Though Cowards Flinch

I note with grim bemusement some of the opinions coming out of this blog in recent weeks as regards potential operations in Syria, and the rather shocking attitude of Carl to people he believes hold principles that forbid military intervention in another nation. A deeply disturbing thesis, he calls these principles. Well, I for one disagree. I’m against any attack on Syria by any government.

Western governments cannot be trusted with a gun in their hand, period. It has nothing to do with the possible creation of safe zones, the potential for the Syrian people to rise up if they get Western help or their fate if they don’t. If you put guns in the hands of a movement which is not led by the independent organisations of the working class then, as in Libya, you invite disaster.

This disaster comes in the re-emergence of whatever social roots the criminal dictatorship can rely on, and it comes in the rise of racial, ethnic and tribal tensions. Separatism, as might be emerging some Libyan regions (not forgetting that this country was created by the West), becomes the focus of politics, as it attempts to bury the class struggle that must be waged against the privatisation which Gaddafi had come around to, and which the TNC will support.

If you think this is all abstract Marxist theorising, rather than being based on real events, look at the demands emanating from the local elites in Benghazi regarding Libya’s oil. Look at the details Amnesty International have of the looting of Black Libyan areas by the rebels. And I need not even mention how ethnic, racial and religious tensions became real with a vengeance in Iraq.

When socialists reproach pro-interventionists for listening to propaganda regarding the brutality of Bashar al-Assad, they’re not challenging the veracity of the stories. They’re challenging Western media emphasis on them, and the selection of these particular evils out of a whole world full of torture, oppression and misrule. Pro-interventionists aren’t being sufficiently critical in their approach to such evils. And they plainly haven’t learned the lessons of Western intervention elsewhere.

That lesson is an abject one in total hypocrisy. Concern for the victims of Assad now becomes indifference towards the victims of the Western militaries (and their less politically correct allies) and outright enmity towards those of divergent political aims. To foist such “help” upon the brave civilians who are standing up to Assad is absolute lunacy.

In the end, intervention is not an abstract instrumental question, it is a political one. The reckoning between the people of Syria and the dictatorship will not remain within those narrow parameters because of this. Eleven months into the uprising, the rebels have not been subdued. In fact, if reports are to be believed, Assad is using foreign hired guns to do what he dare not ask the army rank and file to do. Meanwhile the rebels must bring the rest of Damascus over to them – the stirrings of revolution.

Western intervention would almost certainly halt that – and may even result in some accommodation with the regime, after the removal of Assad. How is that justice for the thousands who have died?

These rebellions across the Middle East are not accidental or spontaneous. Dictators who have paid for their rule with oil wealth and relatively good living conditions are being hit by the global economic crisis. People are coming out into the streets not just to demand political freedom but to demand more from regimes that one by one succumbed to the depredations of market capitalism. The other capitalist nations will be more than happy to grant the former if they can forestall demands regarding the latter.

The sort of people the foreign powers are willing to deploy, to shut up the Syrian populace and prevent any further spread of the Arab Spring, is deeply telling however. Up until just this month, head of the Arab League observer mission was Mustafa al-Dabi, the Sudanese military official in post in Darfur whilst the genocide was going on. When the Western nations intervene, or the Arab League intervenes, the purpose will not be to limit civilian deaths, it will be to achieve an outcome satisfactory to those governments.

Moreover, looking at the sort of people likely to attempt to take control of Syria. Another unelected unaccountable trigger-happy transitional authority will simply release the same pressures as it released in Libya – and will thereafter pursue the same policies as Assad, perhaps resulting in worse casualties should any region or ethnic group dare to assert its separatist demands. By the time that happens, we’ll be lucky if there’s a Western media presence never mind a military presence.

Unlike Egypt, but like Libya, the Syrian people have started this with a handicap. They don’t have independent organisations of the working class. But they must develop them. The most we can do is hope on their behalf, and pressure our own governments to both stay aloof and to oppose Arab League intervention. That is not as satisfying perhaps as demanding the immediate bombing of every Syrian military installation in range of the 5th fleet, but that demand is not a solution to the problem – it complicates it. Meanwhile trust the Syrians to feel their way towards the right path. Assad’s continuing trickle of concessions are the surest sign that they will get there.

