Though Cowards Flinch and Traitors Sneer, We’ll Fly the Red Flag at an Undetermined Point in the Future
Posted Under: Class, GreenFeed, Labour, Socialism, Venezuela
Working class universalism is not enough. Labour does not deserve our unwavering loyalty
Power to the people!
It’s Friday evening. I should be out partying or down the pub. Instead I’m sitting in front of my computer, wondering what wondrous topic to opine upon for my column. I’ve scoured the news. David Cameron’s doing God and Boris, hopes for a climate change deal this year are looking scandelously dismal, British soldiers are getting shot in Afghanistan and American soldiers are getting shot at home. But what’s really caught my attention tonight has been the debate on Though Cowards Flinch which emerged from an article Guy Aitchison wrote for The Third Estate on Power2010. The discussion on democratic reform, whilst interesting in and of itself, is not really what’s piqued my interest in this thread, rather the disagreements on left wing organisation within and without the Labour Party.
I very rarely get involved in internal left-wing organisational disputes anymore. Partly because, despite their utility to a point (and it is a definite point), they bore the hell out of me. And this is speaking as someone who considers themselves switched on. For the wider public, sectarianism is to socialism as talking about your ex is to sex. It’s a turnoff. More crucially, however, these sorts of debates in the end only serve to distract us from our common goals, our common enemies, and the wider issues facing us in a very unjust world. While we’re bickering about the best way to rally the British workers to our cause, Iraqi civillians are getting blown up, Afghanistan’s tearing itself apart, kids are slaving away in sweat shops, Palestinians are having their homes knocked down, the ice caps and glaciers are melting and David Cameron’s doing God. And Boris.
Just this once, however, I’m going to throw in my two Euro cents. The impetus for this is a comment by Carl Packman in response to my damnation of the Labour Party and everything it stands for these days.
I see what you’re saying Salman, but take something that Mark Fischer said, when he gave a lecture on Marxism recently at Eton: ‘I assured the audience that the whole point of Marxists’ identification with the working class was its universalism.’ The very reason British Marxists should remain tied to the Labour party, and not join fringe yoke like SWP, or any of the other Trot splits, is because the party is historically linked to the Labour movement, and is henceforth the site of working class universalism. New Labour neo-liberalism is its inappropriate thorn, those careerists should not be vindicated by socialists jumping ship.
I tend to avoid discussing Marxism in 19th (or indeed 20th) century terms anymore. The last time I used the words bourgeoisie and proletariat were in an essay on The German Ideology. I believe many of Marx’s ideas remain fundamentally relevant to the modern world, but the modern world is dynamic and disjunctive and theory must remain equally adaptable in its adoption. Creationists, after all, are laughed at in modern Europe. Christians who have successfully incorporated Darwinism into their world view remain part of relevant discourse. The reason I personally feel this point warrants discussion however, is because it’s a debate I’ve had with Reuben many times. It’s a very old idea and one that has never failed to leave me feeling cold.
No political party reserves the right to go unchallenged. And no left-wing organisation deserves the right to be reified, to become a concrete fact in and of itself, to demand the unwavering loyalty of the workers regardless of its political positions. If that party is not the right vehicle for change, we should not be in it. I simply cannot accept that because the Labour party was once the locus for progressive working class political activity that it should always be and will always be, irrespective of its current leadership and its present policies. That is the political equivalent of Creationism. It relies on nothing more than blind faith. Not least the faith that New Labour – a neo-liberal, neo-conservative, repressive war machine that, by gutting the Labour movement and accepting the basic tenets of Thatcherism has done far more damage to the country and the world than the Iron Lady ever could - is simply a transient thorn. It isn’t. It’s been here for the best part of two decades and will remain for the forseeable future. Labour may be heading for a spell in opposition, but the fight against Cameron as he does God and Boris won’t be led by the old class warriors. It will be led, most likely, by David Miliband. Or another obsequious, spineless, supine, Blairite clone with a pretty face and ugly politics.
And it is precisely this kind of faith-based thinking which will continue the New Labour project long after Brown’s government has faded to a dim, uncomfortable and embarrassing memory. New Labour is not a transient thorn. Its intelligent, educated and very bourgeois (look what you’ve made me do!) architects made a calculated, and very correct, decision that they can afford a sharp swing to the middle ground because whatever they do, their core support of left-wing voters will back them come what may. As long as they believe they can get away with that, New Labour will remain entrenched and the British working class will find nothing more than a few empty platitudes.
The workers of Venezuela once owed their loyalty to the loosely social democratic Acción Democrática party. Indeed their largest trade union remains linked it it. But AD was not the right vehicle for a country that desperately needed change. That’s why Chavez rose to fill a gap in political representation, without any reliance on historical links or organisational ties, because he is the right vehicle and the right voice at the right time. That time is now. Parties cannot just be viewed in terms of their history. A week’s a long time in politics and a decade’s even longer. We have to look at their policies here and now and make informed decisions about the change they are likely to bring. Otherwise we’re betraying our own principles, all in the name of some ideological committment to a homogenous, united, organised, class-conscious working class of the last century that thanks to Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown, no longer exists.
Related posts:
- An Interview with Tony Benn
- An Interview with Mark Steel
- An Interview with George Galloway
- Mind the Gap
Reader Comments
Excellent article, Salman. The Labour Party is dead as a vehicle of progressive change for any class, let alone the working class. People like Dave Semple are deluded and believe (in a religious way) that no left organisation can grow other than as a sold-out-to-Labour irrelevance. Which is what he is.
