So, Sunak has called the General Election for July 4th, making my 2023 prediction of an Autumn 2023 election out by 9 months, but beating the predictions of those that claimed he would go to the last minute. In fact, the reason he's gone for the election, now, are fully consistent with the arguments I outlined in my earlier prediction. As, today's CPI data shows, the rate of increase in prices of services, which makes up 80% of the economy, have barely changed from last month, rising around 6% year on year, and wages continue to rise. So, the hoped for cut in official interest rates is now off the cards, for the foreseeable future. Economically, things can only get worse for the government from here.
But, voters are presented with two reactionary and unpalatable choices. Starmer talks about change, but his reactionary nationalist, jingoist and sovereigntist Blue Labour, with its embrace of Brexit, offers no political change whatsoever from the failed, reactionary, nationalist polices of Sunak, and the Tories. The only change is one of the faces of the politicians implementing those reactionary policies at the expense of workers. It simply means that Starmer's gang get the Ministerial cars and salaries, and what goes with it, rather than Sunak's gang. For workers, in terms of a choice, this is no choice at all.
If things were only about the election itself, and voting, then there would be no reason for Marxists to make any distinction between the two. We certainly cannot actively call for a vote for the reactionary, nationalist policies of Starmer and Blue Labour. But, the election, and voting, forms a tiny part of the concerns of Marxists, in determining our tactics and strategy, including during such periods. Our concern is, rather, always to remain with the working-class, and their organisations, and, in so doing, to try to explain what is going on, and, in so doing to win them away from their continued delusions both in the politics of parties such as Labour, and in bourgeois-democracy itself.
As Lenin set out, in Left-Wing Communism, it is a terrible error, for Marxists to go from their own understanding that bourgeois-democracy is a sham, and that parties like Labour can offer no solutions for workers, to assuming that the working-class as a whole shares that understanding, when it clearly doesn't. What is more, blaming the workers for not understanding that, and for not having yet achieved a revolutionary class consciousness, and so abandoning them to their fate, whilst engaging in a sterile pursuit of an electoral adventure, amounts to nothing more than an infantile throwing out of your dummy.
Many years ago, I wrote that, if a situation ever arose, where, say, in Britain, the BNP grew in electoral support, to become the main recipient of workers votes, the party to which the working-class looked for solutions to its problems, in other words, for all intents and purposes, became the workers party, albeit a reactionary workers' party, then Marxists would have to seek, likewise, to work within it, not, of course, to support that party or its reactionary agenda, but to seek to break workers from it, to expose its contradictions, and idiocies, to support it only like a rope supports a hanged man.
But, in many ways, today, Starmer's Blue Labour, though it has retained the name Labour Party, much as, previously, New Labour retained the name Labour Party, is that BNP I talked about many years ago, or at least a version of UKIP. Rather like the fable of the boiled frog, it has slowly moved away from its previous ideology of conservative social-democracy (neoliberalism) to its current reactionary nationalism. Marxists have to recognise that development, and respond accordingly, to it, but the fundamental reality that the vast majority of workers continue to look to this party for their solutions, to vote for it, and their other mass organisations, the trades unions, remain organically tied to it.
We cannot call for a vote for Blue Labour's reactionary nationalist policies, any more than we could call for a vote for those same policies advocated by the Tories, UKIP or the BNP. But, we have to understand why millions of workers, will do so, why their trades unions will rally around Starmer and Blue Labour, in the election, and we cannot stand aside from that, throwing out our dummies, and demanding that workers act as though they have suddenly arrived at a revolutionary class consciousness.
If it were simply a question of the election, and of voting, we could call for a vote for the Liberals, Greens, Plaid or SNP, all of which stand closer to the kind of conservative social-democratic ideology that both the Tories and Labour used to represent. Better still, it would be, of course, wonderful if the Left could come together on a truly international socialist platform, demanding re-joining the EU, for a joint European workers struggle for a series of socialist demands, and for a European Workers Government, but no such thing is in prospect.
But, even if it were, our main concern is not with simply standing in such elections and registering a protest vote. Our concern is to stand alongside the working-class, and to gain its ear, on the largest possible scale, and to begin, thereby, to prepare it for the attacks on it that Blue Labour will inevitably launch on day one, to offer it a prospect of organising and resisting those attacks, not least, by utilising all those things that make the Labour Party, as the workers' party, albeit, now, a petty-bourgeois, reactionary nationalist workers party, different from those other parties, which may or may not be more progressive in their ideology and programme.
None of those other parties offer the opportunity that exists within the Labour Party, for tens of thousands of ordinary worker members to engage in political activity in the branches and CLP's; none offer the opportunity for those workers to engage in political activity, and to apply political pressure, via their affiliated trades unions. Yes, of course, as seen with Starmer's Bonapartist regime, over the last four years, he and the machine will seek to prevent any such activity, including the suspension and expulsion of members, CLP's, and so on, but, in so doing, he only the more quickly, exposes the reactionary, authoritarian nature of Blue Labour, inviting even more resistance and organisation, including, at some point, a tipping point at which, the majority of members and unions either stand up, and kick out the current reactionary leaders, or else break away to form a new mass party, much as happened with the original break from the Liberals that created the Labour Party, in the first place.
Marxists cannot call for a vote for Starmer's petty-bourgeois, reaction, nationalist policies, but we can engage in the election, including in the electioneering of ordinary Labour members, discussing with them, the reactionary nature of those policies, and need to combat them, to defeat them, and put in their place, progressive socialist policies. We can similarly engage with workers who cannot vote for the reactionary policies of Blue Labour, but who are voting for the Liberals, Greens, Plaid and SNP, explaining why, although those parties might have more in common with the conservative social-democratic ideology of Labour in the past (and of the Conservatives for most of the latter part of the twentieth century) they also offer no real answer.
Those politics and that social-democratic ideology offered no way forward for workers in the 20th century, its failure in the 1970's, led to Thatcher, and created the conditions of the growth of the petty-bourgeoisie, and its reflection in the conversion of the main parties to that reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalist agenda, closer to the ideas of 18th and early 19th century Classical Liberalism, than to the ideas of conservative social-democracy (neoliberalism). It led to stagflation, and the replacement of Keynesian fiscal intervention with Friedmanite monetary intervention, and the subsequent blowing up of asset price bubbles. What is more the Liberals, Greens et al do not have that same relation to the working-class, and its mass organisations, through which the class can exert its social weight upon them, outside the electoral process. Its why the working-class, and its trades unions split from the Liberals in the first place.
In the next six weeks, the bourgeois media will be full of the trivia of the electoral process, in which, much as with the Brexit referenda, the focus will be upon the political celebrities and their individual dramas, as a diversion from the fact that, politically there is not a paper thickness of difference between them. Marxists need to avoid being drawn into that avalanche of trivia and chicken shit politics, which also acts as a convenient diversion from the genocide in Gaza, the issuing of warrants by the ICC for Netanyahu, which ought to be followed by further warrants for the arrest of the western imperialist politicians such as Genocide Joe, Sunak, Scholz, Van Der Lyon, and Starmer who have armed it, or legitimised it with their lies.
Marxists should keep attention on that real life politics as it affects millions of workers across the globe, and continue to hold the politicians of all these parties accountable for it, as we argue for, and build a progressive alternative to the sorry and despicable bunch of the lot of them.
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