Meanwhile I wonder if the anti-war movement should be gearing up to oppose military intervention in a conflict closer to home, as it were, as the tension ratchets up over the Falklands again. I’m sure we’ll be hearing all the pro-interventionist piffle about democracy and self-determination on behalf of the islanders, should Argentina invade. As with Belgium in World War I, it is so much hypocritical twaddle in the mouths of capitalist leaders.

Which neatly brings me back to the deeply disturbing thesis. The capitalist state cannot be trusted to wield the military. Capitalist leaders, in their comfortable London drawing rooms, cannot be trusted to put the welfare of people in front of business when there are no lives at stake – why should they be trusted to put the welfare of people in front of what they consider to be the national interest when there are? Hands off Iran, Hands off Syria, Hands off the Falklands and while you’re at it, Hands off the NHS.

This is not a far left rant intimating that, in the aftermath of some successful industrial action, we’re ready to seize control of the country. We’ve achieved a little. Paul is right when he suggests that a lot of people will come away feeling buzzed by the mood of the marches, demonstrations and conversations on that day. I certainly went back to work the next day feeling like we had made our point.

Paul is also right when he suggests that there’s plenty more to do. There are concerns even more pressing than his particular objections to protesting and marching ad infinitum, or at least til the momentum has worn away as in the anti-war and anti-top up fees campaigns. Succinctly; we need to wrest control of the movement before we’re all bored to death by mid-level union bureaucrats.

Tory Canterbury answered the call to strike with fair aplomb. Somewhere around two hundred and fifty people met at a local hotel to hear union representatives from NUT, ATL, PCS and GMB speak. UCU and UNISON were also in marked attendance. As the pickets from around the city began to come in, this number swelled until there were some five hundred people either marching or milling at the Dane Jon.

Without intending to give offence to the speakers from the above-mentioned unions, however, having a captive audience for a full hour, they managed to lecture us all in hesitant style about why we were on strike. As I said afterwards, and several random people within earshot agreed, we don’t need to talk about why we’re there. We need to be talking about next steps – and a hall filled to bursting with the people who turned up to picket and protest strikes me as exactly where we should be talking about this.

The lack of questions from the floor, and the extended contributions from people who have no more authority than the rest of us, meant that when important matters were mentioned – e.g. the potential for a Canterbury-wide Trades Council, pulling in public AND private sector unions – there was no follow up. This comes back to something Paul was saying the other day, about how these meetings should be structured, if we’re not to be put off by continued pontification from above.

It’s all very well the unions stamping their feet like some latter-day Pompey Magnus. and expecting the foot soldiers to spring into action. But having answered grassroots anger with a coordinated strike, most will be content to going back to sleep, for now. We can’t let the momentum fade. The best way to do that is to establish, by locality, lists of people interested in continuing work as organisers not just within their own unions but in other venues too.

Whilst I have my own ideas about what exactly we need to organise, I’m more interested in the establishment of a local centre of gravity than in dictating the future, one which invites contributions from all workers of whatever political level, whatever role they hold or don’t hold in a union. Through these contributions, union reps can only improve their own performance, better representing their members and their class. And people are more than willing to share, with a little help from a ruthless, watch-wielding chair. This environment – of rigorous scrutiny and vigorous democracy – should be the backdrop to deciding where we go next.

And there are complicated questions to be answered about what comes next. Are we activists only, or is there a cross-over into electoral politics? What’s the fastest way to get rid of the Tory government? Is that the ultimate objective? Are we prepared to accept the Labour doctrine of continued cuts, albeit slower and shallower? Is our role limited to industrial questions? Are there practical ways one union can render support to others, even if we aren’t all on strike?

I suspect that last question should be the first answered; there are immediate, practical ways to begin rebuilding the political consciousness of the working class – a goal which should be common to socialists in Labour, in the Greens, in the smaller parties and those who don’t like the current gamut of party politics. For example, one goal should be the re-institution of the refusal by one worker to cross another’s picket lines. This sort of thing is vital to prepare the next national strike – and there must be more.

