Unfortunately, socialists in Britain have very little choice in this week's elections. Its pretty much the same choice that French socialists had in the second round of their Presidential elections, to vote for either a Liberal or a Nationalist. In France, a majority of voters either abstained or else cast a blank vote, or spoiled their ballot paper in some other way. Local elections at least offer the potential for socialists to get behind decent international socialists where they are standing, but what to do elsewhere?
Marxists will always advise workers to work inside, and to vote for the Workers' Party, and God help us, in Britain, that still remains the Labour Party, unlikely as that seems given the nature of the right-wing careerists in the PLP, local council chambers, and of its right-wing, nationalist politics. All of that is bad, but, to be honest, its not too dissimilar from the horrible politics that the Labour Party has always had. It has always been basically a Liberal Party Mark II, remembering that, initially, the trades unions that created it, gave their affiliation and support to the Liberals, and trades union MP's sat as Lib-Labs. And, it has always been riddled with nationalism too, lining workers up behind the bosses in both WWI and II, and Oswald Moseley found no difficulty sitting as a Labour MP, and Minister, during which time he drew up his economic nationalist agenda – The Mosely Memorandum – that won the backing of other Labour economic nationalists like Nye Bevan, and formed the basis of the economic programme of Moseley's British Union of Fascists.
Even knowing the right-wing bourgeois nature of the Labour Party, as an extension of the trades union consciousness of the forces that created it, Lenin still advised British socialists and communists to join it, and work inside it. He described the Labour Party as a bourgeois workers' party, that is a workers' party in the sense that it is the party that the British workers look to as representing their interests (even though it doesn't), and to which they have organic links, both in their own individual membership, social links to its members via their communities, and via their trades unions. Its in these ways that workers, collectively, can pressure and influence the Labour Party, in a way they cannot do with the other bourgeois parties such as the Liberals and Tories, and other middle class parties such as the Greens.
It is always a possibility for workers to join the Labour Party, and change it from within, as well as influencing it via their trades unions, even though, in practice, that is never straightforward. The first blog post I ever wrote, and which I reproduced, here, when I began writing Boffy's Blog, was one, detailing the difficulty my wife and I had in being allowed to join the Labour Party back in 1974. A year or so ago, in response to the position taken up by Paul Mason, of calling on The Left to essentially liquidate itself, and propose a Popular Front with the Labour Party “Centre” around Starmer, I set out why such a strategy was bound to end in disaster, and would be just a repeat of the calls of the soft left, in the 1980's, to keep our heads down, and support Kinnock, in expectation of a Labour victory. That not only led to further electoral failures, but also enabled Kinnock to launch his witch hunt against the Left, creating the conditions for the takeover of the party by Blair.
Starmer has done exactly the same thing, and all those in the party, like the AWL, that soft-pedalled in opposing those witch hunts, and, indeed, aligned themselves, in many cases, with the witch hunters, and even led the pack in search of blood, on some occasions, have reaped what they sowed, as they now have been expelled. Indeed, as the contradictions mount, Starmer cannot allow the right-wing, nationalist politics of the PLP to be challenged, and the only way of achieving that is to double down even harder on the witch hunt, and the imposition of Bonapartist, authoritarian rule inside the party, to prevent any criticism being able to secure support. The Paul Mason's and co. will find that they have to become even more right-wing and compliant than they have already become as apologists of imperialism, or they too will be expunged. Even the AWL's Zionism, and its cosying up to paleo-rightwingers like Luke Akehurst and John McTernan, was not enough to save them.
As I have described before, in 1848, Marx and Engels joined the German Democrats, knowing it was an openly bourgeois party. They did so, because, in the given conditions of the time, it was the only way of gaining the ear of German Workers, who looked to that party to represent its interests, in the major political struggles of the time - See: Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky. Similarly, Zinoviev said he following, speaking at the Second Congress of the Comintern,
“As the experiences of the Russian Revolution teach us – remember this in England and America! – the most important thing of all is to stay in the midst of the masses of workers. You will often go wrong with them, but never leave the mass organisations of the working class, however reactionary they may be at any given moment”.
Yet, its obvious that Marxists cannot call on workers to simply vote passively and uncritically for bourgeois candidates, even if they are standing under the banner of a Workers' Party. In 1979, faced with such a dilemma, Marxists, in the Labour Party established the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory, bringing CLP's, branches, trades unions, and candidates together around a minimum programme of socialist demands set out in opposition to the official Labour Manifesto, on the basis that, whilst we asked workers to vote Labour, we could not ask them to uncritically support the record of the Wilson/Callaghan government, or the continuation of those policies for another five years. Yet, compared to Starmer's Blue Labour PLP, and the programme he is fighting the local elections on, the Wilson/Callaghan government was a model of progressive social-democracy!
I have suggested similar strategies in other recent General Elections, in 2010 and 2015, as well as a similar approach in the EU Referendum, and so on. But, not even that is possible in Starmer's Bonapartist Labour Party regime. Anyone undertaking such a strategy would be lining themselves up for immediate expulsion. As I described, recently, however, that does not mean that Labour Party members cannot use their time to support local campaigns run around issues such as the need to re-join the EU, and so on, using the election period, as one to make the point of the need to increase the work inside the Labour Party to combat its current direction. Already, Labour is struggling to get activists to go out to campaign for its current right-wing, nationalist agenda, especially in conditions where they feel under threat from an authoritarian leadership. Again that is nothing new.
