A Socialist Campaign For Labour and Europe - Part 2

In 2010, I argued that we needed a Socialist Campaign for Labour Victory, modelled on the SCLV created in 1979. That model arose on the same basis as that described in Part 1. In other words, as socialists we call for a vote for Labour, as the Workers' Party, but we cannot do so on the basis of Labour's record, or official programme, which is inadequate, and in some respects, reactionary, for example, today, in respect to its pro-Brexit stance. In 1979, the SCLV won wide support from CLP's, DLP's, and trades unions. One of its supporters was a certain Jeremy Corbyn. The model contrasted with the position taken by other socialists. The SWP, for example, which was perhaps the largest organisation on the left, at the time, studious avoided involvement in the Labour Party, remaining in splendid and sterile, sectarian isolation from the political struggle that was taking place, inside the Labour Party, during that period. But, come the election, the SWP completely collapsed its position, and called uncritically for a vote for Labour. One of its leading members, Paul Foot, commented at the time that “for the next few weeks we will be the best supporters of Labour.” 

The other basis of the campaign was that, win or lose, the fight goes on. If Labour were to win the election, then the fight of progressive social-democrats and socialists inside the party would continue, to support workers fighting against job losses, and pay restraint, to oppose cuts in public spending, to oppose immigration laws and so on. And, were Labour to lose that would still be the case. It would be necessary to utilise the foundations created to thereby move the Labour Party forward, now in opposition to the Tories, and to rebuild on a firmer footing ready for the next election. 

A programme for a Labour Victory, today, should be founded on these same principles. As I wrote in 2010, with hindsight the programme of the SCLV still rested, in too large a degree, on statism. The fundamental basis upon which we should proceed is rather that outlined by Marx, of workers self-activity, self-organisation, and self-government. Marxists should facilitate workers in that endeavour by providing them with the lessons of the past, both of success and failure, to avoid making the same mistakes. The role of the state, in so far as workers' parties gain control over the government, should be restricted to simply formalising what the workers themselves have created, and to removing any obstacles in the way of the workers' own self-activity and self-government. For example, if workers take over a bankrupt firm and turn it into a cooperative, then the government should legalise the workers action, in the same way the government did in Argentina, after the workers took over a number of companies and turned them into cooperatives. The government should act to do, at a state level, what workers would otherwise have to implement piecemeal at a local level. For example, as Marx said in relation to education, it is wholly objectionable that the state should itself be involved in providing education, but it is sensible that the state should establish minimum educational standards, and appoint inspectors to ensure they are being implemented in each school. 

In the past, I've described how this might operate not just in relation to education, but also in relation to other services, such as healthcare, social care, and housing. On the one hand, the provision of the services can be undertaken by worker cooperatives comprising teachers, healthcare workers and so on. These would have to meet the above nationally determined minimum standards in the services they provide. But, it is also necessary to both prevent rent-seeking activities by these cooperatives, and to ensure that the workers involved in providing these services begin to see what they provide not as simply a commodity, but as a use value, which requires breaking down the alienation of labour that the market and commodity production and exchange creates. It is necessary that they have a human relation with those for whom the service is provided. 

Assembly line of a Fordist Education Factory

On the one hand, that involves increasing the role of the student within the school, as the immediate consumer of the service. Students need to be put in a wholly different relation to the school and the teacher than currently exists within the Fordist education factories provided by the capitalist state. On the other hand, those that pay the cost of the provision of this service are not the students themselves, but their parents. It is necessary to involve parents in education provision to a far greater extent, and the obvious way of doing that is via the creation of commissioning cooperatives, whereby parents form together in an area and establish their own cooperative, so as to commission the education service to be provided to their children. This commissioning cooperative would act to collect the funds to pay for the education, but would also set the terms of the service they expect to be provided, which, in most cases, will be higher than the minimum standards set by the state. This model can be used in relation to health and social care too. 

In relation to housing, we should be in favour of council tenants forming similar cooperatives, and for the housing to be transferred to the cooperative from the council. We should favour the creation of construction and maintenance cooperatives, that could then work with these Housing Cooperatives to enable additional housing units to be built, and scheduled maintenance work to be undertaken on the terms dictated by tenants, and to the standards they require, subject, of course, to that meeting certain minimum standards. In that way, cases like the Grenfell Tower disaster could be avoided. Workers themselves, both as producers and consumers of goods and services, thereby, are united, helping to both undermine the alienation of labour, and the illusions created by commodity fetishism. 

