Though Cowards Flinch

This is the second part of a six part series on the immediate and medium term future of the Labour Left in Britain. 

In the first part, published at my previous bloghome, I argued that despite media portrayals , and despite the doubts of much of the Left within and outside the Labour party, the Labour party remains – at least for the present – the best place for the left to organize.

Briefly, I argued that, just as it was in the late 1970s,  the Left in the Labour party might currently be relatively powerless and somewhat demoralized, but that the Labour party nevertheless retains a membership a long way to the left of the current parliamentary leadership, and that in the absence of any other coherent leftwing force in Britain, it continues to have the infrastructure best suited to the aim of a Left which can, if its gets its tactics right in the coming period, be resurgent and effective whatever the ‘colour’ of the government from 2010 onwards.

In part 3 of this series, I’ll be examining in broad terms what those ‘tactics’ might be, and in particular how they need to differ from the tactics of the Labour left in the 1980s, which won short term gains (especially at local government level) only at the expense of longer term solidarity with organized (or even disorganized labour).   In so doing, I argue,  it favoured temporally attractive but ultimately ineffective ‘identity politics’ over the need to reinvigorate ’class politics’ after the failures of the Labour governments of the 1970s and the seemingly sudden arrival of neoliberalism. 

In chapters 4 and 5, I’ll move on to how such tactics might be implemented in the ‘real world’ of CLP and local councils respectively, assessing some of the institutional but also very personal challenges that young activists, as well as who have matured in the last one or two decades, might face.

Before that, though, I need to do some further scene setting.  While the first part focused on the Labour party and where it now sits in the political environment, this part looks at that environment, and how the Labour left now needs to engage with it.  In short, this part asks the question:  what is the current state of capitalism in Britain, and what are the opportunities and threats for the Left?

As I set out initially here, the mood amongst the ‘liberal intelligentsia’ has changed over the last few months ago.  Just five short months ago, the darlings of the soft left, John Rutherford and Jon Cruddas felt able to write, and expect to be taken seriously:

‘For a brief period, history is in the public realm and it is ours for the making. The Left needs to rediscover our capacity for collective change because the opportunity will not come again for generations. The political fault lines of a new era are starting to take shape.’

The revolution was quick in the making, it seemed to them then.  If anything, their call had taken on a greater urgency, and air of certainty, than the not dissimilar one four months before that (Dec 2008):

‘The recession is a frightening prospect, but it is creating opportunities for social change and economic development that would have been unthinkable even six months ago. The Conservatives are floundering. The opportunities belong to the left. It is a matter of seizing these opportunities and galvanising people’s creativity.’

By mid-August 2009, the Conservatives didn’t seem to be foundering that much, and a call to revolution had turned to a call for the government to give us a Commission which would ask rich capitalists not to be quite so greedy in the future.

Similarly, the LRC’s campaign ‘Their Crisis, Not Ours’, for all its initial verve and soundness of analysis, seems a long time ago now.  As for the accompanying, well-intentioned and occasionally enthusiastic, attempts to form LeftNewMedia as a means of documenting and encouraging the supposedly rising tide of anti-capitalist opinion which  might lead to the storming of the G20 conference, the best I think we can say is that it’s still ‘a work in progress’ (and in my ‘pending’ tray).

In the Guardian too, the journos had sensed the changed mood, and decided the left was going nowhere fast.   One of the articles much read and discussed at the summer evening soirees of the chattering classes was Andy Beckett’s review of his Marxism ’09 weekend.  Here, apparently under the impression that the people turning up the event are representative of the left in Britain (rather than, say, the people out delivering Labour leaflets who never go to conference like this), Andy asked rhetorically whether ‘the Left has blown its big chance’. 

Unsurprisingly, Beckett concluded that  it has: ‘The left used to aim to change society rather than wait for society to change in its favour. For the bankers, who seemed to be facing near-extinction less than a year ago, the prospect of much more slowly losing their dominance over western economies to …… caring capitalists may not seem such a bad deal.’

In the blogosphere too, there’s a sense of defeatism.  From Dave Osler, who has perhaps let his entertaining sense of the sardonic get the better of him, and who’s been talking the chances of  real change down for some time now, it’s no great surprise.  More worrying is the normally indefatigable Ian’s sense of pessimism, as he looks around and see only the:
‘the inability of the left to unite around common issues and to understand the working class;

The inability of Labourites to understand the economic/cultural changes that have happened in the last 2 years and adapt;

The inability of the Trade Unions to completely modify their organisations, in light of the economic recession, and become hard hitting fighting unions.’

Yet all these doomsayers, in their different ways, miss the point. 

While Ian is right about the kind of thing that needs to happen, he’s wrong to conclude that none of them ever will, and while Dave O is right to say that the hopes of a middle class revolt were always misplaced, he’s wrong to conclude that, simply because the middle classes have decided rioting is not for them, that the left as a whole is doomed to inertia.

