Why Won't The Unions Fight For Control Of Our Pensions

Over the last few years, I've written quite a few posts about Pensions. From early on, I was interested in the ideas put forward by Robin Blackburn, who spoke about the Swedish example, from the 1980's, where the Trades Unions were able to get a law passed whereby employers had to create new shares that were then paid into a central Pension Fund. Within a short time, it had grown to account for 7% of the value of shares on the Swedish Stock Market. I put forward a similar idea recently as a means by which the Liberal-Tories could raise the funds needed to pay for the deficit - How To Pay For The deficit. The problem with the Swedish model, as with any system that is in the hands of the bosses or their State, was that, when it suited that State, when it was in a position to do so, it simply scrapped the scheme. That should be no surprise. That is what bosses always do, it is what their State always does. Control comes from ownership, and if workers want to have control over their pensions, they have to own them.

But, the irony is that, in Britain, workers do own their Pension Funds, the money in them is our money to pay our pensions, and even the money paid into them by employers is done so as part of a bargaining process. It is their contribution to our deferred wages. Yet, even though these pensions, this money, is our property, we have no control over it. That is at odds even with every tenet of bourgeois property law, and bourgeois ideology, which stresses that the owners of property should have the unfettered ability to dispose of it as they choose. No one would dream of suggesting that if I buy a house, I should not be able to exercise control over how I use it, decorate it, or who I sell it to. So why, should I not have control over the money in my Pension Fund, why should I not, along with every other worker, be able to exercise a collective control over it, decide where it should be invested or not invested, and when and how I should be able to access it, to take my Pension? The Left frequently talks, in the abstract, about Workers Control. It does so by attaching it as a meaningless, utopian demand to the reactionary demand for nationalisation, in the hope, as Marx described, in attacking such demands, to hide their shame. But, when it comes to something immediate and practical, such as the simple demand for workers to have control over their own pensions the same Left is remarkably silent. Why?

In the last couple of decades, we have seen that workers cannot rely on the State Pension. It has been manipulated and mangled in every way conceivable. The Tories broke the link with earnings, at a time when earnings were rising faster than prices. New Labour failed to restore the link, and insulted Pensioners with a 75p rise. Now, in the midst of further cuts, the Liberal-Tories propose to restore the link with earnings just as wages are being frozen, and prices are let rip. Even in its guarantee against prices, it is changing the link from that with RPI to that with the much lower CPI. For the first few decades of the introduction of National Insurance and Pensions, the vast majority were paying in, whilst never living long enough to draw out. Now that workers are living long enough, that they might be able to actually draw Pension, for a few years of active life, the State proposes changing the rules, so that they can't draw their pension until they are much older. Yet, already, workers in Britain have to wait until they are 65, to draw a worse Pension than workers in France draw at 60!

I was watching the BBC's Newsnight last week, where they were discussing the issue. So much nonsense I have not heard in a long time. I've shown in the past that the argument about the increasing number of Pensioners to people in the working population is false. The reality is that since pensions were first introduced productivity per worker has increased many-fold, probably 100 times what it was. If 1 worker then could support 1 pensioner, then today they could support 100 pensioners. We should be reducing the retirement age not increasing it. The problem is not more pensioners, but the fact that an increasing amount of the surplus, produced by workers, is taken by Capital, to finance the Capitalists consumption, to finance the increasing amounts that go to buying means of production, and to finance the burgeoning Capitalist State. One worker on the programme put it succinctly. He had started work at 15, and paid NI for nearly 50 years since then, on the understanding that he had a contract with the State to retire at 65. Now, the State was breaking that Contract. Anne Widdicombe tried to deny this argument saying his contributions were not to pay for HIS Pension, but the pensions of all those who had gone before. But, this is nonsense. Firstly, she was right to say that the first pensioners had paid nothing or little in to the system. But, the reality is that these first pensioners took very little out of it either. The level of pension was a pittance, it was limited as to who could claim it, and most of them died within a few years at most of receiving it. And over the next few decades that continued to be true, money was paid in by workers who never got to take it out. Moreover, no one would agree, in the first place, to such an arrangement if they did not believe that the provision they were making for others would not likewise be made for themselves.

But, I did a quick calculation. I reckoned that, from when I left school, up to retirement age, I would have paid in £50,000 in NI contribuitons. A few years after I left school I started paying into a Life Insurance Endowment. Its currently worth around 4 times what I've paid into it. Given that for the last 10 years returns on Endowment Polices have been pretty abysmal, its not excessive to suggest that had I invested that £50,000 over the longer period, I should reasonably have been able to expect that it would be worth 6 times what was paid in. So, in fact, I would be quite happy for the State to simply give me what I've paid in, in NI contributions, plus that return, in exchange for it not having to pay me a pension. The £300,000 it would owe me, I think I could quite easily live on for the rest of my life, in fact, more comfortably than the Pension it may or may not eventually pay me.

But, its not just the State pension. The last couple of decades have seen the outright criminality of Robert Maxwell who simply stole money from the workers pension scheme, we have seen the fiasco with Equitable Life, and we have seen first the dishonesty involved in the selling of private pensions fostered by the Thatcher Government, and the subsequent wiping out of billions of pounds of workers savings in them due to the Stock Market collapse of 2000.

I have just been reading an old review by Hugo Radice of a book, “Pension Funds and British Capitalism”, from 1982. Radice begins by pointing out that although this is our money, even getting basic information is not easy. He had been trying to obtain information himself, he says, but gave up after a few months, because he found it hopeless. Minns he says, had the advantage of writing his book just at the time of the Wilson Committee reviewing financial institutions, which perhaps made them more willing to be less secretive. Minns study provided the details for the situation in 1975. With £7.5 billion of holdings they were the second most important share owners after private individuals. Today, that figure is more like £800 billion. Control now as then of these massive amounts of financial power is in the hands not of the workers whose funds they are, but of powerful financial institutions - Merchant Banks, Stockbrokers and Insurance Companies. Radice argues that because these organisations are themselves increasingly linked to the large clearing banks, operational control over the workers funds is exercised by Banking Capital. The significance of that, today, we might want to relate to the fact that this is the same Banking Capital whose speculation and irresponsibility caused the financial meltdown of 2008! In 1975, where Pension Funds (i.e. workers) owned 16.8% of ordinary shares, they controlled only 5.6%. In contrast, where Banks owned only 0.7%, they controlled 17.6%.

Minns figures showed that the funds were concentrated in larger companies, and in the financial sector rather than in industry. The reason for this is that the Fund Managers would not take a stake in any company that gave them more than a few percent of the company, and because they wanted to avoid the management costs of having large numbers of small holdings. Where Funds have specialised in investing in smaller companies, the Banks and Financial Institutions have insisted on much higher returns on the basis of higher risks. The Financial Institutions, through their control of these funds, could also use them to support their own activities, for example, by buying shares in a Company whose Public Offering they were also managing.

But, as Radice says, the role of the Trades Unions has been pathetic. The schemes have Trade Union Trustees, but they are effectively excluded from exercising any kind of influence, even if they were in a position to do so. Even with Local Authorities, where one would expect the unions to have some possibility of demanding control over their members funds, the funds are often managed by the Local Authority itself, although since Minns work, many of them also utilise investment companies for advice, if not actual management of the investments. And, as he says, with private sector employers, the Trustees are appointed by the employer and they have a say only in administration and the payment of benefits, not over investment. Where they have any involvement in investment, it is almost always under the control of external “Experts” and the National Association of Pension Funds, which Radice says is “wholly in thrall to the City”.

Radice argues that control of these funds “is the most obvious area for immediate political mobilisation. If the collective bargaining strength of the unions was combined with a serious educational campaign on the pension funds issue, then the disengagement of the funds from the privately-owned financial sector could proceed without the latter being nationalised. Of course, it implies a very different politics than the proposals for central or local state intervention, but in the long run it would provide a much more solid basis for such intervention than the insertion of clauses into the Labour Party manifesto” (Radice – Capital & Class 16)

He was right, but that was nearly 20 years ago, and not only have the Trades Unions shown no interest in fighting for such a basic democratic right as that workers should control their own Pension Funds, but the Left has shown no interest in pushing them to do so either. Why?

The answer is quite simple. The Trades Unions exist not to fundamentally challenge or replace Capitalism, but only to bargain within it. Without that function the Trades Union bureaucracy, that has a lifestyle similar to that of the petit-bourgeoisie, would have to look for proper jobs, which might not be so lucrative. The basic ideology of the Trades Unions is to respect the sanctity of capitalist property, and the right of management to manage. That is why there is so frequently hostility to actions which challenge that idea, such as occupations of factories etc., and why such actions have almost always been led by ordinary rank and file workers. But, that ideology also leads to the idea that the laws and norms set down by Capital in relation to investment has to be respected too. The purpose of a Pension Fund, under that ideology, is to do no more than to provide workers with the best possible pension in retirement, and that requires that the laws of Capitalist Accumulation be adhered to, and the best people to achieve that are the “experts” from the financial world. Any idea that this massive resource in the hands of the workers could be used for other purposes, could be used as a weapon of class struggle, have to be rejected, because ultimately the basis of the Trades Unions is that there is no class struggle, it is that workers and bosses can have shared interests in ensuring growth of the Capitalist economy. If one wanted to be entirely cycnical, one could also imagine that the Trades Union bureaucracy might not want to see these vast resources used to gain control over large profitable firms, and place them in the hands of a Workers' Co-operative, because the success of such an operation would mean that the bureaucrats themselves would lose their function in such a Co-operative.

This latter also explains the reason that the Left has not taken up the demand that workers should have control of their Pension Funds. The Left, in the sense of the organised Left sects, is a thoroughly sectarian left in the true sense of the word. It places its own narrow interests above the interests of the working class. For the last 100 years it has worked with a dogma. That dogma is that Co-operatives cannot work, and are Utopian. As I've shown elsewhere this idea has no validity in Marxist theory. It certainly has nothing in common with the position of Marx or Engels. The dogma effectively says, nothing significant can be achieved short of the revolution, understood as a repeat of 1917. Everything has to be geared to such a repetition, so that, although the revolutionaries support workers in struggle, they do so mainly for the purpose of building the revolutionary party – for which actually read building their particular sect. Workers self-activity is reduced to the trivial – strikes or other industrial action, to win concessions from an employer or to seek reforms from the Capitalist State – rather than the meaningful self-activity that Marx and Engels envisaged of workers creating their own Co-operatives, organising their own self-government, including the provision of Funds for Education, and Welfare. In fact, rather than this self-government argued for by Marx and Engels, the left adopted the position of Lassalle and the Fabians, and whose importance was recognised by Big Capital itself, of the Capitalist State exercising these functions, and thereby establishing another layer of dominance and control over the lives of workers, in addition to that already existing in the workplace. In this respect that Left's approach to the question of the State has been truly schizophrenic. On the one hand it tells workers that the Capitalist State is their enemy, their oppressor, the agent of the bosses, and that they should not rely on it to be neutral. On the other they repeatedly raise demands for that State to do precisely that, to act on workers behalf, to provide them with essential services, to nationalise their industry and so on, and therefore, to strengthen its grip over them, to exploit and oppress them even more!

