Though Cowards Flinch

The strength in the anti-cuts movement, emanating from the draconian and dangerous agenda of cuts from the existing government, and led in many ways by students and trade union activists, has increased greatly in its current form – and as a consequence further questions are being raised inside it, that extend further than merely “what is it we are against?” (as Tom Miller has rightly written about here).

As the movement grows even stronger, numbers increase and demands start to be met, it is inevitable that questions will get tougher: “Yes, we want change to government policy, but what will that change look like?” and “Yes, the government should crumble, but how do we promote and help form a credible government in its place?”

Many people have been fairly scepitcal of entering into debates on theory, saying things like “save this waffle for the dinosaurs at the branch meeting” – I’m not of that opinion, and I’m also glad of the reference Miller, mentioned above, makes about Lenin (I myself used the Spanish Civil War, for example, to illustrate a point on so-called “left unity” ).

A common criticism of Marx is that while he critiqued and criticised capitalism expertly, he spent less time mapping out what Communism would be like operationally or morally. Perhaps he needn’t have. This, people will say, allowed Communist leaders to do some pretty drastic things justifying their means by their ends, while public intellectuals could excuse killing if it meant a Communistic outcome. It’s no surprise to me that in the periods from WWI to the end of the Cold War the left were not only carved up into Reformists, democratic socialists, revolutionary socialists, utopian socialists, Communists, and Anarchsists, but each of these were carved up in the form of libertarian socialists, Bolshevists, Menshevists, Council Communists (you get my gist).

The left is a broad spectrum, inevitably it will fall out on issues, and at points one faction will wonder why another is being compromised with (why, for example should a statist reformist, work with an an anti-statist libertarian socialist, while he compromises with a civic republican on certain matters). It’s good to belong to a broad church, but differences should be rationalised, and difficult conversations should be engaged – and they should be done earlier rather than later. It is not an option to put off this conversation, no matter how difficult, and no matter how inconsequential it seems at the time, particularly as some of the activism is so exciting and so all encompassing.

In order to steer clear of in-fighting later on, difficult conversations are a must – now.

The movement of students, workers and sympathisers of whatever stripe, with continued energy, focus, and direction, will start to see differences; there was a feeling the night before the tuition fee bill vote that Lib Dem MPs were on their backfeet – we may have lost that battle, but there is a war to be won (a cliche, sure, but you see my point). Unity can bring this disgusting and ideological government to its knees, but as that other cliche establishes, action without theory is aimless.

By some accounts Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi has blamed “English anarchists” for the Europe-wide discontent, while he addressed Italy’s Senate yesterday. It’s doubtful he is referring specifically to a small number of die hard Kroptkinites or even try hard “black flaggers” whose only knowledge of anarchism is through the lyrics of the Dead Kennedy’s. Who I suspect he is referring to is the student movement itself – proof, if any were needed, that their organisation and mobilisation is starting to put the willies up the establishment.

Much to its credit, the movement has been largely self-motivated, dealing with operations in small collectives. One of the consequences of this has been a widening separation between the National Union of Students leadership – under Aaron Porter – and the wider anti-cuts student movement in general. As far as effectiveness is concerned, whether or not Porter has publicly backed the students has not been a problem. However where there have been problems is in Porter’s “dithering” as to whether student occupations can rely on him for his support – which would make a difference to student representatives when present in a court of law – his inability to properly condemn heavy handed police tactics and whether legal aid is readily available to them.

In a comment I left at the Liberal Conspiracy blog yesterday, some people were quick to remind me just how expensive such a promise on legal aid would be – which it is hard to disagree with. However it was not me who promised it. If the disparity between what the NUS can afford and how much legal costs are is so high, why would someone, presumably in a position to know both amounts, make a promise like that. The efforts by many students to drive Porter out is based not upon a far leftist instinct to sectarianism, but on the question of leadership competence – which it looks increasingly as though Porter is lacking in (for a wry take on Porter’s failing leadership do take a look at Latte Labour blog).

One reason to oppose this ousting attempt is in faithfulness to something called “left unity” – brought to the fore recently by Sunny Hundal. In his piece on the “plot” to pass a no-confidence motion against Porter, he cites four reasons to oppose such attempts taking place: 1) It’s not a sensible move strategically at a time when the movement as a whole needs to be united, so as to be more effective; 2) it’s too early, particularly given that only a small proportion of students have taken part in an occupation; 3) the leadership is not actually getting in the way of the students wanting to take direct action; 4) if the no-confidence motion fails then it has only served to cause tension.