But, of course, not all workers are equal. Some workers are unemployed, some are on low wages. The creation of housing cooperatives, building cooperatives and so on, itself creates the potential for unemployed workers to be employed locally, in these organisations, producing goods and services that are socially useful, in exchange for wages. But, similarly creating a worker owned and controlled social insurance scheme, would provide the resources to ensure that unemployed workers could be retrained, or given socially useful work in the community in return for benefits. In the meantime, we should demand that the existing state benefits system provide workers who are not in employment with a decent level of income, sufficient to cover the reproduction of their labour-power, including the upbringing of children. We should also demand that workers in work get a minimum weekly wage. What good is a £10 an hour minimum wage if you only get to work 5 hours a week? We should set a minimum weekly wage of £400, and rising in line with wages or prices, whichever is the greater. 

As a basis for discussion I would put forward the following. 

• Scrap the anti-union laws, and for positive trades union law to enable workers to organise effectively. Wage rises should at the very least keep up with price increases. The same should go for State benefits, grants and pensions. Set up Committees of Workers and Pensioners to calculate an accurate workers cost of living index.
• Bring Britain into line with other European countries. Start now with a 35 hour week and an end to overtime. Resolve the problem of the WASPI women. No to any extension of the pension age, instead reduce the retirement age to 60, with the goal of 55. Back date the pension payment to the WASPI women.
• All firms threatening closure should be occupied, and placed under Workers Control. As the capitalist government in Argentina did with the Zanon factory. A Labour Government should legalise the take-over and make the workers the legal owners to run as a co-operative. If the bosses can’t run the factories the workers can.
• Scrap all immigration controls. Race is not a problem; racism is. There is free movement of capital around the globe so capitalists can maximise their profits. We need the same right of free movement for workers to maximise their earnings. The labour movement must mobilise to drive the fascists off the streets. Purge racists from positions in the labour movement. Organise full support for black self-defence. Create workers defence groups on each estate under the democratic control of Estate Co-operatives, TRA’s or other democratically constituted workers bodies as they arise.
• Make the bosses pay, not the working class! Workers Co-operatives should get the same lavish funding that the State has given to the Banks, which continue to pay out billions in bonuses. For democratic control of the £1 trillion in workers pension funds, so that it can be used in the workers interests not in the interests of the bosses against workers.
• All hospitals, and other health provision to be brought under local democratic control. For democratically elected Boards of Health workers and patients in each hospital. Place control in the hands of elected Health Boards, or Town and Parish Councils, which should be given control over other aspects of local, public sector provision.
• Freeze rents and Council Tax. The Labour and Co-operative movement should mobilise its resources on a national and local level to create a National Construction Co-operative, founded on a federation basis. Co-operative communities should meet their housing and other construction needs through the co-op, which could immediately also begin to train unemployed workers and youth with the skills needed to deal with Britain’s housing crisis.
• End the chaos, waste, human suffering and misery of capitalism now – in Britain and throughout the world – show the urgent need to establish rational, democratic, human control over the economy, the decisive sectors of industry are already social property; remove the unjustified control of this property by shareholders. Labour should amend company law on corporate governance to prevent shareholders having any votes in the company, and should make all boards fully elected by the workers and managers of the company. We need to mobilise the existing resources of the Co-op Bank, and Co-operative Movement in general, to develop a dynamic Co-operative Movement to finance the development of Workers Co-operatives, and we further need to use the billions of Pounds in workers' pension funds to invest in real capital accumulation, and to end their use for financial speculation by the banks and fund managers that currently control these funds. We should use these funds to create new cooperative firms, particularly in labour intensive, high value, high profit areas of the economy, as part of a single co-operative federation, established initially on a national basis, but extending its links to the co-operative movement in the rest of Europe and the world.
• We need a political revolution in the cooperative movement to bring it under workers' control. All retail cooperatives should be converted into worker owned and controlled cooperatives. We need to build a cooperative movement across Europe alongside creating an EU wide Workers Party, and trades union movement.
• The strength of the labour movement lies in the rank and file. Our perspective must be working class action to transcend the limitations that capitalism necessarily encounters. We should build on its foundations, and put a working class socialist system in its place – rather than having our representatives run the system and waiting for the crumbs from the table of the bankers and bosses. But, we cannot wait for some future government to bring that about, or for some single revolutionary event. We have to begin to create the society of tomorrow today, by taking back into workers ownership and control as many aspects of our lives at work and at home as we can now.
• The capitalist police are an enemy for the working class. Support all demands to weaken them as the bosses’ striking force: dissolution of special squads (Special Branch, MI5 etc), and, in the meantime, for public accountability etc. Democratically controlled neighbourhood cooperatives can not only ensure that they are well maintained etc., but can also organise their own policing. That is particularly important where local communities see the police as an enemy in their midst. Democratically constituted communities that find themselves in need of support to deal with criminal gangs, knife crime and so on, should be able to call on workers in other communities to assist them. We demand that all workers have the right to paid leave from work to engage in such neighbourhood policing activities and training, in the same way they do for jury duty.
• We recognise the difference between the police and armed forces as organisations of the capitalist state aimed against the working class, and the ordinary members of those organisations, who are themselves workers. We support democratic rights for all members of the police and armed forces, including the Right of Democratic Assembly, and the right to elect immediate commanding officers. Soldiers should have the right thereby to determine what level of training and equipment is required for any activity, and to demand that it be provided before that action is undertaken.
• A real defence of British workers and their freedoms begins by not attacking workers in other countries, but focusing that defence here in Britain. Bring the troops home from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, and every other outpost of British Imperialism.
• For universal military conscription under democratic trades union control. Using workers defence committees on estates as the basis, develop local workers militia, initially linked to and trained by the existing workers in the armed forces, but ultimately as a replacement for the standing army.
   
