The new point made in the article which started this discussion was that the blockages within New Labour to working-class political input come not only from structural changes in the Labour Party, but also from some structural changes in the unions.
The discussion it has provoked has been not about that, but about whether the qualitative change in the Labour Party which AWL has been describing and analysing for over ten years now ever happened at all.
No, we're told, nothing much has changed. In the Labour Party, everything is as it always was. The only shift is "a few tenth-rate rule changes and minor procedural impediments". There have been "significant" changes in the wider society, but only "outside the formal structures of the party". Any change in the Labour Party is only a passive effect of the wider social changes.
For all Blair's talk of transforming the Labour Party, he hasn't transformed anything at all. The Labour Party organism is just the same (bar "tenth-rate" changes, and only "a few" even of those): it's just that the external pressures on it are different.
Let's be clear what the argument is about. It is not about whether or not we should throw ourselves into John McDonnell's campaign for Labour leader. It is not about whether or not we should support and promote the Labour Representation Committee. We all agree on those things. It is not about whether we should "abandon" the Labour Party. Obviously none of thinks we should, or otherwise we would not be backing McDonnell.
It is not about whether we should advocate unions disaffiliating from the Labour Party: contrary to suggestions in some of the postings in this discussion, we have consistently opposed disaffiliation.
It is not even about whether the Labour Party remains within the general Marxist category of "bourgeois workers' party". It does.
But the general Marxist category of "bourgeois workers' party" includes a vast variety of formations. The "old" Labour Party was exceptional within that spectrum for the relative openness of the channels it allowed for working-class political self-expression. The "new" Blair-Brown Labour Party is exceptional within that spectrum, on the contrary, for the narrowness of such channels. That is a major shift.
The debate is about whether:
1. We recognise that shift; or:
2. We deny it, and claim that the Labour Party is, give or take "a few tenth-rate" considerations, as open as ever.
Presumably there are also differences on tactics following from the difference in assessment, but for now it is unclear exactly what they are.
***
New Scientist of 9 December profiled John Baumgardner, a long-time geophysicist, a researcher into plate tectonics, who believes in the literal truth of the Book of Genesis. Encountering these arguments about the unchanged Labour Party, I feel a bit as I imagine Baumgardner's lab colleagues must have felt when they found out about his Christian beliefs.
Where do you start? Presumably Baumgardner thinks geological science started going wrong with Lyell back in 1830, and all modern evolutionary theory and cosmology is wrong too. What of modern science does he accept? From what common ground can you start a debate?
At least Baumgardner specifies. He accepts most of "the present laws of physics" but believes that "there are a couple of issues where I believe there must have been some form of divine intervention... [to] explain why radioisotope methods seem to give dates for some rocks of hundreds of millions of years... [and to allow] a mechanism for cooling".
Our collective assessment of the Labour Party has, of course, evolved over a shorter period than since 1830. But we have been mapping an internal "counter-revolution" in Labour since at least 1986, when Neil Kinnock went on the offensive in the aftermath of the miners' defeat.
Over the 20 years since 1986, we have not only assessed developments, but taken part in them, fighting many battles against bad political and structural changes in the Labour Party. We said at the time that many of those battles had high stakes, and to lose them would change the Labour Party much for the worse; but lose we did.
And now we're told that all those defeats add up to no more than "a few tenth-rate rule changes". So where can we start from in a debate with the people who say this? Are we to assume that everything we have observed since 1986 is denied? Or will the "nothing-has-changed" school concede that some things really did happen - in the same way that Baumgardner concedes that some of modern science is valid - and tell us what really didn't? Where has there been divine, or diabolic, intervention to implant in our minds and in the newspaper files a record of struggles that never really happened?
Or do they concede that all those battles did happen, but we were completely wrong to get agitated about them? That we should have been saying: Kinnock, or Smith, or Blair, should be opposed on those issues, but it scarcely matters - if we lose, it will only be of tenth-rate significance?
And - it follows logically - if we were to reverse all those defeats, and re-democratise the Labour Party structures, that would only be a "tenth-rate" thing too, not worth putting much effort into?
If the Labour Party now goes with Alan Johnson's proposal to cut the union say at Labour Party conference from 50% to 15%, will that, too, be a "tenth-rate" matter? Scarcely requiring us to get out of bed to oppose it? Or does that signify things getting serious? Maybe even so serious as to be positively ninth-rate?
What the "nothing-has-changed" school might reckon to rank as highly as eighth-rate or seventh-rate, I can't imagine. And first-rate? Could anything short of the extermination of humankind by nuclear war count with them as a first-rate change?
***
The biggest changes came in the mid-90s, with Blair, though he built on Kinnock and Smith. Let's sum up the results, as we have been describing them for almost ten years now.
1. Input to Labour Party conference from the labour movement has become qualitatively more difficult, limited to four motions from the four biggest unions, a maximum of four motions from the CLPs, and not much else. The conference has become much more a stage-managed publicity event, and much less a parliament of the labour movement. The union say at conference, though still substantial (nearly 50%), has been sharply reduced (from 90%).
2. Not by formal rule-change, but by dint of repeated stands by Blair and Brown and repeated failure to protest by the union leaders, Labour Party conference decisions have ceased to have practical weight. It is not just that the Labour government does not carry them out: no-one feels any obligation to be guided by them, or even to make them publicly available.
3. The union say in the National Executive has been reduced both numerically (to 12 out of 32) and in substance (the Executive has become essentially only a consultative committee for the parliamentary leadership). Union input has been further diluted by the setting-up of the National Policy Forum, where the unions have only 30 out of 183 representatives, and, moreover, those 30 operate "behind closed doors" as far as the rank and file of the unions are concerned.
4. Meanwhile, a veritable army of "New Labourites", many with no labour-movement background or allegiance at all, sits above the formal structures of the Labour Party. Even before the 1997 general election, this Blair-Brown "party within a party" was weightier than the formal "Labour Party machine"; over the last nine years in government it has acquired further weight. See Workers' Liberty 64-5 for the 3000 people appointed to "task forces" and the like in 1997-8 alone.
5. The Constituency Labour Parties have a lower membership on paper than they had even in World War 2, when all electoral contests with the Tories were suspended and most activists had been drafted into the armed forces. On all accounts, the active membership has declined even more than the paper membership. Union delegates to CLPs have become rare. About half of all CLPs no longer bother to send a delegate to Labour Party conference. Those CLP delegates who do arrive vote, in their majority, way to the right of the unions.
6. While Labour councils carry out relentlessly anti-working-class policies, rebellions by left-wing Labour councillors are much rarer than for decades, even though councillors are necessarily much more vulnerable to pressure from even quarter-alive local Labour Parties than MPs are.
7. The Labour Party has not had a functioning youth organisation, unofficial or official, for nearly 20 years. Nominally, a Young Labour organisation exists, but it does not even have a website, or a reference on the Labour Party website. We tried to intervene in this Young Labour organisation when it was set up in the early 1990s. We had some people in AWL at the time who thought it would offer great openings. Most of us were more sceptical, but we readily agreed to try and see. We soon had to conclude - without dissent - that nothing much could be done there. There are very few active student Labour Clubs.
8. Labour government policy is relentlessly and directly anti-working-class, and counter to mass working-class opinion, on all the key issues - trade-union rights, privatisation, health service, education, pensions, Iraq... Of course all previous Labour governments betrayed their working-class supporters, and directly clashed with workers in struggle. None gloried in affronting working-class opinion as this one has done.
***
In reply to these eight points, we are told that it is sometimes possible for unions outside the "big four" to wriggle their way onto Labour Party conference floor to second composites, and that the unions still account for a larger part of Labour Party funding than I allowed for in the article.
That's a long way short of proof that nothing has changed bar "a few tenth-rate" details!
I'm not at all convinced by the figures on funding. In 2005, we're told, union affiliations contributed £8 million - and it is "no matter how you choose to count the extra £11,950,000 loans involved in the 'cash for peerages' scandal". Why "no matter"? However we "choose to count" that £12 million, it can scarcely be as proof of the Labour Party's closeness and responsiveness to a working-class base!
