. Very militant-sounding, of course – but surely little more than a statement of fact. How dare the Corbynistas not abandon their leader to the carnivorous affections of his enemies!

Momentum is thus described rather grandly as Corbyn’s “Praetorian guard”, when – inasmuch as it has any success getting off the ground – it will resemble not some elite military unit, but rather the same bundle of naive, excitable human material that so spectacularly swept aside the cynical Brewers Green machine people this summer. If one were so minded, one could call such an agglomeration a ‘mob’; and, indeed, Hodges comes close when he declares mandatory reselection of MPs to be a “protection racket” (how dare those little people in branches and CLPs presume to interfere in promising careers!). Praetorian guard, not so much.

It paints a pretty picture, though – on one side, a vast invading force of hardened warriors (or, otherwise, a Mafia family – if only Hodges could make his mind up); and the other, a rag-tag militia of simple-hearted Labour ‘moderates’, with only parliamentary salaries, corporate backing and the entire bourgeois press to defend them. Will our plucky heroes survive, against all the odds?

Hodges is not the only journo with Militant on the mind. While he can only manufacture silly conspiracy theories about Jon Lansman, however, The Sunday Times at least managed to find some kind of tenuous connection – in the person of Dave Nellist, former Militant MP, and still a leading light in Militant’s modern incarnation, the Socialist Party in England and Wales.

The first sentence – which, as any journalism course will tell you, is the most important, since it is the most likely to be read – reads: “Trotskyists are being urged to join a new group for Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters in a fresh effort to purge moderate Labour MPs and shift the party further to the left.” Those who make the effort to read a little further are rewarded with the subtle clarification that comrade Nellist supports … mandatory reselection, “which moderates fear will lead to a purge”. By “moderates”, they mean rightists; by “fear”, they mean ‘are telling the press’; by “purge”, they mean a reckoning with their treachery. Other than that, entirely fair and accurate.

Lest the reader imagine that this sort of fanciful material is restricted to august mainstays of the rightwing press, we cite, finally, the Huffington Post: a terribly modern, web-only bunch of liberal clickbait peddlers. Breaking with the pattern observed so far, HuffPo’s Owen Bennett discovers the hidden hand not of Militant, but the Socialist Workers Party. What’s the skinny here? That the SWP’s Party Notes – forced into the open by this paper – calls for its members to attend Momentum meetings, make their political affiliation clear and see if any of those present would be interested in attending the Next Really Important Demonstration.

SWP national secretary Charlie Kimber was happy to offer a few ‘damning’ quotes to Bennett (who, somewhat ungratefully, calls him “Mr Kimble” for most of the piece – whoops!), suggesting that the SWP might perhaps consider standing candidates against Labour “when you have a rightwing Labour council sticking two fingers up to Jeremy Corbyn”.3 Displaying an uncharacteristic sense of caution, “Mr Kimble” insists that any such action would have to be considered “very carefully”. Very wise – not that Owen Bennett is able to judge.

Wrong for 20 years

In truth, none of the far-left bogeypersons advanced by the media are really plausible. We may return to SPEW, née Militant: it would be a wonderful thing, truly, if it were leading its members decisively into battle against the poor beleaguered souls of the Labour right. It is, alas, doing no such thing. It is plain enough at this point that its leadership has come round – grudgingly – to the idea that the fight is worth having. Very good.

However, it has spent the last two decades committed more staunchly than anyone to the idea that the Labour Party is dead and it is necessary to break all remaining pro-working class forces from its allegiance, to form a new workers’ party in the idealised image SPEW has of old Labour. Instead of merely admitting the plain truth – that, in the light of newly available evidence, those 20 years were spent committed to a wrong theory – SPEW instead chooses to contort reality, claiming that it was correct all along, and a full and final victory for Corbyn would represent in reality the founding of the new workers’ party it had always envisioned!

This is a notably lithe theoretical dodge, but advancing it among people who have not already drunk the Kool-Aid will provoke laughter at best, and a discreet phone call to the men in white coats at worst. The confusion does not stop there – SPEW has called for affiliations to be opened up to its like, but still opposes the re-affiliation of the RMT and FBU unions, and still insists that it will run candidates against Labour in the next local elections – SPEW supremo Peter Taaffe is evidently not as circumspect as “Mr Kimble”.

In short – ladies and gentlemen of the press – Militant is not back from the dead, and is not presently the danger you remember it to be. But without Militant running things in secret, and without SWP infiltration, just what is there left to be scared of? Fortunately, Sam Coates – deputy political editor of The Times, no less – has discovered another insidious threat.

Labour Party Marxists has published a six-point plan to ensure that Mr Corbyn’s agenda is widely adopted: “As the hard right begins its civil war, the left must respond with disciplinary threats, constitutional changes and reselection measures,” it said.

Indeed, we did – and do. These people are traitors, and need to be ushered – politely but insistently – out of the Labour movement. This is not their place. It is not clear how many people are listening to us, if that matters. We do not exaggerate our influence in the wider movement; after all, we have the deputy political editors of eminent daily papers to do that for us, apparently.

There are three possible explanations for these egregious stupidities. The first is that they are honest, if severe, mistakes. The deputy political editor of The Times has mistaken our small propaganda group for a large organisation that will rise, rampant, should mandatory reselection be placed on the Labour Party rulebook. Its Sunday sister is genuinely under the illusion that the modern successor to Militant still has the wherewithal to take over city councils and get people onto the Labour benches. (Simple error, if nothing else, almost certainly accounts for the “Mr Kimble” business.)

Number two: these papers are actively and deliberately lying. Their activity is equivalent in substance and form to the forged ‘Zinoviev letter’ – a cynical and dirty trick to delegitimise the Labour leadership.

And finally, the middle way: the elementary errors of research and fact are to be explained by an indifference to the truth of the matter. This is the mode of communication defined by philosopher Harry G Frankfurt as “bullshit”.4 The bullshitter cares not if what he says is true; only that it convinces enough people enough of the time.

The common thread among all three is contempt for the readership. Either these stories are deliberately deceptive; or they are advanced in the confidence that nobody will check either way; or those commissioned to write them are incompetent. None of these options shines glory on the papers concerned. The condition for any of them working is uncritical acceptance of untruths by the people they purport to keep informed.

Well, if anybody is curious enough to find this article as a result of all this free publicity, and patient enough to read all the way to the end – socialism is, above all else, about not treating the general population like morons. It is this dangerous idea that rankles both the careerist technocrats of the Labour right and the demagogues of the press.

Notes

1. The Daily Telegraph October 10.

2. The Sunday Times October 18.

3. www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/10/16/momentum- swp-jamie-reed-entyists_n_8312330.html.

4. HG Frankfurt On bullshit Princeton 2005.

 

Inside the Labour Party, Labour structures and programme

Recruit, win new affiliates, transform (updated)

Gallery

Jeremy Corbyn’s election presents the left with a historic opportunity. James Marshall outlines a programme of immediate action and long-term strategic goals (this is a slightly updated version of an earlier article)

At the well publicised prompting of Peter Mandelson, Charles Clarke, David Blunkett and above all Tony Blair, the hard right has already launched what will be a protracted, bitter, no-holds-barred struggle to put an end to the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Blair’s ‘Alice in wonderland’ opinion piece in The Observer had nothing to do with the former prime minister trying to swing votes in the closing two weeks of the leadership contest.1 Comrade Corbyn had already won. No, its purpose was perfectly clear. Rally the Blairites and their corporate, state and international allies … and declare war.

Given the punishing logic of the first-past-the-post election system, it is unlikely that the hard right will go for a breakaway. Minor parties tend to suffer “significant under-representation” at a national level.2 Another Social Democratic Party is therefore an outside possibility. But, unlike the early 1980s, the political centre is not enjoying a sustained revival.3 At the last general election the Liberal Democrats were decimated. They remain marginalised and loathed. It is probably true that “more than two” Labour MPs are considering defection, either to the Tories or the Lib Dems. Nonetheless, political suicide remains an unattractive proposition for most Blairites.4 Their constituents would turf them out at the first opportunity. Instead of the glories of high office, it will be the musty corridors of the House of Lords. Knowing that, the right will therefore stay firmly put and fight hard … until we send them packing.

The well-timed announcement by leading members of the right that they would refuse seats in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet needs to be understood as an act of civil war. Yvette Cooper, Chuka Umunna, Tristram Hunt, Emma Reynolds, Liz Kendall, Shabana Mahmood, Mary Creagh, Jamie Reid, Chris Leslie and Rachel Reeves have in effect constituted themselves a shadow-shadow cabinet. This parliamentary gang of 10 are still members of the Labour Party, but, obviously, they do not share the same values as the mass of Labour members.

In that context, Corbyn is absolutely right to maintain the leader’s ‘hire and fire’ prerogative. After all, he faces not just 10 rebels. No, it is more like 110. We Marxists want the abolition of the Bonarpartist post of leader. But these are extraordinary times and require extraordinary measures. The idea of having the PLP elect the shadow cabinet was being touted by the right. Thankfully Corbyn’s early pronouncements on this subject were rethought. He wisely opted to keep the dictatorial powers long favoured by past Labour leaders.

Appointing the shadow chancellor was always going to be a litmus test. The more timid members of Corbyn’s inner circle were reportedly urging him to go for someone from the centre. Instead he chose John McDonnell. Excellent. So there is in effect a Corbyn-McDonnell leadership.

Offering shadow cabinet seats to the likes of Andy Burnham, Hilary Benn, Angela Eagle, Lucy Powell, Lord Falconer, Rosie Winterton and Chris Byrant was always going to happen. Corbyn is a natural conciliator. And the fact of the matter is that there are simply not enough leftwingers in parliament. Unless, that is, Corbyn went for a pocket-sized shadow cabinet and appointed talents from outside parliament. That is what we LPMers advocated.