Rather than engaging in the sort of sectarian banter that gives Weekly Worker readers a hard-on, communists can use their skills and their knowledge of history, of other places and situations and tactics, to throw down deep roots in their class and establish a natural leadership. Merely by pushing for an aggressive line with the government and for the full accountability of those who claim to be our leaders we alienate nine-tenths of Labour Party hacks. Most Greens for that matter. This approach would be the making of any socialist, in my eyes.

One of the things which struck me so forcefully was how absolutely anathema the people brought out on Wednesday last would consider the usual sort of stilted, bureaucratic meetings that any local Labour Party basically runs on. Similarly, how ruinously dull would be judged the “political discussion” meetings so beloved of the smaller socialist parties? Millions of people are up for the challenge of beating the government and answering their ideologically-driven cuts agenda; to do them justice, we have to escape from the old paradigms. And the first step is making every meeting count.

Both sides should “give ground”, says Mr Ed Balls (via the BBC), to avert Wednesday’s “hugely disruptive” strike. He says “the government has got to give some ground, so have the unions”. What does this mean, in practice?

Well, it basically amounts to a special tax on whatever proportion of the workforce are employed by the government. That tax is two-fold, coming primarily in an immediate contributions hike, and secondly in the number of contributions. This is a tax on people who are already low earners (the majority of public servants earn substantially less than the national average), never mind the additional strains low earners face.

I don’t want to rehash the argument about pensions. The government never had a leg to stand on – and their devious, British Airways-style attempt to bully democratic unions by offering a slightly less crappy deal and then threatening to withdraw it unless the strike is called off just proves what we all suspected. Tories are outright bastards, high on the stench of their own rank privilege.

I did want to shout out to all those people who gush about Miliband, Balls and company. There’s nothing like the Labour Shadow Chancellor telling the country that he can sympathise with extra taxes on the poor to really make one’s Sunday morning. Yes, vote Labour and watch them try to out-smarm George Osborne.

Balls, like twat Miliband, flipflop over strikes for two reasons. The first is pure opportunism. They want to seem like the voice of reason. One wonders what constituency they’re appealing to. The strike is going ahead; millions will follow the lead of the unions. Anyone opposed to it can get all the “voice of reason” bullshit they want from Francis Maude.

I’ll be staying an extra fifteen minutes at the pickets just for him, by the way, the supercilious shitbag.

The second reason is that Balls is really just Tory-lite. Dubbed “Labour’s Keynesian rottweiler” by one utter dicksplash at the New Statesman, the five point plan for jobs and growth is shockingly weak. Moreover, it says absolutely nothing about the state of public services. The reason? Because Balls will plough on with privatising prisons, privatising hospitals and privatising schools. In order to seem small business and family friendly, he too will be pushing pension “reform”.

He will be pushing “the cuts to welfare, education and Home Office budgets that [Labour] set out before the election”.

He will be pushing “discipline in public and private sector pay”.

And on pensions? “Under Labour contributions and the retirement age would be rising too”.

Essentially he concedes the central Tory principle; that the poor must pay for economic “recovery”. Workers must pay for the rich to stay rich.

So I say, fuck you Ed Balls.

Since I’m on leave, I made the mistake of wading into the usual storm in a teacup about who-interrupted-what-Tory-twunt’s-right-to-speak. This time it’s random activists with David Willetts at a gathering in Cambridge. O tempora! O mores!

Of course, having enjoyed immensely watching a Tory minister get shouted down (which is about all any government minister is good for), I wish to, ironically enough, have my own say about the whole affair, and to quirkily raise an eyebrow at some of the conclusions drawn by my good friend Paul Sagar, and the loonier types over at Liberal Conspiracy.

Paul suggests that because there’s no point in having the debate (all Tories being scum – right on, comrade), there’s no point in disrupting it either, lest we incur the wrath of a few pudgy academics and their intellectual offspring. Fair point, I suppose, but I’d rather shout down the Tory, as an expression of my endless rage at these fucks.

Moreover, not to get in the way of the rather worthy debate over who has what right to be heard, or determine what others hear, but I suspect that anyone who doesn’t want to yell and scream and burn Number 10 to the ground isn’t really feeling the effects of what the Tories are doing to the country, not to put too fine a point on it.