But, its precisely for this reason that the Left itself cannot argue for control over the workers' Pension Funds either. It has repeatedly told them that only the revolution will do. If workers really did gain control over that £800 billion in their Pension Funds, and did begin to use it in an active manner to further their interests as workers then much of that ideology, purveyed by the left, would be undermined. The fact, that many of the examples of Workers Co-operatives, have been in small firms that had already failed, strengthened the arguments of that sectarian left. But, there have been plenty of examples of Workers Co-ops that even in these unfavourable conditions have succeeded – Tower Colliery is one that springs to mind. In part, even the failure of some of those other Worker Co-ops, such as at Meriden and KME in the 1970's, was due to the fact that the Co-operative Movement itself did not give them the support they needed. For example, British Steel insisted that KME paid cash in advance, and all of them faced problems raising finance from the private banks. They would have benefited from a Co-operative Bank that also saw its role in more overtly political terms, and such a Bank would benefit if it had at its disposal that £800 billion of workers funds.

£800 billion would buy around two-thirds of the companies in the FTSE 100 outright. That kind of control over companies of that size would undermine many of the arguments raised against Worker Co-operatives. Once these Co-operatives began to demonstrate their viability, it is not just bourgeois ideology that would be undermined, which says that production and distribution cannot take place without the existence of Capital and Capitalists, but would undermine the ideology of the sects, that nothing is possible until the revolution, apart from repeated struggles to defend what has previously been achieved. The sects and their leaderships reproduce themselves on the basis of their sectarianism and this ideology, just as much as the Trades Unions reproduce themselves on the basis of their ideology of bargaining within the system. If workers want to proceed they have to break out of the ideology of both, which is more related than either group would like to admit.

Proletarian Strategy - Part 8

No Sectarian Schemas

One of the basic elements of Marxist analysis is that we do not set up any sectarian principles of our own, but that we develop our tactics and strategy on two things. Firstly, our understanding of the fundamental laws that govern Capitalist society, an understanding that workers themselves cannot, at first understand, because those laws are hidden from their view. Secondly, we base ourselves upon the actions of the working-class itself in the way it responds to the situation, in which it finds itself. It will sometimes choose a course of action, or a form of organisation that is wrong, and that will fail – for example, Luddism. But, as it develops means of struggle, forms of organisation, and solutions to its problems that can resolve its problems, that can enhance its position, then the task of Marxists is to codify that experience, to seek to generalise it, and to develop it with all the means at their disposal. For all of the reasons set out by Marx and Engels, and Lenin and others, Trade Union struggle, Economism, whether it be at the sectional level of industrial struggle at the enterprise or industry level, or at the political level seeking reforms from Capital within the confines of the existing system, can never provide workers with a solution. Nor, for the reasons I have set out above is it even likely that the working-class will suddenly rise up in revolt against Capital, with the clear intention of establishing Socialism. But, the last 100 years has given us ample evidence in pretty much every country of the world, that workers spontaneously gravitate towards a solution to their problems based upon the establishment of Co-operatives. The number of Co-ops continues to grow, and the number of people employed in Co-ops along with it. Yet, by and large the orthodox left, including those who call themselves Marxist, have failed to analyse this development, and far from attempting to identify what works within that experience, far from generalising the lessons, remedying the defects etc. the orthodox left continues instead to insist on putting forward its own sectarian schemas in place of the solutions devised by the workers themselves. As a consequence, the development of the Workers Co-ops is held back, the deficiencies that the Marxists have uncovered remain uncorrected, and the likelihood, therefore, of their failure is enhanced, thereby confirming the sectarian prejudices of those whose actions contributed to that failure. The closest parallel I can think of is the attitude of those sectarians who from the beginning decried the Bolshevik Revolution, who proclaimed that “Socialism was not possible in a backward country”, who on the basis of the idea that Socialism in One Country was impossible, decried even making the first step on that path etc., and who on that basis contributed to the isolation of the USSR, and its subsequent failure, thereby confirming their own prognosis.

Of course, the lesson of Stalinism and of the Theory of Socialism In One Country, as well as Marx's criticisms of the reactionary, Utopian Socialists, who believed in building isolated Little Icara, also illustrate the need to avoid the opposite danger. Workers who having established their own piece of property, limit themselves to a strategy based on trying to isolate themselves, and to only further their own particular interests, rather than seeing that those interests can only be furthered by attempting to build an alliance with workers outside their own enclave, by attempting to generalise their own experience, will ultimately fail whether that is workers in a Co-op, or in a Workers State. But, in order to generalise, it is first necessary to particularise. There will not be an international revolution without national revolutions occurring first. There will not be a National Co-operative economy, without individual Workers Co-operatives being established first. In both the developing economies, where the prospect exists for workers in developing new, dynamic Labour movements, to establish such Worker Co-operatives as part of the rapidly developing economy, and so in conditions where such ventures have a considerable chance of success, and in the developed economies, now facing the problem of lack of competitiveness in a global market place, and where, even more than in the past, the tactic of “more militancy” can offer workers no solution to the increasing attacks on their living standards, there is a pressing need to develop such a strategy. Not a strategy based on the idea that the development of worker co-ops is without difficulties, or is a linear progression, but a strategy that recognises it is not. A strategy that requires an understanding, therefore, of the need for class struggle, but a class struggle that seeks to place ever greater degrees of the economy and of society under the ownership of the working-class, and takes it out of the hands of private and State capital. That was the strategy of Marx, it is just as applicable today.

Back To Part 7

Proletarian Strategy - Part 3

Co-operatives and Workers States

In Part 2, I demonstrated that the orthodox left position in relation to Co-ops is both Ultra-Left, and at the same time essentially bourgeois – not surprising as Lenin showed that Ultra-Leftism is essentially a petit-bourgeois phenomenon. It is not true that Workers Co-ops are forced to take on the same Management forms and structure, or to make the same kinds of decisions as Capitalist enterprises. But, even were it true, so what? Will not a Workers State also face exactly those problems so long as it operates within a predominantly global Capitalism? Is that an argument then for putting off any revolution until the whole world or a large proportion of it can engage in a simultaneous uprising? We may just as well say, “The idea of a Workers State sounds attractive, but that state would face the same problems as the Capitalist States.” In fact, Lenin had to argue against such Ultra-Leftism amongst the Bolsheviks.

“Or take the Menshevik Vperyod of the same date, which contains among other articles the following “thesis” by the notorious Menshevik Isuv:

'The policy of Soviet power, from the very outset devoid of a genuinely proletarian character, has lately pursued more and more openly a course of compromise with the bourgeoisie and has assumed an obviously anti-working class character. On the pretext of nationalising industry, they are pursuing a policy of establishing industrial trusts, and on the pretext of restoring the productive forces of the country, they are attempting to abolish the eight hour day, to introduce piece-work and the Taylor system, black lists and victimisation. This policy threatens to deprive the proletariat of its most important economic gains and to make it a victim of unrestricted exploitation by the bourgeoisie.'

...Indeed, the Bolsheviks ought to present Isuv with a medal, and his thesis ought to be exhibited in every workers’ club and union as an example of the provocative speeches of the bourgeoisie. The workers know these Lieberdans, Tseretelis and Isuvs very well now. They know them from experience, and it would be extremely useful indeed for the workers to think over the reason why such lackeys of the bourgeoisie should incite the workers to resist the Taylor system and the “establishment of trusts”.

Class-conscious workers will carefully compare the “thesis” of Isuv ... with the following thesis of the “Left Communists”.

'The introduction of labour discipline in connection with the restoration of capitalist management of industry cannot considerably increase the productivity of labour, but it will diminish the class initiative, activity and organisation of the proletariat. It threatens to enslave the working class; it will rouse discontent among the backward elements as well as among the vanguard of the proletariat. In order to implement this system in the face of the hatred prevailing among the proletariat against the ’capitalist saboteurs’, the Communist Party would have to rely on the petty bourgeoisie, as against the workers, and in this way would ruin itself as the party of the proletariat” (Kommunist No. 1, p. 8, col. 2).'

... It serves as a good lesson for the workers, who know that it is precisely the vanguard of the proletariat which stands for the introduction of labour discipline, and that it is precisely the petty bourgeoisie which is doing its utmost to disrupt this discipline. Speeches such as the thesis of the “Lefts” quoted above are a terrible disgrace and imply the complete renunciation of communism in practice and complete desertion to the camp of the petty bourgeoisie.

... The workers, having grown out of the infancy when they could have been misled by “Left” phrases or petty-bourgeois loose thinking, are advancing towards socialism precisely through the capitalist management of trusts, through gigantic machine industry, through enterprises which have a turnover of several millions per year—only through such a system of production and such enterprises. The workers are not petty bourgeois. They are not afraid of large-scale “state capitalism”, they prize it as their proletarian weapon which their Soviet power will use against small proprietary disintegration and disorganisation.

This is incomprehensible only to the declassed and consequently thoroughly petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, typified among the “Left Communists” by Osinsky”

Lenin, Left-Wing Childishness

Moreover, the SWP argument (and not just the SWP, the same message could be found, as Tomlinson shows, from Mandel) displays a terrible pessimism in respect of the fundamental idea of Socialism itself. It essentially sees no advantages in terms of productive efficiency arising from workers ownership of the means of production whatsoever! It places the whole weight of the basis of Socialism on just one very unsteady leg – that of planning. Yet, there is no grounds within Marx, for such a belief. Marx made no such fetish for planning, no such claims for its necessity. The whole emphasis of Marx is, on the contrary, on the necessity of Workers Ownership of the means of production. Even Lenin and Trotsky did not place the whole of their emphasis on planning as the fundamental economic advantage for Socialism. How could they? Lenin introduced the NEP, and encouraged private western monopolies to invest in Russia, and was more than aware of the problems of trying to plan a complex economy.

