Tag Archives: SPEW

Democracy and the Labour Party, Trade unions

RMT union: Join us in battle!

The RMT is debating whether or not to affiliate. Jim Grant of Labour Party Marxists says get back in

“You can take your distance from America,” Tony Blair told the Chilcot inquiry years ago, “but you might find it is a long way back.”

So, also, it seems, is the case with taking of distance from the Labour Party. Close to 15 years after being expelled from Labour, thanks in large part to Blair’s many crimes, the Rail, Maritime and Transport union is to decide whether or not to apply for re-affiliation. The crunch moment comes on May 30, at a special general meeting.

“For many years I myself wouldn’t have dreamed that I would ever be campaigning to rejoin Labour,” Steve Hedley tells us. “So what has changed? Well, in a word, Corbyn.” Hedley is not a nobody in the RMT – he is assistant general secretary, and a long-standing militant and official in the union. He has spent most of that time on the fringes of the far left, briefly joining the Socialist Party in England and Wales (and the article quoted above was published on the Socialist Appeal website). If he has changed his mind on the matter, no doubt many others have too.

In the beginning

The story of the RMT’s relationship with the Labour Party is a long one – indeed, it is about as long as any such story could possibly be. For it was a motion originating in a branch of the Amalgamated Union of Railway Servants, one of the RMT’s ancestors, that led the Trades Union Congress to kick-start the Labour Representation Committee in 1899. Within a couple of years, there were MPs in parliament answerable, in theory, to the labour movement; and, though independence from the Liberal whip was largely a theoretical matter for Labour’s first MPs, the break was nonetheless decisively important in the history of the British workers’ movement – and for that matter in the history of ‘bourgeois’ politics in this country as a whole.

For the next century, the AURS and its successor, the National Union of Railwaymen, were core affiliates to the Labour Party; no less loyal was the National Union of Seamen, the other component part of today’s union. Even 20 years ago, with Jimmy Knapp still in the general secretary’s seat of what was by then the RMT, a break with Labour would have been quite unimaginable.

Knapp presided over some significant industrial battles, but aided and abetted Neil Kinnock and John Smith, as they paved the way for Tony Blair. In 2001, in a move reflecting deep disappointment with the first Blair government in the RMT ranks, the top job was taken by Bob Crow, an avowed communist and militant organiser. Under his leadership, RMT members in Scotland used the union political fund to sponsor candidates of the Scottish Socialist Party, which was riding high at the time; this can only have been a calculated provocation, and the inevitable result – expulsion from the ranks of Labour’s affiliates – followed in 2004.

Since then, the RMT’s political fund has been put to highly eclectic uses. The SSP, of course, collapsed into irrelevance within three years, when it split over Tommy Sheridan’s attempts to sue the Murdoch empire over allegations about his sex life. It continues to exist, just about, today; it is merely a tail of the nationalists, and a well-docked tail at that. The RMT sponsors a smattering of MPs on an individual basis – mostly Labour, but also including leftish nationalists and Greens. It has also been a primary sponsor first of the now disbanded ‘No to the EU’ ‘Lexiteer’ slate in the 2009 and 2014 European elections, and the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition on an ongoing basis. Electoral returns for both have been generally awful – which is to say, below the pretty poor historic standard of far-left candidates in Britain’s hostile electoral system.

Though many on the far left greeted the RMT’s break with Labour – in the context of the invasion of Iraq, top-up fees and the rest – as a great step forward, it is clear, on the evidence of the last 15 years, that it was in fact a step backpolitically for the RMT and the labour movement as a whole. The most successful use of the RMT political fund in these years, apart from supporting some Labour MPs, has been boosting petty bourgeois candidates (a matter on which those who urged disaffiliation, like SPEW, are tellingly silent).

Transformed Labour?

On the RMT’s side, then, the opportunity is there to step back into the central terrain of British labour movement politics. But not only that. As Hedley tells us, there is a serious class struggle going on for the very future of the movement itself, and the place where the battle rages is the Labour Party. Merely by making that move, Britain’s most militant union would send a very clear message. The impact of the return could – almost– be worth the wasted years in the political desert.