This was suggested to me by the people in the LibCon sandbox, sorry comments page, who also suggested that David Willetts isn’t, in fact, insane, but is “one of the more reasonable Tories”. This is the guy flogging yet another book about how terrible the Baby Boomers are? Christ! I can’t imagine how that fits in with the moral preconceptions of the Daily Mail.

Oh wait, yes I can. It’s all the selfish, solipsistic Baby Boomers, none of whom had to fight against tyranny. After all, who cares about Northern Ireland? Or sexism and racism? We beat Hitler! Let’s just wave flags all day! It’s nothing to do with the staggering concentration of wealth and power in ever fewer hands, screwing the majority of the boomers, and generations X and Y and sharpening the demographic imbalance.

This guy is sane? So why should I be worried about the people who genuinely think he has something of worth to say?

It’s simple: I shouldn’t.

The next election is not being fought in the heads of such people, nor is the future of the UK. They’ll prevaricate all the way through a potential revolution or will decide that revolution is impolite and line up with the Tories anyway. The next election is being fought in the heads of the millions being screwed who didn’t vote and who don’t turn up to Cambridge University how-d’you-dos!

According to the BBC figures, my household income is in the 8th decile, where 7-and-above see more taxes than they do benefits. I find it hard going at the moment, I can only imagine what the seven deciles below my household income are finding, especially as – never mind their ordinary wages being what we should classify as “Shit” – fair chunks of their material redress are being slashed.

Those people don’t give a toss about who gets shouted down – and neither do I!

Paul S explains his second grievance; that Willetts looks like the good guy, after all these people yelled him down. Question: to whom? Answer: some random anoraks in the blogosphere and his own side. Cry me a river. Such grievances demonstrate in stark terms just how incomplete is the Liberal acceptance that the media is owned by the enemy. They don’t need an actual basis in fact to create a story! They are the true children of Blair in that respect.

Lastly Paul goes on to refer to a previous incident with these Cambridge activists, suggesting that they don’t always know what they are talking about, and that some healthy doubt about their conviction might lend their actions some much needed moderation.

I find that amusing; here we are, a bunch of activists with no extra resources beyond our own heads and whatever scholarship we can lay our hands on – while juggling managing a home, going to work and all the rest – challenging a government with a huge staff of supremely qualified people. Challenging them evidentially, not just ideologically, for that matter. They should already be melting down the bronze for our fucking statues. We’re not always going to get it right. But then, there’s no IQ test, or knowledge test, to qualify for the vote is there? So what does it matter?

People are angry and the sooner we shake off the shackles of this rigmarole we have built around so-called ‘democracy’ and show that anger, the better; will all the equivocators please fuck off?

And I didn’t need to mention No Platform once!

There’s something to the Take That song I heard on the radio just last night, which goes “They say nothing / Deny everything / And make counter-accusations”, referring to ”Kings and Queens and Presidents / Ministers of Governments”. Perhaps from Take That it’s just a catchy line – I doubt Robbie Williams has had a serious political thought since he was sixteen.

But the whole song, entitled “Kidz” seems almost custom-built for a video of the recent violence between police and students in London, as a result of the Conservative-Lap Dog coalition attempt to finally demolish whatever vestiges of equity remain in the education system. Everything fits if you just add in Vince Cable-and-assorted-others who got nailed in the Telegraph sting to fit the lines quoted above.

Cable has come out to condemn the Telegraph for demonstrating that the Lib-Dems are inveterate liars, saying one thing in public and another thing in private. His rationale is that the poor showing of the MPs who fell victim to the sting threatens the constituency-MP link. One wonders what state he thinks that link is in when MPs habitually lie to their constituents. Just a thought.

It is some indication of the stage I’ve reached that part of me wants Vince Cable’s head on a plate. Literally.

There is something righteous and eminently admirable about someone who takes up his position honestly and defends it rationally. This cannot be said about the Lib-Dems who have been exposed by this little sting. The worst of them were prepared to court privilege and position by saying nothing in public whilst expressing misgivings in private that would endear them to those facing the business end of this government.

So kill them all. What would we miss, exactly?