• Free abortion and contraception on demand. Women’s equal right to work, and full equality for women. 45 years after the passing of the Equal Pay and Equal Opportunities Acts, women remain unfairly treated in the workplace and in the home. This shows that statist measures, such as passing Acts of Parliament, requiring certain types of behaviour, is ineffective without workers having the power to enforce those rights. That power only comes with ownership and control of the means of production. The development of workers co-operatives providing that ownership and control would be an immediate way to enforce equal pay and opportunities.
   
• Start improving the social services rather than cutting them. Stop cutting jobs in the public sector. But, recognise that, as state capitalist enterprises, these services are there to meet the needs of the bosses not workers. The evidence of that is the extent to which most of these elements of the welfare state were developed during The Depression by the Tory Chancellor Neville Chamberlain. All of them are run by state capitalist bureaucrats, and suffer all the attendant problems of inefficiency and expense that goes with it. As a beginning, we need Official Committees of Social Workers to introduce Workers Inspection, and Control. We need Committees of Carers to oversee the work of facilities. But, ultimately real control can only come if these services are taken out of the hands of the bosses’ state, and placed directly in the hands of workers.
• It is essential to achieve the fullest democracy in the labour movement. Automatic re-selection of MP’s during each parliament, and the annual election by Annual Conference of party leaders. Annual election of all trade union officials, who should be paid the average for the trade. These measures are essential if we are to have a leadership of the labour movement, which is responsive and loyal to the interests of the working class. Yet again we go into an election with right wing Labour MP's getting a free pass. That is totally unacceptable.
• The expenses scandal lifted the lid on the corruption of bourgeois democracy, but it has only told a fraction of the truth. Open the books on bourgeois democracy. We need an elected committee from the labour movement to audit all MP’s expenses, salaries and other earnings. But, we also need to know about all the other members of this club. Full disclosure of all top journalists earnings and connections with the bosses along with those of the media monopolies they work for; full disclosure of the earnings and links of the top civil servants, the judges, and military top brass. For elected committees of Workers Inspection to open the books of the biggest companies to uncover the truth about the billions pocketed by the top bosses and the tax they avoid paying.
• Scrap the Monarchy and House of Lords. Complete the bourgeois democratic revolution, and vest all legislative and executive power in the House of Commons. For annual elections to Parliament, and the right of recall so we can kick the bums out when they fall down on the job.
• Capitalism is a global system, we need a global workers movement to fight it. To begin with we should at least develop an effective European Labour Movement. Socialists inside the LP, and other workers parties throughout Europe, should combine to fight for a single European Workers Party linked to a single European Trade Union. Scrap the European Commission and other unelected bodies, and vest power in the European Parliament. 