“It would have to try to solve them by trimming the workforce, by pushing 'flexibility' and generally undermining the conditions that union action has achieved in the industry.” Why? Why could not a worker owned enterprise implement the transitional demand for a sliding scale of hours? Why could it not do what Engels says above a sensible Trades Union would have to do in such a crisis -
“In a commercial crisis the Union itself must reduce wages or dissolve wholly” - in order to preserve itself as an organisation ready to resume the battle. Indeed, given the examples quoted by Marx of the greater efficiency of the Lancashire textile Co-ops, or Connolly's example of the efficiency of the Ralahine Co-op, why could not workers simply rely on that greater efficiency of the Workers' Co-op, to deal with the situation? Greater efficiency does not at all imply greater “exploitation”, it simply means that workers are able to come up with all kinds of innovative ideas to increase production, whilst lowering their workload, when they are conscious that such innovations directly benefit them rather than some Capitalist. This is the fundamental economic strength of Socialism, not planning.

Forward To Part 4

Back To Part 2

Proletarian Strategy - Part 2

Ultra-Left Childishness

In Part 1, I have argued that Marx and Engels, basing themselves on their understanding of the workings of the Capitalist Economy, and their experience of working-class struggles, identified not only that Trade Union struggle could provide no real solution for workers' problems, but explained why that was the case. It was rooted in the fact that workers did not own property, and with only their Labour-Power to sell, Capital would always have the whip hand. Wages would rise and fall in line with the demand for Labour-power, and Capital Accumulation determined what that demand would be. If Capital decided its return was inadequate, it would reduce accumulation, wages would fall. And if Capital Accumulation was rapid, it would be the demand for Labour that would push up wages not Trade Union action. The answer could only be for workers themselves to become the owners of their means of production by the establishment of worker owned producer Co-operatives.

But, the Ultra-Left have opposed such a strategy. In the 1970's, as the Long Wave boom came to an end, workers, in Britain, found that the strategies and tactics they had employed for the previous two decades or so of boom, were no longer adequate. As firms closed, simply striking was no answer. They began to occupy the factories. But, as workers in France discovered in 1968, and as Vestas' workers discovered recently, simply occupying is no answer either. At some point, if you want to live you need an income, and to get an income you need to consider the need to work, to restart production. In the 1950's and 60's, if your firm threatened to close the gates, or to lay-off workers, a strike might produce some results, and if it didn't, there was always another job. After 1970, there was no guarantee of another job any time soon. It was in this climate, and with the backdrop of a Labour Government, in which Tony Benn was Industry Minister, and pushing elements of the Alternative Economic Strategy, such as the National Enterprise Board, and Planning Agreements, that a number of Worker Co-operatives were established such as that at Meriden, at Kirby, and at the Scottish Daily News. The experience of these Co-ops was not good, and that served to strengthen the antipathy towards Co-ops that the Left already had.

As Jim Tomlinson wrote in an article, British Politics and Co-operatives, in Capital and Class 12 1980, the orthodox left position was that so long as Co-operatives operated within a Capitalist environment they would be forced to adopt Capitalist management practices. Just how much that Left orthodoxy differed, and continues to differ from the politics and strategy of Marx and Engels, just how much it was imbued with bourgeois ideology is demonstrated by a quote Tomlinson gives from Socialist Worker of 20th July 1974, in relation to the Scottish Daily News.

“The object is to save jobs. The running of a newspaper, or any other enterprise, along commercial lines, requires that commercial considerations come first. Workers ' management sounds attractive, but that management would face the same problems as the Beaverbrook management.

It would have to try to solve them by trimming the workforce, by pushing 'flexibility' and generally undermining the conditions that union action has achieved in the industry.

...You cannot build islands of socialism in a sea of capitalism. And workers' management of a commercial concern operating in that sea deprives the workers of the strength of union organisation directed against management...Real workers' management is for the socialist future.”

Tomlinson quotes a further article by Duncan Hallas in relation to the Meriden Co-op, in SW on 10th August 1974.

“Co-operative self-management by workers will come. But, it can only realise its potential when the working class controls the economy and when planning for its own needs replaces production for profit.”

There is so much wrong here that it is difficult to know where to begin. So let's start at the beginning.

“The object is to save jobs.” Is it? Is that the extent of socialist ambition, to go no higher than simple Trade Unionism, and trade union goals? Should not a socialist, applying Marxist principles, have higher ambitions than that, for example developing an alternative form of property, and undermining bourgeois property relations?

“Workers ' management sounds attractive, but that management would face the same problems as the Beaverbrook management.” Is that true? It would not face baying shareholders demanding shareholder value. Its workers might well decide to forego their share of dividends, in order to hold on to their jobs, for instance. Workers might also decide not to plough back all of their profits into an expansion of Capital, aware that Capitalism is a system prone to cycles. They might decide to act like Pharaoh in the Bible, and lay aside funds for the lean years. A private Capitalist has no such incentive, because they are unconcerned about laying off workers in the lean years, other than to the extent that re-employing and retraining them would increase the costs.

As Tomlinson says, the mistake is to conclude that competition forces a particular form of management and strategy on companies, essentially assuming that companies are forced to adopt Taylorist methods. But, that is essentially a structuralist not a Marxist method of analysis. It leaves out the fundamental aspect of Marxist analysis that “the truth is always concrete.” In fact, a concrete analysis demonstrates that even within Capitalist enterprises a whole gamut of structures have been adopted, and few of them conform to Taylorist principles. In fact, most firms moved away from assembly line production per se, towards other forms of continuous flow production, the development of work groups in which a degree of worker autonomy was encouraged, many of which resulted in increases in labour productivity of 100%! And, the concept of profit maximisation is open to a whole variety of interpretations too. In Japan, for instance, it was interpreted in a very long game sense, of maximising market share, which often meant lower short-run profits. In today's economy, there are many smaller, high value added firms that operate outside the sphere of shareholder pressure, and have focussed on a non-profit-maximising model, that accepts the idea of limited market share, and enterprise size, precisely to avoid the need to profit maximise, and are, therefore, able to focus on other goals, including effects on the environment, job satisfaction etc.

Back To Part 1

Forward To Part 3

Oh Sweet Irony

The Alliance For Workers Liberty have reprinted an interview from 1979 about the Socialist Campaign for A Labour Victory. The article comes with no comment other than to clarify some of the historical details. But, the purpose of the article is clear. In the election the AWL began by trying to build an electoral alternative to voting Labour. It failed, and was excluded by the other sectarian ventures. In the end, it settled for standing its own candidate, and at the very last minute declared the setting up of a "Socialist Campaign To Stop The Tories and Fascists".

The irony of that can be discerned by the scorn poured upon the SWP, and IMG for pursuing an almost identical course of action back in 1979. The AWL declared in standing a candidate that it was part of their commitment to building a revolutionary party. In the article, they write, however,

"Proclaiming the revolutionary party — a ‘revolutionary party' which like the SWP in Lambeth can get 200 votes - doesn't actually build the party."

In fact, the AWL would have felt they had done well to have scored 200 votes in Peckham, where their candidate stood and secured a derisory 75 votes! The irony in the article when compared with the AWL's politics and practices today would be side splittingly funny, were it not for the fact that some of us were members of this organisation back in 1979, when it was capable of acting in a rational manner. On that matter too, a look at what it has to say about the progress of the SLL/WRP is instructive.

For the young members of the AWL who will only get to know what zig-zag their organisation is about to perform next after the leadership tell them about it, the meaning of the article is that the AWL fucked up in the election by standing a candidate. It fucked up by first telling you that the LP was dead and trying to lead you into a deal with the SWP/left List,as part of a "Unity Offensive" against an SWP in internal turmoil, and then having to try to deny it had ever said anything like that. It is saying that you are about to collapse into the LP, because you have nowhere else to go, and that you will, however, follow the same "Party Building" sectarian politics you have followed outside the LP. In other wordds you are about to do exactly what I said you would do several months before the election.

Politics Of the Ghetto - Part 7

Part 7

Marxists, Bourgeois Democracy, and The Workers Party

“Purdy and Prior are not alone in their inadequate analysis of the practice of a Communist Party struggling through the institutions of bourgeois democracy. It is the crucial failure of all the proponents of Euro-communism... It has left the CPGB without any analytical basis for constituting itself a separate organisation from the Labour Party, a fact not lost to the more acute of bourgeois commentators – see the reports in the Financial Times on the 1978 Congress of the CPGB. It has left those Marxists who join the Labour Party without course any of action, reduced to moral critiques of the leadership and token victories in some constituency parties, while Party Conference decisions continue to be ignored.”

(ibid p. 111)

Once again Elson's thirty year old comments are as depressingly relevant today as they were then, in fact, even more so. The Left sects, rather than acting as a transformative force, have contented themselves with being simply an oppositional force. Although the Leninist left has emphasised its opposition to Parliamentarism, its practice has itself been Parliamentarist. Rather than being concerned to actually build the working class, and its organisations, the Left has concentrated on building its own sects – usually at the expense of the movement as a whole - has devoted considerable amounts of time and effort to what amount to little more than studentist debates in various forums, and to winning elections – not bourgeois democratic, in which the Left outside the Workers Party does abysmally – but rather elections of officials, the passing of resolutions which are then ignored, as Elson says above, and so on.

Had the left put just half the effort into building rank and file organisations, whether in the Trade Unions, Co-operatives, or within Communities, that were themselves transformative, in that they encouraged and facilitated, workers themselves to develop their own solutions, they would both have changed the workers material conditions, and thereby consciousness, as well as by passing all of those restrictions they complain that official structures, and its leadership, bureaucracy etc. impose upon them. In so doing they would not only have created powerful forces capable of developing a politics from the ground up, but would also have created the seedbed from which real, militant, working class politicians could have sprung forward, and the kind of real working class conscious support, which is necessary to ensure that resolutions once passed, are adhered to, that politicians and other representatives when selected are truly accountable. Instead the left has settled ror form rather than content, has settled for defending its purity, and pyrrhic victories, in the debating chamber rather than transformation of class consciousness. Ironically, if it had done that, the very process of working with ordinary working class people, in developing such organisations would have built its own forces, would have led to an automatic transmission belt of workers on to the path of a Marxist understanding.