I’ve already taken into consideration the third point above, the second point doesn’t seem true within the ranks of the mobilised student movements involved, or previously involved, in university occupations, for whom the time for precise and dedicated action is now, and the need for adequate leadership is vital, and to point number four, the same could be said about any attempt – this certainly is no way in which to judge whether to act or not; as the American poet and Spanish Republican supporter Archibald MacLeish once said: “The man who refuses to defend his convictions, for fear he may defend them in the wrong company, has no convictions.”

As of Hundal’s first point, we get this age old adage “left unity”. But what does that actually mean? And how can we be certain unity on the left is not slightly arbitrary?

To explore this, what better subject is there than the Spanish Civil War. It has been said that “The Spanish Revolution is an object lesson, in the negative, of the need to forge revolutionary workers parties of the Bolshevik type.” The reason this could be said by a Spartacist front is because for them the Spanish Civil War was destined to fail on the grounds that the main left wing group (or the one considered principally most broad) were too willing to flirt with right wing workers and peasantry unions as well as bourgeois capitalist party systems in Catalonia. The origins of the POUM (Partido Obrero Unificación Marxista) – to whom George Orwell was joined when he fought in the war – already passed through phases of splinters and cells before properly coming to fruition. Andres Nin – who was murdered on the 22^nd June 1937 by Stalinists – originally fell out with Leon Trotsky for opposing the move for the ICE (Communist Left of Spain), affiliated with the Trotsky founded ILO (International Left Opposition), to become entryists in the Spanish Socialist Youth, instead desiring to unite with the BOC (Workers and Peasants Bloc – considered on the right wing of the Communists). Eventually Nin founded the POUM, after which he was accused by Trotsky of “veer[ing] between reform and revolution” (it has also been stated that Nin curbed the revolutionary subjectivity of the workers in the POUM – whose fault it was not that they had such a lousy leader).

The actors in the Spanish Civil War knew who it was they wanted to keep from power – the mess of anti-Communists, Fascists and anti-Masonic, anti-Semitic Catholics who composed the Falange founded in 1933 by José Antonio Primo de Rivera – but what they wanted to achieve in the event of a victory was quite unsure. This issue had been dealt in a particularly diplomatic way between anarchists and Bolsheviks. As Trotsky himself had said on 17 December 1937 in a work called Lesson of Spain: The Last Warning, the anarchist workers joined on the Bolshevik road to revolution, but opposed the goals. The problems became far worse when questions started to arise as to whether this was a civil war at all or a revolution? Most groups involved agreed that defeating the fascists was the most pressing task. But even in the programme of the POUM the steps post-victory were towards a dictatorship of the proletariat – demonstrating it’s avowedly Leninist position. This didn’t sit particularly easy with the Stalinists, for whom worker power is a dangerous tool. It’s hardly surprising that many Stalinists, as well as Stalin himself, were to be considered counter-revolutionary, but it is slightly more surprising that the POUM were, and still are, themselves considered counter-revolutionary by cells of Trostkyites, Fifth Internationalists and anarchists.

Orwell fled as the in-fighting between Stalinists and Trostkyites took a turn towards extreme violence and loss of life (he was actually shot in the neck by some Communists). In spite of this Orwell chose to focus on the so-called Spanish character in his account of the war, Homage to Catalonia, as the reason why the Republicans did not succeed. The foremost scholar of the period Professor Paul Preston criticised Orwell for his lazy analysis of the disorganised Spaniard, instead looking towards other factors which explain why the Republicans couldn’t get the better of the enemy. One possible reason is that they spent too much time fighting themselves. However this may have been a necessary evil; after all if they hadn’t argued the toss about what post-victory looked like then, it would have been necessary to do it during the revolutionary period – whereby the infighting would’ve rendered their governance weak.