The latest Labour Party accounts available on the Electoral Commission website show income from affiliates (i.e. mainly trade unions) as £7.6 million out of £29.3 million in 2004, and £6.8m out of £26.9m in 2003.
The general picture of a reduced (though still large) trade-union weight in Labour Party funding comes not just from snapshot figures but also from more substantial studies such as Dave Osler's Labour Party plc.
I don't have a copy of Osler's book to hand; but I notice that when it was published, neither our reviewer in Solidarity, ME, nor reviews from leftists dedicated to remaining fully immersed in the Labour Party and daily expecting a new shift to the left there, such as Socialist Appeal, saw any inaccuracy in Osler's picture of a Labour Party leadership much more closely tied to big business, including financially, and much more distanced from the unions.
But even if Osler was wrong, and the Labour Party still relies mostly on union funding, that doesn't prove at all that nothing has changed as regards its openness to working-class political input.
***
The suggestion that our views on the qualitative change were just "a reflection within the AWL of the bombastic posturing of people like [Bob] Crow [of the RMT]" makes no sense at all.
We had developed all the essentials of our assessment of Blair/Brown's "New Labour" long before Crow became RMT general secretary in 2002. When he started his "bombastic posturing" on the Labour Party question, we were highly critical of it (and we had plainly opposed disaffiliation of unions from the Labour Party right from the point when it started to be a subject of serious discussion, with the FBU's conference in May 2001: see for example our leaflet to the SWP's Marxism 2001.)
In 1990, the paper we used to publish, Socialist Organiser, was banned by the Labour Party. Seven or eight years earlier, we had had a fight in our own ranks about what we should do if the Labour Party banned our publication. Most of us argued that in such an eventuality we should duck and dive, as the British Trotskyists had done after the banning of their paper Socialist Outlook in 1954.
Come 1990, did we say that nothing had changed, or only "tenth-rate" details had changed? No. Even then we recognised a change. We rejected the recommendations for ducking and diving put to us by many on the Labour Left. We didn't abandon the Labour Party, but we continued to publish Socialist Organiser "illegally", accepting that there would be a cost in expulsions. At Easter 1991 we launched the Alliance for Workers' Liberty as a public, open revolutionary organisation with no pretensions to Labour Party legality.
Over the next few years, some AWLers started arguing that we should step back a bit and make ourselves more "Labour Party"-ish. We did not agree with their general case, but we tried to see what practical things could be done to respond to whatever was reasonable in their concerns. We attempted (without success, as noted above) to intervene in the new official "Young Labour" movement. In 1995 we attempted to get ourselves a new "Labour-Party-legal" profile by a combination with Labour Briefing.
The reason that didn't work was more to do with the special politics of the little group around Briefing than with generalities of the Labour Party - what the enterprise broke down over was their refusal, after having agreed to have open debate, to print a very mildly-worded article of ours critical of Provisional Sinn Fein. But in the ensuing polemic against the Briefingites' insistence that we should attune ourselves to the Labour "broad left" we had to observe that even then "a broad left [was] organised almost nowhere" in the Labour Party.
In the course of the row, we had a little split. Most of those who had been arguing for a more "Labour-Party-ish" orientation now concluded that there was no point in building an autonomous revolutionary organisation, and they should instead aim to "spread the influence of Marxism within the labour movement" (i.e. within the Labour Party) in a more general way. We insisted that we must not "go quiet when the official structures go quiet". (See the section of Workers' Liberty 52 on "building the party", which is adapted from a polemic from those who split from us in 1995 to sink into the Labour Party).
***
By then, the changes in the Labour Party were approaching the point of "the transformation from quantity into quality". A dramatic signal was given by the call by Stephen Byers, then a top Blairite, in September 1996, for the Labour Party to break all links with the unions, and Tony Blair's statement in January 1997 that the Labour Party must be transformed into an unambiguously "pro-business" party like the Democrats in the USA.
As the 1997 election approached, we had a discussion which concluded that our old general political slogans, along the lines of "vote Labour, and fight to demand working-class policies from Labour", no longer had grip. After a lot of debate, we decided to raise the general political slogan of a workers' government - not just a "demand on Labour", but a call for a general restructuring of the labour movement - while voting Labour.
In Workers' Liberty 39, of April 1997, we summarised our new assessment and our new conclusions.
"Blair has said it openly. They want to make the Labour Party into an out-and-out bourgeois party... The lesser, half-way-house, versions of the Blair project would, while keeping some formal ties, make the unions junior lobbyists rather than the decisive core of the party". We raised the call for a new Labour Representation Committee - a call which was eventually to bear fruit several years later.
Everything was much more fluid and open then. In essence, what has happened over the last decade is that the emerging new shape of 1997 has become the hardened structure of 2006.
In 1997 it seemed a real possibility that Blair and Brown would use the strong position accruing to them immediately after their election victory, when they had a lot of popular credibility, to go for a quick and complete break with the unions. They did not. The union leaders were so servile that they felt no need to go for something so risky.
We soon recognised that Blair-Brown had, for the time being anyway, gone for the "lesser, half-way-house version". So Labour was "still a bourgeois workers' party, but now with the dialectical balance massively tilted towards the bourgeois pole in an entity that was always highly contradictory".
As the tilt consolidated, we drew conclusions that independent working-class candidates against Labour were becoming opportune (Workers' Liberty 49), and codified and re-codified our assessment (see, for example Workers' Liberty 52, Workers' Liberty 59, or our conference documents from 1999 onwards, collected for easy reference in our discussion bulletin no.237, in April 2003.)
We never said that all life within the Labour Party would now cease. On the contrary. When within a few months of Blair's 1997 election victory, sixty-one MPs rebelled on incapacity benefit, we trumpeted it as the beginning of a possible rallying of working-class opposition within the Labour Party. It didn't turn out that way, but not for lack of us being open to even the most elusive possibilities.
We mobilised ourselves to intervene as best we could when the London Labour Party was thrown into ferment over Ken Livingstone's challenge for the Labour candidacy for Mayor of London, in 1999-2000. We responded eagerly and actively when a "Labour Against The War" movement developed over Iraq in early 2003. And, of course, we have responded eagerly and actively to the Labour Representation Committee launched in 2004, and to John McDonnell's campaign for Labour leader.
A sober assessment of the much-more-than-tenth-rate changes in the Labour Party does not in the least exclude intervening when and where that's possible.
Maybe our assessments were wrong. But then the nothing-has-changed school should tell us where we went wrong. Was it all the way from 1990? Or from even before then? Or do they concede that at some points the Labour Party did change a bit? When?
***
Or is that something new that should change our assessment has happened in recent years?
That's possible, of course. A dramatic event might show us that we had missed important aspects of what had happened before; or it might simply reverse what had happened before; or set things on a different course.
It's possible. But what event of recent years could conceivably be cited as showing that developments in the Labour Party have not really been as bad as we thought in the late 90s, or as dramatically reversing the evils of the late 1990s?
The biggest about-turn in the labour movement in the last ten years has been a marked shift to the left, since about 2001, in trade-union elections, and the ensuing rise of a new generation of union leaders much more willing to act as real trade-unionists and as left-wingers of some sort than the "Ken Jackson" generation which allowed Blair to do what he did in the mid-90s.
AWL has made a highly critical assessment of this "awkward squad", emphasising that they have failed almost completely in the cardinal task of rebuilding workplace organisation and leading effective struggles on wages and conditions (on pensions, for example).
Nevertheless, they are not the same as the "Ken Jackson" generation. For some years now, they have put leftish resolutions through TUC and Labour Party conferences, directly contradicting Blair-Brown government policy on central issues.
When they started doing that, we did not respond by saying: "Oh, we have our assessment of the Labour Party, so we know it will all come to nothing". We responded by advocating, energetically and enthusiastically, that trade-union activists build on those resolutions to open a real fight in the Labour Party. (See the documents collected in discussion bulletin 237, or in the appendices to The Trade Union Movement, New Labour, and Working-Class Politics). We speculated hopefully that the union leaders' verbal combativity might stimulate some revival of left activism in CLPs.