We are told by another advocate of reaffiliation, however, that “RMT branches are divided, and the vote at the SGM is likely to be close.”1)Jeff Slee in Labour Briefing Indeed, all the signs are of a close contest. Hedley begins his article with a disclaimer – “I refuse to fall out with anyone over the debate in the RMT about reaffiliation to the Labour Party” – that suggests in itself that fur is likely to fly.

A document outlining the terms offered by the Labour Party has been circulated among RMT branches with a covering letter from general secretary Mick Cash 2)Cash’s letter is available here. The document itself is marked “private and confidential”, but seems to have been inadvertently published on the RMT website for a brief period and, at time of writing, was still in Google’s cache. Drawn from the response of the Labour Party to the RMT’s advances, it reads – admittedly to an outsider – like a document written by an advocate of reaffiliation who takes great pains to reassure opponents that their fears are unfounded.

So who are these opponents? We find many grumbles in the comments beneath comrade Hedley’s forthright Facebook posts, but a more systematic argument comes – where else? – from our comrades in SPEW. An article in their RMT members’ bulletin puts their case. “Socialist Party members of the RMT welcome the fact that a dialogue with the Labour Party has begun,” the comrades tell us:

A transformed Labour Party, with full democratic rights and due weight in its structures for trade unions – the collective voices of workers – would take forward the objectives of the RMT, as defined in our rule book: to “improve the conditions and protect the interests of its members” and “to work for the supersession of the capitalist system by a socialistic order of society”.

So far, so good. However, “are the terms of affiliation currently on offer – losing our political independence and handing £240,000 a year to a largely unreconstructed party machine (if we affiliate our full membership) – really the best way to pursue the RMT’s objectives at this moment?” Phrasing the question in that way, naturally, presumes an answer in the negative. The article continues:

There is nothing on what the party will do to stop Labour-controlled authorities implementing driver-only operation (DOO) and sacking guards on Merseyrail and Rail North, massive funding cuts in Transport for London, or privatisation plans for the Welsh railways. The RMT has AGM policy supporting local councils setting no-cuts budgets by using their reserves and borrowing powers. Yet rightwing Labour-led councils continue to slash jobs and local services and nothing is said about it.

There follows a fairly accurate description of the bureaucratic obstacles to Labour Party democracy, and so on, and the conclusions write themselves: “once the cheque is handed over, it’s no longer our money”; worries about the “(extremely limited) opportunities and (still considerable) overheads that affiliation would bring”.

We should start by pointing out that what the SPEW comrades are engaged in here is the spread of what public relations professionals call “fear, uncertainty and doubt”, or FUD. Note that the RMT would “lose its political independence”, apparently: the confidential document, to which the SPEW article refers, explicitly repudiates this, except in the case of standing candidates against Labour. And indeed there is nothing in the Labour Party rules that excludes (say) campaigning for immediate rail renationalisation simply because Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are too timid to call for it themselves.

If we are to identify standing candidates against Labour as the blocker issue, however, then the high-minded openness to reaffiliation affected by the SPEW article is revealed as a sham, for there is exactly zero point in even a politically healthy federal party of the labour movement accepting affiliates who stand against it in elections. It seems that we founder on the great socialist principle of SPEW being permitted to do whatever the hell it likes.

There is something more troubling yet, however, about the SPEW approach to this question, which is its petty bourgeois character. We mean this in the narrowest possiblesense – SPEW behaves exactly like a provincial estate agent, obsessed with getting the better of some petty transaction. £240,000 doesn’t buy enough influence in the Labour Party.

Sectionalism

In a more expansive sense, the petty bourgeois attitude expresses itself, in the trade union movement, as sectionalism– the pursuit of the narrow aims of the union over and above those of the movement as a whole. It is thus highly regrettable that SPEW constantly encourages such sectionalism – what does the RMTget for its money? – above the general interest, which is hardly ideal from the point of view of an organisation that considers itself Trotskyist.