Of course the majority of me is governed by intellect and not instinct. I value human life. I also appreciate that these people aren’t entirely responsible for their actions – they are fallible individuals placed in a system which is organised from the top down, with the Prime Minister and his coterie wielding immense patronage, and to that extent it is the anti-democratic system which is fault.

There’s also the part of me which doesn’t want to simply disregard the bourgeois-democratic system as so many turkeys turning up to vote for Christmas and sees instead that these people were elected, however flawed the system. If people cared enough, they could vote for someone else, whatever inertia is lent to such change by other elements of the political system.

What pains me the most is the faux self-righteousness evinced (geddit?) by Cable in his attack on journalists who actually did their job for a change and showed up the penchant of certain MPs to act completely different in government and in private. It is reminiscent of the position taken by some MPs when their expenses came under intense scrutiny and I can’t help but feel that it results from a sense of entitlement.

Do these people believe they have some god-given right to govern, and that what is expedient for them must ipso facto be the right thing to do?

Meanwhile there are people who feel they have to riot and burn to have notice taken of them. Is it then too much to suggest that these two elements are directly related to each other, or born from the same root cause?

Counter-intuitive thought for the day: beat the Tories or this man may be your next Prime Minister

Prior to the election, I wrote a piece asking people to support TUSC – the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. In the immediate aftermath of the election, like so many others, I was buoyed by what seemed a shocking victory by Labour – yes the vote had been slashed and the parliamentary majority had been lost, with Labour dropping to second-party status but it didn’t quite feel like a defeat.

Despite my previous resignation of Labour membership, despite the constant barrage of attacks by the tabloids and despite Lib-Dem pre-game triumphalism about a drop to third place, Labour defied expectations and I was euphoric. This was supplemented by the electoral annihilation of the BNP across Barking and Dagenham and other areas, whatever our rational selves were saying about the unsustainability of such a rout.

Yet that initial euphoria has since given way, as it would have had Labour stayed in government. Thousands of us watched David Cameron’s journey to Buckingham Palace, dejectedly staring at our screens while the Prime Minister to be went inside, and was saluted by the Palace guards as he came out. We felt bitter and angry, for despite everything, led on by Left Lib-Dems, we’d hoped for a Lib-Lab pact.

However unrealistic, these were the hopes of a million people around the country. However much we knew in our hearts that the Libs and Labour would immediately set to writing their own ‘austerity’ package, something inside us rebelled at the idea of a Conservative government. And the last two months have proved that our hope was the correct one – as the swingeing cuts and millions of projected job losses testify.

The one positive aspect to the situation is a resolute hardening of attitudes against the Liberal Democrats. People who might once have considered voting or even joining them have been pushed away by the Lib-Dem decision to go into government with the Conservatives. The phrase ‘the Left’, after so many embarrassing urgings to vote Lib-Dem by various bloggers and pundits, can now refer only to a backbench rump in Labour, and the socialists.

What’s the next step? We already know that the Tories are pushing full steam ahead with many of New Labour’s least popular policies. Except they’re going further. So the part-privatisation of Royal Mail is now wholesale privatisation of Royal Mail. The public sector is going to haemorrhage jobs – against which dubious OBR predictions, of economic growth to pick up the slack, will not count for much. Communities and workers are in for a battering.

So the fightback must begin. This week Bob Crow, leader of the Railway, Maritime and Transport union called for a General Strike. The distance between where we are now and the actualisation of such a demand is incalculable. We have the institutional conservatism and bureaucracies of the unions to overcome, we’ve got some sort of mass political organisation to forge (or reforge, in deference to the Left still in Labour) and we’ve got millions to mobilise.

All very pie-in-the-sky you might say, and you’d be absolutely right. But the alternative is ensconcing ourselves in comfy armchairs to watch as Labour’s ‘leadership’ attempt the obscene tactic of outmanoeuvering the Tories from the Right.

We must realise that the only thing which will stop the government and its partners in Europe dragging our countries to the right by further destroying the unions and communities through increased casualisation of labour and decreased redistribution of wealth is the solid kick in the groin that simply standing up and refusing to go along with it delivers. So, all out, all out. Or else the next stop, after another 18 years of Thatcherism, is New Labour Mark II.