What has happened since then gives us new evidence on what has happened to the Labour structure.
The Blair-Brown structures, far from being different from old Labour structures only in "tenth-rate" detail, are hardened enough that the four years of verbal combativity from the union leaders have "bounced" off them with scarcely any effect.
So high have the barriers been raised, so solidly have they been fixed in place, that it will take a much more deep-going mobilisation of the unions to start to break through them. That is the lesson from the major "new" fact of recent years.
***
The fallback argument of the "nothing-has-changed" school is to admit that things are bad now, but to claim that they were always that bad. CLPs were always moribund, rank-and-file activists always had very little chance of getting issues onto Labour conference floor, and left-wing Labour conference decisions always disappeared into the void with little stir or comment.
Of course the Labour Party organisation, even in its "best" days, has always been sluggish. Of course there have always been defunct ward parties and rump General Committees. Of course Labour leaders have always sought to evade left-wing Labour conference decisions.
But it is simply not true that the entire history of the Labour Party has been uniformly dim and lifeless, differing only in "tenth-rate" detail from today.
The period in the 1920s when Trotsky could plausibly speculate on the revolutionaries gaining the hegemonic position within the broad Labour Party that the pacifist ILP then had, and when the small Communist Party was able to build a mass National Left Wing Movement of expelled Labour Parties and local Labour left caucuses; the period in the 1950s when Bevanism was "Labour's high tide" in terms of constituency activism; the ferment between 1979 and the miners' strike of 1984-5 - all of those differed in more than "tenth-rate" detail from today.
And even outside those periods, life in the Labour Party ran much higher than today at all points in its history, except in the peculiar circumstances of World War 2. Even in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the CLPs were very depleted, it was more open and lively than today.
The idea that the "old" Labour Party was never much different from today's is not only factually false. Although put forward in this debate by people eager for Marxist involvement in the Labour Party, the idea actually makes that Marxist involvement nonsensical.
Rationally, the case for Marxist involvement in the Labour Party depends on the idea that the Labour Party is a contradictory and historically unstable formation, open to dramatic change. If the Labour Party is so stable an organism, with such powers of inertia, that nothing over a century of class struggles has ever been able to change it in more than "tenth-rate" detail - if, more or less whatever happens, it is and always has been the case that CLPs are moribund, rank-and-file activists have very little chance of pushing issues, and left-wing Labour conference decisions disappear into the void with little stir or comment - then what can possibly be the case for revolutionary intervention into it?
If a victory in the Labour Party today that won back all that has been lost over the last 20 years would only be a "tenth-rate" trifle, then what battle in the Labour Party can we imagine that would be really worth bothering with?
***
Am I being unfair? After all, the "nothing-has-changed" school only claim that nothing has changed in the Labour Party as an organism. They concede that some things have changed in society at large. The "mirror" which is the Labour Party hasn't changed (except in tenth-rate detail) - has not been darkened, or twisted - but what we see in it has changed, because it is reflecting different circumstances.
Which different circumstances? Cited are "the reduced scope and purpose of modern trade unionism", "the confidence and combativity of the unions", and "the erosion of local government".
I don't understand what "the erosion of local government" has to do with it. Local councils' autonomy has been much reduced. That does not make it impossible for left-wing Labour councillors, or left-wing Labour councils if there were any, to protest and lead struggles against the anti-working-class policies imposed on those councils by central government policy. What makes that impossible is the lack of life in the local Labour Parties to push the councillors, or councils, to do that.
The weakness of the unions certainly has a great deal to do with it. Blair and Brown would never have been able to do what they did in the mid-90s had the unions had a less craven leadership and a less demoralised membership.
In general terms, the unions are still weak today. If they were stronger, then things would be different. But different how?
As the unions grew stronger and more confident, would the Labour Party automatically, smoothly move to the left, reflecting them? Like an unchanged mirror lightening up as the scene it reflects becomes less dark? Were Blair's and Brown's actions in the mid-90s merely a temporary reflection of the unions' acute weakness then, certain to pass away as soon as the weakness did?
All the evidence suggests not. Even if the deeds of Blair and Brown in the mid-90s - and of Kinnock and Smith from 1986 to 1994 - were in their day mere "effects" of bad trends in the unions (and in fact they weren't just that), the deeds, once done, become causes in their own right. A dramatic remobilisation of the unions would shake up today's Labour Party - most probably not by smoothly swinging it round to "reflect" the new union reality, but rather by forcing a split in which Blair, Brown, and the New Labour "party on top of a party" would finally proceed to the full separation from the labour movement which they have been talking about for ten years now.
The unions have changed - not as we would wish them to change, but changed nonetheless - over the last five or six years. Far from reflecting that change, Blair-Brown's New Labour has only become more fiercely and contemptuously anti-working-class. The New Labour machine has not been pushed into accommodating the unions. On the contrary. It has been pushed into proposing that the unions should lose even the residual and formal position of strength they have in the Labour Party structure - see Alan Johnson's proposal to reduce the union say at Labour Party conference from 50% to 15%, and the proposals now being mooted on the back of the Hayden Phillips report.
To put it crudely: a further union re-mobilisation is more likely to make New Labour "worse" than to make it "better".
Although we use "the union link" as short-hand for the working-class base of the Labour Party, it has never been as simple as that. The Labour Party has never just been a reflection of the unions.
For example, between 1933 and 1956 (with blips in 1937, 1944, and 1955) strike action ran at a very low rate in Britain - not quite as low as in most recent years, but rarely much higher than in 1996 or 2002. Union density in the 1930s was lower than today - 24% in 1935. The bulk of the unions were solidly right-wing, in Labour Party terms, throughout those years. Yet the Labour Party was much livelier than today. The unions were able to break almost the whole Labour Party away from Ramsay MacDonald when he went for cuts in the dole in 1931, and then to rebuild the Labour Party after huge electoral setbacks so that it could win its landslide in 1945. There were significant left movements inside the Labour Party and Labour's youth in the 1930s - not what we would have wished for, but more than today - and in the 1950s the Constituency Labour Party left was, by some plausible estimates, larger than ever before or after.
The condition of the Labour Party today is not just a straight reflection of the condition of the unions. Politics is not just a reflection of trade unionism. Political forms and structures are important. To dismiss them as a "tenth-rate" concern is not Marxism but syndicalism.
It is, moreover, a peculiarly dispiriting form of syndicalism.
The little groups of Marxists who still insist on full immersion in the Labour Party, such as Workers' Action and Socialist Appeal, do not follow our "nothing-has-changed" comrades in their assessment. Being in weekly contact with the reality, they are pretty clear that a lot has changed, and that Marxist activity in the Labour Party is much more difficult than it was. They justify their orientation not so much by claiming that a lot can be done in the Labour Party, as by claiming that not much can be done in general. Nothing much can come from "ticking over" in the Labour Party; but even less from attempting anything else...
The "nothing-has-changed" school, as far I can see, can only push us towards the same sort of practical conclusion, by way of a more implausible and roundabout argument.
We know that things are not good politically in the working class and the labour movement. But to go along with that the idea the Labour Party is as all-encompassing over working-class politics as it ever was - that all the horrors of Blair-Brownism are no more than a reflection of the lack of confidence and combativity of trade unionists in general - that there is nothing beyond "tenth-rate" detail to make New Labour a less accurate reflection of working-class politics than Labour ever was - that, in short, New Labour is simply the Labour Party that the working class in its present state "deserves" - then we paint things as much worse than they are.
Martin Thomas
Comments
Or maybe only just part dead
Arthur,
Agree with your point entirely.
What has happened in the Labour Party isn't just a refelection of the unions, but the state of the unions is decisive.
Martin,
You ask: What do I now think was wrong with the analysis of the Labour Party that I helped develop? The short answer is all of it.
a) I think the entire analysis is an inversion of reality. The focus on internal structures was and is completely mistaken.