Yet, even today, and more so than thirty years ago, the Left is engaged in a deliberate policy of isolation from the working class and its Party. With even fewer forces than it had then, it is engaged in a fantasy politics of pretending that it is the revolutionary Party in embryo, or that the working class is anxiously waiting for it to create some alternative Workers Party. It would be tempting to compare the situation now with that at the end of the 19th Century when the Labour Party was created, indeed those who every few months announce the establishment of some new initiative to create a Workers party, frequently do. But, the degree to which the situation is similar is not at all conducive to those arguments. At the end of the 19th Century, the situation was one of a working class moving Left. It was a working class, increasingly confident and assertive, especially as the New Unionism, led to the organisation of thousands of unskilled workers. It meant that there was an increasing dissatisfaction with the Liberals, to whom the workers had looked as traditional allies arising from the struggles against the aristocracy. It meant that “Labour” candidates like Keir Hardie, were able to attract considerable support.

Yet, as Engels pointed out, these sects, like the ILP and the SDF, although they had many good elements within them, were deeply flawed organisations, precisely because as with today, they were sects. He was not any more impressed by the Socialist League that split from the SDF. Even in conditions where the class was moving Left, where the sects like the ILP had some electoral success, which the sects today certainly cannot claim, Engels advice to the Marxists like Eleanor Marx, and Edward Aveling, was to cut them adrift, and go straight to the workers. Where were the mass of workers? Not, in these “communist” sects, but in the Liberal Clubs! That was what they did, and it was largely upon that basis, and the work that they and others like Tom Mann did, which eventually created the forces through the Trade Unions for the establishment of the Labour Party.

And that advice, to ignore the sects – even to the extent that they organised the “more advanced” workers, was the advice that Engels also gave to the American socialists in how to go about creating a Workers Party. It was the advice that he and Marx had set out in the Communist Manifesto, where they said that the Communists do not create any separate Party from the other Workers Parties, the method they had used themselves in Germany, when they had joined the bourgeois Democrats, precisely because although it was a bourgeois Party, it was the means by which to gain the ear of the mass of workers. It is the fundamental basis of Marxism as a transformative movement, to not look to the end product, but to start from where you are, and change it so as to create the end product. As Elson states,

“It seems to me that it is precisely this notion that constitutes a practical, materialist politics, and differentiates Marxism from utopian socialism. As Marx wrote in the Grundrisse,

'If we did not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange pre-requisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic.' (p.151)

A practical, materialist politics certainly does not consist in simply identifying the proletariat as the agent of revolution, and attributing to it some kind of 'will to Socialism', albeit a will which may be temporarily disoriented owing to 'false consciousness'. As Marx wrote of the Civil War in France, the working class,

'have no ideas to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which the old collapsing bourgeois society is itself pregnant.'(The First International and After, p. 213)”
(ibid p.112)

The point is to identify these aspects of Capitalist society, which represents the seeds of the new society, and to develop them, conscious that in doing so, will itself mean a true class struggle, as the bourgeoisie attempt to constrain such development within limits that do not threaten the process of accumulation, and do not threaten its bases of power in society. It is to develop the kinds of workers organisations upon them that both further workers power and control within society, and facilitate the successful pursuit of that class struggle. Doing so means moving off the terrain of the bourgeoisie, moving away from Economism, and towards proletarian property and democracy.

A Lost Opportuniity

Last year I wrote that it was not necessary for the Left to spend months in what was bound to be futile negotiations trying to cobble together some election vehicle - Why We Need A Socialist Campaign For A Labour Victory. I argued that the experience of the SCLV of 1979, provided the answer. On the one hand it could mobilise large sections of the Left and Labour Movement to oppose the Tories and the fascists by the only credible means of obtaining electoral success - a Labour Victory - whilst using that mobilisation to develop a basic minimum socialist platform around which the Left both inside and out of the LP could organise. As such it would be a basis for creating the kind of movement that will be needed, whoever wins the election. The Left has missed that opportunity, and largely it is down to its own sectarianism, and delusions of grandeur.

When I wrote that blog some sections of the Left were already engaged in discussions to create a "Son of No2EU". Given the nature of the parent, it was never likely that the Son would be much to hope for. No2EU had been a ramshackle vehicle cobbled together by the National Socialists of the British Communist Party, with the support of the Socialist Party. It had all the hallmarks of Stalinist bureaucratic organisation with the addeddd reactionary politics of Nationalism. If the antics inside the LP gave cause for concern in relation to the lack of democracy, No2EU certainly was not a better alternative. If anything the Son was worse. It was clear that many sections of the Left were not even going to be invited to take part in trying to establish it as a broad Left-wing organisation. On top of that the Stalinists decided that they would pull out in order to simply tail the LP, and that meant that the only link that existed with the Labour Movement, via Bob Crow to the RMT, simply disappeared. When TUSC was set up, it was, therefore, by general consent a half-hearted affair that even its participants seem to have little faith in.

The other offerings are if anything worse. RESPECT hardly had the right to be called "Left" to begin with. It was only the existence within it of the SWP that gave it that cover. It was from the beginning a communalist organisation, and the split with the SWP has made it nothing else. The idea that there is anything peculiarly "Left" about opposing the role of imperialism in Iraq, Afghanistan etc. should be called into question by anyone with a brain, given that such a position is being argued in the election by the BNP!

Most ridiculous is the position taken by the AWL. This is an organisation that should have known better, precisely because the original SCLV was the creation of its forerunner. But, instead of learning from its own past it has zigged and zagged all over the place in the last few years electoral activity. For example, a couple of years ago, having spent ages slagging off the SWP, it swung errattically and from out of nowhere to support Lindsey German and the SWP's Left List in the London elections. If organisations of several thousand are delusional in standing candidates in these elections, then an organisation of around 100 people is simply on another planet in standing its own candidate. It is the equivalent in political terms of vanity publishing. But, having done that the AWL, at the last minute, come up with the idea, not of an SCLV, but of a Socialist Campaign To defeat the Tories and Fascists. The cumbersone name is reflective of the cumbersome logic behind it. The AWL want socialists inside and out of the LP to come together to support "socialist candidates" where they are standing, and to vote Labour where they are not.

But, of course, the only result of these "socialist" candidates standing - and who is to say who they are - is not to prevent the election of Tories or Fascists, but to facilitate it by splitting the vote! The only good thing that can be said about that is that we know on past experience that the actual vote these "socialist" candidates will receive will be so small as to hopefully only play such a negative role in cases where the election is extremely close. If the AWL really wanted to stop the Tories and the Fascists from being elected then they would fight in every seat for a Labour Victory, and would do so whilst still arguing the need for mobilising around a socialist programme, and a fight to transform the Labour Movement. It is typical of the mentality of sectarians to proceed on the basis of these delusional politics, in which they beleive that they are todays equivalent of the Bolsheviks, or even of the Trotskyist organisations of the 1920's and 1930's. In the 1920's, Trotsky himself in explaining the basis of the United Front, explained that it could only be applied in conditions where the Labour Movement was divided in fairly even measuere between a reformist and revolutionary wing. If the revolutionaries represented only a tiny minority - in fact Trotsky spoke of the revolutionaries typically having to represent around 40% - then it was pointless them proposing a United Front, for the simple reason that there would be no reason why the real Workers Party should want to have any dealings with them. Yet, the AWL with its grand total of 100 members is so delusional that it beleives it can realistically propose such a United Front to the LP!

Moreover, if I were an ordinary LP member, perhaps a Trade Union militant, who has spent many years of my valuable time trying to secure a Labour Victory, why on Earth would I look kindly upon some insignificant sect that proposes such an alliance to me, whilst at the same time standing outside the Party, and standing its own candidates against mine????

It now seems to me that this sectarianism of the Left is so entrenched that no way forward is likely on the basis of these organisations. Their sectarianism is too entrenched, the vested interests of their leadership who have been in place longer than the Dictatorships of any of the old Stalinist regimes, are too great for them to offer a way forward. Even were they to rejoin the LP, as I have suggested in the past, its almost certain that they would simply resume the method of the Entrist tactic of the past, as merely a means of "Building The Party" from inside, and by leaching off the Workers Party. Fortunately, others on the Left appear to be coming to that realisation too. That is the conclusion that Phil came to over at the AVPS Blog - Can A New Workers Party Emerge. He is right we have to work with the Workers Party we have, but we have to work with that Party on a completely different basis than socialists have worked for the last 100 years. We have to utilise the Party as the means to promote the self-activity of the class, and not in that limited sense that the Left has viewed it of simply self-activity in the form of campaigns and mobilisations to apply pressure, demand reforms etc., but self-activity for the class to develop its own solutions, its own forms, its own organisations. In so doing we create the very changes in material conditions that enable the transformation of conscioussness, and we create the seedbed of new activists that feed into the rebuilding and renovation of the Labour Movement itself from the ground up. There is no shortcut.

All To Play For

Harold Wilson said a week is a long time in politics. With more than six months still to run before the General Election, there is still all to play for. Not too much can be read into the Glasgow By-Election result, but it does have a number of lessons. The turnout was low, but it always is in this seat, and by-election turnout is always lower than in a General Election. But, Labour’s vote was so large that even had their been a 100% turnout, the Labour vote would have still been around 19% of the total! Given the number of parties standing, that could have been enough to win, even if not one single extra voter had voted Labour. That is the measure of the extent to which Labour remains the Workers Party.

In fact, given the nature of the Constituency, and given the conditions under which the election took place, the result for Labour has to give some encouragement. It is amongst ordinary working class voters that the greatest resentment of all the palaver about the expenses scandal is most strongly felt, because it is with them that the greatest contrast exists. Many middle class people employed in white collar jobs, let alone those who run their own businesses, or occupy Management posts know only too well the number of expenses and other fiddles that exist to boost incomes. Its also the lower ranks of the working class who have suffered most over the last year of recession. If there were going to be a rebellion against Labour for all these things then Glasgow should have seen it. There were, after all plenty of other parties standing who could have attracted their votes, some like the SNP, even having the potential of winning. Yet, even the SNP was literally swamped by the Labour vote, whilst the Tories only saved their deposit by coming in third, and the busted flush of the BNP once again did lose their deposit, failing to increase their vote from the last election. As for the sectarian Left in all its stripes, once again it demonstrated its complete irrelevance to the working class, its only function here being to make the 1,000 votes of the BNP look more respectable than it was!