Nevertheless, equipped with his left-centre-right coalition, Corbyn can claim the moral high ground. He is reaching out to all sections of the party. Meanwhile, in terms of internal perceptions, it is the hard right that will be blamed for starting the civil war. That will play well with traditional Labour loyalists. They do not take kindly to anyone damaging Labour’s chances at the polls. After all, for most Labour councillors and would-be councillors, most Labour MPs and would-be MPs, the be-all and end-all of politics is getting into office … even if the manifesto promises nothing more than managing capitalism better than the Tories. A misplaced common sense that wide swathes of the Labour left, including Corbyn and McDonnell, have thoroughly internalised.

However, the hard right will have the full backing of the capitalist media, the City of London, the military-industrial complex, special branch, MI5 and their American cousins. Corbyn’s much publicised admiration for Karl Marx, his campaigning against US-led imperialist wars, his opposition to Nato, Trident and nuclear weapons, his commitment to increase the tax take from transnational corporations, the banks and the mega rich, his republicanism – even his refusal to sing the national anthem at St Paul’s – mark him out as completely unacceptable.

Of course, the distinct danger is that the Corbyn-McDonnell leadership will have their agenda set for them by the need to maintain PLP unity. Put another way, in what is a coalition cabinet, it will be the right that sets the limits and therefore determines the political programme. Why? Because they are quite prepared to walk. That is what Burnham has indicated over Nato and nuclear weapons. The decision by Corbyn to kneel before Elizabeth Windsor and accept a place on her privy council is therefore more than a symbolic gesture.

Watering down, abandoning, putting principles onto the backburner in an attempt to placate the right, if it continues to happen, will prove fatal. Such a course will demobilise, demoralise and drain away Corbyn’s mass base in and out of the party.

Hence the Corbyn-McDonnell leadership faces both an enemy within the PLP and an enemy within their own reformist ideology. They seriously seem to believe that socialism can be brought about piecemeal, through a series of left and ever lefter Labour governments. In reality, though, a Labour government committed to the existing state and the existing constitutional order produces not decisive steps in the direction of socialism, but attacks on the working class … and the return of a Tory government.

Tactically, Marxists will, for the moment, concentrate their fire on the hard right in the shadow cabinet. ‘Blairites out’ should be the common slogan of the left. The mass of Labour members trust the Corbyn-McDonnell leadership, but they have an instinctive distrust for those who support the Progress outfit, those allied with Lord David Sainsbury and the gang of ten, those who vote for welfare cuts, those who want British forces to join the bombing of Syria. Clearly the Blairites are closer in mind and spirit to the Tories than Labour’s members, supporters and affiliates. An obvious target, therefore, is Tony Blair’s old flatmate and co-thinker, Lord Charlie Falconer. He has already threatened to quit over the EU referendum.

Immediate

The left in the Labour Party faces three immediate tasks.

Firstly, there must be a concerted drive to win registered supporters to become full individual members. There are now well over 100,000 of them. If they want to bolster Corbyn’s position, if they want to ensure that he stays true to his principles, if they want to transform the Labour Party, then the best thing they can do is to get themselves a vote when it comes to the national executive committee, the selection and reselection of MPs, MEPs, councillors, etc. Card-carrying members can also attend ward and constituency meetings and themselves stand for officer positions.

Secondly, within the affiliated trade unions we must fight to win many, many more to enrol. Just over 70,000 affiliated supporters voted in the leadership election. A tiny portion of what could be. There are 4,414,929 who pay the political levy.5 Given that they can sign up to the Labour Party with no more than a click, we really ought to have a million affiliated supporters as a minimum target.

Thirdly, the constituency, branch (ward) and other such basic units must be revived and galvanised. Everything should be done to encourage new members, and returnees, to attend meetings and elect officers who oppose austerity and want to support the Corbyn-McDonnell leadership. Labour’s constituency and branches can be made into vibrant centres of organisation, education and action. As such they would be well placed to hold wayward councillors and MPs to account. They could also spearhead a mass campaign to get local people onto the electoral register. The electoral commission reports that nationally “approximately 7.5 million individuals are not registered”.6 Most are “Labour-inclined.”7

Reorganise

As the hard right begins its civil war, the left must respond with a combination of intimidation, constitutional changes and reselection. Those proven to be in the pay of big business, those sabotaging our election campaigns, those who vote with the Tories on austerity, war, housing benefits, migration or so-called humanitarian interventions, must be hauled up before the NEC. If MPs refuse to abide by party discipline, they must be warned that they face expulsion. If that results in a smaller PLP in the short term, that is a price well worth paying.

Meanwhile, we should take full advantage of our current rules. The ‘trigger’ mechanism allows local party units, including both individual members and affiliated organisations, “to determine whether the constituency holds a full open selection contest for its next candidate, in which other potential candidates are nominated or reselects the sitting MP without such a contest.”8 Ironically, if it happens, David Cameron’s proposed reduction in the number of MPs from 650 to 600, and the expected boundary changes, due to be announced in October 2018, could prove to be a golden opportunity. We should deselect hard-right MPs and democratically select tried and trusted leftwing replacements.

Obviously, the party must be reorganised from top to bottom. A special conference – eg, in spring 2016 – should be called by the NEC with a view to radically overhauling the constitution and rules and undertaking an across-the-board political reorientation. We need a new clause four, we need a sovereign conference, we need to be able to easily reselect MPs, MEPs and councillors. We also need to sweep away the undemocratic rules and structures put in place under Blair. The joint policy committee, the national policy forums – the whole horrible rigmarole – should be swept away at the earliest possible opportunity.

Clearly, it is going to take time to change the political make-up of the PLP and subordinate it to the wishes of the membership. But with force of numbers, tactical flexibility and ruthless determination it can be done.

A particularly potent weapon here is the demand that all our elected representatives should take only the average wage of a skilled worker. A principle upheld by the Paris Commune and the Bolshevik revolution. From memory the Italian Communist Party under Enrico Berlinguer applied the partymax even in the 1970s. With the PCI’s huge parliamentary fraction this proved to be a vital source of funds.

Our MPs are now on a basic £67,060 annual salary. On top of that they get around £12,000 in expenses and allowances, putting them on £79,060 (yet at present Labour MPs are only obliged to pay the £82 parliamentarian’s subscription rate). And, as leader of the official opposition, Jeremy Corbyn has just got himself a £6,000 pay rise.9

We in the LPM say, let them keep the average skilled workers’ wage – say £40,000 (plus legitimate expenses). However, they should hand the balance over to the party. That would give a considerable boost to our finances. Even if we leave out our 20 MEPs from the calculation, it would amount to roughly £900,000 extra. Anyway, whatever our finances, there is a basic principle. Our representatives ought to live like ordinary workers, not pampered members of the upper middle class. So, yes, let us impose the partymax.

In the three days following Corbyn’s election, 30,000 joined the party.10 Many more should be expected. But we need to reach out to all those who are disgusted by corrupt career politicians, all those who aspire for a better world, all those who have an objective interest in ending capitalism. To do that we need to establish our own mass media.

Much to the chagrin of the fourth estate, comrade Corbyn has shown his “contempt” for the capitalist press, radio and TV. Relying on their favours worked splendidly for Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell. But our newly elected leader will get nothing but mockery, hatchet jobs and implacable opposition. While there will doubtless be an attempt to court The Guardian and the Mirror group, Corbyn’s turning to the social media is understandable and very much to be welcomed. However, as is obvious, tweeting and texting have severe limits. They are brilliant mediums for transmitting short, sharp, clear messages. But, when it comes to complex ideas, debating principles and charting political strategies, they are next to useless.

To set the agenda, however, we must shun those siren voices urging us to engage with the “unpersuaded” by relying on the existing “mainstream media”.11 As Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband found to their cost, to live by the mainstream media is to die by the mainstream media. No, we need our own full-spectrum alternative.

Once we had the Daily Herald. Now we have nothing. Well, apart from the deadly-dull trade union house journals, the advertising sheets of the confessional sects and the Morning Star (which in reality is still under the grip of unreconstructed Stalinites). No, we should aim for an opinion-forming daily paper of the labour movement and seek out trade union, cooperative, crowd and other such sources of funding. And, to succeed, we have to be brave: iconoclastic viewpoints, difficult issues, two-way arguments, must be included as a matter of course. The possibility of distributing it free of charge should be considered and, naturally, everything should be put up on the web without page limits or paywalls. We should also seriously consider internet-based TV and radio stations. With the riches of dedication, passion and ideas that exist on the left, we can surely better the BBC, Al Jazeera, Russia Today and Sky.

Branding good people as ‘infiltrators’ because, mainly out of frustration, they supported the Greens, Tusc or Left Unity, at the last general election, does nothing to advance the socialist cause in the Labour Party. Such a jaundiced response smacks of cold-war bans and proscriptions. We should be proud of being a federal party. Therefore securing new affiliates ought to be at the top of our agenda. I am sure the FBU and RMT will soon be back. But what of PCS and NUT? Why can’t we win them to affiliate? Surely we can … if we fight for hearts and minds. Then there are the leftwing groups and parties. They too can be brought under our banner. Labour can become the common home of every socialist organisation, cooperative and trade union – the agreed goal of our founders.12 In other words, we can become what Trotsky called a permanent united front of the working class.

Yet sadly, so far, in terms of those outside Labour, apart from the CPGB, there has been a distinct lack of imagination. Instead of a banging on the door, there is a cowardly disengagement. An approach designed to preserve sectarian interests and brittle reputations.

Showing his profundity, his prostration before Scottish nationalism, his unconscious English nationalism, the media darling, Tariq Ali, assesses Corbyn’s victory as “England coming to life again”.13 In that same blinkered spirit he privileges protest politics as against parliamentary politics. Of course, comrade Ali is one of those freelance socialists, a typical dilettante. The idea of actively engaging in our civil war does not seem to occur to him nowadays.

The same goes for Charlie Kimber, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. Our Charlie boasts that he, and his much reduced band of followers, did not take up the opportunity of registering as Labour Party supporters. Why did they stand aloof? After all, a Corbyn vote cost a mere £3 … and for levy-paying members of affiliated trade unions it was gratis. So why did the SWP refrain from giving Corbyn voting support? Comrade Kimber pathetically explains.

