As the Labour leadership contest enters its final leg, party members will be receiving their ballots in the post today. But while the national media is zooming in on a two-horse race between the two Milibands – one the candidate of continuity, the other of modest change – The Third Estate talks to Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, sofa star of This Week and the only contender for Brown’s vacant throne offering genuine left-wing reform.

“I am running for the leadership because I am the best candidate for the job,” Diane Abbott confidently declares. “The most immediate task is to rebuild and revitalise the party and no other candidate has my experience of the party.”

Drawing on her experience as a trade union official, a councillor, an MP, a member of the national executive and a veteran of many grassroots campaigns, Abbott believes she is better placed to engage with ordinary Labour party members than any of her rivals.

“I want to build on the best of the New Labour years, but I am the only candidate offering a fresh vision for the party,” Abbott says. It’s a vision that ranges from greater internal democracy to putting civil liberties back at the heart of its politics. At home, she wants to challenge, not just to the timing of government cuts but their scale, while abroad she wants to see new thinking about Britain’s place in the world by scrapping the Trident nuclear deterrent and withdrawing British troops from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, advocating bringing the railways back into public ownership, Abbott seeks to address one of the core failures of New Labour. “We need to admit that the market is not the answer for everything,” she says.

Labour’s defeat in May’s election has ushered in a new period of reflection for the party. But while most of her rivals are seeking to trim around the edges, pushing for centrist reform, Abbot is clear about her party’s mistakes and how they must be addressed.

“Ordinary people thought that New Labour was not on their side,” Abbot says. “Increasingly it seemed like an elitist project trapped in a Westminster bubble. New Labour became increasingly undemocratic. The Prime Minister was not listening to his cabinet and the Parliamentary leadership was not listening to its own members and supporters or the general public.”

Abbott argues that if ordinary party members had had a real say, Labour could have avoided some of its most damaging mistakes.

“Scrapping the 10p tax rate, the introduction of tuition fees, the failure to regulate the banks properly, the attempt to introduce 90 days detention without trial, locking up children in immigration detention centres, the failure to bring the railways back into public ownership, creeping privatisation in the NHS, and, above all, the Iraq War. These are all things that contributed to our defeat at the last election.”

It has been fifteen years since Clause IV was famously re-written and Labour became New Labour. But after thirteen years of New Labour government, on the day that Tony Blair’s memoir hits the shelves defending his decision on Iraq and urging Labour not to return to the left, what would Abbott say to disaffected left-wingers who have abandoned a party they feel abandoned them long ago?

“I cannot defend the many right-wing decisions that were taken over the past thirteen years and I never have,” Abbot says. “But I can offer an alternative. Under my leadership we will get back to the business of being the Labour party that delivers for the people of this country. Being in opposition gives us a chance to have a real look at the state of the party, and get back to the principles we were built on.”

While a spell in opposition may well be what the party needs to reflect on its many mistakes in government, the conclusions it draws will depend largely on who it selects as its next leader. Abbott’s candidacy, like those of Ed Balls and Andy Burnham, has been overshadowed somewhat by the Miliband brothers, and in particular the elder front-runner. But if David Miliband wins, will it prove the party has learnt nothing from the failings of New Labour?

“David Miliband is the New Labour continuity candidate, the heir to Blair,” Abbott says. “The majority of ordinary Labour party members were against many decisions of the New Labour project. However they see the desperate times we face under the coalition and some think that David Miliband is the quickest way out of it and back to power.”

Abbott believes voters will naturally return to Labour, but the sell will be a hard one. “My view is that the general public are not fools,” she says. “When the Lib-Cons have finished destroying our country we will certainly have voters that will naturally come back, but the rest will take convincing. There is nothing convincing about the same old, New Labour rhetoric, which offers no real alternative to the status quo.”

As a left-winger, and as the country’s first female black MP, Abbott neither sounds nor looks like the status quo of British politics. Her place on the ballot paper was far from secure, however, until fellow Socialist Campaign Group MP, John McDonnell, withdrew his leadership candidacy. By doing so, he said he hoped he could help ensure that a woman got onto the ballot paper of an otherwise testosterone dominated contest. But should politics be about gender, or race, or should it be about having the right ideas and the right policies?

“I am most grateful to John McDonnell, because his withdrawing did ensure that a woman made it on to the ballot,” Abbott says. “However he is a staunch socialist and would not have withdrawn for another principled progressive.”

Abbott agrees that politics is all about policies, but argues that in the 21st century, a winning progressive movement in any country has to reflect the views and concerns of women and minorities. “If we do not have a political leadership which looks like the community around us then it will lack the legitimacy we want to represent,” she says. “Politics should be about representing the needs of people and people come in many different forms. A lack of diversity and a lack of representation in any institution are instantly reflected in debate, policies and implementation.”

One policy that Abbott keenly supports is electoral reform which, more than any other, threatens to split the coalition government. A referendum on introducing the Alternative Vote (AV) system was, albeit rather too little rather too late, included in Labour’s manifesto and Abbott has pledged to back the key coalition proposal.