In recent weeks, it has appeared that Labour has been making a steady recovery. I wrote more than a year ago, that Labour should not be written off, because ultimately its how people feel in their pockets, which determines how they vote. We have increasingly moved towards a Commoditisation of Politics, along US lines, where what is important is marketing a message, and the superficiality of image. Under those conditions, Brown was unlikely to do well. The media focus on him as an image, as though he were some “celebrity” on Big Brother, rather than on politics. We continually have comments from supposedly knowledgeable reporters like John Sopel, on today “Politics Show”, who talk about him not being elected, as though the Prime Minister were a President! Now, it would be a good idea to actually have an elected Head of State, but the Head of State in Britain, is not the Prime Minister, who is elected by Parliament, but is the Monarch who is elected by no one. But, this superficiality can only run so far.

The fact, is that the economy is turning around. It is certainly a far cry from the predictions of a Great Depression that sections of the Far Right and Far Left were making – and hoping for in the belief it would improve their own political fortunes – only a few months ago. Many economists think that the last set of ONS statistics showing that the UK economy was still in recession in the third quarter are questionable. That certainly seems to contradict much of the other economic data that has come out. Either way, economic activity is increasing, and the latest surveys show increasing confidence on the economy from consumers. Its likely that as the effects of an end to restocking in the US, and Europe lead to a slow down in those economies, but I expect not a double dip, Britain will actually be showing stronger growth, partly based on the advantage gained from a lower pound assisting manufacturing, and partly as Britain’s large Financial Services Sector, once again begins to drive growth on the back of a recovering world economy, and massive growth in Asia, in particular, which fuels a phenomenal amount of financial transactions, most of which are funnelled through London, one reason why Brown could probably get away with introducing a Tobin Tax on such transactions whether or not other financial centres followed suit.

Labour’s tactics in Glasgow also demonstrate how they can run the election in the rest of the country as insurgents rather than incumbents. In Glasgow they were able to do that by attacking the SNP, and its record in Government in Scotland. But, in the rest of the UK, it is Tories, Liberals, and Greens who have occupied that role now for the last few years in control of Metropolitan Councils, County Councils and Districts. And, that record has not been a good one. It is a record of swingeing cuts in spending even during a time when Central Government has been massively increasing Public Spending. It is a record like that in Leeds of Tory-Liberal Local Government making outright attacks on Public Sector workers. The record in London under Boris Johnson, also shows what workers could expect were the Tories and Liberals to form the Government. Already, Cameron is talking about freezing all Public Sector pay, and as I have suggested previously that is likely to be at a time when inflation is let rip in order to shrink the Government’s debt in real terms.

Of course, a Labour Election campaign that focuses on such facts is itself hypocritical even were it electorally successful. Labour Councils have cut spending and attacked workers conditions too. The economic facts of life that mean that so long as Capitalism exists whoever is in Government will be forced to act in ways which place the burden on workers, will push down on a Labour Government as much as a Tory Government. Indeed, under the current conditions, they would push down as much on a “Workers Government”, because outside the kind of fundamental change of material conditions that place the working class in a strong economic and social position, that enable it to base any political advancement upon such real economic and social power, any simply radical Left Government would be one built on sand.

That is why for a Marxist the coming election cannot be about who wins the most votes, but is about how to intervene in such a way as to enhance that economic and social power of the working class. That has to be about formulating a programme, such as that I set out in Why We Need A Socialist Campaign For A Labour Victory, which seeks to mobilise the working class to engage in collective self-activity to resolve its problems rather than looking to Parliament or the Capitalist State as the means for doing that. Of course, as part of that it is necessary to raise demands that facilitate the working class in doing that. We do not place any faith in the Capitalist State’s commitment to basic bourgeois freedoms like “Free Speech”, but we recognise the importance for workers of such freedoms, and we fight to defend them using proletarian means of struggle. Similarly, we do not place any faith in the bosses state intervening in a neutral let alone pro-worker fashion in industrial relations, but we do demand that the bosses state get its foot off the workers’ neck, and allow us to organise freely without the hindrance of anti-union laws.

At the moment the sectarian Left have all the hallmarks of crew moving around deckchairs on the Titanic, and in the process even then squabbling about where to place them. The Stalinists of the CPB look likely to simply back Labour uncritically. Son of No2EU looks mercifully stillborn. The LRC looks set to simply accept the Labour Election Manifesto, whilst relying on support at an individual level for Left MP’s like Corbyn and McDonell. Others are likely to engage in individual acts of adventurism standing candidates with no base in the working class, purely in order to salve their own consciences and in the hope of recruiting a few more sectarians into their ranks, whilst others still like the CPGB will support “Left” candidates where they stand, and Labour where they don’t. It’s a bit like an equivalent of those poor souls who suffering from some terrible illness seek out a solution at Lourdes, or some other such unlikely solution to their problems. The truth is that the illness here is the low and falling level of class consciousness within the working class, an illness that has been largely caused by the sectarianism of the Left itself over the last century, which has contented itself with trying to build its own pure, and consequently ever smaller, ever more fragmented vanguard, rather than selflessly building the mass organisations of the class – its Trade Unions, Party and Co-operatives. Unfortunately, the Left look set to keep trying to administer such solutions to the working class.

What we need is a Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory fought for by a Left inside and out of the Labour Party, a campaign that seeks to establish a minimum programme based around building collective working class self-activity, and rebuilding the basic structures and organisations of the class on that basis.

Why The Sectarian Left Really Hate The Labour Party

“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” (emphasis added).

(Zinoviev’s closing speech at the 15th Session of the Second Congress of the Comintern)

Mixed Emotions

I had very mixed emotions on that night in 1997 when Labour was re-elected. On the one hand, it was obviously fantastic, that 18 years of Thatcherite rule had come to an end, on the other, the New Labour Tendency, that had gained dominance, stood for a set of ideas, that most people, even on the reformist Left, in the LP, had opposed, let alone those of us who came from a revolutionary background. From my own personal standpoint, it was elating, because, on the same day, I was elected to the County Council with a vote that was so big that, as one of the people at the count said, it needed to be weighed rather than counted, almost three times the vote of the second place candidate. But, that didn’t outweigh the unease I felt, in the Workingmen’s Club, that night, where the celebrations were taking place. Old adversaries from within the right-wing of the LP, were consumed in an orgy of triumphalism as the results poured in, and I could see that it was as much a triumphalism they felt over the Left, as much as over the Tories.

In the coming weeks, as Labour hit the ground running, with a series of initiatives, I remember talking to my friend, the late John Lockett, who was Deputy Leader of the Borough Council, an old NUM militant, and Labour Leftist, who during the 1970’s and 80’s was perpetually canvassed by the SWP, Militant, and myself, in order to recruit him to one of our organisations, all without success, though he did once tell me, he’d nearly joined the SWP, rather than the LP, in the late 60’s. He complained that, everyday, they were getting faxes, and e-mails, from Labour HQ, telling them what they should be doing, briefing notes on how and where to attack the Tories and so on. My first reaction, because I felt uneasy about this right-wing, superficial, media driven elite, now running the party, was to share his sense that there was something wrong with this. But, after a while I reconsidered it, and thought, what exactly is the complaint all about?

Imagine, during the Miners Strike, if Labour HQ had acted as such an organising centre, sending out information, provided by its staff of researchers, that LP Councillors and activists could have used in their propaganda. Imagine if it had co-ordinated Labour Councillors, in their actions, to oppose the Tories, not just in supporting the Miners, but in co-ordinating those Councils to oppose the Tories’ cuts, and so on. What an amazingly powerful tool that would have been! No, the problem was not that the LP had stopped acting as some ramshackle, amateur outfit, and had begun to operate as a professional political party. After all, that was precisely what Lenin argued the Workers Party had to be – a professional party – in “What Is To Be Done?”

But, it illustrates, I think, part of the reason that the Left, and in particular the sectarian Left, really hate the LP, and its because starting from a feeling of revulsion, every act is viewed with hostility, an hostility that, in some ways, is heightened when New Labour shamed the Left by doing things – like putting the Party on a more professional footing – that the Left should have been fighting for itself, and implementing for years before, themselves. But, that is only a minor part of the real reason for the hostility of the sectarian Left to Labour.

Genetic

That hostility was a part of the whole genetic make-up of the sectarian Left. After the war, various Trotskyists groups infiltrated the LP. Two had particular success. The Socialist Labour League in the 1950’s and 60’s built up considerable support in the Young Socialists, which it won control of. Its history is illuminating. In its early activities the SLL’s predecessor, known as “The Club” had its journal “Socialist Outlook” banned by the Labour Leadership in 1954. It responded, by, instead distributing Tribune. During this period “The Club” made considerable headway both in organising the Left within the LP, and in the trade unions. Compare that with the situation later in 1963, when the LP leadership responded to the SLL’s growing support by closing down the YS. At almost the same time that this was happening the SLL, came to the conclusion that there was a revolutionary situation in Britain, and the most important thing to do was to “Build the Party”. So began the sectarian nightmare that was to become Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party.

But, this scenario should be familiar to younger comrades who did not experience the events of the 1950’s and 60’s, because an almost identical course of events can be found in the responses of the Left during the late 1980’s and 90’s! Few of the sectarian Left would actually argue that there was a revolutionary situation, but that has simply been replaced with the argument that “The LP is Dead”, as the motivation for abstaining from the struggle within it. Of course, the sectarian Left point to the expulsions of some members of Militant, the second organisation to gain considerable support through entrism, during the 1980’s, to bolster this argument with the claim that, “even if we didn’t think the LP was dead, we are not allowed to join”. The argument is fatuous.

As “The Club” demonstrated there is no point of principle that says that revolutionaries have to identify themselves as being members of some separate revolutionary party working inside the LP. Indeed, Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, argued the exact opposite. They wrote,

“The Communists do not form a separate party to the other Workers Parties”!

And, in explaining his and Marx’s position when they joined the German Democrat Party, which was an openly bourgeois party, Engels stresses that, although they formed the Left-Wing of that Party, that is precisely what they were – a wing of the Party, not a separate party working inside it. He says, that their experience was that it was possible to argue for their politics openly, and even to organise openly. And, indeed even in today’s LP, leftish groups like Tribune, continue to organise openly. Many Marxists like myself continued to argue our politics. The main problem that the sectarian Left has faced has been not that it is not allowed to argue its politics, or even to organise, but that it set itself up in the first place as parties in their own right, whose function was to act like parasites within the body of the Workers’ Party, completely in contradiction to Marx and Engels dictum. Worse, in doing so, they have seen it as their prerogative to do what no Workers’ organisation can allow individuals or groups of members to do – and which these organisations most certainly would not allow within their own ranks – and that is to simply flout democratically arrived at decisions, in order to plough their own furrow.