Actors in the civil war against Franco included PSUC (Catalonia United Socialist Party); FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation); POUM; CNT (Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo) as well as anarchists, Communists, Socialists, Reformists, Liberals and everything in between in Barcelona. It is possible to gather these groups to a common purpose, but for a common goal it’s not possible, nor desirable (as a Socialist, I feel absolutely no need to want to bargain with anarchists for example). Stalinists were ideologically geared towards ruining the efforts of those actors, be that through in-fighting or providing gash weaponry from the USSR (it was Trotsky who accused Nin of being too hostile towards the Soviets, though had Trotsky listened to Nin, Stalinsim wouldn’t have been as relevant as it was to the war effort, and both men may have survived death at Stalin’s hands – another of history’s ironies), but real problems had already entered the consciousness’ of all involved – how was left unity possible when “the left” has never been linked to a set of coherent ideas/strategy? Why is it that it seems quite natural to call for unity on the left, when in fact for most of the time many of what counts for left wing ideas are in conflict with one another (something Sunny Hundal must realise, since a lot of his criticism has been directed at what he calls the “far left” who still are, whether we like it or not, on the left).

To draw this back to the original argument, about students wanting to see the back of Aaron Porter, and Sunny Hundal’s (frequent) call for left unity, first of all their call does not represent in-fighting, it has to do with the competence of their union leader. As for left unity, inasmuch as you can sit people down as diverse as anarchists and liberals in the debate against fees, it’s foreseeable that we can agree to a common enemy, but ridiculous to suggest aims and goals can be settled between these people. The problem in the Spanish Civil War among left wing actors was that post-victory apprehensions seeped through prematurely – but perhaps that was inevitable. Anyone who believes the problem with the students today is of left unity is wrong, but perhaps such a concept is a myth anyway.

Shakespeare would have appreciated politics today. The combination of tragedy, the evisceration of the remaining strands of the welfare state, with the comedy of the Westminster bubble would have provided fertile ground for plays.

Had the playwright been conversant in modern culture, it couldn’t have been long before we had satires of Baroness declaiming hysterically of Labour, “There’s Klingons off the starboard bow, scrape ‘em off Dave!” But this is not satire; it’s all too real.

“The only thing [Ed Miliband] knows for sure is that he is a socialist and will stick up for the trade unions.” [BBC]

Meanwhile the whole media would inevitably be cast collectively as Titania, from a Midsummer Night’s Dream, awaking from slumber to see a Nick Bottom that looks suspiciously like Oona King. Alas there’s no Puck to “restores amends”.

We can watch for real this sad troops of failed politicians trooping through the House of Lords, with nary a critical brow raised from a media that should be scathingly critical of such creatures. Compared to this, the now infamous Lord Young looks almost as if he should be taken seriously with his Supermac-cum-Marie Antoinette impersonations.

As for Ed Miliband, who knows what the bard would have made of him. Certainly no socialist, the strongest words to come out of his mouth have been a demand that Labour ‘reclaim’ the Big Society model from the Conservatives. Evidently all the hot air expended by the blogosphere on tearing apart the claims of Big Society have been lost on Miliband, who is also walking a very Kinnock-esque line as regards the violence of student protest.

We know where that line ultimately leads – and Miliband’s inability to escape the Blairite paradigm is already a step further down his road than one might wish. All the comments about how Labour must listen, to become a “people’s party” is the most watered-down tosh and ignores the strong and steadfast role a socialist political party must play if it is not merely to bow and scrape with each demand placed on it by “the market” (i.e. the capitalist class).

Of course Labour is not a socialist political party. The delirious (if politically shrewd) rantings of various Conservatives to one side, it’s fairly obvious from the banal witterings about “hopes and aspirations” that the Labour Party has not moved on from Blair. It has no definite programme, no concrete economic or social aims, no critique of its opposition beyond the populist emotive or cynically managerial – and nor is it likely to acquire such.

Thus the parade of people to the Lords will continue to be fairly inoffensive worthies and party cronies. Labour need merely tread water until people’s resentment of the Conservatives outweighs their demoralisation. In some cases that will happen fast, in some cases slow, but it will happen. Then the populist and managerial aspects to Labour will once more begin to unravel and we’ll have a Conservative government again, unless we interrupt this cycle.

Resentment is not a political programme, it is a reaction. Thus were people slow to cast off Thatcher and Major, thus were people slow to cast off Blair, despite his great and growing unpopularity leading up to the 2005 election. Nor is anger a political programme; the occupations of universities, the demonstrations and – potentially – the strikes of the next few years will not bring down the Conservative government by themselves.

