Socialism 2009: Saturday sessions and the fightback against Cameron
At the weekend, the Socialist Party ran their weekend school, Socialism 2009. Members from Respect, the Alliance for Green Socialism, the Greens and various other groups, including the Labour Party and LRC, were in attendance and turn out was high. The rally on Saturday night had somewhere in the region of sixteen hundred people, and the sessions throughout the weekend were well-attended and had many interesting contributions. Here I’ll be documenting how the weekend went, and some of the discussions that went on.
For me, the session 1 slot on Saturday (2.00-4.30pm) was ‘defeating a Tory government’. I was half an hour late, but I still got to hear Labour and Socialist Party veteran Tony Mulhearn finish his exposition of the lessons which Liverpool in the 1980s had for fighting Cameron.
Mulhearn outlined how the National Front wouldn’t show its face in Liverpool during the 1980s, such was the unity of the labour movement and the working class. The response of the Labour bureaucracy and the Trades Union bureaucracy was to try and crush militancy. The local Labour Party was suspended. Men like Ron Todd and Dave Basnett were ordered to ‘investigate’ the local labour organisations, to detach the district trades council from Labour, even though the members of their unions were receiving the best wages from the Militant/Labour local authority.
When Labour’s leadership turned on its own, the Tories, who might have been forced into a climbdown, were let off the hook. Mulhearn sees a similar betrayal in how trades union leaders, but obviously not the members, are reacting to the crisis. Quite a number of them have tacitly acknowledged the Tory notion that we have to ‘share the pain’ of economic recovery, through agreements with public sector bosses that accepts the principle of cuts in numbers of staff and so on, even before they organise any resistance at all.
Contributions from the floor were varied and included accounts of union sabotage of ballots, lack of faith in the concept of ‘lesser evilism’ at the polls, anger at Tory hypocrisy when it comes to cuts, worry that the feat of TUC and Labour bureaucracy in the ’80s would be repeated, and wonder about how we go from a small movement of shop stewards, activists and supporters to a mass movement when we have so little time. This generated the interesting contention that the process will happen faster than the twenty years it took to develop a base in Liverpool.
Tony Mulhearn’s reason for saying so was that he believes the build up of pressure on the capitalist side, to begin retrenchment immediately, will telescope the development of consciousness, which can be harnessed by socialists.
Another important point made at the meeting was the catastrophic collapse of Labour’s link with young people, which Left Foot Forward ran an article on not too long ago. The post-war working class may still vote Labour, but the policies of the Labour government are pushing the new generation of workers into a heightened degree of apathy. As socialists, we don’t expect that the Tories will find it easy to appeal to young workers, but they find it a damn sight easier when there is no strong party of the working class to compete for their allegiance.
This negatively impacts Paul’s contention that Labour is where we should be. A couple of voices from the floor asked whether or not we should consider re-joining Labour and taking over the party. Mulhearn’s answer was, “We’d rejoin Labour if we could find it”, which was his way of commenting on the often moribund constituency organisations, which he supported with examples he knew of. The youth vote and declining membership are connected in the anti-worker policies of New Labour – but I still haven’t seen a credible plan to oust New Labour.
Only such a plan would justify remaining within Labour. Even then, whether or not we have time to ‘recapture’ Labour, is a different matter with its own implications – we need to be standing working class candidates against many of the anti-working class candidates of Labour, and we can’t do that from within the Labour Party. Respect, the IWCA, the Socialist Party and other groups have some decent enough councillors who deserve support – and each of these groups have a chance to increase their representation and the good work they’re doing.
When it comes to defending Left councillors, or Left MPs, then the Left outside of Labour have more in common with groups like the LRC, which are still within Labour, but that is simply one aspect of the battle for working class representation. Beginning as it did on the same day as the RMT union conference to discuss new political options (on which see Susan’s brief account), this theme was always going to dominate Socialism 2009, and I’ll be coming back to it for Session 3 from Sunday.
It certainly dominated the impressive rally on Saturday night, where Bob Crow, Matt Wrack and Brian Caton won many rounds of applause for their stance on building a new coalition to represent workers at elections, and to organise workers in struggle. On a couple of occasions, however, I was reminded of the point made by Judy Beishon from the platform that workers have more in common with each other than with union leaders, of Left or Right persuasions. The focus by the ‘big three’ on an electoral road, since ‘workers are already represented industrially’, and certainly Brian Caton’s loud bray that he would fight, and he would defend his workers, contrasted with Beishon’s words.
No doubt it is easy to get caught up in the moment, while on a stage, being loved by a couple of thousand supporters. Yet one or two things said from the platform about getting a ‘key figure’, who has the respect of the working class and can put bums on seats, to head some new political arrangement sounded a little too like a call for an SP-dominated version of Respect. I may be wrong, but I’m definitely going to be watching how the new SP-led coalition will relate to the supporting leaders of trades unions, and what sort of power is accorded to them.