The right is set to begin a firestorm. The PLP is dominated by the right. Corbyn has the active support of no more than 20 MPs. Tom Watson is a Brownite. Lord Mandelson is advising protracted war. The trade unions are dominated by a self-serving bureaucracy. There will be internal struggles and attempts to introduce constitutional and programmatic changes.

What ought to be a challenge to join the fight becomes an excuse to stay clear.

Having been torn by splits and divisions in the 1970s and then again in the 2010s, the SWP apparatus wants nothing to do with anything that carries even the whiff of factional strife. So, as with Tariqi Ali, there is the call for marches, protests and strikes … as counterposed to the Labour Party, PLP battles and taking sides in a concentrated form of the class war.14 In other words, in rejecting any sort of active involvement in Labour’s civil war, the SWP stays true to its modern-day version of Bakuninism.

Then we have the Socialist Party in England and Wales. Having categorically dismissed the Labour Party as an out-and-out capitalist party since the mid-1990s, it has been busily rowing … backwards. The old Militant logo has now been cosmetically placed on the masthead of The Socialist. Nevertheless, while Peter Taaffe, SPEW’s founder-leader, is a proven dunderhead, he at least has the good sense to borrow a vital element of the LPM programme. Hence we find him saying this:

“Even today a few remnants of [Labour’s original] federal constitution remain, with some MPs standing on behalf of the Cooperative Party under the Labour Party umbrella. Why couldn’t that be extended to allow anti-austerity parties and campaigns to join with Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party as affiliates, while maintaining their own independent identity, just as the ILP and John Maclean’s British Socialist Party were able to do in the first 20 years of the party?”

Leave aside the historical blunders. The BSP was never John Maclean’s. A hero of the internationalist left during World War I, he ended up, however, as a sad, totally isolated figure, advocating left Scottish nationalism. True, the BSP did affiliate to the Labour Party … in 1916. And, of course, the BSP was by far the largest component body which helped found the CPGB in August 1920 … whose applications for Labour Party affiliation were consistently rejected. That despite very considerable grassroots support in the unions and CLPs. As for the Independent Labour Party, its special conference voted to disaffiliate from the Labour Party … in 1932.15 In other words, between ILP affiliation and disaffiliation there was not two, but three decades.

Despite such quibbles, comrade Taaffe’s call for SPEW to affiliate to the Labour Party is very much to be welcomed. Nevertheless, showing his political acumen, there is the promise that his ridiculous Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition will continue to stand against Labour candidates. A blundering approach supported by Nick Wrack’s so-called Independent Socialist Network (along with the SWP, Tusc’s only other political affiliate).

If Tusc candidates stood on something that resembled a Marxist programme, that would be tactically inadvisable under present circumstances. But what passes for Tusc’s programme is barely distinguishable form Corbynism. Despite that, whereas the Corbyn Labour Party will get mass votes, even with many questionable candidates, Tusc will hardly register. Its votes are uniformly homeopathic.

Left Unity seems to me to be essentially no different. And, as with SPEW and the SWP, members are peeling away to join the Labour Party as individuals. I have been told of a 20% cancellation of standing orders. Left Unity is clearly doomed if it tries to continue as a halfway house project. Unless it votes for the motions of its Communist Platform at its November 21-22 conference, Left Unity will soon begin to fall apart.

We Labour Party Marxist unapologetically take our programmatic lead from the CPGB. Having been demanding the right to affiliate since 1920, today the CPGB ought to be accorded the same rights as the Cooperative Party, the Fabians, Christians on the Left, the Jewish Labour Movement, Scientists for Labour, etc.16 However, we extend that demand to include the SWP, SPEW, Socialist Appeal, Left Unity and other such organisations.

Then there are the trade unions. Those who have disaffiliated or been expelled must be brought back into the fold. In other words the FBU and the RMT. They actively supported the Corbyn campaign … from the outside. So, comrades, now do the same, much more effectively, from the inside. But what about those unions which have never had an organised relationship with us? Regrettably, Mark Serwotka, PSC general secretary, was one of those turned away in the Harriet Harman-organised purge. But, instead of impotently complaining about it on Twitter, he should turn the tables on the outgoing Blairite apparatus by bringing in his entire membership. Mark, fight to get PCS to affiliate.

I heard him interviewed on BBC Radio 4 on this. He enthusiastically supported Corbyn’s September 15 speech at the TUC. However, he excused himself from getting the PCS to affiliate. Apparently it has been illegal for civil servant trade unions to affiliate to the Labour Party since 1927.

When we moved a motion to the effect that all trade unions should affiliate to the Labour Party at the February 2015 AGM of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, we met with exactly that sort of legalistic objection. However, as NEC member Christine Shawcroft, who was sitting next to me, said: “What does that matter?” Here comrade Shawcroft, a close ally of Corbyn, shows the exact right spirit of defiance. Comrade Serwotka and other leaders of non-affiliated trade unions should take her lead. Laws can be defied, laws can be changed. The key, however, is to win the PCS’s membership to the idea of affiliation. It would be great if the 2016 PCS annual conference was addressed by Jeremy Corbyn and had a raft of branch motions calling for the union to affiliate to the Labour Party.

Reclaiming

Real Marxists, not fake Marxists, have never talked of reclaiming Labour. It has never been ours in the sense of being a “political weapon for the workers’ movement”. No, despite the electoral base and trade union affiliations, our party has been dominated throughout its entire history by career politicians and trade union bureaucrats. A distinct social stratum which in the last analysis serves not the interests of the working class, but the continuation of capitalist exploitation.

Speaking in the context of the need for the newly formed CPGB to affiliate to the Labour Party, Lenin said this:

“[W]hether or not a party is really a political party of the workers does not depend solely upon a membership of workers, but also upon the men that lead it, and the content of its actions and its political tactics. Only this latter determines whether we really have before us a political party of the proletariat.

“Regarded from this, the only correct, point of view, the Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers with the aid of the British Noskes and Scheidemanns.17”

Despite all the subsequent changes, this assessment retains its essential purchase. Labour is still a “bourgeois workers’ party”. However, with Corbyn’s election as leader, things have become more complex. Labour has become a chimera. Instead of a twofold contradiction, we have a threefold one. The left dominates both the top and the bottom of the party.

That gives us the possibility of attacking the rightwing domination of the middle – the councillors, the apparatus, the PLP – from below and above. No wonder the more astute minds of the bourgeois commentariat can be found expressing deep concern about what will happen to their neoliberal consensus.

Notes

1. The Observer August 30 2015.
2. A Blais (Ed) To keep or to change first past the post? Oxford 2008, p66.
3. From a 2.5% historic low point in 1951, the Liberal Party saw a revival in the 1970s, which saw it win 19.3% of the popular vote in the February 1974 general election.
4. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-34305994.
5. D Pryer Trade union political funds and levy House of Commons briefing paper No00593, August 8 2013, p8.
6. The Guardian February 24 2015.
7. The Guardian July 2 2015.
8. www.grassrootslabour.net/index.php?option=
com_content&view=article&id=200:how-labours-trigger-works&catid=43:forum&
Itemid=60.
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaries_of_Members_of_the_United_Kingdom_Parliament.
10. International Business Times September 15 2015.
11. Eg, Owen Jones, The Guardian September 16 2015 and Roy Greenslade, The Guardian September 14 2015. Chris Boffy, online special advisor to the last Labour government, has also been bitterly complaining about Corbyn’s supposed lack of a media strategy – see The Drum September 15 2015.
12. At the 1899 TUC, JH Holmes, a delegate of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, moved this resolution:
“That this congress, having regard to its decisions in former years, and with a view to securing a better representation of the interests of labour in the House of Commons, hereby instructs the parliamentary committee to invite the cooperation of all cooperative, socialistic trade unions and other working class organisations to jointly cooperate on lines mutually agreed upon, in convening a special congress of representatives from such of the above named organisations as may be willing to take part, to devise ways and means for securing the return of an increased number of labour members to the next parliament” (www.unionhistory.info/timeline/1880_14_Narr_Display.php?Where=NarTitle+contains+%27
The+Labour+Party%27+AND+DesPurpose+contains+%27WebDisplay%27).
13. The Independent September 12 2015.
14. Socialist Worker September 8 2015.
15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Labour_Party#The_ILP_and_Labour_Party_government_.281922.E2.80.9331.29.
16. www.labour.org.uk/pages/affiliated-organisations.
17. VI Lenin CW Vol 31 Moscow 1977, pp257-58.

Alternative clause four proposed by LPM

Objectives

1. Labour is the federal party of the working class. We strive to bring all trade unions, cooperatives, socialist societies and leftwing groups and parties under our banner. We believe that unity brings strength.

2. Labour is committed to replacing the rule of capital with the rule of the working class. Socialism introduces a democratically planned economy, ends the ecologically ruinous cycle of production for the sake of production and moves towards a stateless, classless, moneyless society that embodies the principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”. Alone such benign conditions create the possibility of every individual fully realising their innate potentialities.

3. Towards that end Labour commits itself to achieving a democratic republic. The standing army, the monarchy, the House of Lords and the state sponsorship of the Church of England must go. We support a single chamber parliament, proportional representation and annual elections.

4. Labour seeks to win the active backing of the majority of people and forming a government on this basis.

5. We shall work with others, in particular in the European Union, in pursuit of the aim of replacing capitalism with working class rule and socialism.

Inside the Labour Party, Labour structures and programme

Recruit, win new affiliates, transform

Gallery

Jeremy Corbyn’s election presents the left with a historic opportunity. James Marshall of Labour Party Marxists outlines a programme of immediate action and long-term strategic goals

First the background. Once Jeremy Corbyn got past the gatekeepers of the Parliamentary Labour Party and made it onto the ballot he was always going to be the winner. There are millions out there who are angry, who, no matter how vaguely, want a better world, who feel alienated from and unrepresented by the pro-austerity Labour right. They found their weapon in the person of comrade Corbyn.