The cornerstone of that analysis was this idea:
"The decisive changes are not, it must be stressed, primarily a matter of the policies of New Labour...
It is the changes in structures and in relationships between the Party and the unions, the blocking-off of the channels of working-class representation and of possible effective labour-movement opposition to Labour government policy, that are decisive."
This analysis is upside down. What has really happened to the labour party is fundamentally a political process not first and foremost a set of organisational changes.
The fact is that the changes to the LP reflect the political retreat of trade unionism. Behind this lies the loss of economic power by the trade unions in society. But this doesn't fully explain it. The quality of the existing trade union leadership is an active factor in the process. The specific new LP structures would present no obstacle to the trade unions even now with their existing leadership and on the basis of existing policies. If that leadership should wish to fight their corner.
b) Your 'analysis' can't explain what is happening now with the Hayden Philips report and the campaign by the leadership for a reduction of the union vote at labour party conference.
Your theory says that what happened by 2002 was: 'the blocking-off of the channels of ...possible effective labour-movement opposition to Labour government policy.'
How then do you explain why the leadership want to push through new and very far-reaching changes to the internal structures? If the channels of 'effective opposition' really were blocked there would be no point. Why waste time blocking them further.
But the reason the leadership want to cut the union vote down to a third of party conference is that they fear the prospect of a serious assertion of union interests in the party. Already they have been repeatedly voted down on key issues at recent party conferences. They have also had to make a show of talking to the unions and making concessions as we saw with the 'Warwick Agreement'. The fact that the limited assertion of trade union interests within the existing LP structures has led to demands for some very far-reaching new changes proves beyond question that the old analysis was both premature and defeatist.
c) The strategic conclusion of your analysis was that the labour party was nearly dead, but not quite, and that reviving it was far too big and hard a task for the AWL. Therefore, wait for the labour party to revive itself, or more precisely wait for the union leaders to revive it. In the meantime drift out of the Labour Party and stand the odd candidate against Labour.
The alternative perspective was to try to play as full a part as we could in organisising a fightback in the unions and Labour party combined' In good G Healy style this was contemptuously dismissed as 'burying yourself' in the LP. The result is a situation were Workers' Liberty/Solidarity does not give a clear lead to people to get back into the CLPs and fight in support of Mc Donnell and in defence of the union link.
What was that about having 'no interests separate from the class'?
Tom
Sorting It Out
Tom Rigby and others can argue for themselves, but for my part I am not aware of arguing that NOTHING in the LP has changed. On the contrary in my response to Sean's piece replying to Maria I argued that Blair's domination was partly organisational changes, but that those changes themselves were a reflection of political changes. Accepting that such changes have arisen does not at all commit you to the view that the LP is dominated by Blairite ideology, or a Blairite organisational grip akin to a Stalinist Party. The question remains what in these changes really change the nature of the LP as a bourgeois workers party, and what, therefore, changes the attitude that Marxists should have towards it. My argument is that the LP remains a bourgeoois workers party, there is no alternative mass Workers Party that Marxists could relate to, nor likely to be one in the foreseeable future, and that therefore Marxists should seek to be members of this Party.
The changes in the Party call for different tactics in relation to how to operate within it, not a decision not to operate at all. I doubt that Marx and Engels would have been given full rights to operate as a separate Party within the German Democrats, but for them the more important point was to be able to relate through the Democrats to the working class.
Martin makes the point that at various times the LP was not moribund in the vein of the picture I have painted of it in the mid-70's - I would point out that at the time I had a friend who had spent some time in various parts of the country and had experience of LP's around England, and he said that the Party here was not much different than any other he had come across - but a look at the various points in history where it was not is instructive. In each of the poits it was times when revolutionaries of one variety or another had a relationship to the LP, and in many cases they were times of heightened class struggle outside so that it would be surprising if this was not reflected within the LP itself as the Workers Party. As for the LP not attacking workers as blatantly as Blair I remind Martin of the Solidarity article about the 45 Government, and its opposition to workers strikes, or more recently we only have to think back to the 1970's and the prolonged wage freeze, and the culmination of Callaghan's Winter of Discontent of class war against the lowest paid workers, with him singing to us at Party Conference.
What I found disturbing in Martin's argument was that in reality a lot of it is itself bound up with the importance of not just structures, but of electoralism. I am sure that Marx and Engels did not join the Democrats with the main thing being on their mind winning a majority to a socialist manifesto for the party. Their main concern was to use the Party as a vehicle by which to speak to workers. Surely that is what Marxists work in the LP to achieve. I think it is 100 times more valuable to be able to use the machinery and leverage of the LP in a particular community to go and speak to a few thousands workers facing some problem, and thereby to mobilise those workers into their own direct action than it is to have the necessary open structures to win some vote on this or that programmatic item for the next manifesto, or even to have in place the structures to call together the MP's and Councillors when they inevitably ignore it.
The whole of Martin's argument seems to miss this fundamental aspect of why Marxists should be in a Workers Party, whether it is the LP or some other. Instead, the focus is not on building that Workers party itself not on gaining the ear of the working class by using that Party, but on "Building the Organisation" a la the SWP, or at best "Building the Broad left" in the Party viz the comments re. Briefing, and even then the importantce of even doing that only if it can be done on the basis of total agreement comes out. But all of that is why non-Marxists have become very distrustful of Marxists in the Labour Movement, because they believe - and they are right - that they have their own agenda. Just look at the Militant who even on marches during the Miners Strike carried round buckets collecting for themselves. In Stoke the unions have split from the NHS campaign because of the SP's attempt to control it. That was part of the reason that Kinnock was able to get the acquiescence of even Leftish LP members in the witchhunt.
The reality is that we have seen this many times in the past. The original split in the Labour Movement undertaken by the Communists began it, and opened the way to a rightward move by the reformist leaders. Similar decisions to abandon the workers to their right-wing leaders took place during the 1960's.
It is possible for Marxists to operate within the LP. It is possible to turn LP's branches and CLP's ourtwards to the class struggle. It is possible for Marxists to get across their ideas by doing so to far wider sections of the Labour Movement and working class than they would otherwise be able to do. Okay maybe you can't produce a paper, but how many real workers read the papers that the Left has ever produced anyway? They are far more likely to read a leaflet produced by Marxists with other activists in a LP Branch that deals directly with the issues on their estate, or supports them and discusses the issues arising from their local strike, and there is no LP rules preventing that. Nor preventing individual Marxists when they are canvassing during local elections from spending time talking to tenants and residents about their problems, offering them assistance, spelling out why they need to organise, why they need to join the local LP to rejuvenate it etc.
New Labour is not the LP the working class deserves in its present state, it is the LP many Marxists seem prepared to abandon to the right-wing reformists rather than engage in a fight inside and out of it to transform both the working class, and the LP. The starting point of that is to become less concerned with structures, and restrictions, less concerned with trying to build fantasms inside or outside the LP, less time being concerned with winning a majority for this or that resolution and more time looking at how what exists can be used as a loudspeaker to the class.
Arthur Bough
Attack of the monster straw dolls
Martin,
Most of your argument in the post above is directed entirely against straw dolls. Not just one or two straw dolls, but an entire army of them!
Instead of concentrating on discussing the issues you have misconstrued, twisted, and wrenched out of context what is said in order to construct a patently absurd argument that can then be demolished. You haven't just created little standard straw dolls these are monster fabrications!
For example, you aim a lot of what you say against a current of opinion you call the ‘nothing has changed’ school. This is a school of opinion that exists only in your mind. It is a construction, a fiction. Nobody in this discussion has argued that nothing has changed in the Labour Party. The very idea is absurd.
Your practice here is politically degenerate. You are just making things up. Either substantiate what your are saying by quoting where I say nothing has changed in the Labour Party or withdraw what you’ve said.
When you are not just making stuff up, you come up with some preposterous deductions.
For example, you imply that I think that: 'all the horrors of Blair-Brownism are no more than a reflection of the lack of confidence and combativity of trade unionists in general - that there is nothing beyond "tenth-rate" detail to make New Labour a less accurate reflection of working-class politics than Labour ever was - that, in short, New Labour is simply the Labour Party that the working class in its present state "deserves"'.