In order to achieve even the progressive social-democratic agenda described above, it is necessary for Britain to Remain in the EU. We do not argue that for the same reason that David Cameron did in 2016, or that the Blair-rights and Liberals do today. There is no basis upon which socialists could stand on a platform with Tories, or Liberals, or Blair-rights, simply upon the superficial basis that they both seek a vote to stay, because the more important point is that they seek to stay on diametrically opposed grounds. 

It is a disgrace that the Left allowed the Liberals and Blair-right, as well as Remainer Tories to establish the People's Vote campaign as a conservative social movement that occupied the ground of opposing Brexit. That is the ground that a progressive, internationalist Labour Party should have monopolised for itself, over the last four years. It has marginalised the Left, and demoralised a large proportion of that new generation of young activists that came in behind Corbyn in 2015. That is seen in the fact that 60% of Labour's 2017 vote deserted it in the local elections, and EU parliamentary elections in 2019. The same 60% say they will not vote Labour in the next election. Indeed, 60% of Labour members themselves voted tactically for other Remain supporting parties in the European Parliament elections. Corbyn's nationalist programme has seen him lose a large part of that support, with the biggest decline being amongst the 18-25 year-olds. The party has lost around 100,000 members. Corbyn's reactionary nationalist agenda has allowed the Liberal corpse to be resurrected, and to prosper to a degree whereby it could even overtake Labour in these elections, unless Labour radically changes its position, to become the most militant opponent of Brexit. 

The pro-EU Tories, Liberals and Blair-rights seek to stay only in so far, as they see it as a means of furthering the interests of the dominant sections of British capital. Socialists seek to remain because they see it as fundamental to maintaining the unity and solidarity of workers across Europe, of undermining the petty, narrow minded nationalist divisions that can be thrown up to divide workers, and which are used to pursue a race to the bottom of conditions, of the kind that Cameron's “reforms” were all about, and which would intensify were Britain to actually leave on the basis that the likes of Rees-Mogg seek to achieve. Socialists see remaining in the EU as central to opposing the reactionary nationalist ideas of individual national roads to socialism that Stalinists, and left reformists have put forward in the past, which further the illusion that somehow socialism can simply be legislated into existence by a national parliament, and implemented from on high by the capitalist state. 

Marxists do not, therefore, hold any illusions that social-democratic forces such as those of Syriza, Podemos, or Corbyn are socialist. They are not proposing the kind of building of an independent worker owned property, and independent organisation of workers-power and democracy, increasingly standing in opposition to capitalist property, and the capitalist state, that is required for socialism.  But, we do recognise that, however confusedly and inadequately, they represent the rational interests of socialised capital, looking forward, whereas the conservatives look backwards, in their representation of forms of property that have had their day, even within the confines of capitalism. It is that objective reality, that underpins the collapse of the political centre, and which means that its only resolution, within capitalism, resides with a rejuvenation of social-democracy, or else with the rise of some form of fascism or Bonapartism. 

It is on that basis that Marxists give critical support to social-democratic forces such as Syriza, Podemos, Corbyn and so on. To the extent that these forces can link up across Europe, and extend their influence, the more the objective reality exerts itself against the current appearance of the hegemony of conservative ideas and power. But, the failures of Syriza, and Podemos, and of Corbyn also illustrate why this must be critical support, and why we must vociferously oppose the tendency to establish a cult of personality around the leaders of these movements that is thoroughly unhealthy, and inevitably leads to disappointment and demoralisation. Those that similarly formed a cult of supporters around Chavez, are an example of that same phenomenon. 

In part 3, I will look at how the principles and demands outlined for a Socialist Campaign for Labour can be incorporated with a Socialist Campaign for Europe, and the specific tactics to be employed around these demands and principles in the forthcoming election.

Forward To Part 3

Back To Part 1