The best exemplar of this is the apparent expectation that an acceptable set of terms for affiliation should contain policy on driver-only operation. The proper way to settle such questions is not in market-stall haggling between the Labour Party bureaucracy and its RMT counterparts, but at conference. (Things are more commonly settled in the now smoke-free rooms of backstage stitch-ups, of course.) Say that there was Labour Party policy to nationalise the insurance industry and, as part of negotiations to get an insurance clerks’ union on board, that policy was struck off. I, and hopefully SPEW, would be less than pleased. Yet it seems to think that the RMT should expect just that sort of behaviour.

Can it really be the case that purported Trotskyists – who aspire to be the most conscious vanguard of the labour movement – should promote sectionalism as a matter of principle? Probably not. The truth is that these sad little contortions are designed for internal consumption; the lukewarm participation of the RMT in Tusc is all that keeps it afloat and, once it is gone, the last 25 years of SPEW strategy are basically buried.

But for the moment SPEW is committed to Tusc. The April 25 edition of The Socialist urged readers to “Vote Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition” in the May 3 local elections in England – without exception, it seems: the front-page article makes no mention of voting for any Labour candidates in the vast majority of seats, where Tusc is not contesting. After all, “Today Blairite councils around the country are implementing huge cuts to public services. That is why the Socialist Party is standing, as part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, against some of the worst Blairite cutters at local level.”

Yet, in the same article, we read this:

As we have repeatedly warned, making concessions to the pro-capitalist wing of the Labour Party, and attempting to conciliate with them, will only give them more power to try and defeat Corbyn. Not one inch should be conceded to them. Instead urgent measures are needed to completely transform the Labour Party into a mass socialist, working class party, with a revitalised trade union movement involved at its core through democratic, representative structures.

So how are those “urgent measures” to be won? How about winning the unions to fight for them within Labour itself? Oh no – that would be a waste of money.

Yet, as SPEW’s perspective of creating a Labour Party mark two is progressively invalidated by events, so SPEW comrades are voting with their feet and condemning themselves to a life of ‘poor value for money’ in the Labour Party – those left behind are more and more the irreconcilable and the delusional. The silver lining is that – in precisely the far-sighted spirit of the Communist manifesto– SPEW tends to find it amenable to take its political lead from the RMT, so perhaps a well-advised decision on May 30 will bring Peter Taaffe’s merry men and women finally to the same conclusion.

As already noted, however, a good outcome is far from guaranteed. If it is a close vote against reaffiliation, that will hardly cover SPEW in glory – and we shall say no more than that. To RMT members, we commend the larger view of politics, and hope that those of us wanting to truly transform Labour, rather than wait passively for it to be transformed for us, are soon to be joined by the battered British labour movement’s most militant contingent.

References

References
↑1 Jeff Slee in Labour Briefing
↑2 Cash’s letter is available here. The document itself is marked “private and confidential”, but seems to have been inadvertently published on the RMT website for a brief period and, at time of writing, was still in Google’s cache.
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.

 

The left

Hoist by its own petard

Gallery

The right has given us a gift and we have used it. Charles Gradnitzer of Labour Party Marxists recalls how it all came about.

This article attempts to explain the previous left challenges to the leadership position and why they failed; the old electoral system and the manufactured scandal that changed it; the current state of the Labour left; and the opportunities a Corbyn victory presents to the left and the grassroots membership of the Labour Party.

As most people are aware, Tony Blair won the leadership election in 1994. He was standing against John Prescott and self-professed “moron” Margaret Beckett, so it is safe to say that there was no left candidate. In 2006, anticipating that Blair would be stepping down the following year, John McDonnell announced that he intended to stand as the leftwing candidate in order to ensure there would be a debate within the party and not simply a ‘coronation’ of Gordon Brown as Blair’s successor.

In 2007, a few months before Blair set a formal date for his resignation, Michael Meacher announced his intention to stand. Meacher had been in the Socialist Campaign Group with McDonnell until 1983, when he was expelled after he joined the shadow cabinet. He was a minister for 20 years (and even voted for the invasion of Iraq) until he fell out with Blair and returned to the backbenches in 2003. After this he began to move back to the left and attack Blair over Iraq.