This bears no resemblance to what I actually said. What I did say was that the Blair rule changes are 'minor procedural impediments to the left' and that: 'The significant changes’ that account for the lack of opposition to Blair ‘are all outside the formal structures of the party: in the confidence and combativity of the unions, in the erosion of local government etc etc'.
This may be a different assessment to yours of the importance of the formal rule changes to the Labour Party in explaining the hegemony of Blairism, but the notion that it amounts to the idea that the working class somehow “deserves” Blairism is just rubbish.
Unfortunately this kind of low political slur as opposed to rational argument is typical of the methods of polemic employed by your side in this discussion.
You say that statement A ( a judgement that the rule changes are far from decisive to the Blair hegemony) logically implies statement Z (that the working class "deserves" Blairism), when statement Z is a plainly ridiculous proposition. You persist in making this link even though you can’t establish any necessary link between statements A and Z. It is a not very sophisticated method of putting words in people’s mouths. It was popular with the both the Stalinists and Gerry Healy.
The idea behind the tactic is 'mud sticks' and you seem to be operating on the basis that if you continue to repeat that I think 'nothing has changed in the Labour Party' or that the working class "deserves" Balirism then enough people will believe you.
Unfortunately putting words in other people’s mouths is not the lowest point that you go to. Your use of facts raises serious concerns. You argue not like somebody trying to openly look at the issues and make sense of things in order to work out what to do, but like a lawyer trying desperately to weave a plausible story.
Take this example:
You say in your reply that: “The latest Labour Party accounts available on the Electoral Commission website show income from affiliates (i.e. mainly trade unions) as £7.6 million out of £29.3 million in 2004, and £6.8m out of £26.9m in 2003.”
Martin, you know full well that this is not ‘The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’is it? You know that it is not the accurate figure for how much money the trade unions gave to the Labour Party in those years. Because on the same website it is possible to see an entry for ‘donations’ and it is also possible to get a break down of where these donations come from. If you do this then a completely different picture emerges.
The fact is that in 2004 the trade unions gave the Labour Party £18.3 million out of £29.3 m and in 2003 they gave the party £14.8 m out of £26.9m.
Martin, I would appeal to you to abandon your destructive attitude to the current discussion and instead actually engage with what is being said.
You might make a start by ending the practice of giving people derogatory labels as a way of trying to pigeon hole what they say.
For instance there is the preposterous suggestion that one side in this debate is in favour of ‘burying themselves’ in the Labour Party or ‘full immersion’ in it, (presumably at the risk of drowning). Nobody thinks this.
That whole way of posing the question is wrong.
What the current discussion is about is an assessment and explanation of the changes that have occurred in the Labour Party and what political conclusions and judgements follow.
One thing that the discussion so far has established is that we can agree on building the LRC and campaigning for Mc Donnell.
The issue you might wish to think about is this: has the analysis of the Labour Party you and others have elaborated over recent years made it difficult for you to convince people to turn those slogans like ‘Build the LRC’ and ‘Back Mc Donnell’ into reality? And does the weight you give to questions of internal Labour Party constitution and structure, serve to breed a certain kind of conservatism and a reluctance to bother getting involved in those Labour Party structures?
I think it does.
Yours in solidarity
Tom
Straw dolls?
Obviously Tom agrees that the unions have changed. But he then says that the changes in the Labour Party are only a reflection of those changes in the unions, and not a matter of a significant change in the structure of the Labour Party and in its relationship to the unions or to the working class.
In the previous bout of debate on this, Tom was very explicit about this, asserting for example that Blair was "a typical Labour leader", in fact somewhat less bad than Wilson or Callaghan; that working-class support for the Labour Party was unchanged; that the role of conference within the Labour Party was unchanged; and much more on the same lines.
He summed it up by asserting that the only change in the "bourgeois workers' party" nature of the Labour Party is that it had become a "business unionist" bourgeois workers' party. I.e. there is no tilt to the bourgeois pole in the contradictory combination "bourgeois workers' party"; there's only been a change on the "workers" side, with the unions becoming "business-unionist".
"Business unionism", historically, means unionism on the lines of Samuel Gompers and the early 20th century American Federation of Labor: running trade unions as "businesses" whose sole "business" is to improve wages and conditions for their members (sometimes militantly), while opposing any idea of a workers' or labour political party.
So "business-unionist bourgeois workers' party" is a puzzling formula. But if it conveys any idea at all, it is that the changes in the Labour Party are merely reflections of changes in the unions. AWL collectively has argued the contrary case in some detail for over ten years now.
In his latest contributions, Tom goes further along "nothing-has-changed" lines by applauding Arthur's assertion that the political life in the CLPs today runs as high as it ever did, except maybe in the early 1980s. Publicly-available measures, for example the numbers and the politics of CLP delegates at Labour Party, indicate the contrary, and cannot reasonably be dismissed by reference to anecdotes about inactive Labour Party wards in the early 1970s.
It's no answer at all to claim that we must minimise the adverse changes in the Labour Party in order to keep people's spirits up for efforts like the LRC and the McDonnell campaign.
What would Tom say to someone who claimed that we should insist that the unions today are as militant, as bubbling with life, and as well-organised as they ever were, or otherwise we would fail to keep people's spirits up for the tasks of trade-union work?
Martin Thomas
'Like being savaged by a dead straw doll'
Come on Martin, your posts are getting ridiculous.
In my last post I asked you to argue through the issues based on facts (for instance about who funds the Labour Party) and to rely on reason rather than cheap public school debating tricks. So how do you respond? With more straw dolls, more putting words in people's mouths and a very silly Red Herring indeed (Samuel Gompers for god's sake!).
Oh and deafening silence about who funds the labour Party.
You have made one positive contribution though. The resolution (page 20 onwards) in the link you put up shows clearly that I do not think 'nothing has changed', nor do I support any of the other patently daft formulations you've made up for me in your latest post like the one about Blair being 'less bad' than Wilson or Callaghan.
What the resolution does provide is a clear statement of what has changed and what hasn't.
As for applauding Arthur, I didn't say I agreed with every dot and comma of Arthurs' analysis what I actually said was:
'I thought this Blog entry from Arthur Bough was particularly useful.
It gives people a feel for what the 'old labour party' was really like.
This is also worth reading too.
I particularly liked the observation that Sean must have been in a different Labour Party'
The point about the Mc Donnell campaign and the LRC is not that I want to 'minimise the adverse changes in the Labour Party in order to keep people's spirits up', why would I? We are not talking about the Boy Scouts or Girl Guides are we? AWL members can be allowed out without forming a crocodile can't they?
No, I referred to the problem you have in getting people to take up vigorously the campaigns you mention and especially taking them into their CLPs.
I think this problem arises because of the faulty analysis of the Labour Party developed over the last few years which has resulted in a failure to educate people in the ABC's of marxism concerning the labour movement, ABC's like the idea that:
' In organisation it (the Labour Party) is usually a withered, old, feeble sect, yet influential out of all proportion to its active members, backed and nourished as it is by the organs of bourgeois society. Social-democratic parties such as the Labour Party depend on inertia.'
'One of the central purposes of demanding that the Labour Party act contrary to its nature, but in accordance with the felt needs of millions of workers, is to cut through this inertia and undermine one of the props of capitalist society.'
'The Labour Party is a party which serves capitalism, but which can only do so because it is based on the organised working class movement, many elements of which want to bury capitalism. In that contradiction lies the potential of transcending Labourism.'
Tom
Not Just the Early 80's
I didn't say other than just the early 80's. There clearly have been other times in the history of the LP when high levels of membership and activity occurred, and when this also reflected a move to the Left. The 1920's, The Post-War period up to the early 60's etc.
I think its difficult to see what is happening in the LP during these periods as totally divorced from what is happening in the wider class struggle. The LP is not a straightforward mirror of it that is true, but nor can you divorce one from the other. Nor can you divorce the move to the Right in the LP with the defeats for the working class during the 1980's. There is no straightforward either or answer to the question of whether Blair's control stems from politics or from organisation because the two things are inextricably intertwined.