“It may not be the ultimate solution, but will certainly be fairer than the first past the post system we currently use,” she says. “It is more proportional, reduces the need for tactical voting and will help to reflect true public opinion of fascist parties. Groups like the BNP are very unlikely to get 2nd or even 3rd preferences.”

Like many of her fellow party members, however, she is somewhat less keen on the government’s decision to link the referendum on voting reform with boundary changes.

“I am appalled at the Lib-Cons attempts to use voting reform to bring about boundary changes,” Abbott says. “These are clearly designed to ensure that they maintain and gain more seats in further elections. Tainting the reforms with trying to maintain power is highly inappropriate and may mean that people will not vote for AV reform despite believing this is the best system. This in effect defeats the point of the entire reform.”

This last comment perhaps best reflects Abbott’s philosophy. A socialist, a democrat, a thorn in the side of the Blairite establishment, but Labour through and through.

“We have difficult times ahead,” Abbott says. “I love my party and believe that we will rise to this challenge. But to do this we need every disaffected activist in the Labour movement behind us. They are a group of people who understand solidarity and I am certain they see the importance of uniting against the Lib-Cons.”

The task ahead for Abbott, and for her party, will not be an easy one. In less than a month it will choose which direction it will take. And contrary to the retired rhetoric of the Mandelsons of this world, that choice is not between backwards and forwards, but between left and right. If, after thirteen years of Blair and Brown, after Iraq and Afghanistan, after the systematic rollback of civil liberties and human rights and the stark betrayal of its socialist roots for a market-orientated philosophy, Labour elects David Miliband, it will have learnt nothing from the failings of a leadership that sacrificed genuine progressive principles for power for power’s sake. If, on the other hand, it chooses Diane Abbott, reported to be the favoured candidate of Miliband’s Marxist mother, voters may once again find themselves faced with a genuine choice at the next election and the Labour Party may find itself saying out with the New and in with the old.

For the second year in a row, The Third Estate would like to blow workers everywhere a big wet sloppy kiss and offer them lots of solidarity.

In six days’  time, we could have a Tory government. Or a Labour one. Either way, you’re going to need all the hugs you can get.

xxx

A few months ago I wrote a post promoting some of the fascinating live debates going on in contemporary Marxist journals, in a bid to puncture the myth that Marxism was had become ossified dogma with nothing to say about the modern world. So it seems only fair that I plug the latest issue of International Socialism, which is now up online. It’s been a tough few months for everyone at IS, after the sad and untimely death of its editor, so it’s worth paying tribute to the consistent quality they have maintained.

In this issue, Richard Seymour of Lenin’s Tomb on contemporary racism, Jonathan Neale on the climate movement after Copenhagen, and some chippy postgrad student on Alain Badiou…

It’s Sunday afternoon. I’ve just completed my first week in paid employment as a fully-fledged journalist and, having begun to appreciate the true value of weekends, I am determined to spend them doing something thought-provoking, engaging, cultural and generally productive. Thus, after a deeply thought-provoking, engaging, cultural and generally productive night on the town (well The Hobgoblin in Angel), I’ve woken up late and gone for a fry-up with my hungover girlfriend.

That still leaves the best part of a very warm and sunny afternoon left to burn. But where should the sensitive socialist take his hippy better-half for a romantic day out? Half-way through following a north London nature trail we’ve discovered, I realise we’re near Highgate and decide to take her to the cemetery to see Karl Marx. What, you might think, could possibly be better than that?

Well, for one, not paying the £3 entry fee. I was half-tempted to try to convince them that my great great uncle Karl was buried there and that they should let me enter for free, but I wasn’t sure they’d buy that tactic. After flashing my student card in front of the official’s face fast enough for him not to spot that it is two years out of date, we get into Highgate Cemetery East for £2. Not much to moan about, one might imagine, it’s hardly going to break the bank – even if I do have a girlfriend who insists on ordering the most expensive item on the menu when I take her out to dinner – but it’s the principle!

Highgate Cemetery is a museum of the dead, replete with famous figures, splendid architecture and stunning surroundings and it’s worth the entrance fee. But I object to paying any amount of money (unless it is going to help the world’s poor) to see the founding father of communism. It’s one of the ironies of modern society, like the image Che Guevara, slapped on t-shirts and posters and sold mass-market to thousands of teenagers around the world who haven’t the faintest idea of what he was rebelling against, just that he was a symbol of rebellion. Kind of like the kids who stick photographs of Charles Manson on their walls just to be cool. I digress. If things like religion and the afterlife weren’t just opiates of the masses, Marx would be spinning in his grave.

I’d never seen Marx’s grave before. As a socialist and social sciences graduate, it felt like a kind of pilgrimage to me. When I got there, I was surprised to find there were still fresh flowers at the base of the headstone. I should have expected it really. Family members will often bring flowers to the graves of their loved ones, and among communists, everyone’s a brother or a sister! Pinned down by stones, I found messages written by the people from all over the world who had taken the pilgrimage before me. Skipping past the one written in Chinese that I couldn’t understand, I found one in English that read: “The struggle carries on, comrade!”