In fairness to Dave S, his response to the idea of supporting Labour because of the idea of working class universalism was thus:
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“The who point of Marxist identification with the working class is indeed its universalism – but that’s got nothing to do with the Labour Party. There is a qualitative difference between a Labour Party, however bourgeois, that at least professes to support the working class and will enact social democratic measures accordingly, and what Labour is today. Thus I would argue, if Labour can still claim to be the dominant site of working class activism (which is doubtful), that it is vestigial and in the process of being removed entirely rather than following a cycle of waxing and waning. Seeing such a cycle through the history of Labour is to simplify things to a useless determinism.”
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I’m not sure what his wider positions on Labour are. It’s one thing to argue we should always support Labour because, irrespective of what it stands for now, historically it has been the strongest magnet for the working class. It’s another to say we should vote Labour because they’ll be marginally less awful than the Conservatives. I disagree with both positions, and will not be voting Labour either way, but the latter position at least has a degree of rationality behind it because it deals with tangible causes and effects. To extend the evolution metaphor, that is the position of Christians who have accepted the garden of eden as a myth – still wrong in my view, but the kind of wrong that can be engaged with reasonably.
Salman – good that you’re engaging with the debate, which for all its sectarianist frustrations remains THE key one for the left.
With respect, John, I don’t think you’ve properly engaged with either Dave’s or my (Paul’s) view in the TCF article comments about the Labour Party,and I’m grateful to Salman for setting out that even if we have a healthy disagreement about the potential of the Labour party as a working class going forward.
Salman, I appreciate where you’re coming from, but your focus is still on the PLP leadership, not on the potential of the rank and file. You’ve not really engaged with that side of the argument.
Likewise you praise your own current party, the Greens, for its leftist leadership. That’s fine, but it doesn’t get away from the fact that – and this is just a quick example – in areas of the country like mine the people who adhere to it are a bunch of vacuous twerps who wouldn’t get a socialist idea if it hit them on the head from a great height.
No, that’s not exactly empirical, I know, but it does cut both ways.
It cuts both ways, of course, but this isn’t just a debate over which end we choose to crack our eggs – one way has a much more significant impact than the other. As I’ve said many times, I have a lot of respect for you and the committed socialists like you still in the Labour party. But what really counts, at the end of the day – and the end of the day often turns out to be an election – is what’s in the party’s manifesto, what its elected representatives are signed up to doing and what direction its leadership is taking it in. I’ve no doubt there are a few small c conservatives in the Green party who want to save the polar bears, but have little interest in class politics. But the Green Party manifesto, its basic values and principles and its leaders are all committed to an explicitly socialist vision. That’s what attracted me to the party. I expect that’s probably what attracted people like Jim Jepps and Mark Steel to the party as well. The same cannot be said for Labour, and despite all the things you’re doing to try to change it, the majority of the party’s membership is sadly not on your side.
Hi Salman,
First of all, good article and an interesting debate
I appreciate there are many good things in the Green Party’s manifesto, but anyone can write a manifesto and make it sound good when you know there is absolutely no chance of it being implemented.
For example, no one in the Green Party seems to know how much their welfare policies would cost, or how to pay for all the spending promises like nearly doubling the old age pension, or what the consequences would be for, say, the future funding of the NHS or unemployment of running an economic policy aiming for 0% economic growth.
If you look at their activist base and where they get votes, the Green Party are mainly a pressure group for the progressive middle class. Nothing wrong with that, but it does tend to shape their policies and priorities.
- “anyone can write a manifesto and make it sound good when you know there is absolutely no chance of it being implemented.”
Whilst this is true of the vast majority of political parties without representation in Parliament, that view seems to be excusing doing the wrong thing because it’s easier than doing the right one. Of course Labour only gained unprecedented popularity when it swung sharply to the centre ground and away from its ‘loony left’ 80’s phase and started talking about ‘pragmatism’, ’social exclusion’ and ‘evidence-based policy’. But are these really the arguments we should be making? Surely the ideas we espouse are what is crucial for building a revolutionary, and yes, often utopian, vision?
- “If you look at their activist base and where they get votes, the Green Party are mainly a pressure group for the progressive middle class.”
I can’t apologise for being a middle class socialist any more than I can apologise for being a male feminist, a heterosexual gay rights supporter, an atheist opposed to Islamophobia or an Asian coconut. Where we’re from is less important than where we’re going.
Hi Salman,
“Surely the ideas we espouse are what is crucial for building a revolutionary, and yes, often utopian, vision?”
The ideas and policies which the Green Party stands for would lead to mass unemployment, economic collapse and declining public services. The intentions are noble, but the consequences would be much worse than New Labour at its worst or even than the Tories.
“I can’t apologise for being a middle class socialist”
No need to apologise – me too! The point is not about individuals, it is about institutions. The Green Party is a party where the overwhelming majority of members, activists and voters are part of the progressive middle class. The Labour Party, for all its faults, draws from a much wider range of people amongst both members and supporters.
I’ve worked closely with Green Party activists and councillors in the past and admire and respect many of them, but while they might have an “explicitly socialist vision”, they have no presence or organisation amongst working class people.
Whilst we’re mentioning Venezuela – recent events have highlighted some of the bat-shit crazy economic policies of Chavez i.e.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8464960.stm
When you need to employ soldiers to do your price-checking, I think that may be a clue that something’s not quite right. Would make a bad-ass advertising campaign though “We guarantee the lowest prices! If you can find lower prices anywhere else, – we’ll shoot those fuckers in the face!”
Something else: http://www.risk.net/energy-risk/news/1588505/venezuelan-sands-dwarf-canadian-reserves