Has time run out for Labour socialists?
I can’t express in words how utterly furious I am that John McDonnell has been forced to withdraw from the Labour leadership contest. After a few days of faux outrage over his comment that if he could, he’d go back to the 1980s and kill Thatcher, and Diane Abbott’s mealy-mouthed supporters saying they think he should be the one to withdraw, despite her pledge to do so if he got more nominations (which he had, at that point), John has rightly judged that her supporters won’t come to him, so he’ll have to give his to her.
Not good enough. Every campaign for the next five years – against library closures, against service cuts, against the attempt to further casualise the public sector – is going to be fought outside of Labour. Only historical revisionists and morons believe that the anti-poll tax campaign was a Labour campaign. And yet the Left has kept the life support switched on, firmly demanding that people exercise the great contradiction at the heart of our democracy: loyalty to a Party the leadership of which does not care about them.
Is it time to pull the plug? Since 1923, we’ve faced the same situation. Labour is elected with high hopes for its success, disappoints those hopes and is then swept from office, leaving the Conservatives to pick up where they left off. Since the end of the great depression, after the war, when the exhaustion of the capitalist system allowed for greater state controls (which had been utilised during the war anyway and rubbed off the red taint they previously had), the journey has been backwards – trying to find a way back before the post-war settlement.
This is the mission of the Conservative Party, and ‘big society‘ is just its latest cover. What has Labour’s leadership done? Nothing. We have been losing the battle, and all the while desperately clinging to what Labour has achieved – scarcely anything new without sacrificing something old. So, of the last three parliaments, we got the minimum wage and a long-overdue rise in benefits (for example) whilst Labour set course towards undermining teachers’ unions and education, through faster deregulation of schools.
Meanwhile, Labour socialists – an endangered breed that I’ll deal with in a moment – ask their comrades and friends to hang on in a party that has been swamped by vapid twits. Anyone who goes to all the events touted by the Fabians, has been to Oxford or hangs out online can’t fail to know who I’m talking about. The twits claiming the legacy of Nye Bevan whilst backing Ed Balls, for example, without seeing the incredible disparity between the politics of the two. Whatever Bevan’s deficiencies and later demoralisation, he was no Balls.
Bevan occupies, as one might notice, the strapline of this blog. His sentiment, that one should not stand in the middle of the road, that one should not be afraid to take a position has been my personal code all my life. It is far from the attitude of the Labour leadership and their coterie. It is a party rotten through and through, corrupt, full of patronage and seeking after patronage, unprincipled. It isn’t really socialist at all. In seeking after patronage, people learn to talk with a certain vocabulary, highly technocratic and bloodless. Totally removed from ordinary people.
Labour socialists of the Labour Representation Committee number somewhere below 1000 people – that’s less than one percent of the total party membership (excluding the trades unions). They are condemned by the Labour Right for being backwards. They are excoriated by those who exist as rootlessly as Labour’s London elite for being too provincial, too unwilling to work with other groups (whatever that means, as every Labour campaign I’ve ever seen has involved LRC members and parliamentarians). But they are the last remaining socialists in Labour.
The last election demonstrated that this clique will not exist forever. The Parliamentary group of the LRC was halved, to say nothing of the destruction wreaked about its bigger, less socialist sister, the Socialist Campaign Group. And even this doesn’t account for the wacky behaviour of a bunch of the members of these groups, like Michael Meacher, supposed Left veteran…who nominated Ed Miliband for leader, even though Ed had cleared the bar and with room to spare. So long as the fortunes of this group are tied to Labour, it exists within a contradiction – urging (critical) support for a leadership that will kick the poor when it’s opportune whilst claiming to represent them.
The leadership contest has demonstrated that no matter how well people like John McDonnell work, no matter how much support they gather, they’ll be outmanoeuvred by Labour’s Right, which can rely on the cowardice and (ironically) the uncooperative nature of Labour’s ‘soft’ Left. Harriet Harman and Ed Ball’s nominations for Diane Abbott play the diversity card but in reality are simply intended to prop her up into a slightly more credible candidate (still not very credible, from a political point of view) and force McDonnell out. All he has done is bow to the inevitable.
Abbott has the nominations – she’s on the ballot – but she’s not going to change the Party. Forgive my cynicism, but I’ve met too many soft Lefts. Despite her feminist credentials, she doesn’t have the detailed critique of the Party that is the remit of the LRC – and that would set free the feminist and radical energies that people were quick to impute to her. Indeed when she does her media appearances – the last I heard in-depth was on a Radio 4 discussion programme on Friday about two months ago – she can even be quite conservative. So good luck to her and her supporters – she’ll be better than the other four, but I don’t have any faith in her, and am rather sickened by how heavily she has stressed the fact that she’s black and female – like these are somehow politically relevant, except as tokenism.
John’s letter to Labour members, in which he announces his decision to stand down, acknowledges that despite enormous grassroots pressure – e.g. Tom Harris’ admission that he and other Labour MPs were deluged with letters and emails to demand McDonnell get on the ballot – the Labour bureaucracy and PLP were unmoved. His final appeal is to the strength of the Labour Left, that the fight against the cuts should be continued and that a Conservative government be denied the chance to have everything its own way.