What to make of Ken Clarke’s plans for prisons? His speech later today will apparently denounce the great and growing size of prison populations, call for a focus on cutting re-offending and will imply that it’s Labour’s outdated approach which is at fault; “[J]ust banging up more and more people for longer without actively seeking to change them is what you would expect of Victorian England.”

In actual fact, the Tories have long had what one might call a ‘progressive’ (ugh, hate that word) streak on crime and punishment. In the late 1980s, prison populations under the Tories began to fall as Douglas Hurd and others tried to establish consensus around non-custodial ideas, which would see people avoid prison. But to leave the matter there is to ignore staggering contradictions on the part of the Tories.

Firstly, there’s no proposal to get rid of what has essentially become a people-herding industry of private companies, to whom a lot of services have been outsourced. Clarke’s proposition of pay by performance on the basis of re-offending avoided will not fly – as in other outsourced industries, without cast-iron government guarantees of profit, private companies will avoid sectors that don’t look profitable.

Tory rhetoric here doesn’t escape the New Labourite paradigms.

Secondly, for all this talk about prisons being places of education – a solid and welcome return of a very old liberal idea – this won’t help a great deal if there aren’t any jobs to go to when people get out of prison. With millions unemployed, and Tory plans to slash the State sector to ribbons proceeding apace – and private sector investment not yet prepared to pick up the slack – education won’t stop a slide to crime.

Thirdly, if the answer to the second problem is the social welfare net, then this adds a further contradiction to ‘progressive’ Conservative plans for rehabilitating offenders. Said social welfare net is to face cuts. This, I suspect was one of the key problems with Douglas Hurd’s attempt to reduce prison populations; on his watch, he wanted fewer people in prison – but as inequality rose and communities fragmented under the Tories, crime rose.

Thus the voices on the Tory Right sounded a great deal more authoritative.

Fourthly, Clarke’s proposal is aimed in part at cutting costs – he has said so himself. Apparently the new soundbyte is that sending a man to prison (£38,000) is now more expensive than sending a boy to Eton. Several academics – such as Prof. Malcom Davies – have come forward to suggest that actually leaving potential re-offenders at large (and even with continuing educational measures, reoffending jumped by 8% from 2006-8) costs more than prison.

Since a large number of these people will surely be released to unemployment, this type of false economy can be compared to the Tory false economy of slashing Labour’s job creation schemes and calling it a saving. The upshot is a lot more people claiming various types of benefits, whereas the strategic use of Labour’s funds would have allowed private industry to reduce the cost of employing someone whilst still footing some of the bill.

If the Tories are allowed their own way on the economy, coalition or no coalition, the deeply reactionary hang ‘em and flog ‘em brigade on the right of the Tory Party will not be long in re-establishing themselves – something that happened to Ken Clarke when he was last Home Secretary. As privatisation and the attempt to extract ever more labour for less pay from prison staff continues unabated, I worry to think how our prisons will end up.

This is, after all, the same Conservative Party which resoundingly endorsed Labour’s massive expansion plans – worth some £4bn – of the prison system.

Local newsletters are a key element to the New Localism in campaign strategies.

Paul has written up a document that has been circulating for a while in different forms, about how he won his election in the Bickerstaffe ward in West Lancashire. In it, he details lots of different ways in which one can build up a personal vote by connecting with and serving voters in a constituency.

Emphasis on a local approach to elections seems to be one of the lessons learned by a certain part of the Labour Party. There’s even a desire for leaflets that look like they are homemade, rather than glossies purchased at great expense from Labour Party HQ (like those sold via godawful MembersNet).

To the best of my knowledge, Oxford still stands out as the constituency to adopt energetic local targeting – and was rewarded both at the last set of local elections and this year’s set and by hanging on to Andrew Smith’s seat in Oxford East, despite a wafer-thin majority in 2005. And this is grand, as it kept the Lib/Tories out.

Yet I can’t help but feel that there’s something missing, despite Paul’s injunction not to leave out the politics, not to smooth out views that aren’t mainstream, and I wanted to investigate that.

My first conjecture is that engagement in this local way can be seen as a more intensive farming of what already exists by way of pro-Labour or anti-Tory sentiment. It turns higher numbers of supporters out to the polls, much in the way that General Election campaigns are a qualitative jump on other elections, and produce like quantitative jumps.