Nor can you divorce what is going on in the LP from what the attitude of Marxists is to the LP. The periods during which Marxists have taken the attitude that the LP is dead, and have gone off on some sectarian party building exercise have co-incided with periods when the Party has moved further to the Right, and that is quite udnerstandable, because it has largely been the Marxists that have provided the backbone for organising and campaigning within the party, and around whom wider political forces could be grouped to challenege the leadership.
As for the idea that the LP has generally been some kind of activist organisation with a healthy internal life I agree I have mainly gone from anecdotes, I'll have to look out some of my old Politics notes on the Labour party and comparison to other British parties over the twentieth century, but I would point out a couple of things. If Trotsky thought that a small number of revolutionaries could gain control of the LP in the 1920's that doesn't sound to me like a very large active party, it sounds more like what we see in TU's where a small base of activism allows revolutionaries to win positions way out of kilter with their real support amongst the majority of members. Anecdotal again its true, but the stories during the 1960's of Councillors - not just Labour Councillors - being just people who were prepared to do the job, and I know our local Councillor during the 1960's was of that ilk - are replete. Finally, if the LP during all this period was so open, so active etc. then why was it that I spent several years ferrying leading members of the I-CL from conferences they were at in Staffordshire down to important meetings of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy in London or spending my own weekends attending such meetings? Indeed why was the CLPD necessary at all if the LP was so open and active? If that were true we never would have had the build up of right-wing, careerist politicians that the Party had by the late 1970's.
My point is that, yes there have been significant changes in the LP since the early 1980's, but the early 1980's was not typical of the LP. It has had similar periods in its history before, and probably will again unless Marxists blow it by failing to relate to it.
The question is how can such repeated changes be countered. To some extent they can't as long as the class struggle itself ebbs and flows. But I would repeat what I said previously a lot depends on why Marxists believe they are in the LP. The "Entrist" tactic had one simple purpose to shortcut the process of building a revolutonary party. Those engaged in it had no interest in building the LP only in using it as a feeding pool for new recruits to their own organisation, and perhaps the means of creating some larger organisation via a split in the LP. If that is your purpose for being in the LP then any downturn in the LP will soon cause you to look for some more lucrative pool to fish in. Activity anyway will always be geared to Party Building so the first time some new activity comes along where possible recruits are available you transfer your activity from the LP to the other campaigns etc.
For ordinary workers in the LP this demonstrates a separate agenda, and necessarily creates suspicion. It also goes along with a necessity to concentrate on "real" politics as opposed to dealing with the everyday problems of workers like getting their Council house repaired etc. which is seen as routinism. Its routinist because it takes up time, and while it might win support or new members for the LP it rarely wins immediate new members for the revolutonary group, and therefore contradicts its main objective.
So when the class struggle in general turns down, and the potential influx of new militants and more likely recruits for the revolutioanry organisation turns down interest in working in the LP turns down with it because all that is left is this routine type of activity that does not have the romantic appeal of rrrevolutionary activism. Its that process that allows the right to reassert itself, and having done so to introduce structural changes or simply to use its control of existing structures to further lessen the impact of the Left.
The only innocculation for that is if Marxists stop seeing work in the LP in terms of a tactic, stop focussing on the idea of trying to win political control of it - though I'm not saying that shouldn't be an aim just not an overriding aim - and instead begin to see it as most workers do as THEIR party, to relate to it as Marx and Engels suggested in the Communist Manifesto, and as Engels continued to advise to the end of his life to the Americans - "to have no separate party from the workers party". Only with that mindset will the correct approach develop, will the necessary focus on working in the party to build it unselfishly to turn it out to the working class in its struggles so that workers inside and out are educated and organised, and that means dealing with all of those day to day boring problems of workers every day life as opposed to the romantic revolutioanry activism. And as I said above to do that you do not not need to be able to win votes at Party Conference and so on. Every individual member of the LP can go out in their community and talk to workers about their problems, use the authority of the LP - and the resources - to encourage people to form Tenants Associations and so on, can go out to picket lines, and thereby build the real link between the Party and the class based on what a real workers party should be about - encouraging the self-activity of the class. No right-wing bureuacrat can expel you for doing that. And yes Marxists need clarity of ideas, which is why websites like this are important for these kinds of discussions, and if its necessary Party names are not unheard of. If Marxists want to operate in unofficial factions until such time as they can operate as legal factions then that is not beyond the whit of man either through the use of a website to produce a paper, the use of e-mail to send out information etc., and if individual LP members produce a LP leaflet on an estate jointly between themselves and the residents, or during a strike with pickets that gives no grounds for expulsion, yet it does allow the Marxists to have direct contact with the working class, to educate them in the process of producing the leafletr, and encourages the workers to self-activity.
The main job of Marxists as handed down to us by Marx and Engels was not to build a Leninist vanguard party, but to educate the working class and thereby to raise its class conscioussness to the level where it is able to begin to take back control of society into its own hands. That remains the difference between a Marxist and a Leninist. The Marxist remembers that it is the working class that is the revolutionary agent.
Arthur Bough
Falls in LP Membership in Previous Times
The following extract is from an article by Charlie Kimber in International Socialism.
"The classic Labour response to such disastrous falls in membership is to say that it has happened before and, in those cases, the party has recovered. Certainly the party has been in trouble before. In particular membership dropped drastically during the earlier Labour governments of 1964-70 and 1974-79. Fred Lindop, in a detailed study of a local Labour Party in south London, gives a revealing glimpse of how previous Labour betrayals gutted the party of activists:
From the mid-1950s, the Greenwich Labour Party went into a long term decline in membership and levels of activity. Membership declined by over 75 percent between 1954 and the mid-1980s.The records show an almost continuous concern with the inactivity of wards and other party organisations, interspersed with very brief periods of resurgent confidence (early-mid 1960s, early 1970s). The decline was clearly part of a national trend… Reports in the late 1960s and early 1970s constantly refer to the Labour Party being ‘remote in recent years from the people it should represent’. The catastrophic collapse of membership between 1965 and 1970 was identified as a direct consequence of the unpopularity of the Wilson government’s economic policies (though the secretary in February 1968 attributed much of this to ‘the fact that the electorate in general and party members are not aware of the positive achievements of the Labour government’).10
Overall disillusion with the 1964-70 Labour government meant that nominal membership dropped from 817,000 (1965) to 680,000 (1970). Assessments of Labour membership in the 1960s and 1970s, which look much better than today, should be treated with caution. In particular, the rule between 1963 and 1980 that each constituency had to register at least 1,000 members, even if it had far fewer, caused vast over-counting: ‘The method of counting members hid the scale of the decay. But when a more honest system was adopted in 1981, the supposed membership of 666,000 was shown to be only 348,000’.11 Steven Fielding notes:
Analysing a situation she thought ‘deplorable’, in 1965 Labour’s national agent believed parties claiming 1,000 only had about 250 members. On that basis membership that year was inflated by about one-third, a distortion that only increased with time.12"
Source:
International Socialism
Arthur Bough
Straw dolls? 2
1. Tom introduced the term "business-unionist" as his preferred definition of what is special about the Labour Party today. I responded by saying that I can't see how the unions today, let alone the Labour Party today, fit the classic model of "business unionism", which is historically associated with Samuel Gompers. Tom, in response, accuses me of introducing a straw doll by mentioning Gompers.
But if someone introduced a straw doll by mentioning "business unionism", it was not me but... Tom. If Tom wants to say that the labour movement in Britain today is "business-unionist", but in some fashion that has nothing to do with the classic "business unionism" of Gompers, then please explain.
2. Tom accuses me of more straw dolls. But everything he writes is still on the lines that (a) rather little has changed in the Labour Party; (b) such changes as there have been are a reflection (in a largely unchanged "mirror") of changes in the working class and in society beyond the Labour Party structures.