The struggle carries on. So long as there is injustice in the world, so long as there is poverty and inequality and starvation and war and oppression, the struggle carries on. Because it has to.

In 1967, a young sergeant named Mario Terán entered the schoolhouse in the tiny Bolivian village of La Higuera to execute the world’s most famous revolutionary. Upon seeing him, Che Guevara uttered his famous last words:

“I know you are here to kill me. Shoot coward, you are only going to kill a man.”

Because men are mortal. But ideas like justice, equality, freedom and peace never die.

Several decades later, Mario Terán received free eye surgery from Cuban doctors.

Hat tip to Derek Wall for this report from an attendee of the Green Party conference. Encouraging signs for those of us on the left who see the Green Party as the most promising vehicle for progressive change in British politics and for those who see the party as much more than a single-issue environmental pressure group. My one disagreement with the author is that I would actually go so far as to say, from their manifesto, the Greens are quite explicitly socialist.

At its conference in London over the past weekend, the Green Party provided more evidence of its gradual evolution from a narrow environmentalist sect into a left social democratic party with a strong emphasis on ecological issues.

First, the conference passed with large majorities two resolutions drafted by members of Green Left, the Party’s ecosocialist tendency; one pledging support for the National Pensioners’ Convention and its election manifesto, and the other calling for the imposition of a top limit to the pay and bonus differentials in all organisations, so the maximum wage that any organisation could pay would be ten times that of the lowest paid worker.

Second, in its revue of the Party’s health policy, conference removed all the egregious anti- science references in it that had previously been such an embarrassment, and reversed its previous opposition to the use of embryonic stem cells in medical research.

Third, the make-up of the membership is clearly starting to change. Over the past year, party membership has increased by around two and a half thousand and is now hovering close to ten thousand (and rising). The number of young faces at the conference has clearly grown over the last year or so, as has the number of new members coming from the ranks of the ex-Labour diaspora. As one member, attending her first conference, remarked “I used to think of the Greens as single issue obsessives, but now I believe the Party represents the principles I spent thirty years fighting for in the Labour Party, informed by a realisation of the scale and urgency of the environmental crisis we face.”

Some charming, handsome, intelligent fellow has written a column on the First International for this weeks Socialist Worker. Read it here.

Bolivian president, Evo Morales, and vice-president, Alvaro Garcia Linera, celebrate the election victory in La Paz. Photograph: Jorge Bernal/AFP/Getty Images

Exit polls are confirming predictions that Evo Morales has won a convincing victory over his conservative rival, Manfred Reyes, in Bolivia. Whilst facing staunch opposition amongst wealthier Bolivians living in the gas-rich East, Morales – an Aymara coca farmer and the country’s first indigenous president – has always enjoyed strong support from the poorer Quechua and Aymara people in the highland West. Bolivia, Latin America’s poorest country, has suffered from decades of neo-liberalism and the coca eradication programmes carried out by previous governments on behalf of the US. However, with the continent’s second largest reserves of natural gas, the country has the tools to lift itself from destitution. Morales’s wildly popular decision to ‘nationalise’ the gas (in reality Bolivia’s gas reserves have always belonged to the state, foreign corporations were just paying a marginal amount to extract it) has helped GDP leap from $9bn to $19bn since he came to power in 2005, whilst his social programmes have helped raise the quality of life for the poorest sections of society.

For all those in the West who say socialism is dead, that it was tried and failed and no longer matters to anyone in a society where everyone is middle class – look at Latin America. This is where socialism matters. This where it is genuinely making a difference to people’s lives. This – and in all the deeply impoverished countries of the world, held back as the centuries of colonialism that have raped their resources have turned to newer, more insidious forms of neo-liberal exploitation – is where socialism is needed.

Since Chris’ tragic death at the weekend there have been a number of warm and inspiring tributes, and I thought I’d highlight a few here.

Michael Rosen in the Guardian.

Alex Callinicos, John Rose and many other comrades in Socialist Worker.

Snowball on Histomat.

Keith Flett from the London Socialist Historian’s group.

Chris Harman, editor of International Socialism, former Editor of Socialist Worker and a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party, died last night in Cairo where he was speaking. This news is still raw, but I wanted to offer some initial thoughts.

Chris made, through his journal writings and numerous books, an enormous contribution to post-war Marxist thought. Equally important though was his activity in bringing the ideas of Socialism to new generations of people. His short book How Marxism Works was the book that won me to Marxism at the beginning of this decade. Through the pages of Socialist Worker, and through speaking at meetings up and down the country, he inspired people to fight for a better world.

I met Chris on a number of occasions, and only last weekend heard him speak. In person he could often seem oddly shy, whilst when speaking in public was capable of the most extraordinary polemic. It is very difficult to think about him in the past tense.