Already, even in the early stages, pollsters had him way out in front: eg, on 53%. And, of course, on the very last day, on August 12, when people had their final opportunity to sign up and vote in the leadership contest, the Labour Party’s computer system crashed. It was obvious why. Corbyn supporters were desperately trying to register. So the 59.5% vote came as no surprise to me. Frankly, I was expecting something a little over 60%.

Anyway, there can be no doubting the scale of Corbyn’s victory. He ended miles ahead of Andy Burnham (19%), Yvette Cooper (17%) and Liz Kendall (4.5%). And the fact that Tom Watson, the Brownite deputy leader, only won after three rounds means comrade Corbyn possesses immense authority. So fuck Watson’s doubts over Trident, etc. Our Jeremy gained a crushing first-round mandate in all three categories: registered supporters: 83.8%; affiliates: 57.6%; individual members: 49.6%. To rebel against Corbyn is to rebel against these figures.

Despite that, at the well publicised prompting of Peter Mandelson, Charles Clarke, David Blunkett and above all Tony Blair, the hard right have already launched what will be a protracted, bitter, no-holds-barred struggle to overturn the September 12 result. Blair’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ opinion piece in The Observer had nothing to do with the former prime minister trying to swing votes in the closing two weeks of the leadership campaign.1 Corbyn had already won. No, its purpose was perfectly clear. Rally the Blairites and their corporate, state and international allies … and declare war.

As I have argued, under present circumstances it is unlikely that the hard right will go for a breakaway. Another Social Democratic Party is an outside possibility. But, unlike the early 1980s, the centre ground is not on the up. At the last general election the Lib Dems were decimated. They remain marginalised and loathed. Hence the Blairites have nowhere to go except the government benches. Being dedicated careerists, they are hardly attracted to that – their constituents would turf them out at the first opportunity. Instead of the glories of high office it would be a suicide jump. Knowing that probable outcome, most of the right will therefore stay put and fight hard … until we send them packing.

The announcement by leading members of the right that they would refuse seats in comrade Corbyn’s shadow cabinet needs to be understood as an act of civil war. Yvette Cooper, Chuka Umunna, Tristram Hunt, Emma Reynolds, Liz Kendall, Shabana Mahmood, Mary Creagh, Jamie Reid, Chris Leslie and Rachael Reeves have in effect constituted themselves a shadow, shadow cabinet. Obviously this parliamentary gang of 10 do not share the same values as the mass of Labour members.

In that context, Corbyn is absolutely right to maintain the power to hire and fire. After all, he faces not just 10 rebels, No, it is more like 100. We Marxists want the abolition of the Bonapartist position of leader.

But these are extraordinary times and require extraordinary measures. The idea of having the PLP electing the shadow cabinet was being touted by the right. But thankfully Corbyn thought twice about his early pronouncements on this subject. Instead he wisely opted to keep the dictatorial approach long favoured by past Labour leaders.

Appointing the shadow chancellor was a litmus test. Many timid leftists as well as members of Corbyn’s inner circle were reportedly urging him to opt for someone from the centre. Instead he chose John McDonnell. Excellent. So there is in effect a Corbyn-McDonnell leadership.

Offering shadow cabinet seats to the likes of Andy Burnham, Hilary Benn, Angela Eagle, Lucy Powell, Lord Falconer, Rosie Winterton and Chris Bryant was always going to happen. Corbyn is a natural conciliator. And the fact of the matter is that there are simply not enough leftwingers in parliament. Unless, that is, Corbyn went for a pocket-sized shadow cabinet and appointed shadow ministers from outside parliament. That is what we LPMers advocated.

Nevertheless, equipped with his left-centre-right coalition, Corbyn can claim the moral high ground. He is reaching out to all sections of the party. Meanwhile, in terms of internal perceptions, it is the hard right that will be blamed for starting the civil war. That will play badly with traditional Labour loyalists. They do not take kindly to anyone damaging Labour’s chances at the polls. After all, for most Labour councillors and would-be Labour councillors, most Labour MPs and would-be Labour MPs, the be-all and end-all of politics is getting into office, no matter what the programme.

However, the hard right will have the full backing of the capitalist media, the City of London, the military-industrial complex and the secret state. And Corbyn’s much publicised admiration for Karl Marx, his campaigning against US-led imperialist wars, his opposition to Nato, Trident and nuclear weapons, his commitment to increase the tax take from transnational corporations, the banks and the mega-rich, his republicanism – even his refusal to sing the royal anthem at St Paul’s – mark him out as completely unacceptable for Labour’s hard right and the business and state establishment.

Of course, the distinct danger is that the Corbyn-McDonnell leadership will have their agenda set for them by the need to maintain PLP unity. Put another way, in what is a coalition cabinet, it will be the right that sets the limits and therefore determines the political programme. Why? Because they are quite prepared to walk. That is what Burnham has indicated over Nato and nuclear weapons. The decision by Corbyn to kneel before Elizabeth Windsor and accept a place on her privy council is therefore more than a symbolic gesture.

Watering down, abandoning, putting principles onto the backburner in an attempt to placate the right, if it continues to happen, will prove fatal. Such a course will demobilise, demoralise and drain away Corbyn’s mass base in and out of the party.

Hence the Corbyn-McDonnell leadership faces both an enemy within the PLP and an enemy within the shadow cabinet. That is why Marxists will, at the first politically appropriate moment, be agitating for the removal of rightwingers from the shadow cabinet. An obvious target being Tony Blair’s old flatmate and co-thinker, Lord Charlie Falconer. He has already threatened to quit over the EU referendum.

Immediate

The left in the Labour Party faces three immediate tasks.

Firstly, there must be a concerted drive to win registered supporters to become full individual members. There are now well over 100,000 of them. If they want to bolster Corbyn’s position, if they want to ensure that he stays true to his principles, then the best thing that they can do is to get themselves a vote when it comes to the national executive committee, the selection and reselection of MPs, MEPs, councillors, etc. Card-carrying members can also attend ward and constituency meetings and vote for officer positions.

Secondly, within the affiliated trade unions we must fight to win many, many more to enrol as Labour supporters. Just over 70,000 affiliated supporters voted in the leadership election. A tiny portion of what it could be. There are 4,414,929 who pay the political levy.2 Given that they can sign up to the Labour Party at no more than a click of a button, we really ought to have a million affiliate supporters as a minimum target.

Thirdly, the constituency, branch (ward) and other such basic units must be revived and galvanised. Everything should be done to encourage new members and returnees to attend meetings and elect officers who oppose austerity and want to support the Corbyn-McDonnell leadership. Labour’s constituency and branches can be made into local centres of organisation, education and action. As such they would be well placed to conduct a mass campaign to get local people onto the electoral register. The election commission estimates that nationally “approximately 7.5 million individuals are not registered”.3

Reorganise

As the hard right begins its civil war, the left must respond with a combination of disciplinary threats, constitutional changes and reselection measures. Those in the pay of big business, those sabotaging Labour election campaigns, those who vote with the Tories on austerity, war or migration, must be hauled up before the NEC. If MPs refuse to abide by party discipline, the whip must be withdrawn. We should democratically select and promote trustworthy replacement candidates. If that results in a smaller PLP in the short term, that is a price well worth paying.

Obviously, the party must be reorganised from top to bottom. A special conference – ie, in spring 2016 – should be called by the NEC with a view to radically overhauling the constitution and rules, and undertaking an across-the-board political reorientation. We need a new clause four, we need a sovereign conference, we need to be able to easily reselect MPs, MEPs and councillors. We also need to sweep away the undemocratic rules and structures put in place by Blair. The joint policy committee, the national policy forums – the whole horrible rigmarole should go.

Clearly it is going to take time to transform the PLP and subordinate it to the wishes of the membership. But with a combination of threat, reselection and rule change it can be done.

A particularly potent weapon here is the demand that all our elected representatives should take only the average wage of a skilled worker. A principle upheld by the Paris Commune and the Bolshevik revolution. From memory even the Italian Communist Party under Enrico Berlinguer applied the partymax in the 1970s. With the PCI’s huge parliamentary fraction this proved to be a vital source of funds.

Our MPs are now on a basic £67,060 annual salary. On top of that, they get around £12,000 in expenses and allowances, putting them on just under £80,000 (yet at present they are only obliged to pay the £82 parliamentarians’ subscription rate). And as leader of the official opposition Jeremy Corbyn has just got himself a £6,000 pay rise.4

We in the LPM say, let them keep the average skilled workers’ wage: say £40,000 (plus legitimate expenses). They should, however, hand the balance over to the party. That would give a considerable boost to our finances. Even if we leave out MEPs from the calculation, it would amount to a roughly £900,000 extra. Anyway, whatever our finances, there is a basic principle. Our representatives ought to live like ordinary workers, not pampered members of the upper middle class. So, yes, let us impose the partymax.

In the three days following Corbyn’s election 30,000 joined the party.5 Many more should be expected. But we need to reach out to all those who are disgusted by corrupt career politicians, all those who aspire for a better world, all those who have an objective interest in ending capitalism. To do that we need to establish our own mass media.

Much to the chagrin of the fourth estate, comrade Corbyn has shown his “contempt” for the capitalist press, radio and TV.6 Relying on them worked splendidly for Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell. But our newly elected leader will get nothing but mockery, hatchet-jobs and implacable opposition. While there will doubtless be an attempt to court The Guardian and the Mirror group, his turning to the social media is understandable and very much to be welcomed. However, tweeting, texting and blogging has severe limits. They are brilliant at transmitting short, sharp and clear messages. But, when it comes to complex ideas, debating principles and charting political strategies, they are worse than useless. To set the agenda we need our own full-range media.
Once we had the Daily Herald. Now we have nothing. Well, apart from the deadly dull Morning Star (which in reality is still in the hands of unreconstructed Stalinites).

We should aim for an opinion- forming daily paper of the labour movement and seek out trade union, cooperative, crowd and other such sources of funding. However, we need to be brave: iconoclastic viewpoints, difficult issues, arguments, must be included as a matter of course. We should also consider internet-based TV and radio stations. With the riches of dedication, talent and ideas that exist on the left, we can surely better the BBC, Al Jazeera and Sky.