They might bring down the Coalition, depending on how panicky the Lapdogs get, but a subsequent general election would almost certainly see a Conservative outright victory or a renewed Coalition unless much wider sections of the working class are moved into joining hands with those in struggle. The battle to do this will be at once emotive and intellectual; the appeal to solidarity and collective, class interest. There is no possibility of Miliband doing this, or letting it happen within his Labour Party without a moment like the 1985 Party Conference.

Perhaps the kindest minds of posterity will judge Mr Miliband a sort of Hamlet. Caught between the ghost of his father, alive in the presence of the demonstrators (though not the hack SU and NUS officials who ostensibly lead them), and what he sees as pragmatism, he’ll wander the bland halls of Victoria Square slowly going mad. Or will vanish with a whimper, like Kinnock, to take his place as a working peer, like so many of the dignified, restrained worthies he himself has and will elevate.

No hyperlinks to racist thug organisations here, but if you google your way to the (a?) English Defence League site via words like ‘casuals’ ‘united’ and ‘poppies’, you’ll find that the EDL are selling customised poppies in advance of Remembrance Day.

Most graciously, they say they’ll be giving ‘a percentage’ of their profits to the British Legion, who are generally recognised to have a monopoly on the poppy selling trade at this time of year.  

That”s one trade monopoly people haven’t been to bothered about challenging.

At least until now.

I wonder what the British Legion think of this ‘support’ they’re getting from the EDL, and what they think of the EDL using ‘contacts’ within the British Legion to pass on their contribution.

Recently I wrote:

An anti-Semite by the name of Sheikh Ibraheem Zakzaky will be addressing an otherwise very respectable Mosque tonight in my local area of Kilburn.

He is the head of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN), the website of which has an article clearly demonstrating the extent to which he views Jews as plotters. An article on that website details a recent seminar given by a deeply dubious character Sheikh Yusuf Ali who talks about the Zionist plot against Muslims; then clearly details Zakzaky noting “the Jewish plot against Islam is manifested in Iraq as they sent Bush to capture Iraq for them”. There is of course the obligatory reference to the “protocols”.

According to his biography on the official website of the IMN:

The goal of the Islamic movement is to enlighten the Muslims as to their duties as individuals and as a community. The movement owns more than three hundred primary/secondary schools located in different places mainly in the northern part of the country. They are known by the name of Fudiyyah Schools. This is in addition to many Islamic centers and other institutions. The movement also owns the Nigeria’s most widely circulated newspaper, Al Mizan, in the Hausa language.

It also details Zakzaky’s arrests, which the site claims were “for his ideas”.

The Jerusalem Post – one of the few publications with details of Zakzaky’s visit – mentions details of the host of the conference, the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC). They say:

The IHRC is a Hezbollah and Islamic Republic supporting organization. At an anti-Israel rally in Hyde Park during the Second Lebanon War, its chair Massoud Shadjareh wore a Hezbollah flag as did research director Reza Kazim, who was seen chanting phrases like “We are all Hezbollah” and “Bomb, bomb Tel Aviv.” At a pro- Israel rally in London’s Trafalgar Square in 2008, Kazim was ejected by the police for filming within the roped off area.

According to an article written by the Middle East Strategic Information written in 2009:

• Zakzaky’s IMN is growing popular among impoverished Nigerian Muslims
• He believes Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden do not exist, acts of terrorism in the west are organised by western intelligence services, and that Tony Blair was behind the 7/7 bombings
• He claims Nigeria’s secularist leaders perform ritual sacrifices removing unborn babies from their Mother’s wombs by ripping them out
• He believes Jews are “”dastardly infidels” and draws inspiration from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and the deceased Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin

He has been and gone now, but came almost unnoticed.

I hate to come across all Eustonite or “decent” but if Geert Wilders or Le Pen or someone dreadful like that came to our town, we’d be all over them like a rash, but with figures such as Zakzaky – who is not small beer by the way, he is the head of Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) – we give it a miss.

Some may say that Zakzaky has never committed terror himself, which is why it is not important, but this does not disprove his threat. Some may say, in his words, he does not cause terror. This is questionable, but I’m careful not to make claims I cannot substantiate. During the conference season, the Quilliam Foundation held an event on how non-violent extremism can be just as dangerous as violent extremism. Whether directly or indirectly, Zakzaky has sounded off to the tune of racial discrimination and religious violence, and this should not be sniffed at.