In actual fact, while Jon Cruddas and his colleagues’ way of going about change is unlikely to achieve much (as I’ve set out here, and will set out in more detail in part 3), his assessment of where we stand at the moment, as reflected in Andy Beckett’s aforementioned report, is pretty good:

‘This is the early knockings of this crisis. You’ve still got trillions of pounds of debt around. The assumption…..is that we tinker with this economic system, and then go back to 60 consecutive quarters of growth. But out in the country people know different. There is no economic status quo any more…….. There is a space for a populist left politics – around  ID cards and Trident, around taxes, tax justice – that wasn’t there a year ago. This is going to take years. There was a long lag between the Wall Street Crash in ’29 and the New Deal…..In the meantime, there could be a different new form of politics, much more populist, dangerous, fascistic, like the BNP.’

While his mention of ‘populist left politics’ is redolent of the loose, intellectually incoherent and ultimately failed politics of the New Urban Left of the 1980s to which he would have Labour return, he’s right about two things. 

First, it is anger at what’s happening, and not some Fabianist vision of a more reasonable ethical socialism drawn up in Compass’s seminar rooms - the early 21st century equivalent of the late 19th century Webbs’ drawing room - which will drive a new leftwing movement, if that anger is not wholly hi-jacked by the far right first.

Second, the anger which can fuel proper and effective leftwing action will be a ‘slow burner’.

While the initial financial crisis may have seemed like the golden opportunity for the left, and while it may seem that that opportunity has now gone, Cruddas is right to say that this is just the beginning. 

Now is the time to be hopeful, not for defeatism, and now is the time to start preparing the ground within the Labour party for what comes next.

When Thatcher came to power in 1979 and set about dismantling industrial Britain,  there was no immediate revolt.  The anger that developed against her and her government, and culminated in the near-won strikes of the mid to late 1980s, burned slowly, and grew in proportion to the real experience of the effects of Thatcherite policy.  The anger was such, and the organisation sufficiently good, that if the Labour party had then been in a position to support the workers, rather than pussyfoot around its short term electoral concerns, history would have been very different.

The same slow-burning anger is likely to develop over the next year or two, not as a result of reading about bankers’ bonuses in newspapers, but as unemployment stays high, short term unemployment becomes long term poverty and deprivation from the things people got used to, and as welfare ‘reform’ is implemented and those on the receiving end suffer the consequences of an increasingly alienated bureaucracy.

The anger will rise as public services that people have become used to are slashed by a government (of any hue) whose key performance measure is the reduction of debt at as percentage of GDP, whatever the arguments of sensible economists about the irrelevance of this in objective terms, and as the willingness to implement savage cuts becomes a badge of political honour.

Most importantly, the anger of workers  – already apparent in the recent militancy at Vestas, the refineries and perhaps most especially at Visteon in Enfield – will grow as employers in both the private and public sector seek to squeeze them till the pips squeak, either because of government directive (public sector) or because they think they can (private sector).

The challenge for the Labour Left, in league with other leftist bodies, is to be ready for that growing anger, to fuel it in much the same way as the Daily Mail fuels the righteous anger of its readership, and to help channel it away from the far right, and towards better targets. 

The challenge is to also to be unashamed about this, to reach back to a time before the hegemony of the Daily Mail, to the capacity of the 196os Daily Mirror, and before that the 1890s Clarion, to galvanise worker and public opinion in favour of the validity of solidaristic struggle.  

The Labour Left, when it starts to doubt the validity of its renewed calls for class struggle under the barrage of abuse from the dominant rightwing media,  should remember that Conservatives, in less guarded moments, feel great pride in their personal roles in the class struggle of the 1980s, and are happy to acknowledge its reality.  We should do the same.

Finally, the challenge for the Labour Left will be to learn from others, and help build on successes to date.  The East Lindsey dispute was not won, and the BNP were not excluded, for example, because of a spontaneous uprising.  The dispute was won because it was carefully planned, using all available commnications technologies, by people within the trade union movement and in support of it, including the Socialist Party.   The Socialist Party got it right in East Lindsey, and the Labour Left should not allow old emnities to get in the way of the tactics they need to learn and relearn.

In part 4, I’ll look at what all this means in practice for the Left within the Labour party, having looked in part 3 at what mistakes from the 1980s we can’t afford to repeat, and how our model should be less the post-Marxist left of the 1980s, more the distinctly Marxist left of the 1890s, picking our targets with care  (I’ve suggested one here for starters), and with a view to maximum impact and maximum involvement of all types of leftwing activists from within and beyond the established political process. 

Our tactics and style, I will contend, must go beyond the ‘reasonableness’ of Compass, or whatever latest form ex-New Labour will take, and its pointless call for an ethical socialism based on self-restraint and a new moral purity. 

Instead, it will need to tap into the emotional resource of solidarity and tradition that made the Labour and trade union movement what it was, before it was emasculated by the ‘rogue tradition’ of dry communitarianism introduced by New Labour.  

It needs to do so in a very 21st century way, in a way which establishes the primacy of working class struggle, whilst describing the working class in terms 21st century workers (and unemployed) people can relate to, and without setting to one side the undoubted gains made by those who have involved themselves in the struggle for the recognition and valuing of non-class identities, not least gender.

In short, the Labour left should now be setting in motion the process of establishing a new tradition within the party – the ‘fifth tradition’ I referred to all the way back here.

But that’s for part 6, and there’s a lot of detail to get through before then.   I hope you’ll be back for part 3, and a (fairly brief) assessment of what we shouldn’t be doing and on what basis we shouldn’t be doing it (see here for some early, wordy tips).