Branding people as ‘infiltrators’ because, mainly out of frustration, they supported the Greens, Left Unity or the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition in the last general election does nothing to advance the socialist cause in the Labour Party. Such a jaundiced response smacks of the cold-war bans and proscriptions. We should be proud of being a federal party. Therefore securing new affiliates ought to be at the top of our agenda. Indeed we should actively seek to bring every leftwing group or party under our banner. Labour needs to become the common home of every socialist organisation, cooperative and trade union – the agreed goal of our founders.7 In other words, a permanent united front.

Yet sadly, so far, apart from the CPGB, there has been a distinct lack of imagination from those outside Labour. Instead of a banging on the door, there is a cowardly disengagement. A runaway approach designed to preserve sectarian interests and reputations.

Showing his profundity, his prostration before Scottish nationalism, his unconscious English nationalism, the media darling, Tariq Ali, assesses Corbyn’s victory as “England coming to life again”.8 In that same blinkered spirit, he privileges protest politics, as against parliamentary politics. Of course, comrade Ali is one of those freelance socialists: a typical dilettante. The idea of actively engaging in our civil war does not seem to occur to him nowadays.

The same goes for Charlie Kimber, national secretary of the Socialist Worker Party. Our Charlie boasts that he, and his much reduced band of followers, did not take up the opportunity of registering as Labour Party supporters. Why do they impotently stand aloof? After all, a Corbyn vote cost a mere £3 … and for levy-paying members of affiliated trade unions it was gratis. So why did the SWP refrain from giving Corbyn voting support? Comrade Kimber pathetically explains.

The right is set to trigger a firestorm. The PLP is dominated by the right. Corbyn has the active support of no more than 20 MPs. Tom Watson is a Brownite. Lord Mandelson is advising a protracted war. The trade unions are dominated by a self-serving bureaucracy. There will be internal struggles and attempts to introduce constitutional and programmatic changes.9

What ought to be a challenge to join the fight becomes an excuse to opt out.

Having been torn by splits and divisions in the 1970s and then again in the 2010s, the SWP apparatus wants nothing to do with anything that carries even the whiff of factional strife. So, as with Tariq Ali, there is the call for marches, protests and strikes … as counterposed to the Labour Party, PLP battles and taking sides in a concentrated form of the class war. In other words, the SWP stays true to its modern-day version of Bakuninism.

Then we have the Socialist Party in England and Wales. Having wrongly classified, dismissed, the Labour Party as an out-and-out capitalist party since the mid-1990s, it is busily rowing … backwards. The old Militant marker has been cosmetically introduced onto the masthead of The Socialist. Despite that, the politics remain idiotic. Peter Taaffe expects Corbyn to come to him and his floundering Labour Party mark II project otherwise known as Tusc. Showing the same sort of myopic vision as comrade Kimber, SPEW informs us that Tusc will stand against Labour candidates in the next round of council elections. A blundering stance supported by Nick Wrack’s Independent Socialist Network (along with SPEW and the SWP a Tusc
affiliate).

If Tusc stood on something that resembled a Marxist programme, that would be tactically inadvisable under present circumstances. But what passes for Tusc’s programme is barely distinguishable from Corbynism. Despite that, whereas the Corbyn Labour Party will get mass votes, even with many questionable candidates, Tusc will hardly register. Its votes are uniformly homeopathic.

Left Unity, seems to me to be essentially no different. And, as with SPEW and the SWP, LU members are peeling away to join the Labour Party as individuals. Obviously this project, as with all halfway house attempts to recreate the Labour Party, is doomed. Unless it votes for the motions of its Communist Platform, Left Unity has no future.

We Labour Party Marxists unapologetically take our programmatic lead from the CPGB. Having been demanding the right to affiliate since 1920, we demand that the CPGB ought to have the same rights as the Cooperative Party, the Fabians, Christians on the Left, the Jewish Labour Movement, Scientists for Labour, etc.10 However, we also extend that demand to include the SWP, SPEW, LU and all other such organisations.

Then there are the trade unions. Those who have disaffiliated or been expelled must be brought back into the fold. In other words the Fire Brigades Union and the Rail, Maritime and Transport union. They actively supported the Corbyn campaign … from the outside. So, comrades, now do the same, much more effectively, from the inside.

The same goes for unions which have never had an organised relationship with us. Regrettably, Mark Serwotka, Public and Commercial Services union general secretary, was one of those turned away in the Harriet Harman-organised purge. But, instead of impotently complaining about it on Twitter, he should turn the tables on the Blairite apparatus by bringing in his entire membership. Mark, fight to get PCS to affiliate.

I heard him interviewed on BBC Radio 4 on this. He enthusiastically supported Corbyn’s September 15 speech at the TUC. However, he excused himself from getting the PCS affiliated. Apparently it has been illegal for civil servant trade unions to affiliate to the Labour Party since 1927.

When we moved a motion to the effect that all trade union should affiliate to the Labour Party at the last AGM of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, we met with exactly that sort of legalistic objections. However, as NEC member Christine Shawcroft, who was sitting next to me, said, “What does that matter?” Here comrade Shawcroft, a close ally of Corbyn, shows the exact right spirit of defiance. Comrade Serwotka and other leaders of non-affiliated trade unions should take her lead. Laws can be defied, laws can be changed. They key, however, it is win the PCS’s membership to want to affiliate. It would be great if the 2016 annual conference was addressed by Jeremy Corbyn and had a raft of branch motions calling for the union to affiliate to the Labour Party.

Reclaiming

Real Marxists, not fake Marxists, have never talked of reclaiming Labour. It has never been ours in the sense of being a “political weapon for the workers’ movement”. No, despite the electoral base and trade union affiliations, our party has been dominated throughout its entire history by career politicians and trade union bureaucrats. A distinct social stratum, which in the last analysis serves not the interests of the working class, but the continuation of capitalist exploitation.

Speaking in the context of the need for the newly formed Communist Party of Great Britain to affiliate to the Labour Party, Lenin said this:

“[W]hether or not a party is really a political party of the workers does not depend solely upon a membership of workers, but also upon the men that lead it, and the content of its actions and its political tactics. Only this latter determines whether we really have before us a political party of the proletariat.

“Regarded from this, the only correct, point of view, the Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers with the aid of the British Noskes and Scheidemanns.”11

Despite all the subsequent changes, this assessment retains its essential purchase. Labour is still a “bourgeois workers’ party”. However, with Corbyn’s election as leader, things have become more complex. Labour has become a chimera. Instead of a twofold contradiction, we have a threefold contradiction. The left dominates both the top and bottom of the party.

That gives us the possibility of attacking the rightwing domination of the middle – the councillors, the apparatus, the PLP – from below and above. No wonder the more astute minds of the bourgeois commentariat can be found expressing deep concern about what will happen to their neoliberal consensus.

Notes

1. The Observer August 30 2015.
2. D Pryer Trade union political funds and levy House of Commons briefing paper No00593, August 8 2013, p8.
3. The Guardian February 24 2015.
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaries_of_ Members_of_the_United_Kingdom_Parliament.
5. International Business Times September 15 2015.
6. See Roy Greenslade in The Guardian September 14 2015. Chris Boffy, online special advisor to the last Labour government, has also been bitterly complaining about Corbyn’s supposed lack of a media strategy – see The Drum September 15 2015.
7.At the 1899 TUC, JH Holmes, a delegate of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants moved this resolution:
“That this congress, having regard to its decisions in former years, and with a view to securing a better representation of the
interests of labour in the House of Commons, hereby instructs the parliamentary committee to invite the cooperation of all cooperative, socialistic, trade unions, and other working class organisations to jointly cooperate on lines mutually agreed upon, in convening a special congress of representatives from such of the above-named organisations as may be willing
to take part to devise ways and means for securing the return of an increased number of labour members to the next parliament.” (www. unionhistory.info/timeline/1880_14_Narr_Display. hp?Where=NarTitle+contains+%27The+Labour+ Party%27+AND+DesPurpose+contains +%27WebDisplay%27).
8. The Independent September 12 2015.
9. Socialist Worker September 8 2015.
10. www.labour.org.uk/pages/affiliated- organisations.
11. VI Lenin CW Vol 31 Moscow 1977, pp257-58.