3. I don't have the materials to hand to engage in detailed debate about Labour Party funding. But if it is indeed the case that the trade union leaders have given much larger donations to the Labour Party than commonly supposed, that does not undo the basic changes in the Labour Party (summarised by me, above, in eight points, none of which have been questioned). It is a secondary point.
4. Arthur says we should be in the Labour Party because that is where we can speak to workers. This argument depends on how many, and what selection of, workers you can actually find in the Labour Party branches. You can't say you must be in the Labour Party to speak to workers, but it doesn't matter whether there are actually any number of workers in the Labour Party branches! There is plenty of evidence - take the number and character of CLP delegates to Labour Party conference for an easily available index - that there are fewer workers, and in particular fewer workers open to militant socialist arguments, in the Labour Party branches than in almost any other period in its history. Of course there have always been defunct Labour Party branches, of course the whole organisation of the Labour Party has always been sluggish and bureaucratic, of course there are a few relatively lively branches even today, but the situation has changed, and dramatically. Actually I agree with Arthur that Marxists should, if possible, hold Labour Party membership cards, and certainly, at the very least, "keep an eye on" the CLPs. I don't agree that they can and should in present conditions see the Labour Party as their main channel to "speak to workers".
5. Yes, the 1945-51 government attacked strikers! It was a bourgeois government. But I submit that someone who can't see any big difference between the reforming 1945-51 government and the Blair regime is suffering from a very, very bad case of the "nothing-has-changed" syndrome. Between repealing anti-union laws and maintaining them; between founding the NHS and wrecking it; between nationalisation and privatisation; etc: such differences are minor details which fully pumped-up Marxists should regard as trivial and unimportant?
6. Whether Marx's and Engels' tactics with the Democrats in 1848 were right is a moot point. See David Ryazanov's Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, where Ryazanov argues that (a) their tactics were wrong, in part because in fact they made it harder for Marx and Engels to get across to the most militant workers; (b) Marx and Engels later came to think that they were wrong.
But even if Marx and Engels were right in early 1848, you can't deduce a tactical conclusion for Britain in 2006 directly from that.
7. I don't deny that the Labour Party is still, in general terms, a bourgeois workers' party. But since when has it been an iron law that Marxists must always join bourgeois workers' parties if available? Are French Marxists duty-bound to dive into the Socialist Party, German Marxists duty-bound to immerse themselves in the SPD, etc? I would say that such things are matters for concrete tactical judgement.
When Lenin advocated that the British CP seek to affiliate to the Labour Party, he made his argument not on the basis of the Labour Party being in the general category "bourgeois workers' party", but on the basis of the Labour Party's relative openness.
8. As I pointed out above, AWL's analysis of what's special about Blair-Brownism has not been developed "in the last few years" (as Tom puts it), but was pretty much fully developed, in essentials, seven or eight years ago. What was then new and possibly fluid is now hardened, but the essential shift took place that far back. Tom will remember that he himself wrote some of the articles analysing the changes back then. He knows thinks that he, and all the rest of us, were wrong? Fair enough. But Tom should not pretend that what he is arguing against is some new idea developed only "in the last few years".
Martin Thomas
A few Points
1. Speaking to workers. My point is not that Marxists can speak to workers just in LP branches or CLP's, though obviously that is important too. My point is that whatever revolutionary Marxists might want to beleive the working class see the LP as THEIR party. They not only do not see, but are usuallu very wary of people who belong to small revolutionary groups - often with good reason. It is possible on an individual basis sometimes to overcome that by work in local organisations such as consistent work in say a TRA, the Militant obviously had some similar success with work on the Poll Tax, and other non socialist orghanisations like Sinn Fein have shown that this kind of consistent community work can pay off. But generally speaking it does not, partly because the forces of the revolutionary left are just to small to be able to undertake it on the scale required, and also because it is often seen just as yet another aspect of Party building. The experience of votes for the left in local elections prove the point. In fact if workers were to look for an alternative workers party to vote ofr to the LP it is more likely to be the BNP than the revolutionary left. In large part the revolutionary left have done this to themselves. Does anyone serioously beleive that any ordinary worker would read any of the papers of the Left. But if your perpsective is to speak now directly to the workers rather than through the medium of the LP then the nature of the Left press has to change dramatically in order to speak to, on the level of, and addressing the immediate concerns of ordinary workers. That in fact is what the BNP are doing.
My point about speaking to workers was not to limit it to workers in the LP, any more than work in the unions should limit you to speaking only to the unionised workers in the workplace - one of the reasons TRotsky advocated factory committees which include non unionsed workers - but to use the LP as I put it as a loudspeaker to speak to the class, to use its resources, including where possible the remaining active members to turn outwards into the communities in a way that small revoluitonary groups on their own cannot possibly do.
2. My point about the 1945 government was not to suggest that there were no differences, but on the contrary to demonstrate that even the most left wing Labour government we have had undertook similar actions to those Blair's government has done. It was to point out that other government's such as Wilson's proposals to introduce IN Place of Strife, Callaghan's outright and prolonged attack on the working class in some ways were worse than Blair. For the whole of the 1970's the Wilson and Callaghan governments were viciously cutting Public Spending, and imposing wage freezes. Blair's government has presided over huge real increases in Public Spending and has introduced the Minimum Wage. True they have carried through privatisation, but under Callaghan and Wilson nationalisation was used as a means to pressure workers in those industries as a means of enforcing their wage freezes, whilst low prices from those industries were used to subsidise private industry.
3. Perhaps M & E TACTICS were wrong specifically in relation to the Democrats, but let's remember it was not a bourgeois workers party, but a bourgeois party pure and simple, just one that was closest to the workers. And the fact remains that until his death Engels advice to the US socialists was to build a workers party on almost any platform provided it was one on which they could get agreement, and that the principal outlined in the Communist Manifesto "The Marxists do not create any party separate from the workers Parties" remianed the guiding principle for all Marxists to follow.
Arthur Bough
Business unionism: alive and well?
On the subject of business unionism.
Kim Moody, who knows a wee bit about the US workers' movement doesn't quite share Martin's ultra restrictive definition of 'business unuionism'.
He doesn't just restrict the term to Gompers and his immediate followers, but uses the term to help make sense of a dominant form of trade union leadership in the US. This is how Moody uses the concept to help make sense of the defeat of the reforming leadership of the teamsters union. It is a long extract, but worth reading, you might even see some parallels with the movement here:
"It's easy to look at the situation in the Teamsters and write it all off to the usual suspects: Carey became a threat to big business. He not only presided over a profound transformation of a major union situated at the heart of the economy, he took on UPS, won, and set an aggressive ne w pattern for labor as a whole.
So, corporate America, their Republican buddies, and the courts (under pressure or by preference) did him in.
No doubt about it, this cast of characters went after Ron Carey like hound dogs after a bleeding fox. Rest assured they're not done yet. They, in one of their many forms, will probably get their teeth into Rich Trumka and maybe others.
Some of labor's best will go down, while many of the worst will walk away unscathed and grinning. Corporate America won this one.
There's another culprit here, however. The tragedy at the Teamsters was, at least in part, an inside job.
The problems now faced by Ron Carey and the Teamster reform movement were born in the actions and political culture of top-level labor and their Democratic Party "friends."
This culprit's name is business unionism.
It comes clean or dirty, and in many political shades. Call it what you like, its basic characteristics are: top-down organization, closed-door negotiations, dependence on the Democratic Party, a fetish about the union's material property and accumulated wealth, a softness on employer "competitiveness," and a general distrust of the rank and file.
Everything in the top-down world of business unionism is "let's make a deal".
Shuffling money around to win elections, legally or not, in the unions or the nation, is second nature.
Junior Hoffa offered a particularly crude version of it when he said during the 1996 Teamster election campaign, "What you want is a union with a big bank account and a strong leader."
Today's AFL-CIO leaders certainly aren't a bunch of Hoffas. But they are still basically business unionists. They promise change and bring new energy to organizing and speaking out on issues. But they have taken on more high-priced consultants, more multi-million dollar media campaigns, more bureaucratic institutes, more talk of "partnerships" with business.
