1. The decisions taken at the 2007 Labour Party conference at Bournemouth have disenfranchised the affiliated trade unions and Constituency Labour Parties. Unless the major unions can be turned round, and forced to push through a reversal of Bournemouth and a restoration of Labour Party democracy, this marks an historic turning point in the process of change that has taken place in the Labour and trade union movement over the last decade.
It will reduce Labour to a US-style political party, with real political input from the organised working class limited to a junior lobbying role for trade union leaders.
This crisis of working class representation demands urgent action. Thus we campaign for a re-composition in the socialist and labour movement.
We campaign for the creation by socialists and trade-union organisations of a broad Workers' Representation Committee - an open, democratic socialist organisation committed to the promotion of internationalism, peace and equality. Its mission is the creation of a socialist society organized on the basis of social ownership of the instruments of social production, with production, distribution and services democratically controlled and administered by the workers themselves. Its immediate aim will be to achieve the widest possible representation of labour in opposition to the representatives of capital.
It will appeal for widest possible unity under the banner of working class representation. It will encourage local affiliates and committees to adopt a flexible approach, utilising whatever means available, to secure working-class political representation.
Getting such organisations (Trades Councils, ad hoc committees) to initiate independent working-class candidacies in elections is a central part of the fight for working-class political representation
2. To make broadcast appeals to the general public to "build a new mass workers' party" is arid, empty, and downgrades the necessary programmatic, educational, and local-sinew-building work necessary for any real workers' party to emerge. We dedicate ourselves to a multi-dimensional, multi-faceted fight to build a broad movement, as organised and cohesive as possible, for independent working-class representation. Work to build such a movement can create the basis for the future regroupments which can actually create a new mass workers' party.
3. We fight to unite the left for a new movement to achieve independent working-class representation in politics. There are four fronts to this effort:
- A rearguard fight in the Labour-affiliated unions over the coming months, up to their 2008 conferences, for them to repudiate the Brown plan and table proposals in the Labour Party to restore their political rights;
- A fight to win commitments from different sectors of the left to the cause of unity for working-class representation, and practical steps to piece together unity where possible;
- A fight in the unions affiliated to the Labour Representation Committee to commit them to the cause of unity for working-class representation, and, where possible, to practical initiatives like the proposal widely supported (though eventually, this time, rejected) in the RMT for that union to initiate a broadly-backed independent working-class slate for the May 2008 London mayor/ GLA elections;
- A fight to create the underpinnings of such a movement in each city and district by building the Trades Council and committing it to the politics of independent working-class political representation;
- In all this, a constant battle to promote fully independent working-class politics.
4. The Labour Representation Committee, commanding the affiliation of six trade unions and a large number of trade-union branches, would be the best immediately-available axis for launching this new workers' representation movement. Our motion proposing that was defeated at the November 2007 LRC conference, but we should continue the argument within the LRC. A fight for affiliations to the LRC in trade-union bodies (including national unions like PCS) will be a useful lever to promote the perspective of workers' representation.
5. Our efforts, however, should not at all be confined to arguments within the LRC. We should take the argument out into every body of the left and of the labour movement where we can get a hearing.
6. The original Labour Representation Committee of 1900, the first form of the Labour Party, had union affiliations totalling only 353,070 members, less than 20% of the total trade union membership at the time of 1,908,000. Only bit by bit did the affiliated membership rise to 1.45 million in 1909. If the socialists, and the more politically-assertive unions, had waited until they had a majority, or near-majority, of the union movement, then the Labour Party would not have been founded at all in 1900. Likewise today: to wait for all the big unions to move would be to paralyse ourselves. We should fight for the socialists and the more politically-assertive unions to give a lead - and do so fully aware that, with recent industrial defeats, in the calculable future growth for a new working-class political venture is likely to be slower, not faster, than after 1900.
7. Our fight over the next year in the Labour-affiliated unions cannot be limited to a fight to restore the status quo. It should be a fight to restore the full right of the unions (not just the "big four") to table motions at Labour Party conference, to abolish the Policy Forum, to make the union representatives on the Labour Executive fight for union policy, and to apply maximum union pressure to the New Labour leadership to respect the conference decisions on privatisation, anti-union laws, rail renationalisation, council housing, the health service, and so on, passed under working-class pressure.