Despite Bob Crow being easily the most accomplished speaker, to the point where a few members were giving him a standing ovation, key voice of the rally was Keith Gibson. Keith was one of the workers at the Lindsey Oil Refinery, who led workers out on a series of strikes, which secured hundreds of jobs for the workers – both British and foreign – at different refineries around the UK. His deafening bellow struck home as the authentic, unpolished voice of working class anger at the situation being imposed on us.
His message of standing united, of finding a political solution to New Labour and of never taking our eyes off the demands of workers rang around the hall to loud applause, and I think the socialists – of many parties – who attended the rally were stiffened in resolve by it. Peter Taaffe said it right, when he said the point of such meetings was to arm socialists with the rhetorical weapons needed to go back to our workplaces and play our small role. Hopefully that is what the rally achieved.
(See also: And Now For Something Completely Sectarian, Nation of Duncan and David Bishop)
“This negatively impacts Paul’s contention that Labour is where we should be. A couple of voices from the floor asked whether or not we should consider re-joining Labour and taking over the party. Mulhearn’s answer was, “We’d rejoin Labour if we could find it”, which was his way of commenting on the often moribund constituency organisations, which he supported with examples he knew of.”
In the absence of the evidence base you argue for (quite rightly), I think this is a ‘glass half empty, glass half full’ issue; where Tony and others at Soc 2009 see the withiering on the vine of CLP infrastructures as evidence of the pointlessness of joining labour, I prefer to view it as evidence that the existing infrastructure is relatively easy to take over in many places.
Put it this way. all things being equal (and I accept they’re not) would you rather set up your own local organisation from scratch with no cash and no members other than you and four comrades, or be ‘invited’ to run an organisation with quite a few willing but slightly directionless members of slightly unknow talent but a little promise, a bank account, an exisitng office base and a printing machine, and one which has at least formal links to other bodies in which you are interested in engaging?
I’d like to take up the second option, from an organisational point of view, obviously. It makes the most sense. But there are ‘externalities’, if you like, to this pragmatic approach to local organisation – e.g. the cost of associating with a name that is really quite besmirched. Also it is the case that many local organisations have very few resources anyway.
That’s not totally true of Canterbury – there’s a local Labour Club here, which is an excellent meeting venue unlikely ever to be detached from the Labour Party. But it is true of many other local parties. Which is why I’m looking forward to your Part 4, Step 5.
The other thing is that, over quite a swathe of the country, creating any degree of labour organisation (small ‘l’) involves building a new organisation anyway. Then there’s the local Labour Party groups who know full well that they are stuck in neutral, are not themselves ideological, but will still passively-aggressively oppose any move to the Left.
I don’t disagree with any of that, and it will always be a horses for courses matter. It’s an open question but at the very least it seems silly not to try in places where we (the left) think it may work well. After all, as I said somewhere else, there’s pretty good evidecne that it worked a generation ago.
Of course the party name was not so besmirched a generation ago, and that’s an additional challenge, but I think there are two answers. First, there’s the quite deliberate and successful local branding that ‘Manchester Labour’ has engaged in over the last fifteen years. Second, any de-besmirchment can only be undertaken properly where real changes are taking place in the type and quantity of activity is happening, and of course the de-besmirchment/proper activity is iterative.
As I’ve said many times, i’m not nostalgic about the Labour name/brand, and I’ll address that further in step 5, but it just seems a shame that for all the left shouts ‘organisation, organisation, organisation’ it can’t see a fairly obvious opportunity at local level because it (e.g Salman) is blinded by (understandable) national level hatred).
I don’t know how the Manchester Labour branding worked, so I can say neither yeh or nay on the subject. But I worry about the fact that modern Labour branding efforts simply involve having the councillors and the MP on the doorstep and out being seen as much as possible. Which is all very well, if a little apolitical, but will not work wonders when it comes to the grit of actually protecting jobs etc.
The other thing to consider is that suspicion of Labour does not derive solely from apprehension about the national image of the party. The bureaucratic machinations of the Right are nigh unchallengeable – as can be seen in the suspension of more than couple of CLPs or candidacies over the last two years. Grabbing the odd constituency will not change that – and if it begins to, you can bet your ass that the well-entrenched PLP and their allies in the trades union bureaucracy will act to forestall it.
As far as socialists outside the party are concerned, that seems like a pretty good reason to invest effort in something we know can’t be so easily stymied.
Again, I agree mostly, but I query whether the bureaucratic machinations of the PLP and union leaderships are quite so unchallengeable as is now often assumed.
Certainly (and in addition to the selection horrors) the PLP actions in respect of alternative positions put at conferene (e.g the fourth housing option) suggest that the rule change have made for a sense irreversibility, but I’m not convinced that it can’t be done through appropriate tactics at subnational level.
That is what step 3 of 5 addresses tomorrow.