They have spent millions on the federation's headquarters, and despite talk of a new way of doing politics, forked over more money to don't-deliver Democrats than ever. Union democracy is not on their agenda.
They have not transcended business unionism so much as given it an information-age makeover.
Carey, too, must share some of the responsibility. All that happened did so under his presidency. He hired the consultants. In choosing old style money-driven electioneering in 1996, he, in effect, chose business union methods over the rank and file campaign advocated and conducted by the Teamsters for a Democratic Union.
The consultants hired by Carey were the conduit to labor's old ways of doing things. What the whole bunch did was introduce the old back-room political culture into a Teamsters' union that was fighting to get past all that.
Carey was, in turn, drawn further into this swamp. The federation officers, consultants, and politicians are so rooted in that old culture, they probably didn't even know they were corrupting something. And that points to the problem.
Business unionism and its culture of bureaucratic functioning and top-down dealing is so familiar and so ingrained that both its high-placed practitioners and rank and file victims often don't even notice it at work.
That's just the way the world is and always has been. Right?
Wrong! It wasn't always like that and nothing was proving the old business unionism wrong more than the reforming, fighting rank and file Teamsters, above all the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and the leader of the reform coalition Ron Carey.
They had won the direct vote on top leaders, wiped out layers of'time-serving bureaucrats, lowered staff and officer salaries, trusteed dozens of mob-run locals and trained members to run them, launched new forums of accountability, and, yes, taken on corporate America like no business union has or could in decades.
But Carey made a mistake. It's not just that he hired some self-serving consultants. When he let in these impeccably "pro-labor" fundraising and marketing professionals he took a step away from the rank and file approach that won the election in 1991 and made the reform movement one of the most powerful and thorough ever.
In a speech at the Teamsters for a Democratic Union convention in November, Ken Paff said, "if you're going to take on corporate America, you better make sure you're not vulnerable.' Carey is basically a straight arrow and his accomplishments in the last six years are enormous, but he made himself and the reform movement vulnerable when he sought the media-blitz shortcut and took on the political pimps and methods of business unionism.
The lesson here is too easily lost in the details of guilt or innocence. Revitalizing the labor movement isn't just about cleaning up a few worse-than-average unions, much less hiring a bigger horde of money-guzzling media and PR experts. Hoffa is wrong, it's not about big bank accounts. It's about rank and file power and accountable leadership.
That's the prize. That's where to keep your eyes."
The Labour Party is dead.
5. The Constituency Labour Parties have a lower membership on paper than they had even in World War 2, when all electoral contests with the Tories were suspended and most activists had been drafted into the armed forces. On all accounts, the active membership has declined even more than the paper membership. Union delegates to CLPs have become rare. About half of all CLPs no longer bother to send a delegate to Labour Party conference. Those CLP delegates who do arrive vote, in their majority, way to the right of the unions.
I think that the Labour "Party" is dead, and is now similar to those of the US (Dem/Rep) wherein those at conference are simply whooping puppets,there to play up whatever has been decided in guacamole filled rooms.
The Labour Party has become the leading Party of the borgeouise, the Tories having dissapeared into a fratricideal war between the one nationers and Thatcherites. It has for all time (until it's use has been and gone) removed from the dangerous hands of the working class.
It's dead, let it go, after all if a horse was this sick someone would shoot it to put it out of it's misery.
Could We Have A Different Working Class Please?
Bob complains on the one hand that only half of CLP's send delegates to Annual Conference - I'm not sure how this compares with the percentage for most of the Party's history - presumably the point being that these CLP's don't bother because they are to the Left of Blairism and see no point in taking part in the circus. But then he wants to have it both ways by complaining that the delegates that do arrive vote to the Right of the unions.
The point of all this appears to be to support his idea that the LP is dead and Marxists might as well build some alternative workers Party. Okay, let's consider who the potential recruits for this Party are. The most obvious target is those that vote for revolutionary Left candidates in elections. The problem with this is that the number of such people is derisorily small. A much larger number of working class people vote for the BNP!
The problem for Bob's perspective and of talking directly to the working class is that this working class is in fact itself way to the Right of those workers that Bob dismisses as hopeless cases in the LP. I am not saying that the LP is made up of revolutionaries - far from it. It is made up of a combination of careerists, and of a large number of workers that have entrenched reformist views, sometimes quite right-wing reformist views. But the majority of workers I know in the LP are still to the Left of Blair. The problem is that the workers Bob wants to appeal to are the same workers that by their several million DID vote for Blair because they largely agreed with what he was saying, some of them formerly having voted for Thatcher and the Tories. The further problem is that several million more workers STILL voted for the Tories or their pale shadow in the LibDems. This working class that Bob wants to appeal to to build this new Workers Party is a figment of his imagination, but as Lenin used to say the truth is concrete.
For the last 80 years Trotskyists have consoled themselves for their ineffectiveness with the idea that the problem was a crisis of leadership. It is the same now as far as the LP. Its problem is not a downturn in the class struggle, a growing tide of defeatism that has infected even the revolutionary Marxists causing them to seek quick panaceas of one form or another the search for a Talisman of truth in the writings of some different TRotskyist on the one hand or the revelations of the Quran on the other, but the fact of the Blairite leadership which has cut off the swell of working class outrage that is believed to be just waiting to explode at any minute.
The same perpsective is applied to the Trade Unions. But wait what about those Trade Unions that DO have revoluiotnary Marxists as their leaders? Oh yes of course they are not REALLY revolutionary Marxists. But nor was Arthur Scargill and peter Heathcliff, but it didn't stop one of the greatest demonstrations of raw working class action in British history taking palce for a year. What this perspective seems to miss is the fact that whether the members of the SWP or SP, elected to leadership positions in the Trade UNoins,are true revolutionary Marxists or not, if their election was based on a really class conscious membership then such leaderships would not be able to sell out disputes like the pensions dispute because the membership would not let them. The crisis of the Labour Movement is not and never has been a crisis of leadership it is a crisis of class conscioussness within the working class, a crisis that has arisen because the Marxists have not udnertaken the task Marx and Engels assigned to them of patiently explaining and eductaing the class. Despite all the repeated mantra about socialism being possible only through direct independent working class action from the bottom up, revoluitonary Marxists have continued to be dominated with questions of leadership, and structure, and when they have been unable to win such positions of leadreship within the real working class they have created their own alternative working class within which they could win leadership. But as time has gone on the size of this alternative working class - i.e. that which could be attracted to supposedly revolutionary parties - has become smaller and smaller, the distance between it and the real working class wider and wider.
Astronomers believe that the Moon was once part of the Earth flung off as another planet crashed into the proto Earth. The Moon has continued to influence the Earth beneficially just as the revolutionary parties have continued to influence the workers parties they separated from at the beginning of the last century. But the Moon is moving further away from the Earth, slowly its influence is diminishing and its size in the night sky getting smaller. The further it moves away the less gravity will hold it to the Earth until it simply flies off into space. It would be a pity of the same fate awaited revolutionary Marxists.
Arthur Bough
Irresponsible
I think your post is irresponsible, and I take it you are not a LP member, and have never been or have not been for a long time. Paper and active membership are very low compared to what they have been in the past, true. But paper membership is still above 200,000 and active membership probably something less than half that. If active membership is only 50,000 that is still nearly 50,000 more than the combined total of the revolutionary Left and assorted versions of CP. From direct knowledge of my own LP I know that the vast majority of these members are ordinary working class people.
Let me take it from another angle. Twenty years ago when I was President of my local TUC we used to have meetings in the local Town Hall. There were something like 50 affiliated union bodies, and each month the meeting would be attended by around 100 delegates. My union branch meeting istelf was well attended. A couple of years ago I attended a similar meeting of the TUC. It was held in the back room of the Catholic Club, and was attended by 6 people including me, and two members of the SP.
So what then are Trade Unions and the Trade Union movement dead too? Should marxists give up on them and go off on some romabntic quest believing that they can substitute for the class yet again, beleive that unions like the workers party would be floursihing if only it had the right leadership?
Arthur Bough