All of the stories referred to above contain details of new people – not previous Party members – getting in contact as the result of political campaigns, of doing things like donating to a paypal account or pledging to give out a leaflet or two. And that’s great, so long as it represents the first of a series of steps towards political practice.

One person joining the Party, so long as they sit at home, or only come out for leafleting and the odd branch meeting is useful if the purpose of all this localism is just to continue to win elections ad infinitum, but as we know from the New Labour years, winning elections ad infinitum is not always a good thing.

The natural response of Labour’s left will be, “Aha, but winning elections ad infinitum is a good thing if the Left control selections” – and I would be the last to dispute the value of having Labour Lefties in office, rather than Tories. But to leave the matter there is to be unnecessarily reductive when it comes to political practice.

For a start, it does not take into account the qualitative changes on consciousness that can be brought about by a) wider political events and b) holding power as the result of election at which the masses turn out and then slink back home, without the continuous presence of mass (i.e. working class) interests exerting themselves.

So, for example, Labour’s path from the high tide of the Left back through different types of reaction until Blairism was reached is one not due solely to the technocratic attitude of Mandelson etc but also due to the defeats of the labour movement and the disenchantment and disengagement that this produced.

Thus there are backlashes both from within – through the creation of a bureaucratic layer of representatives who almost as soon as they are elected become separated from the concerns which elected them – and from without, through defeats produced by the actions of organised capital. This has been acknowledged even by New Labour, with calls for politicians to meet more real people – which may see a wider adoption of this local campaigning style.

But adoption of these campaigning methods can’t combat this, especially because the political orientation of Labour itself won’t remain stable, and the campaigning methods themselves are designed to appeal to people as voters, i.e. as consumers of a political product – a passive role. They are not embedded with an affiliation to the working class nor the combative spirit that leading our class to sustainable victories requires.

Instead we have an organisation fit to give voice to local communities – not a bad thing – in defence against cuts etc, but not ideologically equipped to stop those cuts across whole fronts of activity, nor with the necessary sinews required to mobilise the entire working class – which is the only way to stop such cuts.

Again the Labour leftie says “Aha! But…” This time the objection will be that whether or not to further integrate people whose interest is caught by these methods is the choice of that person, and can be aided by actions on the part of the local Labour organisation – e.g. curry nights after CLP meetings etc. There is also the point that most Labour branches and CLPs at least have the nominal involvement of the trades unions.

These tactics and resources can be used to knit the relevant sinews together, and while we Labourites might not approach things with the same all-encompassing methodology of our very rigid Marxist friends, by being local, by being connected, the political ideology intrinsic in everything from our structural position to our methods of engagement performs exactly the same function as your explicit ideology. Only better. And with less silly words.

All of which would be great if the labour movement and Labour Party bureaucracy stood still, or could be simply swept away by one titanic effort at gathering every Left activist together under the banner of the Labour Party conference. Yet these elements of reaction draw a continuing strength and renewal from the confused and contradictory ideas and practices of a great section of the working class.

Including, for example, the section that voted Tory or for other parties. Political engagement on the local model outlined in the various articles cited will not overcome these contradictions. Indeed such contradictions can happily exist alongside them – e.g. the anti-student prejudices of some towns wouldn’t be shifted because students more often than not don’t vote, or vote at home, and only stay in the area of the university for three years or less.

Yet, as has been proved time and again over the last two years, students are a vital key to undoing the attempts by the Conservative, Lib-Dem and Labour Parties to marketise third-level education. In particularly militant areas, they have been the staunchest defenders of trades union rights, of the rights of staff and even the rights of immigrants to work.

Organising and linking these sorts of struggles together requires a particular political perspective – its adoption by Labour would be a positive measure, but there’s no indication that this is what is going on. ‘Localism’ does not apply to this political perspective.

It’s also interesting that not one of these ‘local’ models mentions the ongoing efforts by various Lefts within the unions to retake the leadership of these behemoth institutions. Or mentions people in their single most important capacity: as producers of surplus value. It is here that such confused consciousness will be confronted – and not always at the behest of theoretically aware socialists; more often than not through a simple lense like fairness, as at Royal Mail.