Some will perhaps accuse me, and have done before, of making straw man of whom to knock down. The point here is that I’m not accusing anyone of supporting Zakzaky – though there obviously are some who do - and I’m certainly not saying that in the absence of an anti-fascist picket of him, that I should therefore deduce the anti-fascists in fact support Islamic fascists. It is not true. But I have difficulty understanding why people like Zakzaky don’t wind them up to the point of protest, whereas smaller targets like David Irving, do.

Now let me quickly qualifiy this before I get myself into trouble. Of course Irving is bad news, and has dangerous ideas, but at least he is an army of one; him and maybe some idiots in the National Front or Combat 18. His words are largely ignored by the vast amount of thinking human beings, and are taken on board by a small group of twits that if they express their counterfactual opinions, land themselves in court. Zakzaky, on the other hand, is the head of a church, has many followers and is fiercely anti-Semitic – context, here, is all.

In my quest to get more airplay on Zakzaky, I wrote to three individuals/organisations that I thought could maybe help; Peter Tatchell, Hope not Hate and Unite Against Fascism.

I requested their help in numbers to picket the arrival of Zakzaky and ask questions of the mosque why they felt it responsible to invite someone with a evident history of anti-Semitism and crime.

I saw something on him at the Jerusalem Post and some bits on Harry’s Place blog here and here, as well as a cross-post on the Spittoon website, but when I read next to nothing about him in the mainstream press I wrote to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jewish Chronicle – as well as tweeting Martin Bright and Stephen Pollard – Hampstead and Highgate Express and the Kilburn Times.

The only response I got from any of these places was Peter Tatchell to tell me he was ill and had no campaign funds. Tatchell in his email recommended I contact the Board of Deputies of British Jews and contact local news sources – which I had done. It is a great credit to the man for at least writing back to me and taking my email seriously; there indeed is someone who will not allow sentimentalities affect his principles, and I can’t talk highly of him for doing so.

Tatchell’s first line said it all: “I share your anger about Mosques hosting extremist clerics and preachers. It is no better than having a right wing white racist speaking.”

There is no such thing as a “decent” left. There are leftwingers and rightwingers, with some mixing in the middle, and there are hypocrites and those who allow confused politics affect principles. I do not level this charge at anyone in particular, but in the fight against fascism in all its forms, we can’t just sit on our hands, we should be pulling our fingers out.

In the end I went down to the mosque by myself, and I was ineffective and nervous about getting on the wrong side of anyone. But were I backed up with the same level of energy certain organisations reserve for other far rightwingers, we could have told a number of people what we think about foul ideas infiltrating vulnerable communities.

Reading the Economist this week, I noted an article which might provide the opening lines to the epitaph of Sunny Hundal’s idea (responded to by myself and Madam Miaow) that the right-wing Tea Party movement are somehow more successful at taking control of the Republican Party than their leftie counterparts.

The usual ideas (clichés?) are floated by Sunny – we socialists are all too busy fighting amongst ourselves etc, they’re more pragmatic while we’re more idealistic etc – but in actual fact, the seeming drift of the Republicans towards the Tea Party movement doesn’t change the nature of the Republican Party at all. Fiery rhetoric about slashing state powers on the ground, continuing corporate welfare when not stumping.

The Economist mentions the primary race for Georgia, in which all the candidates addressed the local Tea Party group and did a grip’n'grin. Candidates thought to be ‘establishment’ candidates – like Oxendine and Deal – lost out to Handel, who in her leaflets denounced her opponents, dubbed “the good ole boys” as “politics as usual”. Handel was also recognised to be more popular at the local Tea Party convention. So far, so good for the Tea Party movement, right?

Well, we’ll see. Ms Handel was endorsed by Sarah Palin, darling of the Republican grassroots, and surged ahead in polling shortly thereafter. Palin is the darling of the Republican grassroots and the Tea Party movement; her endorsements carry a huge amount of weight (or at least press coverage, which can amount to the same thing in races loaded up on TV spots) and she doesn’t wield them against Tea Party people – such as her decision not to endorse Jane Norton over Ken Buck in Colorado.