The Left was rightly outraged when the Right who went on to form the SDP flouted LP decisions, and demanded their expulsion. Yet, the sectarian Left believes it should be able to simply ignore the decisions of the Party, and then respond with righteous indignation when the Party calls it to account!

But, even were it the case – and I am in no doubt that the right-wing of the LP would resort to expulsions or a split if it thought that the Party was going to become a Party that truly challenged the power of Capital – that it was impossible to organise and argue your politics openly, this does not justify simply packing your bags and leaving, which is what all of those groups effectively did during the 1980’s and 90’s – despite the history presented by the Socialist Party, only a few of its members were expelled, the rest left as the result of a decision by the organisation itself. Engels’ statement, about their experience, of finding no problem operating openly, does not preclude the option of operating covertly if that proves not to be the case! The “Club”, had no great problem, and suffered no lack of ability to recruit within the LP and Trade Unions by distributing “Tribune” rather than “Socialist Outlook”. In the 1930’s, Trotsky made clear that there was no point of principle that sections of the FI had to declare that that was what they were, or had to produce a paper, or any other such fetish. The point was to stick with the workers. Today, given the ability to produce and distribute such a newspaper electronically, and thereby anonymously there is even less point of principle at stake.

But, the reality is that these organisations, that came out of the post-war Trotskyist movement, never saw that as their main function. In part, that stems from their genetic make-up. 1914, saw the existing division of the Labour Movement, between its reformist and revolutionary wings, heighten into a physical split, with the creation of the Third International. The effective collapse of the Second International, together with the rapid recruitment of forces to the banner of the Third, combined with the view that the War was simply the prelude to inevitable revolution on a global scale, justified the revolutionaries in driving forward that split. The analysis that Capitalism was in its death agony – leading to a choice only between Socialism or Barbarism – together with the continued existence of huge revolutionary forces – if we count those of the ordinary rank and file members of the various CP’s – led Trotsky and his comrades to wrongly conclude that, armed with the correct programme and tactics, the Fourth International could be born out of the ashes of the Third, as a mass Party of World Revolution. The idea then, of seeing yourself as such a revolutionary party, flowed from the world the revolutionaries thought they were living in. They had an excuse, for being mistaken about where they were in history. Today we have no such excuse.

Historical Materialism

Marxists should use the tools of historical materialism to analyse the world in which they live, and develop their programme and tactics accordingly. Capitalism was not in its death agony at the beginning of the twentieth century, nor in the 1930’s, and its massive expansion after WWII, and today, show that it is not now either. The decision, with the benefit of hindsight, to divide the workers’ movement after WWI, was a huge mistake, from which we are still trying to recover today. It is, in part, what creates the weakness of the Marxist Left, within the Labour Movement, and which, because of the failure to accept the nature of that mistake, leads to the adventurism of that Left, and its continued daydreaming and occupation of a fantastic world, in which it still believes that it is the embryo of some new revolutionary party, that will suddenly become a mass party if only the correct conditions arise, if only it finds the right set of demands to raise, the right milieu in which to work, and so on.

This is what determines the mindset of that Left, and explains its otherwise inexplicable actions. The starting point for a Marxist is to ask what are those material conditions, what is the point in history with which we have to deal? The answers seem not too difficult to uncover, if not too welcome for a Left that has spent the last 100 years convincing itself that the revolution is at hand. The conclusions from it not too difficult to comprehend, if again, not too exciting for a Left that has framed its actions and programme around the idea that all it has to do is uncover the right set of demands, ensure its doctrinal purity, and a grateful class will flock to its door sweeping it to power!

It is a refusal to deal with this reality that explains, not just the tendency of that Left to continually see some catastrophe on the horizon – which began with the SLL back in the early 1960’s – whether it be an economic collapse, or an environmental catastrophe but also explains the attitude of the sectarian Left to the LP. It is the politics of Mr. Micawber, always anticipating something to turn up, which would save the situation.

The reality we face is that of Capitalism as Imperialism, but an Imperialism, which does not signify as Lenin believed, Capitalism in decay, but represents the most dynamic phase of Capitalism, a phase in which it has created for the first time a truly global market for all commodities including Labour Power, and through which it has raised the International Division of Labour to new heights, a phase in which it has forged a dynamic link between science and production in a way previously unheard of, and through which technology itself feeds into the process of further development of the productive forces via the medium of IT. It is a phase, which is driving forward production and growth at faster rates than Man has previously thought possible, and which will before too long see the industrialisation of the last Continent to be modernised – Africa – as well as the application of science to resolve some of the remaining problems facing mankind, in particular in providing sufficient energy and clean water, and dealing with some of the issues of health and the environment. It is setting the true conditions in place required for the establishment of socialism as a global co-operative system. But, the transition to such a system is no more automatic today than it was in the past. The possibility remains that if Mankind does not actively transform social relations, then Imperialism will reach a point where decay sets in, or Mankind might destroy itself.

The reality we face is that the human material forged in the great furnace of class struggle during the latter part of the 19th century, and early 20th century has been frittered away. The divisions in the workers movement created by the establishment of the Third International turned the fire of class struggle away from the bosses and their agents, and into internecine conflict, the most grotesque example of which, was the Stalinist Third Period, that allowed Hitler into power. The huge potential for creating a mass revolutionary workers party that existed even into the 1930’s, has not existed now for decades. A truly dialectical process has been at work. The failure of Marxists to provide the working class with practical working solutions to their immediate problems, outside a limited Economism of Trade Union struggle, has led to those Marxists being seen as increasingly irrelevant to the working class. It is notable that even where “Marxists” were able to create something approaching sizeable movements of workers in the industrial sphere, where they have been able to get their members elected to positions of authority within the Trade Unions this has never translated into any kind of meaningful electoral success. In fact, even the success of those revolutionaries that have won positions in the Trade Unions has largely been a sham, a case of appearance rather than reality. No serious person believes that the majority of Civil Servants, for example, share the “revolutionary” politics of those organisations whose members won control of their union’s leading body. That is why when that body backtracked over the pensions fight there was no mass revolt by the rank and file!

The example of Militant and Liverpool City Council could be cited, but the reality is that pretty much the same argument applies. The working class of Liverpool did not vote for “Militant” Councillors, they certainly did not vote for revolutionary politics. They voted for Labour Councillors, who happened to actually be members of Militant, who had won positions within the Liverpool LP, by similar means to those used by revolutionaries to win positions within the Trade Unions! It was the fact that these positions were built on sand – along with some pretty poor tactics employed by Militant, for example its failure to link up their struggle with the Miners Strike – that enabled both the Tory Government to defeat them, and allowed Kinnock to remove them. In reality, the working class of Liverpool voted not for anything revolutionary, but only for the kind of reforms that previous reformists have advocated, reforms that seek to simply ease the workers condition, temporarily, until such time as the bosses or their state, are able to undermine them.

In short it was the Economism of industrial struggle simply transposed onto the political arena. As such, the comments made by Marx in relation to such struggles apply. He wrote,

“At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!"

…Thirdly. Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system.”

Value, Price and Profit

Economism

However admirable, from the point of view of trying to ameliorate the condition of workers housing, in Liverpool, the politics of Militant amounted to nothing more. They neither represented a shift in class power, nor provided workers with any protection from the renewal of attacks by Capital at some future time of its choosing. Had the City Council, however, supported the establishment of Housing Co-ops by workers to take over the estates, to build new housing and so on, then not only would that have represented a significant shift of economic and social power away from the bosses and their State at national and local level, but by placing the ownership of the housing directly in the hands of workers it would have protected workers from the future attacks of Capital, through privatisation of the housing stock, rent increases and so on.

As, Marx puts it,

“If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?”

Both Trade Unionism and Municipal Socialism – and indeed state socialism in general – are examples of this “Vulgar Socialism”, because they all rely on changes in DISTRIBUTION, rather than understanding as Marx set out that this distribution is a function of production, and the ownership of the means of production. Raise taxes, and increase benefits, or provide workers with some other improvements through the Social Wage for example, but fail to transfer ownership of the Means of production into the hands of workers, and Capital will respond by all those methods Marx outlines, to reverse that redistribution. Establish workers ownership of the means of production, however, and those top-down, redistributive, reformist policies become unnecessary, because distribution is permanently changed in the workers interests!

A similar situation can be seen now in relation to the Royal Mail dispute. Of course, as Marxists we give our full support to the Royal Mail workers, but precisely because we are Marxists it is our duty to do more than that. The headlines, of the Tory Press, in speaking about the dispute spelling the death knell of the Royal Mail, are sickening, but it has to be admitted not without foundation. Were Royal Mail a private Capitalist firm, then the strike would fall immediately on the profits of the firm. It would have an immediate incentive to bring the dispute to a close. But, it is not. It is a state capitalist enterprise, which Capital has sought to transfer into the private sector. A strike, which destroys the Royal Mail, simply accomplishes that task for Capital, and does so whilst transferring the blame for it, directly on to the workers!

Even were that not the case the position of the workers is constrained. As Marx puts it,

“Take, for example, the rise in England of agricultural wages from 1849 to 1859. What was its consequence? The farmers could not, as our friend Weston would have advised them, raise the value of wheat, nor even its market prices. They had, on the contrary, to submit to their fall. But during these eleven years they introduced machinery of all sorts, adopted more scientific methods, converted part of arable land into pasture, increased the size of farms, and with this the scale of production, and by these and other processes diminishing the demand for labour by increasing its productive power, made the agricultural population again relatively redundant. This is the general method in which a reaction, quicker or slower, of capital against a rise of wages takes place in old, settled countries. Ricardo has justly remarked that machinery is in constant competition with labour, and can often be only introduced when the price of labour has reached a certain height, but the appliance of machinery is but one of the many methods for increasing the productive powers of labour. The very same development which makes common labour relatively redundant simplifies, on the other hand, skilled labour, and thus depreciates it.”