With this, every socialist will agree – but I will not use my energies to electrify the zombified party that Labour has become, and I am one among many. Campaigns dominated by socialists will come together, and as last time, Labour’s leadership will do what it can to hinder them, so long as they aren’t tied to the apron strings of mother Parliament. They will face no backlash from their members, as the membership have nowhere else to turn. The odd constituency party might endorse the LRC, but even these constituencies can’t seem to get their MPs in line. And this is before the vast and reactionary weight of the trade union bureaucracy is employed by said leadership.
Are we simply to say that time has run out for socialism in the Labour Party? My anger at McDonnell’s withdrawl howls Khrushchev’s famous retort at the PLP and its groupies, “History is on our side. We will bury you!” And yet…
Marxism is not an exact science. Having shaken my socialist eight-ball, the answer comes back “Indeterminate”. This is the truth. The struggle for socialism in Labour is indeterminate. Socialism within Labour may be buried beneath the avalanche of bureaucratic indifference and then made irrelevant by the emergence of an organisation outside Labour that can combine within itself all the loose strings from every campaign the Left fights. The failure to do this after the poll tax campaigns, and after the anti-war campaigns has been the life-support of Labour’s Left.
These failures are contingent – failures of tactics, rather than of principle – and a success in this field will remove that last remaining leg. On the other hand, the failure of Labour’s Left to conquer the Labour Party (whilst a rather taller order than the first) is equally contingent, one of tactics and not of principle. Everything flows, and there will be more mass campaigns thrown up by the intrinsic processes of capitalism meeting the contradiction of the indestructible basic solidarities of the working class. These tactics will have longer to test themselves out until the impulse either to utterly change Labour or to leave it will move even the conservative behemoths of UNISON and Unite.
Excellent post Dave, spot on!
The Labour Party is controlled from the top down and the leadership and the movers and shakers are firmly entrenched in the Blair mould. I don’t think there’s enough socialists left in there to challenge that structure. I left the LP over 25 years ago and I’m sure that the internal election processes must have undergone one hell of a shake up since then, effectively narrowing control to one group.
Now you’ve realized after last we spoke the need for two things: an electoral system that guarantees proportionality (with none or low thresholds), and the need for a Left Party.
Anyway, Oskar Lafontaine too made an anti-immigrant remark or two (but this was during his inactive years 1999-2005), yet brushed that completely aside. I hope the whole LRC and also the left comrades outside the arrogant official far-left see the light at the end of the tunnel and band together.
No, it’s not an exact science, deciding whether the Labour left’s is finished as a meaningful force, but my answer – as you’d expect – is probably not.
As you know, I’ve harboured doubts about the extent to which John getting on the ballot sheet would result in a surge of activity/success within Labour, as opposed to being something of a distraction followed by the usial disappointment. If he’d been on, I’d have done my best, but I don’t think his not being changes the fundamentals about what the Labour left needs to do. Indeed, it could be argued that supporting, of necessity, a candidate like Diane Abbott – who needs draw in the Left is she’s to stand any chance – may create a better platform for engagement with members about what it actually means to be leftwing.
A disappointment, but not the end of the world.
I don’t see how success in getting John on the ballot can possibly be viewed as a distraction if, on the other hand, you’re prepared to say that “supporting…a candidate like Diane Abbott…may create a better platform for engagement with members about what it means to be leftwing”.
John would ‘of necessity’ have to convince the unconvinced to back him, if he was ever hoping to win said leadership contest which (and let’s be realistic) there was a slim chance of him doing and there is no chance of Abbott doing. So the same argument can be used of his campaign – and it had the advantage of there being a much more politically sophisticated leader at the top of it, not the diversity-card-carrying caricature that is Diane Abbott.
As I said, I hope she wins as, politically, she’s better than the others. But her lack of organisational critique will see her assimilated to the ‘natural’ ways of thinking of the Labour Party heirarchy long before she can do anything to re-ignite the spent torch of Labour socialism. As for ‘what the Labour left needs to do’, the fact that Labour CLPs were simply ignored by the PLP and the fact that the senior members completely outmanoeuvred the Left by endorsing a pseudo-leftie as a sop to ‘diversity’ shows the depths of opposition Labour lefties face.
And I’ve seen no evidence, even in limited terms, that Labour’s left has the capacity anywhere to beat this, engagement or no engagement.
As I have admitted, events might prove me wrong, but McDonnell’s defeat – bearing in mind the strength of his appeal to rank-and-file trades unionists (standing ovations when other speakers are simply applauded etc), his unashamed defence of socialism and his clear method of speaking directly to the concerns of ordinary workers – can’t be seen as anything short of a disaster for the Left. Now the Left are stuck campaigning for Diane Abbott, if any of them can work up the enthusiasm, especially judging on the basis of her answers to that crowd-sourced interview.