But who is she endorsing? In Handel’s case, whatever the candidate says about “the good ole boys” and ending “politics as usual”, she’s no outsider. One time President and CEO and a county Chamber of Commerce, having worked as an executive for companies like KPMG, she was appointed Chief of Staff for a previous Georgia governor, and from 2007 until 2010 she served as Secretary of State in Georgia. This is a full-time careerist politico, who, incidentally, has received numerous endorsements from the rest of the Republican establishment.

So what effect, really, is the Tea Party movement having on Republican politics? It would be easy to portray the Deal v. Handel run-off in August as establishment v. Tea Party-backed outsider, as the Economist does, but it would also be lazy. They are both political insiders, and actually, so the commentary from local sources seem to suggest, Handel is probably more liberal than Deal, but she has endorsements from well-known conservative figures to bolster her reputation.

My point in all this is to suggest that the Republican grassroots are being diddled in exactly the same way as Leftie grassroots activists. As has been noted with regard to the Labour leadership election, since the stinging criticisms a couple of months ago that most of the candidates fudged the question of gay marriage, more candidates have come out to back it – as it’s likely to be a popular position with a large section of Labour’s base (though very unpopular with another section).

It’s a sop – it won’t change anything fundamental about Labour’s approach, but it allows the candidates to appeal for grassroots support. The Tea Party movement is being used in the same way. At the bottom are people with a some genuine grievances – the belief that immigration results in worse employment conditions, or the wish that NAFTA should be scrapped, for example. Yet Republicans aren’t going to curb immigration, and they won’t scrap NAFTA. It’ll hurt economic growth.

Meanwhile, far from being grassroots-run, the Tea Party movement is basically a network of professional pressure groups which can link national political figures and large emailing lists, and which can fill stadiums with people who believe that these groups are the last-ditch American defence against socialism. The sort of hyperbole common to true believers here would be hilarious if it wasn’t so dangerous – but the candidates they’re backing don’t share any of these beliefs. People who have served in state and national politics aren’t that naive. They are using the grassroots, and will then promote their own agenda once in office.

The odd sop will be thrown to the base, of course – that’s just good politics. But the disconnection between Right grassroots and leadership, and Left grassroots and leadership is exactly the same.

It should be a lesson that, after eight years of a Republican President, the grassroots of the Right – the sort who idealised things like the 9/12 campaign – were disillusioned and pissed off. Two years in to a Democratic Presidency and Congress which promised much and delivered little, the implication of Sunny’s remarks (though he might not see it like this) are that Democratic supporters expected too much – that blame should lie with the grassroots, rather than with tenacious corporate lobbying, a massively funded propaganda campaign, or with obfuscating Senators.

The grassroots American left has every right to be pissed off. They were taken advantage of – and the Republican grassroots will likely be in the same position once Obama can no longer be the whipping boy for every frothing congressional wannabe.

In the UK, we should learn this lesson. Whoever wins the leadership election now – John McDonnell having failed to make the ballot – the result is going to be a disconnection between what the activists of the party want and what the PLP and the trades union bureaucracies settled for. That’s not the fault of demanding activists – as in America, it is the fault of the process underpinning Labour Party politics.

So for the next five posts I am going to discuss the Labour Leadership race, by discussing each candidate in turn. This week I am going to start off with whom I personally believe to be the most controversial candidate of the whole leadership battle.

Prior to the beginning of the Leadership race, I must admit that I had never heard of Diane Abbott. The only candidate that I had heard of was David Miliband, due to the obsessed love for him by an old school friend. I have to admit that I was in support of Miliband, due to my political naivety and the only one I knew about but decided to check out the other candidates and this saga of posts will help me to come to a comprehensive decision before September comes around.

Diane Abbott, the only female and black women to have entered the race, was elected to the House of Commons in 1987 for the constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington as the first black women to become an MP. Now in 2010, she has been in Parliament for over 23 years and is being called the ‘token’ candidate? As a fellow blogger stated, ‘… tokenism is often the way that otherwise insuperable barriers of discrimination are overcome’, calling Abbott a ‘token’ candidate seems slightly unfair seeing as Diane has been in Parliament and worked her way up the Labour party. Is this not due to her not being a New Labour Minister or does it go deeper to the idea that she is a women and comes from an ethnic background?