The left

Democratic organisation needed

Gallery 1 Comment

Stan Keable attended the January 17 meeting of Unison activists 

Unison members must be wondering what happened to the superior strength, the greater protection against government attacks, that would result from the merging of three public-sector trade unions into one mega-union in 1993, when the National and Local Government Officers Association, the National Union of Public Employees and the Confederation of Health Service Employees joined forces. With almost 1.3 million members, Unison is second in size to Unite, whose 1.4 million members are mainly in the private sector, and twice as big as the next largest union, the GMB.
Today, however, faced with continual public-service cuts, job losses and increasing workloads, instead of feeling the strength of the union around them, Unison branches are, it seems, left to fight alone.
A privileged, unelected, overpaid and unaccountable bureaucratic caste enjoys the comforts of the union’s plush Euston Road offices, imploring lay activists to ‘recruit, recruit, recruit’, while giving little or no help to the embattled branches on the frontline of austerity. Speaker after speaker at the unexpectedly packed Reclaim the Union meeting (around 120 attended) in the Mechanics’ Institute in Manchester confirmed what it means to be a Unison branch secretary today: “loads of stress, no money and no support”, as Kirklees local government branch secretary and would-be left general secretary candidate Paul Holmes put it. Comrades gasped in shock and disbelief when Paul told us that incumbent general secretary Dave Prentis had turned down invitations to appear on the BBC’s Question time panel 17 times. We expect our gen sec to seize every opportunity to fight our corner.
The purpose of the meeting was to coordinate left nominations for Unison’s national executive council elections, which branches must submit before the February 20 deadline. In the first half of the meeting, left slates were agreed, or were in preparation, for each region and each service group (local government, health, education, water, police and justice, etc) as well as for ‘self-organised groups’ (unfortunately referred to as SOGs) of black and young members.
The process of adopting left slates of NEC candidates was carried on harmoniously, with chairperson Max Watson, convenor of the NEC left caucus, telling people to “get together in the break and sort it out”, wherever there were too many, or too few, candidates for the available seats. However, the “open discussion on the nature of the campaign: slogans, demands, etc” was totally unfit for purpose. Speakers were allowed two minutes each, so it was impossible to develop, or challenge, an idea adequately. No motions were proposed, so the campaign has no concrete policies. The level of unity achieved was simply the elimination of competition between left candidates, but with no explicit agreement at all about exactly what the campaign stands for.
Of course, everyone was against the coalition government, public- service cuts and austerity, and wanted a fighting, democratic union, instead of one suffocating under the “dead hand of the bureaucracy”, as one comrade put it. But democratising the union so that its officials are controlled by the membership, and winning rank-and- file support for a positive socialist programme, will require much more than an ephemeral election campaign to replace one set of bureaucrats by another. It will require the building of a membership organisation, where the politics and tactics of the campaign can be argued out openly and determined democratically, by voting – not left in the hands of the NEC left caucus to resolve elsewhere, after the meeting. The opportunity was missed to launch such an organisation.
Incidentally, I am still a member of Unison United Left, but it is evidently now defunct, and no-one even mentioned it. It was never able to achieve real unity of the left in Unison, after the Socialist Party in England and Wales withdrew in 2004 rather than subordinate itself to the larger Socialist Workers Party. Despite this UUL struggled on, at the time the SWP was engaged in its disastrous Respect popular front. However, it seems to have finally come to an end in 2013, when Marshajane Thompson and other feminists pulled out over the SWP’s handling of the rape allegations against ‘comrade Delta’.
They attempted to relaunch the Campaign for a Fighting and Democratic Unison1 left network based on the divisive ‘safe spaces’ principle: “What we won’t do is seek, jointly, to be the ‘leadership’ of the ‘left’ or ‘rank and file’ alongside those who can tolerate the treatment of women by the leadership of the SWP. We will not organise alongside nor devote any energy to promoting those who support the SWP Central Committee.” These are Marshajane Thompson’s words.2 Excluding what is still the largest group on the British left is not the best way to build left unity, which requires toleration of the views of others, alongside unity in action. Needless to say, no-one mentioned the CFDU either. It was stillborn – the most recent post on its website being October 28 2013.
Gen sec candidate
The second half of the meeting consisted of hustings for the single left general secretary candidate which everyone desired. Unlike the NEC elections, this is not urgent, as no timetable has been set, and the contest may take place late in 2015. Unfortunately, this was not explained at the start. Had the lack of urgency been made clear, and had an alternative timetable and procedure been proposed for adoption of a candidate, the meeting might have opted to postpone a decision. As it was, the meeting voted (68 for, 22 against, 24 abstentions) in favour of adopting a candidate by majority vote of those present. This would seem to indicate (roughly, of course) the presence of a solid group of 24 SPEW members or disciplined supporters, a non-aligned group of 22 or more who preferred delay, but were not acting under SPEW discipline, and a substantially larger bloc of SWPers, perhaps Labour left supporters and others who had come expecting a vote.
The three runners on offer were given 10 minutes each to present their case, followed by two-minute “questions” (or ‘contributions’) from the rest of us, and two minutes each for the prospective candidates to reply at the end. A frustrating experience, and the wrong way to approach the matter. Surely, agreed policies for the Reclaim the Union campaign should be adopted first, and then a candidate chosen who would promote those policies.
The prospective candidates were: Paul Holmes, a Labour Party member for 35 years (but “very angry”), who stood in 2010 as the candidate of the so-called ‘United Left’, coming third with 13% of the vote in a 14% turnout3; established leftwing front runner Roger Bannister of SPEW, who came second last time with a respectable 20%; and the SWP’s Karen Reissman, a first-timer.
In the 2005 and 2010 contests, the left had failed to agree on a single candidate – as may yet be the case this time – and Roger Bannister, although nominated by fewer branches than his ‘United Left’ rivals, had gained by far the biggest vote. He bluntly announced that he would stand again this time, no matter what this meeting decided, unless he was convinced (in other words, unless SPEW was convinced) that another left candidate stood a better chance of winning. SPEW’s Glen Kelly backed this up by announcing that their supporters would not participate in a selection vote, if one was taken at this time.
Needless to say, this did not go down well, and does not augur well for the prospects of uniting the left in Unison, which can only be based on voluntary, democratic unity – the acceptance of decisions by majority voting, not the “consensus” which SPEW speakers claimed to be seeking. One speaker asked if we really wanted a president like comrade Bannister, who puts two fingers up to democracy. Isn’t that what we are trying to overcome? Another speculated that SPEW had done a count, estimated that their candidate did not have majority support in the room, and then cynically announced they would not accept a vote.
Decision-making by “consensus” necessarily means behind-the- scenes negotiations (not transparent democracy) – in this case between the little ‘revolutionary’ bureaucrats of the two groups which currently dominate the Unison left: SPEW and the Socialist Workers Party. It excludes, disenfranchises, depoliticises and demobilises socialists who do not belong to these two groups and the mass of rank-and-file Unison members that must be organised into the Reclaim the Union campaign if it is to be effective – not as voting fodder to elect an alternative bureaucracy, but as active members with equal rights to determine the politics of the campaign. And to develop an ongoing struggle beyond a single round of elections. Promoting ‘revolutionary’ bureaucrats is an unconvincing and ineffective way of challenging the bigger Labourite bureaucrats in control of the union.
In his defence, comrade Bannister pointed out that SPEW had made it quite clear, throughout the preparatory discussions of the NEC left caucus which convened the meeting, that it did not want, and would not accept, a vote to select a single left candidate at this time. Such a vote had not been put on the agenda of the meeting, the actual wording being: “General secretary left candidate debate”. This agenda item, of course, contributed heavily to attracting the unexpectedly high attendance, and many comrades said that they had come expecting a vote to select a single left candidate.
But, whereas SPEW had instructed its members not to participate in any such vote, the SWP’s leaflet, A united left to meet the challenge, primed its members to force the issue – in the full knowledge that SPEW would not accept the result if it lost the vote: “We have to hold a measured debate today with the aim of reaching agreement on a united candidate.”
At the end of the hustings session, the votes were as follows: Roger Bannister – nil; Karen Reissman – 61; Paul Holmes – 15; abstentions – 41. So despite the total abstention by SPEW supporters, who will evidently not accept the result anyway, the SWP’s candidate gained an absolute majority of those present. Arguments made in her favour included that she is a woman like 84% of Unison members, and there has not yet been a woman gen sec; that she is a leading health service activist, and the fight to defend the NHS will be of key significance both in Unison’s general secretary election and in the general election.
Against comrade Reissman were those claiming that the SWP is toxic. In fact, not only is she an SWP activist, but, in the words of Labour left activist Jon Rogers, she “chaired the session of a conference of her discredited party, at which a victim of rape was denied a platform”.4
Cryptically, Paul Holmes said that he expects to see four candidates for the position of Unison general secretary, as there has been a “tear” in the union bureaucracy. So he is expecting the right wing to be divided this time, but he is also expecting the left to remain divided, fielding two rival candidates, as in the previous two elections. However, the election has not yet been called, so there is still time to put things right, as comrade Rogers suggests: “Neither Roger nor Paul indicated that they felt bound by this avoidable foolishness – and the ‘left’ (such as we are) will need to meet again at national delegate conference to try to take the decision which we should not have pretended to take today”.5
Notes
1. https://fightingdemocraticunison.wordpress. com. The original CFDU was one of the groups that came together to form the United Left in 2001.
2. www.workersliberty.org/story/2013/10/25/ workers-liberty-statement-split-unison-united-left: see comments after the article.
3. Incumbent ‘moderate’ gen sec Dave Prentis gained 67% in 2010, which means that less than 10% of those eligible to vote backed him.
4. http://jonrogers1963.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/ one-step-forward-one-step-back.html.
5. Ibid.

Witch-hunts and expulsions

Threat of witch-hunt averted

Gallery

Stan Keable reports on the Labour Representation Committee’s November 8 annual conference (this article first appeared in Weekly Worker No1034, November 13 2014)

Thankfully, the “thoroughly bureaucratic, intolerant and dangerous” proposal1 put before the Labour Representation Committee’s annual conference was pulled at the last minute.

Michael Calderbank, on behalf of the LRC’s national committee, agreed to remit the ‘LRC culture’ section of the NC statement that had been presented to the conference in Friends House. This, amongst other things, threatened to “suspend or terminate” the membership of individuals, affiliates or local LRC groups that are guilty of “wilfully misrepresenting the views of the LRC, its elected national bodies or officers, whether to other LRC members or the wider public, by any means” (item (c)).

So neither the ‘LRC culture’ section, proposed by the NC, nor the Labour Party Marxists amendment to it was voted on. This amendment would have deleted all but the first two paragraphs, and listed examples of “bureaucratic tendencies” which “we must guard against” in order to defend freedom of discussion and the “open, inclusive and mutually supportive atmosphere” which the NC statement claimed to defend.

Moving the section, comrade Calderbank had reminded us that the first priority is “getting the politics right” and stated, quite rightly, that “the culture of the organisation is important too”. Debate is essential “within a shared viewpoint”. I agree. Interestingly, he explicitly upheld the right to heckle, praising comrade Walter Wolfgang of Labour CND – who was present – and had been manhandled out of the 2005 Labour Party conference for heckling Jack Straw over the invasion of Iraq. As James Marshall wrote recently, heckling is a “time-honoured way for the weak to challenge the power of the strong”.2

Accepting the right to heckle was not the view of all, however. Communication Workers Union activist Gary Heather, who had been chair of Greater London LRC for a number of years, “reluctantly” supported the NC’s proposal, and was “disappointed that it was necessary”. He could not “see why heckling is necessary”. Likewise Susan Press, who had “chaired the worst meetings of the national committee, where people were shouting each other down” (I believe this must refer to the notorious April 2012 NC row, which broke up in disarray, and was never minuted). She said: “Heckling is not acceptable in any shape or form. It is the last refuge of those who have no rational argument.”