In the 1950's and early 60's, the right-wing Labour leadership also conducted witch hunts and expulsions against the Left, at a time when that Left had been gaining in strength, around issues such as nuclear disarmament, especially in its Young Socialists. Labour banned the Socialist Labour League, which became the sectarian Workers Revolutionary Party of Gerry Healy. It is a good lesson for the Left, in not getting carried away with the idea that expulsion from the party can somehow be turned to advantage in the shape of building some alternative. The same lesson comes from the experience of the expulsion of Militant in the late 1980's, and early 90's.
In the early 1960's, following the banning of the SLL, Labour membership fell, and it is always the case that the members of the Left form the bedrock of party activism. The party became moribund, even though its paper membership figures continued to show significant numbers of members. Yet, even with a moribund party, Labour was able to win the 1964 and 1966 elections, largely on the basis of a traditional working-class vote that had had enough of 13 years of Tory government. But, this kind of inertial support for social-democratic parties is what led to their gradual decline in elections in the period from WWII to today, and, as in France, Greece and so on, their virtual extinction. As my blog post about trying to join Labour in 1974 indicated, even at that time, the party was still moribund, with branches comprising half a dozen old careerist Councillors, who only held meetings as and when it was necessary, and often didn't even bother to canvass, especially given that they did not have the activists to do so.
The same was true following Kinnock's gutting of the party in the late 1980's, and early 90's. Not only did large numbers of activists leave, but those that remained had little enthusiasm to go out and canvas purely for the greater glory of a bunch of right-wing careerists. Its true that, under Blair, party membership did take a spike higher, but most of this was, again, just a paper membership. As it became clear that Blair would win big in 1997, there was no shortage of middle class careerists who wanted to attach themselves to the bandwagon, and secure for themselves a cushy parliamentary career, or even just be associated with those that did, in order to gain an ear, as they built their own careers in public relations, media, and so on. None of these people were going to do the day to day drudge work of ordinary members, week in week out, other than as part of the occasional photo-shoot. No end of such people still leach on the periphery of Labour, many having been drawn closer in again, after Corbyn was removed, and appear on the News Press Reviews, and other such “you scratch my back” opportunities.
With Starmer now set on ravaging the party membership, the same history is being repeated, and, as in the past, they will rely on inertia, on opposition to the Tories rather than support for Labour, and on TV and media, rather than boots on the ground. In fact, in my area, both the Tories and the Liberals seem to have more ability to get boots on the ground canvassing than does Labour, and that despite the fact that Labour is still supposed to have around 500,000 members.
There will indeed be some Labour candidates standing who are international socialists, and where they can be found, they should be given what support we can offer, but they are likely to be as rare as hen's teeth, because the party Leadership has imposed its authoritarian rule on the elections. Manifestos and election material are all being closely and centrally manufactured, and the same liberal economic policies, smothered in cloying nationalism pervades it. Marxists cannot ask voters to simply vote for that uncritically. We have to build an alternative, just as its necessary for French Socialists to build an alternative to the Thatcherite policies of Macron, the failed conservative social-democratic politics of the French Socialist Party and Communist Party, and indeed the economic nationalist politics of Melonchon.
Its clearly not an easy task, but the fact that half a million, mostly young people, flocked into the Labour Party in 2015, and brought the biggest increase in Labour's vote since 1945, in the 2017 General Election, despite the inadequate politics of Corbynism, shows its not impossible. As I said at the time of Corbyn's original nomination, the danger would be that it became just another example of cultism, of the Left swarming around some new saviour, at the expense of actually building a healthy, democratic movement. And, so it turned out, with Momentum being simply a Corbyn fan club, and organiser of public spectacles, but failing to deal either with Corbyn's own failings, or building the mechanisms in the party to remove the power of the right-wing careerists. We must learn from that too, as we rebuild.
In 2019, as Corbyn ignored the views of the party membership, and embarked on the idiocy of his economic nationalist agenda around Brexit, 60% of Labour Party members, let alone voters, abandoned Labour in the Spring elections to local Councils and to the European Parliament, and voted instead for anti-Brexit candidates. It created the conditions under which it was impossible for Labour to get those votes back by the time of the 2019 General Election. Today, Starmer is an even bigger Brexiter than was Corbyn, and he has wrapped himself even more comprehensively in the butcher's apron stained with the blood of millions from the British Empire. Even were it possible to hold your nose and vote for his right-wing liberal agenda, its impossible to vote for that reactionary agenda that is indistinguishable from the Tories, and indeed, increasingly hard to differentiate from UKIP. The only thing Starmer and Labour have going for them is the fact of Boris Johnson's Tories being even more distasteful, and what is worse from the perspective of many Tories also incompetent.
If progressive Labour voters are likely to do as they did in 2019, the question is where would they put their vote? In 2019, the answer was easy. They voted for Liberals, Greens, or the SNP and Plaid who were offering clear opposition to Brexit. But, besides the fact that all these parties offer the same choice of liberalism and/or nationalism, they offer no real alternative either. In fact, when a Liberal canvasser came to my door recently, I asked him why they were no longer supporting re-joining the EU. “We are,” he replied. But, its quite clear that in practice they are not. None of their spokespeople raise the issue, and although in their election material they talk about climate change, and all the usual stuff about litter, there is not one word about the terrible effects of Brexit, or mention of a commitment to re-joining the EU. So, it will not be surprising if, as with the French Presidential elections, the biggest vote goes to “None of the above”, as they all offer pretty much the same set of abysmal options.
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