8. All the Labour-affiliated unions, even the most leftish, let the Bournemouth rule-change go through without opposition. Energy in fighting for a reversal of that position must be coupled with sober assessment of the realities which it illustrates. We can possibly win a commitment to reversal of the rule change at CWU conference next year. In the biggest unions - Unite, Unison, GMB - the political structures have become so impermeable that overturning the leadership line will be very difficult. In Unite, indeed, it will require forcing a special conference, since on the current schedule Unite is not due to have a policy conference until after the Bournemouth rule change is "finalised" in autumn 2009.
9. Realistically, therefore, we have to plan for a future in which the Labour Party structures are firmly closed off to working-class politics.
10. The negative slogans "disaffiliate from the Labour Party" or "leave the Labour Party" do not thereby acquire positive content. Rather, it is a question of the positive fight for working-class political representation, and of being willing to face the consequences if the New Labour machine responds by expulsion.
11. The mere fact that even if Bournemouth is consolidated, the biggest unions will - in the calculable future, short of a political earthquake - remain attached to it, will not define Labour as a "workers' party", even in the "bourgeois workers' party" sense. Unions have been attached to populist parties in Latin America. The British unions were attached to the Liberal Party before the rise of Labour (and probably had more real influence there than the unions now have in New Labour); some important unions remained tied to the Liberal Party until 1908. The US unions are attached to the Democratic Party. All three Italian union federations are attached to the Democratic Party (the new merger of the main body of the old Italian Communist Party with the ex-Christian-Democrat Margherita party). That sort of attachment just makes the unions clients of bourgeois politics, not the party any sort of workers' party.
12. Even with Bournemouth consolidated, the Labour Party will have some special features as a bourgeois party: tradition, connections, memory, etc. It cannot be ruled out that at some later stage some Andreas Papandreou figure in the Labour Party may seek to re-forge its links to the organised working class - and, if the socialists have been unable to build a genuine, even small, workers' party in the meantime, succeed in doing so.
Although the outcome will be indicated fairly plainly after the 2008 union conferences, and indeed is well flagged up even now, the next general election will most likely take place before we can say absolutely definitively that Bournemouth is consolidated.
Even if Bournemouth is consolidated, that does not necessarily rule out activity in CLPs here and there (in the same way as in the late 19th century Marxists were active in East End Radical clubs linked to the Liberal Party), though the Bournemouth vote (82% of CLPs voting to ban themselves from putting political motions in future) provides solid confirmation that there is very little life in the great majority of CLPs.
Activity to win working-class socialist candidates through local Labour Parties; "default" votes for Labour where no socialist candidate is standing; and activity here and there in CLPs - all these, then, are not ruled out in the period ahead. But the lack of life in the CLPs indicates that these will be secondary elements in the fight to build a movement for working-class representation.
13. Where a union leadership has made it clear that it is committed to the Bournemouth rule change, and attempts to reverse the policy have failed, then Labour affiliation is as "de-politicising" for the union as any alternative: it means that the union's political activity is defined by being yoked to the New Labour machine without the union even seeking to have an open, public political voice in the matter. In that situation, it would be sectarian to oppose disaffiliation motions, and wrong not to initiate them ourselves. We seek to add positive direction to such motions by linking them to our positive proposals - fight for a workers' representation movement, affiliation to LRC, etc. - but we cannot contend that workers have no right to unyoke their unions from the New Labour machine unless and until those workers have a clear Marxist perspective.
14. Our effort is not confined to pushing and pulling at the level of national unions and political formations. We also seek to build the workers' representation movement at local level. Without such grass-roots work, any efforts at a national scale will amount to juggling with largely fictitious quantities.
we should initiate a long-term consistent campaign to build or revive Trades Councils as political organs of the labour movement. Working-class politics cannot re-emerge without the emergence of more or less broadly recognised pan-worker (cross-union) organisation on a geographical basis. Trades Councils are no arbitrary or special gimmick, but the basic, obvious form of such organisation. They were the local organisations of the Labour Party in most places before 1918.