So in 2007 we arrived at a situation where the left was fielding two candidates in a leadership election – presumably to make up for the failure to stand anyone at all in 1994. But with two days to go before the close of nominations Meacher stepped down and asked his supporters to back John McDonnell, who was relying on nominations from Meacher’s supporters and those of the centre-left deputy leadership candidate, Jon Cruddas. However, much of Meacher’s support came from MPs who did not see McDonnell, a rebellious backbencher, as a credible candidate and the Brownites subsequently pressured 14 of Meacher’s supporters not to nominate McDonnell. Cruddas supporters also failed to back him and in the end he fell 16 nominations short of the 45-MP threshold. This meant that Gordon Brown, with a total of 313 nominations, was elected unopposed and the leadership conference was reduced to the coronation McDonnell had predicted in 2006.

When Brown resigned as both prime minister and leader of the Labour Party after the 2010 general election, which resulted in a hung parliament, the Miliband brothers and Ed Balls declared their intention to stand, while comrade McDonnell also announced that he would stand again. But once again there was a second left candidate – Diane Abbott, a fellow member of the Socialist Campaign Group – and this time McDonnell dropped out, asking his supporters to back Abbott. However, she went out in the first round, having received the lowest vote of any candidate from the parliamentary and constituency sections of the electoral college (though she did head Andy Burnham and Ed Balls in the union and affiliate section). So it was ‘Red Ed’ who won the leadership election in 2010, narrowly beating his brother, David Miliband, thanks to the “pernicious influence” of the trade unions – a truly bizarre claim, given that the vote of a union member was worth 0.13% of that of an MP.

Experiment

What was interesting about the 2010 election was a little noticed experiment conducted by John Mann in his Bassetlaw constituency, the outcome of which would go on to drastically alter the course of Labour Party history.

Mann, convinced that there was a need to “widen democracy” and open up the leadership election to the public, identified Labour supporters in his constituency and conducted a ‘primary’ to determine who he should vote for in the leadership election. At a cost of several thousand pounds he worked with the Bassetlaw CLP and other volunteers to conduct a postal ballot of over 10,000 people who were said to be Labour supporters.

Writing for Progress magazine in July 2010, Andy Burnham – who was, of course, standing as a leadership candidate – praised John Mann’s primary. In his article he stated that membership fees were a barrier to participation, that he wanted to create an affiliate membership (ie, ‘registered supporters’), and that as leader of the Labour Party he would look to include registered supporters in future internal elections and selections. (To Burnham’s dismay Labour supporters in Bassetlaw voted for David Miliband in the primary and John Mann cast his ballot accordingly.)

Stephen Twigg, the chair of the rightwing Progress group from 2005 to 2010 and its current honorary president, wrote a contribution to The purple book, published by Progress in 2011. In his chapter, entitled ‘Letting the people decide: redistributing power and renewing democracy’, he stated:

“In 2005 only 1.3% of the electorate was a member of a political party, afallfrom4%in1983…The fall in membership has resulted in fewer people being involved in selecting Labour’s MPs. The average constituency Labour Party has around 300 members. This equates to a very small percentage of the local population. When candidates were selected by large memberships 50 years ago, it was easier to see how they reflected the wishes of the local population.

“How, then, could Labour seek to increase the influence of ordinary people over the decision of who represents them? One way would be to introduce closed primaries …”

He went on to advocate ending the automatic affiliation of union members in favour of an opt-in system; and abolishing the electoral college in favour of ‘one member, one vote’ (Omov) – “opening up access to the Labour Party and how it operates should be an important organisational goal”, he said.

When Ed Miliband became leader in 2010, he immediately set about reviewing the party structure – as Blair had done in 1997 – through a bogus “consultation” known as Refounding Labour. Party units and individual members were asked to make submissions to this review, but when the recommendations were published it was clear that the party had, at best, cherry-picked submissions – in all likelihood the recommendations were a foregone conclusion and the submissions were mostly ignored.

The end result of this review was the introduction of ‘registered supporters’. These did not have to pay a fee, but were largely election fodder. They were not involved in internal party selections – if they were involved in the party at all.