I would ask comrades Press and Heather to reconsider this one-sided, negative, fixed view of heckling, evidently born of bad experiences. A heckle can be a quick way of contributing to a debate without wasting time, whether in support of a speaker or critical of what they are saying, and is not always and inevitably disruptive of the discussion.

Of course, heckling might sometimes be unacceptably disruptive – the chair should intervene when appropriate – or it might be off-putting for a particular speaker, who is certainly entitled to say ‘No heckling, please’. But a blanket ban would be overkill, and accusing those who do not want such a ban of being in favour of disruption, as some do, is inaccurate and unfair.

Bad behaviour

Explaining why the NC had found it necessary to make its proposals, comrade Calderbank surprised me by referring to “bad behaviour” in the Workers Revolutionary Party and Socialist Workers Party. Both of them, he said, had “covered up bad behaviour” – something the LCR must not do, if it is to be a ‘non-sectarian’ organisation, free from the deficiencies of the ‘sectarian’ left. The reference to the SWP is, of course, its cover-up and mishandling of the ‘comrade Delta’ rape accusation.

Comrade Calderbank here spectacularly misses the point of the SWP’s deficiencies in respect of the Delta case, in my view. The SWP did not have a policy of tolerating rape – or sexual abuse or discrimination: quite the opposite. It did, however – and still does – run an extremely bureaucratic regime – by which I mean a regime which restricts debate to such an extent that anyone expressing a dissident viewpoint soon finds themselves subject to a silencing order or even summary expulsion. It is precisely the outlawing of free speech, and the forbidding of public criticism, that creates fertile conditions for cover-ups by a ruling or dominating bureaucracy. It is precisely the open reporting of NC meetings, and Labour Briefing editorial board meetings, which can help to guard against bureaucratic cover-ups and keep our leadership accountable.

“A lot of nonsense” has been written about the NC proposals, said comrade Calderbank, and assured us that the NC was not “preparing for a witch-hunt” – but, there was “no place in the LRC for sectarian activity”. Not very reassuring. Now “sectarian activity” must certainly be a very bad thing, not to be tolerated, but in case anyone wondered what he meant by “sectarian”, he went on: “Telling lies to discredit the LRC or to build their sect” might help to sell “sectarian gossip sheets …”

Having been explicitly accused of “misrepresentation” in “a deliberate attempt to undermine the LRC” in my report of the October NC meeting3 (an irresponsible accusation not backed up by any explicit quote, nor by ‘putting the record straight’ with a public reply), I cannot avoid the conclusion that he was talking about my article, and the “sectarian gossip sheet” was a reference to the Weekly Worker. Item (c), quoted above, in the NC’s “examples” of behaviour which the LRC will “refuse to tolerate”, fits perfectly with comrade Calderbank’s hopelessly, if unintentionally, sectarian phrases.

Nevertheless, in moving Labour Party Marxists’ amendment, I accepted comrade Calderbank’s, and the NC’s, good intentions. But, I said, “the best of intentions can lead to the worst of outcomes”. They do not intend a witch-hunt, and they do not want to be expelling people – they just want comrades to toe the line and obey their interpretation of acceptable behaviour. Sorry, comrades, no thanks. The inclusive and tolerant atmosphere we all yearn for must, above all, be tolerant of the free expression of minority views (within a shared socialist viewpoint, of course). It goes without saying that violence or the threat of violence should not be tolerated, but the NC proposals are “superfluous” in this regard, I said.

In the discussion, comrade John Moloney also asserted that the proposals were superfluous. Points (c), (d) and (e) (“wilfully misrepresenting” etc, “disruptive behaviour” etc, and “bringing the LRC into disrepute”) were “totally subjective”, while “expulsion for violence or threats of violence don’t need new rules”, he argued. And points (a) and (b) (“physical, sexual or verbal abuse, attacks or harassment”; and “discrimination or abuse on the grounds of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, or religion/belief”), he said, “we do anyway”.

Graham Durham said the NC proposals were “politically motivated”. “The class wants to fight”, he said. “This is a motion to expel those who want to fight.” And the alternative NC slate led by comrade Durham, in their flyer, said: “We support the right of socialist political groups and individuals to have freedom of discussion in the LRC and are opposed to any attempts to introduce codes to allow exclusion or expulsion.”

John McDonnell MP, unusually, intervened in the debate to correct an assertion by comrade Durham that the origin of the NC’s concerns about LRC culture had been an incident in a meeting in a House of Commons committee room, where he had been accused of supporting the “fascist” government in Kiev – but, as he had explained at the time, he had been misquoted, and had never said that he supported the Kiev government (leaving aside whether it is fascist). The misrepresentation had been resolved immediately, in that meeting. In fact, explained comrade McDonnell, the ‘LRC culture’ proposals arose in response to bad behaviour at NC meetings at which he had been absent, due to ill-health.

Any instance of “disruptive”, “threatening” or “bullying” behaviour should, likewise, be dealt with at the time, and not stored up as a perpetual complaint against those you disagree with. The “worst” behaviour was undoubtedly at the April 2012 NC meeting (which I did not attend), and I do not envy Susan Press the extremely difficult task of trying to keep order as chair of that meeting. I understand it broke up in disarray and, as minutes of the meeting were never distributed, I have never seen a proper report of what happened. So we are left with mutual recriminations and vague, unsubstantiated allegations and generalisations. After two and a half years, it is futile to attempt retrospective disciplinary action by inventing an inappropriate catch-all code – which is what the NC’s proposals amounted to.

In the conference itself – despite sharp political “attacks”, difficult moments of heckling, individuals occasionally speaking over or ignoring the chair, sometimes continuing speaking after being told to stop – all these instances were handled with reasonable discretion at the time. The organisation showed itself tolerant of debate, and thankfully did not give way to the few philistine voices wailing against “wasting time” on debate, or complaining about “sectarian divisions” – read ‘political debate’.

Left ‘pressure’

Last year I reported a one-third drop in attendance at the annual conference – it was down to a little over 100 in 2013. This year, however, I am pleased to report no reduction in attendance, with approximately 110 comrades packed into the small hall at London’s Friends House. Perhaps we have passed a low point, and can now start to grow. In any case, tolerance of minority views, debate and majority decisions is the way forward. United action requires that minorities be heard – or else why should they join, and why should they stay?

No NC report was presented to conference, and no membership figures or list of current affiliates were given. But comrade McDonnell candidly reported the views of some affiliates, who have said, “We can’t send delegates, because you don’t do anything”. Sussex LRC, with a record of effective organisation, public meetings and campaigning rivalled only by Brent and Harrow, submitted an emergency motion to “restructure” the NC, which NC member Clare Wadey described as “too large at 67 members, or inquorate” and her admission that “it has been totally ineffective” was not challenged. Political secretary Pete Firmin confirmed that “everyone agrees” that the NC needs to be restructured, but “the question is how to do it”. And, on that basis, conference voted to remit the Sussex proposal to the new NC.

Guest speaker Matt Wrack of the Fire Brigades Union brought “greetings from the TUC general council”, and said that to get rid of this coalition government the only alternative is a Labour government – “but we need to have a discussion about that”. He contended that “Toning down the rhetoric to get Labour elected is a disastrous route” and was very critical of the trade unions’ role in the Labour Party. After a unanimous anti-austerity vote at the TUC congress in September, almost all union delegates at the national policy forum had voted down an “emergency budget” resolution. Instead of posing “austerity lite” against “austerity armageddon”, we need a “socialist renaissance”. He commented: “People are prepared to fight, but do not think the organised left is the answer.”

Disagreement over our assessment of the state of the workers’ movement was brought out in the hustings session, where two of the three rival candidates for the post of political secretary presented their cases. In the event, Pete Firmin was elected with 59 votes to Graham Durham’s 21, while Louise Reece, who did not speak, received 12 votes. Comrade Durham’s oft-repeated charge that Pete Firmin and the LRC leadership are pessimistic and defeatist, while the working class is itching to fight if only it is given a lead, was countered by comrade Firmin’s sober assessment that the “bad state of the movement is reflected in the bad state of the LRC” – the sort of honesty that is necessary to face up to, and remedy, the weaknesses of the organisation and the workers’ movement as a whole. Self-deception does not help at all.

Vicky Morris of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty moved the successful motion, ‘Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory’. This commits the LRC to “advocate a Labour government as the best outcome of the May 2015 election” and to “advocate a Labour vote, at the same time as advancing working class measures as demands for the labour movement to press upon the Labour leaders …” Comrade Morris said that Labour had adopted policies to abolish the bedroom tax and repeal the Social Care Act as a result of pressure, and such pressure could achieve similar results with respect to a Labour government in office. Assessing the “condition of labour movement forces”, she said that the “direness of the Labour Party reflects and feeds back onto the direness of the trade unions, which, in turn, reflects and feeds back onto the direness of the socialist left”. In these circumstances, she argued, “there is no realistic alternative to voting Labour and the election of Labour government”.

The NC statement, moved by comrade McDonnell and adopted by conference with minor amendments (apart from the ‘LRC culture’ section, of course), offered a similar perspective: “Our task is to campaign for the Labour leadership to represent the interests of the working class by offering a real alternative to austerity in the form of socialist policies.” Left MPs, said comrade McDonnell, must resist the attempted rightwing coup against Ed Miliband: “The first meeting of the LRC NC must set about the task of bringing together left MPs and councillors on a socialist platform, so they can become a distinct socialist element influencing the Labour government after the May general election.” The election may produce a small Labour majority – in which case we must ensure “the socialist left is a distinct element in the coalition of forces behind the Labour government”. Labour may be simply the biggest party, in which case we must argue against a coalition with other parties, and for a minority Labour government to “enact policies in the interests of the working class”.