This is, in fact, the situation that Royal mail workers face, not in relation to a struggle for higher wages, but in relation to a struggle to prevent their real wages being cut, to prevent a speed-up, and so on. Why? Because the global market now means that Capital will flow to where it sees the opportunity to access what have been Monopoly profits, some of which have been absorbed in higher wages than the global market would set, because the advance of technology means that Capital is presented with many alternatives to the use of Labour Power in the transmission of communications! As Marxists we have to offer workers more in terms of a practical solution than just the same old dead-end of industrial struggle that ultimately is doomed to failure either immediately or some ways down the road.

“ limiting (ourselves) to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it,”

Independent Working Class Political Solutions

And how are we to simultaneously try to change it? Not, with calls for a Labour Government to act, not with calls for some non-existent Workers Government to come to power and act, but by the same means that Marx and Engels proposed. What Post Office Workers need now is the establishment of their own Communications Co-operative, owned and controlled by them. As Marx said,

“ the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society”.

Such a Co-operative could recombine the postal and telecommunications operations, providing workers with some protection against the continued development of electronic communication in place of paper. It could combine with the Co-op Bank, to offer the kind of Post Office and Banking operations that workers require, and so on. Yet the Left does not advocate such solutions, because it is stuck in a form of political trench warfare.

This might seem a diversion from the topic of this blog, but it is not. It is precisely this shortsighted view of political trench warfare, where the whole battle is about winning this or that skirmish – usually tied to the idea that out of such disputes a few more recruits for “building the Party” can be won – and about exposing the LP and TU leaderships, that characterises the sectarian stance of the Left. Everything is seen in these terms, because the whole strategy is based around nothing more than the idea of “building the Party”, and winning the leadership. It places the cart some distance in front of the horse.

But, to complete that dialectal process, the increasing separation of the Marxists from the working class, the failure to provide it with any kind of strategy which could deal with its immediate problems has led to an increasing depoliticisation of the class, a significant fall in its level of class consciousness compared to previous generations. Whereas the period from the late 19th century saw a steady rise in workers organisation, and in class consciousness as workers parties won ever larger votes in elections, and organised ever larger numbers within their organisations, the period from the 1930’s onwards has seen a reversal of that process. The election success of Labour in 1997, marked a sharp break with what had been a persistent decline in its support from 1945 onwards, a decline that certainly was not matched by any increase in support for a left alternative.

In a discussion on this topic on Phil’s Blog at AVPS, one comrade commented,

“The left hate Labour because of the politics they represent.”

In part, that is true, but only in part, because as I will demonstrate there is no qualitative difference between Labour’s politics now, and Labour’s politics in the past. But, the comment is significant to the extent that it is true, for what it actually means. What it means is that the sectarian Left not only hate Labour for those politics, but hate those millions of workers who at best share those politics!!!! It means that sectarian Left has to hate even more those millions of workers whose politics stand even further to the Right than New Labour, those who vote Tory, or Liberal, or UKIP, or BNP!!! It means that the only people that the left DO NOT hate, is that less than 1% of the working class, and petit-bourgeois intelligentsia – i.e. mostly the current, and past memberships of the various sects – that agrees with it.

Third Period

That is who its propaganda and activity is directed towards, that is who it speaks to, that is why it continues to decline even when Labourism is in decline, and when the BNP and other fascists are the ones who benefit. In fact, the left’s sectarian position is similar to, but worse than the sectarianism of the Stalinist Third Period. In the 1930’s, the German Stalinists, had millions of workers as members and supporters. They were able to continue to relate to, and organise those workers. Their sectarianism, damnable as it was, was a sectarianism directed at only Social-Democratic workers. But, today’s Left has virtually no membership or support within the working class, its Third Period lunacy is effectively directed at the working class as a whole!!! Its no wonder the BNP are breeding like vermin.

The decline in class consciousness has been reflected not just in working class support for the Tories, but even for more right-wing parties such as the BNP and UKIP. Without seeing things in too mechanical and deterministic a way, it has to be recognised that a condition for building a mass workers party has to be that working class consciousness is rising not falling, as much as that a condition for raising working class consciousness, is the interaction with that class of the Workers Party, and the Marxists within it. And that decline has been mirrored in the performance of workers parties elsewhere.

In a sense the root cause of the sectarianism of the Left, and its attitude to Labour resides not just in its genes, in what it has inherited from Leninism, but resides also in its own failure to attract support to itself, even as support has drained away from the traditional workers parties. It is what leads now to repeated attempts to recreate those old reformist parties, by the revolutionaries pretending to be something they are not, whether it be attempts to create a Labour Party Mark II, or even the example of Die Linke, which is winning support not by moving the class Left, but simply by occupying the Centre-Left ground abandoned by the Social Democrats.

In Britain even this argument is strained by the Left’s arguments about why it has abandoned the LP, and why it insists it must create some LP Mark II. The argument generally rests on three legs. The first leg is that the LP as a bourgeois Workers Party – that is a Party based on the working class, but having a bourgeois programme and outlook – is continually pulled to either of these two poles, and the transformation of recent years has pulled it irretrievably towards the bourgeois pole. The second argument is that the membership of the LP has collapsed, and the remaining membership are made up of middle class elements and careerists, thereby undermining its claim to be a Workers Party based on a working class membership. The third argument is that although the link with the Trade Unions can act to counteract this second argument, the organisational changes brought in by the leadership have meant that the normal channels for exerting working class influence over policy making by the Trade Unions through the CLP’s and Conference have been closed down.

Labour Then And Now

Let us look at how valid any of these arguments actually are. The first argument is about the political stance of the Party. In reality the Left has told itself a story here, and convinced itself of it. There are a number of events, which play into this story. What is odd, is that in reality in order to convince itself of the story it has told the sectarian Left has had to abandon some of what it has argued in the past! Take one of the main battle lines, one of the events that play into this story – the scrapping of Clause IV. Clause IV, which vaguely committed the party to securing, through Public Ownership, the full fruits of their labour, for the working class, was seen as to some extent embodying the socialist goal of the party. By setting out to scrap it, so the story goes, New Labour made clear its intention to abandon any such goal, and to make the LP into a purely bourgeois party.

Nice story. But, hold on, for years the revolutionary Left had argued that, in reality Clause IV was meaningless. Not only is the phrase about “full fruits of their labour” economically illiterate, for the reasons Marx set out as against Proudhon, but “Public Ownership” by the Capitalist State, has never been about securing anything for workers, and even if it were, the commitment is so vague as to leave room for a coach and horses to be driven through. Which indeed, had been the case, because no Labour Government has ever paid a blind bit of notice to Clause IV when it got into office. Even Attlee’s Government had to be pushed hard from below to nationalise the Capitalist lame ducks it took over.

Yet, the battle over this meaningless totem has been turned into a significant turning point! If anything is significant in it, it is that the Left chose to waste so many resources over fighting it, and took its defeat over it so badly! Its true that, combined with the abandonment of the idea of advocating state capitalist nationalisation, as a means of resolving the problems of British Capitalism, New Labour, introduced other ideas such as PFI, which provided the financial resources for the necessary investment in schools, hospitals and other pieces of infrastructure, at the cost of paying out huge amounts in rental and interest payments to the private firms involved. Yet, how is this different in principle to the huge rip-off of the NHS, and other state-capitalist enterprises, that has been the feature of all of them from their inception?

We can argue that such a policy is not in the workers interests – though personally I do not see it as a Marxist’s job to advise the Capitalist State on what is the best method of managing the problems of the Capitalist economy, and its need for infrastructure investment, anymore than I would see it as our job to advise a Capitalist to raise Capital by a Share Offer rather than issuing a Bond! – but, it is no less in the workers interests than has been state capitalist nationalisation. So, in that sense it does not represent a more right-wing position, it does not signify a shift to the Right by the Party, only the adoption of one bourgeois solution as opposed to another.

What is more, the apparent reluctance of many firms now, to engage in PFI schemes, reflects the fact that many of these deals have not turned out as lucrative for private capital as they anticipated, and given the vast number of new hospitals, schools and other facilities that have been built, it is not at all clear that, on balance, such a strategy has not benefited the workers who rely upon these facilities. In any case, as a strategy, it is precisely that pursued by Lenin in the 1920’s, who faced with a shortage of Capital, and expertise, turned to western private Capital to invest in Russia in similar PFI type ventures. If it was good enough as a strategy for Lenin, it seems strange that a revolutionary Left that prides itself on being his heirs should criticise Labour for adopting it!

And Labour has renationalised industries such as Network Rail. Moreover, it has done so in a far more subtle way than nationalisations in the past. It took Network Rail back effectively at no cost. The same has been true of the re-nationalisation of the National Express East Coast franchise. By contrast, the nationalisations of Coal and Rail and so on, by the Atlee Government, involved paying out such generous compensation, to the former owners, that those industries were crippled for decades after their nationalisation.

A similar story appears to apply to the Banks. Northern Rock was nationalised at virtually no cost. Last year when the Government took majority stakes in the other high street banks, the banks and others present at the meetings declared that they were presented with a fait accompli, which they have described as being a “mugging”.

The same is true of other areas of policy. The 1945 Attlee Government maintained food rationing for the working class long after it should have been scrapped. It did so, in order to bolster Britain’s Balance of Payments, which was crucified as a result of the War, and the policies of the US, but also because of Attlee’s decision to develop a nuclear deterrent, and to involve Britain in the Korean War. It has now been admitted that in 1976 there was no real need for Britain to go to the IMF for a loan, and no chance that the IMF would turn it down, if it refused to accept the terms that the IMF sought to impose. They did so, because it gave them political cover to undertake the Public Expenditure cuts they were politically committed to.

By contrast, if we are to measure Labour governments by such actions we would have to say that New Labour moved considerably to the Left of either Attlee or Wilson/Callaghan, because far from Public Spending cuts it has instituted a massive increase in Public Spending, tripling expenditure on that other fetish of the Left, the NHS.

For years, the Left cried out, like a wolf in the night, calling for a Minimum Wage, and the nationalisation of the Banks. There was absolutely no chance of any of these Labour Governments carrying out either policy. Yet Blair carried out the first, and Brown the second. Again, if we judge by actions not words, we would have to place New Labour to the Left of these previous Labour Governments.