There’s also the contention that intrinsic political understanding can only go so far before we need a valid and all-encompassing critique of the processes which we’re trying to control, whether in the interests of the ‘working class’ or ‘the people’ or whatever constituency one is claiming to represent.

My second conjecture builds upon the first. Taking all the above into account, that the form of engagement advocated is rather narrow, my suggestion is that returns will be yielded a) while Labour is in opposition, or while there is a threat of a Tory government and while Labour is perceived as more interested in ‘people’ than the Tories b) so long as other groups do not adopt the same intensive practices.

As regards a) Labour will not always be in opposition – and what government we get when it moves into power will act to offset local campaigning, however much we think to mitigate it. Similarly, given a Tory victory over organised labour, there’s no guarantee that the political sphere of debate cannot move right. That being so, a rootless Labour Party will tend to move with it, and the advantage of being better than the Tories will diminish all the while.

Likewise condition b) will not always hold. When other parties begin adopting such tactics, it will be politics which distinguishes between the competitors – and the consciousness of the voters, determined as it will be both by the action of opposing interests against theirs and by the efficacy and organisation developed by any defence of their interests. Local action goes some way to providing repositories of resistance – but this is largely defensive, and the point of the socialist movement is to gain things for the working class, not merely defend what there is.

This is the key difference, I would submit, between implicitly having a grasp of theory through practice, and explicitly being able to understand the relationship between the two and the broader processes at work – i.e. the difference between Labourism and Marxism.

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.

Below is a five hundred word article, originally written for Claude Carpentieri’s Hagley Road to Ladywood blog, as part of his really excellent 2010 Election special series.

The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition isn’t going to win the next General Election. It probably won’t even get someone elected. Only forty-two constituencies will have TUSC candidates, all well-known local campaigners.

To put this into perspective, this is far smaller than the ninety candidates plus that the BNP are going to run at the election. Yet if you live in one of those constituencies, you should vote TUSC. Here are some of my reasons for supporting them, on the streets and at the ballot box.

First, no other party intends seriously to fight for workers’ rights. At every turn, Labour’s leadership have bowed and scraped before the Press and the Tories when they demanded a disavowal of workers’ decisions to strike. In fact, based on the consensus at Labour List, workers’ rights won’t even be on the agenda for this election.

Meanwhile, the Labour government has provoked PCS into a strike by trying to cut down on pensions and redundancy remuneration, to make it cheaper to fire people.

Whoever wins the election, workers will fight – for jobs, for wages and against the straightjacket of anti-union laws – and workers will be right. TUSC offers a platform that will tie together demands from different sections of the working class and develop them into a comprehensive political programme.

Second, after the election we’re facing cuts in public services. Perhaps 25,000 council job losses and many more central government jobs besides threaten to stretch service provision to breaking point.

Both Tories and Labour are trying to be as vague as possible – but in education, for example, our final wave of academy-funding was signed off Friday fortnight ago and headteachers are already whispering ‘the R-word.’

That’s redundancies, for the uninitiated. That’s larger class sizes and poorer lessons for your kids.

TUSC won’t have the chance to pass laws preventing this, but we will be out on the picket lines with your kid’s teachers, when they inevitably strike to protect their jobs and the quality of education.

Third, a lot of the cuts are likely to be trumpeted as ‘local democracy’. Concrete Tory proposals for local authorities will free them from the spending ringfences imposed by central government, and allow them to gut funding of the voluntary sector and public services. Unfavourable ‘public consultations’ will simply be ignored.

‘Local democracy’ is the catchphrase being used by Tories to annihilate the universality of public services. Through ‘top-up fees’, Barnet Tories plan to allow rich people to bunk queues and get additional services, while the general public can lump it, and, oh, have staffing levels in public services cut.

Only a socialist alliance, advocating working class solidarity and action from the ground up, can stand up to a class-based attack on what little wealth redistribution and equality remains. This won’t be Labour, still living in the shadow of its capitulation to Thatcherite economics.

It certainly won’t be the racist BNP, to which a lot of working class Labour voters have fled.

It can be TUSC.