Politics Of The Ghetto - Part 1

Part 1

Groundhog Day

I was just reading an old edition of Capital and Class, journal of the Conference of Socialist Economists. I came across an article from 1979 with which I found myself in almost total agreement, and what is more the article is relevant to the situation today. The article, “Which Way Out of the Ghetto?”, by Diane Elson, is a critique of a book by David Purdy and Mike Prior entitled, “Out Of The Ghetto”, which was in turn an intervention into the debate over the Communist Party’s “British Road To Socialism”.

The background is all too familiar. As Elson points out, there had just been a

“victory of the Conservative Party in a General Election in which the Marxist candidates, from the Communist Party, the Workers Revolutionary Party, and Socialist Unity, generally polled less votes than the candidates of the National Front; and in which considerable numbers of working class people appear to have switched their vote from the Labour to the Conservative Party. The marginalisation of the British Left, our confinement in a political ghetto, has once again been forcibly demonstrated.”

Not only is that description of the situation depressingly familiar, but in fact, the situation of the Left is much worse today than it was even then. The Left does not appear, during the 30 year interval, to have learnt any lessons whatsoever, other than the wrong ones. In 1979, the group I belonged to – what is today the AWL – with miniscule forces, mobilised a large section of the LP and Labour Movement around the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory. As I’ve written in my blog on that, today I would have some serious disagreements with some of the politics upon which it was based, but it was a genuine attempt to relate to the working class as it really was, rather than some romanticised version of a working class that is just waiting for the right leadership to come along and free it from the evil clutches of the reformists and bureaucrats. Today, the AWL zigs and zags, in the classic fashion of a bureaucratic centrist (i.e. Stalinist) organisation, one minute describing the LP as a “stinking corpse”, the next wondering why anyone believes that it considers the LP dead!!!! One minute it correctly, as it did in arguing for the SCLV, rejects the idea of standing candidates against Labour other than on a clear revolutionary platform for clear political objectives, the next it collapses into support for the SWP’s “Left List”. Its attitude to the LP itself is just as schizoid, unable to decide whether it is in or out. Having denounced others for standing candidates, it decided to stand its own candidate in what could only be described as a moment of sectarian madness.

I had managed to get some comments about this posted to the AWL’s website, which originally didn’t get deleted. AWL comrades asked me how it was possible to call for a vote for Labour under conditions of the LP calling for cuts etc. I reminded them of the attitude of the SCLV under the same conditions, and asked if they had actually spoken to any real workers lately, because if they had he would know that it was not the LP that was divorced from the real working class, but the AWL and other sectarians. At the same time as doing what they had argued against other sectarians doing – and just days before the election Martin Thomas even published an article from 1976 setting out clearly why they should not! – they attempted to cover their shame by launching yet another of their front organisations, as a sectarian version of the SCLV, the clumsily conceived and titled Socialist Campaign To Stop The Tories and Fascists.

I’ve chosen the AWL, as an example of this sectarianism, just because they are an extreme version. In the election, the AWL’s candidate received just 75 votes. In the past, I’ve got more votes than that in a Parish Council Election, I was pressed into contesting, to make up the numbers, and that was the only bourgeois democratic election I’ve stood in that I’ve LOST! In the last two County Council elections I stood in, I got around three thousand votes. It would not have been so bad if the AWL had actually been standing on a revolutionary programme, but it wasn’t. As I’d pointed out to them some months ago, their politics are just as reformist as those of the LP. The main difference is that the LP are more intelligent reformists, and actually in contact with real workers. Just because the AWL decorate their programme with revolutionary rhetoric does not make it actually a revolutionary programme. In fact, the AWL, like pretty much all of the Revolutionary Left works with a Minimum and Maximum Programme. The Minimum Programme is what they actually do. It is thoroughly reformist, thoroughly Economistic – and that is the case when they engage in other activity, for example their politics in relation to Iraq, was Economistic – it is based upon energetic work in the Trade Unions, to build more militancy, aimed at improving workers conditions, WITHIN Capitalism. That same approach extends to other activity, that takes on a political colouration only because it is addressed to the level of the State at central or local level, for example, anti-cuts activity. Nothing within this activity is subversive of Capitalism as a Mode of Production; none of it is about putting forward solutions that actually counterpose SOCIALIST solutions, i.e solutions which prefigure the future society, through the development of socialistic forms and content, here and now, to Capitalism. The only Revolutionary content of such Programmes is the ultimatistic references to the need for Capitalism to be overthrown, for a Workers Government (incorrectly defined) etc., which have no other purpose than unanchored (and therefore pointless) propaganda, which has no real connection to the Minimum Programme, or activity based upon it, and for the purpose of “educating”, and motivating the endless stream of new, young recruits, that such organisations require, to replace all of those cadre who have recognised that life within such organisations is just like Groundhog Day, and left; a massive resource that has largely been wasted.

This is the subject of Purdy and prior’s work, and of Elson’s critique of it. I’ll begin by relating the 95% of Elson’s Critique that I agree with, before coming to the 5% I disagree with.