Comrade McDonnell welcomed the Greater London LRC amendment to the NC statement, under which “the LRC will prioritise support for Labour candidates that support LRC policies”. This is an improvement on the AWL’s call for an across-the-board Labour vote, and sensibly allows us to direct our limited forces in support of leftwing and socialist candidates.

Notes

1. See http://labourpartymarxists.org.uk/the-culture-we-need-comes-with-thorns.

2. Ibid.

3. ‘Inclusivity and intolerance’ Weekly Worker October 9; and http://labourpartymarxists.org.uk/lrc-inclusivity-and-intolerance.

Nationalism and internationalism

Oppose nationalism across the board

Gallery 1 Comment

Use the May 2014 Euro elections to fight for socialism and internationalism, argues James Marshall of Labour Party Marxists

Opposition to the European Union continues to embarrass, vex and divide rightwing bourgeois politicians.

The current situation is easy to summarise. Under severe pressure from the UK Independence Party, David Cameron has committed the Tories to an in-out referendum following the next general election in 2015. If returned to No10 he solemnly pledges to negotiate a root-and-branch reform of Britain’s relationship with Brussels. Smelling blood, Nigel Farage wants to turn the May 2014 European election into a referendum against Bulgarian and Romanian migrants and continued EU membership. And, worryingly, an Open Europe poll puts Ukip on 27% – significantly ahead of Labour (23%) and the Tories (21%).1 Meanwhile, the swelling anti-EU mood gives rise to further rifts within Conservative ranks. Eg, Adam Afriyie – tipped by some as a future Tory leader – has been agitating for a referendum this side of the general election.2

Disgracefully, not a few in the labour movement have aligned themselves with the xenophobic right. Among the Labour MPs who signed up to the People’s Pledge – a cross-party (now semi-defunct) campaign calling for an EU referendum – are Ronnie Campbell, Rosie Cooper, David Crausby, Jon Cruddas, John Cryer, Natascha Engel, Jim Fitzpatrick, Roger Godsiff, Tom Harris, Kate Hoey, Lindsay Hoyle, Kelvin Hopkins, George Howarth, Iain McKenzie, Austin Mitchell, Graham Stringer, Gerry Sutcliffe, Derek Twigg and Keith Vaz. The RMT was the first union to give official backing. Brian Denny of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain sits on its national council, as does Mark Seddon, former editor of Tribune. Other council members include Tory MPs Zac Goldsmith and Douglas Carswell, Nigel Dodds (Democratic Unionist Party deputy leader), Marta Andreasen (Ukip MEP till February 2013, when she defected to the Tories), Jenny Jones (Green Party) and Jim Sillars (SNP deputy leader 1990-92). Bob Crow, Boris Johnson, Caroline Lucas and Bill Greenshields (CPB chair) are prominently listed as supporters.

The foul nature of the People’s Pledge can be gathered from the protest it staged outside the treasury on July 21 2011. That was the day when EU leaders launched a second, £96 billion, bailout for Greece. The campaign said that there should be no further contributions from Britain. Bob Crow in particular singled out article 122 of the Lisbon treaty, which “obliges” British taxpayers to “risk” billions of pounds at a “time of cuts to public services at home”.3 Presumably Greece should be abandoned to a disorderly default and forced to exit from the euro zone.

For its part, the British National Party roundly condemns international bankers for “strangling the Greek economy”, demands that the UK “withdraw from the European Union” and wants to reserve government funds for “more useful projects”.4 Sadly, a position which almost passes for common sense on the left nowadays too. Both the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party in England and Wales are set to partner the Morning Star’s CPB in the No2EU electoral front – note the line-up of speakers for the North West constituency launch meeting: Bob Crow (RMT), Roger Banister (SPEW) and Michael Lavalette (SWP).5 According to a recent No2EU bulletin, a break with the EU will allow Britain to “be rebuilt with socialist policies.”6 A clear case of national socialism. And, unfortunately, where the CPB, SWP and SPEW have led Socialist Resistance, Respect, Alliance for Green Socialism, Socialist Labour Party, Solidarity, etc have followed.

What appears to be an incongruous, puzzling and unnatural alignment between left and right in actual fact stems from a common source. Uniting 28 countries, having an agreed legal framework, committed to the free movement of labour and capital, the EU stands as an existential threat to the nation-state cherished by those for whom the future lies in the past. After all BNPers yearn for a white, 1950s Britain with traditional weights and measures and close trading relations with Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In a similar way, the nation-state is viewed as the natural vehicle for socialist transformation by left reformists, ‘official communists’ and former Trotskyites alike. The dream is of a referendum which in due course will see a return to Keynesianism, welfarism and “British sovereignty”.

As an aside, it is worth noting the deep distrust Marxists have generally had for referendums. So-called ‘direct democracy’ is a chimera in any complex society. Nuances have to be considered, likely consequences predicted and alternatives closely studied. That is why we advocate indirect democracy: ie, the election of recallable representatives who are tasked with debating and deciding political positions and stratagems. Marx certainly denounced – and in no uncertain terms – Louis Bonaparte’s deployment of successive referendums to consolidate his dictatorship and excuse foreign adventures.7 The wording of the question is, of course, everything. Eg, to vote ‘no’ was to declare oneself opposed to democratic reforms, to vote ‘yes’ was to vote for despotism and war. Referendums bypass representative democracy, political parties and careful deliberation. Something not lost on Adolph Hitler. He managed to get a 90% mandate for his dictatorship on August 19 1934 – despite an almost unprecedented campaign of intimidation, there were millions of spoilt ballot papers.

Standing out

Against this dire background the position of the Labour Representation Committee stands out positively. The November 2011 AGM was presented with resolution 15, which reads as follows:

1. That the Europe-wide capitalist crisis requires a Europe-wide working-class response.

2. That we should no more oppose European capitalist integration than we would oppose the merger of two companies, even though the bosses use mergers as an excuse to attempt job cuts and other attacks. When Britain PLC merges into Europe PLC, the answer is to link up with other European workers in solidarity and struggle.

3. 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’.

4. The road to a socialist united Europe is the road of responding to European capitalist unification by organising for cross-European workers’ and socialist struggle. We advocate the following programme for this struggle:

Oppose all cuts; level up wages, services, pensions and workers’ rights to the best across Europe;
Tax the rich and expropriate the banks, Europe-wide;
Scrap the EU’s bureaucratic structures; for a European constituent assembly;
Against a European defence force; for a Europe without standing armies or nuclear weapons;
For a European workers’ government.

5. In a referendum on British entry to the euro, our position will be to advocate an active abstention and our slogans will be along the lines of ‘In or out, the fight goes on’; ‘Single currency – not at our expense’; and ‘For a workers’ Europe’.

The resolution concludes with a three-point commitment:

1. To organise public meetings and debates about Europe across the country.

2. To initiate a short statement setting out this position and circulate it around Britain and Europe for signatories.

3. To produce a short pamphlet setting out this position.8

Given that the resolution originated with and was moved by the social-imperialist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, it was perhaps surprising that the AGM voted in favour. But, thankfully, it did. True there are some problems with it. Eg, a European workers’ government is perfectly fine as a programmatic position, but is a sad joke when it comes to immediate agitation. At present there is no serious revolutionary Marxist party anywhere in Europe. Nevertheless, the resolution was eminently supportable and it was good to see it gain a clear majority.

That said LRC leaders such as Graham Bash, Andrew Fisher and Mike Phipps evidently thoroughly disapproved of the resolution … and, as far as I am aware, the concluding three-point commitment remains unfulfilled. Of course, this may well be due to the decline and disorganisation of the LRC over the last couple of years.

Next May

However, the AWL has presented this year’s LRC national conference with another resolution on Europe. Noting the 2011 policy, the growth of Ukip and the rerun of No2EU, the AWL’s resolution 13 once again condemns British nationalism and xenophobic calls for an EU withdrawal. The position on organising an “all-European working class and socialist struggle”, etc is also reiterated. Nevertheless, the conclusion is questionable. The AWL calls for a “campaign advocating a Labour vote” in the May 2014 EU elections on the basis of opposing cuts, supporting the levelling up of wages across Europe, striving for the pan-European organisation of the working class, scrapping the EU’s bureaucratic structures, etc. Slogans such as ‘For international working class solidarity – for a workers’ united Europe’ are recommended in that spirit.

Frankly, the conclusion does not follow from the premise. Ed Miliband and his candidates for 2014 will hardly be standing on the principles of internationalism and the perspective of a European workers’ government. Nor will they oppose all cuts or advocate a European constituent assembly. No, Labour candidates will be standing on a version of British nationalism barely distinguishable from that of the Tories and the Lib Dems. In the pointed words of deputy leader Harriet Harman, the “top priority” of Labour MEPs will be to “make sure they get the best deal” and “bring jobs and growth here in the UK”.9

That does not rule out voting Labour. Indeed, it has to be admitted, most LRC affiliates and individual members are firmly within the auto-Labour fold. But surely it would be far better for the LRC to use the May elections as an opportunity to make propaganda for its vision of a Europe ruled by the working class. Instead of running a campaign “advocating a Labour vote”, the LRC should challenge British nationalism across the board and spread the message of pan-EU working class unity, democracy and socialism. An election dominated by Ukip and British nationalism needs the input of the LRC and other leftwing organisations.

Notes

1. Daily Mail May 28.

2. The Daily Telegraph October 12.

3. http://communist-party.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1377:article-9-demonstration-no-bail-out-without-a-referendum&catid=78:eu-a-popular-sovereignty&Itemid=91.

4. www.bnp.org.uk/policies/foreign-affairs.

5. www.socialistparty.org.uk/campaign/Election_campaigns/no2eu/17420.

6. www.tuaeuc.org/no2eu-wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/a5_no2eu.pdf.

7. See Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and The civil war in France (1871). Also there is Kautsky’s book, Parliamentarism, direct legislation and social democracy (1893).

8. Resolutions booklet November 2011, p11.

9. www.labour.org.uk/labour-party-european-election-candidate-selection-results,2013-08-02.