Really it comes down to a balance of the two; Abbott has not had as much limelight exposure as say David Miliband; unless you are an avid fan of This Week then of course you will know about Diane and her antics on the sofa with Michael Portillo. She was an avid challenger of the New Labour movement, and was a figure of the left of the party but this has all been undermined by her decision to send her son, James, to City of London School, where the fee is £10,000 a term.  As she has admitted, calling her son’s education ‘intellectually indefensible’, this goes against her socialist and left leaning politics. For someone who targeted members of her own party (Harriet Harman and Tony Blair) for sending their children to selective schools, it seems a bit hypocritical.

What made the issue worse for many right-wingers was her comment trying to defend her actions, that ‘West Indian mothers would go to the wall for their children.’

This has caused a ripple effect within the Labour party and the right, especially those from white communities who are aggrieved at the suggestion that they wouldn’t do whatever was good for their children, whatever the personal cost. Such sentiments miss the point. I don’t think this was what Diane was trying to get at; she was just making a statement about a particular cultural view of motherhood, though it may give an opportunity to attack her.

I wonder how this would have gone down had Andy Burnham said something similar about his kids?

Tensions always arise when someone mentions the race card. I am not a fan of the race card, but I do take a guilty pleasure and use the ‘mixed race bombshell’ every once in awhile when around a racist, but shouldn’t we flip it on its head and think about how everyone else who calls her a token candidate is also using the race card in some way?

Next Week: David Miliband

What follows is a paper presented by Dave Zachariah to the conference for the Swedish labour movement’s researcher network. Today’s article includes chapters 1 and 2, Introduction and Conceptions of the State. Chapters 3, 4 and 5, 6 then 7 will follow at intervals on this blog. Dave asked to have this posted here to see if an activist feedback would be forthcoming.

1. Introduction: How did social democracy turn from being one of the most successful political mass movements in history into a series of national parties in political crises and deep ideological confusion within one hundred years? The thesis in this article is that the crisis of social democracy is a long-term result of the fundamental problems that the political strategy of any reformist workers’ movement inevitably encounters in relation to the state and the economy, and which it has yet to solve.

These problems will increasingly bring the question to the fore: is the goal of social democracy to be a party in government or an organization for social transformation? Whilst this may at one point have been synonymous to its members, it will be argued why it necessarily ceases to be so with the passage of time.

2. Conceptions of the State: The struggle of early social democracy for the modern democratic rights and universal suffrage in particular rested on an impulse that went back to antiquity, best summarised by Aristotle’s observations of ancient Athens:

A democracy exists whenever those who are free and are not well off, being in a majority, are in sovereign control of the government, an oligarchy when control lies in the hands of the rich and better born, these being few.[1]

It was this class aspect that was the basis of the struggle by the upper classes to prevent or undermine democracy throughout centuries. Bourgeois thinkers, such as the liberal John Stuart Mill, worried about the “danger of class legislation on the part of the numerical majority, these being all composed of the same class”[2] and could therefore not accept equal votes.

The struggle for democratic rights by the workers’ movements was a precondition for it to become a strong mass movement with a base in the industrial working class. As long as organizing was illegal this strategy for social transformation would remain impossible. The struggle for universal suffrage was a part of the strategy. The spectacular membership growth of social democracy strengthened the belief that seizure of state power through the parliamentary road was inevitable. State power would be used for progressive reforms with the longterm goal to “transform the organization of bourgeois society and liberate the subjugated classes, to the insurance and development of the intellectual and material culture”.[3]

The split of the labour movement after the outbreak of World War I and the October revolution also implied a theoretical split in the conception of the state and thus different political strategies. In the social democratic conception, the existing state was an instrument that could be conquered by the workers’ movement while the followers of the Bolsheviks contended that the state always was an instrument for the ruling classes to uphold their domination.

The gains made by European social democracy would eventually show that the communist parties’ conception of the state in capitalist economies was mistaken. The altered political balance of forces after World War II brought social democracy to governments in several countries, in which it could implement a series of important working-class reforms.

Even in a country like Great Britain, whose parliamentary system was long considered to have kept the state safe from the workers’ movement, the Labour party could implement a series of nationalizations of industry and the country’s most important reform during the 20th century: the introduction of a National Health System that provided the population with health care according to socialist principles.