The Labour left saw straight through Refounding Labour: it was a step towards achieving the rule changes Progress wanted to make. Writing in Left Futures, Jon Lansman predicted that registered supporters “could be given votes in leadership elections as if they were affiliated members”.1 This prediction was not entirely hard to make, given that Progress had been pushing for primaries, using Mann’s Bassetlaw experiment as a case study on widening political engagement with the party.

Falkirk and Collins

With Progress gunning for opt-in affiliation and Omov to reduce the “power of the unions” in the Labour Party, the executive committee of the Unite union adopted a new political strategy in 2011 to “reclaim Labour”. The strategy consisted of three major goals: maintaining the union link; increasing the number of trade union or “trade union-friendly” prospective parliamentary candidates; and increasing the number of trade unionists in constituency Labour Parties in order to secure the success of the first two goals.

Though Progress had failed to get primaries, opt-in affiliation and Omov into the Refounding Labour recommendations, its opportunity finally arrived in 2013, when Unite’s political strategy blew up in its face. In July that year, Eric Joyce, the disgraced former Labour MP for Falkirk, accused Unite of rigging the selection process.

The Unite convenor at Grangemouth oil refinery, Stephen Deans, had become the chair of Falkirk West CLP shortly after Joyce had resigned after nutting a Tory MP in the House of Commons bar. Deans began to implement Unite’s political strategy in Falkirk, recruiting union members from Grangemouth into the CLP. While Deans was chair the size of the CLP doubled from fewer than 100 members to over 200.

Falkirk West had agreed to have an all- women shortlist, which would exclude the Progress candidate, Gregor Poynton. However, when it was discovered that the trade union-friendly Katie Myler was Unite’s preferred candidate, Progress went apeshit, with Peter Mandelson warning Miliband at the 2013 Progress conference that the unions were trying to “take over” the party.

In March 2013 the Labour NEC created a subcommittee to investigate claims that Unite had signed up and paid for members without their knowledge and the report was published in June that year. As a result both Katie Myler and Stephen Deans were suspended from the party and Falkirk was placed under “special measures”. The report was handed to the police in the hope that Unite would be charged with fraud, but Police Scotland concluded that “there are insufficient grounds to support a criminal investigation at this time”.

In one of the most infuriating examples of the pot calling the kettle black, the report revealed that the Blairite candidate backed by Progress, Gregor Poynton, had paid party subscriptions for 11 new members, which was actually against the party rules, whereas the report exonerated Unite of any wrongdoing.

In spite of the report and the police investigation, former Labour Party general secretary Ray Collins was asked to head a review to make recommendations for party reform. Collins, who had been assistant general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union until 2008, recommended most of the policies Progress had tried to push through in 2011: the abolition of the electoral college, the introduction of Omov, mandatory opt-in affiliation of union members, new rights for registered supporters, including the right to vote in the leadership election. In order to appease the Parliamentary Labour Party, Collins recommending raising the threshold for leadership nominations from 12.5% to 15% of Labour MPs.

The Collins review was put to a special conference, to which I was delegated in 2014. The Labour left vociferously opposed the recommendations, while they were supported by the centre and the right. In the run-up to conference delegates received numerous letters from Ed Miliband urging them to vote for the reforms. One such letter told the story of Paul, a lifelong trade unionist and figment of Miliband’s imagination, who finally joined the Labour Party after the reforms were announced – on the basis that “until now the party never felt democratic. It never felt like one I could join.”

The event itself was a stage-managed stitch-up. The first sign of this was that it turned out there had been no conference arrangements committee and therefore no CAC report. A number of CLPs had submitted emergency motions which were not on the agenda and, when this was pointed out to conference, Angela Eagle assured delegates from the chair that the CAC had met in January. But if it met in January it would not have been able to consider submitted motions or actually do any arranging, because the Collins review was not published till February.

The conference went on as planned. General secretary after general secretary stood up to denounce the reforms, but in the end it was all hot air. When it came to the vote, 96% of the unions (with the honourable exception of the Bakers Union) and 74% of the CLPs voted for the reforms, giving a total of 86.29% in favour and 13.71% against. The experiment conducted by John Mann in 2010 had borne fruit.