Political initiative is likely to come through Trades Councils — relatively close to the rank and file — before it conquers the inertia of the big national trade union bureaucracies.
This idea is not based on illusions about the condition of Trades Councils today. Rather the contrary: it is that we know that the local sinews of cross-union organisation are weak, and that any national move will lack real grip unless it goes together with strengthening of those sinews.
On the same principle, the work of building Trades Councils will be empty if it is confined to adding delegacies and passing paper resolutions. To have real life, a Trades Council must support union-organising drives and strikes, and run anti-privatisation, NHS, union-rights, anti-racist etc. campaigns — maybe through sub-committees — with the Trades Council itself as the ongoing core. It will link the fight for working-class representation in the electoral arena with working-class politics in non-electoral campaigns and organisation in the workplaces.
But we also know that the fight to build a new movement for workers' representation may be long and uneven. The Trades Councils are a relatively open, responsive avenue for even patchy and episodic stirrings of working-class political self-assertion. An orientation to rebuilding Trades Councils puts us in the best position to make the most of such stirrings.
15. Our actual experience of recent Trades Council work indicates that the work is hard slog, but by no means barren or hopeless.
The idea does not mean that in a city where our forces are small and the Trades Council is tightly controlled by a clique, we have to sacrifice essential other activity to single-combat with that clique. If a particular AWL branch feels it can’t manage both the AWL basics - branch meetings, educationals, open meetings, contact work, sales, etc. - and a Trades Council effort, then it should discuss with the EC whether or not to leave the Trades Council in the 'pending' tray for now.
And obviously Trades Councils will not resolve the political impasse of the working class — will not even help in resolving that political impasse — unless we can win decisive political influence for the AWL or a future AWL-plus within them. We should combine all organisational activity to build Trades Councils with activity to win political influence. Immediately, for example, we should fight not only to build Trades Councils but also to affiliate them to the LRC or a reformed Workers’ Representation Committee.
We should not be fetishists, either. Sometimes ad hoc local committees may have to “go round” shrivelled, cliquey Trades Councils. Sometimes local workers’ representation committees may be formed as ad hoc bodies.
And it’s possible the next stage of socialist advance will be the emergence of a small revolutionary party based on a future radicalisation mostly among youth, which can acquire a substantial profile some time before winning hegemony in many Trades Councils.
16. In all of this, increasing the political profile of the AWL as an open Marxist organisation remains a priority. We are not simply brokers for working-class regroupments; nor are we self-effacing enthusiasts of building Trades Councils without too much worry about the politics.
In all the work outlined in this resolution, we argue for fully independent working-class revolutionary politics - for authentic "Third Camp" Marxism. We do not have some cut-rate programme with which to fob off "the masses" while we reserve our full ideas for a select few. We do not make our Marxist programme an ultimatum. We fight for independent working-class political self-assertion here and now, with the working class and the unions as they really are, and support every positive step in that direction; but at the same time, we constantly fight for that self-assertion to be on the clearest possible political basis.
When the Labour Party was relatively open and lively, and we had wide scope for using it to promote our politics to a relatively wide working-class audience even at election time, it made tactical sense to let ourselves be bound by Labour Party discipline not to stand against the party.
We no longer have such good grounds to accept the discipline of the Labour Party. Running AWL members as socialist candidates in elections is for us an opportunity for agitation and propaganda; for taking our socialist message out to a much wider working-class audience than normally is possibility for us; for training our activists; and for winning new contacts. Over history, including recently (in France, for example), electoral campaigning has been an important means for Marxist organisations to build themselves. We do not accept the idea that Marxists should not present themselves to the broad working-class public at election time unless they first have majority (or large) trade-union support, or an expectation of a big vote: the election campaigning can be one means for moving from a position of small influence and support to one of larger influence, support, and organisation.
Resources make it impracticable for us to run such candidates more than on an occasional "demonstration" basis, but we should let as few elections as possible pass by without at least that "demonstration" that socialist alternatives exist.
We should mobilise the AWL to run at least one of our members as a "demonstration" socialist candidate in the next general election.