At the same time it became evident for the Western European communist parties, for instance the large Italian PCI and French PCF which had grown through their instrumental role in the anti-fascist struggle, that the revolutionary strategy based on the Comintern model was fruitless in societies with a stable capitalist economy and working parliamentary state with universal suffrage, as they all gravitated towards a reformist position during the postwar period. Only in parts of Asia, Africa and South America, where such social conditions did not pertain, did the original strategy still have relevance.

1-Aristoteles och Saunders [1, p.245].
2-Mill [9, ch.7,§.1].
3-Party programme of the Swedish Social Democratic
party (SAP) from 1911, [12, §.1].

After due consideration, I have decided NOT to ask Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) the country to nominate me for the CLP section of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party.

As I set out here, I do think I have the experience and capabilities to make an effective member of the NEC, and I would have had a pretty clear personal manifesto on which to campaign for a seat.

This manifesto would have included a quite specific agenda for changing the power balance within the Labour party through the reordering of financial flows within the party, in a way which goes beyond the still fairly rhetorical and tokenist commitments being made by Labour leadership candidates to re-engage the grassroots.  I hope that whatever lefties are elected to the NEC might consider taking up these ideas, although I will be trying to put them through the formal LRC processes in time for their AGM in the Autumn, such that LRC nominees on the NEC are bound by any mandate given to them in this respect.

I feel I might have been able to do a decent job for the Labour left on the NEC, and I was encouraged by the informal support of Labour activists whose judgment I respect when I mooted the idea.

I do have some doubts about the way in which the Grassroots Alliance slate is drawn up by some slightly nebulous form of  ‘consensus’, especially the way in which that consensus may be aimed at providing a slate accommodating of Labour’s ‘non-Blairite centre’ rather than at putting forward those candidates with the best track record and political maturity.

However, I accept willingly that, overall, due process has taken place within the participating organisations , and that my own desire to stand for the NEC emerged too late for me to go about getting myself considered as part of that process. 

Due process may not have been perfect, but there is a clear willingness from participating organisations in the Alliance to do the right thing in terms of democratic transparency.  In the case of my own organisation within the Alliance, the LRC, it is clear that, whatever I think of formal hustings as a process (more on that in later posts) the process is done with rigour, combined with comradely respect between winners and losers.

I have no wish, therefore, to impinge on that process by putting myself forward for nominations independently; to do so would be out of keeping with the organisational discipline that I think Labour needs, and it would potentially create frictions and negative consequences which would far outweigh anything distinctive I could bring to the NEC.

I wish all the candidates nominated by the Grassroots Alliance well, and will be proposing their names to my own CLP.

As for myself, my attention turn to the election for the party’s National Constitutional Committee (CLP section), for which I am definitely seeking nominations from CLPs.

My personal statement in support of my request for nominations for the NCC will form my next post.

Now listen up.

I’m a very important and influential political commentator – a bit like Nick Robinson but with smaller glasses and a proper understanding of politics –  so I really haven’t got time to waste writing extra stuff for a medium-sized blog. 

So here’s an article I wrote for Red Pepper earlier tracing the historical dodginess of Credit Rating Agencies, and with an exciting start, middle and end bit.

This one’s for free, but I want you all to give serious consideration to subscribing to the magazine itself, and not just because I have now become its top writer, though that would be justification in itself.

Subscribe because Red Pepper is about the only regular (6 times a year) socialist magazine of its type available, and it’s actually pretty dammed good.  I don’t agree with all the stuff in there - in fact I’ll soon be critiquing one central article in the most recent edition which I think is rampant bollox -  and there’s too much Billy Bragg adoration, but it’s always well worth a good look through. 

It’ s run in a heroic pauper type way on a shoestring by really committed people, including the greatly estimable Hilary Wainwright who did a lot of the setting up in the 1980s and sticks with it even though she could easily tootle off and do other stuff instead.  Hilary, for reference, wrote by far the best book on the Labour left in the 1980s, and I still use it as a source of wisdom and clarity about what the left got wrong in the 1980s, even though I am also very wise.

It costs 20 quid for six editions a year, and you get back copies when you subscribe, which you can do by clicking here and doing the debit card stuff.

If you really get into it, and if you’re a student or something, you could go to your university bookshop and harrass them about stocking it if they don’t already.  After all, many of them already stock Total Politics, and that’s utter shite.