Labour left

In 2015 the Labour Party suffered a crushing defeat under Ed Miliband. In Scotland the party was all but wiped out. This defeat had major ramifications for the political composition of the PLP. Seven sitting Campaign Group and Left Platform MPs were wiped out by the Scottish National Party, and five Campaign Group MPs stood down and were replaced by candidates that are not leftwing.

The 11 left ex-MPs would have been enough to put Corbyn on the ballot without any nominations from MPs who later regretted it. In addition to this 18 Left Platform PPCs were stood in Conservative strongholds, continuing a tradition of parachuting centrist and right wing candidates into Labour strongholds while sticking socialists in unwinnable seats.

One of the most striking things about the Corbyn campaign has been that it reveals how badly the parliamentary party reflects the views and wishes of the membership and the unions. This is the result of NEC interference in constituency selections and the fact that the Labour right has been well organised for years. There is very little organisation of the ‘hard left’ or even ‘soft left’. There is no leftwing membership organisation that regularly meets, holds press conferences, tries to win important internal and parliamentary selections, and produces economic policy documents. In short the left has nothing analogous to Progress. A leftwing proto- Progress exists in the sense that the left does some of these activities, but it is not organised into one organisation.

Luke Akehurst, the secretary of Labour First, produced an interesting article on what he calls the “hard left” for his blog. The situation he describes is basically right: the ephemeral left organises through “networks” of Facebook groups, email lists, phone calls, and meetings of various established groups. However, his claim that these “networks” are an “experienced and highly motivated machine” is grossly exaggerated.

The Labour Representation Committee, set up in 2004, is not capable of organising anything on the scale that is needed. It has its conferences and some of its comrades sell Labour Briefing at meetings, but beyond that it does not really do a great deal. It is haemorrhaging members and looks like it is on the verge of collapse.

Andrew Fisher, who was joint secretary of the LRC with Pete Firmin, started the Left Economics Advisory Panel, which, as the name suggests, produces ‘leftwing’ (ie, neo-Keynesian) economic policy documents and press releases. Fisher has also written a book called Austerity: the failed experiment.

The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy tends to concentrate on internal party matters: electing people to the conference arrangements committee, the NEC, the national policy forum; submitting soft-left contemporary motions to conference and rule changes aimed at making the Labour Party more democratic and accountable to the membership.

A group not mentioned by Luke Akehurst is Socialist Action. Few people know who is in SA because when it split from the International Marxist Group it began to pursue a ‘deep entryist’ strategy. It is so secretive I would wager there will be members of Socialist Action who do not know each other. It does not organise openly. You can sometimes guess who is in it – if they once worked as advisors for Ken Livingstone when he was London mayor, for example, or today they talk about deficit reduction through investment rather than public-sector cuts.

Membership of these groups tend to overlap and they mostly stand for various positions under the banner of the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance. A fact that did not go unnoticed by Akehurst, who points out how undemocratic this arrangement is. He notes that the name is ironic, given that one of the main groups in the CLGA is the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. The CLGA also has a website that carries reports from the CLPD about NEC and NPF meetings, conference, and other Labour Party internal affairs.

The Centre for Labour and Social Studies is also worth mentioning because when it was launched it was described in The Guardian as a “leftwing antidote to Blairite pressure group Progress”. Owen Jones describes it in similar, though less hostile terms, as the left’s answer to Progress. Considering it has Sally Hunt from the University and College Union and Sir Paul Kenny on its national advisory panel, I would question whether this think-tank could really be considered leftwing. The advisory panel also includes the former leader of Respect, Salma Yaqoob, so it is not really even part of the Labour Party.

In addition to this there is the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs of which Corbyn is a member. It was set up in 1982 as a split from the Tribune group after Kinnock and other members of Tribune abstained in the deputy leadership election in 1981, costing Tony Benn the job. Amusingly, Corbyn’s refrain that his candidacy is “not about personalities, but about policies” is exactly what Benn said in 1981 when he stood against Denis Healey for deputy leader.

