Labour Lose Glasgow East

For most of the last week or so Michael Crick has been giving reports from Glasgow to the effect that despite earlier predictions of an SNP triumph, Labour was set to hold on to the seat. BUt, the reality contradicted the predictions - Labour lost what should for it be one of its strongest seats. It looks like SNP voters turned out, and Labour voters didn't. It crowns a succession of terrible election defeats for Brown as the successor to Blair's New labour crown. All of the criticisms of Brown as against Blair in that respect are nonsense. The rot had already set in under Blair who was himself losing elections. In fact, when he first took over Brown's popularity and that of Labour rose significantly. With decisive action over a number of crises last Summer Brown looked to be in the ascendant, until the uncalled election fiasco, and the turn of the economy with the Credit Crunch and Northern Rock put the skids under his administration.

As Tony Benn said, on BBC News 24 this morning voters are not turbning away from Labour because of Brown, but because the New Labour project is dead in the water, it has conspicuously failed to meet the needs of ordinary workers. It has fed their basic desires for the last ten years on a debt fuelled orgy of consumption, and even to some extent met their needs for better Public Services by pumping billions and billions into health and education Spending and other Public Services as part of its Keynesian counter-cyclical policies during the early part of the decade. But given the inefficient, state capitalist nature of those services most of the money there was swallowed up by the Stalinesque bureaucracies that dominate these institutions. Simply replacing Brown is no answer. But nor is replacing the policies of New Labour with the policies of Old Labour, or even the statist plicies of much of the Left including the Trotskyists whose worshipping of solutions based on greater State involvement covered with the veneer of "Workers Control" or "Workers Government", owe far more to the politics of Ferdinand Lassalle than they do to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

Criticising such an approach in "The Critique of the Gotha Programme", Marx wrote,

"“Instead of arising from the revolutionary process of transformation of society, the "socialist organization of the total labour" "arises" from the "state aid" that the state gives to the producers' co-operative societies and which the state, not the workers, "calls into being". It is worthy of Lassalle's imagination that with state loans one can build a new society just as well as a new railway!
From the remnants of a sense of shame, "state aid" has been put -- under the democratic control of the "toiling people". …"

and he went on,

"That the workers desire to establish the conditions for co-operative production on a social scale, and first of all on a national scale, in their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionize the present conditions of production, and it has nothing in common with the foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of the governments or of the bourgeois.”

In fact, the whole of his Critique is devoted to warning socialists against advocating the role of the State as a means of resolving workers problems, against calling on workers to place demands for the State to act in such a manner, rather than mobilising the working class to get up off its knees to resolve its own problems, to create its own Co-operative enterprises and so on as the basis of developing the workers own self-confidecne and class conscioussness.

Only if Marxists return to that perspective, and integrate themselves with the workers mass organisations including the co-operatives and Labour Party, and through real Trade Union work on the shopfloor rather than pedantic debates at Trade Union meetings can the further onward march of Capitalism be stemmed.

In a discussion at a recent left event John McDonnell argued that Labour faced an annihilation similar to that of 1931. There will be some sectarians on the left who will view such a prospect with glee as confirming their own prejudices. As TRotsky said of the Oehlerites they put defending their own prejudices above the interests of the working class. But such sectarians should be careful about thinking that such a development will benefit their own narrow aspirations. After 1931, despite the existence of the centrist ILP, and a much larger and more entrenched in the working class group of British Trotskyists, history saw the ILP effectively disappear and get swallowed up again into the LP, and the Trotskyists continued to splinter into ever more particles. It was not the Left that benefitted from the disintegration of the 1930's form of New Labour, but the Right, and further entrenching of bourgeois ideas. Even in the aftermath of the War, and in need of rebuilding a decaying British capitalism it was the Labour Party not the left that the working class turned to. Today the weakness of the Labour party finds its concomitant again not in any increase in support for the left but in increased support for the Right whether it be the Nationalists, the BNP, or the various bouregois parties of varying hue from the Tories to the Lib Dems and the Greens.

Marxists are supposed to learn from analysing reality. Its time the Left after 80 years of a failed strategy leanred that perhaps they have something wrong.