I sympathise with much of the sentiments made by Dave. Also, I am absolutely gutted that John withdrew. And Diane did have less nominations than John. I doubt at this point I will leave the LP because there is a reason to stay and am pleased that Dave mentions the LRC. And the LRC may be considered by some on the left as ‘hard left’… though to be honest I have no time for pointless labels. The LRC is engaged more in struggles, campaigns and activism than say Compass who remain in the bureaucracy and do sod all (sorry but they don’t!). The problem with all of the candidates (with the exception of Diane Abbott but I still don’t see her as an activist in the same as John McD.) is that they have been connected to the NL machine, maybe different individual but they won’t stray too far from the NL ideology (and Ed Balls article on immigration was extremely appalling!!). We will get more of the same. Frankly I wouldn’t mind a purge of thankless NL drones who have an inability to think for themselves, many who look like they have auditioned for The Apprentice, what about getting more activists including TUs and real people who can engage and think for themselves who are grounded in the real world and once you do that you can demolish that hierarchy that exists and it is those conditions that are created that encourage more women and Black people to get involved. More rank and file activists less bureaucrats.
Dave, if only I could produce something an angstrom as articulate; but I can’t, so I’m going to circulate it to as many people as possible instead.
If the left need to band together they will need to do a lot better than the Respect 33’251 votes and TUSC 12’275 at the General Election.
Personally I’m sad and annoyed about John not getting on the ballot paper but for over 8 million voting people, Labour is the only show in town.
Not to oversimplify things, but fat lot of good it seems to have done Ian, hmm?
Are you refering to the Labour left, or to the left outside Labour?
If the second, a fat lot of good has indeed been accomplished by the Socialist Alliance, the Socialist Green Unity Coalition, Respect, Respect Renewal, Left List, No2EU, TUSC, SSP, Solidarity, have I missed any?
Let me guess, it will be different next time. The big breakthrough is just around the corner.
Yes we are where are, of course – for where else would we be? But that doesn’t justify what you said – you were rightly critical of the groups outside Labour. No one here seeks to defend them – but it’s not enough simply to point to the millions of people who voted Labour for precisely the reason I mentioned. It has done us a fat lot of good.
There are other things to consider and my article above, as part of my broader series of articles considering the relationship of Left in and Left out of Labour, does that.
We are where we are Dave.
Just to clarify, I am not a LP member – indeed, I have participated in several of the groups I listed.
I am, however, at a crossroads. Do we keep pouring time, effort and money into a series of coalitions and alliances that continue to fail to capture any form of public support, or do we seek to work within the Labour Party.
After all, where socialists base themselves is a tactic and not a principle – unfortunately from reading and hearing many things from the “New Workers Party” trend, this difference does not seem to have been appreciated. I have had people telling me that substantial numbers of Trade Unionists in their area are seeking to join or re-join Labour and exert some influence, and instead of seeking to support these guys standing back and saying “its doomed to failure”. Surely socialists should seek to be in the middle of these battles, rather than standing on the sidelines and saying “I told you so” if things don’t go well.
I recently left the Labour party, as many on the left have. Of the 250,000 who have left since 1997, how many do we think were socialists? The present membership is 150,000, if a 100,000 socialists join before September 8th and vote for Abbott, don’t you think that would tell the leadership something? If that doesn’t happen, we on the left can only really blame ourselves, can’t we?
This is my point, that there is no breakthrough around the corner, either way.
I agree with you on this, things aren’t going to happen over night. We need to be looking at how we draw these 100,000 people back into political activity, serious, long-term and thought out political and campaigning activity. I don’t have much faith in the Labour Party as a vehicle to do this – but I am rapidly losing faith in the idea of a new formation being able to do any better.
I don’t feel as demoralised about this as you do. Perhaps because I haven’t been in the LP. for quite a while now. (There was very little attraction in being a member when they had a massive majority under Blair and Brown)
The whole thing says more about the MP’s than it does about the membership of the Labour Party. It says even less about the views of people who vote labour, or the members of the unions that donate to it.
I can’t see the assorted socialist groups to labour’s left achieving any electoral breathrough in the next few years, let alone managing to unite their forces.
So I’m sending off my application form to rejoin Labour and will vote for Diane Abbott. Not because she’s ideal, but because she’s qualitatively better than anyone else standing.
I can’t really see why anyone on the left wouldn’t spend 100 quid doing this.
The arguments for democratising the Labour Party are just as strong as the arguments for P.R. So how can these New Labour types get away with gerrymandering things in their own interests.
Stay in and fight them.
Socialist arguments will win.
I left New Labour soon after I put Blair into power (an action I regret to this day). I had hoped that the left of the party would have more backbone and act as a restraining influence but it was not to be. The Labour Party is destroyed and us socialist have to move on, find something new rather than resurrect the shameful carcass Blair left behind.
The hardest thing in my life was committing to voting Tory simply to ensure the worst excess of Labour – authoritarian control freakery – never came to fruition by way of ID Card and NIR. Thankfully the Lib Dems had a surge and gave me a viable alternative.