Two other ‘groups’ worth mentioning are the Left Platform, which was actually the name used for a statement put out before the general election, signed by sitting Labour MPs and PPCs. The second consists of the 10 newly elected Labour MPs who, after winning the election, wrote an open letter committing themselves to anti-austerity politics. Among the list of signatories are Corbyn supporters such as Richard Burgon, Clive Lewis and Kate Osamor.

Nomination

The Left Platform is worth mentioning because its post-election meeting put the dire state of the Labour left into perspective. On May 12, it met in London to discuss the prospects of standing an anti-austerity candidate. John McDonnell, having failed to get enough nominations in the last two leadership elections, immediately ruled himself out. Comrade McDonnell and other MPs thought that they could get at most 16 nominations, due to the 2015 wipe-out of the Campaign Group and the lack of new socialist MPs.

At first there was a campaign to get Jon Trickett to stand. There was even a change.org petition to put pressure on him, but once it became obvious he was not going to put his name forward, the left started searching for an alternative. Some wanted Michael Meacher to stand as the anti-austerity candidate, given that he was one of the initiators of the Left Platform, but he had already indicated that he was going to back Andy Burnham. It was then that comrade Corbyn took up the mantle.

The best anybody on the Labour left was hoping for at that point was that Corbyn would get enough airtime to put forward an anti-austerity position before the nominations closed, but after his Facebook page exploded a campaign was mounted to secure him enough nominations to get on the ballot paper. The campaign argued that the inclusion of Corbyn would widen the debate and enfranchise thousands of members who would otherwise not engage with the leadership election. Elements of the centre and the right – including Luke Akehurst – supported his inclusion on the ballot in the hopes that Corbyn would be humiliated during the leadership debate and the “hard left” would be crushed and demoralised.

Tens of thousands of Labour members and supporters bombarded MPs via email and social media in order to get him on the ballot. It was clear from some of the responses that this pressure from the grassroots accounted for at least some of the support. Other MPs clearly nominated Corbyn in order to shield Burnham from claims that he was too leftwing and in the pocket of the unions.

The morning that the nominations closed it did not look as though he was going to make it onto the ballot – in spite of the optimistic editorial in the Morning Star and assurances from his campaign team that they had enough support from MPs. But that morning there was a last- minute surge of nominations and as the clock struck 12 he had made it onto the ballot.

The first sign that Corbyn was reaching out to people beyond the notoriously insular world of online leftism was at the Newsnight Labour Party leadership hustings on June 17. During the hustings Corbyn had the most audible support, even though he did not capitulate, as the other candidates did, to one particular chauvinist in the audience.

In July YouGov dropped a polling bombshell: Corbyn would win in the final round with 53%. At first this poll was dismissed, but to the terror of the centre and the right such findings kept on coming in. Poll after poll was putting Corbyn in first place. In addition to this the supporting nominations from unions and constituency parties were also rolling in. In the end Corbyn had the support of 36 MPs, two MEPs, six major trade unions, 152 constituencies, and two affiliated socialist societies, putting him ahead of the other three candidates.

The campaign has exceeded the wildest expectations of many comrades. He has been speaking to packed-out meetings across the country and the party has doubled in size. 160,000 people registered as members, affiliates, or supporters in the last 24 hours before the registration closed.

Opportunities

There are, as I see it, two opportunities here for the left: the first is democratic reform of the Labour Party to undo the damage Tony Blair did. The second is a serious regroupment of the left within the party.

To grasp the first opportunity, we must first understand what is undemocratic about the Labour Party. In 1997 the annual conference adopted Tony Blair’s changes to the way the party programme and manifesto were developed. This was known as Partnership into Power and it remains in place to this day. The changes introduced six policy commissions, the NPF and the joint policy committee, and used these new bodies, along with ‘contemporary resolutions’, to reduce the role of conference in determining the party programme.

The policy commissions – which comprise 16-20 members representing the government, the NEC and the NPF – produce policy documents for the national policy forum and the joint policy committee (JPC) to discuss. The JPC acts as a steering group for the NPF, and is made up of representatives from the cabinet, the NEC and the NPF itself. It determines what policy the NPF will debate and when. The NPF is made up of 194 representatives from all sections of the party – CLP members and trade union delegates have the greatest representation, but it also includes the entire NEC.

