Mr Brown Comes Back From The Coast

The Labour Party might still be mired in the Brown stuff, but the by-election victory at Glenrothes means they are smelling slightly sweeter today. Speculators talk about a dead-cat bounce when shares make a half-hearted recovery the day after a huge decline. No doubt a number of appropriate descriptions of what bounced here could similarly be adduced.

Partly, the explanation for the win seems to be tactical voting. Some Tories interviewed last night on TV said they had voted Labour to stop the SNP, because of their opposition to Scottish Independence. Partly, it could e a reaction against the rule of the SNP in Scotland itself. But, a main consideration must be that Gordon Brown has been seen in the current financial crisis to be a safe pair of hands. A drastic turnaround from the situation only a few weeks ago - though it has to be said that itself was a turnaraound from Brown's initial popularity. This is the problem with bourgeois Parliamentarism. Electors are faced with essentially two choices between identical products - just like choosing between two identical soap powders in different packets - and so change their allegiance based on ephemera. See: here .

Yes, in Scotland they also had the option of voting for two avowedly Socialist even revolutionary parties, but, as has happened for the last 100 years, the working class, if it was aware of their existence, ignored it. Yet again it should be a lesson that if socialists want the working class to take them seriously then socialists have to go that working class - as Trotsky once put it, "the Mohammedans beleive the mountain will come to the prophet, Marxists believe it is much more sensible for the prophet to go to the Mountain." Surely, even the faux Marxists wrapped up in their own little world who believe they are involved in "mass work" by handing out a few leaflets for candidates with no hope at elections, or when they engage in harangues with political opponents at Trade Union Branch meetings must realise that they are doing nothing of the sort. Mass work involves being involved with all of those workers that have not ven reached that level, and you require a conduit to reach them, a lever by which the infinitessimally small numbers of the Marxists can move a bigger weight.

Rank and file organisations within workplaces, or Factory Committees can be one way of doing that in the industrial sphere provided that they are geared to real mass work at organising the self-activity of the workers within the factory rather than as they have been simply election machines or resolution mongering machines. Tenants and Residents Associations can fulfill a similar function within communities. But, if such work is to be done on a meaningful level if such work is to be joined up across communities across workplaces it requires much greater numbers than the revolutioanries can currently provide. And if such activity is not to simply be a form of syndicalism it wil require a political perspective that the tiny revolutionary groups - even were they combined - cannot provide. It will require a focus on the Labour Party. A focus again not on the Labour party as a forum to slag off right-wing Labour members, but a means of connectin with ordianry workers in their daily lives of using its machinery to work within the community, and help initiate the self-activity of the class.

At the present time there are a number of campaigns going on around the question of housing and evictions, in Manchester and lewisham for instance. The stock response of the statist left is to simply demand that the bourgeois state resolve the problem. Those that raise such demands know this bourgeois state will not do that, but their horizon is geared not to providing real solutions to the working class, but the insignificant task of embarrassing the Labour and bouregois politicians. A real solution for the working class in these situations runs through showing them how they can establish Co-operative Housing to take over both the houses and the management of Estates so that they the workers living there can exercise real democratic control without continually having to fight a running battle with Landlords or Banks whether they be private or State. It runs through demands that the working class take control of things like the Co-op Bank, of Unity Trust and so on and runs them to meet its needs. Of course, where workers take action to prevent evictions, or to stop the privatisation of Council housing Marxists should support them in the same way they support workers striking for higher pay or better conditions, or against redundancies. But the job of Marxists is to explain to workers why such solutions are inadequate, why at best they provide a temporary solution, and why they need to act themselves to take over ownership of the means of production for themselves, by utilising their resources and the credit already available to establish their own Co-operative property.

Once workers see that works they can see a different world is possible. Then they will support politicians and parties whose ideas are based on that different world, but not before. Then workers will not be so fickle in their voting moved one way or another by ephemera, but will begin to see and udnerstand the path ahead, and will stick to it.