Lessons For The Left
Lesson 7 – Strategy, Tactics and Principles (i)
Paul draws heavily on Gramscian concepts of strategy of “war of position”, “war of manoeuvre”, and the concept of “hegemony” to flesh out the conclusions he draws from his essentially subjectivist analysis of current conditions. This is the basis of his argument above about the need to move from a strategy of survival to a strategy of resistance.
He says,
“Antonio Gramsci warned that, in a Western democracy, the state is just an “outer trench” in the defence of capitalism, and that behind it stands “a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks” stretching right through civil society.”
In actual fact, this statement is back to front. It is all those fortresses, and earthworks that represent the outer trench. It is they which are a natural feature of the bourgeois landscape, so natural that no one notices them. That is what makes them so powerful as ideological bastions, the means by which the “ruling ideas” are able to control civic society without a shot being fired. Its only when that landscape is disrupted by some social earthquake that the ruling class has to fall back to its inner bulwarks of defence, in the form of the state, first in its own passive defences, via the courts and so on, and ultimately via the mobilisation of the bodies of armed men.
Because Paul fails to identify the real immediate enemy as being the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, and its ideological representatives amongst the Liberals/anarcho-capitalists, he actually erects his defences in the wrong place, and facing in the wrong direction, much as did the British in Singapore in 1942. So, Paul says,
“Only twice — under Michael Foot (1980–83) and under Corbyn — has the Labour leadership failed to act as a solid defensive fortification for the profit system. In both cases the corporate elite mobilised their resources to a) split the party, creating the SPD in the 1980s and the TIG in 2019; and b) reputationally damage the leadership to the point where — combined with the impact of a centrist split — it could not win an election.”
The idea that this was the result of the corporate elite, is somewhat conspiratorialist. Certainly, in relation to TIG, you would have expected the corporate elite to have done a much better job, but, in any case, the result was not at all what it wanted. The failure of Labour, in conditions where the Liberals were never going to be in a position to form a government, or even win sufficient seats to act as a stabiliser on a Corbyn government, was inevitably going to result in the election of a Tory government, forced into the cul de sac of a hard Brexit, which is the last thing it wants. It put a hard Brexit supporting Johnson into Downing Street, meaning it now faces the nightmare of Brexit. For all the claims, the corporate elite would have much preferred a Corbyn government, and No Brexit, than a Johnson government and Brexit, let alone a No Deal Brexit. The corporate elite would have controlled Corbyn as they did Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan. And, the likelihood is that had Labour been elected in 2019, the PLP would have isolated him, and probably replaced him anyway.
Paul continues,
“But it’s important to know what the establishment were afraid of: on both occasions it was a strategy of austerity, class warfare and military intervention that pushed a crucial component of social democracy — what we call today the Soft Left — into an alliance with the anti-capitalist left.”
The problem, here, being that this “anti-capitalist Left” was not really “anti-capitalist” at all, in the sense of being socialist. It was itself social-democratic, but as a form of reactionary, nationalist social-democracy, as represented by Corbyn's pro-Brexit position. It was only “anti-big corporate capital”, the actual form of capital that is progressive, whilst being pro-small capitalism, the form that is reactionary. And, the reality is that the soft-Left were never in alliance with Corbyn, any more than the Soft-Left around Kinnock were ever in alliance with Foot, who shared those same reactionary economic nationalist illusions as Corbyn.
It was less than a year before Kinnock stabbed the miners in the back, and simultaneously scabbed on the struggles of Left Councils fighting Tory cuts, for example, opening the flood gates for that soft-Left to capitulate wholesale. Those of us who lived though it remember it well. Its indelibly printed on our consciousness. When the chips were down, and the soft-lefts were required to live up to their left rhetoric, over spending cuts, rent or rate rises, they melted like butter. And, the ruling class have more than enough experience of such elements to know that they will always act in that way. It requires no conspiracy by corporate elites to achieve such a condition.
Paul says,
“After 2015 the soft, radical and orthodox left tendencies (I’m using Jeremy Gilbert’s typology here) found common cause in an anti-austerity programme.”
And, that in itself was an inadequate basis on which to build any kind unity, which indicates precisely why the concept of a broad alliance will fall apart on first contact with real class struggle.
He goes on,
“Seek tactical unity with the broadest possible coalition of anti-neoliberals inside the Party”
But, on what basis? In actual fact, neo-liberalism (conservative social-democracy) is progressive as against the reactionary liberalism of the Brexiteers, and economic nationalism of the Lexiters. The way forward is not via “anti-capitalism” or “anti-neo-liberalism”, but by pushing forward through such conditions, driving their contradictions to their fullest extent.
Paul notes,
“If we leave aside all tactical mistakes, the sabotage alleged in #LabourLeaks and the incompetence revealed in the Labour Together report, we lost because the left’s war of manoeuvre the ran into an effective ruling class war of position.”
He describes a series of events including “the smear and disinformation campaigns against Jeremy himself; the alleged sabotage by party officials described in #LabourLeaks; the TIG walkout; the prorogation of Parliament and the attack on the judiciary; the overthrow of May and the purge of the Conservative Party’s liberal wing; the absorption of thousands of UKIP members into the Tory party; the adoption of data manipulation methods from the US right; the Blairite takeover of the Libdems — plus the creation and dissolution of the Brexit Party.”
But many of those things like the prorogation, attack on the Judiciary, overthrow of May, purge of Tory social-democrats, entryism by Kippers etc., were not instituted by the ruling class! Quite the contrary. All these things were quite against the interests of that ruling class, and were rather the project of a reactionary, petty-bourgeois, nationalist elite, against whom the ruling class were trying to fight their own rear-guard action! A section of the Left, those that marched under the banner of Another Europe Is Possible, and who wore badges saying “Love Corbyn Hate Brexit”, and who came out to march against Johnson's coup, recognised that, but Corbyn, and his Stalinist entourage not only failed to take part in that action, but described those that did as being merely Liberals and Blair-rights. It was almost a direct parallel with the Third Period failure of the Spanish Stalinists to defend the Popular Front government in 1932, against the attacks of the fascists and Monarchists.
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