Its true, that Labour has not abolished all of the Tories anti-union laws. That should certainly be criticised, but does this fact mark out Labour now as qualitatively different from previous Labour Governments? Attlee’s Government, for example, even without such laws, sent the troops out to confront striking workers. Wilson’s Government attempted to introduce the first anti-union laws with “In Place of Strife”, and Callaghan’s Government did not need anti-union laws, when instead it could rely on the TUC, and compliant union leaders to police the workers in return for being invited to Number 10 for beer and sandwiches! Indeed, during this period the main fear was of a Corporatist State, in which the unions became just a transmission belt for the policies of the Capitalist State.

The most notable policy criticised has been the decision to invade Iraq. Again it is certainly a policy to be criticised, but does it mark out any qualitative change over past Labour Governments? Clearly not. The earliest Labour governments not only took responsibility for maintaining the Empire and the enslavement of millions of people around the globe, but Labour leaders actively recruited workers’ battalions to fight in the intervention against the Bolsheviks in Russia! Attlee’s Government maintained the Empire, and presided over the slaughter of millions in the Indian sub-continent on independence, as well as sending troops to fight in Korea and so on.

Wilson’s Government stayed out of Vietnam, though there were reports of covert operations, but turned the North of Ireland into an armed encampment, and introduced internment i.e. concentration camps. Callaghan’s Government continued that policy as well as Labour backing Thatcher’s adventure in the Falklands.

If we deal with actions rather than words it is difficult to see that any of the actions carried out by Labour since 1997 are in any way qualitatively different from those of previous Labour Governments that failed to provoke the Left into declaring that Labour had become beyond the pale.

Let us turn to the second argument then about the LP’s actual membership. Again most of this argument is based on myth. The first thing to say is that the LP has rarely been a mass working class party of the type of the German SPD at the beginning of the twentieth century. Moreover, even when it has gone through periods of increased membership, it has always been the case that much of this membership was purely on paper. Indeed, during the 1980’s part of the Left’s mistaken arguments over One member One Vote, was that it allowed these many paper members to vote!

Basing, the argument on the level of membership and activity during the 1980’s is fraudulent, precisely because that period was untypical! There are many studies of LP membership, which show this to be the case. Some of them were done by the International Socialists in years gone by, precisely in order to make the argument about the LP, that the rest of the sectarian Left now try to make. I know from my own experience that for most of the decade prior to the upsurge of the 1980’s the LP was largely moribund in terms of its membership base.

See: Pits, Pongs and Politics

In fact, all the evidence is that initially membership increased markedly under New Labour. Certainly Blair’s own CLP – which also can hardly be described as being typically middle class – seems to have been very successful in recruiting large numbers, and stimulating involvement, and some of that seems to be directly due to the more professional attitude that New Labour brought with it. Having said that, it is also equally clear that current membership has declined dramatically.

But, has this dramatic decline had any qualitative effect compared to similar conditions in the past? Not that I can see. In some ways it is similar to the period under Gaitskell when having once been the case that the unions acted as a bulwark of the Right, with the CLP’s providing the Left influence, the situation was reversed with the CLP’s standing to the Right of the Trade Unions. Moreover, it is necessary to understand the natural hunting grounds of different sections of the class within the Party itself – a fact, which is important for understanding why the sectarian Left really hate the Labour Party. The reality is that the LP has always been made up of essentially two classes of activist. On the one hand there is the ordinary working-class member who joins because they have some concern for what is going on in their own neighbourhood. Often their concerns do not stretch much beyond that horizon. Very limiting from the point of a Marxist that is true, but nevertheless a fact of life.

On the other hand, there are those, be they union militants who have reached a certain level of class consciousness, or others who have joined because of some wider political concern, whose main interest is in debating these wider issues, and for whom the hum drum routine of the Branch meeting, dealing with community issues, is a distraction. One group sees the Branch as its main area of operation, the other sees the CLP, the DLP or higher bodies as the main area of operation, and in that regard the passing of resolutions on these matters of concern is the main focus of political activity. For fairly obvious reasons it is with this latter group, and, therefore, with this latter arena of politics that the Left has traditionally attached its wagon. The Left has seen a focus on the Branch work as “routinism”, as it believes would be a correct Leninist description. Yet, in fact, it is through that Branch work that real work inside the working class occurs.

My experience is that although there has been a general reduction in LP membership and activity, the make-up of the Party at that basic grass roots level of the Branch remained virtually unchanged, and overwhelmingly proletarian. Even at the level of elected Councillors, the majority that I know are solidly working class. When I was a County Councillor – and County Councillors tend to be less proletarian than District Councillors – the vast majority of Labour Councillors were working class, with only a handful of lecturers, and even white collar workers. The leader was a former GEC production line worker, and his successor a comrade from my own Branch was an ex-fireman, who lives in a Council house. I am fairly confident that a sociological survey would demonstrate that the LP remains far more proletarian in its make-up than the average Left sect.

Where the difference does lie is at the level of the CLP, DLP etc. Here, the very fact that those members of the Left, for whom this was the centre of activity, have vacated the space, has necessarily changed its political composition. Now politicos with a different agenda, careerists who see these forums as means of advancing themselves have been able to dominate, and rather like during the 1960’s a layer of shop stewards and convenors was incorporated into the union bureaucracy, so today layers of these activists are incorporated into the LP bureaucracy.

The Politics of The Student Debating Club

In other words it is not that the composition of the LP has dramatically changed, but merely that the sectarian Left see it that way, because there eyes have always been fixed on that one narrow aspect of LP, which for them was all important. It was all important, because what characterised their existence in the LP was nothing constructive, no attempt to build the Party as the Workers Party, but was a continuation inside that Party of their raison d’etre outside it, continual sterile debate. What characterised it was simply such debate in order to launch attacks on the Party Leadership. The real reason the sectarian Left hate the LP, is that the Party has acted like a parent with a spoiled child – it has taken away the toys.

And this finally leads into the third leg of the argument, that the Party has closed down all avenues of debate, and decision making. The obvious reply to this argument is that the decisions about Conference etc. were all decisions taken by the Party and its members, including the Trade Unions. No one forced these decisions on the Party. Moreover, these decisions can be overturned by the party if it so chooses. Again, what frustrates the sectarian Left is that it failed to get its own way in these decisions. To use Marx’s phrase it failed to “Win The Battle of Democracy”. But, because this sectarian left comes from an essentially undemocratic tradition, rather than responding by trying harder to persuade workers of its correctness, it prefers bureaucratic measures that attempt to determine how votes should be held so as to best favourite it (hence opposition to OMOV), or relies on Leninist organisational prowess to pack meetings with delegates, or simply ignores democratic decisions and chooses to support anti-Labour candidates as did the RMT, and others.

The sectarian Left really hates Labour because it put an end to all these undemocratic games. Certainly, the Blairites were not slow to use similar methods themselves, but once again that explains the fury of the sectarian Left, which fumes at being beaten at its own game. 25 years ago I wrote then as a member of one of these organisations about what I saw as the dead-end of this kind of politics and outlook.

See: Being A Revolutionary Means Getting Your Hands Dirty

That document could have been written today as a description of the attitude of most of the Left, and its debilitating Third Periodist sectarianism.

Even in terms of the other criticisms that go with this leg of the argument its possible to see how thin and hypocritical are the arguments. Take the arguments over LP Conference. Clearly a Party Conference, should be able to debate true emergency motions, but the argument that the Party had fundamentally changed because discussion on Policy had been moved to the Policy Forums, is not just misplaced, but thoroughly hypocritical! During the 1980’s most organisations realised that trying to actually get anything positive done via Conference Plenary sessions was impossible. Nearly all organisations including the revolutionary Left itself began to break up such events into a range of workshops to discuss particular areas of policy, which were then fed back into plenary sessions for more rational debate and the possibility of reaching decisions that could be acted upon.

No sensible person can believe that a real democratic debate that deals thoroughly with complex issues can be had in the space of a couple of hours at most during a Conference. Revolutionary groups themselves long ago established Commissions whose role is precisely that of the LP’s Policy Forums, for that reason. By all means debate how the membership of such forums should be formed, and how the rank and file at all levels could be involved in such discussions, but do not give us hypocritical nonsense about such forums themselves being undemocratic, when in your own organisations you do exactly the same thing!

But, of course, as I stated above it is not the principle which is the real issue, it is the fact that in moving discussion into such forums the toys were taken away. The left had to give up the idea of some studentist debate at Conference – and similar arguments apply at the other lower policy making bodies such as the CLP and DLP – which produce more heat than light, but which fulfil the function the sectarian left assigns to it – salving its conscience by proclaiming its purity, and “exposing” the politics of the leadership, and instead was faced with having to spend some time actually being constructive!

As I said in that old document, the irony is that the sectarian Left having run around like headless chickens for decades in an attempt to “Build The party”, or each sects microscopic version of it, have singularly failed. Yet, had a fraction of the effort been put into constructive work day in day out alongside the ordinary working class members of the Party, its likely that just as Marx and Engels were able to win support for their ideas as a by-product of such activity, so would the Marxist Left. What is more, in undertaking such work in the context of a real Workers Party, faced with having to “win the battle of democracy” every day to persuade those workers of its ideas in struggle, many of the sectarian divisions that have sprung up between the various Left sects would have disappeared. Each sects ideas would have been tested in the fire of class struggle, and the workers would decide, which to discard. Its only because the ideas of that Left remain at the level of debate that no such test can be applied, no conclusion achieved, and so each sect is able to continue to argue that it is right.

Still Time To Correct The Mistakes

All of this is depressing, but as yet not crucial. At the moment the bosses do not need the fascists because the left is weak, and bourgeois democracy is strong. Not only do the bosses not need the fascists, but for now the bosses need to keep the fascists in their cage. The fascists only threaten to bring destabilisation and social unrest, which is not in the bosses interests for Capital accumulation. That is probably one reason for the emergence of the EDL, partly a reflection of the fact that the attempt to present an image of suits not boots by the BNP, will be pissing off part of its membership, partly the fact that the Spooks, and agent provocateurs of the State will be having a bit of fun, stirring up dissent within fascist ranks. But, that may no always be the case. IN the 1920’s the German bosses did not need Hitler, and the Nazis were unable to mobilise large forces as a result of lacking the backing of the big bourgeoisie. By the 1930’s with the German Stalinists, and German Social Democrats winning majorities of votes between them, and increasing votes for the Stalinists, German big business turned to Hitler, and the situation changed in a matter of just a few years.

Given our knowledge of what happened then, and what is happening now, it would be an even worse crime than that committed by the Stalinists, if the sectarian Left continued its own Third Period madness, in its attitude to the LP, and the millions of workers it represents.