Each year the NPF produces a report and presents it to the annual conference. Conference votes on the document as a whole, which is several hundred pages long. Each report represents one of three stages of the policy development process: stage one is a single document that considers the “big challenges” of the day; stage two outlines specific policies to tackle them; stage three produces the draft ‘final year policy’ document. Once the draft FYP document is passed by conference, the party is then asked to submit amendments to it. These are taken to the final NPF, where they are debated, and the final version is agreed by consensus. This document is taken to the annual conference, and once it is rubber- stamped it becomes the party programme.

At the annual conference the unions and constituency parties are able to submit contemporary resolutions, which can only address matters that the NPF could not discuss in its reports, so they have to pertain to events that have occurred in the three months between the last NPF meeting and the conference (hence the name ‘contemporary resolution’). They are only added to the programme if they receive two-thirds majority support.

Once this bureaucratic process is complete, a ‘Clause V’ meeting is held, where various delegates from the cabinet, the unions, the backbenches, the NEC and the NPF select which bits of the programme will go into the party manifesto. It is widely know that much of the FYP documents and almost all of the contemporary resolutions are left out or, if they are included, they are often reworded. This has yet to be quantified, but the CLPD has commissioned a report in order to identify all the differences between the party programme and last year’s manifesto.

This process was supposed to widen participation in drafting the manifesto, but in reality it has shut members out of that process even more. Most delegates to conference do not know what is going on, and this lack of knowledge is compounded by the fact that the speeches in favour of the FYP document usually do not correspond to the contents of the document. And, even if delegates do understand what is happening, I would wager that only a tiny minority have actually read the FYP document. In the unlikely case that they have and they disagree with it, the only option they have is to vote for or against it: it cannot be amended or taken in parts at annual conference.

Neither is the national policy forum itself transparent or accountable. Nobody knows what goes on at the NPF: it is not live-streamed or minuted, and delegates do not give report-backs, so you cannot know how your delegates have voted. You do not know which amendments were even considered or on what basis they were accepted or rejected; nor do you know who voted for or against them. Even if you did, the Clause V meeting which determines the manifesto renders the entire exercise of creating a party programme redundant – the participants are appointed, not delegated, and the meeting is not exactly transparent.

This entire process has to be changed and Corbyn must commit himself to doing this. As previous leaders have done, he could organise a review – similar to Partnership into Power or Refounding Labour, only less reactionary – in order to simplify the process, as well as making it democratic and transparent. I am not sure that going back to cobbling together often contradictory policy from party conferences at a Clause V meeting is the best approach, but a simplified, accountable, transparent, representative body – with recallable delegates – that is responsible for drafting the party programme and manifesto would be a good start; the role of the party conference should be to debate, amend, insert and delete sections of the party programme and manifesto.

There is a whole raft of other measures that I would like to see: the abolition of trigger ballots, the ability of constituency parties to recall sitting MPs and councillors, the end of NEC interference in parliamentary selections, a serious campaign to get all trade unions and other socialist groups to affiliate to the party, and an end to bans and proscriptions of socialist groups.

The second opportunity is a serious regroupment of the left. Hundreds of thousands of people have flooded into the party since the general election. As many as two thirds of these people have joined in order to support Jeremy Corbyn. Currently a small proportion are meeting at phone banks in order to canvass for him. They are also gathering at meetings of local Red Labour groups, which were recently established and largely existed on social media until they branched out into the real world.

It would be an absolute disaster if the left failed to turn the waves of Corbyn supporters flooding into the party from an amorphous mass into something more concrete.

Notes

1. www.leftfutures.org/2011/07/refounding-la- bour-attacks-union-influence-and-will-disap- point-members.

2. The Guardian August 16 2012.

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.

Nationalism and internationalism

Oppose nationalism across the board

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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.

The left

Socialist Appeal: Waiting for the class to move

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

Allan Woods
Allan Woods: appealing

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

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

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

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

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

Leninism

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

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

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

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

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

Reclaim Labour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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